by Simon Brett
‘If we could pongle back to Mimsy La Pim for a momentette, Winthrop . . . ?’
‘Of course, my dear young lady.’
‘Do you have any thoughts about the identity of the stenchers who’ve kidnapped her?’
‘Hmm.’ The veteran actor was contemplative for a moment. ‘Well, of course, she does mix with some fairly unsavoury types. Her current – what shall I say? Protector? – Well, he’s up to his collar stud in organised crime. So it could be the work of some of his enemies . . . or, on the other hand, if he was starting to tire of Miss La Pim’s charms he might have set the kidnap up himself.’
‘You’re saying you think it’s a Mafia job?’
‘Could certainly be.’ Stukes rubbed his chin reflectively. ‘On the other hand, in cases like this, which often get blamed on organised crime, I think it’s much more likely to be something closer up and more personal.’
‘Sorry, not on the same page?’
‘Personal jealousy is a much more likely motive.’
‘Whose jealousy?’
‘Mimsy La Pim’s career may be on the skids now, but when she arrived in Hollywood she was everyone’s dish of the day. Which meant her youthful innocence elbowed out someone else whose youthful innocence was beginning to show a few cracks. Women’s jealousies last a long time, you know.’
As he spoke, he gestured to the set, where stood an actress uncertain whether she was more scared by her crown of snakes or her husband.
‘You mean that Zelda . . . ?’
Twinks got no further as Hank Urchief came bustling up to them, glowing with confidence. ‘Well, I’ve fixed it!’ he announced.
‘Fixed what?’ asked Twinks.
‘Got you a bigger part, doll. Just had a word with the writer and persuaded him it was a good idea that Helen of Troy gets snatched by the Minotaur. That’s why Theseus goes into the labyrinth: to rescue you just before the Minotaur eats you.’
‘And is that what’s going to happen?’
‘Sure thing, babe. It’s a done deal. Writers don’t argue with stars, you know.’
Twinks looked down towards the two men on folding canvas chairs. Paul Uckliss-Hack was tearing his hair out, communicating the latest script change to Gervase Blunkett-Plunkett. As the professor took in the full enormity of what had happened, he started to pull his hair out too.
12
Blotto Investigates
No one of Blotto’s acquaintance actually worked, if you don’t count servants and solicitors and people like that (and men of his breeding never did count servants and solicitors and people like that). So when he woke the following morning at the Hollywood Hotel and discovered that his sister was already on set filming as Helen of Troy in The Trojan Horse, he felt rather at a loss.
Of course, that didn’t stop him from going down to the dining room to have breakfast. It wasn’t like an English breakfast, though. The Americans really did have some strange ideas. Who would want to drink orange juice at that time in the morning? And why in the name of Denzil didn’t cooks in America know that bacon should be served pink and slippery, not purple and crispy? In fact, the only thing his breakfast at the Hollywood Hotel had in common with the one he’d normally have at Tawcester Towers was that it was huge.
As he crunched up the last piece of cremated bacon and wiped the egg up off his plate with some rock-hard quoit called a bagel, he wondered how he was going to spend the day. The attraction of playing with his clockwork jumping frog seemed to have palled a bit. In a strange place without Twinks around . . . what could a boddo do? The feeling of being at a loss returned to him.
That was until he remembered he had a quest. Yes, of course, the day before he had decided to devote the rest of his life to finding Mimsy La Pim. How could he have forgotten something as important as that?
Toad in the hole, he reminded himself, he was going to be like Sir Gally . . . thing. Some half-remembered lines he’d heard from a beak at Eton drifted into his consciousness.
‘My strength is as the strength of ten
Because my heart is pure . . .’
Yes, that’s bong on the nose, he thought. Mind you, my strength won’t be as the strength of ten, it’ll be as the strength of a hundred. My heart’s going to be as spoffing pure as . . . well, as spoffing pure as a heart can get. Like a knight of yore . . . though he was never quite sure what ‘yore’ was . . . or when it was. And what was it Arthur’s boddoes were always questing for, after a healthy breakfast at the Round Table . . . ? Oh yes, the Holy Gruel. From now on, finding Mimsy La Pim was going to be Blotto’s Holy Gruel.
