The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3) by Kyril Bonfiglioli
Don’t point that thing at me
The epigraphs are all by Robert Browning, except one, which is a palpable forgery.
This is not an autobiographical novel: it is about some other portly, dissolute, immoral and middle-aged art dealer. The rest of the characters are quite imaginary too, especially that Mrs. Spon, but most of the places are real.
1
So old a story, and tell it no better?
Pippa Passes
When you burn an old carved and gilt picture frame it makes a muted hissing noise in the grate – a sort of genteel fooh – and the gold leaf tints the flames a wonderful peacock blue-green. I was watching this effect smugly on Wednesday evening when Martland came to see me. He rang the bell three times very fast, an imperious man in a hurry. I was more or less expecting him, so when my thug Jock put his head around the door, eyebrows elaborately raised, I was able to put a certain aplomb into my ‘Wheel him in.’
Somewhere in the trash he reads Martland has read that heavy men walk with surprising lightness and grace; as a result he trips about like a portly elf hoping to be picked up by a leprechaun. In he pranced, all silent and catlike and absurd, buttocks swaying noiselessly.
‘Don’t get up,’ he sneered, when he saw that I had no intention of doing so. ‘I’ll help myself, shall I?’
Ignoring the more inviting bottles on the drinks tray, he unerringly snared the great Rodney decanter from underneath and poured himself a gross amount of what he thought would be my Taylor ’31. A score to me already, for I had filled it with Invalid Port of an unbelievable nastiness. He didn’t notice: score two to me. Of course, he is only a policeman. Perhaps ‘was’ by now.
He lowered his massive bum into my little Régence fauteuil and smacked his lips courteously over the crimson garbage in his glass. I could almost hear him scrabbling about in his brain for a deft, light opening. His Oscar Wilde touch. Martland has only two personalities – Wilde and Eeyore. Nevertheless, he is a very cruel and dangerous policeman. Or perhaps ‘was’ – or have I said that?
‘My dear boy,’ he said finally, ‘such ostentation. Even your firewood is gilded now.’
‘An old frame,’ I said, playing it straight. ‘Thought I’d burn it.’
‘But such a waste. A nice Louis Seize carved frame …’
‘You know bloody well it isn’t a nice Louis anything frame,’ I snarled. ‘It’s a repro Chippendale trailing-vine pattern made about last week by one of those firms in the Greyhound Road. Came off a picture I bought the other day.’
You never know what Martland knows or doesn’t know, but I felt fairly safe on the subject of antique frames: even Martland couldn’t have taken a course on them, I thought.
‘Would have been interesting if it had been a Louis Seize one though, you must admit; say about 50 by 110 centimetres,’ he mumbled, gazing meditatively at the last of it glowing in the grate.
At that point my thug came in and deposited about twenty pounds of coal onto it and retired after giving Martland a civil smile. Jock’s idea of a civil smile is rolling back part of his upper lip from a long, yellow dogtooth. It frightens me.
‘Listen, Martland,’ I said evenly. ‘If I had lifted that Goya, or fenced it, you can’t really think that I’d bring it here in its frame, for God’s sake? And then burn the frame in my own grate? I mean, I’m not a dullard, am I?’
He made embarrassed, protesting noises as though nothing was further from his thoughts than the princely Goya whose theft from Madrid had filled the newspapers for the past five days. He helped out the noises by flapping his hands a bit, slopping some of the alleged wine onto a nearby rug.
‘That,’ I said crisply, ‘is a valuable Savonnerie rug. Port is bad for it. Moreover, there is probably a priceless Old Master cunningly concealed beneath it. Port would be very bad for that.’
He leered at me nastily, knowing that I was quite possibly telling the truth. I leered back coyly, knowing that I was telling the truth. From the shadows beyond the doorway my thug Jock was smiling his civilest smile. We were all happy to the casual eye, had there been such an eye on the premises.
At this stage, before anyone starts to think that Martland is, or was, an ineffectual neddy, I had better fill in a bit of background. You doubtless know that, except under very extraordinary circumstances, English policemen never carry any weapon but the old Punch-and-Judy wooden truncheon. You know too that they never, never resort to physical unkindness – they dare not even spank the bottoms of little boys caught scrumping apples nowadays, for fear of assault charges and official inquiries and Amnesty International.
You know all this for certain, because you have never heard of the Special Powers Group – SPG – which is a peculiar kind of outsider-police squad conjured up by the Home Office during a fit of fact-facing in the weeks following the Great Train Robbery. The SPG was engendered by an Order in Council and has something called a Sealed Mandate from the Home Secretary and one of his more permanent civil servants. It is said to cover five sheets of brief-paper and has to be signed afresh every three months. The burden of its song is that only the nicest and most balanced chaps are to be recruited into the SPG, but that, once in, they are to be allowed to get away with murder – to say the least – so long as they get results. There are to be no more Great Train jobs, even if this entails – perish the thought – bashing a few baddies without first standing them expensive trials. (It’s saved a fortune in dock-briefs already.) All the newspapers, even the Australian-owned sort, have made a deal with the Home Office whereby they get the stories hot from the septic tank in exchange for sieving out the firearms-and-torture bit. Charming.