The Mortdecai Trilogy (39 page)

I durst not give him time to change his magazine so I shed my jacket and slung it over the bins. ‘Rooty-toot-toot’ went the Browning. That made seven rounds expended, seven to go; even I could tell that. The floor sloped down in a gentle ramp towards him. I kicked over a couple of bins which rolled down the slope, dripping pig’s blood and goodness knows what else. He shot at them, for the Dutch are cleanly folk. Ten rounds gone, four to go. I raised an unoccupied bin-lid and slammed it onto the floor; he fired two more rounds, quite wildly.

Where I had kicked the bins away I saw that there was a monstrous iron door with a lever instead of a handle. It looked like an excellent door to be behind.

‘Jackson!’ I bellowed – it seemed a plausible sort of name – ‘JACKSON! Don’t use the bombs: I’m coming out to take him
myself.’ Hommel can scarcely have believed that, but he must have dithered a bit because I got that great iron door open and scrambled through it without a shot being fired at me. The room inside the door was cold as the tip of an Eskimo’s tool: it was, indeed, what the meat-trade calls a Cold Room. The lever on my side of the door had a position marked SECURE in red paint. I made it so. High up on two walls were those rubber-flap kind of entrances you see in hospitals; between them and through them ran an endless belt with large hooks. (Yes, just like a dirty weekend with a shark-fisher.) A pistol roared outside and a bullet spanged against the splendidly solid iron door. I sat with my back to the door and quaked, partly with cold, for I had discarded my jacket in that little
ruse de guerre
, you remember. The secure lever beside my head wagged and clicked but did not allow admission. Then I heard voices, urgent voices: the Dutchman was no longer alone. An unpleasing sort of whirring, grating noise made itself heard: evidently they had got hold of some kind of electrical tool and were working on the door-handle. Had I been a religious man I should probably have offered up a brisk prayer or two, but I am proud, you see: I mean, I never praised Him when I was knee-deep in gravy so it would have seemed shabby to apply for help from a bacon-factory.

The grating noises on the other side of the door increased: I looked about me desperately. On the wall was one of these huge electrical switches such as American Presidents use for starting World War Last. It might well set off an alarum, I thought; it might turn off all the electrical power in Mr Mycock’s bacon-factory – certainly, it couldn’t make things worse. I heaved with all my might and closed the contacts.

What happened was that pigs started trundling through the room. They were not exactly navigating under their own power, you understand, for they had all crossed The Great Divide or made the Great Change; they were hanging from the hooks on the endless belt, their contents had been neatly scooped out and were doubtless inhabiting the
PET-FOOD ONLY: WASH HANDS AFTER HANDLING
bin. They were the first truly happy pigs I had ever seen.

The eighth – or it may have been the ninth – pig wasn’t really a pig in the strictest sense of the word; it was a large Dutchman,
fully-clothed in what would be called a suit in Amsterdam. He was hanging onto a hook with one hand and seemed to have all his entrails. His other hand brandished the Browning HPM 1935, which he fired at me as he dropped to the floor, making his fourth mistake that day. The shot took a little flesh off the side of my belly – a place where I can well afford to lose a little flesh – then he aimed carefully at the pit of my belly and squeezed the trigger again. Nothing happened. As he looked stupidly down at the empty pistol I kicked it out of his hand.

‘That was fourteen,’ I said kindly. ‘Can’t you count? Haven’t you a spare magazine?’ Dazedly, he patted the pocket where the spare magazine nested. Meanwhile, I had picked up the Browning; I clouted him on the side of the head with it. He passed no remarks, he simply subsided like a chap who has earned a night’s repose. I took the spare magazine out of his pocket, removed the empty one from the pistol (using my handkerchief to avoid leaving misleading fingerprints) and popped it into his pocket. I cannot perfectly recall what happened then, nor would you care to know. Suffice it to say that the endless belt was still churning along with its dangling hooks and, well, it seemed a good idea at the time.