How to do it, though? What should be his first step? He wished Twinks was there to ask. She’d know. She always knew guff like that. (Had Twinks been there, she would have been able to inform him that the lines which had emerged dimly into his mind through the fogs of adolescence had been written by Alfred Lord Tennyson. But she wasn’t there, so Blotto remained, as he had for much of his life, uninformed.)
Blotto was still turning over in his mind the intractable question of what he should do next when he got back to his suite. Just as he entered, the telephone rang. He answered it.
‘Ratteley-Baa-Baa!’ Even if the voice hadn’t identified the caller as Ponky Larreighffriebollaux, what he said would have done.
‘Ritteley-Boo-Boo!’ Blotto responded instinctively.
They galloped through the bits about fruitbats, suspenders, hippos and boot blackeners before the ritual’s traditional end.
‘Ra-ra!’ said Ponky.
‘Ra-ra-ra!’ said Blotto.
‘Listen, Blotto me old ship’s biscuit, I’ve thought of a rather beezer way of spending the day.’
‘And what’s that, Ponky me old snaffle bit?’
‘I thought we could take out a cricket bat and ball to some park and just, you know, biff it about a bit, like we used to do, you know, at prep school, even before we went to Eton. What do you say?’
Blotto couldn’t deny he was tempted. The number of days he and Ponky had spent, biffing it about a bit with cricket bat and ball were beyond number. And each one had brought the warm glow of time well spent. But that was before he had a Quest, before he had dedicated himself to finding his Holy Gruel. So he said, ‘No.’
The reply was so unexpected that it was a moment before Ponky could recover the power of speech.
‘Is this your idea of a joke, Blotto? Are you jiggling my kneecap?’
‘No,’ came the reply. ‘I cannot waste a day like that.’
‘“Waste”?’
‘Yes. “Waste”.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because’, Blotto replied seriously, ‘I have a higher calling.’
‘A higher calling than cricket?’ asked his friend.
‘Yes.’
‘Well, tiddle my pom,’ said Ponky Larreighffriebollaux incredulously.
* * *
Blotto scoured his brain for leads in his investigation. It didn’t take long. One of the great beauties of Blotto’s brain, unlike that of most people, was that it was uncluttered by superfluous thought.
The one memory he could cling on to – in fact, the only lead he had in the case – was his sister’s suggestion that there might be an Italian connection to the kidnapping.
So Blotto sauntered down to the hotel foyer and asked at the reception desk, ‘Do you know how I’d get in touch with the Mafia?’
The man he asked immediately ducked down behind the counter, as if in anticipation of machine-gun fire, and it took a while before he could be coaxed back into an upright posture. Blotto repeated his question.
‘No, no, no,’ the man gabbled, ‘we have nothing to do with the Mafia at the Hollywood Hotel! There may be other hospitality businesses here in LA that pay protection money and host Mafia conferences, but you won’t find any of that stuff going on here!’
‘I wasn’t suggesting that you were in the pay of the stenchers,’ Blotto reassured, ‘I just wondered what’s the easiest way to get in touch with th
em.’
The receptionist looked around the foyer and noticed the two Mediterranean types who had last been seen at Mimsy La Pim’s party.
‘I think you’ve found it,’ he told Blotto. ‘If you ask in a few more places the easiest way to get in touch with the Mafia, you’ll get in touch with them, sure as eggs is eggs.’
‘Tickey-Tockey,’ said Blotto.
So he decided he might have an Italian lunch.
The restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard was called Giorgio’s, and as soon as the waiter offered him the menu, Blotto repeated the question he had put to the hotel receptionist. ‘Do you know how I can get in touch with the Mafia?’
The reaction he got was not dissimilar. Panic came into the man’s dark eyes. His moustache, which when Blotto entered the restaurant had been ripe for twirling, now drooped like the wattles of an apologetic bloodhound. Wordlessly, menu still in hand, the waiter dashed to the back of the room, picked up a telephone and burst into a panicked flurry of Italian with a range of gestures that suggested he might have a future in silent movies.
