Flying Dutch

FIVE

Can I speak,” Vanderdecker shouted, “to Professor Montalban?”

In a long life, reflected the Flying Dutchman, I have come across many bloody silly ideas, but two of them are in a class of their own for pure untainted idiocy. One was the Court of King Ludwig of Bavaria, and the other is the privatised British telephone service.

A long way away, definitely in another continent and quite probably in another dimension, a little voice asked him to repeat the name.

“Montalban,” he said. “M for Mouse…”

The lovely part of it was that he was standing in a telephone kiosk within sight of the gates of the power station he was telephoning. If he was to shout just a little bit louder they’d be able to hear him without using the phone at all.

“Who’s calling, please?” said the voice.

“My name’s Vanderdecker,” Vanderdecker said.

“I’m sorry,” said the voice, “I didn’t quite…”

“VANDERDECKER…Oh I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to shout, it’s not a very good line…Oh I see. When do you expect him back?”

“Professor Montalban has gone to Geneva,” said the voice, “we don’t expect him back for a week or so. Will you hold?”

“No, no,” said the Flying Dutchman, “that’s fine, have you got a number for him in…”

“Could you speak up, please?” the voice said, “it’s rather a poor line.”

“Have you got a number where I can reach the professor in Geneva?” Vanderdecker enunciated. The voice said no, she didn’t, could she take a message? Vanderdecker thanked her and hung up.

Even on his antiquated maps, Geneva was clearly marked as being a long way from the sea. Not from water, but from the sea. All in all, it would be foolish to risk trying to reach him there. Vanderdecker pressed the little lever, but no change came cascading down into the tray marked Returned Coins. There would be nothing for it, he said to himself, but to put out to sea for a while until the good professor came back.

For above the seven thousandth time, Vanderdecker assured himself that the alchemist would be as keen to see him as he was to see the alchemist. If Montalban was even remotely concerned with the same field of research as he had been in the reign of His Most Catholic Majesty Philip II, it stood to reason that he would welcome a chance to examine his very first human guinea pigs. His reading of scientific journals had taught him a lot about the way scientists think. They like to have plenty of data. Vanderdecker had a ship full of data; noisome, foul-smelling data, it was true, but…

At this point, a thought entered into Vanderdecker’s mind. During the short time it stayed there, it made its presence felt in more or less the same way a hand grenade would assert itself in a glassworks.

If Montalban had drunk exactly the same stuff as he had, presumably Montalban had been subject to exactly the same side-effects. Yet here the alchemist apparently was, spending a week here, a fortnight there, completely surrounded by human beings. It was by no means unlikely that he had gone to Geneva in an aeroplane, and that while there he would stay in a hotel. If he was able to do these things, it necessarily followed that he didn’t smell. How was this?

In Caithness, many of the postmen still ride bicycles. If without any warning they get downwind of a member of the crew of the sailing ship Verdomde, they tend to ride these bicycles into trees. The sound of a postman’s head making contact with a Scots pine brought Vanderdecker out of his reverie. He was being antisocial again. Time to move on.

While he had been away, the crew had passed the time by going for a swim in the sea. Complete immersion in seawater did nothing to impede the communication of the smell, but it did make you feel better. Now the water around Dounreay has been declared completely safe by NIREX, which may be taken to mean that it’s about as safe as a gavotte in a minefield; but from the point of view of Vanderdecker’s crew, this was a point in its favour. They could bathe in it with a clean conscience if it was polluted already.

By some strange accident of chance, it was Antonius, the first mate, who noticed it first; and this in spite of the fact that the odds against Antonius noticing anything at any given time are so astronomical as to be beyond calculation. The next person to notice it was Sebastian van Dooming. He only noticed it because after his ninth attempt to drown himself he was so short of breath that he was inhaling air like a vacuum-pump. Then Pieter and Dirk Pretorius noticed it, and they pointed it out to Jan Christian Duysberg. He in turn mentioned it to Wilhelm Triegaart, who told him that he was imagining things. In short, by the time Vanderdecker returned, everyone was aware of it. They all decided to tell their captain at the same time.

