The Mortdecai Trilogy (15 page)

Perhaps Krampf had indeed died of heart disease after excess at table: statistically he was a sitter for just that. Perhaps Johanna had indeed fallen violently in love with me: my friends have sometimes been kind enough to say that I have a certain appeal, perhaps an adroitness in these little matters. Perhaps the second powder-blue Buick and its driver were merely a relief shift ordered by Krampf: I had had no opportunity to put this to him. Perhaps, last of all, I would indeed send for Johanna and live the life of Riley with her and her millions until my glands gave out.

The more I thought about this view of things the more sensible it became and the sweeter shone the sun on the unjust. I leaned back luxuriously into the rich-smelling leather of the Rolls –
my
Rolls! – and quietly whistled a happy stave or two.

Martland, surely, would never believe that Krampf’s infarct was natural; he would assume that I had murdered him as per invoice and had been devilish clever about it.

Only Johanna knew that I had burned the negative and if I dropped the merest hint to Martland that I might just have
forgotten to do so he would never dare unleash his death dogs on me but would be forced to respect his word and protect me from all annoyances; such as, for instance, death.

I liked it; I liked it all, it fitted together, it made nonsense of my fears, I felt positively young again. For two pins, I’d have turned back and given Johanna a little farewell token of my esteem after all, that’s how young I felt. The lark was on the wing and flying strongly, while the snail was positively striding up its favourite thorn.

Admittedly, there was one fly trampling about in the ointment of my content: I was now the proud but shy owner of about half a million pounds’ worth of hot Goya – the hottest piece of property in the world. Despite what you read in the Sunday papers, America is not seething with mad millionaires panting to buy stolen masterpieces and gloat over them in their underground aviaries. As a matter of fact, the late Krampf had been the only one I knew of and I did not much want another like him. A superb spender, but hard on the nervous system.

Destroying the painting was out of the question: my soul is all stained and shagged with sin like a cigarette smoker’s moustache but I am quite incapable of destroying works of art. Steal them, yes, cheerfully, it is a mark of respect and love, but destroy them, never. Why, even the Woosters had a code, as we are told on the highest authority.

Probably the best thing was to take it back to England – it was, after all, as well hidden now as it ever could be – and get in touch with a specialist friend who knows how to do discreet deals with insurance companies.

You know, all those dreary pink Renoirs which are incessantly getting pinched in the South of France are either sold back to the insurers at a straight 20 per cent of the sum insured – the companies won’t pay a franc more, it’s a matter of professional ethics – or they are pinched at the express request of the owners and immediately destroyed. The French
arriviste
, you see, lives in such a continual agony of snobbism that he dares not put his Renoir, bought three years ago, into a public auction and so admit that he is short of a little change – still less dare he take the risk that it might fetch less than he has told all his awful friends it is worth. He would rather die; or, in practical terms, he would rather assassinate the painting and collect the
nouveaux francs
. In England the police tend to purse
their lips and wag their fingers at insurance co’s who buy back stolen things from the thieves: they feel that this is not a way to discourage villainy – in fact the whole process is strictly against the law.

Nevertheless, if a certain young man, not unknown at Lloyd’s, murmurs in the proper ear that a bundle of currency posted to an accommodation address in Streatham will bring about a change of heart in certain thieves and cause them to panic and dump the swag in a left-luggage office – well, insurance co’s are only human you know (or didn’t you know?) and a thousand pounds is a great deal less than, say, five thousand ditto. The certain young man not unknown at Lloyd’s was also not unknown to me and although he didn’t like murmuring in that sort of ear more than once or twice a year he had, I knew, a heart of gold and owed me a trifling kindness. Moreover, he was terrified of Jock. Don’t think I’m recommending this particular caper, though: the police are professionals and we laymen are only gifted amateurs, at the best. If you must sin, find an obscure, unexplored branch of crime that the Yard hasn’t any experts in and work it gently, don’t milk it dry, and vary your
modus operandi
continually. They’ll get on to you in the end, of course, but if you’re not greedy you may have a few good years first.

