The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time dg-3

by Douglas Adams

  Stanley wasn’t a good downpour. Nothing wrong with a good downpour for clearing the air. Stanley was the sort of thing you needed a good downpour to clear the air of. Stanley was muggy, close, and oppressive, like someone large and sweaty pressed up against you in a tube train. Stanley didn’t rain, but every so often he dribbled on you.

  Dirk stood outside in the Stanley.

  The actor had kept him waiting for over an hour now, and Dirk was beginning to wish that he had stuck by his own opinion that actors never got up in the morning. Instead of which he had turned up rather eagerly outside the actor’s flat at about 8:30 and then stood behind a tree for an hour.

  Nearly an hour and a half now. There was a brief moment of excitement when a motorcycle messenger arrived and delivered a small package, but that was about it. Dirk lurked about twenty yards from the actor’s door.

  The Motorcycle Messenger Arrival Incident had surprised him a bit. The actor didn’t seem to be a particularly prosperous one. He looked as if he were more in the still-knocking-on-people’s-doors bit of his career than in the having-scripts-biked-round-to-him bit.

  Time dragged by. Dirk had read through the small collection of newspapers he’d brought with him twice, and checked through the contents of his wallet and pockets several times: the usual collection of business cards for people he had no recollection of meeting, unidentifiable phone numbers on scraps of paper, credit cards, cheque book, his passport (he had suddenly remembered that he had left it in another jacket when his quarry had paused for a longish time at the window of a travel agent yesterday), his toothbrush (he never travelled without his toothbrush, with the result that it was completely unusable), and his notebook.

  He even consulted his own horoscope in one of the papers, the one written by a disreputable friend of his who toiled unscrupulously under the name of The Great Zaganza. First he glanced at some of the entries under other birth signs, just to get a feel for the kind of mood the GZ was in. Mellow, it seemed, at first sight. “Your ability to take the long view will help you through some of the minor difficulties you experience when Mercury ...,” “Past weeks have strained your patience, but new possibilities will now start to emerge as the sun ... ,” “Beware of allowing others to take advantage of your good nature. Resolve will be especially called for when ...” Boring, humdrum stuff. He read his own horoscope. “Today you will meet a three-ton rhinoceros called Desmond.”

  Dirk clapped the paper shut in irritation, and at that moment the door suddenly opened. The actor emerged with purposeful air. He was carrying a small suitcase, a shoulder bag, and a coat. Something was happening. Dirk glanced at his watch. Three minutes past ten. He made a quick note in his book. His pulse quickened.

  A taxi was coming down the street towards them. The actor hailed it. Damn! Something as simple as that. He was going to get away. The actor climbed into the cab and it drove off down the street, past Dirk. Dirk swivelled to watch it, and caught a momentary glimpse of the actor looking back through the rear window. Dirk watched helplessly and then glanced up and down the street in the vain hope that ...

  Almost miraculously a second taxi appeared suddenly at the top of the street, heading towards him. Dirk shot out an arm, and it drew to a halt beside him.

  “Follow that cab!” exclaimed Dirk, clambering into the back.

  “I been a cabbie over twenty years now,” said the cabbie as he slid back into the traffic. “Never had anybody actually say that to me.”

  Dirk sat perched on the edge of his seat, watching the cab in front as it threaded its way through the slow, agonising throttle of the London traffic.

  “Now that may seem like a little thing to you, but it’s interesting, innit?”

  “What?” said Dirk.

  “Anytime you see anything on the telly where someone jumps in a cab, it’s always ‘Follow that cab,’ innit?”

  “Is it? I’ve never noticed,” said Dirk.

  “Well, you wouldn’t,” said the cabbie. “You’re not a cabbie. What you notice depends on who you are. If you’re a cabbie, then what you especially notice when you watch the telly,” continued the cabbie, “is the cabbies. See what the cabbies are up to. See?”

  “Er, yes,” said Dirk.

  “But on the telly you never actually see the cabbies, see? You only see the people in the back of the cab. Like, the cabbie’s never of any interest.”

  “Er, I suppose so,” said Dirk. “Um, can you still see the cab we’re supposed to be following?”

