The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(70)
‘Charlie, dear,’ said Johanna, ‘I think I shall go shopping. I hear you have a cute little street right here in London called Bond Street, right? Kind of a poor man’s Rue de Rivoli?’
‘More of a rich man’s Marché des Puces,’ I said, ‘but you have the general idea. Almost any taxi-driver will know the way there; it’s almost a furlong. Don’t overtip. Have fun. I’ll go to my bank, I think.’
That was where I went, on foot, for the good of my health. This journey involved passing through the more Chinese parts of Soho – for reasons which I shall presently make clear – and I chanced to glance through the window of a particularly well-set-up-looking restaurant. To my amazement, there sat Johanna, deep in conversation with a portly person who looked like an owner of such a place. She did not see me.
Now, you do not have to be a natural worrier to worry a little at the sight of your bride deep in conversation with Soho restaurant-owners when she has assured you that she is shopping in Bond Street, nor do you have to be a jealous or suspicious man to feel a stirring of curiosity as to what such a bride could possibly have to discuss with such a restaurant-owner. I mean, I had papers to prove that Johanna was my ever-loving wife; I had her word for it that she was in Bond Street, snapping up bargains in wild mink and such, and the restaurant-owner’s best friend would have felt bound to admit that he, the restaurant-manager, was as Chinese as a restaurant-owner can be, even in Soho.
Pray do not for a moment think that I dislike Chinese chaps; some of my best friends are those who make life beautiful with spare-ribs cooked in oyster sauce, not to mention pieces of duck swaddled in pancakes. No, what disturbed me was a certain wrongness about this situation, a wrongness which imparted an all-too-familiar twitching pang in the soles of my feet. Johanna, you see, was not a liar in the way that ordinary wives are liars. Although my acquaintance with her so far had been brief and torrid, I had formed the opinion that she was too rich, too self-confident, too clever to resort to lying in day-to-day matters.
Why, then, was she not in Bond Street, as advertised, scribbling her signature on Travellers’ Cheques and scooping up emerald parures and things?
What I did was what I always do when in doubt: I telephoned Jock.
‘Jock,’ I said, for this was his name, you see, ‘Jock, are you still friends with that rough, ugly, deaf-and-dumb night watchman at those publishers in Soho Square?’
‘Yeah,’ he said succinctly.
‘Then straddle your great motor-bike, Jock, scoop up this sturdy, deaf-and-dumb friend and drop him in Gerrard Street. He is to enter a restaurant called the No Tin Fuk and order a simple, nourishing repast. Give him some money for this because I am sure those publishers he works for keep him short of the readies. When in the restaurant he is to watch, guardedly, a beautiful blonde lady called Mrs M. – yes, the one I married the other day – and to use his skill at lip-reading. She will be talking to a portly Chinese gentleman; I long to know what she is saying.’
‘Right, Mr Charlie.’
‘Make all haste, Jock, please.’
‘That’s us you hear coming round the corner,’ he said.
I replaced the receiver in a courteous position then trotted puzzledly off to my bank. This was not my real bank, where I keep my overdraft, it’s what I call my Savings Bank. It isn’t even a Savings Bank in any ordinary sense of the word: it is the long-established premises of the most learned print-seller in London, an ancient person who does not approve of me for reasons which I do not understand. Why I call him my Savings Bank is as follows: I have a large and lavishly-produced book called The Complete Etchings of Rembrandt van Rijn. Every etching R. van R. ever etched is reproduced in its exact size and so exquisitely that it is hard to believe that they are not the originals. Moreover, these illustrations are ‘tipped in’, which means that they are printed separately and just lightly gummed to the pages by one edge. Whenever I have a few pennies to spare in my pocket, pennies which I might not want to confuse the nice tax-man with, I trundle round to the said print-dealer and buy a Rembrandt etching from him. A real one, of course, for he sells no others. This purchase takes some little while because he is an honest man, you see, and honest men can afford to stick out for the real price. Unlike some I could name.
When I have bought such an etching I toddle home, rip out the appropriate illustration in the Complete Etchings, and lovingly replace it with the real one I have just bought. Your common burglar would not dream of nicking such a book but, as it stands today, it’s worth about a quarter of a million in any large city in the world. Decent chaps like me scarcely ever have to flee for our lives but, if we must, it’s nice to have our savings with us unobtrusively. Your common Customs Officer, bless him, is unlikely to spare a glance for a fat, dull art-book with little or no pornographic content, carried by a fat, dull art-dealer.
The ancient dealer, on this occasion, grudgingly admitted that he had a pretty fine second-state impression of ‘The Three Trees’ with thread margins, and gave me the sort of look which art-dealers give you when they are pretty sure that you cannot afford the work of art in question. I, however, was embarrassingly flush with money from my American caper and said disdainfully that what I really had in mind was an impression of the first state of that etching, on vellum. He reminded me that there was only one such example, which happens to be in Samuel Pepys’s scrapbook in the Library of a place called Magdalene College, which is in a town called Cambridge, famed for its unsound scholarship and web-footed peasantry. Forty minutes later he handed over the etching and gave me a glass of better sherry than you would think, while I parted with a sheaf of great, vulgar currency-notes. Over his largest print-cabinet he has a mahogany tablet inscribed with the words of one of my favourite authors, Psalms xx, 14: ‘It is naught, it is naught, sayeth the buyer: but when he is gone his way, then he boasteth.’ As I lurched out, grumbling, he directed my attention to this.