The Mortdecai Trilogy (23 page)

I gaped at the man. Perhaps he was human after all.

‘What exactly do you want me to do?’ I asked.

‘Well, it’s more
who
, really. Think of someone young and beautiful and fabulously rich.’

I thought. I thought briefly because I am not wholly stupid.

‘Mrs Krampf,’ I said.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Marry her. That’s all.’

‘All?’

‘Well, practically all.’

‘I need to go back to sleep,’ I said. Back to sleep is where I went.

O Sorrow, wilt thou live with me
No casual mistress, but a wife.

 

In Memoriam

 

To tell the truth, that was not one of the times when I enjoyed a long and untroubled repose. Well, look, do you remember the last time
you
were told that you could continue living on the condition that you married a madly beautiful, sex-happy she-millionaire whom you were pretty sure had murdered her last husband in an almost undetectable way? Did
you
get in the wholesome eight hours of sleep?

The actual sequence of events was that I awoke, sat up and chewed fingernails, cigarettes and Scotch whisky – not necessarily in that order – for an hour or two. (I need scarcely tell you that Jock had smuggled me in a bottle of Messrs Haig and Haig’s best and brightest.)

Those secret agents and chaps that you read about in the storybooks would have had it all figured out to the last bloodstain in a moment, I don’t doubt, but I had not their resilience, nor their youth. Perhaps, too, I was not, in those days, quite as clever as I am now. After a while I said ‘bollox’ and ‘I dunno’ and ‘soddem’ – in that order, this time – and went back to sleep after all. I don’t really know why I troubled to wake up in the first place, for it was
evident to the most casual eye that the old anti-Mortdecai conspiracy still had its hand on the wheel, its finger on the pulse and its thumb up to the knuckle-joint. ‘Soddem’ was without doubt the best phrase I had coined that day. I said it again. It seemed to help.

‘I gotta get me bottle back,’ mumbled Jock the next day, sitting on my bed and watching Nurse Quickly deal with my neglected toenails.

‘Oh, I’d not worry about that, Jock. They’re sending us off on a convalescent holiday to the Lake District tomorrow – a couple of lungfuls of mountain air and you’ll be as full of fight as a lion. It’s all these nurses that have been sapping your strength.’ He shifted uneasily.

‘I don’t reckon you quite got the idea about “bottle”, Mr Charlie. It isn’t just guts, it’s more like sort of relishing using your guts. You know, like sort of having a bit of a laugh when you’re duffing someone up.’

‘I think I see,’ I said, shuddering thoughtfully and strumming one of Nurse Quickly’s gorgeous breasts with a newly trimmed great toe. Without a flicker of expression she drove half an inch of scissor-point into my other foot. I didn’t scream; I have a bit of bottle myself, you know.

A moment later, when she had completed my pedicure, Jock took the scissors gently from her and with one hand crumpled them up. Then he held out his spade-like hand, cupped. Nurse Quickly leaned forward until the breast previously referred to rested in his hand. He growled quietly; she made a sort of throaty noise as he started to squeeze. Disgusted, I dragged my foot with some difficulty out from between them and sulkily turned my back.

They left the room together, without a word, headed for the linen-cupboard if I know anything about hospitals.

‘Youth, flaming youth,’ I thought bitterly.

‘Tirra lirra’ by the river
Sang Sir Lancelot.

 

The Lady of Shalott

 

Well, there we were, Blucher and Jock and me, sitting around a table on the terrace of an hotel under one of those Lake District mountains that people send you postcards of, sipping tea (!) and watching a party of idiots getting ready to walk up the mountain. It was a fine day for early November in Lakeland – in fact it was a fine day for anywhere in England, any time – but it was only about five hours before dusk and the climb they were planning takes a smart three hours each way. A Mountain Rescue Warden was pleading with them, almost tearfully, but they just looked at him with amused contempt, the way a female learner-driver looks at her instructor. (She
knows
that hand-signals are a lot of nonsense invented by men to baffle women; why, her mother has been driving for years and has never used a hand-signal and she’s never been hurt. A few other people, yes, perhaps, but not her.)

The mountain-rescue chap finally raised both hands and dropped them in a gesture of finality. He turned away from the group and walked towards us, grinding his teeth audibly. Then he stopped, whirled around and
counted
them ostentatiously. That would have frightened me. They just giggled. As he walked
towards us I made a sympathetic grimace and he paused at our table.

‘Look at the buggers,’ he grated. ‘Wearing
sandals
! Just a lot of nasty accidents looking for somewhere to happen. Coom nine o’clock, me my mates’ll be scouring t’bloody mountain for the twist in t’dark, brecking wor necks. And I’ll miss t’Midnight Movie, like as not.’

‘Too bad,’ I said, keeping my face straight.

‘Why do you do it?’ Blucher asked him.

‘For
foon
,’ he growled, and stalked away.

