The Mortdecai Trilogy (12 page)

There was no tea to be had in the morning but I was on the very threshold of the old West and knew that I had to learn to rough it. ‘Pioneers! Oh, Pioneers!’ as Walt Whitman never tired of exclaiming.

Neither the desk nor the garage had anything to report, so I toddled out to take the air and see if the neighbourhood was blue-Buick-infested. What I found was a sort of bar advertising in its window something called the Old Oklahoma Cattleman’s Breakfast Special. Who could resist it? Not I.

The O.O.C.B.S. proved to be a thick steak, almost raw, a hunk of salt bacon the size and shape of my fist, a pile of hot sourdough biscuits, a tin pot of ferocious coffee and half a gill of rye whisky. Now I am a man of iron, as you will by now have realized, but I confess I belched. I was trapped, for the barman and the short-order cook were both leaning on the bar, watching my future career with considerable interest as it were, their faces grave and courteous but sort of expectant. Britain’s honour lay in pawn to my knife and fork. I weakened some of the coffee with some of the whisky and drank it, suppressing a gagging shudder. I found strength after this to try a hot biscuit, then some more coffee, then a corner of the bacon and so on. Appetite grew on what it fed upon and soon, to the amazement of myself and all beholders, the very steak itself fell to my bow and spear. ’Tis from scenes like this that Britain’s greatness springs. I accepted a free drink from the barman, shook hands gravely and made a good exit. Not all Ambassadors sit in Embassies, you know.

Much fortified, I collected the Rolls and turned my face toward the Golden West, the Lyonesse of our times, the nursery of the great American fairy tale. At noon I crossed the State line into the panhandle of Texas, a solemn moment for any man who rode with the Lone Ranger each Saturday morning as a child.

Mindful of the Buick-mounted rustler on my trail, I started to buy a few gallons of petrol at almost every petrol station, taking care to inquire at each one for the road to Amarillo – which lay due West on that very road. Sure enough, the blue car swept by me somewhere between the townships of McLean and Groom, the driver looking neither to right nor left. Clearly, he was satisfied of my destination and intended to front-tail me to Amarillo. I let him have a few reassuring glimpses of me in his driving mirror, lying a mile behind him, then chose a useful left hand turning and sped south to Claude then southeast through Clarendon to the Prairie Dog Town fork of the Red River – there’s a place name to stir the blood – which I crossed at Estelline. I felt no need of luncheon but kept up my strength with a little rye whisky here and there and an occasional egg to give it something to bite on. Following the least probable roads I worked my way West again and by mid-afternoon I was satisfied that I must have lost the Buick for good. Needless to say I had lost myself too, but that was of secondary importance. I found a sleepy motel staffed by one thirteen-year-old boy who hired me a cabin without raising his eyes from his comic book.

‘Hail Columbia! Happy land!’ I told him, borrowing freely from R.H. Horne, ‘Hail, ye heroes! Heaven-born band!’

He almost looked up, but decided in favour of The Teenage Werewolf From Ten Thousand Fathoms – I couldn’t find it in my heart to blame him.

I zizzed away the worst of the afternoon, awakening some three hours later with a mighty thirst. When I had seen to that I strolled outside to stretch my legs and scare up some ham and eggs. A furlong down the dusty road, under the shade of a valley cottonwood, stood a powder-blue Buick.

That settled it: the Rolls was bugged. No human agency could have tracked me through that mazey day unaided. Quite calm, I ate the bacon and shirred eggs along with great manly cups of coffee, then sauntered back to the Rolls with the air of a man quite unencumbered with powder-blue Buicks. It took me
almost ten minutes to find the tiny transistorized tracer beacon: it was magnetized fiercely to the underside of my right hand front mudguard.

I started the Ghost and drifted away in the wrong direction; after a few miles I hailed, frantically, a State Trooper mounted on an unbelievable motor bike and proclaimed myself lost.

When a native son is unwise enough to ask the way of an American policeman he is either jailed for vagrancy or, if the policeman is a kindly one, told to buy a map. This one, I swear, would have
struck
me for flagging him down had I not been wearing an English accent and a Rolls Royce of great beauty, but these beguiled him into a
pro hac vice
civility. I got out of the car and, as he pointed things out to me on the map, leaned lightly against his great Harley Davidson machine, letting the grumble of the idling engine drown the smart click of the mini-transmitter’s magnet as it clamped itself under his rear mudguard. He roared away northwards at a dashing pace; I lurked down a dirt road until the Buick dawdled by in confident pursuit, then off I went like the clappers, south and west.

