Kek Huuygens, Smuggler

Introduction

One of the most common questions put to writers at cocktail parties is, “Where do you get your ideas?” Well, other than rarely getting them at cocktail parties, most writers have no idea where they get their ideas. On a few occasions when they do remember where they got a particular inspiration, it usually stays with them a long time.

It was this way with Kek Huuygens.

I was living in Rio de Janeiro at the time, and enjoying it very much, spending my hours divided about equally between golf and trying to think up workable plots so that my writing could sustain my sport habit, not to mention my family. This one day, after a round at the Gavea Country Club, I was sitting on the veranda with my partner of the day, a man named Les Weldon, sipping a gin tonic, when he turned to me and said sadly, “Old So-and-so-died yesterday.”

“Oh?” I asked, vastly disinterested. My mind, at the time, was torn between a scene on the Rio docks I was hoping to use in a book I was hoping to write, and the fact that I had inexplicably developed a shank that day, than which there is no greater curse.

“Yes,” he said. “He was quite a man. Polish, you know, but during the war he went to Holland and took on a Dutch name. Fought with the underground in France and later became an American citizen.”

“That’s nice,” I said. I figured if maybe I turned my right hand over just a trifle and, of course, kept my stupid head down and my stupid eye fixed on the stupid ball, maybe I could control the stupid club-head from turning in my stupid hand, and send the shank back to wherever it came from. The Devil’s Pro Shop, probably.

“Yes,” Les said. “Now that he’s dead I could tell you things about him I couldn’t while he was alive, because not everything he did was strictly within the law.”

“That’s nice,” I said. I wondered if possibly one of our opponents that day had gone in for Macumba, which was the local version of Voodoo. Possibly he had had a small figurine of me made, and was opening the tiny hand and turning the miniature club just as I swung. I’d have to keep an eye on him the next time we played.

“Yes,” Les said. “There was the time, for example, when he smuggled five million dollars into the United States from Belgium. Legally — or anyway, almost legally.”

I looked up, frowning, my mind at last drawn from my shank, at least temporarily. You can never forget a shank completely.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “How do you smuggle legally?”

“I said, or almost legally,” Les said reprovingly. “I’ll tell you about it.” And he did.

And Kek Huuygens was born.

Naturally Kek has had many adventures since then, as many as I have been able to dream up, because the original, while quite a man in his own way, unfortunately didn’t serve literary requirements other than in his five million dollar caper. Still, I thank him (and Les Weldon, of course) for bringing Kek to life.

Kek has developed, of course, over the years since he was born in Rio de Janeiro. He has become quite a man, taken on a more definite form, fixed his idiosyncracies more firmly, become more of a person. He has experienced more: married and divorced, loved and been loved, hated and been hated. He has traveled a long way from the Warsaw of his youth; he has seen the world.

I have no idea where Kek Huuygens is at the moment; we’ve sort of lost track, unfortunately. But wherever he is, I know that behind those cool gray eyes that razor-sharp mind is busy, putting the little cogs together in some scheme or other to confound the customs service of one country or another. I am sure, as always, he has some plan he is perfecting, which will bring gain to others, but mostly to himself.

I just wish I knew what it was!

Robert L. Fish