As I was saying, before the above gnomic utterances, I was by now wholly reconciled to a Panglossian view of things: all was explicable, the tangled web made, after all, a comprehensible pattern when looked at in sunlight and also, after all, one Mortdecai was worth a whole barrelful of Martlands, Bluchers, Krampfs and other dullards. (‘One of the most remarkable phenomena connected with the practice of mendacity is the vast number of deliberate lies we tell ourselves, whom, of all persons, we can least expect to deceive.’ J.S. Lefanu.)

To complete my skimpy breakfast, and to celebrate the victory of virtue over dullness, I opened a bottle of the twelve-year-old Scotch and was just raising it to my lips when I saw the powder-blue Buick. It was coming out of an
arroyo
ahead of us, coming fast, engine howling in a low gear, coming straight for our nearside. Our offside was barely a yard from a sheer drop of hundreds of feet – it was a fair cop. I’d had my life. Jock – I’ve told you how fast he could be when necessary – wrenched the wheel over to the left, stood on the brakes, snatched first gear before the Rolls stalled and was turning
right as the Buick hit us. The Buick man had known nothing of the strength of a vintage Rolls Royce, nor of Jock’s fighting brain; our radiator gutted his car’s side with a ghastly shriek of metal and the Buick span like a top, ending up poised on the shoulder of the road, its rear end impossibly extended over the precipice. The driver, face contorted with who knows what emotion, was fighting frantically with the door handle, his features a mask of nasty blood. Jock got out, ponderously strolled over to him and stared, looked up and down the road, went to the front of the mangled Buick, found a handhold and heaved enormously. The Buick tilted, started to go very slowly: Jock had time to get to the window again and give the driver a friendly grin before the nose went up and slid out of sight, slowly still. The driver showed us all his teeth in a silent scream before he went; we heard the Buick bounce three times, amazingly loudly, but never a thread of the driver’s scream – those Buicks must be better soundproofed than you’d think. I believe, but I am not sure even now, that it was friendly Mr Braun – who was once again proving to me the statistical improbability of death in an aircraft accident.

I was surprised – and pardonably proud – to find that throughout the episode I had not lost my grip on the Scotch bottle: I had my drink and, since the circumstances were exceptional, offered the bottle to Jock.

‘That was a bit vindictive, Jock,’ I said reprovingly.

‘Lost my temper,’ he admitted. ‘Bloody road hog.’

‘He might easily have done us a mischief,’ I agreed. Then I told him about things, especially like powder-blue Buicks and the dreadful – is that word really so worn out? – the dreadful danger I was – we were – in, despite my recent brief and lovely courtship with the phantasms of success, safety and happy-ever-after. (It seemed hard to believe that I could have been dallying, so few minutes before, with so patently tinsel a mental mistress as safety.) My eloquence ran to such heights of bitter self-mockery that I heard myself, aghast, telling Jock to leave me, to get out from under before the great axe fell.

‘Bollocks,’ I’m happy to say, was his response to that suggestion. (But ‘happy to say’ is not true either: his loyalty served me but briefly and him but shabbily – you might say that his ‘bollocks’ were the death of him.)

When the whisky had somewhat soothed our nerves we corked the bottle and got out of the car to examine its wounds. An Anglia driver would have done this first, of course, raging at fate, but we Rolls owners are made of sterner stuff. The radiator was scarred, weeping a little on to the baking road; a headlamp and sidelamp were quite ruined; the offside mudguard was heavily crumpled but still not quite so much that it would flay the tire. The show was, if necessary, on the road. I went back into the car and thought, while Jock fussed over the damage. I may have sipped a little at the whisky bottle and who shall blame me?

No one passed along the road, in either direction. A grasshopper stridulated endlessly; I minded this at first but soon learned to live with it. Having thought, I checked my thinking both ways from the ace. The result came out the same again and again. I didn’t like it, but there you are, aren’t you?

