The Mortdecai Trilogy (21 page)

You will not find it hard to believe that, since returning to this, my oubliette, I have had more than one suck at my brother’s delicious whisky. I intend to have a couple more, then to consult sagacious sleep.

Why we so used to relish the life stories of condemned men, and why so many of us mourn the passing of capital punishment, is because ordinary decent chaps like us have a fine feeling for the dramatic proprieties: we know that tragedy cannot properly end in nine years’ comfy incarceration and useful, satisfying work in the prison bakery. We know that death is the only end of art. A chap who has gone to all the trouble of strangling his wife is
entitled
to his moment of splendour on the gallows – it is a crime to make him sew mailbags like a common thief.

We loved those tales told at the gallows-foot because they freed us from the tyranny and vulgarity of the happy ending; the long, idiot senescence, the wonderful grandchildren, the tactful inquiries about the life-insurance premiums.

Since there’s no help, come then, let’s kiss and part. Something has gone wrong. I shall attract no help by firing my pistol, for today is evidently the first of September: duck shooting has begun and since before dawn the Moss and the shore have echoed with sporting musketry.

Martland has found me; I suppose I always knew he would. He came to the mouth of the mine and called down to me. I didn’t answer.

‘Charlie, we know you’re down there, we can
smell
you, for God’s sake! Look, Charlie, the others can’t hear me, I’m willing to give you a break. Tell me where the bloody picture is, get me off the hook, and I’ll give you a night’s start; you might get clear away.’

He
can’t
have thought I’d believe that, can he?

‘Charlie, we’ve got Jock, he’s alive …’

I knew that was a lie and suddenly I was filled with rage at his shabbiness. Without exposing myself I aimed the .455 at a knob of
rock near the entrance and loosed off a round. The noise deafened me momentarily but I could still hear the snarl of the big distorted bullet ricocheting toward Martland. When he spoke again, from another spot, his voice was tight with fear and hatred.

‘All right, Mortdecai. Here’s another deal. Tell me where the bloody picture is and where the other photographs are and I promise I’ll shoot you cleanly. That’s the most you can hope for now – and you’ll have to trust me even for that.’ He enjoyed that bit. I fired again, praying that the mangled lead would take his face off. He spoke again, explaining how void my chances were, not understanding that I had written off my life and wanted only his. He listed lovingly the people who wanted me dead, from the Spanish Government to the Lord’s Day Observance Society – I was positively flattered at the extent of the mess I had made. Then he went away.

Later they shot at me with a silenced pistol for half an hour, listening between shots for a cry of pain or surrender. The slugs, screaming and buzzing as they tore from wall to wall, nearly drove me insane but only one touched me; they didn’t know whether the shaft turned left or right. The one lucky shot laid my scalp open and it is bleeding into my eyes – I must look a
sight
.

The American tried coaxing me next but he, too, had nothing to offer but a quick death in exchange for information and a written confession. They must have raised the Rolls from its grave in the canyon, for he knows the Goya wasn’t in the soft-top. Spain, it seems, is due to renew a treaty with the USA about Strategic Air Force bases on her territory, but every time the US reminds them about it, the Spaniards change the subject to the Goya. ‘Duchess of Wellington’ – ‘known to have been stolen on behalf of an American and to have entered the US.’ He wouldn’t have told me about the bases if he thought I had any chance of surviving, would he?

I didn’t bother to reply, I was busy with the turpentine.

Then he told me the alternative, the
dirty
death: they have sent for a canister of cyanide, the stuff they use on rabbits here and on people over there. So evidently I cannot hope for Martland to come down and fetch me. I shall have to go out to him. It’s of no importance.

I have finished with the turpentine; mixed with whisky it has served beautifully to dissolve the lining of my suitcase and now the
Goya smiles at me from the wall, fresh and lovely as the day she was painted, the incomparable, naked ‘Duquesa de Wellington,’ mine to keep for the rest of my life. ‘
Donc, Dieu existe
.’

There is enough whisky to last me until the light fades and then – who could be afraid? – I shall emerge with my six-gun blazing, like some shaggy hero of the Old West. I know that I shall be able to kill Martland; then one of the others will kill me and I shall fall like a bright exhalation in the evening down to hell where there is no art and no alcohol, for this is, after all, quite a moral tale. You see that, don’t you?

All the characters in this book are fictitious: any similarity to real people or corpses is both accidental and disgusting.

The epigraphs are all by Alfred, Lord Tennyson except one which is a palpable forgery. The forgery is signed, after a fashion.

There is not a word of truth in this book. I have neither met nor heard of anyone who resembles any character in it, I am glad to say. They are all figments of my heated imagination, every one of them. This is particularly true of the fictional narrator, whose only resemblance to me is around the waist-line.

I apologize for what he says about the art-trade. Why, some of my best friends, etc.

There is, I believe, a very sophisticated cop-shop South of the Thames but I have never seen it except in the mind’s eye, which is where I should like to keep it. The only pub I know called The Bunch of Grapes is in Gracie Fields’ deathless aspidistra song. I believe that there was once a shop in the East End called Mycock’s Electrical but I know of no pig-abattoirs of that name.

