‘You craven wretch,’ I sneered. Inexplicably, I then fell asleep for another hour. Nature knows, you know.
It was still only nine o’clock when I set off on the last leg of my journey, feeling old and dirty and incapable. You probably know the feeling if you are over eighteen.
It is hard to drive in a cringing position but nevertheless I got the Rolls into its stride and strode across the Staked Plains at a good mile-munching pace. The Staked Plains are not really very exciting, when you’ve seen one Staked Plain you’ve seen them all. I particularly don’t want to tell you where Krampf’s rancho is – perhaps was now – but I don’t mind admitting that it lay two hundred straightish miles from my overnight bivouac and between the Sacramento Mountains and the Rio Hondo. Just names on a map that morning, the poetry all gone. There’s nothing like gunfire to drive the glamour from words. I soon became tired of the creosote bushes, desert willows and screwbeams, not to mention the eternal, giant cacti, so different from the ones Mrs Spon grows in her conservatoilette.
I entered New Mexico at noon, still unmolested, still feeling old and dirty. At Lovington (named after old Oliver Loving who blazed the fearful Goodnight-Loving trail in ’66 and died along it of arrow wounds the following year) I had a bath, a shave, a change of raiment and a dish of Huevos ‘Ojos de Comanchero,’ which sounded lovely. In reality it was the most terrifying sight I had seen to date: two fried eggs decorated with ketchup, Tabasco and chopped chillis in the semblance of a pair of bloodshot eyes – I would as soon have eaten my own leg. I waved the grimly thing away; Old Oklahoma Cattlemen are one thing but these were merely tetrous. I tried, instead, ‘Chilli ’n’ Franks’ which proved to be rather good, just like chilli con carne but with dear little salty bangers instead of the ground meat. While I ate, various admiring peons were handwashing the Rolls, with soap ’n’ water only, of course.
With a bare hundred miles to go, clean, dapper and now only middle-aged again, I pointed the Rolls’ nose toward the Ranch of the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin, where I would lay down my pilgrim’s scrip of care, my cockle-hat of fear and my staff of illegality; where, moreover, I would take delivery of a great deal of money and perhaps kill a Krampf. Or perhaps not. I had left England prepared to keep my part of the bargain with Martland, but I had thought a great deal during those hundreds of remorseless American miles and had evolved certain arguments against keeping faith with him. (We had never been friends at school after all, for he was the house tart, and known to one and all as ‘Shagnasty’: not for nothing does a boy acquire such a name.)
I had also bought a denser pair of sunglasses; my old ones were calculated for the lemonade-like rays of the English sun and were no proof against the brutal onslaught of the desert light. Even the shadows, razor edged, purple and green, were painful to look at. I drove with all windows shut and the side blinds drawn across: the inside of the Rolls was like an ill-regulated sauna bath but this was better than letting in the dry, scorching fury of the air outside. I was soon sitting in a distressful swamp of sweat and my old wound started to trouble me; chilli ’n’ trepidation were playing the devil with my small intestines and my borborigmus was often louder than the engine of the Rolls, which loped on undeterred, quietly guzzling its pint of petrol per statute mile.
By mid-afternoon I was alarmed to notice that ! had stopped sweating and had started talking to myself – and was listening. It was becoming difficult to distinguish the road amongst the writhing pools of heat-haze and I could not tell whether the scraggy-feathered road-runners were under my wheels or a furlong ahead of me.
Half an hour later I was on a dirt road under a spur of the Sacramento range, lost. I stopped to consult the map and found myself listening to the enormous silence – ‘that silence where the birds are dead yet something singeth like a bird’.
