The Mortdecai Trilogy (16 page)

Smith shook his head emphatically, lips tightened.

‘Ask away,’ I quavered, ‘I have nothing to hide.’

‘Well, that’s already being a little less than candid, Sir, but we’ll let it pass this time. Would you tell us first, please, what you did with the negative and prints of a certain photograph, formerly in the possession of Milton Krampf?’

(Did you know that in the olden days when a sailor died at sea and the sailmaker was sewing him up in his tarpaulin jacket, along with an anchor shackle, prior to committing him to the deep, that the last stitch was always ritually passed through the corpse’s nose? It was to give him his last chance to come to life and cry out. I felt like just such a sailor at that moment. I came to life and cried out. This last stitch had finally awakened me from the cataleptic trance I must have been in for days. Far, far too many people knew far, far too
much about my little affairs: the game was up, all was known, God was not in his heaven, the snail was unthorned and C. Mortdecai was
dans la purée noire
. He had been
dumb
.)

‘What negative?’ I asked brightly.

They looked at each other wearily and began to gather their things together. I was still being dumb.

‘Wait!’ I cried. ‘Silly of me. The negative. Yes, of course. The
photographic
negative. Yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. As a matter of fact I burned it, much too dangerous to have about one.’

‘We are glad you said that, Sir, for we have reason to believe it is true. Indeed, we found traces of ash in a, uh, curious footbath in Mr Krampf’s private bathroom.’

You will agree, I’m sure, that this was no time to expatiate on the niceties of French plumbing.

‘Well, there you are, you see,’ I said.

‘How many prints, Mr Mortdecai?’

‘I burned the two with the negative; I only know of one other, in London, and the faces have been cut out of that – I daresay you know all about it.’

‘Thank you. We feared you might pretend to know of others and attempt to use this as a means of protecting yourself. It would not have protected you but it would have given us a fair amount of embarrassment.’

‘Oh, good.’

‘Mr Mortdecai, have you asked yourself how we happen to be here so soon after the killing?’

‘Look, I said I’d answer your questions and I will: if I have guts I’m prepared to spill them now – I’m quite unmanned. But if you want me to ask
myself
questions, you must get me something to eat and drink. Anything will do to eat; my drink is in the outer office if King Kong and Godzilla out there haven’t stolen it all. Oh, and my servant needs something too, of course.’

One of them put his head out of the door and muttered; my whisky, not too depleted, appeared and I sucked hungrily at it, then passed it to Jock. The boys in the Brooks Bros suits didn’t want any – they probably lived on iced water and tin tacks.

‘No,’ I resumed, ‘I have not asked myself that. If I really started to ask myself about the events of the last thirty-six hours
I should probably be forced to conclude that there is a world-wide anti-Mortdecai conspiracy. But tell me, if it will cheer you up.’

‘We don’t much want to tell you, Mr Mortdecai. We just wanted to hear what you would say. So far we like your answers. Now tell us about the way you lost the Rolls Royce.’ At this point they switched the wire recorder on.

I told them frankly about the collision but altered the subsequent events a little, telling them lovely stories about Jock’s gallant bid to save the Buick as it teetered on the brink; then how we had tried to back the Rolls on to the road, how the wheels had spun, the shoulder crumbled and the car gone to join the Buick.

‘And your suitcase, Mr Mortdecai?’

‘Brilliant presence of mind on the part of Jock – snatched it at the last moment.’

They switched off the recorder.

‘We do not necessarily believe all or any of this, Mr Mortdecai, but again it happens to be the story we wanted. Now, have you anything else in your possession which you intended to deliver to Mr Krampf?’

‘No. Honour bright.
Search
us.’

They started studying the ceiling again, they had all the time in the world.

Later, the door knocked and a deputy brought in a paper sack of food; I almost fainted away at the wonderful fragrance of hamburgers and coffee. Jock and I ate two hamburgers each; our interrogators didn’t like the look of theirs. They pushed them away delicately with the backs of their fingers, in unison, as though they’d rehearsed it. There was a little carton of chilli to spread on the hamburgers. I had lots of it but it spoils the taste of whisky, you know.

