Flying Dutch

by Tom Holt

  Good question, Jane girl, very good question indeed. As usual when faced with a thorny problem, Jane wondered what her mother would say. That was relatively easy to extrapolate; are you sure you’re eating properly, Jane dear? Jane finished the last mouthful of her jam doughnut, and her conscience was clear. Yes.

  Unfortunately, that left the original good question largely unanswered. Why are you doing this, Jane dear, and is it really terribly sensible? What are your employers going to say? Do you still have employers? What will become of you, you reckless, feckless child?

  I used to be a bored accountant, she said, until I discovered Bridport. Then I got caught up in the destiny of mankind, and I became a sort of knight-errant for the Sock. Quite by chance. I tracked down the wholly improbable person I was sent to find, and I offered him the deal I was sent to offer him. He turned it down. I should now report back to my superiors and get back to doing some accounts. Except that my superiors have turned out to be rather spooky people, and I’ve got myself into such a mess now that it doesn’t seem terribly prudent to go back. Don’t ask me how this happened; it was none of my doing, and I suspect that I’m not cut out for this sort of thing, but it wouldn’t do to think too closely about it for fear of suddenly going completely mad. Besides, I don’t really want to be an accountant any more.

  I am therefore going to a place called High Norton to see a very old alchemist and give him a rude message. What then? If I do all right, and whatever Captain Vanderdecker has up his sleeve works out, what then? When I suddenly decided to be on Vanderdecker’s team, what was going on inside my silly little head?

  Well, Jane said to herself, Captain Vanderdecker has lots and lots of money, in a rather peculiar way. If he manages to get what he wants from Professor Montalban, no doubt he could be persuaded to express his immense gratitude in fiscal terms. Then Jane can live happily ever after and won’t have to go to work ever again. Provided that Vanderdecker really exists, of course, and this whole thing isn’t the result of an injudicious bed-time cheese sandwich. And if it is, why then, we’ll wake up and go to work as usual. Fine.

  But that’s not the reason, is it? Jane frowned at the space where the doughnut had been, and was forced to confess that it wasn’t. So what the hell was? Could it possibly be Captain Vanderdecker’s grey eyes? We consider this point, said Jane hurriedly to ourselves, only out of thoroughness and to dismiss it. Captain Vanderdecker is very old, he spends all his time on a ship in the middle of the sea, and by his own admission smells.

  Ah yes, said the inner Jane, but if he didn’t smell he wouldn’t have to spend all his time in the middle of the sea. Don’t get me wrong, it added hurriedly, I’m not suggesting there’s anything in the grey eyes hypothesis as such, I’m just suggesting that it can’t be rejected as easily as all that. Are you doing all this because you want to help Captain Vanderdecker out of his predicament? Be truthful, and write on one side of the paper only. Yes, of course that’s part of the reason; but grey eyes needn’t enter into that at all. Then why did you bring them up in the first place?

  Let’s leave the eyes on one side for a moment, as they say in the anatomy labs. Did you suddenly make up your mind to be a heroine because it seemed the right thing to do? Yes, mother, I did, of that I am sure. And because I hate being an accountant, and it seemed like a good idea at the time, and there might be good money in it. Because I wanted to.

  Because it means that, whatever happens next, I will be a different Jane ever after, the sort of Jane who does that sort of thing. As for the realities of her situation, we will take a chance on the ravens feeding her. Talking of which, where is she going to sleep tonight? Even new Janes have to sleep and put on clean underwear in the mornings, and she is down to her last change of intimate garments. I may sympathise with Captain Vanderdecker, but I’m damned if I’m going to end up smelling like him.

  But the voice of the new Jane had an answer to that, and told her that she would sleep in a hotel in Cirencester and first thing in the morning she would buy herself new underwear in the Cirencester branch of Marks and Spencer. Then she would go and see Montalban, and after that, who could say?

