Flying Dutch

by Tom Holt

  SEVEN

  Gerald—you remember Gerald—was puzzled. He squashed the plastic cup in his hand into a spiky ball and dropped it in the waste-paper basket, where it bounced off a heap of shareholders’ circulars and rolled onto the floor under his swivel chair.

  Actually, Gerald wasn’t the only person in the City of London that morning who was seriously puzzled, and we only single him out because we have already been introduced to him and know what a level-headed sort of fellow he usually is. If Gerald can’t understand it, it must be odd.

  It was. Something extremely unpleasant was happening to the dollar, and Gerald didn’t like it. His relationship with the dollar was rather like Heathcliffe’s relationship with Cathy, although which of them was which at any given moment it was generally difficult to decide. But if something bothered the dollar, it bothered Gerald. It was like telepathy.

  At the next desk, Adrian was getting into an awful tangle with the Deutschmark, while Imogen had washed her hands of the yen and was having a quiet sit down and a cup of lemon tea. In fact, virtually all the occupants of the glass tower that housed Marshall Price Butterworth were behaving like ants whose queen has just died; there was a great deal of activity and absolutely no unified purpose. And over the whole organisation hung the dreadful possibility that if this went on much longer they were all going to have to miss lunch. It was as bad as that.

  Black Thursday, as it has since come to be known, started in the usual way. The breakdown of Middle East peace talks took some of the shine off oil and vague fears on Wall Street about the possibility of the restoration of the Jacobites caused the pound to fall two cents in early trading, but good figures from the banking and insurance sector helped the FTSE to perk up a bit, and only the lost, violent souls whose business it was to follow the vertiginous progress of the Hang Seng were having anything but a perfectly average day. Then it happened. Somewhere in the ether through which the faxes hurtled invisible the notion was spawned that something too ghastly for words was about to happen to the National Lombard Bank. Nobody knew where it came from, but such instances of parthenogenesis are so commonplace in the Square Mile that nobody ever bothers to ask. Consult anyone who has had anything to do with the markets since they introduced the new technology and they will tell you that all such rumours originate with a little man who lives in a converted railway carriage in Alaska and phones them through to the newspaper seller at Liverpool Street station. It may not be true, but it provides a much-needed focal point for baffled indignation.

  Once the rumour had started, it grew. Nobody believed a word of it, of course—nobody ever does—but as custodians of the trust of countless small investors they saw it as their duty to wipe as many millions off the price of everything as they possibly could, and so the process was set in ineluctable motion. In the short time it takes for a message to bridge the Atlantic on fibre-optic wings the rumour had hit New York, and from there it moved on, faster than light and considerably faster than thought, to Tokyo, Hong Kong, Sydney, Paris, Geneva and all the other financial capitals of the world. So swift was its development and transmission that within two hours of its immaculate conception it was prompting market-makers in the Solomon Islands to get out of cowrie shells and knocking the bottom out of the reindeer futures market in Lapland.

  Gerald took another long, unfriendly look at the screen, scratched his ear with his left index finger, and decided to take an early lunch. The dollar, he decided, was only doing it to attract attention to itself, and if he ignored it then it would stop playing up and return to normal. It was not, perhaps, the view that Keynes or Adam Smith would have taken, but it made about as much sense as anything else. He picked up his personal organiser, scribbled a note saying “Sell” on his scratch pad to remind him when he came back, and tottered off to the Wine Vaults.

  ♦

  All the time in the world, said Vanderdecker to himself through teeth clenched tight as masonry, we’ve got all the time in the world, so let’s not get all over-excited about a little puff of wind in the North Sea.

  The gale howling through the shredded canvas of the mainsail was so loud that Vanderdecker was compelled to stop talking to himself and shout to himself instead. All around the Verdomde, waves as high as towers were forming and collapsing, like those speeded up films which show you a rosebud forming, flowering and withering away. The rain meanwhile was lashing horizontally into his eyes, so that even if it hadn’t already been as dark as midnight he wouldn’t have been able to see anything anyway. Nothing unusual, he screamed at his subconscious mind. Normal business hazard. Slight electric storm in the North Sea.