The moment he put the phone down, he quickly regained his composure. His moustache perked up and he went into Take Two of his greeting-a-new-customer routine. ‘Gooda afternoon, sir,’ he said. ‘Here issa the menu. Could I get you a drinka while you choose your luncha?’
Blotto hadn’t thought whether he wanted a drink or not, but now the suggestion had been planted in the fertile vacancy of his brain, he realised what a good idea it was. ‘You don’t by any chance do a buzzbanger of a cocktail called a St Louis Steamhammer, do you?’
The waiter smiled and said that indeed they did. In fact, their barman was renowned throughout Hollywood for the quality of his St Louis Steamhammers.
With a small bow the waiter receded, leaving his customer to study the menu. All panic had left the Italian’s face. Whatever anxieties he may have had a few moments earlier seemed to have been allayed completely by what had been said on the telephone. He wore the complacent look of a man who knew that, whatever problems might arise, somebody else was going to sort them out.
Blotto, meanwhile, consulted the menu. It was not a very rewarding experience. He knew he was in an Italian restaurant, but he thought printing the menu in Italian was taking the whole concept far too far.
Needless to say, he didn’t speak Italian. He thought that learning their languages was kowtowing to foreigners in a manner which was beyond the barbed wire. If communication was required – as he knew it might be in extreme circumstances – then it was down to them to learn English. It wasn’t difficult. Even Blotto, who didn’t have an unrealistic assessment of his intellectual prowess, had mastered the basics by the time he was five. Why on earth did people who were British go through what Blotto could avouch, from his years of French and Latin lessons at Eton, was the much more laborious process of learning foreign languages? Some perversities he would never understand.
Now it goes without saying that someone who’d grown up as Devereux Lyminster, scion of the noble house of Tawcester, had never before encountered Italian cooking. Like all people of his breeding, he had started out with nursery food and never moved far away from it. He’d been fed the same food at Eton, Tawcester Towers and other aristocratic households, and in the London restaurants and gentlemen’s clubs he frequented. He’d certainly never eaten pasta.
But, narrow though his own mind actually was, Blotto liked to think of himself as a broad-minded boddo. So he was prepared to give this Italian menu a chance. He was quickly disappointed, however, by the very first word he encountered.
‘Antipasto’. His knowledge of foreign languages may have been limited, but even he could work out what that meant. ‘Anti’, he knew, was ‘against’. And, knowing foreigners’ predilection for slapping gratuitous ‘a’s and ‘o’s on to the ends of perfectly workable English words, ‘pasto’ must mean ‘past’. So this restaurant he was in was actually ‘against the past’, a sentiment that didn’t sit well with someone whose family could be traced back to the Norman Conquest, and who rather regretted the abolition of the feudal system.
Blotto might have encountered further enormities in the menu had his attention not been diverted by the arrival of the waiter with his St Louis Steamhammer. Served in a tall glass with a long straw and maraschino cherry, its wonderful appearance diverted his mind from the inadequacies of Italian cuisine – a word he would not have recognised. Nor, indeed, would he have recognised cucina, which might have been more appropriate in the circumstances.
Blotto raised the straw to his lips, anticipating the tectonic shift of brain layers that the drink customarily induced. He took a long, hard slurp.
Great galumphing goatherds! I’ve never felt an impact like that from any previous St Louis Steamhammers! The barman at this Italian restaurant deserves some kind of international award . . .
These were the last thoughts that went through Blotto’s mind before he slipped into oblivion. Distracted by the arrival of his drink, he not been aware of the contemporaneous arrival through the restaurant door of the two Mediterranean types he’d failed to notice on the S.S. Regal, at Mimsy La Pim’s party or in the foyer of the Hollywood Hotel. Nor had he been aware of the lead-filled sock with which one of them had struck him over the back of the neck.
As a result, he was also unaware of being bundled out of the restaurant into the back of a black limousine. And unaware of being driven at breakneck speed along the streets of Los Angeles.
In fact, the next thing he was aware of was waking up with a splitting headache, with his arms tied to a chair and facing Lenny ‘The Skull’ Orvieto.