A vast, theatrical moon rose over Texas and I drove on spellbound for hours through forests of Spanish Bayonet and fields of amaranthine sagebrush. At last, on the edge of the Llano Estacado, the Staked Plains themselves, I edged the Rolls into a friendly canyon and settled down to sleep behind the wheel, a bottle of whisky within easy reach in case of mountain lions.

Prompt on cue, a coyote curdled the thin distances of the night air with his whooping love song and, as I drifted into sleep, I thought I heard the muted thunder of far away, unshod hooves.

I met him thus:
I crossed a ridge of short broken hills
Like an old lion’s cheek-teeth …

 

An Epistle

 

I was awakened by a shot.

Not thrilled? Then I venture to guess that you have never been awakened in that way yourself. For my part I found myself down among the accelerator and brake pedals before I was properly awake, whimpering with terror and groping frantically for the Banker’s Special pistol in its hidey-hole under the seat.

Nothing happened.

I thumbed back the hammer and peeped, wincing, over the edge of the window.

Nothing went on happening.

I looked through the other windows – nothing – and decided that I had dreamed the shot, for my sleep had been illustrated with the dread exploits of Comancheros, Apaches, Quantrill’s guerrillas and other fiends in human shape. I treated myself to another O.O.C.B.S. breakfast, only this time without the steak, ham, hot biscuits or coffee. There were one or two bad moments but I was not sick and the old rapture was soon recaptured and I felt emboldened to step out for
un petit promenade hygiénique
. As I opened the car door another shot rang out, followed one fifth of a second later by the bang of the car door closing again. There is still
nothing wrong with the Mortdecai reaction time.

I listened carefully to my audile memory, recalling the exact noise of the shot.

1. It had not been the unmistakable, explicit BANG of a shotgun

2. Not the vicious CRACK of a small calibre rifle

3. Not the BOOM of a .45 pistol

4. Not the ear-stinging WHAM of a heavy calibre standard rifle, or a magnum pistol fired in your direction

5. Not the terrifying whip-crack WHANG-UP of a high velocity sporting rifle fired towards you, but something of the same nature

6. A sporting rifle, then, but

7. Not fired in the canyon because no echoes and surely

8.
Not fired at me
– dammit, a Girl
Guide
couldn’t miss a Rolls Royce with two slowly aimed shots.

My intellect was satisfied that it was some honest rancher smartening up the local coyotes: my body took longer to pacify. I crept back on to the seat and twitched gently for fifteen minutes, nibbling at the rye from time to time. After about a hundred years I heard an old car start up miles away across the desert and chug even further away. I sneered at my craven self.

‘You craven wretch,’ I sneered. Inexplicably, I then fell asleep for another hour. Nature knows, you know.

It was still only nine o’clock when I set off on the last leg of my journey, feeling old and dirty and incapable. You probably know the feeling if you are over eighteen.

It is hard to drive in a cringing position but nevertheless I got the Rolls into its stride and strode across the Staked Plains at a good mile-munching pace. The Staked Plains are not really very exciting, when you’ve seen one Staked Plain you’ve seen them all. I particularly don’t want to tell you where Krampf’s rancho is – perhaps
was
now – but I don’t mind admitting that it lay two hundred straightish miles from my overnight bivouac and between the Sacramento Mountains and the Rio Hondo. Just names on a map that morning, the poetry all gone. There’s nothing like gunfire to drive the glamour from words. I soon became tired of the creosote bushes, desert willows and screwbeams, not to mention the eternal, giant cacti, so different from the ones Mrs Spon grows in her conservatoilette.

I entered New Mexico at noon, still unmolested, still feeling old
and dirty. At Lovington (named after old Oliver Loving who blazed the fearful Goodnight-Loving trail in ’66 and died along it of arrow wounds the following year) I had a bath, a shave, a change of raiment and a dish of
Huevos ‘Ojos de Comanchero,’
which sounded lovely. In reality it was the most terrifying sight I had seen to date: two fried eggs decorated with ketchup, Tabasco and chopped chillis in the semblance of a pair of bloodshot eyes – I would as soon have eaten my own leg. I waved the grimly thing away; Old Oklahoma Cattlemen are one thing but these were merely tetrous. I tried, instead, ‘Chilli ’n’ Franks’ which proved to be rather good, just like chilli con carne but with dear little salty bangers instead of the ground meat. While I ate, various admiring
peons
were handwashing the Rolls, with soap ’n’ water only, of course.