  Out of the tiny corner of his eye which was still operational, Vanderdecker noticed something, and he edged out from under the insufficient shelter of the beer-barrel. “Sebastian!” he yelled, “pack it in, will you? This is neither the time nor the place.”

  As soon as the first bolt of lightning had split the velvet sky, Sebastian had hurried on deck with a great lump of magnetic iron ore in his hands. He kept it specially for thunderstorms, and although he had so far failed to attract a single sky borne volt with it there was always a first time. Up to a point, Vanderdecker admired the man’s ingenuity, to say nothing of his tenacity, but he wasn’t in the mood for a swim if a baffled thunderbolt went straight down through the soles of Sebastian’s invulnerable feet and reduced the Verdomde to woodshavings.

  “Take in all sail!” Vanderdecker shouted, but nobody was listening, as usual. That’s what’s wrong with this bloody ship, mused its captain as a wave broke over the side and tried to pull all his hair out, too much bloody apathy. Nobody cares if all the sails get ripped into dusters. So what? We weren’t going anywhere anyway. Only this time they were going somewhere; they were going to Geneva to see Professor Montalban, with five barrels of radioactive deodorant safely lashed down in the hold. The one time I want to get somewhere, I run into the worst storm in fifty years. Tremendous!

  Just then there was a horrible rending sound; timber, grievously maltreated, giving way. The yard arm of the mainsail had cracked under the pressure of a freak gust, and its own weight was dragging it down on a hinge of splintered wood. Down it came with shattering force on the back of Sebastian van Dooming’s head, crushing him onto the deck like a swatted cranefly. Old instincts die hard; before he knew it, Vanderdecker sprang forward and knelt over his fallen crewman, shielding his crumpled body from the violence of the storm.

  “Is that you, skipper?”

  “It’s all right,” Vanderdecker said, as Sebastian’s large eyes slowly opened. “You’re going to be all right.”

  “Am I?”

  “Yes,” Vanderdecker promised.

  “Oh, for crying out loud,” Sebastian exclaimed, picked himself up, and shuffled away through the driving rain, muttering something about it just not being fair. Vanderdecker shook his head and retreated back to the cover of the beer-barrel.

  When, eventually, the storm had blown itself out, Vanderdecker hadn’t the faintest idea where they were. By a miracle—or sheer force of habit—the ship had stayed in one piece, but only just. The sails were in tatters, the mainmast was completely useless, and the whole structure of the vessel had been so badly knocked about that it was patently obvious that major repairs would be needed just to keep her afloat. Just my luck, Vanderdecker raged in the silence of his mind, just my perishing luck.

  Ironically, there was now no wind whatsoever; the ship sat there like a rubber duck in a bath all the rest of the day, and when darkness fell the stars were clear and bright in a cloudless sky. With their help, Vanderdecker worked out more or less where he was and then faced up to an agonising decision.

  The first mate’s report on the damage forced him to admit that a change of plan was inevitable; unless it was patched up pretty damn quick, the ship would be going nowhere except down. And there was only one place, in the whole wide world, that the ship could be patched up. No alternative. Pity the place was such a dump, but still.

&nbs
p; Vanderdecker called the crew together on deck and told them. We are no longer going to Geneva; instead, we are going to Bridport. As the all-too-familiar chorus of groans, complaints, accusations and other going-to-Bridport noises reached its crescendo, Vanderdecker walked away and opened the last can of Stella Artois. He needed it.

  ♦

  Man’s reach must exceed man’s grasp, or what’s a heaven for? For twenty years Marion Price had dreamed of a nice little cleaning job at a chicken-plucking factory somewhere, and here she still was, running the tourist information office in Bridport.

  Every year, when the clouds close in and Aeolus lets slip the sack wherein the four winds are pent, about a hundred thousand miserable-looking holiday-makers with children dangling from their wrists traipse in from West Bay and demand to be informed as to what there is to do in Bridport when it’s wet. To this question, there is only one answer. It rarely satisfies. Nothing shall come of nothing; speak again. Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but that’s all there is to it. There is absolutely nothing to do in this man’s town in the rainy season except grow your hair.