It was now becoming colder every moment and I was shaking like any aspen, but even cowards derive a little warmth from a handful of Browning HPM with a full magazine. I awaited what might befall, regretting nothing but having wasted a perfectly good jacket. An indistinct voice shouted through the door.

‘Eh?’ I shouted valiantly.

‘Open up, Mr Charlie,’ shouted Jock. I opened up. Had I been one of these emotional Continental chaps, I believe I would have clasped him to my bosom.

‘We got to get out, Mr Charlie, the place’ll be crawling with Old Bill in about ten seconds flat.’ We took off at a dog-trot. To my horror, at the turn of the corridor stood Johanna, holding my Banker’s Special like a girl who knows how to use Banker’s Specials. She gave me one of those smiles which jellify the knees, but the brain remained in gear. From the direction of the entrance there came a sort of crowd-scene noise and, rising above it, the sound of patient exasperation which only policemen can make. Someone came clumping nigh and we ducked into the nearest
room. There were no pigs in it. What was in it was bales and bales of newly-laundered white coats and overalls such as those who work in bacon-factories love to wear.

When the legions had thundered past we emerged, white-clad, and I was snapping orders about stretchers at Jock, calling him ‘Orderly’ and asking ‘Nurse’ if she knew how to use portable cyclometric infusion apparatus. She said she did, which was not the first time she had lied to me. The policemen at the entrance paid us no heed, they were busy keeping people out. ‘Bart’s Hospital,’ I snapped at the taxi-driver, ‘casualty entrance. Emergency: use your horn.’ At Bart’s we dispersed, shedding white clothing, found the main entrance and took three separate taxis home. I arrived first – I needed that healing drink.

‘Well,’ I said curtly when the others had assembled, ‘first things first.’ I still had a residue of hospital-registrar arrogance in my voice. ‘Does either of you know what happened to the other chap – the English one?’

‘Yeah,’ said Jock. ‘He’s face down in one of them big bins of pigs’ guts.’

‘Oh dear,’ I said, ‘poor fellow, how horrid for him. I mean, I don’t actually feel any
affection
for him but he must be hideously uncomfortable.’

‘I don’t fink he’s feeling uncomfortable, Mr Charlie.’

‘Oh dear,’ I said again. ‘I suppose that means I’ve got to send that Luger of yours to Ginge the Gunsmith again? I don’t suppose you had time to pick up the used cartridge-cases? No? Ah well.’

(Perhaps a word of explanation to the innocent is called for here. The ballistics wizards, as everyone knows, can infallibly tell which bullet has been fired from which fire-arm – they use comparison-microscopes – and the cartridge-cases are an even greater give-away. Therefore, anyone who has used a fire-arm for a naughty purpose tends to toss it over London Bridge into the Thames where, I fancy, the accumulation of fire-arms so discarded must by now be constituting a hazard to shipping. Jock, however, will no more be persuaded to discard his Luger than to part with his autographed photograph of Shirley Temple. This means that whenever he has ‘used up’ someone with it I have to pay Ginge a great deal of money to ‘tiddly’ it. This involves putting in a new striker-pin, buffing up the face of the breech-block and
engraving a few new scratches on it and doing some extremely fancy work with a lathe on the chamber and barrel. After Ginge has finished with a pistol the comparison-microscopes get a fit of the sulks and the ballistics wizards go home and beat their wives.)

‘Now, Johanna,’ I said in a no-nonsense voice, ‘you seemed to know those two chaps: who were they? The Englishman and the Dutchman? Eh?’

‘They were both Dutchmen, Charlie dear. Deputy Commissioner Rubinstein likes to call himself Robinson because his English is perfect, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, wasn’t it?’ I said.

‘And they really were both policemen but very, very bent ones. You see, darling, most of the heroin in the world passes through Amsterdam – or do I mean Rotterdam? – and that amounts to a great many millions of pounds, you understand, and you can’t really blame an underpaid policeman for kind of not noticing that someone is absent-mindedly dropping ten thousand pounds a year into a West Indies branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia for him, can you? I mean, when it comes to privacy, the Bank of Nova Scotia makes those Swiss banks look like back-numbers of
Playboy
.’

