The Mortdecai Trilogy (11 page)

Then we began to ride. My soul
Smoothed itself out, a long-cramped scroll
Freshening and fluttering in the wind.
Past hopes already lay behind.

 

The Last Ride Together

 

I awoke feeling positively chipper but the feeling didn’t last. By the time I had dressed and packed I was being shaken with hangover like a rat in the grip of a keen but inexperienced terrier. I made it down to the hotel bar by easy stages (take the
slow
lift, never the express one) and the barman had me diagnosed and treated in no time at all. Your actual hangover, he explained, is no more than a withdrawal syndrome; halt the withdrawal by injecting more of what is withdrawing and the syndrome vanishes with a rustle of black wings. It seemed to make good sense. His prescription was simply Scotch and branch water – he swore a great oath that the branch water was freighted in fresh and fresh each morning from the Appalachian mountains, would you believe it? I tipped him with no niggardly hand.

Well medicated, but by no means potted, I paid my bill at the desk, collected a spotless Silver Ghost from a reluctant brownish chap and drove carefully away in the general direction of New Mexico. Posterity will want to know that I was wearing my Complete American Disguise: a cream tussore suit, sunglasses and a cocoa-coloured straw hat with a burnt-orange ribbon. The
effect was pretty sexy, I don’t mind telling you. Mr Abercrombie would have
bitten
Mr Fitch if he’d seen it and the
Tailor and Cutter
would have been moved to tears.

Curiously, I was afraid again. I felt obscurely that this land – ‘where law and custom alike are based on the dreams of spinsters’ – was nevertheless a land where I might well get hurt if I were not careful – or even if I
were
careful.

By the time that I was quite clear of the city’s unlovely faubourgs and purlieus I needed petrol: the Silver Ghost is a lovely car but its best friend would have to admit that its m.’s per g. are few. I selected a petrol station that looked as though it could use the business and drew up. This was near a place called Charlottesville on the edge of the Shenandoah National Park. The attendant was standing with his back to me, arms akimbo, saying, ‘Howd’ya like that guy?’ and staring after a large powder-blue car which was vanishing at great speed down the road. He didn’t realize my presence until I switched off the engine, then he double-took the Rolls in the most gratifying way, whispering ‘shee-
it!
’ again and again. (I was to hear enough admiring ‘shee-its’ in the next few days to refertilize the entire Oklahoma dust bowl.) He giggled like a virgin as he dipped the nozzle into the petrol tank and sped me on my way with one last dungy praise spattering my ears. I wondered vaguely what the powder-blue car had done to earn his disapproval.

I got a little lost after that, but an hour later I hit Interstate Highway 81 at Lexington and made excellent time down through Virginia. Once over the State line into Tennessee I called it quits for the day and booked in at a Genuine Log Kabins Motel. The yellow-haired, slack-mouthed, fat-arsed landlady wiggled her surplus flesh at me in the most revolting way: she looked about as hard to get as a haircut and at about the same price. Everything in my Kabin was screwed to the floor: the landlady told me that newlyweds often furnish their entire apartments with stuff they steal from motels, they spend the whole night unscrewing things, she told me with a coy giggle, indicating that she could think of better ways of passing the time. Like being screwed to the floor, I dare say.

The sheets were bright red. ‘By golly,’ I told them, ‘I’d blush too, if I were you.’

For supper I had some Old Fashioned Mountain Boys’ Corned Beef Hash; you’d think it would be delicious in Tennessee but it
wasn’t, you know; not a patch on Jock’s. I drank some of my store of Red Hackle De Luxe and went to sleep instantly – you’d never have unscrewed
me
.

You can’t get an early morning cup of tea in an American motel, not even for ready money; I wished I had brought a portable apparatus along. You’ve no idea how hard it is to get dressed without a cheering cup inside you. I hobbled to the restaurant and drank a whole pot of their coffee, which was excellent and nerved me to try the sweet Canadian bacon and hot cakes. Not at all bad, really. I noticed that the owner of the powder-blue car – or one very like it – had selected the same motel, but I didn’t see him, or her. I idly wondered whether they’d done much unscrewing. For my part, I checked out with a clear conscience, I hadn’t stolen anything for days.

I hardly got lost at all that morning. I was on US 40 in not much more than an hour and sailed clear across Tennessee on it, wonderful scenery. I had lunch in Nashville: spareribs and spoon bread and the finest jukebox I ever saw: it was a privilege to sit in front of it. Dazed with hot pork and decibels I nearly stepped under the wheels of a powder-blue car as I stepped off the sidewalk (pavement). Now, at the last count I’m sure there were probably half a million powder-blue cars in the United States, but when pedestrians walk under their wheels American drivers usually turn a bit powder-blue themselves and lean out and curse you roundly, calling you ‘Buster’ if you happen to be at all portly. This one did not: he looked through me and drove on, a thick-set, jowly chap rather like my Mr Braun, the crown prince of fish and chips, but hatted and sunglassed to the point of anonymity.

