The Mortdecai Trilogy (33 page)

The chaps in blue mackintoshes conversed in quacking tones together for a while, then turned on me.

‘Who you?’ asked one of them. I clapped my hand against my jaw in a piteous way and mimed the miseries of a tooth-ache sufferer. The man took my hand away from my jaw and slammed it with the side of his heavy pistol. Then he picked me up from the floor, sat me back in the chair.

‘Tooth-ache better now?’ I nodded vigorously. ‘You recognize our faces again maybe?’ There was no longer any need to mime suffering.

‘Goodness, no; you chaps all look the same to … I mean,
no
, I have a terrible head for figures, that’s to say faces or …’

He shifted the big pistol to his right hand and slammed me with it again. Now I really did need a dentist. He had not, in fact, rendered me unconscious but I decided to be so for all practical purposes. I let my head loll. He did not hit me again.

Through half-closed eyes I watched the three mackintoshed persons take off the clothes of the unconscious Dr Lo. He was a well-nourished dentist, as dentists go. One of the nasties took something out of his coat-pocket and threw the cardboard outer wrapping over his shoulder. It landed at my feet: the brand-name was ‘Bull-Stik’ – one of those terrifying new cyanoacrylic adhesives for which there is no known solvent. If you get it on your fingers, don’t touch them, it will mean surgery. One of the three men spread it all over the seat of the dentist’s chair and sat the naked Dr Lo down upon it, legs well apart. Then they played other pranks with the stuff which you will not wish to read about and which I would gladly forget. To tell the truth, I passed out in good earnest. Delayed shock, that sort of thing.

When I came to my senses I found my mouth full of little hard, pebbly scraps which I spat out onto my hand. Well, yes, assorted fillings, of course.

The three mackintosh-men had left so I tottered over to where Dr Lo was sitting. His eyes were more or less open.

‘Police?’ I asked. He made no sign. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘you’ve got to have an ambulance and they’ll call the police anyway; it will look odd if we don’t call them straightaway.’

He nodded his head slowly and carefully, as though he had just come to realize that he was a very old man. He was, in fact, in his forties – or had been that morning. I, too, felt that I had aged.

‘First,’ I said (I couldn’t talk very well because of the damage to my teeth; he couldn’t talk at all for reasons which will occur to you), ‘first, what have you got for me that I must take away?’ His head rotated slowly and his gaze fastened on the wall beside the door. I went over to the wall. ‘This?’ I asked, pointing to a rather bad scroll painting. He shook his head. I pointed in turn to several framed diplomas designed to reassure the customer that Lo Fang Hi was licensed to yank teeth within reason. He went on shaking his head and staring mutely at the wall. There was nothing else on the wall except some fly-dirt and a vulgar toothpaste-advertisement featuring a foot-high Mr Toothpaste Tube with arms and legs, surrounded by a score or so of actual tubes of the said dentifrice. That is to say, it had once been surrounded by such tubes but these were now scattered on the floor, each one burst open and squeezed-out by the nasties. I prised Mr T. Tube himself off the wall. He was filled with a fine white powder.

I have no idea what heroin and cocaine are supposed to taste like, so I didn’t do the fingertip-tasting thing that they do on television if you’re still awake at that time of the night, but I had little doubt about its not being baby-powder.

I was never a star pupil at mental arithmetic but a quick and terrified calculation taught me that I had become the proud but shy possessor of something more than half a kilogramme of highly illegal white powder. Say, eighty thousand pounds in Amsterdam. More to the point, say fifty years in nick. I cannot say that I was much gratified; I am as fond of eighty thousand pounds as the next man – for I am not haughty like my brother – but I do prefer to
have it quietly dumped for me in the Union des Banques Suisses, rather than carrying it around in an improbable toothpaste-tube full of prison-sentences.

Dr Lo started to make alarming noises. I have always been a charitable man but this was the first time that I had ever blown a Chinese dentist’s nose for him. He could not, of course, breathe through his mouth. Then I telephoned for an ambulance and policemen and scrammed, for I am a survivor.

Back at the hotel I telephone Johanna – did you know that you can
dial
London from China? – and told her, guardedly that all was not well with her toothsome friend and that her husband, too, had known better days. She told me to get some change, walk down the street to a telephone kiosk and ring again. This I did, for I am ever anxious to please. Soon we were in touch again, on a wonderfully clear line.

‘It’s really easy, Charlie dear,’ she said when I had unrolled the tapestry of my dismay. ‘Do you have a pencil or pen?’

