The Mortdecai Trilogy (30 page)

With prudes for proctors, dowagers for deans
And sweet girl graduates in their golden hair.

 

The Princess

 

The Theory Morning went well; when it came to my turn I was able to do a pretty convincing imitation of a Levantine, for I had begged a clove of garlic from the kitchen; the Instructress fell back in disorder when I came bellying up to her, whining and waving my hands and gurking out great poisonous gusts of that prince of vegetables.

My pretty table-mate at luncheon also reeled back aghast but I had saved a snippet of the garlic against this very contingency and she chewed it obediently. ‘Why,’ she cried a moment later, ‘I can’t smell you at all any more!’ I enquired courteously after her bruise and learnt that it was still quite drettful and that she had meant to wub arnica into it but couldn’t quite weach it herself. We looked at each other speculatively.

This did not prevent her, later that afternoon, from doing her best to smarten me up painfully during the ‘Seek and Destroy’ exercise in the extensive shrubbery and plantation: indeed, she playfully planted, from quite twenty feet away, a graphite bullet squarely
into the rolled-up pair of woollen socks which I had prudently placed where a cricketer keeps his box.

‘You shall pay for this,’ I muttered, gazing at the scarlet stain with which the crotch of my combat-trousers was splashed. (I was on the White side of this particular ploy or
Kriegspiel
, you see, while she was Red and our bullets were appropriately tinted.) I dutifully reported myself dead to the nearest Umpire, who tittered, sprayed an aerosol detergent on my red badge of honour and sent me back into the fray blushing. Craftily, I slithered across the lawn to the ditch or ha-ha, wormed along it until I was past the shrubbery, slithered out again and took up my position in a small, unkempt patch of scrub on the fringe of the plantation. (I was taught, long ago, always to choose the smallest piece of cover which will hold you; if you are behind the most barely adequate of the hummocks or bushes you will be the last to be rushed and may well be able to rake the other chaps with flank-fire while they are rushing the bigger ones. I don’t know what they teach soldiers in these days of neutron-bombs. Prayer, perhaps.)

I had chosen my spot well; not a single sinner passed within range for the best part of an hour and I almost think I was beginning to doze off, lulled by the fragrance of myrtle, pine-needles and many another pleasing pong such as botanists relish on a warm afternoon. I was aroused from my musings by the faintest of scraping sounds from, of all places, the direction of ha-ha. ‘Har har!’ I thought, ‘Gotcher!’ for I was confident that this scraping sound was from my nubile friend; confident, too, that she would either surrender and offer to show me her bruise or, failing that, give me a sight of her on the skyline so that I could match up the bruise with another.

Nothing of the sort. The student who emerged from the ha-ha was small and skinny and, against all the rules, not wearing the College combat dress. What she was wearing was a sort of hooded track-suit of dull sky-blue – rather like the old French Army field-colour – but striped and slashed diagonally with dark green, as was her face. But I am no milliner; I simply shot her in the chest.

It was a lovely shot. Have you ever swung to a really fast pheasant and known, even as you pulled the trigger, that you could not possibly have missed, that the bird will drop tidily, quite dead, so close to your feet that your dog will have nothing to do but thump his tail approvingly? No? Oh. Well then, have you ever,
at the poker-table, drawn a card to a 7, 8, 9, 10 straight with the absolute certainty that the card will be a 6 or a knave? No?
Really
not? Then, clearly, you are a golfer and will know the feeling that golfers never tire of describing: the feeling just as you finish your swing that this is a really meaty one which will send your ball right onto the green and make you wish that you weren’t just playing for a lousy fiver.

This was, as I say, a lovely shot at that distance; it hit the girl on the central vertical axis, exactly half-way between the navel and the clavicle. Had it been a real bullet it would have collected a goodly chunk of her sternum and shredded it through the aorta, not killing her quite instantly but giving her perhaps a second and a half in which to regret that she had not chosen some other career.

Her reactions were slow, or perhaps she was simply a dullard; she checked in her stride and looked down stupidly at the ‘wound’, touched the splash of white powder in a puzzled sort of way, raised her fingers to her lips and tasted them. I raised my head from behind the hummock and cheerily told her that she was dead. She shot at me, which was against the rules. I wasted no time in protesting, for her bullet struck a stone in the hummock and screamed away
en ricochet
– no graphite bullet that. ‘Bitch!’ I thought angrily and squeezed off a couple of rounds at her camouflaged face – this, too was against the rules. One of them must have connected for she screamed and clutched at her eyes. The odd thing was that she was screaming in no European language that I had ever heard and the screams were delivered in a round tenor voice. A
man
’s voice.

