The Mortdecai Trilogy

by Bonfiglioli, Kyril

  He started getting incoherent again and kept beginning sentences with the words ‘Do you realize …’ and not finishing them, so I set my face against him.

  ‘Pull yourself together,’ I told him sternly, pressing a pound note into his hand. As I drove away I caught a glimpse of him in the driving mirror; he was jumping up and down on something. Too emotional by half, some of these diplomatic chaps. He’d be no good in Moscow, they’d have him compromised in a trice.

  I found my hotel and handed over the Rolls to an able-looking brownish chap in the garage: he had a witty twinkle in his eye, I took to him instantly. We agreed that he could use only the duster on the coachwork and nothing else: Mr Spinoza would have haunted me if I’d let his Special Secret Wax be scoured with detergents or ossified with silicones. Then I rode the elevator – as they say over there, did you know? – up to the reception desk (my bags with me) and so by easy stages to a well-appointed suite with a lavatory worthy of the goddess Cloaca herself. Like a true-born Englishman I turned the ridiculous air conditioning off and threw open the windows.

  Fifteen minutes later I turned the air conditioning back on and had to telephone the desk to send someone up to close the windows for me, oh the shame of it.

  Later on they sent me up some sandwiches which I didn’t much like.

  Later still I read myself to sleep with one half-comprehended paragraph.

  9

  Does he stand stock-still henceforth? Or proceed

  Dizzily, yet with course straightforward still,

  Down-trampling vulgar hindrance? – as the reed

  Is crushed beneath its tramp when that blind will

  Hatched in some old-world beast’s brain bids it speed

  Where the sun wants brute-presence to fulfil

  Life’s purpose in a new far zone, ere ice

  Enwomb the pasture-track its fortalice.

  The Two Poets of Croisic

  Do you know, they brought me a cup of tea in the morning – and jolly good tea it was too. If I could remember the name of the hotel I’d tell you.

  Then they gave me one of those delicious elaborate American breakfasts, all sweet bacon and hotcakes and syrup and I didn’t like it really.

  I rode the elevator (!) down to the garage to inquire after the Rolls which had, it seemed, passed a comfortable night. The brownish chap hadn’t been able to resist washing the windows but only with soap and water, he swore, so I pardoned him and gave him of my plenty. Ten minutes later I was in an enormous taxi-cab, an air-conditioned one, hired for the day for fifty dollars; it seems an awful lot, I know, but money’s worth awfully little over there, you’d be surprised. It’s because there’s so much of it, you see.

  The driver’s name seemed to be Bud and somehow he’d got the notion that mine was Mac. I explained amicably that it was, in fact, Charlie, but he replied:

  ‘Yeah? Well, that’s very nice, Mac.’

  I didn’t mind after a while – I mean, when in Rome, eh? – and soon he was driving me round the sights of Washington, sparing nothing. It is a surprisingly splendid and graceful city, although built largely of a grotty kind of limestone; I loved every minute. The great heat was tempered by an agreeable little breeze which whipped the girls’ cotton frocks about in the most pleasing way. How is it that American girls all contrive to have such appetizing legs; round, smooth, sturdily slender? If it comes to that, how is it that they all have such amazing tits? Bigger, perhaps, than you and I like them, but nonetheless delicious. When we stopped for a traffic light, a particularly well-nourished young person crossed in front of us, her stupendous mammaries jouncing up and down quite four inches at each step.

  ‘My word, Bud,’ I said to Bud, ‘what an entrancing creature, to be sure!’

  ‘Ya mean de dame wit de big knockers? Nah. In bed, they’d kinda spread out like a coupla fried eggs, king-size.’

  The thought made me feel quite faint. He went on to give me a summary of his personal tastes in these matters, which I found fascinating but bizarre to a degree.

  It has been suggested, with some truth, that Van Dyck’s work when he was at Genoa constitutes the best group of portraits in the world. I came round to this point of view myself in the National Gallery at Washington: until you have seen their Clelia Cattaneo you can scarcely claim to have seen anything. I stayed an hour only in the Gallery: you can’t absorb much art of that richness at one sitting, and I’d really only intended to look at one particular Giorgione. Had I but time as this fell sergeant Death is swift in his arrest, I could have unfolded a tale or two about it, but that shot is no longer on the board.