  Feeling rather surprised and slightly frightened, Jane thanked her new avatar for its guidance and finished her tea. Whatever it was that had got into her seemed like it was going to stay there for some time, and on the whole she wasn’t sorry.

  ♦

  “Mrs Carmody,” the man said, “is everything ready?” The elegant woman nodded. “Please be so kind as to bring it through, then, we mustn’t keep our guests waiting.”

  Shortly afterwards, Mrs Carmody wheeled in an old–fashioned trolley with a porcelain cake-stand and a silver tea-set on it. The man thanked her and asked her yet again for her opinion of the cat.

  “No,” she said.

  “Thank you so much,” said the man. “Would you just ask Harvey to show them in?”

  The man inspected the cake-stand and tried a slice of the malt loaf. It passed muster. Then he closed the lid of the spinet and leaned against it, waiting for his guests to arrive.

  The helicopter pilot was the first to enter. He had taken off his flying jacket and he came into the room backwards; not out of diffidence or perversity, but so that he could keep the muzzle of his gun pointed at Danny’s navel. Danny came next, and after him the camera crew. The co-pilot of the helicopter brought up the rear; he resembled the pilot very closely, except that his suit was navy blue and his gun was of a different make.

  “Do sit yourselves down, gentlemen,” said Professor Montalban. “There should be enough chairs for you all. I’m sorry you had such a long wait, but apparently the malt loaf took rather a long time to rise.”

  Danny, who had spent the last hour and a half in the cellar listening to the opinions of the camera crew, was not impressed. He hated malt loaf anyway. The barrel of the pilot’s gun suggested that he should sit down.

  “Thank you. Harvey, Neville, please help our guests to some tea and cake,” said the Professor. The pilot gave him a severe look and picked up a plate, while the co-pilot took charge of a cup and saucer with his free hand. The Professor poured the tea and selected a slice of the malt loaf, and the two armed men delivered them to Danny, who accepted them with all the good grace he could muster, which was not much. Then Harvey and Neville repeated the same routine for the head cameraman, the assistant cameraman and the sound recordist. It all took a very long time, and more than a little tea ended up in the saucer.

  When he judged that the polite thing had been done, the Professor introduced himself. “My name,” he said, “is Montalban. This is Harvey,” he said, indicating the pilot, “and this is Neville.”

  That, it seemed, was all the explanation that Danny was going to get, at least until the Professor had cleared his mouth of malt loaf. Danny waited, urging himself to stay calm and not do anything that could be construed as hostile or threatening. That wasn’t too hard, in the circumstances; a Mongol horseman would find it difficult to make a threatening gesture with a cup in one hand and a plate in the other. He would also be hard put to it to eat the cake or drink the tea.

  “And this,” said the Professor at last, “is my personal assistant, Mrs Carmody. I trust you had a reasonable journey here.”

  Danny nodded cautiously. His arms were aching from holding up the teacup and the plate, but Harvey’s gun was still pointed at him.

  “Mr Bennett,” went on the Professor, “I must apologise for troubling you like this, but to a certain extent you did bring it on yourself. You see,” he explained, “you did mention that you knew something about Cirencester.”

  Danny’s hand wobbled, spilling tea. “Cirencester?”

  “Exactly. And Harvey here felt that he had no option but to bring that fact to my attention.”

  This time, Danny dropped his cup. “Harvey!” he exclaimed.

  “That’s right, Danny,” said Harvey sheepishly. “We meet at last.”

  Now that he came to think about it, of cours
e, Danny never had met his superior in the flesh, however many telephone conversations they had shared. Nor had he ever asked what the H stood for. He had invariably asked the switchboard for Mr Beardsley, and prefaced his remarks with “Look…” It only went to show.

  “I thought you were probably only bluffing,” Harvey went on, “but you can’t be too careful, and maybe you had finally managed to nose out something important, instead of all that crap about the Milk Marketing Board. So…”

  “Look,” Danny said, probably out of sheer habit, “just what is going on?”

