The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(32)

Neither the desk nor the garage had anything to report, so I toddled out to take the air and see if the neighbourhood was blue-Buick-infested. What I found was a sort of bar advertising in its window something called the Old Oklahoma Cattleman’s Breakfast Special. Who could resist it? Not I.

The O.O.C.B.S. proved to be a thick steak, almost raw, a hunk of salt bacon the size and shape of my fist, a pile of hot sourdough biscuits, a tin pot of ferocious coffee and half a gill of rye whisky. Now I am a man of iron, as you will by now have realized, but I confess I belched. I was trapped, for the barman and the short-order cook were both leaning on the bar, watching my future career with considerable interest as it were, their faces grave and courteous but sort of expectant. Britain’s honour lay in pawn to my knife and fork. I weakened some of the coffee with some of the whisky and drank it, suppressing a gagging shudder. I found strength after this to try a hot biscuit, then some more coffee, then a corner of the bacon and so on. Appetite grew on what it fed upon and soon, to the amazement of myself and all beholders, the very steak itself fell to my bow and spear. ’Tis from scenes like this that Britain’s greatness springs. I accepted a free drink from the barman, shook hands gravely and made a good exit. Not all Ambassadors sit in Embassies, you know.

Much fortified, I collected the Rolls and turned my face toward the Golden West, the Lyonesse of our times, the nursery of the great American fairy tale. At noon I crossed the State line into the panhandle of Texas, a solemn moment for any man who rode with the Lone Ranger each Saturday morning as a child.

Mindful of the Buick-mounted rustler on my trail, I started to buy a few gallons of petrol at almost every petrol station, taking care to inquire at each one for the road to Amarillo – which lay due West on that very road. Sure enough, the blue car swept by me somewhere between the townships of McLean and Groom, the driver looking neither to right nor left. Clearly, he was satisfied of my destination and intended to front-tail me to Amarillo. I let him have a few reassuring glimpses of me in his driving mirror, lying a mile behind him, then chose a useful left hand turning and sped south to Claude then southeast through Clarendon to the Prairie Dog Town fork of the Red River – there’s a place name to stir the blood – which I crossed at Estelline. I felt no need of luncheon but kept up my strength with a little rye whisky here and there and an occasional egg to give it something to bite on. Following the least probable roads I worked my way West again and by mid-afternoon I was satisfied that I must have lost the Buick for good. Needless to say I had lost myself too, but that was of secondary importance. I found a sleepy motel staffed by one thirteen-year-old boy who hired me a cabin without raising his eyes from his comic book.

‘Hail Columbia! Happy land!’ I told him, borrowing freely from R.H. Horne, ‘Hail, ye heroes! Heaven-born band!’

He almost looked up, but decided in favour of The Teenage Werewolf From Ten Thousand Fathoms – I couldn’t find it in my heart to blame him.

I zizzed away the worst of the afternoon, awakening some three hours later with a mighty thirst. When I had seen to that I strolled outside to stretch my legs and scare up some ham and eggs. A furlong down the dusty road, under the shade of a valley cottonwood, stood a powder-blue Buick.

That settled it: the Rolls was bugged. No human agency could have tracked me through that mazey day unaided. Quite calm, I ate the bacon and shirred eggs along with great manly cups of coffee, then sauntered back to the Rolls with the air of a man quite unencumbered with powder-blue Buicks. It took me almost ten minutes to find the tiny transistorized tracer beacon: it was magnetized fiercely to the underside of my right hand front mudguard.

I started the Ghost and drifted away in the wrong direction; after a few miles I hailed, frantically, a State Trooper mounted on an unbelievable motor bike and proclaimed myself lost.

When a native son is unwise enough to ask the way of an American policeman he is either jailed for vagrancy or, if the policeman is a kindly one, told to buy a map. This one, I swear, would have struck me for flagging him down had I not been wearing an English accent and a Rolls Royce of great beauty, but these beguiled him into a pro hac vice civility. I got out of the car and, as he pointed things out to me on the map, leaned lightly against his great Harley Davidson machine, letting the grumble of the idling engine drown the smart click of the mini-transmitter’s magnet as it clamped itself under his rear mudguard. He roared away northwards at a dashing pace; I lurked down a dirt road until the Buick dawdled by in confident pursuit, then off I went like the clappers, south and west.

A vast, theatrical moon rose over Texas and I drove on spellbound for hours through forests of Spanish Bayonet and fields of amaranthine sagebrush. At last, on the edge of the Llano Estacado, the Staked Plains themselves, I edged the Rolls into a friendly canyon and settled down to sleep behind the wheel, a bottle of whisky within easy reach in case of mountain lions.

Prompt on cue, a coyote curdled the thin distances of the night air with his whooping love song and, as I drifted into sleep, I thought I heard the muted thunder of far away, unshod hooves.





13





I met him thus:

I crossed a ridge of short broken hills

Like an old lion’s cheek-teeth …





An Epistle





I was awakened by a shot.

Not thrilled? Then I venture to guess that you have never been awakened in that way yourself. For my part I found myself down among the accelerator and brake pedals before I was properly awake, whimpering with terror and groping frantically for the Banker’s Special pistol in its hidey-hole under the seat.