“Hold on, will you?” Vanderdecker said. There was a brief but total silence, and then everyone started talking again.

“Quiet!” A man who has just spent five minutes talking into a British Telecom payphone is not afraid to raise his voice. “Sebastian,” he said, choosing someone at random, “can you please tell me what’s going on?”

“It’s the smell, captain,” replied the spokesman. “It’s gone.”

Vanderdecker stared. Then he sniffed so violently that he almost dislocated his windpipe.

“When did this happen?” he asked quietly.

“Must have been when we were all swimming in the water, captain,” Sebastian said.

“You don’t say.” Vanderdecker closed his eyes, buried his nose in Antonius’s doublet and concentrated. There was still a whiff of it there, but it was very faint. “This water here?”

“That’s right,” several voices assured him. Others urged him to try it for himself. They didn’t want to be rude, they said, but he smelt awful.

Vanderdecker needed no second invitation. He pulled off his shirt and trousers and jumped into the sea.

“I do believe you’re right,” he said, a quarter of an hour later. They were back on board ship again by this stage. The ship itself was as bad as ever, but what could you expect? “It’s definitely still there, but it’s faded a hell of a lot.”

“What d’you think’s happened?” asked the first mate anxiously. “What’s going on?”

Vanderdecker had a shrewd idea that it wasn’t a coincidence. He didn’t know much about these things, but it stood to reason that the sea next to a power station absorbs quite a fair amount of any escaping vapours or things of that sort. Until a few days ago, Professor Montalban had been doing experiments inside that very same power station. If that’s a coincidence, Vanderdecker said to himself, then I’m not a Dutchman.

An hour later, it had worn off. The cloud of avaricious gulls which had formed over the ship suddenly evaporated. The fumes from Wilhelm Triegaart’s repulsive pipe were once again the sweetest-smelling things on the ship. Because he had had his immersion later than the others, Vanderdecker was slightly more wholesome than they were; only slightly. He would still have been barred from any fashionable sewer as a health hazard.

Vanderdecker said, “Get me all the empty barrels you can find. Then fill them up in the sea where you lot were all having your swim.”

Antonius, who was a conscientious man, felt it his duty to point out to Vanderdecker that you can’t drink seawater. Vanderdecker ignored him politely. He was thinking again.

It no longer matters, he said to himself. Geneva can be on top of the Alps for all I care—if we can keep ourselves from smelling for just a couple of days, we could make it to Geneva and go see Montalban.

While we’re on the subject of coincidences, how else would you account for the fact that the Dow Jones’ second biggest slide in twenty years started that same afternoon?

The most direct route by sea from Dounreay to Geneva, so to speak, is straight down the North Sea and into the Channel. Vanderdecker, however, was extremely unhappy about going anywhere near the Channel now that it was so depressingly full of ships. He made for Den Helder.

Yet another of these wretched coincidences; MV Erdkrieger, the flagship of the environmentalist pressure group Green Machine, left Den Helder at exactly the same time on the same day that Vanderdecker left Scotland. It was headed for Dounreay. Its progress was slightly impeded by its cargo of six thousand tons of slightly wilted flowers, contributed by Green Machine’s Dutch militant sister organisation Unilateral Tulip, which the Erdkrieger’s crew intended to use to block the effluent outlets of the newly-built Fifth Generation Reactor whose construction and installation Professor Montalban (better known in environmentalist circles as the Great Satan) was presently supervising. As a result, the Erdkrieger was not her usual nippy self. She was going about as fast as, for example, a sixteenth century merchantman under full sail.

“Now then,” said Mr Gleeson, “the Vanderdecker Policy.”

Mr Gleeson was not what Jane had expected, but then she shouldn’t have expected him to be; not if she’d thought about it for a moment. What she should have expected was an extraordinary man; and for all his shortcomings, he was certainly that.