‘Of course I have,’ I snapped ‘but what the hell –’

‘Then write this down. Secrete the uh dentifrice about your person. Take an early flight tomorrow from Hong Kong to Delhi. Then Delhi to Paris. Then take Air France Flight ZZ 690 to J.F. Kennedy Airport, New York. Can you spell that? OK. Now, in flight, go to the toilet – sorry, dear, I’ll never get used to saying “lavatory” – and unscrew the inspection plate behind the pan. Hide the stuff in there. At Kennedy, walk through customs and book on Flight ZZ 887 to Chicago: this is the same aircraft but it’s now a domestic flight – no customs, get it? In flight, retrieve the dentifrice. Call me from Chicago and I’ll tell you what to do next. OK?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘How do you mean, “no”, dear?’

‘I mean, sort of “no”. It means, no, I won’t do it. I have seen a film about San Quentin penitentiary and I hate every stone of it. I shall not do it. I shall flush that stuff down what you call the toilet as soon as I get back to the hotel. Please do not try to persuade me for my mind is made up.’

‘Charlie.’

‘Yes?’

‘Remember when I coaxed you to have that vasectomy done just after we were married?’

‘Yes.’

‘In that cute little clinic?’

‘Yes.’

They did not perform a vasectomy.’

‘Good God!’ I cried, appalled. ‘Why, I might have had a baby!’

‘I don’t think so, dear. What they did do was implant in your, uh, groin a tiny explosive capsule with a quartz-decay time-system. It explodes in, let’s see, ten days time. Only the guy who put it in can take it out without activating a kind of fail-safe mechanism, so please don’t let anyone meddle with it: I kind of like you as you are, you know? Hey, Charlie, are you still there?’

‘Yes,’ I said heavily. ‘Very well. Just give me those flight numbers again. And Johanna?’

‘Yes dear?’

‘Tell the chap who knows how to take the gadget out of me to be very, very careful crossing the road, eh?’

Being of noble fostering, I glance
Lightly into old Laggan’s ingle-nook …
Rabbits or snipe-fowl – even nicer things:
Has any longer title – God-remitted?

 

The Old Poacher

 

I stayed not upon the order of my going, nor even to lose my £1000 at the tables in far-famed Macao, but crammed everything – well, almost everything – into my suitcase and went down to the desk to pay my bill and book a ticket on the night-flight. The desk-clerk – how is it that they all contrive to look the same? – said that he had something in the safe for me. Had there been anywhere to run to I daresay I would have run. As it was, I made a nonchalant ‘Oh, ah?’ The desk-chap twiddled the safe and fished out a stout envelope; it was addressed in a scrawly hand to ‘The Friend of the Poor’ and the clerk had omitted to remove the clipped-on piece of paper which read ‘For the overweight, Jewish-looking guy who wears his collar back to front and drinks too much.’ I am not proud, I opened the envelope: it contained a note saying ‘Dear Father, I played your dough at the craps table and made five straight passes and then faded a couple other shooters taking the odds and got lucky and I
taken 5% for my time and trouble and I hope the poor will offer up a prayer for yours truly …’ The other contents of the envelope were a quite improbable wodge of currency notes of all nations. Hotels like the one I had been staying at have, of course, all-night banking facilities: I bought a cashier’s cheque for my winnings (and most of my £1000 walking-about money) and sent it to the poor, as my conscience dictated. The only poor I could think of at the time was C. Mortdecai in Upper Brook Street, London, W1. I shall always remember that nice American as the only honest man I have ever met.

Painlessly gaining the price of another Rembrandt etching for the rainy-day scrap-book usually has a soothing effect on the nerve-endings but, long before my taxi-cab dumped me at the airport, I was quaking again. This was not necessarily a bad thing; had I been able to put a bold front on I would certainly have been apprehended as an obvious malefactor but, twitching with terror as I was, the customs chaps and security thugs wafted me through as a clear case of St Vitus’ Dance or Parkinson’s Disease – well-known occupational hazards among Curial Secretaries.

All went as merrily as a wedding-bell until the penultimate leg of the journey: Paris to New York, via Air France. A little too merrily, indeed, for by then I was a bit biffed – you know, a little the worse for my dinner, which had been several courses of Scotch whisky – and on my journey to the lavatory or toilet I sat, quite inadvertently, on the laps of several of my fellow-passengers. Their reactions varied from ‘Ooh, aren’t you
bold!
’ via ‘
Ach, du lieber Augustin
’ to ‘
Pas gentil, ça!
’, while one impassive Chinese gentleman ignored me completely, pretending that his lap was quite free of any Mortdecai. Having at last locked myself in the loo or bog, I found that I had failed to arm myself with the necessary screwdriver with which to unscrewdrive the inspection-plate.

Back to my seat I teetered, watched narrowly now by the stewardess. When she came to enquire after my well-being I had decided upon a
ruse
: I would tell her that the zip of my trousers was jammed and that she must find me a screwdriver so that I could free the Mortdecai plumbing system. Alas, my usual fluent French deserted me – look, can
you
remember the French for ‘screwdriver’ when you’re biffed? – and I had to resort to a certain amount of sign-language, pointing vigorously at my fly while vociferating the
word ‘screwdriver’ again and again. Her English was little better than my French.

