The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(81)
I made guarded, mistrustful noises which may or may not have been audible over the munching of fried bread.
‘All you have to do is to make friends – make great friends – with a beautiful young woman. She is a sort of business-associate of mine in a confidential enterprise and I have a feeling that she is leaking. Oh do stop raising your eyebrows in that silly way, dear; you know I mean that she has been chatting a bit too freely with our uh competitors. I want you to get close to her, spend freely as though you were tired of carrying all that money around; this will make her gaze at you lovingly. Then start to wheedle; see if she is as careless a talker as I suspect. You might hint that you are a researcher journalist for one of the English Sunday papers, hunh?’
My knife and fork crashed down on my plate – a lesser plate would have cracked from side to side – and I stood up, giving an Arctic glare which would have withered a lesser woman.
‘There are some things,’ I said stiffly, ‘which a chap simply cannot be asked to do. Assassination, yes. Impersonating a Sunday journalist, no.’
‘Forgive me, dear,’ she said hastily, ‘I was perhaps lacking in, uh, insight when I suggested that. Just hint, then, that you are a heavy investor and that you have heard that she might be on the inside of some nice little deal such as you love to buy a piece of and that you have a wallet to prove it. But get close to her first, win her confidence; I’m sure she will find you adorable. Well, gosh, I do, don’t I?’
I sat down again but my breakfast no longer held any charms for me; it looked like a cruel parody of a painting by Kandinsky.
‘Very well,’ I said at last, ‘how and where do I make pals with this lady?’
‘Tonight, darling. It’s all arranged. Her name is Loretta. You are to be her partner at a reception: it’s only at one of those Gulf Arab Embassies so you don’t have to hunt for a white tie and tails, a simple tuxedo will do. Sorry, I mean dinner-jacket.’
Loretta proved to have one of those wonderfully flower-like, vulnerable faces; her eyes seemed always to be on the point of brimming with happy tears and her generous lips seemed to have been bruised with a thousand savage kisses. I found myself longing to protect her, which is what it’s all about really, isn’t it? Bridegroom though I was, I became painfully desirous of finding whether the rest of her bore out the promise of that lovely face.
After the reception and after what passes as a buffet in that class of Embassy she shuddered delicately at my suggestion of a visit to a night-club. (I, too, shuddered a little but mine was a shudder of relief at not having to spend a great deal of money. I mean, I’m not mean, I’m really not, but fifty pounds for cheap champagne and a surplus of decibels has never struck me as good value. ‘Quantum meruit,’ is what I say.)
‘Take me home,’ she murmured. Her murmur was of the brand which sends the familiar tingle galloping up from the base of the spine to the dorsal region. I took her. Home, I mean. ‘Home’ proved to be an apartment in a discreetly splendid block of flats off Curzon Street. The porter discreetly failed to see us but his back was benign. If ever a porter’s back registered the words ‘Bless you, my children,’ that porter’s back did so.
At the door of her apartment she handed me the key – I cannot bear bossy women who pretend to be able to open a door unaided – and stood facing me in such a position that I would have to stand very close to her indeed in order to reach the keyhole. Her great, violet-coloured eyes gazed up at me, swimming with the aforesaid unshed tears, her lips trembled tremulously and, in short, she was exuding all those infinitesimal signals which are supposed to tell a chap that a girl expects to be kissed, and that right speedily. I fell to the task with a will. She was very good at it. When her breathing quickened I found the keyhole and, still locked in each other’s arms, we fox-trotted into her apartment. It was a lavish sort of pad, full of flowers and dominated by a monstrous sofa drawn up in front of a blazing fire of genuine logs. She vanished for a moment and returned bare-footed with a bottle of Armagnac and two glasses. I forget what the Armagnac was like, I was spellbound by the sight of her perfectly-shaped little toes as she twiddled them in front of the blaze.
As a conversational opener I lamely pointed out that this was well-known to be a sure way of catching chilblains and, inexplicably, she burst into laughter. Then she fell upon me frantically. Our mouths met and clamped together with all the mindless determination of a pair of bar-magnets. For a minute or two, or it may have been three, nothing was to be heard but the succulent sounds of face-chewing, the crackle of the logs and the bee-loud noise of certain zip-fasteners. (If ever I am forced by the soaring price of blackmail to write my memoirs, I have determined to entitle them The Zip is my Undoing.)
Suddenly, when it became abundantly clear that Loretta complaisantly expected me to work my wicked will on her, I unstuck myself from her embrace with a guilty start. Was I not a bridegroom? Was I not in love with my bride Johanna? The answers were ‘Definitely’ and ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ in that order. I had been told to ‘get close’ to Loretta – was I, perhaps, exceeding my brief? Loretta was languorously making it clear that I was certainly exceeding my briefs, if you will forgive a little vulgarity just this once.
‘Look, ah, darling,’ I gabbled, ‘I’ve just had the most awful thought.’
‘It’s all right,’ she murmured, ‘I took my pill this morning.’