From somewhere above me a shot was fired, but there was no sound of a bullet passing and I had no intention of cringing twice in one day. Moreover, there was no mistaking the nature of the firearm, it was the wholesome bark, flattened by the heavy air, of a large calibre pistol loaded with black powder. High on the ridge above me was a horseman waving a broad brimmed hat and already starting to descend with casual mastery of – and disregard for – his mount. Her mount, as it turned out, and what a mount. ¡Que caballo! I knew what it was immediately, although I had never before seen the true bayo naranjado – the vivid orange dun with a pure white mane and tail. It was entire – no one, surely, could geld a horse like that – and came down the ragged rock slope as though it were Newmarket Heath. The low-horned, double-girthed Texas saddle was enriched with silver conchos over intricately tooled and inlaid leathers and the girl herself was dressed like a museum exhibit of Old Texas: low-crowned black Stetson with rattler band and woven-hair storm-strap, bandana with the ends falling almost to the waist, brown Levi’s tucked into unbelievable Justin boots which were themselves tucked into antique silver Spanish stirrups and garnished with Kelly spurs fashioned, apparently, of gold.
She arrived at the foot of the slope in a small avalanche, reins slack, welded to her saddle with fierce thighs, and the stallion took the storm ditch as though it was not there, landing dramatically beside the Rolls in a spatter of stones.
I wound a window down and peered out with a polite expression. I was met with a spray of cheesy foam from the horse’s mouth; it showed me some of its huge yellow teeth and offered to bite my face off, so I wound the window up again. The girl was inspecting the Rolls; as her horse moved forward past the window I found myself staring at a beautiful gunbelt of Mexican work with buscadero holsters, containing a pair of pristine Dragoon-pattern Colts, the paper-cartridge model of the 1840s, with grips by Louis Comfort Tiffany – unmistakable – dating from perhaps twenty years later. She wore them correctly for the Southwest – butts forward, as though for the flashy Border cross-draw or the cavalry twist (much more sensible), and they were not tied down, of course – this was no Hollywood mock-up but a perfect historical reconstruction. (Try mounting or even trotting with pistols in open holsters tied down to your thighs.) From the saddle scabbard protruded, as was only fitting, the butt of a One-in-One-Thousand Winchester repeater.
From hat to horseshoes she must have been worth a fortune as she sat – it gave me a new vision of the uses of wealth – and that was not counting her splendid person, which looked even more valuable. I am not, as you may have guessed, especially keen on commonplace sex, especially with women, but this vision unequivocally stirred my soggy flesh. The silk shirt was pasted to her perfect form with delicate sweat, the Levi’s made no bones about her pelvic delights. She had the perfect round hard bottom of the horsewoman but not the beamy breadth of the girl who started to ride too young.
I emerged from the other side of the car and addressed her across the bonnet – I am just enough of a horseman never to try to make friends with tired stallions on hot days.
‘Good afternoon,’ I said, by way of a talking point.
She looked me up and down. I sucked in my tummy. My face was as blank as I could make it but she knew, she knew. They know, you know.
‘Hi,’ she said. It left me gasping for air.
‘Can you by any chance direct me to the Rancho de los Siete Dolores?’ I asked.
Her bee-stung lips parted, the little white teeth opened a fraction; perhaps it was a sort of smile.
‘What is the old auto worth?’ she asked.
‘I’m afraid it’s not for sale, really.’
‘You are stupid. Also overweight. But cute.’ There was a hint of a foreign accent in her voice, but it was not Mexican. Vienna perhaps, perhaps Buda. I asked the way again. She raised the handle of her beautiful quirt to her eyes and scanned the Western horizon. It was one of those quirts with a bit of pierced horn let into the handle: more useful than a telescope in that climate. I began, for the first time, to understand Sucher-Masoch.
‘Go that way right acrosslots,’ she pointed, ‘the desert is no worse than the road. Follow the b
ones when you come to them.’
I tried to think of another talking point but something told me she was not much of a chatterbox – indeed, even as I searched for a way to detain her she had flicked the thong of her quirt under the stallion’s belly and was away into the shimmering jumble of baking rock. Well, you can’t win them all. ‘Lucky old saddle,’ I thought.
In twenty minutes I came upon the first of the bones she had spoken of: the bleached skeleton of a Texas Longhorn artistically disposed beside a faint track. Then another and another, until I reached a huge ranch gateway in the middle of nowhere. Its sunbleached crossbar supported a great polychromed Mexican carving of an agonized Madonna and a board hung below into which had been burned the rancho’s brand – two Spanish bits. I wondered whether there was a joke implied and decided that, if there was, it was not of Mr Krampf’s making.