As I stood up a shot came from another direction and I felt a strong snatch at the waist of my combat-blouse: another camouflaged Oriental was emerging from the ha-ha. I knew I was down to the last round in the clip – the solid, cupro-nickel coated round – but I have always set my personal safety before that of people who are trying to kill me. I shot him in the head. He died uncomplainingly, passing no remarks.

A third man clambered out of the ditch, similarly camouflaged. This was a bad thing, because my pistol was empty and the spare clip was filled with graphite only. As I scrabbled in my pocket a genteel sort of sound, like a bank manager’s fingers drumming on his desk-top, was to be heard from the plantation behind me. The man rose to his full height, stared down at his chest as puzzledly as
the first chap had stared, then dropped dead. I swung around, still trying to drag the clip from my pocket.

Johanna emerged from the trees, holding a curious kind of machine-pistol of a brand I had never seen before.

‘What’s new, pussy-cat?’ I quavered valiantly. She planted a wifely but perfunctory kiss on my cheek before trotting over to the ha-ha to seek out any further fiends in human shape. She found none. We took the chap with the sore eye back to the College with us.

Over a cup of tea in the Commandant’s office, or ‘den’ as she chose to call it, we chatted of this and that. Johanna’s cup of tea was what she calls a ‘General Montgomery’, which is a fearful kind of dry Martini and so called because the proportion of gin to vermouth is twelve to one. Mine was a richly-deserved Red Hackle De Luxe – a fluid expressly designed to twitch people back from the very edge of the grave – while the Commandant was demurely sipping neat Navy rum. The actual teapot seethed unloved upon its tray.

‘Look,’ I said. They looked, politely.

‘Look, why were those awful people trying to kill me, eh? Eh?’

‘They weren’t,’ said the Commandant crisply.

‘Well, you would certainly have had me fooled.’

‘Charlie dear, they were not trying to kill you
in particular
is what Sibyl means. Yes, dear, this is Sibyl but you must continue to call her Madam while you’re here. (Oh Charlie, dear, please don’t let your mouth hang open like that.) They were infiltrating the Command Post, you see.’ I didn’t see.

‘Where’s that?’ I asked.

‘Why, here, dear.’

‘No no no, quite wrong, this is Dingley Dell College, ask anyone.’

‘Well, yes, dear, but it’s a few other things as well. All sorts of things, in fact.’

I had a nasty feeling that someone would soon say that I should not trouble my pretty head with such things, so I shut up.

‘In fact,’ Johanna said with becoming modesty, ‘it was probably me they were hoping to kill. I was kind of expecting it, you know? That’s why I wasn’t at dinner last night, sitting on – OK,
at
– Sibyl’s right hand. I arrived here just after dawn, when Fiona would have locked her doggies up, and spent the day in the plantation or
whatever you call it in Britain and there I was, just in time to save your life, wasn’t I, darling?’

‘Indeed you were,’ I said bitterly. ‘Indeed you were. Forgive me for not having thanked you at the time. Let’s see, how many times does that make?’

She gave me a long, level look which should have stuck out between my shoulder-blades but I was not abashed for I have received many such looks in my career. It takes a very long and level look indeed to abash a dealer in Old Master paintings.

‘Who, then,’ I asked curtly, ‘were these avenging angels? Mere fortune-hunters? Cast-off lovers? I feel I have a right to know, you know.’

This time she raised an eyebrow. Long, level looks I can cope with, but when Johanna raises an eyebrow strong men have been known to rend their garments. I quailed. My question had been in bad taste.

‘Sorry,’ I said.

‘They were from 14K.’

‘That’s 14, Quai d’Orsay?’ I asked brightly. ‘Assassination rules;
Au Quai
?’ They looked at me. I fancy I did a spot more quailing.

