The Mortdecai Trilogy

by Bonfiglioli, Kyril

  By lunch-time I felt able to totter down to the restaurant and recruit my strength properly; I had something green and crisp and tasty which was evidently the pubic hair of mermaidens but which the waiter assured me was fried seaweed. Then there were slivers of duck cooked in a sort of jam; a delicious goo made of the swim-bladders of some improbable fish; deep-fried dumpling-like things each containing a huge and succulent prawn, and so on and so forth: there was no limit to their inventiveness.

  There was also something to drink which they said was distilled from rice. It had the deceptively innocent taste which made Pimm’s No. 1 such a handy drink for seducing girls when I was at University. I went gratefully back towards my room, smiling at one and all. I was in that delightful stage of not-quite-drunkenness when one overtips happily and there was no lack of minions to overtip. I even pressed a sheaf of currency into the hand of someone who proved to be an American guest; he said, ‘OK, Father, whaddya fancy?’ Realizing my mistake, and remembering my clerical kit or garb, I waved an airy hand and told him to play it for me on anything he fancied: it would all go to the poor. Then I found my room, crashed the Mortdecai turnip onto the pillow and completed the cure with a couple of hours of the dreamless.

  By late afternoon the cure was completed and I felt strong enough to open the sealed envelope of instructions which Johanna had given me at Heathrow Airport.

  ‘Lo Fang Hi,’ it read, ‘Doctor of Dentistry and Orthodontics.’ Clearly a poor joke but nevertheless I looked him up in the telephone-book (even if you do know that the Chinese keep their surnames where we keep our Christian ones, a Chinese telephone directory is a skull-popper) and found him. I telephoned him. A shrill and agitated voice admitted to being Dr Lo. I resisted the temptation to say ‘Hi’ and said, instead, that I was a toothpaste-salesman – for that was what I had been told to say. What he said was that I might come around as soon as I liked, indeed, he suggested I came very soon. Yes, very soon indeed, prease. I hung up, musingly. The Roman collar had been tormenting my neck and I recalled that I had rarely seen a toothpaste-salesman in a cassock, so I changed into an inconspicuous little burnt-orange lightweight which that chap in the Rue de Rivoli ran up for me in the day when £300 would still buy a casual suit.

  The address, to my surprise, was not ‘In the Street of the Thousand Baseballs, ’Neath the sign of the Swinging Tit’ as the old ballad has it, but in Nathan Street, Kowloon, which proved to be a dull, respectable sort of boulevard, reminiscent of Wigmore St, London W1. (I do not know who Mr Nathan was nor why he should have such a street named after him; indeed I know nothing of Mr Wimpole, no, nor even Wigmore, although I could tell you a thing or two about Harley.)

  The cab-driver spoke American with a pronounced Chinese accent. He was also the proud owner of a sense of humour: he had evidently taken Buster Keaton’s correspondence-course. When I told him to take to No. 18, Lancaster Buildings, Nathan Road, Kowloon, he leaned over his seat and eyed me in a tiresome, inscrutable way.

  ‘Cannot take you there, buddy.’

  ‘Oh? And why not, pray?’

  ‘Can take you to Rancaster Birradings, Nathan Rod, but not Number 18.’

  ‘Why not?’ I asked, a tremor in my voice this time.

  ‘Number 18 on third floor; taxi does not fit into erevator.’

  ‘Ha ha,’ I said stiffly, ‘but I notice that your meter is running; laugh on your own time, or while driving me capably to Lancaster Buildings, Nathan Road.’

  ‘You a poreeseman?’

  ‘Certainly not. I happen to be a toothpaste-salesman, if you must know.’

  He wagged his head respectfully, as though I had said something impressive, or perhaps funny. He took me to Lancaster Buildings in an expert and blessedly silent fashion. On arrival I under-tipped him by precisely 2½% – not enough to cause a scene but just enough to make it clear that taxi-drivers should not jest with sahibs.