‘ “Screw” I onderstand,’ she said demurely ‘but what is zis “draivaire”, hein?’

‘ “Draivaire”,’ I said wildly, ‘ “drivaire” is like, yes,
conducteur
!’ and again I frantically pointed at that area of my trousers where my personal lightning-conductor is housed. She clapped her hands gleefully as understanding came to her.

‘Ah! Now I onderstand! You weesh me to tell the
conducteur
– the pilot – that you weesh to do to him what Général de Gaulle has done to the whole French nation, not so?’

‘Oh, sweet Christ and chips and tomato sauce,’ I sighed, subsiding into my seat. This baffled the stewardess; she went away and brought another stewardess, a polyglot of dusky hue and tenor-baritone voice.

‘I doth spake English a few better what she,’ growled this new one, ‘exprime what be this thou askings?’ But she knew what a screwdriver was (it’s
tournevis
in French, as any sober man can tell you). Five minutes later the perilous powder was safely screwed up behind the lavatory pan and I was pulling myself together on the lavatory floor.

‘Pull yourself together,’ I told myself sternly. ‘You must excite no suspicion. You cannot afford to be lodged in some foreign nick with a quartz-decay timing-system nestling beside your
vas deferens
. A low profile is what you must keep.’ So I strolled down the aisle to my seat, twirling the screwdriver and whistling a nonchalant bar or two from
Cosi Fan Tutte
, having craftily left my trouser-fly agape to encourage onlookers to understand the object of my mission. I don’t suppose anyone gave me a second glance.

Everything continued to go wonderfully smoothly and soon, soon I was in wondrous Chicago and little the worse for my journey. (I suspect that the much-vaunted ‘jet-lag syndrome’ is nothing more than the common hangover of commerce. Certainly, I felt no worse than I would normally expect to feel at that time of day.)

The windiness of Chicago is grossly over-described: I was much windier myself. On the journey to my hotel I strained my eyes out of the taxi’s windows, hoping to catch a glimpse of some mobsters cutting-down dirty, double-crossing rats with ‘typewriters’ or blasting their molls with ‘pineapples’ but none was
to be seen. When I complained of this to the cabbie he chuckled fatly.

‘Nixon we got,’ he said over his shoulder, ‘who needs Capone?’ I pretended to understand. Well, I’d heard of Capone of course: he’ll have a place in history, won’t he?

My hotel was really just the same hotel that I’ve stayed in all over the world except that it was a bit taller than most. They’ll never take the place of Claridge’s or the Connaught; still less the duplex penthouse suite in the Bristol (that’s in Paris, France) but at least you know where you are in these new ones. You know exactly the size and springiness of your bed, exactly what the room-service will be like if you can get them to answer the phone – and you know better than to put your shoes outside the door.

I visited the loo or toilet – who would not? – and found the porcelain pan protected by the usual strip of ‘sanitized’ paper. (This reassures Americans that they may sit safely, for Americans are terrified of germs, everyone knows that. Hotel-managers love it for its ‘cost-effectiveness’: whipping a piece of paper around the receiver and giving a blast of aerosol takes far less time than actually cleaning it. Only Arabs are not fooled: they stand on the seat.) Then I had a brisk shower (the shower was programmed to scald you or freeze you; you didn’t stay under it long – ‘cost-effectiveness’ again, you see) and, having put on a fresh clothe or two, I had a brisk debate with myself. The upshot was that I telephoned Blucher before Johanna, for reasons which will occur to you. Blucher seemed full of merriment.

‘How full of merriment you seem, to be sure,’ I said sourly.

‘Well, Mr Mortdecai, to tell the truth I just took a call from a Chinese gentleman – he doesn’t exactly work for me but he sometimes throws me a bit of news just for laughs, you know? – and he tells me that you sat on his lap when you were about forty minutes out from Paris, France.’

‘An unexpected air-pocket. I rebuked the
conducteur
– sorry, the pilot – for his clumsy driving.’

‘An air-pocket at 30,000 feet? Yeah, of course. And the screwdriver bit – don’t tell me you tried the old toilet-inspection-panel routine? You did? You really did?’ Had I not known him for a humourless man I might almost have thought that he was stifling a laugh.

‘Hey,’ he went on, ‘did you taste the stuff since you retrieved it? I mean, it may really
be
tooth-powder now, huh?’

‘It may very well have been that in the first place, for all I know.’

‘Hunh? Oh. Yes, that’s good thinking. Well, I’d say you should just call your lady now and do exactly what she tells you. Some of our fellows will be sort of close at hand with fresh diapers for you but you won’t see them. And don’t call me again until you get back to the UK unless something comes up that you really can’t handle. OK?’

‘You mean, like death?’