  “Oh yeah, I’m following him okay. So, the only time you ever actually ever see the cabbie is when the fare says something to him. And when a fare says something to a cabbie in a drama, you know what invariably it is.”

  “Let me guess,” said Dirk. “It’s ‘Follow that cab!’”

  “Exactly my point! So if what you see on the telly is to be believed, all cabbies ever do,” continued the cabbie, “is follow other cabbies.”

  “Hmmm,” said Dirk, doubtfully.

  “Which leaves me in a very strange position, as being the one cabbie that never gets asked to follow another cabbie. Which leads me to the unmistakeable conclusion that I must be the cabbie that all the other cabbies are following ...”

  Dirk squinted out of the window trying to spot if there was another cab he could switch to.

  “Now, I’m not saying that’s what’s actually happening, but you can see how someone might get to thinking that way, can’t you. It’s the power of the media, innit?”

  “There was,” said Dirk, “an entire television series about taxi drivers. It was called, as I recall, Taxi.”

  “Yeah. Well. I’m not talking about that, am I?” said the cabbie irrefutably. “I’m talking about the power of the media to selectively distort reality. That’s what I’m talking about. I mean, when it comes down to it, we all live in our own different reality, don’t we? I mean, when it comes down to it.”

  “Well. Yes. I think you’re right, as a matter of fact,” said Dirk uneasily.

  “I mean, you take these kangaroos they’re trying to teach language to. What does anyone think we’re going to talk about? What are we gonna say then, eh? ‘So, how’s the hopping life treating you then?’ ‘Oh fine, mustn’t grumble. This pocket down me front’s a bit of a pain, though, always full of fluff and paper clips.’ It isn’t going to be like that. These kangaroos have got brains the size of a walnut whip. They live in a different world, see. It will be like trying to talk to John Selwing Gummer. You see what I’m saying?”

  “Can you see the cab we’re following?”

  “Clear as a bell. Probably be there before him.”

  Dirk frowned. “Be where before him?”

  “Heathrow.”

  “How on earth do you know he’s going to Heathrow?”

  “Any cabbie can tell if another cabbie’s going to Heathrow.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You read the signs. Okay, so there’s certain obvious things like the fare’s carrying luggage. Then there’s the route he’s taking. That’s easy. But you say he may just be going to stay with friends in Hammersmith. All I can say is, the fare didn’t get into the cab in the manner of someone going to stay with friends in Hammersmith. So, what else do you look for. Well, here’s where you need to be a cabbie to know. Normal life for a cabbie is lots of little bits here and there. You don’t know from minute to minute what’s gonna happen. What work you’re gonna get, how the day’s gonna go. You kind of prowl around in a restless kind of way. But if you get a fare to Heathrow, you’re away. Good solid journey, good solid fare. Wait in line for an hour or so. Get a good solid fare back to town. Thats your whole morning taken care of. You drive in a completely different way. You’re higher up on the road. You take better lines through corners. Your’re on your way, you’re going somewhere. It’s called doing the Heathrow hop. Any cabbie’ll spot it.

  “Hmmm,” said Dirk. “That’s remarkable.”

  “What you notice depends on who you are.”<
br />
  “You couldn’t happen to tell which flight he’s catching, could you?” asked Dirk.

  “Who do you think I am, mate,” retorted the cabbie, “a bloody private detective?” Dirk sat back in his seat and stared out of the window, thoughtfully.

  Chapter 7

  There must be some kind of disease that causes people to talk like that, and the name for it must be something like Airline Syllable Stress Syndrome. It’s the disease that seems to kick in at about ten thousand feet and becomes more and more pronounced, if that’s a good word to use in this context, with altitude until it levels out at a plateau of complete nonsense at about 35,000 feet. It makes otherwise rational people start saying things like “The captain has now turned off the seatbelt sign,” as if there were someone lurking around the cockpit attempting to deny that the captain has done any such thing, that he is indeed the captain and not an impostor, and that there aren’t a whole bunch of second-rate and inferior seatbelt signs that he mightn’t have been fiddling about with.

