Кирил Бонфильоли - The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery

I hastened to say that yes, goodness gracious, I had scarcely thought he would lightly betray such a trust, after all, I wasn’t a bank inspector, was I, ha ha. (Did he flinch a millimetre?) Indeed, we could have had this chat, I supposed, at the Maison Française Garden Party next week, to which I happened to know the Warden had arranged for him to be invited (well, I knew I could fix that all right). His eyes gave off a glint, such as chinks in people’s armour give off. I struck while the chink was open, saying that if it came to that we could have discussed it after dinner at The Great House next month (that was truly a whopper: no self-respecting Duke has even heard of Clearing House Banks, he deals direct with Fort Knox). He melted almost visibly; the trained eye could detect gobbets of molten manager oozing out of the fatal chink. Still breathing on his base little soul as on a platinum flute, I protested that, why, only the other day I had been saying to Lord Rumble of Colne (his Chairman) that British banks were quite as silent as any grave in Zurich (may God forgive me) and that I wanted no more just then than routine confirmation of what the Bursar had told me about Bronwen’s academic grants, prizes and awards. The sources only – I had no interest in amounts. How the fibs tumbled out! And how intently he now listened!

I lolled awhile, watching him muse furiously, weighing his professional integrity against not one but two social triumphs. In the meantime, our moustaches were exchanging invidious glances. Professional integrity lost the day, of course – doesn’t it always? – and he mumbled something into the acoustically shielded mumbling-box on his desk. In a trice or two he was handing me three telex print-outs with the smirk of a doctor showing you your Liver Function Test results, confident that you don’t know your AST from your bilirubin. He was right, of course, for I am something of a simpleton (indeed, when I was a youth my parents so despaired of my intellect as to contemplate buying me a seat in the Metal Market or, if even that proved too demanding, putting me into Holy Orders). On the other hand, I do seem to have picked up a few scraps of knowledge about the bits of paper that bankers swap around amongst themselves.

One of the three bits of paper he handed me was a mere TTP (Telegraphic Transfer Payment) which stated, almost en clair , its message, which was to pay a sum into Bronwen’s coffers precisely equal to what the Bursar had told me her Fellowship was worth per term. The other two were Tested Cables and I put a baffled look on my face and a hand into my trouser-pocket. I’m not nearly so disorganised as my friends think: that very morning I had snipped out all the lining of the said pocket, leaving just enough to clip a small ball-point pen onto, and had shaved those areas of the Mortdecai quadriceps which were within reach of the said ball-point pen. The bank manager may well have thought that I was playing pocket-billiards but in fact I was scribbling rapidly onto the smoothened thigh.

Prefixes were what I was scribbling.

Perhaps at this point I should explain about Tested Cables. (If you are very rich you can skip this bit; in fact you can skip it even if you are but a common or high-street bank manager or an up-market thief.) A Tested Cable is a way of shunting chunks of money from a bank in one country to a ditto in another. Most of it is a jumble of figures, known as prefixes, indicating, to people who know about such things, the country, city and bank of origin, then the bank to which the lettuce is addressed, the account number of the recipient and, finally, the amount of lettuce to be shifted. Some years ago a goodish bit of thieving went on: you got into a bank-vault (at night, so that you didn’t have to hurt anyone except the aged night-watchman who had previously declared himself willing to be biffed a little for an honorarium of £500) and, just for the look of the thing, you nicked the contents. You burned the notes, didn’t you, because most of them had been ‘punched,’ or perhaps you gave a few to people you had a grudge against. What you really wanted was a sight of a certain slim volume which lived in the vault – I don’t think you’d want me to tell you the colour of the binding – so that you could take a few holiday-snaps of its pages with your Minox camera. You left the book behind, naturally. It contained the prefixes of all the serious banks in the world.

You had, of course, already cultivated the acquaintance of a rich chap who had a bulging account in, let us say, the Reichsbank in Tel Aviv and you had elicited his account number, who knows how? Then, on the pretext of spending a dirty weekend in Paris, you spent a dirty weekend in Paris and opened a bank account for yourself there. Back in London, you dialled yourself into the kindly Post Office’s telex system and sent the Tel Aviv bank the appropriate jumble of numbers; nipped over to Paris and nonchalantly let them fill your attaché case with large, vulgar currency notes. Well, it’s a living, I suppose; the only dreary bits are all that air-travel and the sameness of Paris whores.

By the bye, I really wouldn’t urge you to try this particular caper yourself: banks aren’t stupid, you know. They sussed this one out after a mere two years and a mere twenty million pounds or so; one or two of the victims, you see, had at last noticed that there were one or two noughts missing from the end of their statements of account. Nowadays, all Tested Cable Transfers go through a frowsty room in the HQ of the Clearing House Banks Association, where sits a proud, rat-faced man who is Told The Trick each day by word of mouth. He must never write it down, on pain of being banned for life from the moustache-wearing classes. ‘The Trick’ may simply be subtracting the day of the month from the prefix or adding in the number 69 or whatever. Most of you would hardly remember World War II, but secret agents morsing messages in those days always included a Deliberate Mistake, so that London would know that they were not transmitting a load of old moody at the behest of an Abwehr person who was courteously grinding the muzzle of his PPK into their earholes.

If you’ll allow me to get back to where I was – in the office of Bronwen’s smirking bank manager – what I was doing was keeping the baffled look pinned onto my map while scribbling numbers onto the Mortdecai thigh. All three of the absurd bits of paper had two prefix-groups in common; one had to be the prefix of this branch, the other must be Bronwen’s account number. I recked not of these; the numbers I scribbled were the other groups on the two TCTs, groups which could only be the prefixes of the banks of origin. Finally, I gave the fellow an overacted ‘I give up’ look, thanked him courteously, flicked a pitying glance at his starveling moustache, left my cigarette just where it would leave a tiresome mark on his leatherette desk-top and made the sweeping kind of exit which only Mrs Spon and I know how to do properly. (The boy who makes my shirts has tried and tried but has never quite mastered it.) (The sweeping-out of a room, I mean.)

Back in Bronwen’s set I stripped off all clothing from my southerly aspect and shifted my tum aside so that I could see the ball-point marks on the Mortdecai thigh. I copied the numbers onto a very small piece of paper indeed before scrubbing them off the thigh. Then I lifted the telephone and asked for an outside line, for I wished to dial the number of a venal bank manager I know in London. Then I remembered the snippets of wire I had found on Bronwen’s carpet and replaced the receiver. I thought a stroll would do me good. First I strolled to the joke shop on the corner and bought a brace of those little glass stink-bombs, then strolled further until I found a telephone kiosk which had not recently been vandalised. Having got through to my London number, I browbeat my way through the usual succession of secretaries whose only function is to prevent people talking to people they want to talk to and, in about £1’s worth of time, I was helloing the London bank manager friend.