The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(25)
I thought about it carefully.
‘More on landing, really,’ I said at last, ‘which is all wrong when you come to think about it.’
He thought about it for several minutes.
‘You mean, like in an elevator?’
‘Exactly.’
He guffawed happily, his own man again now, reassured that all men are sphincters at bottom, if I may coin a phrase.
Having settled the amenities, we got out our work, like two old women at a quilting-bee. Mine took the shape of a dreary German paperback on the Settecento in Naples (it takes a German kunst-kenner to make that epoch dull) while he unzipped a document case full of computer paper, infinitely incomprehensible. I battled for a while with Professor Aschloch’s tulgey prose – only German poets have ever written lucid German prose – then closed my eyes, wondering bitterly which of my enemies the nice American worked for.
He had made one mistake in an otherwise flawless performance: he hadn’t told me his name. Have you ever exchanged three words with an American without being told his name?
I seemed to have made a great many enemies since Wednesday. The likeliest and nastiest possibility, the one which caused most puckering, was Colonel Blucher’s lot, whoever they were. Martland was a horrible bastard in his own insular way but he could never shake off that blessed British sense of perspective. The grim, unbelievably rich US Government Agencies were another matter. Too serious, too dedicated; they believe it’s all real.
Acid digestive juices, triggered by angst, started to slosh about in my stomach and uneasy gurgles came from the small intestine. I positively welcomed the stewardess with her tray of pallid garbage; I shovelled the stuff down like a starving man while my nice American waved his away, all jaded and travelled and statistically improbable.
Ulcer appeased for the nonce by plastic smoked salmon, rubber chop in vitreous aspic, chicken turd wrapped in polystyrene bacon and weeping half-thawed strawberry on dollop of shaving soap, I felt able to examine the possibility that I might be mistaken and that the man was, after all, just a wholesome American dolt. (Like a British dolt, really, only with better manners.)
Why, after all, should anyone want to plant such a man on me? What could I get up to on the journey? What, if it came to that, could he get up to on the journey? Extract a confession from me? Prevent me seizing command of the aircraft or overthrowing the Constitution of the United States? Surely, too, it would be a waste of an agent, for after several hours of propinquity I could scarcely fail to recognize him in the future. No; clearly, he must be what he seemed, an indifferent-honest executive, perhaps one of that super research firm which sells the State Department advice on where to start its next minor war. I turned to him, warm and relaxed, with new confidence. A man who smokes Upmanns cannot be all bad.
‘I say, forgive me, but what are you doing?’ I asked, in as British a way as I could muster. Gladly, he folded up the concertina of computer paper he had been grappling with (easy, though, for anyone who can handle an American Sunday newspaper) and turned amiably toward me.
‘Why, I’ve been uh correlating and uh collating and uh evaluating this very, very complete printout of costs-sales data on a retail multiplex in uh Great Britain, Sir,’ he explained candidly.
I continued to look at him, eyebrows hoisted a little, tiny, polite British question-marks shimmering from my hairline.
‘Fish and chips,’ he explained. I dropped the lower jaw a bit, achieving, I felt, an even more British effect.
‘Fish and chips?’
‘Right. I’m thinking of buying it.’
‘Oh. Really. Er, much of it?’
‘Well, yeah, kind of, all of it.’ I made interested, interrogatory faces and he went on, and on. It appeared that fish and chips represent the last ￡100M industry in Britain still unclobbered and that he was about to clobber it. Seventeen thousand friers, almost all independent and many of them only marginally profitable, using half a million tons of fish, a million tons of potatoes and 100 thousand tons of fat and oil. They use, he told me, whatever fish their ‘sender’ chooses to sell them and pay whatever they have to; frying the stuff, for the most part, in oil which a Hottentot would spurn as a sexual lubricant. He painted a grisly picture of the present and a rosy one of the future, when he would have bought all the shops and franchised them back on his terms.
It all seemed to make very good sense and I decided, as he droned usefully on, that I would provisionally believe him to be genuine at least until we landed. In fact we rather chummed up, to the point where he asked me to come and stay at his apartment. Well, of course, I didn’t believe in him that much, so I’m afraid I told him that I would be staying at the British Embassy. He looked at me thoughtfully, then told me about his dream of getting a duke to be chairman of his English company.
‘Capital idea!’ I said heartily, ‘Can’t have too many of them. Wonderful little workers, every one. Mind you, there’s pretty stiff competition for your actual dukes today; even the merchant banks can’t seem to hold them any more, they’re all going into the menagerie trade as fast as they can. They may creep out into the open again now that Wilson’s gone, of course, but if I were you I’d settle for a marquess or a brace of earls: far more of them about and they’re much less uppity.’
‘Earls?’ he said. ‘Say, do you by any chance know the Earl of Snowdon?’ His eyes shone with innocence but I started like a guilty thing upon a fearful summons.