‘No, Charlie dear, it means Number 14, Po Wah Road, Canton, China. That used to be the headquarters of a sort of Tong – they call them Triads now in the newspapers – formed by the old Nationalist Government or, to be exact, by Madam Chiang, Sun Yat Sen’s grand-daughter, which amounts to the same thing – in 1945 as a “bulwark against Communism”. They’re still anti-Communist but they have kind of diversified their operations in the last twenty years or so. They’re into the Golden Triangle in a big way now.’

I both boggled and blushed, as any chap would who has shared many a loving jest with his bride about her being a natural blonde. She gave me another of the looks; there was little kindness in it.

‘Charlie, even you must have heard of the Golden Triangle; it is the opium-growing area bounded by the hill-country of Burma, Laos and Thailand. You must have realized what all those nasty little wars are about. Well, 14K desperately needs acetic anhydride and they can only get it from us.
Now
do you see?’

‘No,’ I said frankly.

‘Oh, golly. Acetic anhydride is for refining morphine. It’s essential. Refining opium into morphine reduces its bulk and
increases its value; refining morphine into heroin does the same – in spades. You can buy a kilo of Number Three in Bangkok for a couple of hundred pounds; as heroin in Hong Kong it’s worth maybe £6000 wholesale, which means, say £30,000 on the streets. If you can get it to Amsterdam you can triple that, even after paying off the narcotics-gendarmes who have starving mistresses and a mortgage to support. In New York …’

‘Yes, yes,’ I said, ‘I know all that, although the prices seem to rise every week. And I know about the Police Sergeant in Hong Kong who has fifty-six bank accounts, too. But when I said “No” I meant “No, I don’t know who this ‘
us
’ is – I mean this ‘us’ who has a half-Nelson on the acetic what-d’ye-call-it.” Who, in fact, is this “us?” ’ I asked with a fine disregard for the niceties of the English tongue. She exchanged a quick glance with the Commandant.

‘Oh, I see,’ she said. ‘Yes, well, I guess you might as well know. “Us” are – oh, hell, you’ve got me doing it now –
we
are – or rather we’re friends with – the Woh Singh Wo, probably the most ancient Tong in China.’

‘Oh, ah,’ I said feebly.

‘Yes. We’re in a sort of league with them. It’s a little complicated to explain just now …’

‘White slaves?’ I asked curtly. She stared at me, then giggled in that annoying silvery-tinkle way.

‘No, Charlie, you have it upside down, dear.’

‘Sometimes, yes,’ I said stiffly, for I do not care to have my bedroom fads spoken of in public, ‘but what do you mean? Are you – we –
against
white slaving?’

‘Well, yes, you might say that. Yes, that’s very good, Charlie.’ She went off into the silvery laugh again.

‘Now look here,’ I said, trying to control the Mortdecai temper, ‘I’m not an inquisitive man but would you mind telling me, just between the three of us …’

‘Four,’ she said. I counted us. We were three.

‘Eh?’ I said.

‘No, Ho,’ said a voice behind me. I laid an egg as I whirled round. There, behind me, bulked a massive Chinese gentleman in a silk suit. I still don’t know how he got there.

‘Charlie, this is my friend Mr Ho. Mr Ho, this is my husband.’ The Chinese chap made noises both respectful and disbelieving.
I pulled myself together and ransacked my mind for a telling remark.

‘How do you do,’ is what came out.

‘I manage,’ he said. I smiled, not showing the teeth.

There fell a sort of silence. Mr Ho did not sit down. Johanna and the Commandant – I would never learn to call her Sibyl – looked at their laps as though they had embroidery there. It fell to me to biff the ball of conversation about.

‘Mr ah, Ho,’ I began, in the jovial, over-civil way in which one addresses chaps whose skins aren’t quite the same colour as one’s own.

‘No,
Ho
,’ he said.

‘Eh?’

‘No, not eh, not ah ho:
Ho
,’ he insisted. I began to feel like the straight man on a Linguaphone record; decided to assert myself.

‘What’s your line of business then, Mr Ho?’ I asked jovially.

‘Hut,’ he said. There was little in that remark for me so I let it fall to the floor, hoping that the maid would brush it under the chair next morning.

‘Charlie dear, Mr Ho is saying that he
hurts
people. He does it for a living, you see.’

‘Oh, ah,’ I said.

‘Charlie dear, the phrase “oh ah” is very rude in Cantonese.’

I said a very rude word in English, then subsided into a sulky silence.