The lavatory inspection-panel ruse for smuggling heroin was, indeed, once used but it has long been ‘blown’ or I would not have related it. It is almost as old-fashioned as using motor-car tyres, cameras from Kowloon, hollowed-out boomerangs from Bendigo (New South Wales), ‘pregnant’ ladies from Amsterdam, long-playing records pressed out of ganja resin, or even dusty carpets from Kashmir which need a little attention from a certain dry-cleaner in London’s dockland before they are delivered to the consignee. The same is true of other naughty techniques described: pray do not let them tempt you to embark upon a life of crime. You may be a hare but ‘Old Bill’ is a most capable tortoise.

I apologize to Air France: its hostesses are all excellent linguists. Many of them can even understand my French.

Come into the garden, Maud,
I am here at the gate alone …

 

Maud

 

Yes, well, there it was. That was that. I’d had my life.

So I drank the last of the whisky, looked a loving last once more on the naked Duchess and shed perhaps – I forget – a tear of self-pity, that last of luxuries, before climbing stiffly to my feet. The heavy, friendly old Smith & Wesson pistol was loaded in all chambers with the murderous soft lead target ammunition. I pulled the hammer back a little, which allows the cylinder to spin. I span it, listening to the quick, fat chuckle of the ratchet.

Then I sat down again.

I had left it just that few minutes too late and there had been just too small a jolt of Scotch in the tail of the bottle. Had there been even one more fluid ounce, I could have gone roaring out of my smelly cavern like some old grizzly bear, but now sobriety had me by the throat. You see, I had begun to consider just where the bullets would smash into my well-nourished body; what bones would be shattered, what spillikins of the said bones would be sent splintering through which of my delicate organs, how
long
this mangling would last before generous Death brushed pain aside and passed his hand over my eyelids, closing them forever.

No, wait, sorry. Hang about a bit. It has just occurred to me that you might be a trifle puzzled as to why Charlie Mortdecai – I – should have been preparing for death in a smelly cavern, chaperoned only by a naked Duchess, a large revolver and an empty whisky-bottle. I realize that some might find these circumstances unusual, perhaps even bizarre.

This, then, is what happened before you came in. Nude readers begin here. There’s this chap Me, you see – the Hon. Charlie Mortdecai – I was actually christened Charlie – who is, or rather am, a nice, rich, cowardly, fun-loving art-dealer who dabbles in crime to take his mind off his haemorrhoids. Then there’s this fantastic painting by Goya of ‘The Duchess of Wellington’ who, at the time of being painted, had absent-mindedly forgotten to put her knickers back on. Or, indeed, anything else. Having so much respect for other people’s property that I sometimes feel bound to care for it myself, I had nicked the painting from the Prado, Madrid, and exported it personally to a millionaire art-lover in New Mexico. I found the art-lover freshly murdered, and his randy-eyed young widow casting about for a replacement. All went wrong, as all these things do, and, as my sense of fun started to fray at the cuffs, I shortened my lines of communication – as the generals used to say – and made tracks for England, home and beauty, in the order named.

All sorts of people were by that time disliking Mortdecai warmly, and in an almost-final hot pursuit I was obliged to kick in the head of my trusty thug Jock, who was about to die even more unpleasantly in the quicksands of Morecambe Bay, Lancashire. I – Mortdecai – holed up in a disused red-oxide mine on Warton Crag (still in Lancashire), found that my enemies had traced me thither, and realized that my life was over. I was in a pretty shabby mental and physical state by then and resolved to get as drunk as I could, then to come roaring out of my stinking lair and kill at least Martland, chief of my persecutors.

Right? Any questions? There I was, then, preparing to go out and meet the kind of messy death I had too often seen happen to other people. I couldn’t see myself in the rôle at all.

Ah, yes,
but
. What else? Where was your actual alternative?

I upturned the bottle and collected three more drops, or it may have been four.

‘Pull yourself together, Mortdecai,’ I told myself sternly. ‘Nothing in life became you like the leaving of it. It is a far, far better thing that you do now. You are ready and ripe for death. You’ll
like
it up there.’

‘Up?’ I thought. ‘
Up
there? Must you joke at a time like this?’

Then I looked again at the painted Duchess, her canvas propped against the wall of the mine-shaft, smiling like a whole choir of Mona Lisas, voluptuously sexless, erotic only on a level that I could never reach. Although God knows I have tried.

‘Oh, very well,’ I told her.

I crawled to the entrance of the little mine. There was no sound outside, no movement, but they were there, all right. There was nowhere else they would be.

I emerged.

An enormous light burst out but, unaccountably, it was pointed not at me but in the opposite direction. It illumined not me but a pallid, startled Martland. Well, at least I could fulfil that part of my programme. He peered down the beam at me, making urgent little movements with his hands.

‘Martland,’ I said. I had never heard myself use that voice before but I knew that there was no need for more than the one word.

