The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(20)

Jock had a sauté of chicken livers ready for me but I had no stomach for the feast. Instead I chewed a banana and about a third of a bottle of gin. Then I had a little zizz, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands in sleep. A zizz, you know, is a very present help in trouble. With me, it takes the place of the kind, wise, tobacco-smelling, tweed-clad English father that other boys had when I was a schoolboy; the sort of father you could talk things over with during long tramps over the hills; who would gruffly tell you that ‘a chap can only do his best’ and that you ‘must play the man’ and then teach you to cast a trout-fly.

My father wasn’t like that.

Sleep has often taken the place of this mythical man for me: often I have woken up comforted and advised, my worries resolved, my duty clear.

But this time I awoke unrefreshed and with no good news teeming in my brain. There was no comfortable feeling that a warm, tweedy arm had been about my shoulder, only the old gin-ache at the base of the skull and a vague taste of dog dung in the mouth.

‘Heigh-ho,’ I remember saying as I listened to the Alka-Seltzer fussing in its glass. I tried the effect of a clean shirt and a washed face; there was some slight improvement but various small nit-sized worries were still there. I have a dislike for coincidences and I detest clever young American colonels, especially when their uniforms do not quite fit them.

I was rather a cheery, carefree chap in those days, always ready to welcome a little adversity just for the pleasure of dealing with it deftly. So I was worried at feeling worried, if you see what I mean. One should only have a sense of impending doom when one is constipated and I was not, as it happened.

Jock handed me a stiff envelope when I emerged: it had been delivered, while I slept, by what he described as a long streak of pee in a bowler hat. Jock, with unerring aim, had offered him a pint of beer in the kitchen, which had been refused with some brusqueness.

The writer, who seemed to be assistant private secretary to someone else’s permanent under-secretary or something, said that he was instructed to request me (or was it the other way about? – I forget) to present myself at Room 504 in one of the uglier new Government office blocks at 10.30 a.m. the following day, there to meet a Mr L.J. Crouch.

Now, I have only two basic rules for the conduct of my life, to wit:

Rule A My time and services are at the complete disposal of the customer at any time of the day or night and no trouble is too great when the interests of others can be served.

Rule B On the other hand, I’m buggered if I’m going to be buggered about.

I handed the note to Jock.

‘This clearly falls under Rule B, does it not, Jock?’

‘Dead right it does, Mr Charlie.’

Ten thirty is the time stated?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Then call me at eleven in the morning.’

‘O.K., Mr Charlie.’

Happier after that expression of poco-curantism, I strolled down to Veeraswamy’s and thoughtfully gorged myself with curried lamb and buttered chapatis. The splendidly dressed doorman gave me his usual splendidly military salute in exchange for the shiniest half crown I could find in my pocket. Cheap at the price. When depressed, go and find someone to salute you.

Curry, in my small experience, makes women want to go to bed and make love; it just makes me want to go to bed and get the weight off my stomach. Curiously ponderous stuff, curry.

I carried my freight distressfully to bed and Jock brought me whisky and soda to cool the blood. I read Karl Popper’s Poverty of Historicism for a while then fell asleep to dream guilty, furtive dreams about Punjabi colonels in deerstalker hats.

The burglar alarm went off at 3 a.m. When we are at home this only takes the form of a low, whining noise, pitched at a menacing frequency, which sounds in both bedrooms, both bathrooms, the drawing room and Jock’s bog. It stops as soon as each of us has pressed a switch, so that we know we are both alert. I pressed my switch and it stopped immediately. I went to my post, which is an armchair in the darkest corner of my bedroom, after I had stuffed my bolster under the covers to simulate a sleeping Mortdecai. Above the armchair is a trophy of antique firearms, one of which is an 8-bore shotgun by Joe Manton, loaded with dust shot in the right-hand barrel, BB in the other. An old-fashioned bell pull below it releases the clamps which hold it to the wall. My job was to lurk there motionless, watching the door and the windows. Jock, meantime, would have checked the bellboard to ascertain where the alarm had been triggered from, then stationed himself by the tradesmen’s door whence he could cut off retreats and, if necessary, follow an intruder upstairs to my room. I lurked, in a deadly silence broken only by my load of curry, which was churning about inside me like socks in a washing machine. It is very difficult to be frightened when you are gripping a loaded 8-bore shotgun but I managed it. This should not have been happening, you see.

After an eon or two the alarm made one brief peep, which was my signal to go downstairs. Sodden with funk, I crept down to the kitchen, where Jock stood naked and shadowy by the door, balancing an old 9-mm Luger in his hand. On the bellboard a violet light marked FRONT DOOR was still flickering frantically. With a couple of jerks of the head Jock outlined our tactics: I slid into the drawing room where I could cover lobby and front door, Jock silently drew the bolts of the tradesmen’s door. I heard him wrench it open and bound into the corridor – then he called me low and urgently. I ran through the dining room, into the kitchen, out of the door. Only Jock was in the corridor. I followed his stare to the lift indicator: it said ‘5’ – my floor. At that moment the lift motor growled and the ‘5’ flicked out and Jock hurtled to the stairhead and vanished downwards with scarcely a sound. You should have seen Jock in action – an intimidating sight, especially when naked, as then. I ran down half a flight until I could see into the well of the staircase: Jock had taken up a position on the ground floor, covering the lift doors. After a second or two he jumped up and vanished into the back regions; puzzled for a moment, I suddenly realized that the lift must have gone down into the basement. I galloped down, humpetty-dump, all fright forgotten now, and had reached the third floor when a glance at the indicator showed me that the lift was again rising. Up I fled again, arriving at the fifth floor sadly blown. The indicator had stopped at ‘3’. I slammed into the flat, stumbled through into the drawing room and knelt down beside the record-player console. A button inside it communicated with the ‘Set-A-Thief’ duty room – I yearned for those thugs. I didn’t press the button, for someone hit me at the base of the skull, just where my gin-ache still lingered. My chin hooked on to the edge of the console and there I hung awhile, feeling very silly. Then he hit me again and I sank effortlessly through the floor, miles and miles and miles.