Flying Dutch

by Tom Holt

  “Mr Vanderdecker,” she asked, “what exactly do you want out of life?”

  Vanderdecker smiled; that is, there was an initial movement at the corners of his mouth that developed into a ripple just under his nose and ended up with a full display of straight, white teeth. “What a peculiar question!” he said.

  “Yes,” Jane admitted, “and as a rule I’m not into this soul-searching stuff. But you see, it is quite important.”

  Vanderdecker was surprised. “Is it?”

  “Yes, actually,” Jane said, “it is.”

  “Well then,” Vanderdecker said, composing himself and looking grave, “The way I see it is this. After all this time, and bearing in mind the things I’ve told you about, I would have thought it was more a question of what the hell it is life wants out of me. Blood?”

  “I see,” Jane said. If she’d had a notebook, she would probably have written it down. “So you’ve never had any urge to rule the world, or anything like that?”

  “What, me?” Vanderdecker said. “No, I can’t say I have. It would be nice to change some things naturally.”

  Jane leaned forward and looked serious. “Such as?”

  Vanderdecker considered. “I don’t know,” he said, “now you come to mention it. I can’t actually think of anything that even remotely matters. You get such a wonderful sense of perspective at my age.”

  “You look about thirty-three.”

  “Thirty-five,” Vanderdecker replied. “And you flatter me. Aren’t we getting a bit sidetracked, or is this all relevant?”

  “It’s sort of relevant,” Jane said. “So you would say that you’re a relatively balanced, well-adjusted person?”

  “Perhaps,” said the Flying Dutchman. “When you consider that I’ve lived for over four hundred and fifty years, and seven-eighths of those years have been mind-numbingly boring, I think I’ve coped reasonably well. What do you think?”

  “I think,” said Jane with conviction, “that I’d have gone stark staring mad in the early fifteen-sixties.”

  “I tried that,” Vanderdecker reminisced. “It lasted about eight hours. You can’t go mad running a ship, which is what I do most of the time. You simply don’t get an opportunity. Just when you’re starting to work up a good thick fuzz of melancholia, someone puts his head round the door to tell you that the cook and the bosun are fighting again, or that some idiot’s lost the sextant, or we appear to be sixty leagues off the Cape of Good Hope and weren’t we meant to be going to Florida? There’s all sorts of things I was always meaning to get around to—learning to play the flute, calculating the square root of nought, going mad—but I just didn’t have the time. After a while you give up and get on with things.”

  “But don’t you ever feel…” Jane searched for the right words, only to find that she’d forgotten to bring them. “Don’t you feel sort of different? Important? Marked out by Destiny?”

  “Me?” Vanderdecker said, surprised. “No. Why should I?”

  “I’d have thought you might,” Jane said. “What with being immortal.”

  “That’s not what it feels like,” Vanderdecker said. “May I put it bluntly?”

  “Please do.”

  “It’s hard to feel special or important,” he said, staring at the table in front of him, “let alone marked out by Destiny, when you smell quite as bad as I usually do. I trust I make myself clear.”

  “Perfectly,” Jane said.

  “Good.” Vanderdecker lifted his head and grinned. “Do I get to hear your story now? About this life policy of mine.”

  “If you like,” Jane said. “Fire away.”

  So she told him.

  ♦

  “Look,” Danny said to the telephone, “what you obviously fail to grasp is…”

  The pips went, and Danny fumbled desperately in his trouser pocket for more small change. What he found was five pennies, a washer and a French coin with the head of Charles de Gaulle on it which he had somehow acquired at Gatwick Airport. He made a quick decision and shoved the French coin into the slot. Remarkably enough, it worked.

  “What you obviously…” he said. The voice interrupted him.

  “No, Danny,” it said. “What you fail to grasp is that you’re supposed to be filming a boat race. Anything not germane to high-speed navigation is therefore off limits. Keep that principle firmly before your eyes and you won’t go far wrong.” Danny dragged air into his lungs, which were tight with anger. He forced the same air out through his larynx, but he sublimated the anger into determination.

