The Mortdecai Trilogy (7 page)

Still, what if I approach the august sphere
Named now with only one name, disentwine
That under-current soft and argentine
From its fierce mate …?

 

Sordello

 

The telephone woke me at a most
inconvenient
hour on Monday. A honeyed American voice asked if it could speak to Mr Mortdecai’s secretary.

‘One moooment please,’ I crooned, ‘I’ll put you throooo.’ I stuffed the telephone under my pillow and lit a cigarette, musing the while. Finally I rang for Jock, briefed him and gave him the telephone. Holding it between hairy thumb and forefinger, pinky delicately crooked, he fluted, ‘Mr Mortdecai’s seckritry ’ere.’ Then he got the giggles – disastrous after yesterday’s feast of beans – and so did I and the telephone got dropped; the Honeyed American Voice must have thought it all
most
peculiar. It turned out that it – the H.A.V. – was a Colonel Blucher’s secretary at the American Embassy, and that Colonel Blucher would like to see Mr Mortdecai at ten o’clock. Jock, properly shocked, said that there was no chance of Mr Mortdecai being out of bed at that hour and that he never received gentlemen in bed. (More giggles.) The voice, no whit less honeyed, said that, well, Colonel Blucher had in fact envisaged Mr. Mortdecai calling on
him
and would ten thirty be more convenient. Jock fought a stout rearguard action – in a curious way he’s rather
proud to work for anyone as slothful as me – and finally they struck a bargain for noon.

As soon as Jock put the instrument down I lifted it again and dialed the Embassy (499 9000, if you want to know). One of the most beautiful voices I have ever heard answered – a furry, milky contralto which made my coccyx curl into ringlets. It quite distinctly said:

‘Care to embrace me?’

‘Eh?’ I gobbled, ‘what’s that what’s that?’

‘American Embassy’ – this time in rather more sanitary tones.

‘Oh. Yes. Of course. Silly of me. Ah, what I wanted to know was whether you have a Colonel Blucher working there.’

There was a click or two, a muted electric ‘grrr’ and before I could do anything about it I was once more in communication with the original Honeyed (honied?) Voice. She didn’t say she was Colonel anyone’s secretary this time, she said she was the War Room, CumQuicJac or SecSatSix or some such mumbo-jumbo. What
children
these warriors are.

I couldn’t very well say that I was just checking to see whether Col. Blucher was real or just a Heartless Practical Joke, could I? In the end, after a bit of spluttering, I said that I had an appointment with her guv’nor, d’ye see, at sort of noon really, and what number in Grosvenor Square was the Embassy. This should have been a heavy score to me – lovely footwork you must admit – but she was a fast, damaging counterpuncher.

‘Number twenty-four,’ she warbled unhesitatingly, ‘that’s two, four.’

I rang off after a mumbled civility or two. Rolled up, horse, foot and guns. I mean, fancy a bloody great place like that
having
a street number, for God’s sake.

Jock averted his gaze: he knows when the young master has taken a bit of stick.

I pushed my breakfast moodily round the plate for a while then told Jock to give it to the deserving poor and bring me in its stead a large glass of gin with both sorts of vermouth in it and some fizzy lemonade. A quick actor, that drink, gets you to where you live in no time.

Sucking a perfumed cachou, I walked to Grosvenor Square, soberly clad and musing madly. The musing was to no avail; my
mind was as blank as the new, soft fallen mask of snow upon the mountains and the moors. The cachou lasted as far as the portals of the Embassy, within which stood a capable-looking military man, standing at what is laughingly called ease. The jut of his craggy jaw made it clear to the trained eye that he was there to keep out Commie bastards and anyone else who might be plotting to overthrow the Constitution of the United States. I met his eye fearlessly and asked him if this was number twenty-four and he didn’t know, which made me feel better.

A succession of well-designed young ladies took charge of me, wafting me ever deeper into the building. Each one of them was tall, slim, hygienic, graceful and endowed with amazingly large tits: I’m afraid I probably stared rather. I fetched up all standing (nautical term) at the outer office of Col. Blucher, where sat the Voice itself. She, as was fitting, had the finest endowment of all. I should think she had to type at arm’s length. In the twinkling of an eye – and I mean that most sincerely – I was shunted into the inner office, where a lean, wholesome, uniformed youth gave me a chair.