  Another thing that Dirk reflected on as he settled back into his seat was the curious coincidence that not only does the outside of an aircraft look like the outside of a vacuum cleaner, but also that the inside of an aircraft smells like the inside of a vacuum cleaner.

  He accepted a glass of champagne from the cabin steward. He supposed that most of the words that airline staff used, or rather most of the sentences into which they were habitually arranged, had been worked so hard that they had died. The strange stresses that cabin stewards continually thumped them with were like electric shocks applied to heart-attack victims in an attempt to revive them.

  Well.

  What a strange and complicated hour and a half that had been. Dirk was still by no means sure that something somewhere had not gone terribly wrong, and he was tempted, now that the seatbelt sign had been turned off by the captain, to go and take a bit of a casual stroll through the aircraft to have a look for his quarry. But no one was going to be getting on or off the aircraft for a little while now, so he would probably be wiser to restrain himself for an hour. Or even longer. It was, after all, an eleven-hour flight to Los Angeles.

  He had not been expecting to go to Chicago today, and the sight of his quarry making a beeline for the check-in desk for the 1330 flight to Chicago had made him lurch. However, a resolution was a resolution, so after a brief pause to make sure that his quarry hadn’t merely gone up to the check-in desk to ask directions to the tie shop, Dirk had made his way light-headedly to the ticket sales desk and slammed plastic.

  Overwhelmed with his sudden solvency, he had even booked himself business class. His anonymous employer was obviously someone of means who was not going to quibble over a few minor expenses. Suppose his quarry was travelling business class? Dirk would not be able to keep tabs on him from a seat stuck in the back of the plane. There was almost an argument there for travelling first class, but not, Dirk reluctantly admitted to himself, a sane one.

  But, an hour and a half after the plane had taken off, Dirk was beginning to wonder. As a business-class passenger he was denied access to the first-class section up in the nose of the plane, but could wander freely wherever else he liked. He had wandered freely up and down each aisle three times now, surreptitiously watched each of the toilet doors, and seen his quarry nowhere. He returned to his seat and pondered the situation. Either his quarry was in the first-class cabin or he was not on the plane.

  First class? He just didn’t look it. The fare would be quite a few months rent on his flat. But who knows? Maybe he had caught the eye of a Hollywood casting director who was whisking him over for a screen test. It wouldn’t be difficult to slip into the first-class cabin and have a quick look around, but it would be difficult to do it without attracting attention.

  Not on the plane? Dirk had seen him heading in towards passport control, but there had been a moment when he had suddenly looked round and Dirk had ducked quickly into the bookshop.

  A few seconds later, when Dirk next glanced up, his quarry had gone—into, Dirk had assumed, passport control. Dirk had lingered for a decent interval, bought some newspapers and books, and then made his way through passport control and into the departure area himself.

  It had not especially surprised him that he had not spotted his quarry anywhere in the departure area: it was a shining maze of pointless shops, cafés, and lounges, and Dirk felt that there was nothing to be gained by rushing around hunting for him. They were being funnelled inexorably in the same direction anway. They’d be on the same plane.

  Not on the plane? Dirk sat stock still. Thinking back, he had to admit that the last time he had actually physically seen his quarry was before he had even gone through passport control, and that everything else was based on the assumption that his quarry was going to do what he, Dirk, had decided he was going to do. This, he now realised, was actually quite a large assumption. Cold air trickled down his neck from the nozzle above him.

  Yesterday he had inexpertly boarded a bus while tailing this man. Today, it seemed, he had inadvertently boarded a plane to Chicago. He put his hand to his brow and asked himself, honestly, how good a private detective he really was.

  He summoned a cabin steward and ordered a glass of whisky, and nursed it as if it were very ill indeed. After a while he reached into his plastic bag of books and newspapers. He might as well just pass the time. He sighed. He drew out of the bag something he had no recollection of putting there.

  It was a courier delivery packet, which had already been opened. With a slow frown developing on his forehead, he pulled out its contents. There was a book inside. He turned it over, wonderingly. It was called Advanced Surveillance Techniques. He recognised it. He’d had a flyer for it yesterday in the post. He’d screwed it up and thrown it to the floor. Folded between a couple of pages of the book was the exact same flyer, flattened and smoothed out. With a deep sense of foreboding, Dirk slowly unfolded it. Scrawled across it in felt tip, in handwriting that was oddly familiar, were the words “Bon Voyage!” The cabin steward leaned across him. “Can I freshen your drink, sir?” he said.

