The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(109)
‘Hey, Mr Mortdecai, are you OK?’ he asked with what seemed to be anxiety.
‘Grrr,’ I growled, for neither ‘yes’ nor ‘no’ seemed to fill the bill.
‘Look, Mr Mortdecai, I’m really very very sorry you were kind of uh roughed up a little …’
‘Grrr,’ I reiterated, putting a little more venom into the word this time.
‘ … but you see I had to get you off the street fast and I had to make it look like it wasn’t friends picking you up and I didn’t have any skilled help this side of town and I guess these fellers uh kind of got their orders at second-hand and they’re well kind of hostility-situation-orientated …’
‘Again?’
‘ … hostility-situation-orientated and, well, when guys like these snatch a guy they snatch him real good, hunh?’
‘Are you trying to say, Colonel, that these men exceeded their orders?’
‘Well, I’d say so.’
‘And you will, of course, be rebuking them?’
‘Why yes, I guess I shall. Hey, Elmer’ – this was to the ugly chap beside my chair – ‘Elmer, why don’t you go get yourself some chow?’ As Elmer turned towards the door I rose to my feet and, in the nasty, rasping voice I developed years ago when I was an adjutant in the Guards, I rasped the word ‘Elmer?’
He span around in a clockwise direction, thus meeting my left hook to the liver and, indeed, aiding it. How it sank in, to be sure. We have all heard of those miraculous punches which ‘travelled no more than four inches’, have we not? Well, this one must have travelled quite twenty inches and had some 180 pounds of Mortdecai muscle, fat and spite behind it. The ugly chap went ‘Urrrgghhh’, or something which sounded uncommonly like it, and folded up like an ill-made Venetian blind. (Jock, you see, had long ago told me that ‘when you give a geezer a bunch of fives in the gut, don’t think about the gut, nor the abominal wall; just make out that you’re hitting his bleeding back-bone – from the front; see?’ Jock knows about these things, you understand.)
Blucher pressed a buzzer, I suppose, for the other two ugly men entered and, at a gesture from Blucher’s pinkie, hauled out their stricken comrade before he could damage the carpet beyond repair.
I sank back into my chair, feeling a trifle more in tune with the infinite. Blucher registered neither approval nor mild reproof although I fancy a corner of his mouth twitched in what might have been amusement in another man.
‘Well, now, where were we?’ I asked comfortably.
18 Mortdecai does not get the right vibrations
That a lie which all a lie may be met and fought with outright.
But a lie which is part a truth is a harder matter to fight.
The Grandmother
Blucher made a courteous gesture, indicating that he was all ears and was prepared to lend me them unreservedly. I glanced around the office; it was clearly not his own but on loan from some Midas-like business-man, for the walls were bespattered with exceedingly costly graphics by Münch, Braque, Picasso, Léger and all those chaps – beyond the dreams of avarice if that’s the kind of thing one likes; certainly beyond the reach of Blucher’s salary and outside his Agency’s Scale of Office Furnishings. Nevertheless, in Washington most places are bugged, everyone knows that, don’t they? I skated the other heavy package of powder across the frozen black lake of the desk; it landed on his lap with a satisfying thump followed by a manly grunt of discomfort from Col. Blucher.
‘I am prepared to tell all,’ I murmured to him, ‘but not between these walls. I am a survivor, you see, and I have a certificate from my old headmaster to prove it. Let us go for a stroll: a little fresh air will be jolly good for us both.’
He looked at me incuriously, which meant, of course, that he was thinking furiously; I could almost hear his synapses crackling and popping like breakfast cereal. ‘Would the lies he could have his lads beat out of me be more valuable than the half-truths I was prepared to volunteer?’ was evidently the question which he had fed into his crew-cut nut. He came to the right decision: after all, coming to decisions is what such chaps are paid for – like ‘one who gathers samphire, dreadful trade’.
‘Hey, that’s a great idea, Charlie!’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’
In the outer office the two larger ugly chaps were still playing pinochle, but two-handed now because from the open door of the lavatory or bathroom came a rhythmical ‘Urrgh, urrgh’ from Elmer. I paused by their table and cleared my throat. Neither of them looked up. ‘Tell Elmer,’ I said in the voice of an overpaid physician, ‘that he should take more exercise and drink less. The only hard thing about him is his liver.’ One ugly chap kept his eyes on his cards (and who shall blame him, because a quick kibitz had shown me that he only needed the last queen to perfect what pinochle-players call a ‘round-house’) but the other slowly raised his eyes to mine and gave me his best and coldest Edward G. Robinson stare – the one that is supposed to make you think of gats, concrete overcoats and paving-slabs dropped into the Potomac River with your ankles wired to them. I have seen such looks done better.
‘Well, so long, youse guys,’ I said, courteously using their dialect. Neither of the pinochle-players responded but Elmer said ‘Urrrghh’ from the lavatory or bathroom.