The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(113)

Consumed now with vulgar curiosity and death-wish, I opened the bag again and drew out the cylinder. It was light. It was made of cardboard and looked exactly like the cylinders in which people store and dispatch prints and drawings, things like that. I raised one end to my eye and, pointing it at the window or porthole, peered through it. I found myself gazing at the left-hand unit of the bust of my teetotal neighbour. She cuffed it aside and made a noise like an expiring soda-water syphon. I think I said ‘Whoops!’ but I cannot be sure.

Nothing seemed to be in the cylinder except a roll of heavy paper so I inserted a couple of fingers, gave a skilful twirl and extracted it like a well-buttered escargot. Unrolled, it seemed to be a good colour-reproduction of a Rouault gouache painting; closer inspection proved it be a clever copy in gouache, all done by hand. I say ‘copy’ because the original happens to be a rather famous Rouault called Après-midi d’un Clown and it is in the Peggy Guggenheim collection or one of those places. It really was beautifully executed, more like a forgery than a copy, for the copyist had laid it down on a jaconet backing and had even added a cachet de vente, a couple of collectors’ marks and a museum reference number. I tut-tutted or tsk-tsked a bit, because it had been rolled the wrong way, with the paint side inside, a practice which any art-dealer knows better than. My portly she-neighbour was making her soda-syphon noises again and I realized that the painting was perhaps a little explicit: in Rouault’s day, you see, clowns seemed to spend their après-midis in the most bizarre fashion. (For my part, I have never taken much interest in modern art; I feel that it is a subject which calls for a good deal less research.) As I rolled up the gouache and twiddled it back into the cylinder a scrap of paper fell out of the opposite end. It was typewritten and said YOU MAY WELL FIND THIS USEFUL AT HEATHROW. I tore the scrap of paper into as many pieces as it had room for, musing anguishedly the while. I mean, it is not often that copies of famous Rouault gouaches creep unobserved into your briefcase and it is still rarer to be told that they will prove useful at airports. I would have liked to go to the lavatory but that would have meant passing Mr Lee and his friend and, on the way back, they might have looked at me. I was in no shape to cope with that sort of thing. I took the coward’s way out, I stabbed the appropriate bell-push and asked the stewardess for ‘some more of that ginger ale and, yes, perhaps a spot more of that brandy’. My neighbour – I shall always think of her as Carrie Nation – whispered to the stewardess urgently. The stewardess looked at me puzzledly. I looked at the stewardess smilingly but I fancy the smile came out as more of a lopsided leer, really. In a few moments Carrie Nation had been moved to another seat and, more to the point, my brandy had been delivered at the pit-head.

I supped, mused, supped again. Nothing made sense. I made another attack on the virtue of the crossword; it was by the compiler who always tries to work in the word ‘tedding’ – I suspect Adrian Bell – so I had no difficulty with ‘Currying favour with Tory bandleader; making hay while the sun never sets’, but the rest defeated me. I gave myself up to thoughts about survival, staying alive, things like that. One good result of this thought or thinking was engendered by the fact that the airport security people with their metal-detectors had not detected the Rouault copy in my briefcase but had pin-pointed my silver pocket-flask in a trice. This had to mean that the two Chinese gentlemen could scarcely be carrying anything more lethal than a cardboard dagger. Their gats, shivs and other bits of mayhem equipment must be in their suitcases, in the hold of the aircraft. Clearly, then, when I arrived at Heathrow, London, all I had to do was not to wait for my own suitcase to creak out of the constipated luggage-delivery system but to abandon it, flee through Customs with nothing but my briefcase and take a speedy taxi to Walthamstow or some other improbable place where I might have a friend. Meanwhile, the Chinese gentlemen would be fretting and fuming at the luggage-carousel, impatient for their murder-tackle to appear.

How lucidly one thinks, to be sure, when one has taken just a suspicion of brandy more than one should. I folded my hands smugly across that part of the torso which lies a little south of the liver and had a little zizz. When I awoke, the smugness was still there; I seized the Times crossword, gave it a masterful glare and had it whining for mercy in twenty minutes.

I have always sneered in a well-bred way at those idiots who, as soon as the aircraft’s engines have been switched off, stand up, clutching their brats and other hand-luggage for quite ten minutes until the surly cabin-crew deign to open the doors, but on this occasion I was well to the fore and sped down the ramp far ahead of the field. Had this been Newmarket, a casual observer equipped with field-glasses and a stop-watch would have hastened to the nearest telephone and had a chat with his bookie.

Ignoring all signs telling people where they might wait for their luggage I galloped straight to the Customs Area and towards the blessed sign which said TAXIS, waving my innocent briefcase at the customs chap. He crooked an authoritative finger at me; I skidded to a halt. ‘Nothing to declare, officer,’ I cried merrily, ‘just the old briefcase full of the old paper-work, eh? Mustn’t detain you, sure you’re a busy man yourself –-’

‘Open it,’ he said. ‘Sir.’

‘Certainly, certainly, certainly,’ I quipped, ‘but do be quick, there’s a good chap, or all the taxis will be taken. Nothing in there, I assure you.’