‘Going to overhaul his equipment,’ said Blucher wisely.

‘Or beat his wife,’ I said.

We went on sipping tea; that is to say, Blucher and I sipped while Jock sort of hoovered his up with a lovely, wristy motion of the upper lip. I don’t much care about tea-drinking in the afternoon; in the morning the stuff Jock brings to me in bed is like that Nepenthe which the wife of Thone gave to Jove-born Helena, but in the p.m. it always makes me think of Ganges mud in which crocodiles have been coupling.

‘Well, now,’ Blucher.

I put on my intelligent, receptive face, the one I wear when a heavy customer, pen poised over cheque-book, starts to tell me about his philosophy of art-collecting.

‘Mr Mortdecai, why do you suppose I and my superiors have uh preserved you from uh death at very very trouble and expense?’

‘You told me: you want me to marry Johanna Krampf. I cannot begin to understand why. By the way, what did you do with Martland’s er cadaver or mortal coil?’

‘I understand it was fished out of the Thames at Wapping Old Stairs. The uh marine organisms had done a good job and the cause of death is recorded as “uncertain”. Police suspect a vengeance homicide.’

‘Goodness,’ I said, ‘their
minds
!’

He fidgeted fretfully. I was not asking the right questions. Chaps like him do not like to volunteer information, they like it to be wheedled out. I sighed.

‘All right,’ I said, ‘why must I marry Mrs Krampf? Is she planning to overthrow the Constitution of the United States?’

‘Charlie,’ he said heavily.

‘Please don’t be formal,’ I interrupted. ‘My acquaintances call me Mr Mortdecai.’

‘Mortdecai,’ he compromised, ‘if you have a fault it is a regrettable tendency towards flippancy. I am a humourless man and I recognize it – few humourless people can – I do ask you to bear this in mind and to remember that I hold the strings of your life in my hand.’

‘Like the Blind Fury with the Abhorrèd Shears,’ I chirrupped. It was his turn to sigh.

‘Ah,
shit
,’ is what he sighed. ‘Look, I perfectly realize that you are not afraid of death; in your own kooky way I believe you to be a pretty brave man. But death as an inevitability-concept-situation is very very far removed from the slow infliction of death by means of PAIN.’ He sort of barked that last word. Then he collected himself, leaned over the table towards me and spoke gently, reasonably.

‘Mortdecai, my Agency is concerned only with winning. We are not regular guys in any sense of the word; we have no code of behaviour which would stand the light of day, still less an in-depth investigation by the
Washington Post
. What we do have is a number of specialized operatives who are skilled in inflicting PAIN. Many of them have been doing it for years, they think about it all the time, I’m afraid that some of them kind of like it. Do I have to go on?’

I straightened up in my chair, looked bright, helpful, unflippant.

‘You have my undivided attention,’ I assured him. He looked meaningfully at Jock. I took the hint, suggested to Jock that we must be boring him and that the hotel swarmed with chambermaids whose bottoms needed pinching. He ambled off.

‘Right,’ said Blucher. ‘Now. Mrs Krampf seems to be kind of crazy about you. I won’t say I find that easy to understand, I guess it’s a case of whatever turns you on. I don’t have any clearcut idea right now of why we want you around her except that we know there must be something. Something big. A few months before her husband uh died, our uh accountancy branch, as we call it, had detected the clandestine movement of very large amounts of currency into and out of the Krampf empire. After his demise we looked for these movements to cease. They did not. In fact they increased. Understand, we’re not talking about low-grade, bush-league money-shifting – that’s for the IRS or Currency Control guys. We’re talking about sums of money which could buy a Central
American republic – or two African ones – overnight and still leave you a little walking-about money. We don’t have any idea what it’s all about. So go marry Mrs Krampf and find out.’

‘Okay,’ I said briskly, colloquially, ‘I’ll cable her first thing tomorrow and slip her the good news.’

‘You don’t have to do that, Mortdecai. She’s already here.’

‘Here?’ I squeaked, looking about me wildly, like any pregnant nun. ‘What do you mean “here”?’

‘I mean right here in this hotel. In your room, I guess. Try looking in your bed.’

I made a sort of imploring noise. He patted me on the shoulder in a scoutmasterly way.

‘You ate a dozen and a half oysters at luncheon, Mortdecai. I
believe
in you. Go in there and win, boy.’ I gave him a look of pure hatred and crept whimpering into the hotel and up to my room.

She was there all right but she wasn’t in bed, thank goodness, nor even naked: she was wearing a thing which looked like a cream silk pillowcase with three holes cut in it – cost hundreds of pounds, probably – Mrs Spon would have priced it at a glance. It made her look a great deal more than naked. I fancy I blushed. She paused, poised, for a second or two, drinking me in like Wordsworth devouring a field of yellow – yes, yellow – daffodils. Then she rushed forward and into my arms with an impact which would have felled a lesser man.