‘No,’ I agreed, ‘I cannot blame them for this. Indeed, I might well suffer a pang or two of temptation myself in the circumstances. What I can – and do – blame them for is for attempting to blow big, painful holes through essential organs of mine which I have not yet finished with.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘there is that. But they
got
their blame all right, didn’t they, dear?’

‘True, true. And now you will please be kind enough to tell me who was employing these sticky-fingered arms of the law. I mean, at the time when they put the old snatcheroo on me.’

‘What beautiful American you speak, Charlie!’

‘Never mind about that, just tell me who gave them The Notice about me.’

‘Is that the same as a “contract” in the States?’

‘Oh, burst a bleeding frog!’ I bellowed – I believe this was the first time I ever raised my voice to her – ‘Forget the semantics, what I want to know is who they were working for.’

‘
Pas devant les doméstiques
,’ she murmured. Jock left the room in a marked manner; his intellect is second to, well, almost anyone’s, but he does know two French sentences. One of them begins with ‘
Vooly voo cooshey
’ and the other is the one Johanna had used. He can be hurt; he has his pride.

‘They were working for Mr Lee, silly,’ said Johanna.

‘And where is Mr Lee now, would you say?’ She lifted the telephone, giving me that smile; dialled a number and said something into it in a language I didn’t recognize. She listened for perhaps thirty seconds, then said something which sounded like a number. Then she gave me that smile again, the one that softens every bone in my body except one. Hung up. I mean, she hung up the telephone. ‘Mr Lee is at present approaching the John F. Kennedy International Airport, Charlie dear. He should be touching down in about fifty minutes. He is in a big, comfy jet and no one else is aboard except a dozen or so of his, uh, naughty friends, six real Interpol agents, half the staff of the US Narcotics Bureau and your friend the Commandant.’

‘You mean the dreaded Commandant of that College of yours?’ I squeaked. ‘Are you trying to tell me that she was on the side of the angels all the time? Next you’ll be telling me that she’ll draw an MBE for her part in this nonsense!’

‘She got her MBE when you were at school, Charlie. Parachuting into Belgium. Her OBE came through when she snitched a boatload of Hungarian scientists out from a little Yugoslav port called Rijeka in the ‘50s. The least she can draw from this little caper is a DBE – in fact I’m putting her in for a Life Peerage.’

‘
You
’re putting …’

‘Yes, dear.’ That seemed to close that subject. Then I thought of another question.

‘Just what do
you
expect to draw from this, Johanna?’

‘You, dear.’ I looked wildly around; there was no one else in the room.

‘Me?’ I said.

‘Yes.’ Oh well, I thought, ask a silly question and you’ll get a silly answer. Little did she know that Colonel Blucher had offered me a spot of survival in this vale of tears in exchange for infiltrating whatever organization Johanna thought she was running; little did Blucher know how abject a dog’s breakfast
I had made of it all. I rose and made courteous noises to the effect that I had to go and see a chap in Jule’s Bar in Jermyn Street.

‘Yes, do go and have a little fun, dear; I know you’ll forgive me if I don’t join you tonight.’ Game, set and match against me, as usual.

Oh selfless man and stainless gentleman!