Past the gate the trail was well-defined; the buffalo grass became richer with every furlong and I began to get glimpses of groups of horseflesh crowded under the cottonwoods – Morgans, Palominos, Appaloosas and I don’t know what-all. Occasional riders began to fall in casually behind and beside me: by the time I reached the huge, rambling hacienda itself I was escorted by quite a dozen charro-clad desperadoes, all pretending that I wasn’t there.
The house was astonishingly beautiful, all white columns and porticoes, the outside a maze of green lawns, fountains, patios, flowering agaves and yuccas. The door of a carport rolled itself up unbidden and I gentled the Rolls in, between a Bugatti and a Cord. When I emerged, bags in hand, my escort of bandits had vanished upon some unheard summons and only a small, impertinent boy was visible. He fluted something in Spanish, whisked my luggage away from me and indicated a shady patio, to which I made my way in as elegant a fashion as my tortured trousers would allow.
I sat down on a marble bench, stretched luxuriously and rested my grateful eyes on the statuary half-hidden in the green shade. One statue, more weather-worn than the others, proved to be an ancient and immobile old lady, hands folded in lap, gazing at me incuriously. I leaped to my feet and bowed – she was the kind of woman to whom people would always accord bows. She inclined her head a little. I fidgeted. Clearly, this must be Krampf’s mother.
‘Have I the honour of addressing Mrs Krampf?’ I asked at length.
‘No, Sir,’ she replied in the careful English of the well-taught foreigner, ‘you address the Countess Grettheim.’
‘Forgive me,’ I said, sincerely, for which of us, not being a Krampf, would care to be mistaken for one?
‘Are Mr and Mrs Krampf at home?’ I asked.
‘I could not say,’ she replied serenely. The subject was evidently closed. The silence stretched out beyond the point where I dared do anything about it. If the old lady’s mission in life was to prevent me feeling cosy, she was certainly in fine midseason form – ‘si extraordinairement distingueée’ as Mallarmé used to say, ‘quand je lui dis bonjour, je me fais toujours l’effet de lui dire “merde”’.
I looked at the statues again. There was an excellent copy of the Venus Callipygea, on whose cool marble buttocks my eyes lingered gratefully. Determined not to be flustered, I succeeded so well that my sun-sore eyelids began to droop.
‘Are you not thirsty?’ the old lady suddenly asked.
‘Eh? Oh, well, er –’
‘Then why do you not ring for a servant?’
She knew bloody well why I did not ring for a servant, the old bitch. I did ring for one then, though, and a strapping hussy appeared wearing one of those blouses – you know, the ones with a sort of drawstring or rip-cord – bearing a tall glass full of something delicious.
I inclined politely toward the Countess before taking the first sip. This, too, proved a mistake, for she gave me a basilisk stare as though I’d said, ‘Cheers, dears.’
It occurred to me that I should tell her my name, so I did and a certain limited thaw set in; clearly, I should have done this before.
‘I am Mr Krampf’s mother-in-law,’ she said suddenly and her toneless voice and impassive face somehow carried words of contempt for people named Krampf. And for people named Mortdecai, too, for that matter.
‘Indeed,’ I said, with just a hint of polite incredulity in my voice.
Nothing happened for some time except that I finished my drink and summoned the courage to ring for another. She already had me summed up as a low-life; I felt she might as well know me for a toper as well.
Later, a barefoot peon crept in and mumbled to her in thick Spanish, then crept out again. After a while she said, ‘My daughter is now in and wishes to see you,’ then closed her parchment eyelids with finality. I was dismissed. As I left the patio I distinctly heard her say, ‘You will have time to couple with her once before dinner, if you are quick.’ I stopped as though I had been shot in the back. C. Mortdecai is not often at a loss for words but a loss is what he was at then. Without opening her eyes she went on – ‘Her husband will not mind, he does not care to do it himself.’
There was still nothing in this for me. I let the words hang reverberating in the still air while I slunk away. A servant fielded me neatly as I entered the house and led me to a small tapestry-hung chamber on the first floor. I sank into the most sumptuous sofa you can imagine and tried to decide whether I was sunstruck or whether the old lady was the family loony.
