They are all supping cocoa or something around a wet and smokey woodfire outside their tent in Fleagarth: I have studied them carefully through the glasses and there is positively no deception.
What, still alive at forty-two – a fine upstanding chap like you?
Well, yes.
Just.
My manuscript, interlarded with useful currency notes, lies in the bowels of a Warton pillar box, en route for La Maison Spon. I wonder whose eyes will read these last jottings, whose scissors trim away which indiscretions, whose hand strike the match to burn them? Perhaps only your eyes, Blucher. Not yours, I hope, Martland, for I intend that you shall accompany me down to wherever naughty art dealers go when they die. And I shall not let you hold my hand.
They were all out on the Crag in the dark when I returned from Warton; it was a nightmare. For them too, I imagine. I have only a confused memory of creeping and quaking, stalking and counter-stalking, straining aching ears into the blackness and hearing more sounds than there were; finally, the mindless panic of knowing that I was lost.
I regrouped my mental forces – sadly depleted – and forced myself to crouch in a hole until I could orient myself and calm the jam session of my nerves. I had almost succeeded in becoming Major the Honble Dashwood ‘Mad Jack’ Mortdecai, V.D. and Scar, the ice-cool toast of the Ypres Salient, when a voice close beside me said,
‘Charlie?’
I vomited up my heart, bit it savagely and swallowed it again. My eyes were shut fast, waiting for the shot.
‘No,’ came a whisper from behind me, ‘it’s me.’ My heart shook itself, tried a tentative beat or two, settled into some sort of ragged rhythm. Martland and the woman rustled about a bit then floundered quietly down the slope.
Where was the American? He was at my lavatory again, that’s where he was. Probably booby-trapping it. I think he heard me coming, for all movement stopped. I lowered myself to the ground with infinite caution and could see him, eight feet tall against the sky. He took a noiseless step toward me, then another. To my surprise I was now quite calm, the wanky old avenger preparing to kill his man. My pistol was in the paint mine – just as well, perhaps. First, kick in the family jewels, I decided; second, leg-sweep behind knees; third, bounce rock on head until tender. If no rock, drop knee on face, break hyoid bone in throat with side of hand. Should serve. I began positively to look forward to his next step, although I am not a violent man by nature.
He took the next step – a cock pheasant exploded from under his feet with all the racket and drama of, well, of a rocketing cock pheasant. Now, one of the few things which do not startle old country-bred Mortdecai is a rocketing pheasant, but it was not so with the American; he squeaked, jumped, ducked, crouched and dragged out a great long thing which can only have been an automatic with a silencer fitted. As the shards of silence reassembled themselves I could hear him panting painfully in the dark. At last he rose, tucked the pistol away and drifted off down the slope, thoroughly ashamed of himself, I hope.
I had to come back here to the mine; pistol, food, suitcase and bicycle were and are all here: I need them all except, perhaps, the bicycle.
There is a safe and smelly snugness about this little grave already: I can scarcely hope that they will not nose me out but they cannot, after all, put me further underground than this. There’s a Stalingrad for all of us somewhere.
‘Ici gît qui, pour avoir trop aimer les gaupes,
Descendit, jeune encore, au royaume des taupes.’
In any case, to run now would be to die sooner, in some spot of their choosing and in some way I might not much like. I prefer it here, where I dreamed the dreams of youth and, later, lifted many a lawless leg – to use the words of R. Burns (1759–96).
You will not find it hard to believe that, since returning to this, my oubliette, I have had more than one suck at my brother’s delicious whisky. I intend to have a couple more, then to consult sagacious sleep.
Only a little later
Why we so used to relish the life stories of condemned men, and why so many of us mourn the passing of capital punishment, is because ordinary decent chaps like us have a fine feeling for the dramatic proprieties: we know that tragedy cannot properly end in nine years’ comfy incarceration and useful, satisfying work in the prison bakery. We know that death is the only end of art. A chap who has gone to all the trouble of strangling his wife is entitled to his moment of splendour on the gallows – it is a crime to make him sew mailbags like a common thief.
We loved those tales told at the gallows-foot because they freed us from the tyranny and vulgarity of the happy ending; the long, idiot senescence, the wonderful grandchildren, the tactful inquiries about the life-insurance premiums.
Positively the last day – booking for smoking-concerts now
Since there’s no help, come then, let’s kiss and part. Something has gone wrong. I shall attract no help by firing my pistol, for today is evidently the first of September: duck shooting has begun and since before dawn the Moss and the shore have echoed with sporting musketry.
Martland has found me; I suppose I always knew he would. He came to the mouth of the mine and called down to me. I didn’t answer.
‘Charlie, we know you’re down there, we can smell you, for God’s sake! Look, Charlie, the others can’t hear me, I’m willing to give you a break. Tell me where the bloody picture is, get me off the hook, and I’ll give you a night’s start; you might get clear away.’
He can’t have thought I’d believe that, can he?
‘Charlie, we’ve got Jock, he’s alive …’
I knew that was a lie and suddenly I was filled with rage at his shabbiness. Without exposing myself I aimed the .455 at a knob of rock near the entrance and loosed off a round. The noise deafened me momentarily but I could still hear the snarl of the big distorted bullet ricocheting toward Martland. When he spoke again, from another spot, his voice was tight with fear and hatred.