 

Merlin and Vivien

 

It’s odd how one drinks different things in different places. For instance, although I hate champagne cocktails, I always accept a couple from one particular mistress because a champagne cocktail, as anyone will tell you, gets to you where you live very fast and two such drinks enable me to ignore the grotesque schnozzle with which this particular lady has been endowed and to concentrate upon her other charms, which are of great distinction. To take other examples, there are some pubs where I just naturally order a scoop of Guiness and a ‘half ’un’ of Paddy on the side; there is one in Jersey where they always put a large whisky into a split of fresh orange-juice, ignoring the raised eyebrows of the other customers; another place where, even if I have been absent for a year, they draw me a pint of the very best bitter and lay beside it a ball-point pen because they know that I have come there to solve a crossword-puzzle. There is an Italian place in Oxford, which I used to pop into of a morning on my way home, where they are too tactful to greet me, they simply mix a massive brandy and soda and compassionately help me to fold my fingers around it. There is
even a place, many miles from anywhere, where I drink something which I think is called Margarita; it comes in a filth-encrusted bottle without a label and seems to be 140-proof tomato ketchup. I could multiply examples but what I am driving at is that, for some reason, when I am in Jule’s in Jermyn Street, which is arguably the best pub in the world, I always order Canadian rye whisky with ginger ale. Then I send a glass of wine to the pianist with a courteous message and he flicks a courteous glance at me and plays it. Ingrid Bergman never comes in but a man can dream, can’t he?

Having gone through the ritual, and having summoned up the second drink, I made my way to the telephone and dialled Blucher’s ‘secure’ number.

‘This is the Home and Colonial Stores,’ fluted the familiar voice.

‘And my prick’s a bloater,’ I snarled, for I was in no mood to be paltered with.

‘Indeed?’ said the voice. ‘Then I suggest you get in touch with the Royal College of Surgeons, where you may learn something to your advantage.’

‘Grrrr,’ I said. She replaced the receiver. I found another coin, dialled again.

‘Please may I speak to Daddy?’ I grated between clenched teeth.

‘Why, sir?’ I remembered the rest of the absurd password.

‘Mummy’s poorly.’ There were clicks and scrambler-noises and at last Blucher was on the line.

‘I want to speak to you,’ I said. ‘Now. I’ve had it up to here.’

‘Where’s here?’ I told him. He was there in rather less than five minutes, which indicated that his Agency, whatever it was, was squandering prodigious sums of US tax-payers’ money on addresses far above their station in life. Moreover, he was carrying an umbrella, which did not even begin to make him look like an Englishman.

I ordered a drink for him, although it went against the grain. He was, after all, my guest.

‘Just two questions,’ I murmured thinly. ‘Exactly who have I been working for? And has it finished now? And, if so, do I stay alive?’

‘That’s
three
questions, Mr Mortdecai.’ (You may recall that, early in our acquaintanceship, I had rebuked him for using my Christian name.)

‘Very well, three,’ I snapped. ‘So you can count up to three. I know
women
who can count up to nine. Just start at question one and move gently down the list, using your own words.’

‘I have an auto – sorry, a car – outside. Let’s drive around a little, hunh? Then I’ll take you home.’ I thought about that a while, then agreed. I had, after all, telephoned him because I felt that extermination by his Agency would at least be efficient and hygienic; infinitely preferable to being made lethal sport of by female terrorists or Chinese gentlemen bearing grudges.

His car was not one of those great, black limousines that people are taken for rides in; it was a little ‘topolino’ Fiat with nothing sinister about it but a parking-ticket on the windscreen. He drove, as discreetly as a Rural Dean who has had two helpings of sherry-trifle and dreads being asked to puff into a breathalyser, to Grosvenor Square. To No. 24, Grosvenor Square, to be exact. That’s the American Embassy, as if you didn’t know.

‘I’m not going in there,’ I said.

‘Neither am I. My desk will be chin-high with paper-work, all marked “Urgent”. I’m just stopping here because the cops won’t give me a bad time; the number of this car is on the privilege list.’

‘How the other half lives, to be sure,’ I murmured.

‘Now, Mr Mortdecai; your questions. First, you have been working for the United Nations. OK, laugh, enjoy, enjoy. But you have. My own Agency co-operates closely with that particular branch of UNO and I can say most sincerely that in the last few weeks we have achieved some very, very spectacular results.’ I probably said something feeble like ‘Well done’ but he ignored whatever it was and continued.