‘Oh, golly,
no
,’ he said seriously. ‘If you get dead do not on any account call us; we’d have to disown you, that’s the ground-rules, right?’

‘Right,’ I said with equal seriousness. Then I said, ‘I suppose you wouldn’t care to tell me what this is all about?’

‘Right,’ he said. I hung up. Then I called Johanna.

‘Darling!’ she cried when I told her the news, ‘Wonderful! Now, just you sit there by the telephone with a drink and I’ll have someone come and see you.’

‘Do you know what time it is here?’ I squeaked, outraged.

‘I know what time it is here, Charlie; what time do you have there in Chicago?’

‘
Dinner
-time,’ I snarled, for the Spartan boy’s fox was indeed gnawing at my very vitals.

‘Well, just sit there with
two
drinks, dear; the person who’s coming to see you will give you a lovely dinner, I promise.’

‘Oh, very well,’ I said, as I have so often said before. Another revolt quelled, another outpost surrendered. Why do nations pay great salaries to Generals when women can do the job just as well without even using an army? I decided on a spot of toothbrushing – as well as the drink, of course, not instead of.

‘Why, why, why Mortdecai?’ I asked myself as I burnished the teeth still extant (my initials are, in fact, C.S.v.C. Mortdecai, but let it pass, let it pass), ‘why are you suffering these slings and arrows?’

The answer was simple, for the question was merely rhetorical: suffer these slings and arrows or lose my end of the life-death trade-in I had agreed to with Blucher. I have no particular objection to
death as such; it pays all bills and lays on others the chore of hiding the pornograms, the illegal firearms, the incriminating letters: all these things become of little importance when you have six feet of sod o’er you. On the other hand – I distinctly remember saying ‘on the other hand’ gravely to my toothbrush as I rinsed it – on the other hand, d’you see, death was not something I was actually craving just then. For one thing, I was not in a state of grace and, more to the point, I was burning with desire for revenge upon the perfidious Johanna who had played that horrid prank with the quartz-decay capsule implant. (On the ’plane I had thought of asking the stewardess to listen to my
vesiculae seminales
and tell me if she could hear anything ticking, but once again my command of French had failed me. In any case, it is possible that she might have thought it an odd request.)

‘Heigh-ho!’ I thought, then trotted briefly down to the hotel’s drug-store where I made a purchase or two. I don’t think they had ever before been asked for half a kilo of baby-powder. I also bought some stout envelopes and stamps. Lots of stamps. A brief trip back to my room, another to the post office and soon I was relaxing in an arm-chair, my jet-lag symptoms reacting well to the treatment I was pouring into them but my hunger unabated. Only such a man of iron as I could have resisted the temptation to ring for a sandwich or two but I placed my trust in Johanna: if she says there is a good dinner in the offing, then the offing is what the said dinner is in.

Not that I didn’t feel a twinge of trepidation as I awaited my host. By the time the door-bell rang I had arranged the odds in my mind: seven to three said a Mafioso with padded shoulders who would
frisk
me before treating me to
spaghetti oi vongole
plus deep-fried baby
zucchini
with the flowers still attached and lots of fried
piperoni
on the side, while ten would get you seven that it would be a slinky she-sadist who would frisk me only with contemptuous eyes before making me take her to Sardi’s or somewhere like that and buy her pheasant under glass – the most boring grocery in the world.

I was wrong, not for the first time. Who oozed into my suite when I answered the bell was none other than the portly Chinese gentleman upon whose lap I had roosted for a while in the Boeing 747.

‘Harrow,’ he said civilly. I glanced at his tie.

‘Surely you mean Clifton? Oh, yes, sorry, I see; harro to you, too. Have a drink?’

‘Thankyou, no. I bereave you are hungry? Come.’

I came. Went, rather.

You will hardly be surprised to learn that it was a Chinese meal with which I was regaled, but in a Chinese restaurant of no common sort, nor of the nastiness I would have expected from my first impressions of Chicago – a city which seemed intent upon finding how low a lowest common denominator can be. (I hasten to say that some of my best friends may well be Chicagoans – without actually advertising the fact – but have you ever snuffed the scent of the Chicago River as it slides greasily under the nine bridges in the centre of the Windy City? Alligators have been known to flee, holding perfumed handkerchiefs to their noses. As for the carrion gusts from Lake Michigan itself, ‘Faugh!’ is too mild a word by half.)

This restaurant, as I was saying before I caught ecology, was not one of those where oafs stir three or four dishes together and eat the resultant mess with chips and soy sauce, while the waiters watch inscrutably, thinking their own thoughts. No, it was one of those rare ones which has no menu – people just bring you a succession of tiny dishes of nameless things to be eaten one at a time and without soy sauce. I tried not to disappoint these dedicated waiters and gifted cooks; tried, too, to earn a reputation for being the fastest chopstick in the Northern Mid-West.