  “All right,” he said. “You leave me with no alternative.”

  “You’re going to film the race?”

  “I am not going to film the race,” Danny said. “I am going to telephone Fay Parker at the Guardian.”

  Coming from a man with five pennies and a washer in his pocket, this was clearly an idle threat. But of course the voice didn’t know that, and just for once it said nothing.

  “And you know what I’m going to tell her?” Danny went on. “I’m going to tell her the truth about the Amethyst case.”

  The voice wasn’t a voice at all any more. It was just a silence.

  “I’m going to tell her,” said Danny to the silence, “that the person who recommended to the Cabinet Office that the Amethyst documentary should be banned wasn’t the Prime Minister or the Home Secretary or even the Minister of Defence. It was the head of BBC Current Affairs, who wanted it banned so that he could get himself hailed as a martyr to the cause of press freedom and then nobody would dare sack him on the grounds of gross incompetence. Do you think she could use a story like that?”

  The silence carried on being a silence, and Danny was terribly afraid that Charles de Gaulle would run out before it became a voice again. “Well?” he said.

  “Bastard,” said the voice.

  Danny glowed with pleasure. “Thanks,” he said, just as the pips went.

  ♦

  “Really?” said Vanderdecker.

  “Cross my heart and hope to die,” Jane replied, rather tactlessly. “That’s why I was looking for you.”

  “Oh,” Vanderdecker said. “Do you know, that’s rather a disappointment.”

  “Is it?” Jane queried. “Why?”

  Vanderdecker scratched his ear. “Hard to say, really,” he replied. “I suppose it’s just that I’ve been half expecting people to be looking for me for a long time now, and for other reasons.”

  “That’s a bit paranoid, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe,” said Vanderdecker, shrugging his shoulders. “I just had this notion that what I was doing—being alive after so long and all that—was—well, wrong, somehow, and that sooner or later somebody was going to find out and tell me to stop doing it. Act your age, Vanderdecker, that sort of thing. And since I couldn’t stop even if I wanted to, I wasn’t keen to be found. I have this feeling that somehow or other I’m breaking the rules, and that’s not my style at all.”

  “What sort of rules?”

  “The rules,” Vanderdecker said. “Maybe you don’t understand; let me try and explain. Do you remember the first time you went abroad?”

  Jane shuddered. “Vividly.”

  “Do you remember that awful feeling of guilt,” Vanderdecker said, “that you felt—I assume you felt—as if you were breaking all sorts of local laws and violating all sorts of local customs without knowing it, and sooner or later one of those policemen in hats like cheeseboxes was going to arrest you?”

  “Yes,” Jane replied. “That’s a natural feeling, I guess, from being a stranger in someone else’s country.”

  “Well then,” Vanderdecker said, “that’s how I feel all the time. I’m a stranger everywhere except on a ship in the middle of the sea. I don’t think I’ve broken any laws—I don’t think just being alive is actually illegal anywhere, except maybe in some parts of South–East Asia—but the thought of all the embarrassment if anyone ever asked who I was or what I was doing…Do you see what I’m driving at? It mean
s that I can’t give a truthful answer to virtually any question I’m likely to be asked, for fear of being thought crazy or rude. It gets to you after a while, let me assure you. And of course there’s the smell.”

  “Yes,” Jane said. “I could see that would be a problem.”

  “It is,” Vanderdecker assured her. “Decidedly.”

  “If we could just get back to what I was saying,” Jane suggested tentatively. “About your life policy.”

  “You want me…”

  “No.” Jane couldn’t understand why she was so definite about this. “They want you to sign it away. Assign it back to them, actually, but it amounts to the same thing.”

  “I see,” said the Flying Dutchman. “Why should I?”

  Jane couldn’t think of a single reason. Not good.

  “Excuse me for muddled thinking here,” Vanderdecker went on, “because I haven’t even started to consider all the ramifications of this yet, but why the hell should I?”

  “Well,” Jane said feebly, “it’s not going to do you any good, is it?”