  You don’t put it like that, of course. You suggest that they go and take a look at the Bridport Museum, or the Rural Grafts Exhibition, or the Working Water Mill. You draw them little plans on the backs of envelopes to show them how to get there. They stand there, dripping, and stare at you, as if you were keeping from them the secret of the location of King Solomon’s Mines, and finally they take a few Glorious Dorset leaflets and go away. On your way home in the evening, you retrieve the Glorious Dorset leaflets from the litter bin on the corner and reflect on the vanity of human wishes.

  Some of them, however, refuse to go away until you come up with something that sounds at least bearable, and these poor fools are generally advised to go and visit Jeanes’ Boatyard. As a cure for optimism, Jeanes’ Boatyard, which is open to the public from 10 till 3 Mondays to Fridays all year round, has few rivals. In the interests of research, Marion has been there once. Never again. There is a hackneyed quip about such-and-such being as interesting as watching paint dry. The paint-drying shop is the highlight of a visit to Jeanes’ Boatyard.

  Here is Marion Price, and she is talking to a pair of hopeless, incorrigible, dyed-in-the-wool optimists and their seven-year-old offspring.

  “Boatyard?” says the male optimist.

  “The oldest working boatyard in Dorset,” replies the tape recording that lives inside Marion Price’s larynx. “Boats are built there as they have been for the last five hundred years. Traditional crafts are lovingly kept alive by master shipwright Walter Jeanes and his two sons, Wayne and Jason. Nowhere else in Dorset can you more perfectly recapture the splendours of Britain’s age-old maritime heritage. A wide range of refreshments and souvenirs are also available.” And the very best of luck to you, my gullible friends. Why don’t you just go back home to Redditch and redecorate the spare room?

  A long silence. Jean-Paul Sartre would have savoured it. “How do we get there, then?” says the female optimist.

  “Let me draw you a map.” Nimble, practised cartographer’s fingers that have long since sublimated the last dregs of guilt draw a plan of the most direct route. The optimists depart. The rain falls. Time passes.

  Jane Doland, being properly brought-up, wiped her feet before walking into the tourist information office. It was her last hope; she had tried the phone book, the post office and the hotel desk. If they couldn’t tell her here, she would give up and go back to her room.

  “Excuse me,” she said, “can you tell me where I might find Jeanes’ Boatyard?”

  “Certainly.” The woman behind the desk smiled at her. Thank God. It was wonderful to find someone actually helpful in this dismal place. “Shall I draw you a map?”

  “If you wouldn’t mind,” said Jane. “I always forget directions, in one ear and out the other. Is it far?”

  “Oh no,” said the woman behind the desk, drawing busily without seeming to look at the paper, like one of those machines in hospitals that draw charts of people’s heartbeats. “Have you been to Bridport before?” she asked. Jane said yes, once.

  “It’s a lovely little town, isn’t it?” said the woman behind the desk. “Some people just keep coming back time and time again.”

  Very true, Jane reflected, you don’t know how true that is. “This boatyard,” she asked, “is it very…well, old?”

  “Yes, indeed,” the woman replied brightly. “Boats are built there as they have been for the last five hundred years.”

  “As old as that?” Jane asked. “That’s quite a record, isn’t it? Well, thank you very much.” She looked at the map. “Which way is north?” she inquired. The woman pointed, and smiled again. Clearly she enjoyed her work. Just now, Jane envied her that.

  As she waded through the puddles in South Street, Jane cast her mind over the events of the past week, starting with the slump on the markets. As soon as she had seen the report of the attempted sabotage at Dounreay and what had been painted on the wall there, she had set off for the North of Scotland as quickly as she could. It was no problem getting to see the protesters who had done the painting; she simply called the Inverness office of Moss Berwick and they fixed it, using their contacts with the lawyers who were defending them. It had not been an easy interview. None of the Germans spoke A-level German, only proper German (which is a quite different language) and all of them were clearly confused as to why they should be talking to an accountant when they were facing criminal damage charges. But the story had slowly coagulated there in the lawyer’s interview room, and when all was said and done, it didn’t get anyone terribly much further forward. All that Jane could say for certain was that one place that the Flying Dutchman was likely not to be was the North of Scotland, since he had just left there.

