The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(34)

Half an hour later I was on a dirt road under a spur of the Sacramento range, lost. I stopped to consult the map and found myself listening to the enormous silence – ‘that silence where the birds are dead yet something singeth like a bird’.

From somewhere above me a shot was fired, but there was no sound of a bullet passing and I had no intention of cringing twice in one day. Moreover, there was no mistaking the nature of the firearm, it was the wholesome bark, flattened by the heavy air, of a large calibre pistol loaded with black powder. High on the ridge above me was a horseman waving a broad brimmed hat and already starting to descend with casual mastery of – and disregard for – his mount. Her mount, as it turned out, and what a mount. ?Que caballo! I knew what it was immediately, although I had never before seen the true bayo naranjado – the vivid orange dun with a pure white mane and tail. It was entire – no one, surely, could geld a horse like that – and came down the ragged rock slope as though it were Newmarket Heath. The low-horned, double-girthed Texas saddle was enriched with silver conchos over intricately tooled and inlaid leathers and the girl herself was dressed like a museum exhibit of Old Texas: low-crowned black Stetson with rattler band and woven-hair storm-strap, bandana with the ends falling almost to the waist, brown Levi’s tucked into unbelievable Justin boots which were themselves tucked into antique silver Spanish stirrups and garnished with Kelly spurs fashioned, apparently, of gold.

She arrived at the foot of the slope in a small avalanche, reins slack, welded to her saddle with fierce thighs, and the stallion took the storm ditch as though it was not there, landing dramatically beside the Rolls in a spatter of stones.

I wound a window down and peered out with a polite expression. I was met with a spray of cheesy foam from the horse’s mouth; it showed me some of its huge yellow teeth and offered to bite my face off, so I wound the window up again. The girl was inspecting the Rolls; as her horse moved forward past the window I found myself staring at a beautiful gunbelt of Mexican work with buscadero holsters, containing a pair of pristine Dragoon-pattern Colts, the paper-cartridge model of the 1840s, with grips by Louis Comfort Tiffany – unmistakable – dating from perhaps twenty years later. She wore them correctly for the Southwest – butts forward, as though for the flashy Border cross-draw or the cavalry twist (much more sensible), and they were not tied down, of course – this was no Hollywood mock-up but a perfect historical reconstruction. (Try mounting or even trotting with pistols in open holsters tied down to your thighs.) From the saddle scabbard protruded, as was only fitting, the butt of a One-in-One-Thousand Winchester repeater.

From hat to horseshoes she must have been worth a fortune as she sat – it gave me a new vision of the uses of wealth – and that was not counting her splendid person, which looked even more valuable. I am not, as you may have guessed, especially keen on commonplace sex, especially with women, but this vision unequivocally stirred my soggy flesh. The silk shirt was pasted to her perfect form with delicate sweat, the Levi’s made no bones about her pelvic delights. She had the perfect round hard bottom of the horsewoman but not the beamy breadth of the girl who started to ride too young.

I emerged from the other side of the car and addressed her across the bonnet – I am just enough of a horseman never to try to make friends with tired stallions on hot days.

‘Good afternoon,’ I said, by way of a talking point.

She looked me up and down. I sucked in my tummy. My face was as blank as I could make it but she knew, she knew. They know, you know.

‘Hi,’ she said. It left me gasping for air.

‘Can you by any chance direct me to the Rancho de los Siete Dolores?’ I asked.

Her bee-stung lips parted, the little white teeth opened a fraction; perhaps it was a sort of smile.

‘What is the old auto worth?’ she asked.

‘I’m afraid it’s not for sale, really.’

‘You are stupid. Also overweight. But cute.’ There was a hint of a foreign accent in her voice, but it was not Mexican. Vienna perhaps, perhaps Buda. I asked the way again. She raised the handle of her beautiful quirt to her eyes and scanned the Western horizon. It was one of those quirts with a bit of pierced horn let into the handle: more useful than a telescope in that climate. I began, for the first time, to understand Sucher-Masoch.

‘Go that way right acrosslots,’ she pointed, ‘the desert is no worse than the road. Follow the bones when you come to them.’

I tried to think of another talking point but something told me she was not much of a chatterbox – indeed, even as I searched for a way to detain her she had flicked the thong of her quirt under the stallion’s belly and was away into the shimmering jumble of baking rock. Well, you can’t win them all. ‘Lucky old saddle,’ I thought.

In twenty minutes I came upon the first of the bones she had spoken of: the bleached skeleton of a Texas Longhorn artistically disposed beside a faint track. Then another and another, until I reached a huge ranch gateway in the middle of nowhere. Its sunbleached crossbar supported a great polychromed Mexican carving of an agonized Madonna and a board hung below into which had been burned the rancho’s brand – two Spanish bits. I wondered whether there was a joke implied and decided that, if there was, it was not of Mr Krampf’s making.

Past the gate the trail was well-defined; the buffalo grass became richer with every furlong and I began to get glimpses of groups of horseflesh crowded under the cottonwoods – Morgans, Palominos, Appaloosas and I don’t know what-all. Occasional riders began to fall in casually behind and beside me: by the time I reached the huge, rambling hacienda itself I was escorted by quite a dozen charro-clad desperadoes, all pretending that I wasn’t there.