The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(65)

‘Range Rover. They got a sort of winch on the axle; wound me out with it. Didn’t half hurt. Dislocated me shoulder, cracked a couple of ribs and give me a double rupture in me actual groin. All sorted out now.’

‘Is your eye, er, badly hurt?’

‘It’s gorn,’ he said cheerfully. ‘You put the leather smack into it and I was wearing me contack lenses. The nurses like me patch, romantic they call it. I’m not having no glass eye, bugger that, me uncle had one and swallowed it, never got it back.’

‘Goodness,’ I said feebly, ‘how was that?’

‘He put it in his mouth, see, to warm it up and make it so it would slip in the socket easy, then he hiccupped, having been on the piss the night before. Down it went. Cured the hiccups but he never saw the eye again.’

‘I see.’ How the other half lives; to be sure. There was a long and happy silence.

‘Never got it back?’ I wondered aloud.

‘Nah. Me uncle even got the croaker to have a look up his bum but he said he couldn’t see nothink. “Funny,” says me uncle, “I can see you as clear as anythink, doctor.” ’

‘Jock, you’re a bloody liar,’ I said.

‘Mr Charlie?’

‘Speaking.’

‘You don’t half owe me a lot of wages.’

‘Sorry, Jock. You shall have them as soon as I am strong enough to lift a cheque-book. And, now I come to think of it, I’ve got a hefty Employer’s Liability insurance policy on you; I think you get two thousand pounds for an eye. Out of my own pocket I shall buy you the finest glass eye that money can buy, even if I have to pay cash. Please wear it in the house; you can save the romantic black patch for your wenching expeditions.’

Jock lapsed into an awed silence: in his world people only get two thousand pounds by doing highly illegal things which earn you five years in the nick. I fell asleep again.

‘Mr Charlie?’ I opened a petulant eyelid

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘this is still I.’

‘You remember when you went to see that Colonel Blucher geezer at the American Embassy?’

‘I remember vividly.’

‘Well, he’s here. Well, any road, he comes here every day almost. He’s got them all jumping except Doctor Farbstein; I reckon Doctor Farbstein reckons he’s a Kraut.’

‘That figures.’

‘Funny thing is,’ he went on, ‘he never asks me nothing–Blucher I mean – just asks are they looking after me and would I like a Monopoly set to play with the nurses with.’

I waited while he subsided into helpless giggles.

‘Jock,’ I said gently when he had finished. ‘I know Colonel Blucher’s here. As a matter of fact, he’s right behind you, standing in the doorway.’

He was. So was a huge, black, automatic pistol, which was pointing unerringly at Jock’s pelvis. (Very nice, very professional: the pelvic region doesn’t move around nearly as much as the head and the thorax. A bullet there, smashing through bladder and privates and all the other butcher’s offal we keep in our pelvic girdles, is just as certain as one between the eyes and, I’m told, a great deal more painful.)

Blucher ostentatiously flicked on the safety-catch and magicked the pistol away into the waistband of his trousers. That is a very good place to carry a pistol while you still have a waist-line; afterwards the bulge becomes a little ambiguous.

‘Sorry about the dramatics, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘but I thought this might just be a good time to remind you that you are alive right now because I put in a request for you. I can change my mind at any time I feel I have to.’

Well, really! I cringed of course, but it was only partly funk: the rest was embarrassment at his lamentable bad taste.

‘Are you aware,’ I asked bravely, ‘that you are occupying space which I have other uses for? Or rather, for which I have other uses?’

‘I like P.G. Wodehouse too, sir,’ he rejoined, ‘but I would hesitate to use any kind of flippancy in the situation you find yourself in. Or rather, in which you find yourself.’

I gaped at the man. Perhaps he was human after all.

‘What exactly do you want me to do?’ I asked.

‘Well, it’s more who, really. Think of someone young and beautiful and fabulously rich.’

I thought. I thought briefly because I am not wholly stupid.

‘Mrs Krampf,’ I said.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Marry her. That’s all.’

‘All?’

‘Well, practically all.’

‘I need to go back to sleep,’ I said. Back to sleep is where I went.





4 Mortdecai applies his razor-keen brain to the proposition





O Sorrow, wilt thou live with me

No casual mistress, but a wife.





In Memoriam





To tell the truth, that was not one of the times when I enjoyed a long and untroubled repose. Well, look, do you remember the last time you were told that you could continue living on the condition that you married a madly beautiful, sex-happy she-millionaire whom you were pretty sure had murdered her last husband in an almost undetectable way? Did you get in the wholesome eight hours of sleep?