  Number 18 was indeed on the third floor of Lancaster Buildings and the door to Dr Lo’s consulting-room was clearly inscribed RING AND ENTER. I rang, but could not enter, for the door was locked. Hearing sounds within I rapped irritably on the frosted glass, then louder and still louder, crying words such as ‘Hoy!’ All of a sudden, the door opened, a large, tan-coloured hand reached out, grabbed the front of my lightweight Paris suit and whisked me inside, depositing me upon an uncomfortable armchair. The owner of the tan-coloured hand was grasping a large, crude Stechkin automatic pistol in his other tan-coloured hand and waving it in an admonitory sort of way. I understood his desires instantly, for the Stechkin is by no means a lady’s handbag-gun, and sat in my nice chair as quiet as any little mouse.

  There was a patient in the dentist’s operating-chair, being attended to by a brace of dentists. At first it seemed odd to me that the dentists were wearing dark-blue mackintoshes, just like the chap with the Stechkin, while the patient was wearing a white dentist’s smock. (Sorry, a dentist’s white smock.) I began to believe that the patient was, in fact, Dr Lo and that the dentists were quite unqualified in dentistry, especially when I noticed that they were using the drill on him although he refused to open his mouth. When Dr Lo – for it must have been he – passed out for the third or fourth time, his assailants were unable to bring him round. He had not uttered a word through his clenched teeth, although he had squealed through his nose a little, from time to time. I remember thinking that Mr Ho would have done much better, making much less mess.

  The chaps in blue mackintoshes conversed in quacking tones together for a while, then turned on me.

  ‘Who you?’ asked one of them. I clapped my hand against my jaw in a piteous way and mimed the miseries of a tooth-ache sufferer. The man took my hand away from my jaw and slammed it with the side of his heavy pistol. Then he picked me up from the floor, sat me back in the chair.

  ‘Tooth-ache better now?’ I nodded vigorously. ‘You recognize our faces again maybe?’ There was no longer any need to mime suffering.

  ‘Goodness, no; you chaps all look the same to … I mean, no, I have a terrible head for figures, that’s to say faces or …’

  He shifted the big pistol to his right hand and slammed me with it again. Now I really did need a dentist. He had not, in fact, rendered me unconscious but I decided to be so for all practical purposes. I let my head loll. He did not hit me again.

  Through half-closed eyes I watched the three mackintoshed persons take off the clothes of the unconscious Dr Lo. He was a well-nourished dentist, as dentists go. One of the nasties took something out of his coat-pocket and threw the cardboard outer wrapping over his shoulder. It landed at my feet: the brand-name was ‘Bull-Stik’ – one of those terrifying new cyanoacrylic adhesives for which there is no known solvent. If you get it on your fingers, don’t touch them, it will mean surgery. One of the three men spread it all over the seat of the dentist’s chair and sat the naked Dr Lo down upon it, legs well apart. Then they played other pranks with the stuff which you will not wish to read about and which I would gladly forget. To tell the truth, I passed out in good earnest. Delayed shock, that sort of thing.

  When I came to my senses I found my mouth full of little hard, pebbly scraps which I spat out onto my hand. Well, yes, assorted fillings, of course.

  The three mackintosh-men had left so I tottered over to where Dr Lo was sitting. His eyes were more or less open.

  ‘Police?’ I asked. He made no sign. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘you’ve got to have an ambulance and they’ll call the police anyway; it will look odd if we don’t call them straightaway.’

  He nodded his head slowly and carefully, as though he had just come to realize that he was a very old man. He was, in fact, in his forties – or had been that morning. I, too, felt that I had aged.

  ‘First,’ I said (I couldn’t talk very well because of the damage to my teeth; he couldn’t talk at all for reasons which will occur to you), ‘first, what have you got for me that I must take away?’ His head rotated slowly and his gaze fastened on the wall beside the d
oor. I went over to the wall. ‘This?’ I asked, pointing to a rather bad scroll painting. He shook his head. I pointed in turn to several framed diplomas designed to reassure the customer that Lo Fang Hi was licensed to yank teeth within reason. He went on shaking his head and staring mutely at the wall. There was nothing else on the wall except some fly-dirt and a vulgar toothpaste-advertisement featuring a foot-high Mr Toothpaste Tube with arms and legs, surrounded by a score or so of actual tubes of the said dentifrice. That is to say, it had once been surrounded by such tubes but these were now scattered on the floor, each one burst open and squeezed-out by the nasties. I prised Mr T. Tube himself off the wall. He was filled with a fine white powder.