I recognized the chair as soon as I applied my bottom to it. It was covered with shiny leather and the front legs were half an inch shorter than the back legs. This gives the sitter a vague feeling of unease, impermanence, inferiority. I have one myself, for seating chaps on who are trying to sell paintings to me. On no account was I going to take crap of this kind; I arose and made for the sofa.

‘Forgive me,’ I said sheepishly, ‘I have these piles, you know? Haemorrhoids?’

He knew. Judging from the smile he cranked on to his face, I should say he had just developed them. He sat down behind the desk. I raised an eyebrow.

‘I have an appointment with Colonel Blucher,’ I said.

‘I am Colonel Blucher, sir,’ replied the youth.

I’d lost that rally, anyway, but I was still ahead on the chair-to-sofa move, he had to twist his neck and raise his voice when he spoke to me. He looked extraordinarily young to be a colonel and, curiously, his uniform didn’t fit. Have you ever seen an American officer – nay, an American
private
even – with an ill-fitting uniform?

Tucking this thought away into a mental ticket pocket, I addressed the man.

‘Oh, ah,’ was the phrase I selected.

Perhaps I could have done better, given more time.

He picked up a pen and teased a folder which lay on his shining, empty desk. The folder had all sorts of coloured signals stuck on to it, including a big orange-coloured one with an exclamation mark in black. I had a nasty feeling that perhaps the file was labelled ‘Hon C Mortdecai’ but on second thoughts I decided that it was just there to frighten me.

‘Mr Mortdecai,’ he said at last, ‘we have been asked by your Foreign Office to honour a diplomatic
laissez-passer
in your name and on a temporary basis. There seems to be no intention to accredit you to the British Embassy in Washington or to any Legation or Consulate, and our
vis-à-vis
in your Foreign Office seems to know nothing about you. I may say we have received the impression that he cares less. Would you perhaps like to comment on this situation?’

‘Nope,’ I replied.

This seemed to please him. He changed to another pen and stirred the folder about a bit more.

‘Mr Mortdecai, you will appreciate that I have to enter in my report the purpose of your visit to the United States.’

‘I am to deliver a valuable antique motor car under diplomatic seal,’ I said, ‘and I hope to do a little sightseeing in the South and West. I am very interested in the Old West,’ I added defiantly, smugly conscious of a card up my sleeve.

‘Yes, indeed,’ he said politely, ‘I read your article on “Nineteenth Century British Travellers to the American Frontier.” It was very very fascinating.’

There was a distinct draft up my sleeve where the card had been, and a nasty feeling that someone had been doing a little research into C. Mortdecai.

‘We are puzzled,’ he went on, ‘that anyone should want to seal diplomatically an empty automobile. I take it that it will, in fact, be empty, Mr Mortdecai?’

‘It will contain my personal effects; viz., one case of gents’ natty suitings, one ditto of costly haberdashery, a canvas bag of books to suit every mood – none of them very obscene – and a supply of cigarettes and old Scotch whisky. I shall be happy to pay duty on the last if you prefer.’

‘Mr Mortdecai, if we accept your diplomatic status’ – did he linger a moment at that point? – ‘we shall of course respect it
fully. But we have, as you know, this theoretical right to declare you
persona non grata
; although we exercise it very rarely toward representatives of your country.’

‘Yes,’ I babbled, ‘old Guy slipped through all right, didn’t he?’

He pricked his ears; I bit my tongue.

‘Did you know Mr Burgess well?’ he asked, inspecting his pen closely for defects in its manufacture.

‘No no no,’ I cried, ‘no no no no no. Hardly ever met the feller. Probably had a jar of sherbet with him once in a while: I mean, you couldn’t live in the same city with Guy Burgess and not find yourself in the same bar sometimes, could you? Matter of statistics, I mean.’

He opened the folder and read a few lines, raising one eyebrow in a disturbing way.

‘Have you ever been a member of the Communist or Anarchist parties, Mr Mortdecai?’

‘Good Lord no!’ I cried gaily, ‘filthy capitalist, me. Grind the workers’ faces, I say.’

‘When you were at school?’ he prompted gently.

‘Oh. Well, yes, I think I did take the Red side in the debating society at school once or twice. But in the Lower Sixth we all got either religion or Communism – it goes with acne you know. Vanishes as soon as you have proper sexual intercourse.’