He was short; maybe half an inch shorter than Jane, who was a quintessential size 12. He was round but not fat, and his head had hair in more or less the same way a mountain has grass—sparse and short and harassed-looking. He had bright, quick, precise eyes and a smile that told you that he would make jokes but not laugh at yours. As to ninety per cent of him he looked like somebody’s nice uncle. The other ten per cent, you felt, was probably pure barracuda.

“I don’t know,” said Mr Gleeson, “how much you’ve found out for yourself, so I’d better start at the beginning. Would you like something before we start? Cup of tea? Gin and tonic? Sherry?”

Jane had never been in Mr Gleeson’s office before, and she didn’t feel at all comfortable. It was an unsettling place—just comfortable enough to make you start to feel at home, and just businesslike enough to make you suddenly realise that you weren’t. Jane had the perception to understand that this effect was deliberate.

“No, thank you;” she said. Her mouth was like emery paper. Mr Gleeson reclined in his chair and looked at his fingernails for a moment. “The Vanderdecker Policy,” he said, “is the single most important secret in the world. I don’t want to worry you unduly, but when you leave this office tonight you’ll be taking with you enough information to wipe out every major financial institution and destabilise every economy in the world. I just thought you ought to know that. You can keep a secret, can’t you?”

Jane mumbled that she could. Mr Gleeson nodded. He accepted her word on this point. He was a good judge of character, and could read people.

“Actually,” he continued, “the risk involved in telling you this is minimal, because if you leaked it to anybody they wouldn’t believe you. I’m not sure they’d even believe me. Or the President of the United States, for that matter. When you actually come face to face with the true story, it’s so completely incredible that you could publish it in the Investor’s Chronicle and it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference. What we’ve been trying to cover up, ever since long before you were born, is not what the secret is but that it exists. And mainly, of course, we’re trying to deal with the actual problem, so that by the time it does get out—it will one day, it must, there’s no stopping it—we’ll have solved it and that will be that. Now then.”

Mr Gleeson scratched his ear slowly and gently, as if this was a very delicate and difficult feat to perform and required all his concentration. Then he leaned forward.

“So that you can understand what I’m going to say,” he continued, “I’d better just fill you in on the history of this firm’s most important client. You don’t need me to tell you that that’s the National Lombard Bank. It’s a very old bank; in fact it’s the oldest bank of all. To be honest with you, nobody knows exactly when it was founded; it started off as a large number of silver pennies in a sock belonging to an Italian merchant who was too fat to go to the Crusades in person, but was alive to the fantastic commercial opportunity they presented. These silver pennies bred many other silver pennies during the Siege of Jerusalem that the sock was too small to contain them all, and the Italian merchant, or his grandson or whoever it was, built a bank instead and kept them in that. Spiritually, however, the whole organisation remained a sock, and a sock it is to this day. Remember that, and you’ll understand a lot about how banks work.”

“For reasons best known to itself, the sock left Lombardy early in the fourteenth century and migrated to the cities of the Hanseatic League, where it went to live with some people called Fugger. They were kind to the sock and fed it lots of silver pennies, until almost all the silver pennies in the world were either in the sock permanently or else indefeasibly linked to it by a series of binding legal agreements. The more people tried to take money out of the sock, the more money ended up in there, and although everyone complained bitterly about this state of affairs, none of them realised that the only way to break the vicious circle was not to take money out of the sock in the first place. Even now,” said Mr Gleeson, “the lesson has not been learned which is why the economic infrastructure of the developed nations is completely up the pictures.”

“Anyway,” continued Mr Gleeson, “the Fuggers were industrious men, and they weren’t content to let the sock do all the work. They were forever trying to think up new ideas for getting even more silver pennies from people, and one of them hit on a very simple but extremely effective concept. It was basically a form of gambling, and it went something like this.”

“The Fuggers would think of something that was extremely unlikely to happen, and then they would persuade someone to wager them money that it would. Now the proper term for this arrangement is a sucker bet, but the Fuggers wanted to find a respectable name for it, so they called it Insurance. It caught on, just as they knew it would, and soon it became so respectable that they were able to get people to make a new bet every year, and they called this sort of bet a premium. But although everyone was soon convinced that the bets were totally respectable, the Fuggers were perfectionists and wanted to make absolutely sure, so they took to writing the bets out on extremely long pieces of parchment, frequently in Latin. This practice survives to this day; we call them policies, and usually they’re so completely and utterly respectable that it takes a couple of trained lawyers to understand what they mean.”

