The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(80)

‘In Ongary,’ I told her, ‘ve make zat sign like zis’ – and I demonstrated, using fewer fingers.

Inexplicably, Blucher seemed pleased with me. Inexplicably, too, he seemed incurious about my regicidal ploy but I told him all about it nevertheless, for attempted assassination always makes one babble; everyone knows that.

‘And I suppose it was your lot who jimmied the cartridges,’ I ended, gratefully.

‘Why, no, Mr Mortdecai; it wasn’t us at all.’

‘Ah, then Jock is as patriotic as I suspected all along.’

‘Well, no, I wouldn’t say it was Jock, either.’

‘Who then?’

‘I really couldn’t say.’ I knew what that meant. I thought I knew what that meant.

They dropped me off at the wrong end of Brook Street, for security reasons I daresay. The walk did me good. Jock opened the door with an expressionless face and, as I passed through the kitchen, thrust a lusty drink into my hand with a similar lack of emotion. The first sip told me that he had understood that this was no time for such niceties as soda-water.

Johanna was in the drawing-room, her lovely eyes gummed to the television set, whereon there was a chap playing something wonderfully tedious on a tin-whistle made of solid platinum.

‘Look, Johanna,’ I said apologetically …

‘SSHHHH!’ she said. (There are certain instruments which seem to exercise an unaccountable fascination on female human beings. Did you know, for instance, that in ancient Athens there was a law against chaps playing flutes under girls’ windows? There was nothing about giving them bunches of flowers, boxes of chocolates or mink coats, but playing the flute was reckoned to be taking an unfair advantage; even clever girls succumbed to it. I’m not making that up, I’m really not; ask any Greek Historian. Ask him in that lucid interval between the after-luncheon nap and the cocktail hour.)

When the chap had finished his tootling and was shaking the spit out of his valuable whistle, I moistened my own whistle with what was left of the valuable Scotch and said –

‘Look, Johanna, I’m awfully sorry but …’

‘It’s all right, Charlie dear, please don’t go on. I couldn’t bear to hear you explaining how you failed me. Even the best men can break under stress.’ I thought about that one, for I knew that she was not a woman to use words carelessly. Many a bitter rejoinder and witty retort sprang to mind.

‘Ah, well, yes,’ was what I decided to say. Even she could not think of a riposte to that one. We dined early, later, because this was the night when our lovely Italian cook comes and ‘obliges’ and she likes to get away early because of what she calls ‘Binko’. (You probably won’t have heard of ‘Bingo’, it’s a game where the odds are slightly worse against the player than at the ‘fruit-machine’ but you don’t have to wear your palm out pulling the handle. It’s jolly good for the economy too, they tell me; you see, if a chap earning ￡80 a week is giving his wife ￡20 of that for Bingo and encouraging greyhounds himself with a similar amount, well, he’s not going to settle for any lousy, vile-capitalistic differential of bloody 5%, is he?)

We dined early, off a simple bollito misto and in a flurry of sparkling conversation like, ‘Pass the salt, please, dear,’ and ‘Oh, dear, I’m sorry about this wine.’ My final jeu d’ esprit was, ‘Johanna, darling, I think I’m going to get an early night, d’you mind?’ She was ready for that punch; she gave me her sweetest smile and said that she didn’t mind a bit; there was a horror movie on TV starting right now.

It must have been two hours later when she crept into my dressing-room and said that the horror-movie had frightened her dreadfully.

‘There, there,’ I mumbled sleepily, patting her where her nightdress should have been. Then she asked me what had gone wrong in the assassination ploy and I told her that the cartridge just wouldn’t slide into the breech. She couldn’t seem to comprehend at first, so I sort of demonstrated. A few minutes later she said that she almost understood except the bit about the bolt-action. I went downstairs and made a couple of drinks. Playing for time, you understand.

She fell asleep perhaps half an hour later; ballistics is a very boring subject.

A little before dawn she shook me awake again. I was surly; I always am at that hour.

‘Charlie, dear,’ she said, ‘there’s one thing I don’t understand.’ I made unconvincing sleep-noises but to no avail. ‘You see, Charlie, there were supposed to be three cartridges in the clip, weren’t there?’

‘Oh, very well,’ I said.





10 Mortdecai is given a perfectly simple, nay delightful task and makes a dog’s breakfast of it





… And the thicket closed

Behind her and the forest echo’d ‘fool’.





Merlyn and Vivien





‘All the same, Charlie dear,’ she said as I pushed a listless rasher around my breakfast-plate, ‘all the same, you didn’t do awfully well, did you? With the assassination, I mean? I bet a CIA man would have checked every cartridge; the CIA brass accepts no excuses, they say.’ The only retort I could think of was one such as I could never think of using a gently-nurtured millionairess, so I held my tongue and stabbed spitefully at a fried egg. ‘Maybe,’ she went on, ‘that assignment was a little tough for you – as you often say, you are no longer a young man, are you?’ Employing a strength of wrist and hand which I did not know I still possessed, I divided a slice of crisp fried bread with one stroke of the knife, sending half of it skimming across the room like a clay pigeon. ‘So,’ she said, ‘I have thought of a little task for you which you will find simple and delightful.’