  Emerging, already half drunk on injudiciously mixed art, I directed Bud to drive me to a typical lower-middle-class saloon for a cold beer and a bite of luncheon.

  At the entrance Bud looked at me dubiously, up and down, and suggested that we try somewhere ‘classier’.

  ‘Nonsense, my dear Bud,’ I cried staunchly, ‘this is the normal, sober garb or kit of an English gentleman of fashion about to pay a call on his country’s Envoy in partibus and I am sure it is well-known to these honest Washington folk. In Sir Toby’s valiant words: “These clothes are good enough to drink in, and so be these boots, too.” Lead on.’

  He shrugged, in the expressive way these chaps have, and led duly on. He was very big and strong-looking but people nevertheless stared a little – he was dressed a bit informally perhaps, as cabbies often are, while I, as I have said, was correctly clothed as for interviewing ambassadors, merchant bankers and other grandees. In England no one would have remarked the contrast between us but they have no idea of democracy in America. Odd, that.

  We ate in a sort of stall or booth, rather like the old-fashioned London chop house but flimsier. My steak was quite lovely but embarrassingly large: it seemed to be a cross-section through an ox. I had a salad with mine but Bud ordered a potato – such a potato; a prodigious tuber bred, he told me, on the plains of Idaho. I suppose I left about ten ounces of my steak and Bud quite coolly told the waiter (his name was Mac, too) to wrap it up for his dog and the waiter didn’t even flicker although they both knew quite well that it would constitute Mrs Bud’s supper that night. Steak is fearfully dear in Washington, as I daresay you know.

  Bud may have licked me at the steak eating but I had him whipped at the liquor drinking. They have something there called, obscurely, High Balls, which we moved on to after our beer; he was no match for me at that game, quite outclassed. He eyed me, in fact, with a new respect. I believe I asked him to come and stay with me in London at one stage; at least I know I meant to.

  As we left the bar a rather droll-looking citizen swayed across my path and asked, ‘Whaddaya, some kinova nut or sumpn?’ to which I replied in a matey phrase which I had heard Bud use to a fellow cabbie earlier in the day, as follows:

  ‘Ah, go blow it out your ass!’ (A man hath joy by the answer of his mouth; and a word spoken in due season, how good it is! Prov. XV: 23.)

  To my dismay and puzzlement, the drunk chap took exception, for he hit me very hard in the face, making my nose bleed freely down my shirt. Vexed at this, I fear I retaliated.

  When I was in one of those joke-and-dagger units in the war – yes, the Second World War, chicks – I went on one of those unarmed combat courses and, do you know, I was frightfully good at it, though you wouldn’t think it to look at me.

  I popped the heel of my hand under his nose – so much better than a punch – then toed him hard in the cobblers and, as he quite understandably doubled up, drove my knee into what was left of his poor face. He sort of fell down, not unnaturally in the circumstances, and as a precaution I stamped on each of his hands as I stepped over him. Well, he did hit me first, you know, as I’m sure he’d be the first to admit. Bud, enormously impressed, hustled me outside while the saloon behind us applauded – pit, circle and gallery. An unpopular bloke, no doubt. I had very little trouble getting into the cab, although the driver’s seat had changed sides again.

 
All the beautiful young men at the Embassy hated me on sight, nasty little cupcakes, but they passed me through to the Ambassador with no more delay than was necessary to make them feel important. The Ambassador received me in his shirt sleeves, if you’ll believe it, and he, too, didn’t seem to fancy me much. He accepted my courtly, old-world salutations with what I can only describe as a honk.

  Now, for most practical purposes the ordinary consumer can divide Ambassadors up into two classes: the thin ones who tend to be suave, well-bred, affable; and the fleshier chaps who are none of these things. His present Excellency definitely fell into the latter grade: his ample mush was pleated with fat, wormed with the great pox and so besprent with whelks, bubukles and burst capillaries that it seemed like a contour map of the Trossachs. His great plum-coloured gobbler hung slack and he sprayed one when he spoke. I couldn’t find it in my heart to love him but, poor chap, he was probably a Labour appointment: his corridors of power led only to the Gents.

