The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(71)
‘There’s an even better writer,’ I snarled, ‘called Psalms xxviii, 20, and he says He that maketh haste to be rich shall not be innocent!’ I thought I had him there but he blandly asked me which of us I was referring to. You can’t win, you see, you can’t win. Ordinary art-dealers are human beings in their spare time but honest print-sellers are a race apart.
Here is what us scholars call an excursus. If you are an honest man the following page or two can be of no possible interest to you. You are an honest man? You are sure of that? Very well, turn to page 214, because this part is only about how people deploy sums of money which used to belong to other people.
Taking large slabs of money away from other people is, I am told, a simple action for anyone who is strong and brave and doesn’t lose any sleep after hitting people on the head or breaking the law in other ways. Getting it into the fiscal system again in one’s own favour is a different matter altogether. Take a few examples, starting from the bottom.
(A) Your simple villain whose only task in the caper was nicking a get-away car just before the event and wiping the fingerprints or ‘dabs’ off it afterwards. He gets perhaps ￡500 in used one-pound notes and, regardless of his superiors’ warnings, splashes them about in his local pub, buying drinks for one and all. The boys in blue pick him up within 72 hours and kindly ask him to tell them the names of his superiors. He does not tell them, not out of honour-amongst-thieves but because his superiors have been too smart to let him know their names. This is unfortunate for the simple villain because the fuzz has to make quite sure that he does not know. He is often tired when he finally comes up before the magistrate.
(B) The slightly less simple villain with a sensible streak of cowardice who learns of the capture of villain (A) and, at dead of night, takes his ￡1000 in used notes, dumps them in the nearest public lavatory, telephone-kiosk or other evil-smelling place and, in the morning, resumes his honest trade of scrap-metal merchant or whatever.
(C) The mealy-mouthed person who did nothing but ‘finger’ the caper slits open his Softa-Slumba mattress and tucks his ￡25,000 therein while his wife is getting her blue-rinse at the hairdressers. After eight or nine months, when he thinks all is safe, he buys a bungalow and pays the deposit in cash. Two nice gentlemen from the Inland Revenue call in for a chat; they go away quite satisfied. While he is heaving sigh of relief, two other nice gentlemen in blue uniforms call in for a chat and suggest that he pack a toothbrush and a pair of pyjamas.
(D) Now we are among the Brass, the higher echelons of the piece of villainy under discussion. This villain, called (D), is old-fashioned; he believes that a numbered account in a Swiss bank is as safe as the Houses of Parliament. He hasn’t heard about Guy Fawkes. He has heard about Interpol but he believes it is designed to protect chaps like him – chaps who have numbered accounts in Swiss banks. His trial is long, expensive and complicated. He gets a nice job in the prison library but horrid things happen to him in the showers.
(E) He thinks that he can run for it; he has two passports. His share is, perhaps, ￡150,000. His arithmetic is not good: that kind of money is very nice in, say, South Norwood, but it sort of dwindles as you scoot around the world at today’s prices, especially if you feel bound to arrange for your ever-loving wife to meet you in Peru or places like that.
(F) Yes, well, (F) is nearly the smartest of the bunch. First he tucks away a handy little sum like ￡20,000 in a safe place in case he gets nicked. (￡20,000 will get you out of any prison in the world, everyone knows that.) Then he takes the rest of his ill-gotten g’s and, having bought a dinner-jacket far above his station in life, he joins one of those gaming-clubs where they sneer at you if you are seen with anything so plebeian as a ￡10 note. He buys a couple of hundred poundsworth of chips; plays at this table and that and, in the small hours of the morning, gives the lovely cashier-lady a handful of chips and bank-notes, say, ￡2000, telling her to credit his account. He gives her a tenner for herself and she assumes that he has won. He does this discreetly for months, sometimes seeming to lose but usually winning. Every once in a while the lovely cashier-lady tells him that he has an awful lot of money in his account and he lets a big cheque which he can prove to be gambling-winnings slide into his account at the bank. You can legalize about a hundred thousand a year in this way if you are careful.
(G) He is the man who organized the whole thing. (G) is very rich already. There are no problems for him; his holding-companies can make his one-third of a million vanish like a snowflake on a frying-pan. I’m sure there’s a moral there somewhere.
If it comes to that, I daresay there’s a better moral in my book of Rembrandt etchings.
Back in my slum on the fourth floor in Upper Brook Street (W1) (I know it’s a duplex, but I still think it’s robbery at ￡275 a week) I was happily tipping-in my new purchase into the Complete Etchings when Jock sidled in.
‘Jock,’ I said severely, ‘I have repeatedly asked you not to sidle. I will not have this sidling. It smacks of the criminal classes. If you wish to better yourself you must learn to shimmer. What’s the name of those naval-outfitter chaps at the Piccadilly end of Bond Street?’
‘Gieves?’
‘That’s it. There you are, you see,’ I said, completely vindicated. Jock is not good at these things. He waited until I had fully relished my vindication; then he uttered.
‘I got what rows ’e wrote.’ I stared at the fellow. He showed none of the outward signs of brain-disease but these signs would not necessarily have been apparent, you see, for it is well known in art-dealing circles that you could stuff Jock’s brain into any hedgehog’s navel without causing the little creature more than a moment’s passing discomfort, while Jock, on his part, would not notice the loss until the next time he played dominoes.