  I have no idea what heroin and cocaine are supposed to taste like, so I didn’t do the fingertip-tasting thing that they do on television if you’re still awake at that time of the night, but I had little doubt about its not being baby-powder.

  I was never a star pupil at mental arithmetic but a quick and terrified calculation taught me that I had become the proud but shy possessor of something more than half a kilogramme of highly illegal white powder. Say, eighty thousand pounds in Amsterdam. More to the point, say fifty years in nick. I cannot say that I was much gratified; I am as fond of eighty thousand pounds as the next man – for I am not haughty like my brother – but I do prefer to have it quietly dumped for me in the Union des Banques Suisses, rather than carrying it around in an improbable toothpaste-tube full of prison-sentences.

  Dr Lo started to make alarming noises. I have always been a charitable man but this was the first time that I had ever blown a Chinese dentist’s nose for him. He could not, of course, breathe through his mouth. Then I telephoned for an ambulance and policemen and scrammed, for I am a survivor.

  Back at the hotel I telephone Johanna – did you know that you can dial London from China? – and told her, guardedly that all was not well with her toothsome friend and that her husband, too, had known better days. She told me to get some change, walk down the street to a telephone kiosk and ring again. This I did, for I am ever anxious to please. Soon we were in touch again, on a wonderfully clear line.

  ‘It’s really easy, Charlie dear,’ she said when I had unrolled the tapestry of my dismay. ‘Do you have a pencil or pen?’

  ‘Of course I have,’ I snapped ‘but what the hell –’

  ‘Then write this down. Secrete the uh dentifrice about your person. Take an early flight tomorrow from Hong Kong to Delhi. Then Delhi to Paris. Then take Air France Flight ZZ 690 to J.F. Kennedy Airport, New York. Can you spell that? OK. Now, in flight, go to the toilet – sorry, dear, I’ll never get used to saying “lavatory” – and unscrew the inspection plate behind the pan. Hide the stuff in there. At Kennedy, walk through customs and book on Flight ZZ 887 to Chicago: this is the same aircraft but it’s now a domestic flight – no customs, get it? In flight, retrieve the dentifrice. Call me from Chicago and I’ll tell you what to do next. OK?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘How do you mean, “no”, dear?’

  ‘I mean, sort of “no”. It means, no, I won’t do it. I have seen a film about San Quentin penitentiary and I hate every stone of it. I shall not do it. I shall flush that stuff down what you call the toilet as soon as I get back to the hotel. Please do not try to persuade me for my mind is made up.’

  ‘Charlie.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Remember when I coaxed you to have that vasectomy done just after we were married?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In that cute little clinic?’

  ‘Yes.’

  They did not perform a vasectomy.’

  ‘Good God!’ I cried, appalled. ‘Why, I might have had a baby!’

  ‘I don’t think so, dear. What they did do was implant in your, uh, groin a tiny explosive capsule with a quartz-decay time-system. It explodes in, let’s see, ten days time. Only the guy who put it in can take it out without activating a kind of fail-safe mechanism, so please don’t let anyone meddle with it: I kind of like you as you are, you know? Hey, Charlie, are you still there?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said heavily. ‘Very well. Just give me those flight numbers again. And Johanna?’

  ‘Yes dear?’

  ‘Tell the chap who knows how to take the gadget out of me to be very, very careful crossing the road, eh?’

  16 Mortdecai takes a little more drink than is good for him and is frightened by a competent frightener

  Being of noble fostering, I glance

  Lightly into old Laggan’s ingle-nook …

  Rabbits or snipe-fowl – even nicer things:

  Has any longer title – God-remitted?

