The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery

by Kyril Bonfiglioli

  No, if you want an opinion on Jesuit matters, you do not pop over to the nearest Jesuit, you pop over to the nearest Dominican, which is precisely where I was popping. The lay-brother who squinted at me through the grille didn’t at all like the look of me until I opened my mackintosh and gave him a flash of my dinner-jacket, saying that I was an old pupil of Brother Lucas. Then he really hated me, for dinner-jackets are Worldly, you see, and Br Lucas is a world-wide authority on medieval heraldry, revered by one and all, and a notorious pain in the arse. The lay-brother admitted that Vespers were over and I made my way to Br Lucas’s cell, which was pretty cosy as cells go. He didn’t have to call me ‘Mr er ah um;’ Bros call you ‘my son’ if they can’t remember your name.

  ‘Fr,’ I said courteously (for you don’t call them ‘Br’ unless you’re a Br yourself), ‘I derived so much pleasure and profit from your seminar on the Heraldry of Augmentations in er ah um that I feel emboldened to draw upon your learning in two slight matters.’

  ‘Go on, my son,’ he murmured, ignoring the bottle of vodka which had slipped from my pocket onto his priedieu. (Well they are a mendicant order, aren’t they; they’re forbidden to indulge in stinking pride.) I said that my first problem concerned the ‘tierced in pairle reversed’ of the von Haldermanstettens: a famous heraldic crux which I hoped would give him a happy ten minutes of pedantry. He dried up after six minutes so I tickled him up by asking wilily why or and argent were juxtaposed in those arms, contrary to all the laws of blazonry. He revived, expounded lavishly. I snoozed with my eyes open. So can snakes. Then I hit him with the other question.

  ‘I was thinking,’ I said coyly, ‘of writing a little piece for a popular magazine about the difficult task H.H. Pope Pius XII had when it looked as though the Axis powers were certain to win World War II.’ His eyelids drooped sleepily. When a Dominican’s eyes droop sleepily it means that the Dominican is very wide awake indeed; even I know that.

  ‘To be frank, Fr,’ I went on awkwardly, ‘the sort of fee I’m offered by the magazine does not warrant my doing a lot of research, you understand, and I’m told that, in fact, all the relevant documents were published in 1966.’ He made a fat, happy noise, like a Pursuivant on a bend sinister.

  ‘Edited by the Jesuits?’ I murmured delicately.

  ‘ “Edited” is an excellent word,’ he murmured back. I cleared my throat.

  ‘Would you advise me to study this collection? In particular, would I find in it all the Polish diplomatic memoranda to the Vatican concerning, well, for instance, liquidation of Jews?’ He seemed to have fallen asleep. When Dominicans seem to have fallen asleep, even the hardiest Jesuit climbs the nearest tree and pulls it up after him. I waited, my hands folded in my lap to conceal the fact that I had crossed a pair of fingers.

  ‘Tell me,’ he murmured drowsily, ‘what does Flavius Josephus, that meticulous gossip-writer, tell us about Our Saviour?’

  ‘Why, nothing,’ I said. ‘It is a puzzling omission.’ He nodded.

  ‘And what does the New Testament tell us about Our Saviour’s life from puberty until His early thirties?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said again, puzzledly.

  ‘And what, in the Sherlock Holmes story of Silver Blaze, was the significance of the dog that barked in the night?’

  ‘The fact that the dog did not bark, Fr,’ I said patiently. ‘But now, touching on this matter of the 1966 Acts and Documents … oh, yes, sorry, your point is taken. The old argumentum a silentio, what? Oh dear. Quite. Yes. Well, thanks awfully, Fr. Goodnight.’

  He waved a benign brace of fingers at me and was piously approaching the prie-dieu before I was out of the door.

  Furiously was how I mused on my way back across the Quadrangle to the late Bronwen’s set. This musing may not have been what P.G. Wodehouse would have described as ‘all to the gravy’ but it was just gravid enough to give me sufficient sense to call at the Porter’s Lodge, stuff the Shorter Greek Lexicon into an envelope addressed to one Col. Blucher at the US Embassy, London, and tell Fred to post it in two days unless I collected it beforehand – in person and unaccompanied. I asked him to repeat these instructions and, when he had them word-perfect, I released the captive pound note which flirted coyly between my thumb and forefinger.

