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inscribed in Olde Englysshe lettering, is ‘
Rancho de los Siete Dolores de la Virgen
,’ New Mexico. In short, it is from my very good customer Milton Krampf.
    The letter says – mind you, I never saw it, so I’m paraphrasing Martland’s account – that Mr Krampf admires the eminent Chum very much and wants to start a fan club (!) to distribute little known biographical material about said Chum to Senators, Congressmen, British MP’s and
Paris Match
. (Terrifying, that last bit, you will admit.) He further says that a Mr Hogwattle Gloat has been in touch with him and is prepared to kick in with some illustrated reminiscences of ‘your mutual schooldays in Cambridge’. He also says how about the three of them meeting someplace and seeing if they can’t work out something to their mutual advantages. In other words, it is the bite. Coy and clumsy perhaps, but unmistakably the bite. (That made, so far, two members of the cast who’d gone off their chumps, leaving only me sane and responsible. I think.)
    Martland paused in his narrative and I did not urge him on, for this was very bad news, for when millionaires go mad poorer people get hurt. I was so disturbed that I unthinkingly gave Martland a drink. A bad mistake that, I needed him to stay on edge. As he filled with the old familiar juice you could see his confidence returning, his head reassuming the habitual, maddeningly pompous poise.How he must have been loathed by his brother officers as they watched him bully and arsehole-creep his way up the service. But one had to remember, all the time, that he was dangerous and far cleverer than he looked or talked.
    ‘Martland,’ I said after a time, ‘did you say that your hirelings followed me to Spinoza’s this morning?’
    ‘That’s right.’ Crisply, much too crisply. He was definitely feeling his oats again.
    ‘Jock, Mr Martland is telling me
fibs
. Smack him, please.’
    Jock drifted out of the shadows, gently relieved Martland of his glass and bent down to stare benignly into his face. Martland stared back, wide-eyed, his mouth opening a little. A mistake that, the open mouth. Jock’s great hand swung round in a half circle and struck Martland’s cheek with a loud report.
    Martland sailed over the arm of the sofa and fetched up against the wainscot. He sat there a while; his little eyes dripping tears of hatred and funk. His mouth, closed now, writhed – he was counting his teeth, I expect.
    ‘I think that perhaps that was silly of me,’ I said. ‘I mean, killing you is safe enough, it sort of ties things up for good, doesn’t it, but just hurting you will only make you vengeful.’ I let him think about that for a time, to get the nasty implications. He thought about it. He got them.
    At last he cranked a sickly smirk on to his face – beastly sight, that – and came and sat down again.
    ‘I shan’t bear a grudge, Charlie. I dare say you feel I deserve a bit of a bashing after this morning. Not yourself yet, I mean to say.’
    ‘There is something in what you say,’ I said, truthfully, for there was something in what he said. ‘I have had a long day, full of mopery and mayhem. If I stay up any longer I am likely to make a serious error of judgment. Goodnight.’ With this I swept out of the room. Martland’s mouth was open again as I closed the door.
    A brief, delicious session under the warm shower, a whisk of costly dentifrice around the old ivory castles, a puff of Johnson’s Baby Powder here and there, a dive between the sheets and I was my own man again. Krampf’s idiotic departure from his script worried me, perhaps more than the attempt on my own life now, but I felt that there was nothing which could not more profitably be worried about on the morrow which is, as is well known, another day.
    I rinsed the cares from my mind with a few pages of Firbank and swam gently and tenderly down into sleep. Sleep is not, with me, a mere switching off: it is a very positive pleasure to be