With a bare hundred miles to go, clean, dapper and now only middle-aged again, I pointed the Rolls’ nose toward the Ranch of the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin, where I would lay down my pilgrim’s scrip of care, my cockle-hat of fear and my staff of illegality; where, moreover, I would take delivery of a great deal of money and perhaps kill a Krampf. Or perhaps not. I had left England prepared to keep my part of the bargain with Martland, but I had thought a great deal during those hundreds of remorseless American miles and had evolved certain arguments against keeping faith with him. (We had never been
friends
at school after all, for he was the house tart, and known to one and all as ‘Shagnasty’: not for nothing does a boy acquire such a name.)

I had also bought a denser pair of sunglasses; my old ones were calculated for the lemonade-like rays of the English sun and were no proof against the brutal onslaught of the desert light. Even the shadows, razor edged, purple and green, were painful to look at. I drove with all windows shut and the side blinds drawn across: the inside of the Rolls was like an ill-regulated sauna bath but this was better than letting in the dry, scorching fury of the air outside. I was soon sitting in a distressful swamp of sweat and my old wound started to trouble me; chilli ’n’ trepidation were playing the devil with my small intestines and my borborigmus was often louder than the engine of the Rolls, which loped on undeterred, quietly guzzling its pint of petrol per statute mile.

By mid-afternoon I was alarmed to notice that ! had stopped sweating and had started talking to myself – and
was listening
. It
was becoming difficult to distinguish the road amongst the writhing pools of heat-haze and I could not tell whether the scraggy-feathered road-runners were under my wheels or a furlong ahead of me.

Half an hour later I was on a dirt road under a spur of the Sacramento range, lost. I stopped to consult the map and found myself listening to the enormous silence – ‘that silence where the birds are dead yet something singeth like a bird’.

From somewhere above me a shot was fired, but there was no sound of a bullet passing and I had no intention of cringing twice in one day. Moreover, there was no mistaking the nature of the firearm, it was the wholesome bark, flattened by the heavy air, of a large calibre pistol loaded with black powder. High on the ridge above me was a horseman waving a broad brimmed hat and already starting to descend with casual mastery of – and disregard for – his mount.
Her
mount, as it turned out, and what a mount.
¡Que caballo!
I knew what it was immediately, although I had never before seen the true
bayo naranjado
– the vivid orange dun with a pure white mane and tail. It was entire – no one, surely, could geld a horse like that – and came down the ragged rock slope as though it were Newmarket Heath. The low-horned, double-girthed Texas saddle was enriched with silver
conchos
over intricately tooled and inlaid leathers and the girl herself was dressed like a museum exhibit of Old Texas: low-crowned black Stetson with rattler band and woven-hair storm-strap, bandana with the ends falling almost to the waist, brown Levi’s tucked into unbelievable Justin boots which were themselves tucked into antique silver Spanish stirrups and garnished with Kelly spurs fashioned, apparently, of gold.

She arrived at the foot of the slope in a small avalanche, reins slack, welded to her saddle with fierce thighs, and the stallion took the storm ditch as though it was not there, landing dramatically beside the Rolls in a spatter of stones.

I wound a window down and peered out with a polite expression. I was met with a spray of cheesy foam from the horse’s mouth; it showed me some of its huge yellow teeth and offered to bite my face off, so I wound the window up again. The girl was inspecting the Rolls; as her horse moved forward past the window I found myself staring at a beautiful gunbelt of Mexican work with
buscadero
holsters, containing a pair of pristine Dragoon-pattern Colts, the paper-cartridge model of the 1840s, with grips by Louis Comfort
Tiffany – unmistakable – dating from perhaps twenty years later. She wore them correctly for the Southwest – butts forward, as though for the flashy Border cross-draw or the cavalry twist (much more sensible), and they were not tied down, of course – this was no Hollywood mock-up but a perfect historical reconstruction. (Try mounting or even trotting with pistols in open holsters tied down to your thighs.) From the saddle scabbard protruded, as was only fitting, the butt of a One-in-One-Thousand Winchester repeater.

From hat to horseshoes she must have been worth a fortune as she sat – it gave me a new vision of the uses of wealth – and that was not counting her splendid person, which looked even more valuable. I am not, as you may have guessed, especially keen on commonplace sex, especially with women, but this vision unequivocally stirred my soggy flesh. The silk shirt was pasted to her perfect form with delicate sweat, the Levi’s made no bones about her pelvic delights. She had the perfect round hard bottom of the horsewoman but not the beamy breadth of the girl who started to ride too young.

