The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(8)

I walked round the car, admiring it Platonically. There was no point in desiring it – it was a rich man’s car. Would do about seven miles to the gallon, which is all right if you own an oil field. Milton Krampf owns a lot of oil fields. First to last, the car would stand him in at about ￡24,000. Paying that would hurt him about as much as picking his nose. (They say a man who knows how rich he is ain’t rich – well, Krampf knows. A man telephones him every morning, one hour after the New York Stock Exchange opens, and tells him exactly how rich he is. It makes his day.)

A naughty apprentice told me that Mr Spinoza was in his office and I picked my way thither.

‘Hullo, Mr Spinoza,’ I cried cheerily, ‘here’s a fine morning to be alive in!’

He peered malevolently at a spot three inches above my left shoulder.

‘Oo hucking hastard,’ he spat. (No roof to his mouth, you know. Poor chap.) ‘Oo other hucking hiss-hot. How air oo hoe your hace here, oo hurd-murgling hod?’

The rest was a bit rude so I shan’t quote him too verbatim, if you don’t mind. What he was vexed about was my sending the MGB in with the little special matter in the headcloth at such an early hour the day before. ‘At sparrow-fart,’ as he neatly put it. Moreover, he was afraid that people would think he was working on it and he had evolved a dreadful mental image of queues of chaps in cloth caps insisting that he respray their MG’s.

When he had drawn to a provisional close, I spoke to him sternly.

‘Mr Spinoza,’ I said, ‘I did not come here to discuss with you my relationship with my mummy, which is a matter for me and my psychiatrist alone. I came to remonstrate with you about using Dirty Words to Jock, who is, as you know, sensitive.’

Mr S used a lot more very dirty words and some which I couldn’t make out but which were probably vile. When the air had thinned a little he bitterly offered to walk over to the Rolls with me and discuss headlamps. I was surprised and saddened to see a great vulgar Duesenburg – if that’s how you spell it – in the workshop, and said so, which rather started him off again. I have never had any daughters but this did not stop Mr Spinoza sketching out their careers from the nursery to the street corner, so to speak. I leaned on the side of the Silver Ghost, admiring his command of language. ‘A feast of reason and a flow of soul’ is how Alexander Pope (1688–1744) would have summed it up.

While we were thus civilly biffing the ball of conversation to and fro, a sound which I can best describe as a DONK came in from the South side of Mason’s Yard. More or less simultaneously a sort of WANG occurred about three feet north of my belly button and a large pimple appeared in the door-panel of the Silver Ghost. Slapping two and two together in the twinkling of an eye, I lay down, without a thought for my valuable suit. Look, I’m an experienced coward. Mr Spinoza, whose hand had been on the door, realized that someone was getting at his panel work. He straightened up and cried ‘Oi!’ or it might have been ‘Oy!’

There was another DONK outside, followed, this time, not by a WANG but by a sort of crisp, mushy noise and a lot of the back of Mr Spinoza’s head distributed itself freely over the wall behind us. None of it got on to my suit, I’m happy to say. Mr Spinoza, too, lay down then, but too late by now, of course. There was a blue-black hole in his upper lip and a piece of his false teeth arrangements was protruding from the corner of his mouth. He looked quite beastly.

I wish I could say that I had liked him, but I never really did, you know.

Gentlemen of my age and full habit (as the tailors say) almost never scuttle on all fours over oily garage floors, particularly when they are wearing expensive and rather new tropical-weight worsted suitings. This was clearly a day for breaking rules, however, so I put my nose down and scuttled, successfully. I must have looked absurd but I got out into the yard and across it into the doorway of the O’Flaherty Gallery. Mr O’Flaherty, who knew my father well, is an elderly Jew called Groenblatter or something like that and is swart as an Ethiop. He put his hands to his cheeks when he saw me and rocked his head to and fro, keening something that sounded like Mmm-Mmm-Mmmm on the note of G above high C.

‘How’s business today?’ I asked bravely but in a voice that wobbled a bit.

‘Don’t ask it, don’t ask it,’ he replied automatically, then –

‘Who attacked you so, Charlie boy, somebody’s husband? Or somebody’s wife, God forbid?’

‘Look, Mr G, nobody attacked me, there’s some sort of trouble at Mr Spinoza’s and I’m getting away fast – who wants to be involved – when I trip and fall, is all. Now like a good friend you should ask Perce to get me a taxi arreddy, I don’t feel so good.’ I always find myself talking like that with Mr G.

Perce, Mr G’s rat-faced little thug – he can’t afford a good, big one – got the taxi and I promised to send Mr G a good customer, which I knew would keep him from gossiping.

Arrived home, I collapsed into a chair, suddenly quaking with delayed horror. Jock made me a cup of wonderfully refreshing mint tea which made me feel a great deal better, especially after I had followed it with four fluid ozs of whisky.

Jock pointed out that if I said I’d been knocked down by a motor car the Insurance would buy me a new suit. This completed the cure and I got on to the brokers straight away, for my no-claims bonus is just a dream of childhood now. There’s nothing like a little insurance to smooth the troubled brow, take my word for it. Meanwhile, Jock sent the porter’s little girl to Prunier in a taxi for a box of luncheon à porter. There was a dear little turbot soufflé, a Varieté Prunier (six oysters, each cooked a different way) and two of their petits pots de crême de chocolat.