The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(122)

‘Well,’ I said curtly when the others had assembled, ‘first things first.’ I still had a residue of hospital-registrar arrogance in my voice. ‘Does either of you know what happened to the other chap – the English one?’

‘Yeah,’ said Jock. ‘He’s face down in one of them big bins of pigs’ guts.’

‘Oh dear,’ I said, ‘poor fellow, how horrid for him. I mean, I don’t actually feel any affection for him but he must be hideously uncomfortable.’

‘I don’t fink he’s feeling uncomfortable, Mr Charlie.’

‘Oh dear,’ I said again. ‘I suppose that means I’ve got to send that Luger of yours to Ginge the Gunsmith again? I don’t suppose you had time to pick up the used cartridge-cases? No? Ah well.’

(Perhaps a word of explanation to the innocent is called for here. The ballistics wizards, as everyone knows, can infallibly tell which bullet has been fired from which fire-arm – they use comparison-microscopes – and the cartridge-cases are an even greater give-away. Therefore, anyone who has used a fire-arm for a naughty purpose tends to toss it over London Bridge into the Thames where, I fancy, the accumulation of fire-arms so discarded must by now be constituting a hazard to shipping. Jock, however, will no more be persuaded to discard his Luger than to part with his autographed photograph of Shirley Temple. This means that whenever he has ‘used up’ someone with it I have to pay Ginge a great deal of money to ‘tiddly’ it. This involves putting in a new striker-pin, buffing up the face of the breech-block and engraving a few new scratches on it and doing some extremely fancy work with a lathe on the chamber and barrel. After Ginge has finished with a pistol the comparison-microscopes get a fit of the sulks and the ballistics wizards go home and beat their wives.)

‘Now, Johanna,’ I said in a no-nonsense voice, ‘you seemed to know those two chaps: who were they? The Englishman and the Dutchman? Eh?’

‘They were both Dutchmen, Charlie dear. Deputy Commissioner Rubinstein likes to call himself Robinson because his English is perfect, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, wasn’t it?’ I said.

‘And they really were both policemen but very, very bent ones. You see, darling, most of the heroin in the world passes through Amsterdam – or do I mean Rotterdam? – and that amounts to a great many millions of pounds, you understand, and you can’t really blame an underpaid policeman for kind of not noticing that someone is absent-mindedly dropping ten thousand pounds a year into a West Indies branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia for him, can you? I mean, when it comes to privacy, the Bank of Nova Scotia makes those Swiss banks look like back-numbers of Playboy.’

‘No,’ I agreed, ‘I cannot blame them for this. Indeed, I might well suffer a pang or two of temptation myself in the circumstances. What I can – and do – blame them for is for attempting to blow big, painful holes through essential organs of mine which I have not yet finished with.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘there is that. But they got their blame all right, didn’t they, dear?’

‘True, true. And now you will please be kind enough to tell me who was employing these sticky-fingered arms of the law. I mean, at the time when they put the old snatcheroo on me.’

‘What beautiful American you speak, Charlie!’

‘Never mind about that, just tell me who gave them The Notice about me.’

‘Is that the same as a “contract” in the States?’

‘Oh, burst a bleeding frog!’ I bellowed – I believe this was the first time I ever raised my voice to her – ‘Forget the semantics, what I want to know is who they were working for.’

‘Pas devant les doméstiques,’ she murmured. Jock left the room in a marked manner; his intellect is second to, well, almost anyone’s, but he does know two French sentences. One of them begins with ‘Vooly voo cooshey’ and the other is the one Johanna had used. He can be hurt; he has his pride.

‘They were working for Mr Lee, silly,’ said Johanna.

‘And where is Mr Lee now, would you say?’ She lifted the telephone, giving me that smile; dialled a number and said something into it in a language I didn’t recognize. She listened for perhaps thirty seconds, then said something which sounded like a number. Then she gave me that smile again, the one that softens every bone in my body except one. Hung up. I mean, she hung up the telephone. ‘Mr Lee is at present approaching the John F. Kennedy International Airport, Charlie dear. He should be touching down in about fifty minutes. He is in a big, comfy jet and no one else is aboard except a dozen or so of his, uh, naughty friends, six real Interpol agents, half the staff of the US Narcotics Bureau and your friend the Commandant.’

‘You mean the dreaded Commandant of that College of yours?’ I squeaked. ‘Are you trying to tell me that she was on the side of the angels all the time? Next you’ll be telling me that she’ll draw an MBE for her part in this nonsense!’

‘She got her MBE when you were at school, Charlie. Parachuting into Belgium. Her OBE came through when she snitched a boatload of Hungarian scientists out from a little Yugoslav port called Rijeka in the ‘50s. The least she can draw from this little caper is a DBE – in fact I’m putting her in for a Life Peerage.’

‘You’re putting …’