‘All right, Mortdecai. Here’s another deal. Tell me where the bloody picture is and where the other photographs are and I promise I’ll shoot you cleanly. That’s the most you can hope for now – and you’ll have to trust me even for that.’ He enjoyed that bit. I fired again, praying that the mangled lead would take his face off. He spoke again, explaining how void my chances were, not understanding that I had written off my life and wanted only his. He listed lovingly the people who wanted me dead, from the Spanish Government to the Lord’s Day Observance Society – I was positively flattered at the extent of the mess I had made. Then he went away.
Later they shot at me with a silenced pistol for half an hour, listening between shots for a cry of pain or surrender. The slugs, screaming and buzzing as they tore from wall to wall, nearly drove me insane but only one touched me; they didn’t know whether the shaft turned left or right. The one lucky shot laid my scalp open and it is bleeding into my eyes – I must look a sight.
The American tried coaxing me next but he, too, had nothing to offer but a quick death in exchange for information and a written confession. They must have raised the Rolls from its grave in the canyon, for he knows the Goya wasn’t in the soft-top. Spain, it seems, is due to renew a treaty with the USA about Strategic Air Force bases on her territory, but every time the US reminds them about it, the Spaniards change the subject to the Goya. ‘Duchess of Wellington’ – ‘known to have been stolen on behalf of an American and to have entered the US.’ He wouldn’t have told me about the bases if he thought I had any chance of surviving, would he?
I didn’t bother to reply, I was busy with the turpentine.
Then he told me the alternative, the dirty death: they have sent for a canister of cyanide, the stuff they use on rabbits here and on people over there. So evidently I cannot hope for Martland to come down and fetch me. I shall have to go out to him. It’s of no importance.
I have finished with the turpentine; mixed with whisky it has served beautifully to dissolve the lining of my suitcase and now the Go
ya smiles at me from the wall, fresh and lovely as the day she was painted, the incomparable, naked ‘Duquesa de Wellington,’ mine to keep for the rest of my life. ‘Donc, Dieu existe.’
There is enough whisky to last me until the light fades and then – who could be afraid? – I shall emerge with my six-gun blazing, like some shaggy hero of the Old West. I know that I shall be able to kill Martland; then one of the others will kill me and I shall fall like a bright exhalation in the evening down to hell where there is no art and no alcohol, for this is, after all, quite a moral tale. You see that, don’t you?
After you with the pistol
All the characters in this book are fictitious: any similarity to real people or corpses is both accidental and disgusting.
The epigraphs are all by Alfred, Lord Tennyson except one which is a palpable forgery. The forgery is signed, after a fashion.
Disclaimer
There is not a word of truth in this book. I have neither met nor heard of anyone who resembles any character in it, I am glad to say. They are all figments of my heated imagination, every one of them. This is particularly true of the fictional narrator, whose only resemblance to me is around the waist-line.
I apologize for what he says about the art-trade. Why, some of my best friends, etc.
There is, I believe, a very sophisticated cop-shop South of the Thames but I have never seen it except in the mind’s eye, which is where I should like to keep it. The only pub I know called The Bunch of Grapes is in Gracie Fields’ deathless aspidistra song. I believe that there was once a shop in the East End called Mycock’s Electrical but I know of no pig-abattoirs of that name.
The lavatory inspection-panel ruse for smuggling heroin was, indeed, once used but it has long been ‘blown’ or I would not have related it. It is almost as old-fashioned as using motor-car tyres, cameras from Kowloon, hollowed-out boomerangs from Bendigo (New South Wales), ‘pregnant’ ladies from Amsterdam, long-playing records pressed out of ganja resin, or even dusty carpets from Kashmir which need a little attention from a certain dry-cleaner in London’s dockland before they are delivered to the consignee. The same is true of other naughty techniques described: pray do not let them tempt you to embark upon a life of crime. You may be a hare but ‘Old Bill’ is a most capable tortoise.
I apologize to Air France: its hostesses are all excellent linguists. Many of them can even understand my French.
1 Mortdecai prepares to meet his Maker
Come into the garden, Maud,
I am here at the gate alone …
Maud
Yes, well, there it was. That was that. I’d had my life.
So I drank the last of the whisky, looked a loving last once more on the naked Duchess and shed perhaps – I forget – a tear of self-pity, that last of luxuries, before climbing stiffly to my feet. The heavy, friendly old Smith & Wesson pistol was loaded in all chambers with the murderous soft lead target ammunition. I pulled the hammer back a little, which allows the cylinder to spin. I span it, listening to the quick, fat chuckle of the ratchet.
Then I sat down again.
I had left it just that few minutes too late and there had been just too small a jolt of Scotch in the tail of the bottle. Had there been even one more fluid ounce, I could have gone roaring out of my smelly cavern like some old grizzly bear, but now sobriety had me by the throat. You see, I had begun to consider just where the bullets would smash into my well-nourished body; what bones would be shattered, what spillikins of the said bones would be sent splintering through which of my delicate organs, how long this mangling would last before generous Death brushed pain aside and passed his hand over my eyelids, closing them forever.
