The Mouse That Saved The West: ebook Edition (The Grand Fenwick Series 4)

by Leonard Wibberley

  "The truth is that America, doing all it could for the state of Israel, and rightly too, happened at the time to have all its energy eggs in an Arabian basket. Now they have to look around for some different eggs or face mounting prices and a possible serious shortage of oil."

  "It's serious then," Gloriana said. "All those people over there riding bicycles and jogging through the streets—is that part of it?"

  "No," Mountjoy said, "that is part of the American dream of eternal youth. Americans will have nothing at all to do with the wisdom and serenity of age. But then, after all, they are a very young nation, scarcely two hundred years old."

  "Well, Bentner thinks that it is going to affect everybody," said the Duchess. "He says it's going to produce an enormous rise in the cost of living and it may bring about a huge depression—'the collapse of society as we know it now' was the phrase he used."

  "In my lifetime," said Mountjoy, "I've lived through four or five collapses of society and the only one that really bothered me was the disappearance of the horse. The automobile is not an adequate substitute.

  "But Your Grace should not be concerned. I have the matter well before me and propose to get in touch with the United States on the subject. As Your Grace well knows, there have been several occasions in the past when we in Grand Fenwick have been able to put to rights matters which seemed beyond the competence of greater nations."

  When she had left, Mountjoy remained for a long time thinking about Bentner, the energy crisis and the misdirected letter which lay on the table before him. The energy crisis was one he had been long aware was coming, though in the United States it was apparent that the political implications were more immediately worrying to the administration than the unavoidable economic impact.

  Grand Fenwick, which scarcely used any oil energy at all, would hardly be affected. Still Grand Fenwick had a duty to the world and to its close ally, the United States of America. He must think of some plan for avoiding the crisis and present it at the proper moment. The enormity of the project cheered him immediately and he poured himself another cup of orange pekoe as a sort of celebration.

  CHAPTER II

  The Al for whom the misdirected letter to the Count of Mountjoy had been intended was Alfonso Birelli, Chairman of the Board of Transcontinental Enterprises, a conglomerate whose holdings and interests included shipping, airlines, steel, railroads, real estate, electronics, three publishing houses, twenty television stations and Pentex Oil, a mammoth producing, refining, importing and distributing company; the largest in fact in the world.

  Physically he was of a size to match his position—a tall gray wolf of a man, big-boned, with a lean face, cold as frost, though capable now and then of a glint of humor. He was fond of saying that he had come up the hard way, for his father had been a millionaire and his grandfather too.

  "To be born wealthy is a crippling, handicap, which only the toughest survive," he said. "My whole life has been devoted to proving that I am not just the mentally impotent son of a rich man." He had proven it abundantly, over and over again, but those who thought of him as merely a financial and industrial wizard now completely misunderstood him. He was instead a warrior, a fighter, a lover of hazard and of battle; a man who would risk everything to gain his end; and the various companies over which he ruled were a testament to how well his daring had served him. They were for him the spoils of war in which he was always more daring than his enemies.

  His name, even his existence, was quite unknown to the American public at large. Indeed there were many newsmen in the higher strata of press, television and radio who had never heard of him.

  Those at the very top were aware of Alfonso Birelli merely as a Power.

  It was rumored that he had close connections with the Mafia and it was also said that he had close connections with the White House, but this in a sense belittled him.

  It would be more true to say that the Mafia and the White House even had some close connections with Alfonso Birelli, for he had enough muscle to do favors, when he wished, for both. Nor did it matter to him who at any particular time occupied the White House or was the nation's chief Godfather. Whoever they might be, there would come a time when they would need support from Alfonso Birelli.

  It was in keeping with his lone-wolf character that he occupied no luxurious suite of offices but conducted his business from two rooms, furnished in the fashion of the nineteen-thirties, on the twentieth floor of a venerable building on Wall Street.

  There were a desk, a swivel chair, a few filing cabinets and a secretary, Miss Thompson, a woman in her late fifties—plump, sweet and motherly, and hard as a stainless steel nail. She handled all his telephone calls, all his mail and all his appointments. She alone knew where he was at all times and she alone knew who might speak to him and who might not.

  Miss Thompson was surprised, then, one morning, in opening his mail, to find a letter from the Secretary of the Interior, announcing a meeting of American vintners and inviting him to send a representative.

  She glanced quickly at the top of the letter, found that it was addressed to the Count of Mountjoy, Duchy of Grand Fenwick, and threw it in the wastepaper basket.

  Then she reflected that there actually was a Duchy of Grand Fenwick and that the Duchy of Grand Fenwick had on several occasions in the past made a not inconsiderable mark on the United States of America and world history.

  She glanced at the envelope, which was addressed to Alfonso Birelli, and realized that a mistake had been made.

  Any mistake which involved her employer might have, she knew, serious consequences, so she retrieved the letter from the wastepaper basket, put it with the half dozen other communications she had decided should be brought to his attention and glanced at the electric coffeepot on a shelf beside her small desk.