I cannot remember much about the rest of the questions, except that they went on for a long time and some of them were surprisingly vague and general. Sometimes the wire recorder was on, sometimes not. Probably another was on all the time, inside one of the briefcases. I got the impression that they were becoming very bored with the whole thing, but I was by then so sleepy with food and liquor and exhaustion that I could only concentrate with difficulty. Much of the time I simply told them the truth – a course Sir Henry Wotton (another man who went abroad to
lie) recommended as a way of baffling your adversaries. Another chap once said, ‘If you wish to preserve your secret, wrap it up in frankness.’ I wrapped, profusely. But you know, playing a sort of fugue with truth and mendacity makes one lose, after a while, one’s grip on reality. My father always warned me against lying where the truth would do; he had early realized that my memory – essential equipment of the liar – was faulty. ‘Moreover,’ he used to say, ‘a lie is a work of art. We
sell
works of art, we don’t give them away. Eschew falsehood, my son.’ That is why I never lie when selling works of art. Buying them is another matter, of course.

As I was saying, they asked a lot of rather vague questions, few of them apparently germane to the issue. Mind you, I wasn’t so terribly sure what the point at issue was, so perhaps I wasn’t the best judge. They wanted to know about Hockbottle although they seemed to know more about him than I did. On the other hand, they seemed not to have heard that he was dead; funny, that. I brought Colonel Blucher’s name into the conversation several times – I even tried pronouncing it ‘Blootcher’ – but they didn’t react at all.

At last, they started stuffing their gear away into the matching briefcases with an air of finality, which warned me that the big question was about to be asked in an offhand, casual way as they rose to go.

‘Tell me, Mr Mortdecai,’ said one of them in an offhand, casual way as they rose to go, ‘what did you think of Mrs Krampf?’

‘Her heart,’ I said bitterly, ‘is like spittle on the palm that the Tartar slaps – no telling which way it will pitch.’

‘That’s very nice, Mr Mortdecai,’ said one, nodding appreciatively, ‘that’s M.P. Shiel, isn’t it? Do I understand that you consider her as being in some way responsible for your present predicament?’

‘Of course I do, I’m not a complete bloody idiot. ‘Patsy’ is the word over here, I believe.’

‘You could just be mistaken there,’ the other agent said gently. ‘You have no cogent reason for supposing that Mrs Krampf is other than sincere in her feelings toward you; certainly none for supposing that she has set you up.’

I snarled.

‘Mr. Mortdecai, I don’t wish to be impertinent, but may I ask whether you have had a wide experience of women?’

‘Some of my best friends are women,’ I snapped, ‘though I certainly wouldn’t want my daughter to marry one of them.’

‘I see. Well, I think we need not keep you from your journey any longer, Sir. The sheriff will be told that you did not kill Mr Krampf and since you no longer seem to be a possible embarrassment to Washington we have no further interest in you just now. If we turn out to be wrong we shall, uh, be able to find you, of course.’

‘Of course,’ I agreed.

As they crossed the room I rummaged desperately in my poor jumbled brain and picked out the big, knobbly question that hadn’t been asked.

‘Who did kill Krampf?’ I asked.

They paused and looked back at me blankly.

‘We don’t have the faintest idea. We came down here to do it ourselves so it doesn’t matter too much.’

It was a lovely exit line, you must admit.

‘Could I have a drop more whisky, Mr Charlie?’

‘Yes, of course, Jock, do; it’ll bring the roses back into your cheeks.’

‘Ta. Glug, suck. Aarhh. Well, that’s all right then, isn’t it, Mr Charlie?’

I rounded on him savagely.

‘Of course it’s not all right, you sodding idiot, those two goons have every intention of stamping on both of us as soon as we’re well away from here. Look, you think those deputies out there are pigs? Well, they’re bloody suffragettes beside those two mealy-mouthed murderers – these are genuine Presidential trouble-shooters and the trouble is us.’

‘I don’t get it. Why di’n’t they shoot us then?’

‘Oh Christ Jock, look, would Mr Martland shoot us if he thought it was a good idea?’

‘Yeah, ’course.’

‘But would he do it in Half Moon Street Police Station in front of all the regular coppers?’

‘No, ’course not. Oh, I get it. Ooh.’

‘I’m sorry I called you a sodding idiot, Jock.’

‘That’s all right, Mr Charlie, you was a bit worked up, I expect.’

‘Yes, Jock.’