  ‘I won’t beat about the bush, Mortdecai,’ he honked, ‘you are clearly an awful man. Here we are, trying to establish an image of a white-hot technological Britain, ready to compete on modern terms with any jet-age country in the world and here you are, walking about Washington in a sort of Bertie Wooster outfit as though you were something the Tourist Board had dreamed up to advertise Ye Olde Brytysshe Raylewayes.’

  ‘I say,’ I said, ‘you pronounced that last bit marvellously.’

  ‘Moreover,’ he ground on, ‘your ridiculous bowler is dented, your absurd umbrella bent, your shirt covered with blood and you have a black eye.’

  ‘You should see the other feller?’ I chirrupped brightly, but it didn’t go down a bit well. He was in his stride now.

  ‘The fact that you are quite evidently as drunk as a fiddler’s bitch in no way excuses a man of your age’ – a nasty one, that – ‘looking and behaving like a fugitive from a home for alcoholic music-hall artistes. I know little of why you are here and I wish to know nothing. I have been asked to assist you if possible, but I have not been instructed to do so: you may assume that I shall not. The only advice I offer is that you do not apply to this Embassy for help if and when you outrage the laws of the United States, for I shall unhesitatingly disown you and recommend imprisonment and deportation. If you turn right when you leave this room you will see the Chancery, where you will be given a receipt for your Silver Greyhound and a temporary civil passport in exchange for your Diplomatic one, which should never have been issued. Good day, Mr Mortdecai.’

  With that, he started grimly signing letters or whatever it is that Ambassadors grimly sign when they want you to leave. I considered being horribly sick on his desk but feared that he might declare me a Distressed British Subject there and then, so I simply left the room in a marked manner and stayed not upon the order of my going. But I turned left as I went out of the room, which took me into a typists’ pool, through which I strolled debonairly, twirling my brolly and whistling a few staves of ‘Show Us Your Knickers, Elsie.’

  I found Bud asleep in the parking lot and he drove me to a nearby saloon, in fact to more than one. I remember one particular place where a portly young woman took off her clothes to music, while dancing on the bar counter within reach of my hand. I had never seen an ecdysiast before; toward the end she was wearing nothing but seven beads, four of them sweat. I think that was the place we were chucked out of.

  I know I went to bed but I must admit the details are a bit fuzzy: I’m not sure I even brushed my teeth.

  10

  Then we began to ride. My soul

  Smoothed itself out, a long-cramped scroll

  Freshening and fluttering in the wind.

  Past hopes already lay behind.

  The Last Ride Together

  I awoke feeling positively chipper but the feeling didn’t last. By the time I had dressed and packed I was being shaken with hangover like a rat in the grip of a keen but inexperienced terrier. I made it down to the hotel bar by easy stages (take the slow lift, never the express one) and the barman had me diagnosed and treated in no time at all. Your actual hangover, he explained, is no more than a withdrawal syndrome; halt the withdrawal by injecting more of what is withdrawing and the syndrome vanishes with a rustle of black wings. It seemed to make good sense. His prescription was simply Scotch and branch water – he swore a great oath that the branch water was freighted in fresh and fresh each morning from the Appalachian mountains, would you believe it? I tipped him with no niggardly hand.

  Well medicated, but by no means potted, I paid my bill at the desk, collected a spotless Silver Ghost from a reluctant brownish chap and drove carefully away in the general direction of New Mexico. Posterity will want to know that I was wearing my Complete American Disguise: a cream tussore suit, sunglasses and a cocoa-coloured straw hat with a burnt-orange ribbon. The effect was pretty sexy, I don’t mind telling you. Mr Abercrombie would have bitten Mr Fitch if he’d seen it and the Tailor and Cutter would have been moved to tears.

  Curiously, I was afraid again. I felt obscurely that this land – ‘where law and custom alike are based on the dreams of spinsters’ – was nevertheless a land where I might well get hurt if I were not careful – or even if I were careful.