Jane nodded instinctively, for she had just renewed her car insurance. Mr Gleeson went on.

“Well,” he said, “if we can just fast-forward for a bit, the House of Fugger became Fugger and Company, which in turn became the Lombard National Bank, which turned into the National Lombard Bank plc. The name has changed, but the sock remains the same. In fact, you would be forgiven for thinking that the sock is the only truly immortal entity in the world. You would be wrong.”

Mr Gleeson paused and opened the top drawer of his desk, from which he extracted a packet of digestive biscuits. He offered one to Jane, who refused, and then ate one himself. Once he had cleared his mouth of crumbs, he continued.

“Back we go to the sixteenth century. We are in Cadiz, one of the most important seaports in the world. If you are tired of Cadiz, you are tired of life and so on. Naturally, there is a Fugger office in the High Street, offering low-interest overdrafts, mortgages (the word mortgage literally means “dead hand”, which I find terribly evocative, don’t you?), bottomry loans, whatever they were, and the inevitable life insurance. It is a Thursday.”

“Into the Fugger office walks a relatively prosperous sea captain in his early thirties. He has become rather concerned about the risks involved in his profession now that the seas are full of English pirates, and he wants to take out some insurance on his ship. This is perfectly natural, because his ship is his living, and if somebody puts a culverin ball through its bows, our sea-captain will be out of a job.”

“The manager of this particular Fugger office is well versed in the basic tenets of his trade, and the fundamental rule of insurance is, Don’t take bad risks—that, by the way, is what an insurer calls a sucker bet when you offer it to him. There is a severe risk that what the sea-captain fears so much will actually come to pass. Therefore, regretfully, the manager has to refuse to insure the ship. But he is nothing if not a tryer; it hurts him severely if someone walk out of his office without making at least a small bet, and so he suggests to the sea-captain that he might do worse than take out a little life insurance.”

Again Mr Gleeson paused, and Jane noticed to her amazement that he was quivering slightly. Mr Gleeson must have noticed her noticing, for he smiled.

“This is the good bit,” he said, “don’t go away. I remember when I was told it. By rights, of course, I should never have been told it at all. You see, the story is handed down from generation to generation of managing directors of the House of Fugger or whatever they’re calling it this week. Fortunately, the managing directors of the bank had always died in their beds with plenty of notice from the medical authorities, and so there was always time to pass the story on. The way I got to hear it was extremely fortuitous, a complete break with tradition, you might say. You see, I was at Oxford with the son of the then managing director, and I was staying with the family one long vacation. We all went out rough shooting and there was a terrible accident, the old man got shot. No time to get a doctor, he just rolled over and with his dying breath blurted the whole horrible thing out. I happened to be there, and so of course I heard it. I wasn’t even qualified then, but of course I became the bank’s chief auditor on the spot, just as my friend became the next managing director, because of what we had heard. You see, the system is that the whole board knows there’s a secret, but only the MD knows what the secret is. I’ve introduced the same system at Moss Berwick, but it doesn’t seem to have worked so well there.”

“So what is the secret, exactly?” Jane asked.

“I’m coming to that,” said the senior partner. “I was just trying to put it off for as long as possible, because it’s so…so silly, I suppose is what you’d have to call it, if you were going to be savagely honest. I’ve lived with this for thirty years, my entire life and phenomenal successes in my career are built around it and I’ve never ever told anyone before.”

Jane looked him in the eye. She was sorry for him. “Go on,” she said.