  How strange are the workings of Providence, to be sure! As I mounted the staircase to Bronwen’s rooms, not a single electric lightbulb was in action – but then, they never are in the better class of College, are they? Nonetheless, there was something not actually wrong, but sort of not quite right; I could feel it in me water, as Jock would say. I am zonk-prone, you see: people are forever zonking me with blunt instruments, sometimes on the base of the skull, sometimes behind the ear; they never tire of it, I know not why.

  Look, I think it is only fair I should set out for the innocent reader the limits and parameters of my idiocy and cowardice, those two heaven-sent gifts which help a chap survive into what I choose to call early middle age. Reader, are you over the age of eight? Good. Then you must at some time have found yourself embroiled in some frightful catastrophe, such as an outbreak of fire in a theatre. Being the shrewd and sturdy chap that you must be (having pursued my simple narrative so far), you will have observed that in such an imbroglio three distinct kinds of idiot can be seen by the naked eye.

  First; the staunch, officer-type idiot (usually sporting one of those absurd little moustaches which – unlike some I could name – are scarcely worth the mulching) who leaps onto a seat and in staunch, officer-type tones, commands everyone to keep calm, stay in their seats and on no account to panic.

  Second; the idiots who listen to him, keep calm, stay in their seats and get incinerated.

  Third; the idiots who, seeing no survival value in keeping calm and not panicking, rush to the exit and get trampled to death. Unless they happen to be among the leaders at the exit.

  I am happy to say that I belong to this third class of idiot and, being pretty fleet of foot for my age, have always contrived to be placed amongst the first three out of the exit. I’m not saying that this is altogether creditable, nor that my mummy would have approved, but I am alive, am I not? Perhaps this is a good thing. I’m sure my life insurance company thinks so although again, my mummy might raise an objection, not to mention an eyebrow.

  What I’m leading up to in my diffident sort of way is that when the Mortdecai second sense – no, I don’t mean sixth sense, I was never a braggart – when, I say, the M. second sense tells me that large, rough men are about to bonk me on my valuable skull, I tend prudently to trip away in an opposite direction and a rapid, silent fashion.

  So Mortdecai, the portly survivor, marched briskly past the oak – that’s Oxford for outer door – of Bronwen’s rooms and audibly began to turn the next turn and mount the next flight of the staircase. How clever I was, to be sure. The flat of an overdeveloped foot met my chest firmly and in no time I was on my back, precisely at Bronwen’s oak. Someone of great strength raised me courteously to my feet, supported my neck with the inside of his elbow and barked the word ‘Shoddop!’ in my left ear. With a delicate tact of which Jock himself would be proud, he persuaded me to hand over my keys.

  XIV

  Dead man’s hand

  Wherewithall, unto the heart’s forest he flies,

  Leaving his enterprise with pain and cry;

  And there he hides, and does not appear.

  I need hardly say that I was not quite so deeply slumberous as I chose to pretend, but contrived to lie doggo while my assailants, who were two in number, rummaged or ‘frisked’ my person. This rummaging or frisking was superficial, you might say, rather than intimate; the rummagers were evidently looking for something too large to be tucked away in some nook or cranny of my personal plumbing. Something readily found: a pistol, perhaps, or – God forbid – a book.

  They slid my better wallet (sealskin) out of the inside breast pocket of my costly raiment but I was drowsily confident that they would find nothing in it except for
a business card or two, an old photograph of Ingrid Bergman, an out-of-date Diner’s Club card and the £10 which we all carry these days, don’t we, so that the muggers can dash off to ‘make a connection’ and get their fix without wasting precious time kicking you to death. One likes these little transactions to be carried out with a maximum of civility and a minimum of blood or faeces, eh?

