The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(40)

The last envelope was the one I wanted – needed – and it seemed to be in order. There was the magnum print with the faces cut out and a strip of 35-mm negatives on British film stock. A length of amateurish contact prints mostly showed the Backs at Cambridge but the centre frame showed the fronts all right: Hockbottle seemed to have been in charge that day and it had been Chummy’s turn in the barrel. His familiar grin, straight into the camera, showed that he didn’t mind a bit. I burned it without compunction and threw the ashes into the naughty bidet. It represented a lot of money but, as I just said, I am not a brave man – even money can come too dear.

I was not troubled about the possible existence of other prints: Krampf may have been imprudent but he had not, I thought, been wholly potty and, in any case, prints are too easily faked these days; people want to see the negative – and the original negative at that, negatives prepared from a positive print are easily detectable.

She twisted round and stared at the smear of ashes in the bidet.

‘Are you happy now, Charlie? Is that really all you wanted?’

‘Yes. Thank you. It makes me a little safer, I think. Not much, but a little. Thank you very much.’

She rose and went to the safe, selected a couple of chunks of currency and closed the panel negligently.

‘Here is some journey money, please take it. You will perhaps need des fonds sérieux to help you get safely away.’

They were two fat bricks of bank notes, still in their wrappers, one English, one American. The total amount had to be something quite indecent.

‘Oh, but I couldn’t possibly take this,’ I squeaked, ‘it’s a terrible lot of money.’

‘But I keep telling you, I have a terrible lot of money now – this in the safe is nothing, a cash reserve he kept for small bribes to Senators and for unexpected trips. You are please to take it; I shall not be happy unless I know that you have proper funds while you are avoiding these unpleasant men.’

My further protestations were cut short by frightful shrieks from downstairs, superimposed on a bass of snarling roars. We raced for the stairhead and looked down into the hall on a scene of gladiatorial horror: Jock had a peon in each hand and was methodically beating them together like a pair of cymbals, while others, of both sexes, milled around him, tore at his hair, hung on his arms and were hurled off spinning across the tiled floor.

‘?Bravo toro!’ cried Johanna piercingly and the mêlée became a tableau.

‘Put those people down, Jock,’ I said severely, ‘you don’t know where they’ve been.’

‘I was only trying to find out what they’d done with you, Mr Charlie – you said half an hour, didn’t you?’

I apologized all round; the peons couldn’t understand my polished Castilian but they knew what it was all right; there was a good deal of bowing and scraping and forelock-tugging and polite murmurs of ‘de nada’ and they accepted a dollar apiece with every mark of pleasure. One went so far as to intimate courteously that, since his nose was squashed to a pulp, he merited a little extra honorarium but Johanna would not let me give him any more.

‘With one dollar he will get beautifully drunk,’ she explained, ‘but with two he would do something foolish, perhaps go off and get married.’

She explained this to the peon, too, who followed her reasoning carefully and gravely concurred at the end. They are a logical lot.

‘A logical lot, Jock, don’t you think?’ I asked later.

‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Lot of bloody Pakis if you ask me.’

We got away before the sun was very high. I had breakfasted lightly on a little more tequila – it’s beastly but it sort of grows on you – and had contrived to avoid a farewell exhibition-bout with my doting Johanna. She was most convincingly tearful and distrait, saying that she would live only for my message that she might join me and live happily ever after.

‘Where we going, then, Mr Charlie?’

‘I’ll think about that as we go, Jock. In the meantime, there’s only this road. Let’s move.’

But as we drove – as Jock drove, to be exact, for he had slept on the plane – I mused about Johanna. What earthly purpose could all that incredible codswallop of hers be serving? Did she really think that I was swallowing it? Did she think I could believe her bowled over by the faded allure of portly, past-it Mortdecai? ‘Garn’ was the word which kept springing to mind. And yet; and yet … Karl Popper urges us to be constantly on our guard against the fashionable disease of our time: the assumption that things cannot be taken at their face value, that an apparent syllogism must be the rationale of an irrational motive, that a human avowal must conceal some self-seeking baseness. (Freud assures us that Leonardo’s John the Baptist is a homosexual symbol, his upward-pointing index finger seeking to penetrate the fundament of the universe; art historians know that it is a centuries-old cliché of Christian iconography.)

Perhaps, then, all was as it seemed, all to the gravy; indeed, as we soared up winding roads into the high country stretching its strong limbs in the young sunshine, it was hard to credit my fears and suspicions.

Perhaps Krampf had indeed died of heart disease after excess at table: statistically he was a sitter for just that. Perhaps Johanna had indeed fallen violently in love with me: my friends have sometimes been kind enough to say that I have a certain appeal, perhaps an adroitness in these little matters. Perhaps the second powder-blue Buick and its driver were merely a relief shift ordered by Krampf: I had had no opportunity to put this to him. Perhaps, last of all, I would indeed send for Johanna and live the life of Riley with her and her millions until my glands gave out.