“Thank you,” said Mr Gleeson. He was probably quite nice when you got to know him, should you live that long. “The policy that the manager sold Captain Vanderdecker—the sea-captain’s name was Vanderdecker—was a perfectly standard policy specially designed to meet the needs, or rather the gullibility, of sea-captains. You had the choice of paying regular premiums or a single lump-sum premium—the sea-captains found it difficult to pay regular premiums in those days, you see, because they rarely knew where they’d be at any given time from one year’s end to the next—and in return you got an assured sum on death. It wasn’t exactly a fortune, but it would tide your nearest and dearest over until the plague or the Inquisition finally finished her off, and since there was no income tax in those days it was guaranteed tax free.”

“The sting in the tail was this. Because sea-captaining was such a risky job in those days, it was a virtual certainty that the policyholder wouldn’t make sixty years of age. This is where the sucker-bet part of it comes in. Because of this actuarial semi-certainty, the policy contains the proviso that the sum assured—the payout—will increase by fifty per cent compound for every year that the life assured—the sucker—survives over the age of seventy-five. Seventy-five, mark you; those Fuggers were taking no chances. It made a marvellous selling point, and the age limitation only appeared in very tiny script on the back of the policy, just underneath the seal where you wouldn’t think of looking. They sold tens of thousands of those policies, and for every one sucker that made seventy-six, there were nine hundred and ninety-nine that didn’t.”

Mr Gleeson stopped talking and sat very still for a while, so still that Jane was afraid to interrupt him. It is very quiet indeed in a soundproofed office on the fifteenth floor of an office block at two in the morning.

“Talking of sucker bets,” Mr Gleeson finally said, “this one was the best of the lot. You see, Captain Vanderdecker didn’t die. He just went on living. Nobody knows why—there are all sorts of far-fetched stories which I won’t bore you with, because your credulity must be strained to breaking-point already. The fact remains that Vanderdecker didn’t die. He is still alive, over four hundred years later. Please bear in mind the fact that the interest is compound. We tried to calculate once what it must be now, but we couldn’t. There is, quite literally, not that much money in the whole world.”

“So, you see, if Vanderdecker dies, the whole thing will go into reverse. All the money which has gone into the sock—and that’s every penny there is—will have to come out again, and it will all go to Mr Vanderdecker’s estate. This is of course impossible, and so the bank would have to default—it would have to welch on a sucker bet. And that would be that. End of civilisation as we know it. You know as well as I do that the economies of the major economic powers are so volatile that the markets collapse every time the Mayor of Accrington gets a bad cold. The faintest hint that the National Lombard was about to go down and you wouldn’t be able to get five yards down Wall Street without being hit by a freefalling market-maker. And that is the basic story behind the Vanderdecker Policy.”

That same long, deafening silence came back again, until Jane could bear it no longer.

“But surely,” Jane said, “if Vanderdecker is going to live for ever, he’ll never die and the problem will never arise.”

Mr Gleeson smiled. “Who said he was going to live for ever?” he replied. “All we know is that he hasn’t died yet. It’s scientifically impossible for a man to live for ever. Logically, he must die eventually. And every year he doesn’t die, the problem gets inexpressibly worse. You see the trouble we’re in. We can’t afford for him to die, any more than we can afford for him to live any longer. Fifty per cent compound. Think about that for a moment, will you?”

Jane thought about it. She shuddered. “So where is he now?” she asked.

“We don’t know,” said Mr Gleeson. “We lost track of him in the 1630s, and then he kept turning up again. He turns up once every seven years or so, and then he vanishes off the face of the earth.”

Suddenly Jane remembered something. “You mean like the Flying Dutchman?” she said.

“Vanderdecker is the Flying Dutchman,” said Mr Gleeson. “The very same.”

“I see,” Jane said, as if this suddenly made everything crystal clear. “So where does Bridport come in?”

“I was coming to that,” said Mr Gleeson, “just as soon as I’d given you time to digest what I’ve just told you. Obviously you’ve got a remarkable digestion. Or you think I’m as mad as a hatter. Bridport comes in because that’s where Vanderdecker was last recorded in this country. He opened an account at the bank’s Bridport branch in 1890-something. I believe you found it.”

“I did,” Jane confirmed. “Why on earth haven’t you closed it?”

“Easy,” replied Mr Gleeson, “we can’t close it without either his instructions or sight of his death certificate. Rules are rules.”