  If these assailants had been cleverer they would have awakened me and asked where the other wallet was – even a CIA man would have known that there had to be another. Or at least they could have lent a little colour to their assault by nicking the tenner – I mean, you and I would have, wouldn’t we? But no; when I came to my full senses I found the contents of the wallet intact. Which is more than I can say for Bronwen’s set.

  Even Jock would have been alarmed – having failed to derive any satisfaction from my person, as it were, my new friends appeared to have uprooted Bronwen’s African violets, smashed to smithereens her wireless and ransacked her record collection – a suprisingly jazzy assortment for a hag such as Bronwen (but one never can tell with these baggy-clothed, saggy-boobed academic women, a fact I once had the unexpected pleasure of discovering in the stacks of the Bodleian a fair few years ago). Most alarmingly, the rooms were strewn with my quality bespoke suitings. Framed prints, all rather predictably Ashmolean and Tate Gallery posters of the Pre-Raphaelites, had been hoisted off walls and tossed on the floor. Only Bronwen’s books were of any potential value and then only to an antiquarian bookseller or bibliophile. Most of them were now radically abridged, if you know what I mean: they had been flung across the study with great zeal and some clever cretin/inbred must have taken a surprisingly long time to ascertain that ripping up books was not a particularly effective method of finding whatever it might be that they were hoping to find.

  The only thing they had left undisturbed was that damned nuisance of a pink piggy-wig. I suppose even the Shoddopsky twins had their limits.

  As I surveyed the wreckage of a once orderly, if rather dull, set, I felt my head begin to spin far more dramatically than after I’d imbibed several bowls of Armagnac chased down with a late-night bucket’s worth of inferior whisky. And knowing that I could not secure one of Jock’s famed emergency kits, I began to feel the floor slipping away again as I lurched rather inelegantly onto the rummaged bedclothes that littered the lumpy bed.

  When I next woke, it was a rather bitter and mournful Mortdecai who found that he had just spent an uncomfortable night curled up next to that odious pig-thing. The Mortdecai brain-pan still reeled and throbbed and there was little I could do to relieve it but sedate myself with aspirin and regular medicinal shots of whisky. I decided (or rather, my health decided for me) that it was best not to go out at all that day.

  Turner, uncharacteristically shocked by the state of the rooms and the uncharacteristically large tip I proffered, set to work repairing the damage and restoring order in a fashion not dissimilar to that Mrs Spon might have employed – perhaps I’d underestimated the scout’s abilities after all. It was he, note, who brought me hot food in covered dishes from the college dining room and even managed to find some remotely palatable steak and kidney pie with mashed potatoes, a bottle of passable Claret, a large chunk of exceptionally well matured Cheddar and some quite decent port, though I can’t imagine where – or how – in such a place as Scone he might have come by it.

  The following morning I was relieved to find that the pain in my skull had abated almost completely. I made an uncharacteristically early sortie to the Buttery and returned to my rooms with intent to plan the day before me. It cannot have been long afterwards that the tinkle of the phone roused me from what I must confess was something of a zizz.

  ‘Charlie?’ It was Tom.

  ‘Tom,’ I said, choosing my words carefully.

  ‘Something of a problem, old chap, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Concerning, ah, your students’ assignments?’ I enquired elaborately, raising a telephonic eyebrow.

  Tom paused for an instant, clearly a little confused; there followed the inaudible sound of a penny dropping before he continued: ‘Indeed, yes. Seven of them have, er, got full marks, I’m pleased to report, but one of them, er, hasn’t done his essay at all. I popped round to his rooms, and no-one’s seen him since we had our last, um, tutorial. Most odd – he was something of a star pupil, you understand. Chap by the name of Stephanovich.’

  The dots in my head began to connect and I said hurriedly. ‘I think we’d better discuss this in person – are you in for the next half-hour or so?’

  ‘Yes, of course. I say, Charlie, you wouldn’t care to—’

  ‘Smashing. I’ll be round shortly.’ I replaced the receiver with a distinct thunk.