  It was perking briskly. Alfonso Birelli liked a mug of piping-hot coffee brought in with his mail. She poured out the coffee, put the mug on a tray with the letters and took them in to him, first giving the connecting door a gentle kick with her foot, which was her way of announcing her presence. "Morning," said Birelli without glancing up. "Cancel that seat on the Concorde to Paris. Tell Hastings that I'm not going and buy a thousand shares of Etienne et Cie. They'll be down a point and a half when word gets around. What have you got that's funny?"

  "Funny" was his word for important, and she gave him the selected mail, with the Grand Fenwick letter on the bottom. He glanced through the letters and without the slightest exchange of expression read the Grand Fenwick communication to which the envelope was pinned.

  "Son of a bitch," he said thoughtfully, looking from the envelope to the letter. "This means that the Count of Mountjoy has got hold of some communication intended for me. The last person in the world I want knowing anything about my business is Mountjoy. That guy's either the smartest statesman since Machiavelli or the biggest fool ever to hold public office. I've never been able to decide which."

  "It's from the Department of the Interior," said Miss Thompson somewhat unnecessarily. "Shall I call the Secretary, explain the situation, and ask him what his letter was about?"

  "Get him on the phone," said Birelli grimly. "I'll speak to him myself."

  When the call was put through he picked up the phone and said "Benjy? Al here. You know something? I don't give a hang about attending a meeting of the nation's wine growers. Now what else did you have in mind?"

  With such an introduction it took a little while before the Secretary of the Interior grasped the situation, apologized for the error and said his note had contained a reference to the energy crisis, to the low profile the government was going to assume on the matter, to the fact that many were working on plans to soften or avert the crisis when the full extent of the oil shortage became known to the public, that nothing would be done without his first being consulted, and concluded with a request that he lend whatever help he could to the administration when the time arrived.

  "As far as covering up," snapped Birell
i on hearing this, "you're about four innings behind in the ball game right now. Mountjoy knows the contents of that letter and he's probably leaked it to half a dozen chancelleries right at this moment."

  "I hardly think so," said the Secretary. "He's not what I would call a prime source of news of international importance among the governments of Europe."

  "Listen," said Birelli. "Anything to do with oil, oil prices, oil shortages—anything at all—including U.S. government concern about oil—hurts me where I'm very sensitive. Right now I don't want the full facts about the energy crisis to become public any more than the President does. In fact, I can't think of a time when I would be willing to let the facts be known to the public. I've already outlined four plans of my own for dealing with the situation when it arises, but now I have to take into consideration that Mountjoy has been alerted to the coming crisis. Maybe it will mean nothing to him." He paused while he thought of all he knew of Mountjoy and Grand Fenwick. "Maybe it might even be helpful," he said softly, as Plan Number Five began to take shape in his active mind.

  "What might be helpful?" asked the Secretary of the Interior.

  "Never mind," said Birelli. "Just bear this in mind. I'm going to be able to handle the crisis myself without any of your boys from the nation's law schools screwing things up, provided nobody announces that there is a crisis. A crisis is only a crisis when somebody in authority calls it a crisis. Get that around to the presidential staff, too, will you? If they don't understand it, tell them to start reading a book called The Prince by Machiavelli. We've avoided three depressions in the last twenty years by calling them recessions and we can do the same with this oil shortage provided nobody blows the whistle.

  "Anyway, leave it to me. I'll handle it and Mountjoy as well. Just stick to the low-profile idea and hire somebody over there who has brains enough to put the right letters in the right envelopes."

  With that he hung up and took a huge sip of his coffee, no longer boiling hot, his mind busy with Mountjoy, the Duchy of Grand Fenwick and the oil crisis. He canceled all his appointments for the day, told Miss Thompson not to put any phone calls through to him, and by three o'clock in the afternoon he put through a telephone call to France. When the call was concluded and Miss Thompson, in answer to his summons, entered his office to take some dictation, she noted a glint of a smile in his eyes, and knew that he had launched a plan which pleased him well and would have a tremendous impact upon the world.

  The Duchy of Grand Fenwick's oil consumption was the lowest in the whole of Europe, for the tiny nation had no factories, no railroads, no buses, no airplanes, a very small power station and but two automobiles—a Daimler belonging to Her Grace which she used for occasional shopping trips in France or Switzerland, and a Rolls-Royce which Mountjoy had inherited from his father. The Daimler dated from 1947 and the Rolls, a superb Silver Ghost, from 1927. Whenever Gloriana wanted to move about in Grand Fenwick, she walked or rode her bicycle, and Mountjoy walked also, though recently finding himself a trifle stiff, he was sometimes chauffeured around in the Rolls.

  Some days after receiving the letter intended for Birelli, Mountjoy decided to go for a drive in the Rolls both to get some air and to call on Bentner, who lived in a small cottage close to the French frontier three miles from the castle.

  Bentner, though he had made a considerable fortune from his sheep and his vineyards which together with the others of the Duchy produced that noble wine, Pinot Grand Fenwick, insisted on living in this humble dwelling, which was lit by oil lamps and where all the cooking was done on a woodburning range. This was in keeping with his position as founder of the Grand Fenwick Labor Party.