I dismissed the incident from my mind until I reached the outskirts of Memphis late that evening, when I was overtaken by just such a car driven by just such a chap.

They brought me coffee in my hotel room that night and a bottle of branch water for my Scotch; I locked the door and put in a call to Mr Krampf. American telephonists are wonderful, you just tell them the name and address of the chap you want to talk to and they do the rest. Krampf sounded a bit tight but very friendly; there was a lot of noise in the background which suggested that he had guests with him who were also a bit tight. I told him that
I was on schedule, making no reference to his departure from our original plan.

‘Well, that’s just dandy,’ he bellowed. ‘Just dandy.’ He said it a few times more, he’s like that.

‘Mr Krampf,’ I went on guardedly, ‘I seem to have a sort of companion on the road, if you know what I mean. A late model, powder-blue Buick convertible with New York plates. Do you have any idea …?’

There was a long pause, then he chuckled fruitily.

‘That’s awright, son, that’s your kind of escort. Wouldn’t want anyone hijacking that old Rolls and Royce of mine.’

I made relieved noises and he went on: ‘Hey, let’s don’t let him know we tumbled him, just make like he wasn’t there and when he gets here and tells me you never made him I’ll chew his nuts off, huh?’

‘All right, Mr Krampf,’ I said, ‘but don’t be too hard on him, will you. I mean, I was rather on the
qui vive
, you know.’

He delivered another fruity chuckle – or perhaps it was a belch – and rang off. Then somebody else rang off. Perhaps it was just the hotel telephonist, but the noises weren’t quite right for that. Then I rang off and treated myself to a belch, too, and went to bed.

Nothing else happened that night, except that I worried a lot. Krampf hadn’t made his millions by being a drunken old fart; to be a millionaire you need brains, ruthlessness and a certain little maggot in your brain. Krampf had all these and he was cleverer than me and much more evil. This was all wrong. My bowels whined and grumbled, they wanted to go home. Above all, they wanted no part in assassinating clever millionaires in their own homes. I finally nagged myself to sleep.

Yet now I wake in such decrepitude
As I had slidden down and fallen afar,
Past even the presence of my former self,
Grasping the while for stay at facts which snap,
Till I am found away from my own world,
Feeling for foot-hold through a blank profound,
Along with unborn people in strange lands …

 

A Death in the Desert

 

It was Sunday but you’d never have thought so by what was going on when I got to Little Rock, Arkansas. Some sort of protest was going on and, as usual, short-haired chaps in dark blue were boredly biffing longhaired chaps in pale blue jeans, who were calling them pigs and throwing stones and things. All very sad. As a Russian said a hundred years ago, these people believe that they are the doctors of society, whereas in fact they are only the disease. Traffic was at a standstill and, several cars ahead of me, I could see the blue Buick, bogged down in a sea of long hair and flourishing riot sticks.

I killed the engine and mused. Why the devil would Krampf go to the expense and trouble of escorting across half a continent a motor car which no one in his senses would attempt to steal – and escorting it in so curiously oblique a way? Setting aside the strong possibility that he was barmy, I decided that he must have told someone about the extra piece of canvas which ought to be secreted about the car –
that
made him pretty barmy of course – and was now regretting
it. Worse, he might be playing some deeper and more convoluted game, which would be consistent with his unscripted letter to the almost royal Chum. He could scarcely have guessed at the little murder job which Martland had entrusted to me but he might well have come to consider me, for other reasons, as sort of redundant and a threat to his security. ‘The heart is deceitful about all things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it?’ cries Jeremiah XVII:9 and as you know, Jeremiah XVII:9 was a chap with great insight into these matters, as well as being a little barmy himself.

My little private store of worries and ass puckerings was much augmented by all this; I found myself pining for Jock’s strong right arm and brass-garnished bunch of fives. The plot was thickening in a marked manner; if I could not soon lay hold of a spoon with which to stir it, there was a distinct danger that it might stick to the bottom.
My
bottom, probably. And then where would the Hon. C. Mortdecai be? There was a dusty answer to that one.

The traffic moved on after everyone concerned had been thoroughly biffed and bashed and screamed at and I didn’t spot the Buick again until just after the Shawnee crossing of the North Canadian River, where I glimpsed it lurking down a side road. I stopped at the next petrol station (they call it
gas
there, I wonder why?) hoping to give the driver a good eyeballing as he passed.

What I saw made me gape and gibber like a housewife choosing Daz on the television; two or three seconds later I was twenty miles down the road, sitting on a motel bed and sucking in whisky until I could think straight. It was the same car – at least it bore the same number plates – but overnight it had lost a deep dent in a fender and acquired a suit of whitewall tires and another radio antenna. The driver had lost a few stones and become a thin, dyspeptic cove with a mouth like the slot in a piggy-bank. In short, it was not the same car at all. The implications were unclear but one thing stood out like Priapus: there was no way in which this could be a change for the better. Someone was devoting a good deal of time and trouble and expense to the affairs of C. Mortdecai and it certainly wasn’t the Distressed Gentlefolk’s Aid Society. A stupid man might not have been too frightened but I was not stupid enough for that. A really bright chap, on the other hand, would have dumped everything
and run for home with all speed, but I was not really bright, either.