No, wait, sorry. Hang about a bit. It has just occurred to me that you might be a trifle puzzled as to why Charlie Mortdecai – I – should have been preparing for death in a smelly cavern, chaperoned only by a naked Duchess, a large revolver and an empty whisky-bottle. I realize that some might find these circumstances unusual, perhaps even bizarre.
This, then, is what happened before you came in. Nude readers begin here. There’s this chap Me, you see – the Hon. Charlie Mortdecai – I was actually christened Charlie – who is, or rather am, a nice, rich, cowardly, fun-loving art-dealer who dabbles in crime to take his mind off his haemorrhoids. Then there’s this fantastic painting by Goya of ‘The Duchess of Wellington’ who, at the time of being painted, had absent-mindedly forgotten to put her knickers back on. Or, indeed, anything else. Having so much respect for other people’s property that I sometimes feel bound to care for it myself, I had nicked the painting from the Prado, Madrid, and exported it personally to a millionaire art-lover in New Mexico. I found the art-lover freshly murdered, and his randy-eyed young widow casting about for a replacement. All went wrong, as all these things do, and, as my sense of fun started to fray at the cuffs, I shortened my lines of communication – as the generals used to say – and made tracks for England, home and beauty, in the order named.
All sorts of people were by that time disliking Mortdecai warmly, and in an almost-final hot pursuit I was obliged to kick in the head of my trusty thug Jock, who was about to die even more unpleasantly in the quicksands of Morecambe Bay, Lancashire. I – Mortdecai – holed up in a disused red-oxide mine on Warton Crag (still in Lancashire), found that my enemies had traced me thither, and realized that my life was over. I was in a pretty shabby mental and physical state by then and resolved to get as drunk as I could, then to come roaring out of my stinking lair and kill at least Martland, chief of my persecutors.
Right? Any questions? There I was, then, preparing to go out and meet the kind of messy death I had too often seen happen to other people. I couldn’t see myself in the rôle at all.
Ah, yes, but. What else? Where was your actual alternative?
I upturned the bottle and collected three more drops, or it may have been four.
‘Pull yourself together, Mortdecai,’ I told myself sternly. ‘Nothing in life became you like the leaving of it. It is a far, far better thing that you do now. You are ready and ripe for death. You’ll like it up there.’
‘Up?’ I thought. ‘Up there? Must you joke at a time like this?’
Then I looked again at the painted Duchess, her canvas propped against the wall of the mine-shaft, smiling like a whole choir of Mona Lisas, voluptuously sexless, erotic only on a level that I could never reach. Although God knows I have tried.
‘Oh, very well,’ I told her.
I crawled to the entrance of the little mine. There was no sound outside, no movement, but they were there, all right. There was nowhere else they would be.
I emerged.
An enormous light burst out but, unaccountably, it was pointed not at me but in the opposite direction. It illumined not me but a pallid, startled Martland. Well, at least I could fulfil that part of my programme. He peered down the beam at me, making urgent little movements with his hands.
‘Martland,’ I said. I had never heard myself use that voice before but I knew that there was no need for more than the one word.
He opened his mouth. It seemed difficult for him. Perhaps he was going to remind me that we had been at school together. I couldn’t find it in my heart to shoot anyone looking as soppy as he did, but my trigger-finger had a life of its own. The pistol jumped hard in my hand and a puff of dust bounced out of his trousers just below the belt-buckle.
I gazed at the spot, entranced. There wasn’t any blood; you couldn’t even see a hole. Martland looked puzzled, vexed even. He sat down hard on his bottom and looked at me, cross and disappointed. Then he started dying and it was rather dreadful and went on and on and made me feel even more ill than I was and I couldn’t bear it and I shot him again and again but I couldn’t seem to make him stop dying.
Whoever was working the searchlight finally tore himself away from the spectacle and nailed me with the beam. I clicked the revolver three or four times – empty as Mortdecai now – three or four times up into the glarin
g eye of the light, threw it as hard as I could, missed again.
‘Mr Mortdecai,’ said a polite American voice.
I whipped around, eyes tearing at the darkness, my gut hungry for the coming of the bullets.
‘No, Mr Mortdecai,’ the voice went on, ‘please compose yourself. Nobody’s killing anyone else tonight. Everything’s going to be all right. I mean, really all right.’
You cannot imagine how disappointing it is to be all braced for death and then to find, at the very moment of truth, that they’re not frying tonight. I sort of suddenly found myself sitting down and weeping noisily; the sobs tore through my breast like the bullets that hadn’t.
They gave me a flask of whisky and I was sick again and again but at last I kept some down and then there was a dull, silencer plop from Martland’s direction and the noises of his dying stopped and then the woman got me to my feet and helped me down the slope and across the road and up into Fleagarth Wood and to their tent. She was very strong and smelled of old fur coats. I was asleep as I hit the groundsheet.
2 Mortdecai finds that his Maker does not want to meet him
… when the steam
Floats up from those dim fields about the homes
The Mortdecai Trilogy Page 19