Jane was astounded. The last thing she had expected was integrity. “But what about bank charges?” she said. “Couldn’t you just write it off against those?”

“No bank charges in eighteen ninety-thing,” replied Gleeson. “It wouldn’t be right. There would be an anomaly which would have to be noted in the accounts. As the bank’s auditor, I would have to insist on it.”

“I see,” Jane said again. “I didn’t realise the rules were so strict.”

“All we can do,” said Mr Gleeson, “is keep very quiet about it. The only people who know the significance of that account are me, the chairman of the bank, and now you. Obviously the local manager doesn’t know. And if anyone finds out apart from us, of course, we hound them to insanity and have them locked up in a mental hospital.”

“That’s within the rules, is it?”

“I’ve read them very carefully,” Mr Gleeson replied, “no mention of it anywhere. Therefore it stands to reason it must be legitimate.”

“In that case,” Jane said slowly, “why haven’t I…”

“Because,” replied Mr Gleeson, “you have no sense of smell.”

For the third time, Jane asserted that she saw. She lacked conviction.

“Let me explain,” said Mr Gleeson. “There’s one other thing we know about the Flying Dutchman. He smells. Awful.You’ve heard of the Marie Celeste?”

Jane said that she had.

“National Lombard were part of the syndicate insuring her, so it carried out its own investigation. It found the only survivor.”

“Ah.”

“Well might you say Ah,” replied Mr Gleeson. “As soon as the managing director found out what was going on, he cleared everyone else out of the way and spoke to the man personally, just before he died of acute bewilderment. He reported how they were all sitting there minding their own business when this old–fashioned sailing ship came alongside. There was this smell, the survivor said. It was so bad, he said, everyone jumped into the sea and was drowned. Except him. The old–fashioned ship picked him up just before he was about to drown and took him on board. He was on the ship for three weeks before it dropped him off. He described the smell in detail; that bit of the report runs to four hundred and seventy-nine pages, so you can see it made quite an impression.”

“Anyway, it turned out that the name of the ship’s captain was Vanderdecker. Since the name is not common and the survivor said the whole crew were in sixteenth-century costume, it’s a fair assumption that it was him. There have been other incidents since which corroborate the story, but the names won’t mean anything to you because they happened in remote places and the bank managed to cover them up in time. It is an undoubted fact that Vanderdecker smells so horrible that nobody in the world can bear to be in his presence for more than a few seconds at a time. This,” said Mr Gleeson, “is where you come in.”

“I see,” Jane said, for the fourth time.

“What we want you to do,” said Mr Gleeson, “is find Vanderdecker and reason with him. Tell him he can’t take it with him. Negotiate with him to surrender the policy in return for an annuity—a million pounds a year for life or some such figure. It’d be worth it, the bank can afford it. You’d be on commission, naturally.”

“But how do I find him?” Jane said. “If it was possible, surely you’d have done it by now.”

“We haven’t dared try,” Mr Gleeson replied. “In order to find Vanderdecker, we’d have to let too many people in on too much of the secret. Far too risky. Sucker bet. Only someone like you can do it, because you know already. And you only know because I’ve told you, and I’ve only told you because you have no sense of smell. Do you follow me?”

“I think so,” Jane said, “more or less. Actually, I might have a lead already.” And she told him about Lower Brickwood Farm Cottage, and the invoices. When she had finished, Mr Gleeson nodded and smiled, a you-can-call-me-Bill sort of smile that he usually reserved for Prime Ministers.

“Will you help us, then?” he said. “If you succeed, you can name your own fee.”

“Well…” Jane hesitated, genuinely doubtful. If she accepted the job, she would have to find some way of coming to terms with what she had just been told, and that would not be easy, not by a long way. On the other hand, and bearing in mind all the material circumstances, with particular regard to the section of the rules which said nothing at all about locking people up in lunatic asylums, she felt she didn’t have much choice.

“Yes,” she said.

Mr Gleeson grinned at her. “That’s the spirit,” he said. “May the Sock be with you.”