  “That,” said Vanderdecker, “if you’ll pardon me saying so, goes for all life policies. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the prerequisite for collecting on the blasted things is being dead, and I remember hearing something somewhere about not being able to take it with you.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Exactly what?” said Vanderdecker, confused.

  “You can’t take it with you,” Jane said. “So it’s no good to you. On the other hand, it’s putting the financial stability of Europe in jeopardy.”

  “So what’s so wonderful about the financial stability of Europe?” Vanderdecker said.

  Jane felt that she could explain this, being an accountant: but while she was deciding where to start, Vanderdecker continued with what he was saying.

  “Let me put it this way,” he said. “If what you say is true, I’m in a position to tell all the money men in the world what to do. I have the power, the actual and useable power, to introduce a little bit of common sense into the economic system of the developed nations. In other words, I could save the world.”

  “Do you want to?” Jane asked.

  Vanderdecker considered for a moment. “No,” he said.

  “Why not?” Jane asked. “Sounds like a good idea to me.”

  “No it doesn’t,” replied the Flying Dutchman. “That’s why you were asking me about whether I’d ever suffered from megalomania or a desire to rule things. To which the answer is still no. I mean, it’s all very fine and splendid to think that I could sort out interest rates and conquer inflation and send the rich empty away and all that, but that’s not me at all. Damn it, I couldn’t even understand the jute market back in the fifteen-eighties. I’d just make things even worse than they are now.”

  “So why not do what they want?” Jane said. “It would make things easier for you as well.”

  “Would it?”

  “It could,” Jane said. “All you’d have to do is think of the right price.”

  “Go on.”

  “Something like,” Jane said, “an index-linked annuity starting at two million pounds a year, plus all the co-operation and protection you need. Passports, nationality papers, a new ship, bits of paper signed by presidents and prime ministers to shove under the noses of customs men and coastguards. Everything necessary to make life easy for you. No more of this skulking about, hiding, getting your ship fixed up by Jeanes of Bridport because there’s nowhere else you dare go to. You could demand anything at all. A new identity. No questions asked. You could even start enjoying life. You wouldn’t have to spend all your time in the middle of the sea, come to that.”

  “What about the smell?”

  “Demand that they build you a special massively air-conditioned bunker in the heights of the Pyrenees. A hundred special bunkers, one in every country. Real Howard Hughes stuff. That really wouldn’t be a problem.”

  Vanderdecker thought for a moment, then grinned. “That’s very kind of you, and I appreciate the offer, but no thanks. I think we’ll just leave matters as they are.”

  Jane felt as though someone had just pumped sand in her ears. “Why?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” Vanderdecker confessed. “Instinct, mainly. Look,” he said, putting his chin between his hands, “I remember reading somewhere about these tramps, people who’d been living rough for years and years, who finally were persuaded to come in out of the wind and the rain into a nice clean hostel. Clean clothes, beds, hot food. After a week or so, they all started sleeping on the floor, wearing the same clothes all the time and eating the scraps out of the dustbins. The staff couldn’t understand it at all, but the tramps just couldn’t trust the beds and the clothes and the food; they reckoned they must be some sort of trap and they wanted nothing to do with it. You get that way after a while.”

  “I see,” Jane said. “So I’ve failed, have I?”

  “Looks like it,” Vanderdecker said. “Sorry.”

  Jane considered for a moment. “How about as a personal favour to me?” she asked. Vanderdecker stared at her.

  “Come again?” he said.

  “As a personal favour,” she said, “to help me out of a jam.”

  “But…” Vanderdecker’s voice trailed away, and he looked at her. Perhaps he saw something he hadn’t seen for a long time. “You mean, just because I like you or something?”

  “Just,” Jane said, “because you’re a nice person. Like letting someone through in a stream of traffic, or giving up your seat in the Underground.”

  “I hadn’t looked at it from that angle,” Vanderdecker admitted.

  “Try it.”

  Vanderdecker drew in a deep breath. “Did I mention,” he said, “about my adventures in the real estate business?”

  “No,” Jane said. “Are they relevant?”