We sent the Rolls over the precipice. I am not ashamed to say that I wept a little to see all that beauty, that power and grace and history, being tossed into an arid canyon like a cigar end chucked down a lavatory pan. Even in death the car was elegant; it described great majestic curves as it rebounded in an almost leisurely way from boulder to boulder and came to rest, far below us, wedged upside-down in the throat of a deep crevasse, its lovely underparts bared to the sex of sunshine for a few seconds before a hundred tons of scree, dislodged by its passage, roared down and covered it.

The death of the Buick driver had been nothing compared with this: human death in reality seems poor stuff to a devoted television watcher, but who amongst you, seasoned readers, has seen a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost die on its back? I was inexpressibly moved. Jock seemed to sense this in his rough way for he moved closer to me and uttered words of comfort.

‘It was insured full comprehensive, Mr Charlie,’ he said.

‘Yes, Jock,’ I answered gruffly, ‘you read my thoughts, as usual. But what is more to the point, just now, is how easily could the Rolls be salvaged?’

He brooded down into the shimmering, rock-strewn haze.

‘How are you getting down there?’ he began. ‘This side’s all avalanches and the other side’s a cliff. Very dodgy.’

‘Right.’

‘Then you got to get it out of that crack, haven’t you?’

‘Right again.’

‘
Dead
dodgy.’

‘Yes.’

‘And then you got to get it back up here, right?’

‘Right.’

‘Have to close this road a couple of days while the tackle’s working, I reckon.’

‘That’s what I thought.’

‘Mind you, if it was some stupid mountaineering twit stuck down there, or some old tart’s puppy dog, they’d have him up before you could cough, wouldn’t they, but this is only an old jam jar, isn’t it? You’d have to want it real bad – or want something in it real bad – before you’d go slummocking down there.’ He nudged me and winked enormously. He was never very good at winking, it contorted his face horribly. I nudged him back. We smirked.

Then we trudged up the road, Jock carrying our one suitcase now holding essentials for both of us, which he was supposed to have salvaged with wonderful presence of mind as the Rolls teetered on the very brink of the precipice.

‘Whither Mortdecai?’ about summed up my thought on that baking, dusty road. It is hard to think constructively once the fine, white grit of New Mexico has crept up your trouser legs and joined the sweat of your crotch. All I could decide was that the stars in their courses were hotly anti-Mortdecai and that, noble sentiments aside, I was well rid of what was probably the most conspicuous motor car on the North American subcontinent.

On the other hand, pedestrians are more conspicuous in New Mexico than most motor cars: a fact I realized when a car swept past us going in the direction we had come from; all its occupants goggled at us as though we were Teenage Things from Outer Space. It was an official car of some sort, a black and white Olds-mobile Super 88, and it did not stop – why should it? To be on foot in the United States is only immoral, not illegal. Unless you’re a bum, of course. It’s just like in England, really: you can wander abroad and lodge in the open air so long as you’ve a home to go to; it’s only an offence if you
haven’t
one – on the same principle that ensures you cannot borrow money from a bank unless you don’t need any.

After what seemed a great many hours we found a patch of shade afforded by some nameless starveling trees and without a word spoken we sank down in their ungenerous umbrage.

‘When a car passes going in our direction, Jock, we shall leap to our feet and hail it.’

‘All right, Mr Charlie.’

With that we both fell asleep instantly.

John of the Temple, whose fame so bragged,
Is burning alive in Paris square!
How can he curse, if his mouth is gagged?
Or wriggle his neck, with a collar there?
Or heave his chest, while a band goes round?
Or threat with his fist, since his arms are spliced?
Or kick with his feet, now his legs are bound?
– Thinks John, I will call upon Jesus Christ.