  He took a weekly bath in a huge tin tub with water heated on the same range, and he always took the bath in the kitchen, ordering everybody out. Then, with the fire glowing and the water deliciously heated, he stepped into his vast tin tub—pink, fat and a trifle wrinkled—and luxuriated for forty minutes or more. Sometimes he fell asleep in the tub, and Mrs. Marsden, his housekeeper, failing to wake him by hammering on the door, would have to come in and rouse him, naked and rosy, fat and content.

  When this had happened half a dozen times, Bentner married her as being the decent thing to do in the circumstances. After their marriage he still called her Mrs. Marsden and she still called him Mr. Bentner. They had borne those names too long to change. But they had a sort of pudding love for each other—quiet and comfortable and based on deep mutual respect.

  Mountjoy thought Bentner a fool, though he was fond of him. "He has the brain of a somnolent oyster," he once said, but he knew that there was in Bentner and his followers in the Labor Party a kind of plodding sense essential to the political structure of Grand Fenwick.

  Mountjoy was not an autocrat. He was a democrat in that true sense of the word which permits the aristocracy and the commonalty to staunchly champion their own viewpoints without despising each other. The Church, of course, stood patiently neutral, properly calling upon God to bless both sides. "A tolerance of which only God is capable," as Abbot Ambrose, of the tiny monastery lodged in the equally tiny forest of Grand Fenwick, pointed out.

  There was but one gasoline pump in Grand Fenwick to serve the two automobiles of the Duchy. It was operated by Bert Green, who ran the bicycle shop in the village and added to his living by grazing twenty plump sheep on a mountainside pasture. He sold a few new bicycles, mostly around Christmas, and all of them of English manufacture—Raleighs, BSAs and Rudge-Whitworths for the most part.

  Mountjoy then called for his Rolls and, putting on his motoring cap and greatcoat and gloves, descended to the courtyard. He told the chauffeur to drive him to Bentner's place and the chauffeur, touching his cap, said he would have to stop in the village for petrol. He coasted the car down through the village street to Bert Green's bicycle shop and stopped before the old-fashioned, hand-operated gasoline pump. "Fill her up," the chauffeur said to Bert and Bert looked at the pump and at the Rolls, took a stub of cigarette out of the corner of his mouth and crushed it slowly on the ground.

  "Can't," he said. "There's only five gallons in the bottom of the sump. A lot of that's water and the pump can't reach it."

  "What happened?" asked the chauffeur. "Sump leaking?"

  "Nope," said Bert. "Bloomin' Frogs have cut us down to twenty gallons a month, and I put fifteen in Her Grace's Daimler day before yesterday. No more coming for a fortnight."

  "And pray," said Mountjoy, who had overheard the exchange, "why are we to have only twenty gallons of petrol a month in Grand Fenwick?"

  Bert shrugged. "Search me," he said. He went into the bicycle shop, rummaged in a drawer near the cash register where he kept bills, receipts, pencil stubs and a few tools, and came out with a grubby piece of paper. "Chap who came with the delivery truck gave me this. It's in French so I didn't read it." He handed Mountjoy a sheet of green paper with some italic printing on it, and some blank spaces filled in by hand in purple ink. Mountjoy glanced at the sheet. It was headed:

  COMPAGNIE INTERNATIONALE DES PRODUITS MAZOUT FRANÇAIS

  The text read:

  Nous sommes obliges de vous aviser qu'à cause de la situation internationale regardant la provision des produits mazout, il est nécessaire de limiter sévèrement une quote-part a été instituée et le lotissement de Bert Green a Grande Fenwick a été fixe a quatrevingt litres chaque mois.

  Charles Dupleixes

  President C.I.P.M.F.

  The signature was rubber-stamped.

  "When did you get this?" demanded Mountjoy.

  "Last delivery—couple of weeks ago."

  Mountjoy swallowed hard and was for the moment speechless. It was an outrage that he, the Prime Minister of a sovereign and independent nation, should be informed by a gasoline-station attendant that the supply of gasoline to his country was to be almost entirely cut off.

  The thing was beyond bearing, and it cut deeper that he received the news on a printed form letter with a rubber-stamp signature. He would instantly
send a telegram to the President of the French Republic couched in such terms as to have this fellow Dupleixes imprisoned in whatever the French now used as a substitute for the Bastille.

  Meanwhile the chauffeur and Bert stood looking at him patiently and a horrible thought occurred to the Count. "What about the fuel oil for heating my bath?" he asked. It came from the same supplier.

  "Sent the last ten gallons up to the castle yesterday," said Bert. "Should last a week. Looks like we're not going to get any more."

  "Damnation," cried Mountjoy. "The government of the United States of America is obliged, under a treaty approved by their own Senate, to supply me with hot water in perpetuum. This is an outrage. I shall not stand for it."

  He had dismounted to inspect the letter Bert had produced and he now got back into the Rolls and slammed the door. "Drive on," he said to the chauffeur.

  "Can't," the chauffeur replied. "We're out of gas."

  CHAPTER III

  Grand Fenwick, then, became the first country in the world to feel at one blow the full effect of the energy shortage with Mountjoy reduced again to one bath a week, his bath water having to be heated on the woodburning kitchen stove below and brought up several flights of stairs as in previous years.