Blotto had to admit, though, that the receptionist at the Hollywood Hotel had had a point. The easiest way of getting in touch with the Mafia was to ask how to get in touch with them.
13
Lenny ‘The Skull’ Orvieto
It wasn’t difficult to work out how Lenny Orvieto had got his nickname. His head was hairless and there seemed to be only a paper-thin layer of skin covering his cranium. His nose was short and his dark eyes lurked in hollow sockets like evil monsters in caves.
Orvieto was dressed in a light brown suit with a pale yellow pinstripe. On the front of his grey silk shirt a blue-patterned tie was affixed by a diamond pin. The effect was dapper to the point of being dandyish and, though he couldn’t see the man’s feet, Blotto knew they would be wearing spats.
Through the pain in his head, he managed to take in the room in which he found himself. It was windowless, painted pale green and smartly furnished. Having been brought up in Tawcester Towers, Blotto didn’t know that being an interior designer was a profession, but someone more au fait with the ways of the world would have recognised one had been at work in this room. There was a lot of gilt, on the chairs, on the desk behind which ‘The Skull’ sat, and on the ornate frame of the large mirror behind him. This reflected the perfect dome of his hairless head, as well as his two Mediterranean abductors, who were seated behind Blotto.
On the gilt desk lay a snub-nosed automatic pistol.
The boss’s voice had no trace of an Italian accent. He spoke very softly and soothingly, which somehow made him more menacing. If a viper could speak it would have sounded very much like Lenny ‘The Skull’ Orvieto.
‘So . . .’ he said to the still-dazed Blotto, ‘I hear you want to get in touch with the Mafia?’
‘Good ticket,’ said Blotto blearily.
‘I do not like it.’
‘Do not like what?’
‘The use of the term “Mafia” in relation to myself.’
‘Oh?’
‘I prefer the expression “Cosa Nostra”.’
‘Tickey-Tockey.’ Blotto nodded sagely, then asked, ‘What does that mean?’
‘In Italian? It means “our thing”.’
‘And what actually is your “thing”?’
‘The Cosa Nostra’, Lenny replied smoothly, ‘is a charitable organisation set up to look to the welfare of immigrants from Italy
when they arrive in the United States.’
Blotto could have sworn he heard stifled snorts of laughter from the two Mediterranean heavies behind him.
‘And you look after these Italian boddoes by coffinating people who threaten them?’ he asked in a combative manner.
At this suggestion, the thin skin on the bald man’s forehead wrinkled as if in pain. ‘Please . . . where do you get these ideas from? The Cosa Nostra is a peaceful institution, financed solely by charitable donations. We are not associated with any criminal activity.’
Blotto searched Orvieto’s expression for signs of irony, but could see none. So,’ he asked, ‘the Cosa Nostra is different hand of bananas from the Mafia?’
‘Very much so. That is why I was hurt when you used the expression “Mafia”.’
Blotto was abjectly apologetic. ‘Sorry, I really do seem to have got the wrong end of the sink plunger here.’
‘I think you have.’
‘So the Cosa Nostra doesn’t demand protection money from poor greengages trying to run legitimate businesses?’
‘No.’
‘It doesn’t control the drugs trade?’
‘No.’
‘And it doesn’t go around with machine-guns coffinating people who disagree with it?’
‘No.’ Lenny ‘The Skull’ Orvieto laughed at the incongruity of the suggestion. Behind him Blotto heard echoing laughter from the two thugs. ‘As I say, we are a peaceful organisation. We deplore the use of violence in any situation.’
‘Well, I’ll be jugged like a hare . . .’ Still suffering from the blow to the back of his head, Blotto’s brain was working even slower than usual, but he did manage to spot an inconsistency in what the man opposite had just said. ‘Just a hiccup, though . . . If you deplore the use of violence in any situation,’ Blotto began slowly, ‘why did your blunderthugs biff me over the bonce with a loaded sock?’
‘Ah.’ Lenny spread his hands wide in a gesture of apology. ‘I’m afraid Giovanni and Giuseppe do sometimes get a little carried away and forget the principles of peace and altruism that are the basis of our Cosa Nostra beliefs.’
