The Mortdecai Trilogy (3 page)

‘Are you all right, Charlie?’ asked Martland, anxiously.

‘I must go to the lavatory now,’ I said.

‘So you shall, dear boy, so you shall. Maurice, help Mr M.’

Maurice took me down to the children’s loo; they wouldn’t be back from school for another hour, he told me. I found the Margaret Tarrant squirrels and bunnies soothing. I needed soothing.

When we got back to the Lounge the gramophone was dispensing Swan Lake, if you please. Martland has a very simple mind: he probably puts Ravel’s Bolero on the turntable when seducing shopgirls.

‘Tell me all about it,’ he said gently, almost caressingly, his impression of a Harley Street abortionist.

‘My bottom hurts,’ I whined.

‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘But the photograph.’

‘Ah,’ I said sagely, wagging my head, ‘the phokodarts. You have given me too much whisky on an umpty stemach. You
know
I haven’t had any lunch.’ And with that I gave them some of the whisky back rather dramatically. Martland looked vexed but I thought the effect on his sofa cover was something of an improvement. We got through the next two or three minutes without too much damaging the new-found amenities. Martland explained that they had indeed found a photograph behind a Turner in the National Gallery at 5.15 that morning. It was tucked behind
Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus
(No. 508). He went on in his court-room voice –

‘The photograph depicts, ah, two consenting adult males, ah, consenting.’

‘Having congress, you mean?’

‘Just so.’

‘And one of the faces had been cut out?’

‘Both of the faces.’

I got up and went over to where my hat was. The two louts did not move but looked sort of alert. I was not really in any shape to dive out of windows. I pulled down the sweatband of the hat, tore back some of the buckram and offered Martland the tiny oval of photograph. He looked at it blankly.

‘Well, dear boy,’ he said softly, ‘you mustn’t keep us in suspense. Who is the gentleman?’

It was my turn to look blank.

‘Don’t you really know?’

He looked at it again.

‘Much hairier in the face nowadays,’ I prompted.

He shook his head.

‘Chap called Gloag,’ I told him. ‘Known to his friends as “Hockbottle” for some obscene reason. He took the photograph himself. At Cambridge.’

Martland, suddenly, inexplicably, looked very worried indeed. So did his mates, who clustered around, passing the tiny picture from hand to grubby hand. Then they all started nodding, tentatively at first and then positively. They looked rather funny but I was feeling too tired to enjoy it really.

Martland wheeled on me, his face evil now.

‘Come on, Mortdecai,’ he said, all urbanity gone, ‘tell me it all this time. Fast, before I lose my temper.’

‘Sandwich?’ I asked diffidently. ‘Bottle of beer?’

‘Later.’

‘Oh. All right. Hockbottle Gloag came to see me three weeks ago. He gave me the cut-out of his face and said to keep it very safe, it was a free pardon for him and money in the bank for me. He wouldn’t explain but I knew he wouldn’t be trying to con me, he’s terrified of Jock. He said he’d ring me up every day from then on and if he missed a day it would mean he was in trouble and I was to tell you to ask Turner in the National Gallery. That’s all. It has nothing to do with the Goya so far as I know – I just seized that opportunity to slip you the word.
Is
Hockbottle in trouble? Have you got him in that bloody Cottage Hospital of yours?’

Martland didn’t answer. He just stood looking at me, rubbing the side of his face, making a nasty soft rasping sound. I could almost hear him wondering whether the battery would coax a little more truth out of me. I hoped not: the truth had to be delivered
in carefully spaced rations, so as to give him a healthy appetite for later lies.

Perhaps he decided that I was telling the truth, as far as it went; perhaps he simply decided that he already had enough to worry about.

He had, in fact, no idea how much he had to worry about.

‘Go away,’ he said, finally.

I collected my hat, tidied it, made for the door.

‘Don’t leave town?’ I prompted in the doorway.

‘Don’t leave town,’ he agreed, absently. I didn’t like to remind him about the sandwich.

I had to walk miles before I found a taxi. It had all its door handles. I fell soundly asleep, the sleep of a good, successful liar. Goodness, the flat was in a mess. I telephoned Mrs. Spon and told her that I was at last ready to redecorate. She came round before dinner and helped us tidy the place up – success has not spoiled her – and afterward we spent a happy hour in front of the fire choosing chintzes and wallpapers and things and then we all three sat round the kitchen table and tore into an enormous fry-up such as very few people can make today.

After Mrs. Spon had left I said to Jock, ‘Do you know what, Jock?’ and he said, ‘No, what?’