I emerged from the other side of the car and addressed her across the bonnet – I am just enough of a horseman never to try to make friends with tired stallions on hot days.

‘Good afternoon,’ I said, by way of a talking point.

She looked me up and down. I sucked in my tummy. My face was as blank as I could make it but she knew, she knew. They know, you know.

‘Hi,’ she said. It left me gasping for air.

‘Can you by any chance direct me to the
Rancho de los Siete Dolores?
’ I asked.

Her bee-stung lips parted, the little white teeth opened a fraction; perhaps it was a sort of smile.

‘What is the old auto worth?’ she asked.

‘I’m afraid it’s not for sale, really.’

‘You are stupid. Also overweight. But cute.’ There was a hint of a foreign accent in her voice, but it was not Mexican. Vienna perhaps, perhaps Buda. I asked the way again. She raised the handle of her beautiful quirt to her eyes and scanned the Western horizon. It was one of those quirts with a bit of pierced horn let into the handle: more useful than a telescope in that climate. I began, for the first time, to understand Sucher-Masoch.

‘Go that way right acrosslots,’ she pointed, ‘the desert is no worse than the road. Follow the bones when you come to them.’

I tried to think of another talking point but something told me she was not much of a chatterbox – indeed, even as I searched for a way to detain her she had flicked the thong of her quirt under the stallion’s belly and was away into the shimmering jumble of baking rock. Well, you can’t win them all. ‘Lucky old saddle,’ I thought.

In twenty minutes I came upon the first of the bones she had spoken of: the bleached skeleton of a Texas Longhorn artistically disposed beside a faint track. Then another and another, until I reached a huge ranch gateway in the middle of nowhere. Its sunbleached crossbar supported a great polychromed Mexican carving of an agonized Madonna and a board hung below into which had been burned the rancho’s brand – two Spanish bits. I wondered whether there was a joke implied and decided that, if there was, it was not of Mr Krampf’s making.

Past the gate the trail was well-defined; the buffalo grass became richer with every furlong and I began to get glimpses of groups of horseflesh crowded under the cottonwoods – Morgans, Palominos, Appaloosas and I don’t know what-all. Occasional riders began to fall in casually behind and beside me: by the time I reached the huge, rambling
hacienda
itself I was escorted by quite a dozen
charro
-clad desperadoes, all pretending that I wasn’t there.

The house was astonishingly beautiful, all white columns and porticoes, the outside a maze of green lawns, fountains, patios, flowering agaves and yuccas. The door of a carport rolled itself up unbidden and I gentled the Rolls in, between a Bugatti and a Cord. When I emerged, bags in hand, my escort of bandits had vanished upon some unheard summons and only a small, impertinent boy was visible. He fluted something in Spanish, whisked my luggage away from me and indicated a shady patio, to which I made my way in as elegant a fashion as my tortured trousers would allow.

I sat down on a marble bench, stretched luxuriously and rested my grateful eyes on the statuary half-hidden in the green shade. One statue, more weather-worn than the others, proved to be an ancient and immobile old lady, hands folded in lap, gazing at me incuriously. I leaped to my feet and bowed – she was the kind of woman to whom people would always accord bows. She inclined her head a little. I fidgeted. Clearly, this must be Krampf’s mother.

‘Have I the honour of addressing Mrs Krampf?’ I asked at length.

‘No, Sir,’ she replied in the careful English of the well-taught foreigner, ‘you address the Countess Grettheim.’

‘Forgive me,’ I said, sincerely, for which of us, not being a Krampf, would care to be mistaken for one?

‘Are Mr and Mrs Krampf at home?’ I asked.

‘I could not say,’ she replied serenely. The subject was evidently closed. The silence stretched out beyond the point where I dared do anything about it. If the old lady’s mission in life was to prevent me feeling cosy, she was certainly in fine midseason form – ‘
si extraordinairement distingueée
’ as Mallarmé used to say, ‘
quand je lui dis bonjour, je me fais toujours l’effet de lui dire “merde”’
.

I looked at the statues again. There was an excellent copy of the Venus Callipygea, on whose cool marble buttocks my eyes lingered gratefully. Determined not to be flustered, I succeeded so well that my sun-sore eyelids began to droop.