‘Your second question – “has it finished now?” – I can only answer with a kind of qualified “yes”. Your third question – the one about whether you get to stay alive – is a little tough. So far as my bosses are concerned I think I can say that there is now no problem.’ He turned and looked at me as though trying to puzzle out why anyone like me should want to stay alive. I squared my shoulders and looked as haughty as one can in the passenger-seat of a little Fiat. ‘But, Mr Mortdecai, I’m sure you understand that in an operation as complex as this there are many, many loose ends which take a while to sort of mop up and winkle out and we could not of course justify in our budget an expense like protecting, say,
you, around the clock for the next few months. I’m sure you see that.’

‘I quite see that,’ I said, ignoring his garish mixture of metaphors.

‘Have you ever thought of the Seychelles?’ he asked. ‘The Antilles? Samoa? The Virgin Islands?’ I turned upon him a stony glare which should have made him think of Easter Island.

‘Well, how about the Channel Islands? Your wife has a half-share in a really beautiful mansion there.’ I hadn’t known that, but there were many things I didn’t know about Johanna in those days.

‘How do you know that?’ I demanded.

He fixed me with that pitying look with which people often fix me when they have decided that I am simple-minded. Often, if the circumstances are propitious, I wipe off the pitying look with what Jock calls a ‘bunch of fives’, but the passenger-seat of a right-hand drive Topolino is not what I would call a propitious circumstance: the only possible blow would be a round-house left – and the driving-mirror was in the way. Moreover, I was giving away fifteen years, not to mention thirty pounds of self-indulgence.

‘I have always longed to visit the Isle of Jersey,’ is what I said.

You must guard against hating people or even things: it is easy to become like what you hate. Victory at Entebbe destroys us more surely than defeat at Kursk. I did not hate Blucher at all as he drove me home, although I had to work hard at it.

Johanna was not at home but Jock was, of course. His good eye seemed to look at Blucher almost benignly; had I not been preoccupied with other matters – like life and death – I might have thought this strange, for Jock has never been one to betray a liking for the fuzz. I offered Blucher an assortment of chairs, bade Jock supply him with anything he might long for in the way of drinks or eatables, then melted away apologetically as a host melts when he wishes to put the cat out. What I urgently wanted was to get under the shower and refresh the frame with newly-laundred gents’ underwear, half-hose and shirtings as now worn.

I indulged myself, as ever; it must have been quite half an hour before I reappeared, sweet-smelling and freshly clad, in the drawing-room, secure in the expectation that Blucher would have
taken his leave. I was wrong, of course. What he had taken was the infernal liberty of sitting next to my wife, Johanna, on the little Louis Quinze sofa which is not designed to support two people unless the two people do not happen to mind a certain intimacy, a certain warm proximity of hip and thigh. They were chuckling, I heard them distinctly. I do not often stand aghast but aghast was what I stood then.

‘Charlie dear,’ cried Johanna, ‘we thought you were never coming. Do sit, darling; have something to drink, you must be tired.’ I sat in the least comfortable chair in the room and forced a drink between my unwilling lips. (This was, you understand, only to mask or muffle the grinding of my teeth.)

‘Ah, well, Blucher,’ I said, ‘I see that you have made the acquaintance of my wife. Good, splendid, yes.’

‘Darling, we’ve known each other for ages and ages … ’ Blucher looked at her and nodded knowingly, lovingly. I took another gulp of whisky to disguise the gnashing. No conversational gambit offered itself to me; I merely glowered at the few square inches of carpet between my feet.

‘Charlie, dear, you’re not being the perfect host tonight–couldn’t you sort of tell your guest a funny story or something? I mean, he did save your life, huh?’ I lost patience at that point. All bets were off.

‘Look,’ rasped, ‘this guest of mine – perhaps I should say ours –
sold
me my life. The price was that I married you. I liked being married to you until about five minutes ago, I really did, although the, er, extramarital tasks have been a little trying. But he didn’t save my life, he bought and sold it.’