What I did was leave the motel, telling them that I would be back after dinner (I’d already paid, naturally) and drive circuitously to the heart of Oklahoma City, arriving tired and grim.

Not too near the centre I found a solid, sober sort of hotel which looked as though it would not knowingly harbour the more obvious kind of
barbouze
or assassin. I drove into the underground garage and waited until the night attendant had exhausted his stock of admiring ‘shee-
its
’, then I told him that the Rolls was entered in an RR
Concours d’Elégance
in Los Angeles the following week and that a hated rival would stop at nothing to impede my progress or the car’s chances of success.

‘What would you do,’ I asked him hypothetically ‘if a stranger offered you money to let him sit in the car for five minutes while you went away and sat in your office?’

‘Well, Sir,’ he said, ‘I guess I’d jest wave this little old wrench at him and tell him to haul his ass out of here, then I’d ring the desk upstairs and then in the morning I’d kind of tell you how much money he’d offered me, see what I mean, Sir.’

‘I do indeed. You are clearly a capital fellow. Even if nothing happens I shall assume, in the morning, that you refused let us say five, ah,
bucks
, what?’

‘Thank you, Sir.’

I went up in the lift or elevator and started work on the desk clerk. He was a well-scrubbed, snotty little chap in one of those suits only desk clerks can buy – or would want – and his breath smelled of something unwholesome and probably illegal. He studied my luggage like a pawnbroker before he peevishly admitted that he did have a vacant room with bath, but he thawed fast when he saw my diplomatic passport and the five-dollar bill I had carelessly left inside it. He was just sliding the money towards him when I trapped it with a well-shaped forefinger. I leaned over the counter and lowered my voice.

‘No one but you and I knows that I am here tonight. Do you follow me?’

He nodded, both our fingers still on the money.

‘Consequently, anyone telephoning me will be trying to
locate
me. Are you still following?’

He still was.

‘Now, none of my
friends
could possibly be trying to get in touch with me here and my enemies are members of a political party which is dedicated to the overthrow of the United States. So what will you do if somebody calls me?’

‘Call the cops?’

I winced with unfeigned chagrin.

‘No no NO,’ I said. ‘By no means the cops. Why do you think I’m
in
Oklahoma City?’

That really fetched him. Awe stole into his juicy eyes and his lips parted with a tiny plop.

‘You mean, just call you? Sir?’ he said at last.

‘Right,’ I said, and released the five dollars. He stared at me until I was inside the lift. I felt reasonably secure – desk clerks all over the world have two talents: selling information and knowing when not to sell information. These simple skills spell survival to them.

My room was large, well-proportioned and pleasant but the air conditioning made tiresome noises at random intervals. I asked room service for a selection of their best sandwiches, a bottle of branch water, a good drinking glass and the house detective. They all arrived together. I took pains to befriend the detective, who was an awkward, seven-foot youth with a shoulder holster which creaked noisily when he sat down. I gave him Scotch whisky and a load of old moody similar to that which the desk clerk had gobbled. He was a serious boy and asked for my credentials; they impressed him considerably and he promised to keep a special eye on my floor that night.

When he had gone, five dollars later, I inspected my sandwiches with moody pleasure; there was great store of them, on two sorts of bread and filled with all manner of good things: I did my best with them, drank some more Scotch and got into bed, feeling that I had secured myself as best I could.

I shut my eyes and the air conditioner rushed into my head, carrying with it all manner of dread and speculation, a thousand horrid fancies and a mounting panic. I dared not take a sleeping pill. After an interminable half hour I gave up the fight for sleep and put the light on. There was only one thing for it – I lifted the telephone and put in a call to Mrs Spon in London. London, England, that is.

She came through in a mere twenty minutes, shrieking and honking with rage at being awakened and swearing by strange gods. I could hear her vile little poodle Pisse-Partout in the background, adding his soprano yelps to the din; it made me quite homesick.

I soothed her with a few well chosen words and she soon got it into her head that this was a matter of some seriousness. I told her that, at all costs, Jock must be at the
Rancho de los Siete Dolores
by Tuesday and that she must see to it. She promised. The problem of getting an American visa in a few hours is nothing to a woman like her: she once got a private audience of the Pope just by knocking on the door and saying she was expected; they say he very nearly gave her a contract to redo the Sistine Chapel.

Knowing that Jock would be there to meet me eased my worst fears; it only remained now to get there without leaving any bloodstains in my spoor.

I sank into an uneasy slumber interspersed, curiously, with erotic dreams.