‘I think Mr Gloag is dead.’

‘Greedy, I expect,’ said Jock, elliptically. ‘Who d’you reckon killed him, then?’

‘Mr Martland, I fancy. But I think that for once he rather wishes he hadn’t.’

‘Eh?’

‘Yes. Well, good night, Jock.’

‘Good night, Mr Charlie.’

I undressed and put a little more Pomade Divine on my wounds. Suddenly I felt shatteringly tired – I always do after torture. Jock had put a hotty in my bed, bless him. He knows.

Yet half I seemed to recognize some trick
Of mischief happened to me, God knows when –
In a bad dream perhaps. Here ended, then,
Progress this way. When, in the very nick
Of giving up, one time more, came a click
As when a trap shuts – you’re inside the den!

 

Childe Roland

 

Dawn broke for me, at ten o’clock sharp, with one of the finest cups of tea I have ever been privileged to toy with. The canary was in splendid voice. The snail, once again, was on the thorn and showed no signs of dismounting. I hardly winced as the blisters from Martland’s battery made themselves felt, although I did, at one stage, find myself longing for Pantagruel’s goose’s neck.

I had a long chat on the telephone with my insurance brokers and explained to them how they could put the bite on Martland’s ear for the damage to my decorations and promised them the photographs of the intruders as soon as Jock had developed them.

Then I put on a dashing little tropical-weight worsted, a curly-brimmed coker and a pair of buckskins created by Lobb in a moment of genius. (My tie, if I recall correctly, was a
foulard
, predominantly
merde d’oie
in colour, though why you should be interested I cannot imagine.) Thus clad – and with my blisters well Vaselined – I sauntered to the Park to inspect the pelican and other feathered friends. They were in great shape. ‘This
weather,’ they seemed to be saying, ‘is capital.’ I gave them my benison.

Then I went a-slumming through the art-dealing district, carefully keeping my face straight as I looked in the shop windows – sorry,
gallery
windows – at the tatty Shayers and reach-me-down Koekkoeks. Heigh-ho. After a while I was sure that I had no tail (remember that bit, it matters) neither in front nor behind, and popped into Mason’s Yard. There are galleries there too, of course, but I was bent on seeing Mr Spinoza, who is only an art dealer in one very specialized sort of way.

Moishe Spinoza Barzilai is, as a matter of fact, Basil Wayne & Co., the great coach builders of whom even you, ignorant readers, must have heard, although not point one per cent of you will ever afford his lovely panel beating, still less his princely upholstery. Unless, of course, you are reading below your station in life and happen to be an Indian Maharajah or a Texan oil-field proprietor.

Mr Spinoza creates very special one-off bodies for the great cars of the world. He has heard of Hooper and Mulliner and speaks kindly, if a little vaguely, of them. He will restore or re-create the occasional vintage Rolls, Infanta or Mercedes if he feels like it. Bugattis, Cords, Hirondelles and Leyland Straight-Eights will be considered. So will about three other
marques
. But ask him to tart up a Mini with basketwork and silver condom dispensers or to build flip-back fornication benches into a Jaguar and he will spit right into your eye. I mean
really!
What he most loves is a Hispano-Suiza – an ‘Izzer-Swizzer.’ Can’t understand it myself, but there.

He also dabbles in crime. It’s a sort of hobby with him. He can’t need the money.

Currently, he was rebuilding for my best customer a latish Silver Ghost Rolls Royce, which was what I had come to inspect, in a way. My customer, Milton Krampf (yes, truly), had bought it from a right villain who had found it in a farmyard chocked up and running a chaff cutter and turnip slicer after a long career as stock truck, hearse, station wagon, shooting brake, baronial wedding present and mobile shagging station; in the reverse order, of course. Mr. Spinoza had found six perfectly right artillery wheels for it at one hundred pounds apiece, had built a scrupulously exact
Roi des Belges
open tourer body and painted it with sixteen coats of Queen Anne white, each one rubbed down wet-and-dry, and was now
finishing the olive-green crushed Levant Morocco upholstery and free-handing with the fitch the lovely arabesques of the
carrosserie
lines. He wasn’t doing the work himself, of course; he’s blind. Was, rather.

I walked round the car, admiring it Platonically. There was no point in desiring it – it was a rich man’s car. Would do about seven miles to the gallon, which is all right if you own an oil field. Milton Krampf owns a lot of oil fields. First to last, the car would stand him in at about £24,000. Paying that would hurt him about as much as picking his nose. (They say a man who knows how rich he is ain’t rich – well, Krampf knows. A man telephones him every morning, one hour after the New York Stock Exchange opens, and tells him exactly how rich he is. It makes his day.)