  She arrived at West Bay at the same time as a television van, and the sight of it made her heart stop. For a terrible moment, she thought that the van might be there for the same reason as she was—after all, the link between the couple of sentences in the newspaper about goings-on at Dounreay and the dramatic slide on the world markets had yet to be sorted out; had some sharp-nosed ferret of an investigative journalist found out about the Vanderdecker policy? But the little mayfly of terror was soon gone as Jane remembered what she had heard on the car radio about some idiot boat-race at West Bay in the next day or so, and she dismissed it from her mind.

  It was, she admitted to herself as she parked in front of the boatyard, a long shot, a hunch—or, if you preferred English to the language of the talking pictures, a very silly idea. It had started as she sat on the flight back from Inverness, trying to think of good reasons why she shouldn’t follow the Montalban lead. This had not been easy; it was, after all, the logical next step, to go to Geneva, find this Montalban, dream up some pretext for talking to him, and find out what he knew. But for some reason best known to herself—natural diffidence, probably, with a large slice of embarrassment and laziness thrown in—she didn’t want to go to Geneva. Her mind had been floating on the meniscus of this problem when she saw a paragraph on the back page of someone else’s newspaper about terrible storms in the North Sea. It occurred to her that Vanderdecker would be somewhere in the North Sea at this precise moment, on his way to wherever he was going when he met the Erdkrieger (Holland, probably; after all, he was Dutch) and that he might have got caught up in this storm. With unaccustomed boorishness she leaned forward and studied the other person’s newspaper, and saw that the storm (the worst for fifty years, so they reckoned) had been off the Dutch coast. Well then, she said, Vanderdecker’s ship is very old and probably very fragile. If he’s been out in that, he may well need repairs. And where does he come to get his boat fixed? Bridport, of course. A long shot. A hunch. A very silly idea. We shall see.

  ♦

  “Sorry,” said the sound recordist. “I didn’t see you there.”

  Danny Bennet looked at the sleeve of his suede jacket, then at the sound recordist, and said somet
hing very quietly which nobody was supposed to hear. His debut in the field of sports coverage was not going well, mainly because he hadn’t the faintest idea of what was going on.

  It was still raining outside, and from that point of view the inside of the scanner van was as good a place to be as any. It was dry, there was a Thermos of at least luke-warm coffee, and no cameramen. That, however, was about it as far as the attractions of the venue went. On the other hand, there were the monitors, and Danny didn’t like them at all.

  So far as he could make out, his job was to direct operations in such a way that the viewer at home got the best possible view of the proceedings from the best possible angles. In order to manage this, Danny had to make sure that the little motor boats with his camera crews in them were in the right place at the right time. Since he hadn’t the faintest idea where they were, this was of course impossible. All he could see were the pictures on the screens. There was another minor difficulty to face up to; he was entirely ignorant of the rules of old ship racing, which meant that he didn’t have a clue what the pictures on the screens were supposed to look like. Racing, as far as he understood it, meant a number of competitors trying to go faster than each other; but all the old ships went quite remarkably slowly. This was confusing, like a boxing match between two pacifists. There was no way of knowing whether he was doing it right or not.

  Usually in these situations the wise thing to do was to leave it all to the cameramen and not get under their feet. Cameramen have invariably done it all before and know precisely what they are supposed to be doing; their Aatens would be glued to the centre of the action all the time, and all the producer would have to do is sit in the van and stay awake. Unfortunately, this was the first year that the BBC had seen fit to televise this stirring maritime spectacle, and so everyone was as ignorant as he was. For the first time in his television career, cameramen were asking him things instead of telling him. It should have been a moment to savour. It wasn’t.