The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(110)

The way to take a stroll for fresh air in Washington, DC, is to hail an air-conditioned taxi-cab. This I did. I entered the first which offered itself, drawing a vexed look from Blucher. Well, obviously, he must have thought me too half-smart to take the first cab; it would have been the second which would have been in his pay, which is why I took the first, you see. Goodness, how clever I was in those days – barely a year ago!

The driver squinted at us from his little air-conditioned womb of armoured glass and steel-mesh (being zonked is an occupational hazard which even cab-drivers dislike) and asked us courteously how he could earn the pleasure of being of service to us. Well, what he actually said was ‘Yeah?’ but one could tell that it was a civil ‘yeah’.

‘Just drive around the sights, OK?’ said Blucher. ‘You know, Grant’s tomb, places like that?’

‘And the National Gallery, please,’ I chirped up, ‘in fact, the National Gallery first. Oh, and could you stop at a shop where I could buy a torch?’

‘He means, like a flashlight, from a drug-store,’ explained Blucher. The driver did not even shrug his shoulders; he had been driving idiots around all day, we would not even figure in the bleary reminiscences with which he would regale his wife that night as she bathed his bunions.

‘Do you care to start telling now?’ Blucher asked me. I shot him a glance fraught with caution and cowardice, flicking an eye at the driver. ‘Well, hell, why the National Gallery, hunh?’ I began to feel a little in command of the situation: I can cower with the best but, given a fraction of an edge, I am happier in the dominant r?le.

‘First,’ I said, ‘I wish to go there. Second, I earnestly wish to rinse my eyes out with some good art after seeing those frightful graphics in your office. Third, the NG, that stately pleasure-dome, is probably the only unbugged place in this fair city. Fourth, I have a long-standing appointment with a chap called Giorgio del Castelfranco, who has a picture in the Gallery which I both covet and suspect. OK?’

‘Sure,’ he said with policeman-like innocence, ‘you mean the guy who was Bellini’s pupil in Venice – around about when Columbus was discovering America? Hunh? The guy we jerks call Giorgione?’

‘That would be he,’ I said bitterly. ‘And you can cut out the dialect.’

‘Gosh, I really enjoyed your piece about him in the Giornale delle Belle Arte last year; you really made that Berenson guy look a right Charlie – gosh, sorry, Charlie …’

‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘I have been called worse.’ But I sulked all the way to the National Gallery and insisted on paying off the cabbie myself. He examined my tip carefully, interestedly, then handed it back with a charitable sort of look.

Inside the Gallery, I stalked unswervingly past all the lovely art that Lord Duveen had sold to Kress and Widener and fellows like that in the palmy, piping days when Lord Mortdecai (yes, my papa) was peddling piddling pastiches to minor European royalty whose cheques were as good as their word. I halted in an important way in front of the Giorgione and played my torch or flashlight upon it. In a trice a wardress had pounced on me and wrested it out of my hand, making noises like a she-vulture laying its first egg. I handed her my wallet, open at the place which displays my art-historian credentials, and bade her show it to a curator. She was back in another trice or two, spraying apologies and calling me ‘Dr Mortdecai’ and telling me that I might shine my flashlight at anything. Anything I liked.

‘Thank you,’ I said, ignoring the explicitness. I shone the torch on this part and that of the painting, making art-historical noises such as ‘ah’ and ‘hum’ and ‘oh dear’, while Blucher fretted, shifting from foot to foot.

‘Look, Mr Mortdecai,’ he said at last, ‘would you care to tell me what it is you’re looking for? I mean, we do have to …’ I shot him a patronizing glance over my shoulder.

‘I am looking,’ I said pompously, ‘for the brushwork of the young Titian in or about the year 1510. I do not see it. It occurs to me that I just may have been wrong about this picture.’

‘But gosh,’ he said, ‘it says right here on the tablet that this art-work is by Giorgione …’

‘And it may now continue to say so for the time being,’ I said with more than usual pomposity, tossing the torch or flashlight petulantly into the nearest litter-bin. (In the US of A they call waste-paper baskets ‘newspaper-baskets’, which shows a fine sense of values. I like American realists. American idealists, of course, are like all idealists: they are people who kill people.)

‘But here,’ I said, ‘is what we have been waiting for.’ Blucher stared. A titter of thirteen-year-old schoolgirls was swarming into the shrine of art, frantically shepherded by one of those women who are born to be schoolmarms – you know the species well, I’m sure; some of them have quite nice legs but the thick ankles, the slack bust and the calm panic peering from behind the contact-lenses give them away every time. I know a chap who nearly married one of them: he gave me all the field-identification tips. I cannot remember just what it was that Blucher said but, had he been an Englishman he would have said ‘Eh?’

I took his arm and steered him into the formicating mass. The girls tittered, and even groped us while their teacher prated, but I, at last, felt safe: there is no directional microphone which can sort out the words of devious Mortdecais from the prattle of pubescence. Blucher twigged, although it was clear that he thought my precaution a bit far-fetched. (He is – I must be careful not to say ‘was’ – one of those who would be glad to die for the Pentagon’s idea of democracy whereas I am a simple man who believes in the survival of the fittest. Since I have no sons it is clear that the fittest Mordecai to survive is me: I’m sure you see that.)