A naughty apprentice told me that Mr Spinoza was in his office and I picked my way thither.

‘Hullo, Mr Spinoza,’ I cried cheerily, ‘here’s a fine morning to be alive in!’

He peered malevolently at a spot three inches above my left shoulder.

‘Oo hucking hastard,’ he spat. (No roof to his mouth, you know. Poor chap.) ‘Oo other hucking hiss-hot. How air oo hoe your hace here, oo hurd-murgling hod?’

The rest was a bit rude so I shan’t quote him too verbatim, if you don’t mind. What he was vexed about was my sending the MGB in with the little special matter in the headcloth at such an early hour the day before. ‘At sparrow-fart,’ as he neatly put it. Moreover, he was afraid that people would think he was working on it and he had evolved a dreadful mental image of queues of chaps in cloth caps insisting that he respray their MG’s.

When he had drawn to a provisional close, I spoke to him sternly.

‘Mr Spinoza,’ I said, ‘I did not come here to discuss with you my relationship with my mummy, which is a matter for me and my psychiatrist alone. I came to remonstrate with you about using Dirty Words to Jock, who is, as you know, sensitive.’

Mr S used a lot more
very
dirty words and some which I couldn’t make out but which were probably vile. When the air had thinned a little he bitterly offered to walk over to the Rolls with me and discuss headlamps. I was surprised and saddened to see a great vulgar Duesenburg – if that’s how you spell it – in the workshop,
and said so, which rather started him off again. I have never had any daughters but this did not stop Mr Spinoza sketching out their careers from the nursery to the street corner, so to speak. I leaned on the side of the Silver Ghost, admiring his command of language. ‘A feast of reason and a flow of soul’ is how Alexander Pope (1688–1744) would have summed it up.

While we were thus civilly biffing the ball of conversation to and fro, a sound which I can best describe as a DONK came in from the South side of Mason’s Yard. More or less simultaneously a sort of
WANG
occurred about three feet north of my belly button and a large pimple appeared in the door-panel of the Silver Ghost. Slapping two and two together in the twinkling of an eye, I lay down, without a thought for my valuable suit. Look, I’m an experienced coward. Mr Spinoza, whose hand had been on the door, realized that someone was getting at his panel work. He straightened up and cried ‘Oi!’ or it might have been ‘Oy!’

There was another DONK outside, followed, this time, not by a
WANG
but by a sort of crisp, mushy noise and a lot of the back of Mr Spinoza’s head distributed itself freely over the wall behind us. None of it got on to my suit, I’m happy to say. Mr Spinoza, too, lay down then, but too late by now, of course. There was a blue-black hole in his upper lip and a piece of his false teeth arrangements was protruding from the corner of his mouth. He looked quite beastly.

I wish I could say that I had liked him, but I never really did, you know.

Gentlemen of my age and full habit (as the tailors say) almost never scuttle on all fours over oily garage floors, particularly when they are wearing expensive and rather new tropical-weight worsted suitings. This was clearly a day for breaking rules, however, so I put my nose down and scuttled, successfully. I must have looked absurd but I got out into the yard and across it into the doorway of the O’Flaherty Gallery. Mr O’Flaherty, who knew my father well, is an elderly Jew called Groenblatter or something like that and is swart as an Ethiop. He put his hands to his cheeks when he saw me and rocked his head to and fro, keening something that sounded like
Mmm-Mmm-Mmmm
on the note of G above high C.

‘How’s business today?’ I asked bravely but in a voice that wobbled a bit.

‘Don’t ask it, don’t ask it,’ he replied automatically, then –

‘Who attacked you so, Charlie boy, somebody’s husband? Or somebody’s wife, God forbid?’

‘Look, Mr G, nobody attacked me, there’s some sort of trouble at Mr Spinoza’s and I’m getting away fast – who wants to be involved – when I trip and fall, is all. Now like a good friend you should ask Perce to get me a taxi arreddy, I don’t feel so good.’ I always find myself talking like that with Mr G.

Perce, Mr G’s rat-faced little thug – he can’t afford a good, big one – got the taxi and I promised to send Mr G a good customer, which I knew would keep him from gossiping.

Arrived home, I collapsed into a chair, suddenly quaking with delayed horror. Jock made me a cup of wonderfully refreshing mint tea which made me feel a great deal better, especially after I had followed it with four fluid ozs of whisky.