‘Yes,’ he said quietly. I suddenly saw that he had acne. Strike two, as I believe they say over there. And how on earth had they dredged up all this dirt about me in a couple of days? A more unnerving thought:
had
it only been dredged in the last couple of days? The folder looked fat and well-handled as a Welsh barmaid. I wanted to go to the lavatory.

The silence went on and on. I lit a cigarette to show how unperturbed I was but he was ready for that one, too. He pressed a button and told his secretary to ask the janitor for an ashtray. When she brought it she turned the air conditioner up as well. Strike three. My turn to pitch.

‘Colonel,’ I said crisply, ‘suppose I give you my word of honour as a nobleman’ –
that
was a spitball – ‘that I am totally uninterested in politics and that my mission has nothing to do with drugs, contraband, currency, white slavery, perversion or the Mafia, but that it does concern the interests of some of the Highest in the Land?’

To my amazement it seemed to work. He nodded slowly, initialled the front of the file and sat back in his chair. Americans have some curious pockets of old-fashionedness. One could feel the atmosphere of the room relaxing; even the air conditioner seemed to have changed its note. I cocked an ear.

‘Forgive me,’ I said, ‘but I think that your wire recorder has run out of wire.’

‘Why, thank you,’ he said and pressed another button. The mammiferous secretary slithered in, changed the spool and slithered out again, giving me a small, hygienic smile en route. An English secretary would have sniffed.

‘Do you know Milton Krampf well?’ Blucher asked suddenly. Clearly, the ball game was still on.

‘Krampf?’ I said. ‘Krampf? Yes, to be sure, very good customer of mine. Hope to spend a few days with him. Very nice old sausage. Bit potty of course but he can afford to be, can’t he, ha ha.’

‘Well, no, Mr Mortdecai, I in fact was referring to Dr Milton Krampf III, Mr Milton Krampf Junior’s son.’

‘Ah, there you have me,’ I said truthfully, ‘never met any of the family.’

‘Really, Mr Mortdecai? Yet Dr Krampf is a well-known art historian, is he not?’

‘News to me. What’s his field supposed to be?’ The Colonel flipped through the file – perhaps it was the
Krampf
file after all.

‘He seems to have published numerous papers in American and Canadian journals,’ he said, ‘including “The Non-Image in Dérain’s Middle Period,” “Chromato-Spacial Relationships in Dufy,” “Léger and Counter-Symbolism” …’

‘Stop!’ I cried, squirming. ‘Enough. I could make up the rest of the titles myself. I know this sort of thing well, it has nothing to do with art history as I know it; my work lies with the Old Masters and I publish in the
Burlington Magazine
– I am quite a different sort of snob from this Krampf, our scholarly paths would never cross.’

‘I see.’

He didn’t see at all but he would have died rather than admit it. We parted in the usual flurry of insincerities. He still looked young, but not quite as young as when I had come in. I walked home, musing again.

Jock had a sauté of chicken livers ready for me but I had no stomach for the feast. Instead I chewed a banana and about a third of a bottle of gin. Then I had a little zizz, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands in sleep. A zizz, you know, is a very present help in trouble. With me, it takes the place of the kind, wise, tobacco-smelling, tweed-clad
English
father that other boys had when I was a schoolboy; the sort of father you could talk things over with during long tramps over the hills; who would gruffly tell you that ‘a chap can only do his best’ and that you ‘must play the man’ and then teach you to cast a trout-fly.

My father wasn’t like that.

Sleep has often taken the place of this mythical man for me: often I have woken up comforted and advised, my worries resolved, my duty clear.

But this time I awoke unrefreshed and with no good news teeming in my brain. There was no comfortable feeling that a warm, tweedy arm had been about my shoulder, only the old gin-ache at the base of the skull and a vague taste of dog dung in the mouth.

‘Heigh-ho,’ I remember saying as I listened to the Alka-Seltzer fussing in its glass. I tried the effect of a clean shirt and a washed face; there was some slight improvement but various small nit-sized worries were still there. I have a dislike for coincidences and I
detest
clever young American colonels, especially when their uniforms do not quite fit them.

I was rather a cheery, carefree chap in those days, always ready to welcome a little adversity just for the pleasure of dealing with it deftly. So I was worried at feeling worried, if you see what I mean. One should only have a sense of impending doom when one is constipated and I was not, as it happened.