He opened his mouth. It seemed difficult for him. Perhaps he was going to remind me that we had been at school together. I couldn’t find it in my heart to shoot anyone looking as soppy as he did, but my trigger-finger had a life of its own. The pistol jumped hard in my hand and a puff of dust bounced out of his trousers just below the belt-buckle.

I gazed at the spot, entranced. There wasn’t any blood; you couldn’t even see a hole. Martland looked puzzled, vexed even. He sat down hard on his bottom and looked at me, cross and disappointed. Then he started dying and it was rather dreadful and went on and on and made me feel even more ill than I was and I couldn’t bear it and I shot him again and again but I couldn’t seem to make him stop dying.

Whoever was working the searchlight finally tore himself away from the spectacle and nailed me with the beam. I clicked the revolver three or four times – empty as Mortdecai now – three or four times up into the glaring eye of the light, threw it as hard as I could, missed again.

‘Mr Mortdecai,’ said a polite American voice.

I whipped around, eyes tearing at the darkness, my gut hungry for the coming of the bullets.

‘No, Mr Mortdecai,’ the voice went on, ‘please compose yourself. Nobody’s killing anyone else tonight. Everything’s going to be all right. I mean,
really
all right.’

You cannot imagine how disappointing it is to be all braced for death and then to find, at the very moment of truth, that they’re not frying tonight. I sort of suddenly found myself sitting down and weeping noisily; the sobs tore through my breast like the bullets that hadn’t.

They gave me a flask of whisky and I was sick again and again but at last I kept some down and then there was a dull, silencer
plop
from Martland’s direction and the noises of his dying stopped and then the woman got me to my feet and helped me down the slope and across the road and up into Fleagarth Wood and to their tent. She was very strong and smelled of old fur coats. I was asleep as I hit the groundsheet.

… when the steam
Floats up from those dim fields about the homes
Of happy men that have the power to die …

 

Tithonus

 

The woman woke me up a few moments later. The moments must have been hours, actually, for a dank and dirty dawn was oozing into the tent. I squealed angrily and burrowed back down into the sleeping-bag: it smelled of nasty policewomen but I loved it – there were no people there. She coaxed me awake with a finger-and-thumb-nail in the ear-lobe: she must have found that in the works of Lord Baden-Powell. (Don’t you often wonder what B.P. would have done for a living if he had lived in these times?
Oxfam?
Peace Corps?)

She had won her Camp Cookery Badge, that was clear, for the mug of tea wheedled into my quaking fingers was of no tenderfoot quality. I, personally, have no quarrel with Evaporated Milk: it lends a heartening, lusty thickness to cheap tea which, once in a while, I find most gratifying.

Then she made me wash and shave (she lent me a tiny razor with a pink plastic handle: it was called ‘Miaouw’ – why?) and then she showed me where the Elsan was and then we went,
hand in hand
, down through the wood to where a huge American
camper-van was parked just off the road. We climbed in. Two other people were there already. One was on a stretcher, covered all over with a blanket. Well, Martland, obviously. I didn’t have any feelings about that. Not then. Later, perhaps. The other was the American, gabbling gibberish into a wireless set which was quacking back at him. He was, it fuzzily seemed to me, patiently telling someone to get into touch with someone else who would authorize yet another someone to blah-blah. He was very polite to the quacker. At last he went through the ‘Roger and out’ nonsense, switched off all the little knobs and turned around, giving me a smile which was quite unwarranted, considering how early in the day it was. He proved to be a man called Colonel Blucher, whom I had met before. We had never actually hit each other.

‘Good morning, Mr Mortdecai,’ he said, still smiling in that unwarranted way.

‘Oink,’ I said. There was, clearly, something pretty wrong with me still, for I had meant to be a trifle civiller than that, but ‘Oink’ was what came out.

He blinked a little but took no offence.

‘I’m very, very sorry to have to rouse you so early, Mr Mortdecai, for I recall that you are not an early riser. You must be very tired still?’

I was more articulate this time.

‘Oinkle oink,’ I said courteously. It was the strangest feeling: the words were perfectly clear in my head but all I could produce were these farmyard imitations. Distraught, I sat down heavily and put my head in my hands. A sort of juicy noise underneath me and a sort of knobbly softness made me realize that I was sitting on Martland. I jumped up again, squeaking. Blucher was looking worried so, naturally, I tried to hit him, didn’t I? I mean, it seemed a sensible thing to do at the time. But my wild swing only threw me flat on my face and I started to cry again. I wanted my mummy badly, but I knew she wouldn’t be coming: she never did, you know, even when she was alive. She was one of those Mums who believe that Christopher Robin kills all known germs. A kind of literary Harpic.

Blucher came and put his arm around me and helped me to my feet and I fancy I probably started to scream a bit – for I thought
it was Jock come back from his grave in the quagmire – so he took something out of his hip-pocket and, with a look of infinite compassion on his face, slugged me carefully behind the ear. This was much better.

‘Roger and out,’ I thought gratefully as the lovely blackness encompassed me.