Jock pointed out that if I said I’d been knocked down by a motor car the Insurance would buy me a new suit. This completed the cure and I got on to the brokers straight away, for my no-claims bonus is just a dream of childhood now. There’s nothing like a little insurance to smooth the troubled brow, take my word for it. Meanwhile, Jock sent the porter’s little girl to Prunier in a taxi for a box of luncheon
à porter
. There was a dear little turbot
soufflé
, a
Varieté Prunier
(six oysters, each cooked a different way) and two of their
petits pots de crême de chocolat
.

I had a nap and awoke much mollified and spent a useful afternoon with my ultra-violet machine and a grease crayon, mapping the passages of repaint (‘strengthening’ as we call it in the trade) on a gorgeous panel by – well, more or
less
by – the Allunno di Amico di Sandro. (God bless Berenson, I say.) Then I wrote a few paragraphs of my paper for
Burlington Magazine
in which I shall prove, once and for all, that the Tallard Madonna in the Ashmolean is by Giorgione after all, and despite that awful man Berenson.

Dinner was pork chops with the kidneys in and chips and beer. I always send Jock out for the beer in a jug and make him wear a cloth cap. It seems to taste better and he doesn’t mind a bit. They won’t serve the porter’s little girl, you see.

After dinner Mrs Spon arrived with lots of samples of gimp and bobbles and crétonnes for cushion covers and things and pink mosquito netting for the standing drapes round my bed. I had to
be firm about the netting, I must admit it was rather lovely but I insisted that it should be blue-for-a-boy. I mean, I have my little ways but I’m not a deviate, for God’s sake, am I, I asked her.

She was already just a little cross when Martland arrived and loomed in the doorway like a pollution problem. Diffidently, for him, but definitely doomlike.

They admitted, grudgingly, that they knew each other by sight. Mrs Spon flounced over to the window. I know lots of men who can flounce but Mrs Spon is the last woman who can do it. There was a sticky sort of silence of the sort which I relish. Finally Martland whispered, ‘Perhaps you should ask the old doxy to leave’ in just too loud a whisper.

Mrs Spon rounded on him and Told Him Off. I had heard of her talents in that direction but had never before been privileged to hear her unlock the word bag. It was a literary and emotional feast: Martland withered visibly. There is no one like your gently nurtured triple-divorcee for really putting the verbal leather in. ‘Wart on the tax-payer’s arse,’ ‘traffic-warden’s catamite,’ and ‘poor man’s Colonel Wigg’ are just a few of the good things she served up but there was more – much more. She swept out at last, in a cloud of ‘
Ragazza
’ and lovely epithets. She was wearing a suede knickerbocker suit but you’d have sworn she twitched a twelve-foot train of brocade away from Martland as she passed him.

‘Golly,’ he said when she’d gone.

‘Yes,’ I said, happily.

‘Well. Well, look, Charlie, what I really came to say was how sick and sorry I am about all this.’

I gave him my cold look. The big, economy size.

‘I mean,’ he went on, ‘you’ve had a filthy rotten time and I think you’re owed an explanation. I want to put you in the picture – which will give you a bit of a whip-hand, I don’t mind telling you – and er ask your er help.’

‘Gor blimey,’ I thought.

‘Sit down,’ I said, frigidly. ‘I myself prefer to stand, for reasons which will occur to you. I shall certainly listen to your explanations and apologies; beyond that I can make no promises.’

‘Yes,’ he said. He fidgeted a little, like a man who is expecting to be offered a drink and thinks you’ve forgotten to do the honours.
When he realized that it was definitely Temperance Night for him he resumed.

‘Do you know why Spinoza was shot this morning?’

‘Haven’t the faintest,’ I said boredly, although a multiplicity of ideas about it had been running through my head all afternoon. Wrong ones.

‘It was meant for you, Charlie.’

My heart started rattling about irresponsibly in my rib cage. My armpits became cold and wet. I wanted to go to the lavatory.

I mean, electric batteries and so forth are one thing, within reason of course, but that someone actually means to kill you, forever, is a thought that the mind cannot accept, it wants to vomit it out; ordinary people just don’t have the mental or emotional clichés to deal with news like that.

‘How can you possibly be sure of that?’ I asked after a moment.

‘Well, to be perfectly frank, Maurice thought it
was
you he shot. It was certainly you he meant to shoot.’

‘Maurice?’ I said. ‘
Maurice?
You mean
your
Maurice? Whatever would he want to do that for?’