The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(33)

Nothing happened.

I thumbed back the hammer and peeped, wincing, over the edge of the window.

Nothing went on happening.

I looked through the other windows – nothing – and decided that I had dreamed the shot, for my sleep had been illustrated with the dread exploits of Comancheros, Apaches, Quantrill’s guerrillas and other fiends in human shape. I treated myself to another O.O.C.B.S. breakfast, only this time without the steak, ham, hot biscuits or coffee. There were one or two bad moments but I was not sick and the old rapture was soon recaptured and I felt emboldened to step out for un petit promenade hygiénique. As I opened the car door another shot rang out, followed one fifth of a second later by the bang of the car door closing again. There is still nothing wrong with the Mortdecai reaction time.

I listened carefully to my audile memory, recalling the exact noise of the shot.

1. It had not been the unmistakable, explicit BANG of a shotgun

2. Not the vicious CRACK of a small calibre rifle

3. Not the BOOM of a .45 pistol

4. Not the ear-stinging WHAM of a heavy calibre standard rifle, or a magnum pistol fired in your direction

5. Not the terrifying whip-crack WHANG-UP of a high velocity sporting rifle fired towards you, but something of the same nature

6. A sporting rifle, then, but

7. Not fired in the canyon because no echoes and surely

8. Not fired at me – dammit, a Girl Guide couldn’t miss a Rolls Royce with two slowly aimed shots.

My intellect was satisfied that it was some honest rancher smartening up the local coyotes: my body took longer to pacify. I crept back on to the seat and twitched gently for fifteen minutes, nibbling at the rye from time to time. After about a hundred years I heard an old car start up miles away across the desert and chug even further away. I sneered at my craven self.

‘You craven wretch,’ I sneered. Inexplicably, I then fell asleep for another hour. Nature knows, you know.

It was still only nine o’clock when I set off on the last leg of my journey, feeling old and dirty and incapable. You probably know the feeling if you are over eighteen.

It is hard to drive in a cringing position but nevertheless I got the Rolls into its stride and strode across the Staked Plains at a good mile-munching pace. The Staked Plains are not really very exciting, when you’ve seen one Staked Plain you’ve seen them all. I particularly don’t want to tell you where Krampf’s rancho is – perhaps was now – but I don’t mind admitting that it lay two hundred straightish miles from my overnight bivouac and between the Sacramento Mountains and the Rio Hondo. Just names on a map that morning, the poetry all gone. There’s nothing like gunfire to drive the glamour from words. I soon became tired of the creosote bushes, desert willows and screwbeams, not to mention the eternal, giant cacti, so different from the ones Mrs Spon grows in her conservatoilette.

I entered New Mexico at noon, still unmolested, still feeling old and dirty. At Lovington (named after old Oliver Loving who blazed the fearful Goodnight-Loving trail in ’66 and died along it of arrow wounds the following year) I had a bath, a shave, a change of raiment and a dish of Huevos ‘Ojos de Comanchero,’ which sounded lovely. In reality it was the most terrifying sight I had seen to date: two fried eggs decorated with ketchup, Tabasco and chopped chillis in the semblance of a pair of bloodshot eyes – I would as soon have eaten my own leg. I waved the grimly thing away; Old Oklahoma Cattlemen are one thing but these were merely tetrous. I tried, instead, ‘Chilli ’n’ Franks’ which proved to be rather good, just like chilli con carne but with dear little salty bangers instead of the ground meat. While I ate, various admiring peons were handwashing the Rolls, with soap ’n’ water only, of course.

With a bare hundred miles to go, clean, dapper and now only middle-aged again, I pointed the Rolls’ nose toward the Ranch of the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin, where I would lay down my pilgrim’s scrip of care, my cockle-hat of fear and my staff of illegality; where, moreover, I would take delivery of a great deal of money and perhaps kill a Krampf. Or perhaps not. I had left England prepared to keep my part of the bargain with Martland, but I had thought a great deal during those hundreds of remorseless American miles and had evolved certain arguments against keeping faith with him. (We had never been friends at school after all, for he was the house tart, and known to one and all as ‘Shagnasty’: not for nothing does a boy acquire such a name.)

I had also bought a denser pair of sunglasses; my old ones were calculated for the lemonade-like rays of the English sun and were no proof against the brutal onslaught of the desert light. Even the shadows, razor edged, purple and green, were painful to look at. I drove with all windows shut and the side blinds drawn across: the inside of the Rolls was like an ill-regulated sauna bath but this was better than letting in the dry, scorching fury of the air outside. I was soon sitting in a distressful swamp of sweat and my old wound started to trouble me; chilli ’n’ trepidation were playing the devil with my small intestines and my borborigmus was often louder than the engine of the Rolls, which loped on undeterred, quietly guzzling its pint of petrol per statute mile.

By mid-afternoon I was alarmed to notice that ! had stopped sweating and had started talking to myself – and was listening. It was becoming difficult to distinguish the road amongst the writhing pools of heat-haze and I could not tell whether the scraggy-feathered road-runners were under my wheels or a furlong ahead of me.