The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(30)

I dismissed the incident from my mind until I reached the outskirts of Memphis late that evening, when I was overtaken by just such a car driven by just such a chap.

They brought me coffee in my hotel room that night and a bottle of branch water for my Scotch; I locked the door and put in a call to Mr Krampf. American telephonists are wonderful, you just tell them the name and address of the chap you want to talk to and they do the rest. Krampf sounded a bit tight but very friendly; there was a lot of noise in the background which suggested that he had guests with him who were also a bit tight. I told him that I was on schedule, making no reference to his departure from our original plan.

‘Well, that’s just dandy,’ he bellowed. ‘Just dandy.’ He said it a few times more, he’s like that.

‘Mr Krampf,’ I went on guardedly, ‘I seem to have a sort of companion on the road, if you know what I mean. A late model, powder-blue Buick convertible with New York plates. Do you have any idea …?’

There was a long pause, then he chuckled fruitily.

‘That’s awright, son, that’s your kind of escort. Wouldn’t want anyone hijacking that old Rolls and Royce of mine.’

I made relieved noises and he went on: ‘Hey, let’s don’t let him know we tumbled him, just make like he wasn’t there and when he gets here and tells me you never made him I’ll chew his nuts off, huh?’

‘All right, Mr Krampf,’ I said, ‘but don’t be too hard on him, will you. I mean, I was rather on the qui vive, you know.’

He delivered another fruity chuckle – or perhaps it was a belch – and rang off. Then somebody else rang off. Perhaps it was just the hotel telephonist, but the noises weren’t quite right for that. Then I rang off and treated myself to a belch, too, and went to bed.

Nothing else happened that night, except that I worried a lot. Krampf hadn’t made his millions by being a drunken old fart; to be a millionaire you need brains, ruthlessness and a certain little maggot in your brain. Krampf had all these and he was cleverer than me and much more evil. This was all wrong. My bowels whined and grumbled, they wanted to go home. Above all, they wanted no part in assassinating clever millionaires in their own homes. I finally nagged myself to sleep.





11





Yet now I wake in such decrepitude

As I had slidden down and fallen afar,

Past even the presence of my former self,

Grasping the while for stay at facts which snap,

Till I am found away from my own world,

Feeling for foot-hold through a blank profound,

Along with unborn people in strange lands …





A Death in the Desert





It was Sunday but you’d never have thought so by what was going on when I got to Little Rock, Arkansas. Some sort of protest was going on and, as usual, short-haired chaps in dark blue were boredly biffing longhaired chaps in pale blue jeans, who were calling them pigs and throwing stones and things. All very sad. As a Russian said a hundred years ago, these people believe that they are the doctors of society, whereas in fact they are only the disease. Traffic was at a standstill and, several cars ahead of me, I could see the blue Buick, bogged down in a sea of long hair and flourishing riot sticks.

I killed the engine and mused. Why the devil would Krampf go to the expense and trouble of escorting across half a continent a motor car which no one in his senses would attempt to steal – and escorting it in so curiously oblique a way? Setting aside the strong possibility that he was barmy, I decided that he must have told someone about the extra piece of canvas which ought to be secreted about the car – that made him pretty barmy of course – and was now regretting it. Worse, he might be playing some deeper and more convoluted game, which would be consistent with his unscripted letter to the almost royal Chum. He could scarcely have guessed at the little murder job which Martland had entrusted to me but he might well have come to consider me, for other reasons, as sort of redundant and a threat to his security. ‘The heart is deceitful about all things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it?’ cries Jeremiah XVII:9 and as you know, Jeremiah XVII:9 was a chap with great insight into these matters, as well as being a little barmy himself.

My little private store of worries and ass puckerings was much augmented by all this; I found myself pining for Jock’s strong right arm and brass-garnished bunch of fives. The plot was thickening in a marked manner; if I could not soon lay hold of a spoon with which to stir it, there was a distinct danger that it might stick to the bottom. My bottom, probably. And then where would the Hon. C. Mortdecai be? There was a dusty answer to that one.

The traffic moved on after everyone concerned had been thoroughly biffed and bashed and screamed at and I didn’t spot the Buick again until just after the Shawnee crossing of the North Canadian River, where I glimpsed it lurking down a side road. I stopped at the next petrol station (they call it gas there, I wonder why?) hoping to give the driver a good eyeballing as he passed.

What I saw made me gape and gibber like a housewife choosing Daz on the television; two or three seconds later I was twenty miles down the road, sitting on a motel bed and sucking in whisky until I could think straight. It was the same car – at least it bore the same number plates – but overnight it had lost a deep dent in a fender and acquired a suit of whitewall tires and another radio antenna. The driver had lost a few stones and become a thin, dyspeptic cove with a mouth like the slot in a piggy-bank. In short, it was not the same car at all. The implications were unclear but one thing stood out like Priapus: there was no way in which this could be a change for the better. Someone was devoting a good deal of time and trouble and expense to the affairs of C. Mortdecai and it certainly wasn’t the Distressed Gentlefolk’s Aid Society. A stupid man might not have been too frightened but I was not stupid enough for that. A really bright chap, on the other hand, would have dumped everything and run for home with all speed, but I was not really bright, either.