‘Oh, Charlie Charlie Charlie,’ she cried,‘ Charlie Charlie Charlie!’

‘Yes yes yes,’ I countered, ‘there there there,’ patting her awkwardly on her charming left buttock. (That is not to say that the other, or right, buttock was not equally delectable, I only single out the left for praise because it was the one under advisement at the time, you understand.)

She squirmed ecstatically in my arms and, to my great relief, I felt the dozen and a half oysters getting down to their task in the dormant Mortdecai glands. (Wonderfully selfless little chaps, oysters, I always think; they let you swallow them alive without a murmur of protest and then, instead of wreaking revenge like the surly radish, they issue this splendid aphrodisiac dividend. What beautiful lives they must lead, to be sure.)

‘Well,’ I thought, ‘here goes,’ and made an unequivocal move towards what J. Donne (1573–1631) calls ‘the right true end
of love’ but to my amazement she pushed me away firmly and sort of wiggled her frock back into position.

‘No, Charlie, not until we are married. What would you think of me?’ I gaped in a disappointed way but I must admit to having felt a bit
reprieved
, if you take my meaning. You see, this gave me time to put myself into the hands of a capable trainer: a canter round the paddock every morning and a diet of beefsteak, oysters and Guinness would soon lift me out of the selling-plate class and put me into good, mid-season form.

‘Charlie, dear, you are going to marry me, aren’t you, hunh? Your lovely doctor said marriage would be very therapeutic for you.’

‘Farbstein said that, did he?’ I asked nastily.

‘No, darling, who’s Farbstein? I mean the cute American doctor who’s here looking after you – Dr Blücher?’ She pronounced it beautifully, in the accents of old Vienna.

‘Ah, yes, Blücher.
Doctor
Blücher, yes, of course. “Cute” is the very word for him. But I think he’d not much like you to pronounce it that way, he’d think it sounded kind of Kraut: he likes to say it “Bloocher”. To rhyme with “butcher”,’ I added thoughtfully.

‘Thank you, dear. But you didn’t answer my question,’ she said, pouting prettily. (Pouting is one of those dying arts; Mrs Spon can do it, so can the boy who creates my shirts, but it’s almost as rare nowadays as tittering and sniggering. There are, I believe, a few portly old gentlemen who can still
chuckle
.)

‘Dearest Johanna, of
course
I mean to marry you and as soon as possible. Let us say next month. People will talk, of course …’

‘Charlie, dear, I was thinking more of tomorrow, really. I have this crazy British Special Licence for it. No, it was easy; I just got the Chancellor from the US Embassy to take me to see one of your Archbishops, such a sweet, silly old guy. I said I guessed your religion was “atheist” and he said, well, so were most of his bishops so he wrote “Church of England” on the form. Was that all right, Charlie?’

‘Fine.’ I kept my face straight.

‘And Charlie, I have a surprise for you, I hope you’ll be pleased; I called up the Vicar in your own village – well, it’s only maybe forty miles from here – and he was, well sort of hesitant at first about your church-attendance record, he said he couldn’t recollect seeing you there since he confirmed you thirty years ago, but I told him
how the Archbishop had officially written you down as a Church of Englander and anyway he finally came around and said, Okay, he’d stick his neck out.’

‘He said
that?
’

‘Well, no, what he said was something kind of sad and resigned in Latin or maybe Greek but you could tell that was what he meant.’

‘Quite so.’ I’d have given a lot to have heard that bit of Latin or maybe Greek, for our Vicar has a pretty wit.

‘Oh, yes, and he said how about a best man and I said “Oh Golly” and he said he’d round up your brother Lord Mortdecai to do it. Isn’t that lovely?’

‘
Quite
lovely,’ I said heavily.

‘You’re not cross, are you, Charlie? Are you? Oh, and he can’t get the choir together on a weekday morning, he’s real sorry about that; do you mind terribly?’

‘I can bear it with fortitude.’

‘Ah, but his wife has a gang of ladies who sing Bach and I told him yes, great.’

‘Splendid,’ I said, sincere at last.

‘And the organist is going to play “Sheep May Safely Graze” before the ceremony and “
Amanti Costanti
” from
Le Nozze de Figaro
as we go out: how
about
that?’

‘Johanna, you are brilliant, I love you excessively, I should have married you years ago.’ I almost meant it.

Then she came and sat on my knee and we nuzzled and chewed each other’s faces a goodish bit and murmured sweet nothings and so forth. Pleasant for a while but it becomes a trifle painful for the male half of the sketch, doesn’t it?

Johanna said she wanted an early night and would have sandwiches sent up to her room, and as soon as I could stand up I escorted her thither.

‘Not before time,’ said the look on the face of a passing chambermaid.

Back in my room I sank wearily into a chair and lifted the telephone.

‘Room service?’ I said. ‘How many oysters have you in the hotel?’