  “Fairly relevant, yes.”

  “Oh,” Jane said. “Fire away, then.”

  “Right.” Vanderdecker leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. “Many years ago,” he said, “many years ago even by my standards, I bought some land in America. Don’t know why; it was cheap, I had some capital for once, I thought I’d invest it. My idea was to build a little place out in the middle of nowhere but next to the sea, where I and my crew could be sure of some privacy and a glass or two of beer when we came in to land. That sort of thing. Anyway, before I could start building, I met this man in a pub who was down on his luck. He was Dutch, too, and I felt sorry for him. He had a dreadful story to tell, about how he’d been chased out of Holland because of his religious beliefs, forced to sell his farm and his stock and come out to the New World and start all over again, and how he hadn’t got anywhere like the right price for his property back home and the fare out here had taken up a large slice of that because all the carriers were profiteers, and on top of all that the weevils had got into the seed-corn and three of his cows had got the murrain and how he was going to afford enough land in America to support a wife and three children he really didn’t know. So I asked him how much he had and he told me and I offered to sell him my land for exactly that much. It was very cheap indeed, and he accepted like a shot. And I did it because I’m a nice chap, and of course it didn’t matter a hell of a lot to me, considering how I was fixed.”

  “And?”

  “And what I sold him was the island of Manhattan,” said Vanderdecker, sadly. “Error of judgement, wouldn’t you say?”

  Jane didn’t say anything.

  “Of course,” Vanderdecker went on, “I wasn’t to know that then. You never do. But that’s the thing about eternal life; you have to live with your mistakes, don’t you? Like when I met the Spanish Armada.”

  “You met the Spanish Armada?”

  “Pure fluke,” Vanderdecker said. “It was just after the coming of the Great Smell, and we were lying off Gravelines, becalmed Suddenly the sea is covered with Spanish ships. Marvellous. Then all the Spaniards become aware of the Great Smell, and before t
heir commanders can stop them they’re all casting off and making for the open sea with their hands over their noses. Result; they lose the weather-gauge and get shot to bits by my old jute-trading contact Francis Drake. Or what about Charles the Second?”

  “Charles the Second,” Jane said.

  “Exactly,” said Vanderdecker. “There I was in this pub, having a quiet drink, when this tall man with a moustache asks me if he can hitch a lift as far as France. No problem. Cromwell didn’t think so, but I didn’t know that, of course. Dunkirk, there’s another instance of exactly the same thing. If those German cruisers hadn’t come downwind of me at exactly that moment, just as all those little boats were zooming across the Channel with no escort whatsoever…You see the point I’m trying to make. I keep having these drastic effects on history. I don’t try to. I don’t even want to. I hate myself for it afterwards, but it keeps happening. You asked me if I thought I had a special destiny. I know I don’t, it’s just coincidence. Not coincidence, even; pure, calculable probability. If one man stays around long enough, just by his being there, important things are bound to happen to him or because of him sooner or later. Now there’s nothing I can do to stop it, but I’m damned if I’m going to do it on purpose. It was bad enough that time with Napoleon…”

  “Napoleon?” Jane asked.

  Vanderdecker scowled at her. “Who do you think was the idiot who picked up a passenger on Elba in 1815?” he said. “I met this man in a pub. “Where are you headed for?” he asks. “France,” I tell him. “What a coincidence,” he says, “so am I.” Why is it, by the way, that they always want to go to bloody France? I tell a lie, though; Garibaldi wanted to go to Italy. Anyway, I’ve got to face the fact that history to me is little more than a horrible reminder of my own interference. Even now, I can’t listen to the Skye Boat Song without cringing.”

  Jane’s eyebrows may have twitched up an extra quarter inch, but she said nothing. It was a good throwaway line, and she didn’t want to know the details.

  “You should write your autobiography,” she suggested.

  “I did, once,” Vanderdecker said. “It was very boring, very boring indeed. Lots of descriptions of sea-travel, with comments on licensed victualling through the ages. The hell with it. I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can help you.”