  The Old Poacher

  I stayed not upon the order of my going, nor even to lose my £1000 at the tables in far-famed Macao, but crammed everything – well, almost everything – into my suitcase and went down to the desk to pay my bill and book a ticket on the night-flight. The desk-clerk – how is it that they all contrive to look the same? – said that he had something in the safe for me. Had there been anywhere to run to I daresay I would have run. As it was, I made a nonchalant ‘Oh, ah?’ The desk-chap twiddled the safe and fished out a stout envelope; it was addressed in a scrawly hand to ‘The Friend of the Poor’ and the clerk had omitted to remove the clipped-on piece of paper which read ‘For the overweight, Jewish-looking guy who wears his collar back to front and drinks too much.’ I am not proud, I opened the envelope: it contained a note saying ‘Dear Father, I played your dough at the craps table and made five straight passes and then faded a couple other shooters taking the odds and got lucky and I taken 5% for my time and trouble and I hope the poor will offer up a prayer for yours truly …’ The other contents of the envelope were a quite improbable wodge of currency notes of all nations. Hotels like the one I had been staying at have, of course, all-night banking facilities: I bought a cashier’s cheque for my winnings (and most of my £1000 walking-about money) and sent it to the poor, as my conscience dictated. The only poor I could think of at the time was C. Mortdecai in Upper Brook Street, London, W1. I shall always remember that nice American as the only honest man I have ever met.

  Painlessly gaining the price of another Rembrandt etching for the rainy-day scrap-book usually has a soothing effect on the nerve-endings but, long before my taxi-cab dumped me at the airport, I was quaking again. This was not necessarily a bad thing; had I been able to put a bold front on I would certainly have been apprehended as an obvious malefactor but, twitching with terror as I was, the customs chaps and security thugs wafted me through as a clear case of St Vitus’ Dance or Parkinson’s Disease – well-known occupational hazards among Curial Secretaries.

  All went as merrily as a wedding-bell until the penultimate leg of the journey: Paris to New York, via Air France. A little too merrily, indeed, for by then I was a bit biffed – you know, a little the worse for my dinner, which had been several courses of Scotch whisky – and on my journey to the lavatory or toilet I sat, quite inadvertently, on the laps of several of my fellow-passengers. Their reactions varied from ‘Ooh, aren’t you bold!’ via ‘Ach, du lieber Augustin’ to ‘Pas gentil, ça!’, while one impassive Chinese gentleman ignored me completely, pretending that his lap was quite free of any Mortdecai. Having at last locked myself in the loo or bog, I found that I had failed to arm myself with the necessary screwdriver with which to unscrewdrive the inspection-plate.

  Back to my seat I teetered, watched narrowly now by the stewardess. When she came to enquire after my well-being I had decided upon a ruse: I would tell her that the zip of my trousers was jammed and that she must find me a screwdriver so that I could free the Mortdecai plumbing system. Alas, my usual fluent French deserted me – look, can you remember the French for ‘screwdriver’ when you’re biffed? – and I had to resort to a certain amount of sign-language, pointing vigorously at my fly while vociferating the word ‘screwdriver’ again and again. Her English was little better than my French.

  ‘ “Screw” I
onderstand,’ she said demurely ‘but what is zis “draivaire”, hein?’

  ‘ “Draivaire”,’ I said wildly, ‘ “drivaire” is like, yes, conducteur!’ and again I frantically pointed at that area of my trousers where my personal lightning-conductor is housed. She clapped her hands gleefully as understanding came to her.

  ‘Ah! Now I onderstand! You weesh me to tell the conducteur – the pilot – that you weesh to do to him what Général de Gaulle has done to the whole French nation, not so?’

  ‘Oh, sweet Christ and chips and tomato sauce,’ I sighed, subsiding into my seat. This baffled the stewardess; she went away and brought another stewardess, a polyglot of dusky hue and tenor-baritone voice.

  ‘I doth spake English a few better what she,’ growled this new one, ‘exprime what be this thou askings?’ But she knew what a screwdriver was (it’s tournevis in French, as any sober man can tell you). Five minutes later the perilous powder was safely screwed up behind the lavatory pan and I was pulling myself together on the lavatory floor.

  ‘Pull yourself together,’ I told myself sternly. ‘You must excite no suspicion. You cannot afford to be lodged in some foreign nick with a quartz-decay timing-system nestling beside your vas deferens. A low profile is what you must keep.’ So I strolled down the aisle to my seat, twirling the screwdriver and whistling a nonchalant bar or two from Cosi Fan Tutte, having craftily left my trouser-fly agape to encourage onlookers to understand the object of my mission. I don’t suppose anyone gave me a second glance.

  Everything continued to go wonderfully smoothly and soon, soon I was in wondrous Chicago and little the worse for my journey. (I suspect that the much-vaunted ‘jet-lag syndrome’ is nothing more than the common hangover of commerce. Certainly, I felt no worse than I would normally expect to feel at that time of day.)