The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(74)

You can’t get through Jock’s guard – his riposte was like a flash of lightning. ‘And an Alka-Seltzer, I reckon?’ he said. Game, set and match to him, as ever.

‘Please salt the eggs for me,’ I said by way of conceding defeat, ‘I always overdo it and spoil them. And do please remember, the fine, white pepper for eggs, not the coarse-ground stuff from the Rubi’ (Cipriani of Harry’s Bar in Venice once told me why waiters of the better sort call that huge pepper-grinder a ‘Rubi’: it is in honour of the late, celebrated Brazilian playboy Porfirio Rubirosa. I don’t understand it myself because my mind is pure.)

Jock pretended not to be listening; this is an easy trick if you happen not to be listening and one quite unfair to an employer who is in the throes of struggling to the surface of wakefulness.

‘Sod him,’ I thought bitterly. Then I remembered.

‘By the way, Jock,’ I said casually … (If you happen to be a physician in General Practice, God forbid, you will be all too familiar with the ‘By the way, Doctor’ gambit. It works like this: a chap is concerned because his left testicle has turned bright green, so he goes to his croaker or physician and complains of headaches and constipation. Having collected his prescriptions he starts to exit and then, his hand on the doorknob, turns back and casually mumbles ‘By the way, Doctor, it’s probably nothing of interest but …’)

‘By the way, Jock,’ I said casually, ‘Mrs Mortdecai wants the Queen shot.’

‘Awright, Mr Charlie. Did you say two eggs or three?’

‘The Queen,’ I insisted.

‘Yeah, I heard you. You mean the old ponce what runs the drag-club down Twickenham way. I’ll do him tomorrow night, no sweat. You’ll have to give me a score to buy an old throwaway shooter, though, I’m not using me good Luger.’

‘No, no, Jock. I refer to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the II, whom God preserve and upon whom the sun never sets, etcetera.” He fell silent; anyone who didn’t know him might well have thought that he was thinking.

‘Jock,’ I said sternly after a while, ‘your glass eye is leaking. Pray take it out and wipe it.’

‘ ’Tisn’t watering. It’s crying,’ he said in an ashamed but defiant voice.

‘Eh?’

‘Yeah, well, she’s a lovely lady, isn’t she? She never bought me no beer but she never did no one no harm, did she?’

I know how to deal with rhetorical questions; you don’t answer them.

‘Couldn’t we just do the Earl of –’

‘No!’

‘– or Princess – I mean no one would …’

‘The Queen,’ I said firmly. ‘For personal reasons, such as fear, cowardice, patriotism etcetera, I am as reluctant as you to perform this dastardly act but international politics says the deed must be done. So does my wife. Two eggs, please.’

‘Two eggs,’ he muttered, shambling out of the room.

How dearly I would have loved to sink back into innocent sleep but matters of great moment had me by the lug-hole and furthermore Jock sulks if I let my eggs grow cold. I ate them up, every scrap, although they were far from perfect. As I ate, I planned.

An hour later, carelessly clad and deliberately unshaven, I went off to consult my gunsmith. I don’t mean my real gunsmith, of course; he is a bishop-like personage who presides over dim, hushed premises near St James’s Palace and knows the difference between a gentleman and a person. The chap I was going to see is what you might call my other gunsmith, a chap of great dishonesty who sells illegal firearms to persons and whose only work-bench skills are fitting new barrels to pistols which have been in a little trouble and sawing off a few inches from shotgun barrels. He believes me to be a sort of Gentleman Jim The Country House Jewel Thief and I have not thought fit to correct this belief. He does not know my name, naturally. His only points of principle are to refuse credit, to refuse cheques and to refuse to sell firearms to Irishmen. This last is not because he dislikes the Irish or their politics, but for their own good. He is not convinced that they will hold the weapon the right way round, you see, and he likes his customers to come back.

He greeted me with his usual surliness: dealers in illegal firearms almost never smile, you must have noticed that. He was discreetly clad in a filthy singlet and underpants and the carrotty hair with which he is matted was dark with sweat. He had been making toffee-apples, you see, for this is his ‘front’, and the darkened, poky room into which he admitted me was fiercely hot and heavy with the stench of boiling sugar, rotten fruit and gun-oil. The murmur of wasps and blow-flies in the immemorial toffee-vats was quite terrifying to me. (As a child I once swallowed a wasp in a glass of lemonade; it stung me on the left tonsil and my mother feared – in a half-hearted but well-bred way – for my life. Nowadays I stamp on wasps when the conservation chaps aren’t looking.)

‘Hello, Ginge!’ I cried.

‘Oy, mate,’ he replied.

‘Look, Ginge, do you think we could go into another room? I’m wearing silk underclothes, you see, and they’re horrid when one sweats.’

With ill grace he led me into a little, overstuffed back-parlour which was as icy as the workshop had been tropical. With unconscious grace he threw a stolen mink bolero around his shoulders and squatted on a horsehair-covered tuffet. I must say he did look droll but I didn’t dare to snigger; he is very strong and rough and famous throughout the Borough of Poplar for hitting people in vulnerable parts on the smallest provocation.