The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(42)

I was surprised – and pardonably proud – to find that throughout the episode I had not lost my grip on the Scotch bottle: I had my drink and, since the circumstances were exceptional, offered the bottle to Jock.

‘That was a bit vindictive, Jock,’ I said reprovingly.

‘Lost my temper,’ he admitted. ‘Bloody road hog.’

‘He might easily have done us a mischief,’ I agreed. Then I told him about things, especially like powder-blue Buicks and the dreadful – is that word really so worn out? – the dreadful danger I was – we were – in, despite my recent brief and lovely courtship with the phantasms of success, safety and happy-ever-after. (It seemed hard to believe that I could have been dallying, so few minutes before, with so patently tinsel a mental mistress as safety.) My eloquence ran to such heights of bitter self-mockery that I heard myself, aghast, telling Jock to leave me, to get out from under before the great axe fell.

‘Bollocks,’ I’m happy to say, was his response to that suggestion. (But ‘happy to say’ is not true either: his loyalty served me but briefly and him but shabbily – you might say that his ‘bollocks’ were the death of him.)

When the whisky had somewhat soothed our nerves we corked the bottle and got out of the car to examine its wounds. An Anglia driver would have done this first, of course, raging at fate, but we Rolls owners are made of sterner stuff. The radiator was scarred, weeping a little on to the baking road; a headlamp and sidelamp were quite ruined; the offside mudguard was heavily crumpled but still not quite so much that it would flay the tire. The show was, if necessary, on the road. I went back into the car and thought, while Jock fussed over the damage. I may have sipped a little at the whisky bottle and who shall blame me?

No one passed along the road, in either direction. A grasshopper stridulated endlessly; I minded this at first but soon learned to live with it. Having thought, I checked my thinking both ways from the ace. The result came out the same again and again. I didn’t like it, but there you are, aren’t you?

We sent the Rolls over the precipice. I am not ashamed to say that I wept a little to see all that beauty, that power and grace and history, being tossed into an arid canyon like a cigar end chucked down a lavatory pan. Even in death the car was elegant; it described great majestic curves as it rebounded in an almost leisurely way from boulder to boulder and came to rest, far below us, wedged upside-down in the throat of a deep crevasse, its lovely underparts bared to the sex of sunshine for a few seconds before a hundred tons of scree, dislodged by its passage, roared down and covered it.

The death of the Buick driver had been nothing compared with this: human death in reality seems poor stuff to a devoted television watcher, but who amongst you, seasoned readers, has seen a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost die on its back? I was inexpressibly moved. Jock seemed to sense this in his rough way for he moved closer to me and uttered words of comfort.

‘It was insured full comprehensive, Mr Charlie,’ he said.

‘Yes, Jock,’ I answered gruffly, ‘you read my thoughts, as usual. But what is more to the point, just now, is how easily could the Rolls be salvaged?’

He brooded down into the shimmering, rock-strewn haze.

‘How are you getting down there?’ he began. ‘This side’s all avalanches and the other side’s a cliff. Very dodgy.’

‘Right.’

‘Then you got to get it out of that crack, haven’t you?’

‘Right again.’

‘Dead dodgy.’

‘Yes.’

‘And then you got to get it back up here, right?’

‘Right.’

‘Have to close this road a couple of days while the tackle’s working, I reckon.’

‘That’s what I thought.’

‘Mind you, if it was some stupid mountaineering twit stuck down there, or some old tart’s puppy dog, they’d have him up before you could cough, wouldn’t they, but this is only an old jam jar, isn’t it? You’d have to want it real bad – or want something in it real bad – before you’d go slummocking down there.’ He nudged me and winked enormously. He was never very good at winking, it contorted his face horribly. I nudged him back. We smirked.

Then we trudged up the road, Jock carrying our one suitcase now holding essentials for both of us, which he was supposed to have salvaged with wonderful presence of mind as the Rolls teetered on the very brink of the precipice.

‘Whither Mortdecai?’ about summed up my thought on that baking, dusty road. It is hard to think constructively once the fine, white grit of New Mexico has crept up your trouser legs and joined the sweat of your crotch. All I could decide was that the stars in their courses were hotly anti-Mortdecai and that, noble sentiments aside, I was well rid of what was probably the most conspicuous motor car on the North American subcontinent.

On the other hand, pedestrians are more conspicuous in New Mexico than most motor cars: a fact I realized when a car swept past us going in the direction we had come from; all its occupants goggled at us as though we were Teenage Things from Outer Space. It was an official car of some sort, a black and white Olds-mobile Super 88, and it did not stop – why should it? To be on foot in the United States is only immoral, not illegal. Unless you’re a bum, of course. It’s just like in England, really: you can wander abroad and lodge in the open air so long as you’ve a home to go to; it’s only an offence if you haven’t one – on the same principle that ensures you cannot borrow money from a bank unless you don’t need any.