The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(92)

‘Oh, ah,’ I said feebly.

‘Yes. We’re in a sort of league with them. It’s a little complicated to explain just now …’

‘White slaves?’ I asked curtly. She stared at me, then giggled in that annoying silvery-tinkle way.

‘No, Charlie, you have it upside down, dear.’

‘Sometimes, yes,’ I said stiffly, for I do not care to have my bedroom fads spoken of in public, ‘but what do you mean? Are you – we – against white slaving?’

‘Well, yes, you might say that. Yes, that’s very good, Charlie.’ She went off into the silvery laugh again.

‘Now look here,’ I said, trying to control the Mortdecai temper, ‘I’m not an inquisitive man but would you mind telling me, just between the three of us …’

‘Four,’ she said. I counted us. We were three.

‘Eh?’ I said.

‘No, Ho,’ said a voice behind me. I laid an egg as I whirled round. There, behind me, bulked a massive Chinese gentleman in a silk suit. I still don’t know how he got there.

‘Charlie, this is my friend Mr Ho. Mr Ho, this is my husband.’ The Chinese chap made noises both respectful and disbelieving. I pulled myself together and ransacked my mind for a telling remark.

‘How do you do,’ is what came out.

‘I manage,’ he said. I smiled, not showing the teeth.

There fell a sort of silence. Mr Ho did not sit down. Johanna and the Commandant – I would never learn to call her Sibyl – looked at their laps as though they had embroidery there. It fell to me to biff the ball of conversation about.

‘Mr ah, Ho,’ I began, in the jovial, over-civil way in which one addresses chaps whose skins aren’t quite the same colour as one’s own.

‘No, Ho,’ he said.

‘Eh?’

‘No, not eh, not ah ho: Ho,’ he insisted. I began to feel like the straight man on a Linguaphone record; decided to assert myself.

‘What’s your line of business then, Mr Ho?’ I asked jovially.

‘Hut,’ he said. There was little in that remark for me so I let it fall to the floor, hoping that the maid would brush it under the chair next morning.

‘Charlie dear, Mr Ho is saying that he hurts people. He does it for a living, you see.’

‘Oh, ah,’ I said.

‘Charlie dear, the phrase “oh ah” is very rude in Cantonese.’

I said a very rude word in English, then subsided into a sulky silence.

‘Mr Ho, would you like to bring the prisoner in, please?’ said the Commandant. He did not reply. I glanced at him: he was not there. I reckon that I can shift the Mortdecai carcass around fairly noiselessly but this man was quite uncanny; he was even better than old Wooster’s manservant who, as is well known, used to shimmer for England.

‘Mr Ho is the Red Stick for the Woh Singh Wo in England,’ said Johanna hurriedly. ‘That’s sort of, uh, enforcer.’ He was back in a twinkling, carrying the prisoner over his shoulder as casually as you or I might carry a beach-bag, if we were the kind of person who carries beach-bags.

‘Interrogate him,’ said the Commandant, ‘but please don’t make a mess. The carpet is a costly one.’ Mr Ho dumped the man on the floor, took a plastic Pak-a-Mak out of his pocket and threw it at him. The man unrolled it, lay down tidily on it. He was quite naked except for a bandage on his face where my bullet had hit him but his other eye was open and alert. He showed no signs of fear except that his penis had sort of shrivelled up as though he had just come out of a cold bath.

‘If you’re going to torture him,’ I said, ‘I’m leaving.’

‘Probabry not necessary,’ said Mr Ho. ‘If he is professional, will know I can make him talk, will not waste our time. Most torture is crap; it amuses torturer onry; makes innocent man confess to anything, makes guilty man rie, makes stupid man dead too soon. Gestapo rubbish.

‘Professional torture simple.

‘First, hut very much at beginning. Most peopre do not rearise how much pain huts.

‘Second, remove male members. Most peopre talk before this.

‘Third, remove eyesight.

‘Fourth, promise quick death. That is all. Watch.’

He produced a black doctor’s bag. I trembled at the thought of the dreadful instruments he would take out of it but the contents were positively homely. One ordinary electric iron, which he placed tidily at the soles of the prisoner’s feet. He did not plug it in. The prisoner raised himself on one elbow and watched dispassionately. Then Ho laid a coil of thin wire with wooden handles at each and – such as grocers use for cutting cheese – on the man’s genitals. The man’s face did not display any emotion but his penis seemed to shrivel a little more. Then Ho produced a teaspoon and laid it on the carpet at the level of the man’s remaining eyeball and a long, tenpenny nail which he laid on the man’s left breast.

The man seemed to appraise these ordinary, workaday objects – how sensible of Mr Ho to carry nothing incriminating – and came to a decision. He uttered a series of polite, deprecating quacks in what was probably Cantonese.

‘There!’ said Mr Ho kindly. ‘He is professional. Says he knows one thing. Only one. Will say it, if kill quick; now. OK?’

Mr Ho cleared away everything except the long, tenpenny nail, which he left over the man’s heart. The man rattled off a string of syllables in the same polite and unemotional tones he had used before. Mr Ho wrote things on a piece of paper and handed it to the Commandant.