 

The Heretic’s Tragedy

 

A couple of hours later we were rudely awakened when a car travelling in our direction screeched to a halt beside us. It was the official looking car which had passed earlier and four huge rough men poured out of it, waving pistols and handcuffs and other symbols of Law ’n’ Order. In a trice, before we were properly awake, we were sitting manacled in the car, surrounded by deputy sheriffs. Jock, when he had sized up the situation, started to make a deep growling noise and to tense his muscles. The deputy beside him, with a deft backhanded flip, laid a leather-covered blackjack smartly against Jock’s upper lip and nostrils. It is exquisitely painful: tears sprang to Jock’s eyes and he fell silent.

‘Now look here!’ I cried angrily.

‘Shaddap.’

I too fell silent.

They hit Jock again when we arrived at the sheriff’s office in the
single broad dusty street of an empty little town; he had shrugged off the deputy’s officious hands and made snarling noises, so one of them casually bent down and coshed him hard behind the knee. That is pretty painful too; we all had to wait a while before he could walk into the office – he was much too big to carry. They didn’t hit me; I was
demure
.

What they do to you in this particular sheriff’s office is as follows: they hang you up on a door by your handcuffs then they hit you quite gently but insistently on the kidneys, for quite a long time. It makes you cry, if you want to know. It would make anybody cry after a time. They don’t ask you any questions and they don’t leave any marks on you, except where the handcuffs bit in, and you did that yourself, struggling, didn’t you?

‘I shut my eyes and turned them on my heart, I asked one draught of earlier, happier sights …’

After a certain time the sheriff himself came into the room. He was a slight and studious man with an intelligent look and a disapproving scowl. The deputies stopped hitting our kidneys and pocketed their blackjacks.

‘Why have these men not been charged?’ he asked coldly. ‘How many times do I have to tell you that suspects are not to be questioned before they have been properly booked?’

‘We weren’t questioning them, sheriff,’ said one in an insubordinate tone. ‘If we was questioning them they’d be hanging the other way around and we’d be beating on their balls, you know that, sheriff. We was just kind of getting their minds right for being questioned by
you
, sheriff.’

He stroked his face all down one side, quite thoroughly, making a gentle, half-audible sound like an old lady caressing a pet toad.

‘Bring them in to me,’ he said and turned on his heel.

‘Bring’ was right – we couldn’t have made our own way to his office. He let us sit on chairs, but only because we couldn’t stand up. Now, suddenly, I was very angry indeed, a rare emotion for me and one which I have schooled myself to avoid since my disastrous childhood.

When I could speak properly through the choking and the sobs I gave him the full business, especially the diplomatic passport bit. It worked, he started to look angry himself and perhaps a little
frightened. Our gyves were removed and our possessions returned to us, except for my Banker’s Special. Jock’s Luger was in the suitcase which, I was relieved to notice, had not been opened: Jock had prudently swallowed the key and, in the excitement of spoiling our personal plumbing, the deputies had not taken time out to force the lock. It was a very
good
lock and a very strong case.

‘Now you will have the goodness, perhaps, to explain this extraordinary treatment, Sir,’ I said, giving him my dirtiest glare, ‘and suggest reasons why I should not request my Ambassador to arrange to have you and your ruffians broken.’

He looked at me long and thoughtfully, his clever eyes flickering as his brain raced. I was a lot of trouble for him whichever way the cat jumped; a lot of paperwork at the best, a lot of grief at the worst. I could see him reach a decision and I trembled inwardly. Before he could speak I attacked again.

‘If you choose not to answer, of course, I can simply call the Embassy and give them the bald facts as they stand.’

‘Don’t push too hard, Mr Mortdecai. I am about to book you both on suspicion of murder and your diplomatic status isn’t worth a pile of rat dirt in that league.’

I spluttered in a British sort of way to hide my consternation. Surely no one could have seen Jock’s little momentary squib of ill-temper with the Buick – and anyway, at a distance it would surely have seemed that he was trying to
save
the poor fellow … ?

‘Just who am I – are we – supposed to have murdered?’

‘Milton Quintus Desiré Krampf.’

‘Desiré?’

‘That’s how I have it.’

