The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(78)

At home that night I passed a hateful couple of hours with my tape-recorder and an album of some overpaid saxophonist of the early 1940s, recording bits and pieces of the fellow’s beastly art and repeating phrases again and again as though striving to achieve what a saxophonist would probably call perfection. I shall not name the musician for, who knows, he may well be alive to this day (there is no justice, none) and, to my certain knowledge, the Performing Rights Society is very much alive and poised like a *-cat at a mousehole.

For the next few days I played the part. The Great Game. Wore the mask. Worse, I wore the suit and, dear God, the very shoes. Each evening I would creep to that narrow house in that shabby street in the City, clad in the shameful attire, and mount the stairs after fluttering a lecherous eyelash or two at the landlady. Ensconced in the mean room, smelling of undernourished mice (yes, the room) I would play over the tape of the nameless saxophonist, occasionally varying the volume, stopping and starting and so forth, while I peered through the window, measuring angles and distances and fields-of-fire until I could stand the bloody saxophone no more, whereupon I would shuffle downstairs, side-step the now clean and lipsticked but still skinny landlady, and pace moodily down the street towards a taxi-point. The moodiness of the pacing, I need hardly say, was because I was pacing out distances in the street and relating them to my field-of-fire. I reckoned that the State Landau would be clocking up a brisk 12 mph on the day. Trigonometry was the only thing I was good at when I was at school. Well, it was the only thing the masters knew about that I was good at.

Look, let me make it quite clear that I liked none of this at all, not any of it. I don’t speak of wearing clothes which George Melly would scorn, nor of the shoes, the ‘banana specials’ which still visit me in my dreams. I am speaking, seriously for once, of the basic rottenness of it all. This country had accepted my family, had been good to us, had allowed us to become moderately rich and had never pointed the finger of scorn. Why then was I using all my wits to send its Sovereign to a premature grave? Well, yes, my wife had told me to do it, which is a pretty good reason for most chaps to do most things, especially if, as in this case, there was a strong hint that I might find myself slightly dead if the product did not please. There was also the dread Colonel Blucher, who had made it clear that I was to play along with Johanna until otherwise instructed. None of this made me feel any better about my activities; I was sharply aware that Jock’s sense of values was better than mine.

However, in those days I was a man of iron, and was dedicated to the ideal of staying alive – an ideal which seems paltry in retrospect but seemed sensible at the time. Staying alive has a kind of immediacy about it: ask anyone who has been confronted with the choice between life and death.

So I oiled the rifle, visited the horrid house, smirked at the landlady, played the saxophone-tapes, wore the suit, the shoes; nay, even the golfing-cap itself. You have read about the Spartan boy with the fox in his bosom gnawing at his vitals but making no murmur? Very well, I have made myself clear.

‘Jock,’ I said one morning, to Jock, ‘Jock, I need a little help.’

‘Mr Charlie,’ he said heavily, ‘if it’s about the matter what we discussed a few days ago, then before you say another word the answer is “no”. I wouldn’t shop you, not even if it was ever so, you know that, but I carn ’elp. Not with that.’

‘Not even a touch of driving after the event?’ I wheedled.

‘Sorry, Mr Charlie, I coulden turn a wheel of a jam-jar in such circombstations.’

‘Very well, Jock, I daresay I shall manage single-handed. I respect your principles and attach no blame to you. But if I should be, ah, nicked, may I depend upon you to visit me in the condemned cell?’

‘ ’Course.’

‘And perhaps bring me in a pot or two of caviar? The real Grosrybriest, I mean, not the stuff we put out at parties.’

‘ ’Course.’

‘And perhaps,’ I added wistfully, ‘a jar or two of those partridge-breasts in jelly, eh? I mean, I hear frightful tales of what prison governors consider “a hearty breakfast’ for the chap about to do his hundred-yards dash to the gallows. Greasy mutton chops with chips and beans and, and … things.’

‘Don’t you worry your head about none of that, Mr Charlie, I’ll see you right, I got friends in them places. Anyway, they done away with capital punishment, didn’t they? You won’t draw much more than, ooh, say twenty-five years. A doddle. Do it standing on your head. Only thing to remember is, don’t let them big black queers catch you in the showers.’ I did not shudder for I wished to retain Jock’s respect, but the effort cost me a few hundred calories.

‘Look, Jock,’ I said gently, ‘you are right about the abolition of capital punishment but there is one thing they can still top you for.’

‘Reely?’

‘Yes.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like High Treason.’





9 Mortdecai prepares to put himself beyond the pale but wishes that he had a better class of landlady





Her manners had not that repose

Which stamps the caste of Vere de Vere.





Lady Clara Vere de Vere





The dreaded day came. As I left the flat Jock wordlessly handed me my hat and umbrella. I refused the latter; it takes more than a mere umbrella to make an assassin feel like a gentleman. Nevertheless, as I waited for the lift, I found myself humming a stave from the National Anthem, the bit about ‘Long may she reign’. Clearly, some Freudian bits in the back of my brain were longing for rain, you see, so that the Royal party would be travelling in a nice bullet-proof limousine rather than in the open State Landau. London weather let me down, as it always does: the sun shone as mercilessly as a bank-manager’s smile.