Johanna put onto her face that sweet, tolerant look of a Spock-trained mother whose child has just wet the bed for the third time that night.

‘You don’t have it quite right, Charlie dear. As a matter of fact, our guest figured that it would be tidiest to sort of terminate you long ago. It was I who bought your life.’ My brain started to feel like one of those cages where white mice run happily, mindlessly in a wire treadmill.

‘Of course,’ I said bitterly, ‘of course, of course. You bought my life. I must remember to thank you. No use my asking why, I suppose?’

‘Because I loved you, you great, stupid, self-satisfied prig!’ she blazed. I never know what to say on occasions like that; I usually just shuffle my feet and look silly.

‘Er, was that last word “prig” or “pig”?’ I asked, for want of anything better to say. She didn’t answer, just sat there with a face of thunder, tapping her foot on the carpet as though there were some small pest there. Like, say, a Mortdecai. I distinctly saw Blucher’s hand take hers and squeeze it fondly.

‘And how much did you pay for this alleged life of mine?’ I asked, my worst fears coming to the forefront of my brain and starting to dance a lewd jig. To my astonishment she giggled – and in the most fetching way. I had never heard her giggle before.

‘Please make us some drinks first, Charlie dear.’ I did so but with an ill grace, although I softened a little when it came to measuring out my own.

‘Now,’ she said cosily, ‘Franzl will tell you all about it.’

‘
Franzl!
’ I squeaked. ‘Franzl?’

‘Hey, that’s great, Charlie old boy; I knew you and I’d get onto first-name terms in the end. Now, like I said back there at the beginning, the price of you staying alive was marrying Hänschen here.’

‘
Hänschen?
’ I squawked.

‘Why sure, don’t you call her that? No? Well, what I didn’t make clear was that it was her idea, not mine. See, she had this crazy idea that you were the only man in the world for her; well, she always had these really weird fantasies, you know?’

‘No.’

‘Well, she does. Anyway, her organization had penetrated about as far as possible and it was pretty clear that the Chinese guys weren’t about to show any more of their cards without the pot being sweetened up with some heavy action. My own Agency, which is more clandestine than, uh, subversive, was also up against a stone wall and the lousy CIA were commencing to sniff around at our fire-hydrants. Uh, lamp-posts?’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, we’d sort of theoretically ageed that a kind of catalyst was needed, like throwing a new face into the game who might blunder about and get the deer moving … ’

‘He means, Charlie dear, someone resourceful like you but who was not familiar with the scenario … ’

‘You mean,’ I said, ‘that what I didn’t know couldn’t be tortured out of me?’

‘No, dear, just someone with no preconceived notions which might make you follow … ’

‘ … the kind of pattern that a trained agent would; we had to puzzle them by throwing into the ball-game someone clearly unprofessional, someone half-smart … ’

‘He means, dear, that it was like suddenly putting an English Rugby International into the Yale-Harvard match. I knew it was desperately dangerous for you – Franzl offered me eleven to two against your surviving the first week – but it was better than having all those awful people in Lancashire quite certainly destroying you in your cave. You do see that, don’t you darling?’ All I could see was Blucher’s hand patting hers and, when I tore my glance away, the whitening of my own knuckles. Blucher took up the story again.

‘Also, like I said, the bad guys were looking for some heavy action; really heavy, so we dreamed up this attempted assassination of Her Majesty. We never thought you’d get to first base and gosh, we were worried when it started to look like you’d get away with it. We were a little late getting to you that time – the traffice re-routed and all – it surely was lucky that cartridge jammed in the breech. I guess you’d really have done it, hunh?’

‘As a matter of fact, I don’t believe I would. Jock wouldn’t have liked it, you see; he would have handed in his notice.’

‘Well, he wouldn’t have needed to do that. You see, there was an Oriental guy in the window right across the street from you with a sniper’s rifle and he’d have bipped you right between the eyes one fifth of one second after you fired. To save you from interrogation, you understand.’