  Chapter 8

  The sun stood high above the distant Pacific. The day was bright, the sky blue and cloudless, the air, if you liked the smell of burnt carpets, perfect. Los Angeles. A city I have never visited.

  A car, a blue convertible, sleek and desirable, came sweeping west out of Beverly Hills along the, as I understand it, gracious curves of Sunset Boulevard. Anybody seeing such a car would have wanted it. Obviously. It was designed to make you want it. If people had turned out not to want it very much, the makers would have redesigned it and redesigned it until they did. The world is now full of things like this, which is, of course, why everybody is in such a permanent state of want.

  The driver was a woman, and I can tell you for a fact that she was very beautiful. She had fine dark hair cut in a bob, and as she drove, her hair riffled in the warm breeze. I would tell you about what she wore, but I’m very bad at clothes and if I started telling you that it was an Armani this or a what’s-her-name Farhi that, you would know instinctively that I was faking it, and since you are taking the trouble to read what I have written, I intend to treat you with respect even if I do, occasionally and in a friendly and well-meaning kind of way, lie to you. So I’ll just say that the clothes she was wearing were exactly the sort of clothes that someone who knew vastly more about clothes than I do would admire enormously, and were blue. Impossibly tall palm trees towered above her, silent Mexicans moved over impossibly perfect lawns.

  The gates of Bel Air went by—and behind them, perfect houses nestling in perfect bouquets of shrubbery. I’ve seen exactly those houses on television and even I, sceptical and sarcastic old me, have felt that I really, really wanted one of them. Luckily, the sort of the things that people who live in such houses say to each other make me giggle until tea squirts out of my nose and so the moment passes.

  The sleek, desirable blue convertible swept on. There is a se
t of traffic lights, I understand, on the borders of Bel Air and Brentwood, and as the car approached them, they turned red. The car drew to a halt. The woman shook her hair and adjusted her sunglasses in the mirror. As she did so, she caught sight of a brief flicker of movement in the mirror as a small, dark-haired figure emerged quietly from the shade of the roadside and snuck round the back of the car. A moment later he was leaning right over her, pointing a small handgun into her face. I know even less about handguns than I do about clothes. I’d be completely hopeless in Los Angeles. I’d be laughed at not only for my lack of dress sense but also my pitiful inability to tell a Magnum .38 from a Walther PPK or even, for heaven’s sake, a derringer. I do know, however, that the gun was also blue, or at least blue-black, and that the woman was startled out of her wits to have it pointed into her left eye from a range of just under one inch. Her assailant gave her to understand that now would be an excellent moment for her to vacate her seat and, no, not to take the key out of the car or even to attempt to pick up her bag, which was lying on the seat next to her, but just to be very cool, move very easily, very gently, and just get the fuck out of the car.

  The woman tried to be very cool, to move very easily and very gently, but was hampered by the fact that she was shaking with uncontrollable fear as the gun bobbed about just an inch or so from her face like a mayfly in the summer. She did, however, get the fuck out of the car. She stood trembling in the middle of the road as the thief jumped into the car in her place, gunned the engine in a quick roar of triumph, and careered sharply off along Sunset Boulevard, around the bend, and away. She twisted around on the spot in an agony of shocked helplessness. Her world had turned abruptly upside down and tipped her out of it, and she was now, suddenly and unexpectedly, that most helpless of all people in Los Angeles, a pedestrian.

  She tried to wave down one or two of the other cars on the road, but they manoeuvred politely past her. One of them was an open-topped Mustang with the radio playing loudly. I’d love to be able to say that it was tuned to an oldies station and that the words “How does it feeeeel? How does it feeeeeel?” snarled out at this moment, but there are limits even to fiction. It was an oldies station, but the old song it was playing was “Sunday Girl” by Blondie, and so wasn’t even remotely appropriate, seeing as this was a Thursday. What could she do?