The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(72)

‘What rows who wrote?’ I asked at length.

‘Nah, Rosie,’ he said, ‘me deaf-and-dumb mate. It’s his monniker.’

‘Goodness, is he one of those? How awkward for him, with his disabilities. I mean, however does he lisp and titter in sign-language?’

‘Nah. His whole monniker is Rosenstein or Rosinbloom or one of them Eyetalian names but he doesn’t like you to use it because he hates foreigners.’

‘I see. Well, let’s have it.’ He handed me a newspaper folded open at the Sports Page, around the margins of which Rosie had done his dictation. I gave him marks for camouflage: the only way a ruffianly publisher’s nark can be seen reading or writing without arousing suspicion is when he is at work picking his daily loser, and figuring out what a pound each way at nine to four will bring in after tax.

This is what he had written. ‘I cooden get sat were I cood see the Chink’s moosh but I cood see the lady ok she has lovly lips –’ I frowned here ‘– I cood read ever word she said.’ I unfrowned. ‘She said No Mr Lee i have explained befor I don’t want a million pounds. I already have a million pounds. I want the use of your organization. I have the women and you have the organization. I want to sell no part of my end. You will do very well out of your part of the operation. I can finance my self. Now for the last time is it a deal or not. Good. Now I must go shopping. I hav to buy my husband a present to put him in a good mood for what I am goin to ask him to do about the womin.’

I read it again and again. Aghast is the only word for what I was. Of course I had no illusion about Johanna’s saintliness – she was very rich, wasn’t she? – but the White Slave Trade! The sheer brilliance and audacity of reviving that wonderfully old-fashioned way of turning an honest million dazzled me. Johanna was, clearly, even cleverer than I had thought. The only bit that gnawed at my conscience was the suggestion that I was to be involved. It has always been my policy that wives should be free, nay, encouraged to do their own things but that spouses should not be conscripted. Let wives give cocktail parties until the distillery runs dry, but do not ask me to be polite to their awful friends. Let them take up knitting or some such wholesome exercise, but do not expect me to hold the wool. Above all, let them dabble in a little lucrative illegality – but on no account ask C. Mortdecai to participate except in helping to spend the proceeds with his well-known good taste.

White-slaving, you see, is strictly against the law. That is well-known. I might get caught; think how my friends would chuckle. Goodness, how they would chuckle if, after all the dubious capers I have survived, I were to be ‘sent up the stairs’ for living off the immoral earnings of naughty ladies.

I don’t know how the ordinary man in the street reacts to musing furiously for a few hours at having learned that his newly wedded wife is a big wheel in the white-slaving trade. Some would doubtless fish out a little pocket calculator and start figuring percentages. Others would pack a bag and run for their lives. I would have telephoned Col. Blucher and told him all, but he had refused to give me any procedure for getting in touch with him for the nonce; this would come later, he promised me, but in the meantime I was to ‘play it by ear’. (He had translated this for me as: ‘Feel for your own handholds, Mortdecai; it’s only a very small mountain you have to climb. Just kid yourself that there’s a guy above you with a rope. You’ll make out. I guess.’)

Since that telephone call was denied me I adopted Alternative Plan B, which involves taking a firm handhold upon a bottle of Scotch and reading a few pages of the adventures of people called Mulliner, as related by the late P.G. Wodehouse. It was, after a while, difficult to concentrate because the doorbell rang and rang as obsequious chaps delivered huge cardboard boxes full of Johanna’s shopping-loot, but when she at last arrived in person I was mellowed by Mulliner tales and, I suppose, not a little soothed by the healing Scotch whisky. What I was not in was a honeymoon frame of mind.

She embraced me with all the innocent fervour of a bride who has never said anything to a Chinese restaurant-proprietor more compromising than a shy request for a doggy-bag. She ran in and out of the bedroom, ripping open valuable cardboard boxes and parading before me wearing their contents. I made suitable noises but my heart was not in it. To tell the truth, my conscience, with whom I had not been on speaking terms for twenty years, was murmuring that the boxes alone would have kept a starving stockbroker in cigars for a week. For her last trick she appeared in a piece of night-wear which made her previous night’s garment look like something a retired headmistress might wear in the Arctic Circle. I cringed.

‘Johanna,’ I said as she sat on my knee.

‘Mhm?’

I cleared my throat. ‘Johanna darling, is there anything good on the television tonight?’

‘No.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘There never is.’

‘But shall we just look at the newspaper to make sure? I mean, we might be missing an old Gary Cooper or Humphrey Bogart or …’

‘Tonight,’ she said in a firm but loving voice, ‘there is nothing whatever on the television. Unless …’ she cast an appraising eye on the large, solidly-built television set ‘ … well, I guess I could sort of lean over it? I mean, if you really want something on the TV?’

‘Try not to be immodest, I beg of you,’ I said in a distant, British sort of voice. ‘What you are trying to say, evidently, is that since there is nothing on the television you would prefer to spend the evening at the cinema.’