The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(102)

‘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.