The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(125)

‘Of course,’ I said bitterly, ‘of course, of course. You bought my life. I must remember to thank you. No use my asking why, I suppose?’

‘Because I loved you, you great, stupid, self-satisfied prig!’ she blazed. I never know what to say on occasions like that; I usually just shuffle my feet and look silly.

‘Er, was that last word “prig” or “pig”?’ I asked, for want of anything better to say. She didn’t answer, just sat there with a face of thunder, tapping her foot on the carpet as though there were some small pest there. Like, say, a Mortdecai. I distinctly saw Blucher’s hand take hers and squeeze it fondly.

‘And how much did you pay for this alleged life of mine?’ I asked, my worst fears coming to the forefront of my brain and starting to dance a lewd jig. To my astonishment she giggled – and in the most fetching way. I had never heard her giggle before.

‘Please make us some drinks first, Charlie dear.’ I did so but with an ill grace, although I softened a little when it came to measuring out my own.

‘Now,’ she said cosily, ‘Franzl will tell you all about it.’

‘Franzl!’ I squeaked. ‘Franzl?’

‘Hey, that’s great, Charlie old boy; I knew you and I’d get onto first-name terms in the end. Now, like I said back there at the beginning, the price of you staying alive was marrying H?nschen here.’

‘H?nschen?’ I squawked.

‘Why sure, don’t you call her that? No? Well, what I didn’t make clear was that it was her idea, not mine. See, she had this crazy idea that you were the only man in the world for her; well, she always had these really weird fantasies, you know?’

‘No.’

‘Well, she does. Anyway, her organization had penetrated about as far as possible and it was pretty clear that the Chinese guys weren’t about to show any more of their cards without the pot being sweetened up with some heavy action. My own Agency, which is more clandestine than, uh, subversive, was also up against a stone wall and the lousy CIA were commencing to sniff around at our fire-hydrants. Uh, lamp-posts?’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, we’d sort of theoretically ageed that a kind of catalyst was needed, like throwing a new face into the game who might blunder about and get the deer moving … ’

‘He means, Charlie dear, someone resourceful like you but who was not familiar with the scenario … ’

‘You mean,’ I said, ‘that what I didn’t know couldn’t be tortured out of me?’

‘No, dear, just someone with no preconceived notions which might make you follow … ’

‘ … the kind of pattern that a trained agent would; we had to puzzle them by throwing into the ball-game someone clearly unprofessional, someone half-smart … ’

‘He means, dear, that it was like suddenly putting an English Rugby International into the Yale-Harvard match. I knew it was desperately dangerous for you – Franzl offered me eleven to two against your surviving the first week – but it was better than having all those awful people in Lancashire quite certainly destroying you in your cave. You do see that, don’t you darling?’ All I could see was Blucher’s hand patting hers and, when I tore my glance away, the whitening of my own knuckles. Blucher took up the story again.

‘Also, like I said, the bad guys were looking for some heavy action; really heavy, so we dreamed up this attempted assassination of Her Majesty. We never thought you’d get to first base and gosh, we were worried when it started to look like you’d get away with it. We were a little late getting to you that time – the traffice re-routed and all – it surely was lucky that cartridge jammed in the breech. I guess you’d really have done it, hunh?’

‘As a matter of fact, I don’t believe I would. Jock wouldn’t have liked it, you see; he would have handed in his notice.’

‘Well, he wouldn’t have needed to do that. You see, there was an Oriental guy in the window right across the street from you with a sniper’s rifle and he’d have bipped you right between the eyes one fifth of one second after you fired. To save you from interrogation, you understand.’

‘You did wonderfully well, Charlie dear. I have been so proud of you.’

‘Yes, you really did, Charlie old boy.’ He put an arm about my wife’s shoulders and kissed her noisily on the cheek. This was too much. My knuckles were now Whiter-Than-White and I’m confident that any trained observer would have observed that the veins in my forehead were bulging out like firemen’s hoses. I rose to my feet, eyeing them dangerously. We Mortdecais do not make a practice of tearing our guests limb from limb, especially when there are ladies present, however base and treacherous the lady. I must confess, however, that I came pretty close to breaking this rule, and indeed might well have done so had I not recalled that it simply is not done to strike a guest whose posture, while embracing one’s wife, betrays a shameless bulge under the left armpit, where a large, coarse automatic pistol evidently lurks. I stalked out of the room in a marked manner. I did not trip over anything, nor did I slam the door.

Jock, staunch fellow, was in the kitchen, his great boots propped up on the hygienic working-surface. He peered at me over the top edge of his copy of Film Fun. I launched a great kick at the nearest pastel-coloured eezi-slide kitchen-fitment and dented it severely. Jock rummaged in a pocket for his glass eye, moistened it in the mug of tea before him and popped it deftly into its socket.