  By the time that I was quite clear of the city’s unlovely faubourgs and purlieus I needed petrol: the Silver Ghost is a lovely car but its best friend would have to admit that its m.’s per g. are few. I selected a petrol station that looked as though it could use the business and drew up. This was near a place called Charlottesville on the edge of the Shenandoah National Park. The attendant was standing with his back to me, arms akimbo, saying, ‘Howd’ya like that guy?’ and staring after a large powder-blue car which was vanishing at great speed down the road. He didn’t realize my presence until I switched off the engine, then he double-took the Rolls in the most gratifying way, whispering ‘shee-it!’ again and again. (I was to hear enough admiring ‘shee-its’ in the next few days to refertilize the entire Oklahoma dust bowl.) He giggled like a virgin as he dipped the nozzle into the petrol tank and sped me on my way with one last dungy praise spattering my ears. I wondered vaguely what the powder-blue car had done to earn his disapproval.

  I got a little lost after that, but an hour later I hit Interstate Highway 81 at Lexington and made excellent time down through Virginia. Once over the State line into Tennessee I called it quits for the day and booked in at a Genuine Log Kabins Motel. The yellow-haired, slack-mouthed, fat-arsed landlady wiggled her surplus flesh at me in the most revolting way: she looked about as hard to get as a haircut and at about the same price. Everything in my Kabin was screwed to the floor: the landlady told me that newlyweds often furnish their entire apartments with stuff they steal from motels, they spend the whole night unscrewing things, she told me with a coy giggle, indicating that she could think of better ways of passing the time. Like being screwed to the floor, I dare say.

  The sheets were bright red. ‘By golly,’ I told them, ‘I’d blush too, if I were you.’

  For supper I had some Old Fashioned Mountain Boys’ Corned Beef Hash; you’d think it would be delicious in Tennessee but it wasn’t, you know; not a patch on Jock’s. I drank some of my store of Red Hackle De Luxe and went to sleep instantly – you’d never have unscrewed me.

  You can’t get an early morning cup of tea in an American motel, not even for ready money; I wished I had brought a portable apparatus along. You’ve no idea how hard it is to get dressed without a cheering cup inside you. I hobbled to the restaurant and drank a whole pot of their coffee, which was excellent and nerved me to try the sweet Canadian bacon and hot cakes. Not at all bad, really. I noticed that the owner of the powder-blue car – or one very like it – had selected the same motel, but I didn’t see him, or her. I idly wondered whether they’d done much unscrewing. For my part, I checked out with a clear conscience, I hadn’t stolen anything for days.

  I hardly got lost at all that morning. I was on US 40 in not much more than
an hour and sailed clear across Tennessee on it, wonderful scenery. I had lunch in Nashville: spareribs and spoon bread and the finest jukebox I ever saw: it was a privilege to sit in front of it. Dazed with hot pork and decibels I nearly stepped under the wheels of a powder-blue car as I stepped off the sidewalk (pavement). Now, at the last count I’m sure there were probably half a million powder-blue cars in the United States, but when pedestrians walk under their wheels American drivers usually turn a bit powder-blue themselves and lean out and curse you roundly, calling you ‘Buster’ if you happen to be at all portly. This one did not: he looked through me and drove on, a thick-set, jowly chap rather like my Mr Braun, the crown prince of fish and chips, but hatted and sunglassed to the point of anonymity.

  I dismissed the incident from my mind until I reached the outskirts of Memphis late that evening, when I was overtaken by just such a car driven by just such a chap.

  They brought me coffee in my hotel room that night and a bottle of branch water for my Scotch; I locked the door and put in a call to Mr Krampf. American telephonists are wonderful, you just tell them the name and address of the chap you want to talk to and they do the rest. Krampf sounded a bit tight but very friendly; there was a lot of noise in the background which suggested that he had guests with him who were also a bit tight. I told him that I was on schedule, making no reference to his departure from our original plan.

  ‘Well, that’s just dandy,’ he bellowed. ‘Just dandy.’ He said it a few times more, he’s like that.