‘Gawblimey. You’re sure it wasn’t ‘
Voulu?
’

‘No,’ he said, in a literate sort of way and with half a smile. “‘Desiré” is how I have it here.’ One got the impression that if he’d been an Englishman he’d have seconded my ‘Gawblimey’ but one had, too, the impression that he was quite content
not
to be an Englishman, perhaps particularly not the portly Englishman now cowering manfully in front of him.

‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Frighten me.’

‘I never try to. Some people I hurt; it’s part of the job. Some I kill: that too. Who needs to frighten? I’m not that kind of a policeman.’

‘I bet you frighten your psychiatrist,’ I quipped and straightaway wished I hadn’t. He did not give me a cold, blank stare, he didn’t look at me at all. He looked at the desk top where the scratches and the fly shit were, then he opened a drawer and took out one of those thin, black, gnarled cheroots and lit it. He didn’t even blow the rank smoke in my face – he wasn’t that kind of a policeman.

But he had, somehow, succeeded in frightening me. My kidneys started to hurt terribly.

‘My kidneys are hurting me terribly,’ I said, ‘and I have to go to the lavatory.’

He gestured economically toward a door and I got there without actually screaming out loud. It was a very
nice
little lavatory. I rested my head against the cool, tiled wall and piddled wearily. There was no actual blood, which mildly surprised me. At eye level someone had scratched ‘MOTHER F’ into the wall before they had been interrupted. I speculated – ‘– ATHER’? – then collected myself, remembering Jock’s plight; adjusted clothing before leaving.

‘Your turn, Jock,’ I said firmly as I re-entered the room, ‘should have thought of you first.’ Jock shambled out; the sheriff didn’t look impatient, he didn’t really look anything – I wished he would. I cleared my throat.

‘Sheriff,’ I said, ‘I saw Mr Krampf’s body yesterday – goodness, was it only yesterday – and he had quite clearly died of a coronary in the ordinary way of business. What gives with the murder bit?’

‘You may speak English, Mr Mortdecai; I am an uneducated man but I read a great deal. Mr Krampf died of a deep puncture wound in the heart. Someone – you, I must suppose – introduced a long and very thin instrument into his side between the fifth and sixth ribs and carefully wiped off the very slight surface bleeding which would have ensued.

‘It is not a rare
modus operandi
on our West Coast: the Chinese Tongs used to favour a six-inch nail, the Japanese use a sharpened umbrella rib. It’s all-same Sicilian stiletto, I suppose, except that the Sicilians usually strike upwards through the diaphragm. Had Mr Krampf’s heart been young and sound he might well have survived so small a puncture – the muscle could have kind of clenched itself around the hole – but Mr Krampf’s heart was by no means healthy. Had he been a poor man his history of heart disease might have caused the manner of his death to escape notice, but he
was not a man at all, he was a hundred million dollars. That means a great deal of insurance pressure in this country, Mr Mortdecai, and our insurance investigators make the Chicago riot police look like Girl Scouts. Even the drunkest doctor takes a veddy, veddy careful look at a hundred million dollars’ worth of dead meat.’

I pondered a bit. Dawn broke.

‘The old lady!’ I cried. ‘The Countess! A hatpin! She was a leading Krampf-hater and a hatpin owner if ever I saw one!’

He shook his head slowly. ‘Not a chance, Mr Mortdecai. I’m surprised to hear you trying to pin your slaying on the sweetest and innocentest little old lady you ever saw. Besides, we already checked. She covers her head with a shawl in church and doesn’t have a hat or a hatpin in her possession. We
looked
. Anyway, one of the servants has sworn a statement that you were seen entering Krampf’s personal suite, drunk, at about the time of death and that your servant Strapp acted like a homicidal maniac during your visit to the rancho, breaking the same servant’s nose and beating up everyone. Moreover, you are known to be Mrs Krampf’s lover – we have a really fascinating statement from the woman who makes her bed – so there’s a double motive of sex and money as well as opportunity. I’d say you should tell it all now, starting with where you hid the murder weapon, so I don’t have to have you interrogated.’