  I didn’t go round to All Souls immediately, however. There was – need I say? – a question which I had to put to Professor Weiss. An urgent question. I donned my gown – for it was raining a little – and scurried across the Quad in a dignified way, like a don pursued by a female reporter.

  You probably know that a set of rooms at Oxford has two outer doors. The inner outer door is a sort of door, so to say, used merely as a door; you know, it’s useful to have something to open and shut as you go in and out. The outer outer door is called an ‘oak’ and it’s much more important: if you close it you are said to have ‘sported your oak’ and that means you are studying away at Greek epigraphy or a Cypriot lift-boy and must not be disturbed for anything less than an atom bomb on Cambridge.

  Professor Weiss’s oak was not sported. Because he was senior to me I rapped at his inner outer door and counted to ten before opening it.

  His lovely antique Persian carpet was in a disgraceful state: they’re never the same after being drenched with a couple of gallons of blood, ask any good dry-cleaner. Prof. Weiss looked more senior to me than when I’d last seen him; professors are never the same in such circumstances either.

  I am a slave to most of the vices but even my mother would not have accused me of understatement, so I shall not say that his throat had been cut. I mean, a throat sort of starts at the front collar-stud and only goes back an inch or so, wouldn’t you say? On the other hand, it would be extravagant to say that his head had been cut off, because there was quite a bit of gristle and so forth holding it on to the rest of him. I didn’t feel his pulse; even a policeman would have guessed that the poor gentleman hadn’t cut himself while shaving.

  ‘DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING’ was what I remembered from the trashy thrillers I read in my youth, so I only threw a couple of books into the blood and used them as stepping stones while I searched Prof. Weiss’s pockets. The contents of his wallet were of no interest: reader’s cards to some obscure, scholarly libraries, the photograph of an aunt-like person and enough money to buy luncheon at a Greek restaurant. One of his keys opened a steel filing cabinet, which looked more promising. I found his daybook in the top drawer; it contained an entry which read: ‘C. Mortdecai called; insolent pup; prying into B.F.’s death; shewed me regrettable manuscript of hers. People should leave such things alone.’

  Like many a practised coward, whenever I find that I have lifted something too heavy – or too hot – I tend to squeal for help. I’m that sort of a chap. On this occasion I resorted to Jesus.

  Jesus College is one of those frightful places in Turl Street, Oxford (England) and is a sort of enclave of the Principality of Wales – indeed, it is said that if you stand in the Quadrangle of Jesus and bellow ‘MR JONES!’ fifty grimy windows will open and fifty melodious voices will reply, ‘Yes, boyo?’

  I did not bellow, for my friend there is a Fellow of that College. (He was once a Balliol man but has fallen upon evil times, you understand.) In any case, his name is not Jones but something else which I cannot spell. He was in his rooms. I said that I needed to use his telephone importantly and he twigged in a second, being Welsh, you see – devious, devious. He made a tactful exit, saying only that he hoped I would join him for a beer in the Common Room when I had fin
ished. I shuddered, for the beer in Jesus College (Oxford) is very nearly as foul as in Jesus College (Cambridge). Never trust a race which has not invented a national drink of its own, take my word for it. (I refer to the Welsh, of course, but you may apply it to Cambridge men if you care to.)

  The American Embassy was still at 24 Grosvenor Square (although the Arabs probably own the freehold now) and the telephone number was still as I remembered it and one was still clicked and tinkled through the PXs from one furry-voiced secretary to another until one was privileged to speak to the highest-paid, most wild-mink-voiced one of all. I remembered her from a few years back; well, at least I remembered her fantastic tits, the ultimate status symbol for secretary owners. She remembered me all right, too, but I wasn’t going to get any mileage out of that, for she was one of those rare people who do not like me. She made me spell my name three times, then looked me straight in the eye – yes, down the telephone – and assured me that there was no such person as Colonel Blucher and yes, she was his Confidential PA but she had never heard of him and gosh she was sorry but there was a call coming through on the hotline from Afghanistan and goodbyeeee. I said something to her which no gentleman should have known how to pronounce. She said, ‘You’re very welcome,’ and we both put our instruments down. Telephones, you understand.