The sheriff came in and gave us back the contents of our pockets, including my Banker’s Special. The cartridges were in a separate envelope. He was no longer urbane, he hated us now very much.

‘I have been instructed,’ he said, like a man spitting out fishbones, ‘not to book you for the murder you committed yesterday. There is a cab outside and I would like for you to get into it and get out of this county and never come back.’ He shut his eyes very tightly and kept them shut as though hoping to wake up in a different time stream, one in which C. Mortdecai and J. Strapp had never been born.

We tiptoed out.

The deputies were in the outer office, standing tall, wearing the mindless sneers of their kind. I walked up close to the larger and nastier of the two.

‘Your mother and father only met once,’ I said carefully, ‘and money changed hands. Probably a dime.’

As we pushed the street door open Jock said, ‘What’s a dime in English money, Mr Charlie?’

A huge, dishevelled car was quaking and farting at the curb outside. The driver, an evident alcoholic, told us that it was a fine evening and I could not find it in my heart to contradict him. He explained, as we climbed in, that he had another passenger to pick up en route and there she was on the next corner, as sweet and saucy a little wench as you could wish for.

She sat between us, smoothing her minimal print skirt over her naughty dimpled thighs and smiling up at us like a fallen angel. There’s nothing like a pretty little girl to take a fellow’s mind off his troubles, is there, especially when she looks as though she can be had. She told us that her name was Cinderella Gottschalk and we believed her – I mean, she couldn’t have made it up, could she – and Jock gave her the last drink in the bottle. She said that she declared it was real crazy drinking liquor or words to that effect. She wore her cute little breasts high up under her chin, the way they used to in the ’fifties,
you
remember. In short, we had become firm friends and were ten miles out of town before a car behind us hit its siren and pulled out alongside. Our driver was giggling as he pulled over to the side and stopped. The official
car shrieked to a rocking halt across our bows and out leaped the same two deputies, wearing the same sneers and pointing the same pistols.

‘Oh my Gawd,’ said Jock – a phrase I have repeatedly asked him not to use – ‘what now?’

‘They probably forgot to ask me where I get my hair done,’ I said bravely. But it wasn’t that. They yanked the door open and addressed our little Southern Belle.

‘Parm me, Miss, how old are you?’

‘Why, Jed Tuttle,’ she sniggered, ‘you know mah age jest as well as …’

‘The age, Cindy,’ he snapped.

‘Rising fourteen,’ she simpered, with a coy pout.

My heart sank.

‘All right, you filthy deviates – out!’ said the deputy.

They didn’t hit us when they got us back to the office, they were going off duty and had no time to spare. They simply bunged us into the Tank.

‘See you in the morning,’ they told us, cosily.

‘I demand to make a phone call.’

‘In the morning, maybe, when you’re sober.’

They left us there without even saying goodnight.

The Tank was a cube composed entirely of bars, except for the tiled floor which was covered with a thin crust of old vomit. The only furniture was an open plastic bucket which had not been emptied lately. Several kilowatts of fluorescent lighting poured pitilessly down from the ceiling high above. I could find no adequate words, but Jock rose to the occasion.

‘Well, fuck this for a game of darts,’ he said.

‘Just so.’

We went to the corner furthest from the slop pail and propped our weary bodies against the bars. Much later, the night duty deputy appeared – an enormous, elderly fatty with a huge face like a bishop’s bottom, rosy and round and hot. He stood by the Tank and sniffed with a pained expression on his nose.

‘Youse stink like a coupla pigs or sompn,’ he said, wagging his great head. ‘Never could figure out how growed-up men could get theirselves in sich a state. I get drunk myself, times, but I don’t get myself all shitten up like pigs or sompn.’

‘It isn’t us stinking,’ I said politely, ‘it’s mostly this bucket. Do you think you could take it away?’

‘Nope. We got a cleaning lady for them chores and she’s to home by now. Anyways, say I take the bucket away, what you gonna spew into?’

‘We don’t
want
to be sick. We’re not drunk. We’re British diplomats and we protest strongly at this treatment, there’s going to be a big scandal when we get out of here, why don’t you let us make a phone call and do yourself a bit of good?’

He stroked his great face carefully, all over; it took quite a while.

‘Nope,’ he said at last. ‘Have to ask the sheriff and he’s to home by now. He don’t admire to be disturbed at home, ’cept for homicide of white Caucasians.’