He repeated the word ‘interrogated’ as though he liked the sound of it. To say that my blood ran cold would be idle: it was already as cold as a tart’s kiss. Had I been guilty I would have ‘spilled my guts’ – may I use dialect? – there and then, rather than meet those deputies again, especially
frontally
. If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? A still, small voice whispered ‘stall’ in my ear.

‘Do you mean to say that you have arrested Johanna Krampf?’ I cried.

‘Mr Mortdecai, you cannot be as simple as you pretend. Mrs Krampf is now many millions of dollars herself; a poor sheriff does not arrest millions of dollars, they have not a stain on their character. Should I call in a stenographer now, so that you can make the statement?’

What had I to lose? In any case, no one could hurt me too obscenely in front of a sweet little bosomy stenographer.

So he pressed a buzzer and in clunked the nastier of the two
deputies, a pencil engulfed in one meaty fist, a shorthand pad in the other.

I may have squeaked – I don’t remember and it is not important. There is no doubt that I was distressed.

‘Are you unwell, Mr Mortdecai?’ asked the sheriff pleasantly.

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘Just a touch of proctalgia.’ He didn’t ask what it meant; just as well, really.

‘Statement by C. Mortdecai,’ he said crisply to the stenographic ruffian, ‘given at so and so on such and such a date before me, so and so, and witnessed by such and such another.’ With that he shot a finger out at me, like one of those capable television chaps. I did not hesitate: it was time to put on a bit of dog.

‘I did not kill Krampf,’ I said, ‘and I have no idea who did. I am a British diplomat and protest strongly against this disgraceful treatment. I suggest you either release me at once or allow me to telephone the nearest British Consul before you ruin your career irretrievably. Can you spell “irretrievably”?’ I asked over my shoulder at the stenographer. But he was no longer taking down my words, he was advancing toward me with the blackjack in his hairy paw. Before I could even cringe the door opened and two almost identical men entered.

This final Kafkaesque touch was too much for me: I succumbed to hysterical giggles. No one looked at me; the deputy was slinking out, the sheriff was looking at the two men’s credentials, the two men were looking through the sheriff. Then the sheriff slunk out. I pulled myself together.

‘What is the meaning of this intrusion?’ I asked, still giggling like a little mad thing. They were very polite, pretended not to hear me, sat down side by side behind the sheriff’s desk. They were astonishingly alike; the same suits, the same haircuts, the same neat briefcases and the same slight bulges under the nattily tailored left armpits. They looked like Colonel Blucher’s younger brothers. They were probably rather alarming people in their quiet way. I pulled myself together and stopped giggling. I could tell Jock didn’t like them, he had started breathing through his nose, a sure sign.

One of them pulled out a little wire recorder, tested it briefly, switched it off and sat back, folding his arms. The other pulled out a slim manila file, read the contents with mild interest and sat back,
folding his arms. They didn’t look at each other once, they didn’t look at Jock. First they looked at the ceiling for a while, as though it was something of a novelty, then they looked at me as though I was nothing of the kind. They looked at me as though they saw a great many of me every day and felt none the richer for it. One of them, on some unseen cue, at last uttered,

‘Mr Mortdecai, we are members of a small Federal Agency of which you have never heard. We report directly to the Vice-President. We are in a position to help you. We have formed the opinion that you are in urgent need of help and we may say that this opinion has been formed after some extensive study of your recent activities, which seem to have been dumb.’

‘Oh, ah,’ I said feebly.

‘I should make it very clear that we are not interested in law enforcement as such; indeed, such an interest would often conflict with our specific duties.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Do you know a chap called Colonel Blucher? Or, if it comes to that, another chap named Martland?’

‘Mr Mortdecai, we feel we can best help you at this juncture by encouraging you to answer our questions rather than ask any of your own. A few right answers could get you out of here in ten minutes; wrong answers, or a whole lot of questions, would make us lose interest in you and we’d just kind of hand you back to the sheriff. Personally, and off the record, I would not, myself, care to be held for murder in this county, would you, Smith?’