You will not be surprised, percipient reader, to learn that when the tapestries parted the girl who entered the room was the girl I had seen on the stallion. I, however, was very surprised, for when I had last met Mrs Krampf – in London, two years before – she had been a villainous old boot wearing a ginger wig and weighing in at some sixteen stones. No one had told me that there was a later model.
Retrieving my eyes, which had been sticking out like chapel hat pegs, I started to scramble to my feet, making rather a nonsense of it what with my short legs and the unreasonably deep sofa. Upright at last, and rather cross, I saw that she was wearing what I suppose I shall have to describe as a Mocking Smile. Almost, one could imagine a red, red rose between her Pearly Teeth.
‘If you call me “amigo,”’ I snapped, ‘I shall scream.’ She raised an eyebrow shaped like a seagull’s wing and the smile left her face.
‘But I had no intention of being so, ah, fresh, Mr Mortdecai, nor do I care to ape the speech of these Mexican savages. The pistolero valiente disguise is a whim of my kooky husband’ – she had a wonderfully fastidious way of using Americanisms – ‘and the pistols are something to do with castration complexes: I do not care to understand, I have no interest in Dr Freud and his dirty mind.’
I had her placed now: Viennese Jewess, the loveliest women in the world and the cleverest. I pulled myself together.
‘Forgive me,’ I said. ‘Please let us start again. My name is Mortdecai.’ I put my heels together and bowed over her hand; she had the long and lovely fingers of her race and they were as hard as nails.
‘Mine is Johanna. You know my married name.’ I got the impression that she pronounced it as infrequently as possible. She motioned me back into the sofa – all her gestures were beautiful – and stood there, legs astride. Looking up at her from the depths of that bloody sofa was awkward; lowering my gaze I found myself staring at her jean-gripped crotch, fourteen inches from my nose. (I use fourteen in the Borgesian sense of course.)
‘Those are beautiful pistols,’ I said, desperately. She did something astonishingly swift and complicated with her right hand and, simultaneously it seemed, a Tiffany butt was six inches from my face. I took it from her respectfully – look, the Dragoon Colt is over a foot long and weighs more than four pounds: unless you’ve handled one you can’t begin to understand the strength and skill you need to flip it about casually. This was an intimidating young woman.
It was indeed a very beautiful pistol. I spun the cylinder – it was loaded in all chambers but, correctly, one nipple was uncapped for the hammer to ride on. There was much splendid engraving and I was startled to see the initials
J.S.M.
‘Surely these did not belong to John Singleton Mosby?’ I asked, awestruck.
‘I think that was his name. A cavalry raider or something of that sort. My husband never tires of telling how much he paid for them – for myself, I forget, but it seemed an excessive amount.’
‘Yes,’ I said, cupidity stabbing me like a knife. ‘But are these not rather big weapons for a lady? I mean, you handle them beautifully but I should have thought something like a Colt Lightning or the Wells Fargo model perhaps …?’
She took the pistol, checked the position of the hammer and prestidigitated it back into the holster.
‘My husband insists on these big ones,’ she said, boredly. ‘It is something to do with the castration complex or the organ inferiority or some such nastiness. But you must be thirsty, my husband tells me you are often thirsty, I shall bring you some drink.’ With that she left me. I began to feel a bit castrated myself.
She was back in about two minutes, having changed into a minimal cotton frock and followed by a drinks-laden peon. Her manner, too, had changed and she sank down beside me with a friendly smile. Close beside me. I sort of inched away a bit. Cringed away would be better. She looked at me curiously for a moment, then giggled.
‘I see. My mother has been talking to you. Ever since she caught me when I was seventeen wearing nothing under my dress she has been convinced that I am a mare in heat. It is not true.’ She was making me a large, strong drink – the peon had been dismissed. ‘On the other hand,’ she continued, handing me the glass with a dazzling smile, ‘I have an unaccountable passion for men of your age and build.’ I simpered a little, making it clear that I recognized a joke and perhaps a mild tease.
The Mortdecai Trilogy Page 11