  “You should know,” said Harvey, grinning. “You’re the ace investigative producer, you started it.”

  “For crying out loud…Harvey,” said Danny, “put that bloody thing away and explain what all this is about. Are you trying to muzzle my story, or what?”

  “What story?” Harvey asked. “Oh, that load of old cock about nuclear dumping; no, not at all, but you were the one who dragged Cirencester into it, remember.”

  “Actually,” said the Professor.

  Harvey turned his head and looked at him. “What?” he said.

  “I’m sorry, Harvey,” said the Professor apologetically, “there wasn’t time to brief you in full. It was Mr Bennett’s film of the Old Ships Race that made it necessary to bring him here.”

  “Now wait a minute,” Harvey said, and Danny saw that he wasn’t taking any notice of him any more. To be precise, the gun was pointing at the floor. Similarly, Neville had one hand full with a rather sticky slice of malt loaf, and was using the other to hold his plate under his chin to catch the crumbs. It was now or never, Danny decided. He sprang.

  There was suddenly a great deal of movement, and we shall do our best to cover it sector by sector. Then we will join up the various parts to form a concerted picture.

  The cat woke up, arched its back, and started to sharpen its claws on the piece of chair-leg thoughtfully provided for that purpose.

  The assistant cameraman hit Neville with a small padded footstool. Neville dropped his plate and fell over, and the assistant cameraman sat on him and removed his gun from his inside front pocket.

  Mrs Carmody lunged for the trolley, retrieved the cake-stand and carried it out of harm’s way. A slice of malt loaf toppled off it into the carpet and was ground into the pile by Danny’s heel; but that comes later.

  Danny grabbed Harvey’s wrist and tried to bring it down on his knee to jar the gun out of his hand. Unfortunately, Danny wasn’t nearly as strong as he thought he was, and a rather undignified tussle followed, during the course of which Danny slithered on the slice of malt loaf, lost his balance and fell over. In doing so, he nearly dislocated Harvey’s wrist, to which he was still clinging, and jolted his trigger finger, firing the gun. The bullet hit Professor Montalban just above the heart.

  Danny, sitting on the floor surrounded by the wreckage of a chair, stared in horror and relaxed his grip on Harvey’s arm. Suddenly everyone was looking at the Professor, who did something very unexpected. He didn’t fall over.

  “Please, Mr Bennett,” he said, removing a flattened bullet from the lapel of his jacket for all the world as if it were a poppy on the day after Armistice Sunday, “I must ask you to be more careful. There could have been an accident, you know.”

  Harvey expressed himself rather more vigorously, and placed the barrel of his gun in Danny’s ear. Gradually, everyone resumed their place, and the cat went back to sleep.

  “Perhaps,” said the Professor, “I had better explain.”

  ELEVEN

  Not now, Sebastian,” said Vanderdecker, and instinctively ducked. The sound of an invulnerable Dutchman hitting oak planks suggested that Sebastian hadn’t heard him in time.

  It’s quite a distinctive sound, and to tell the truth Vanderdecker was heartily sick of it. Day in, day out, the same monotonous clunking. Had he thought about it earlier, Vanderdecker reflected, he could have turned it to some useful purpose. For example, he could have trained Sebastian to make his futile leaps every hour on the hour, and then it wouldn’t matter quite so much when he forgot to wind his watch.

  Too late now, however, to make a bad lifetime’s work good. With the sort of deftness that only comes with long practice, he put the irritating thought out of his mind and wondered how Jane was getting on. Had she succeeded in tracking the alchemist down yet? She had thought it would be quite easy, and perhaps it would be; after all, the name Montalban seemed to be familiar to other people beside himself these days. There was the lunatic the crew had fished out of the sea and shown the alchemical plant to, for example; apparently, he’d come up with the same name all of his own accord. Certainly Jane had heard of him. So maybe all she’d have to do would be to look him up in the telephone book. Why didn’t I ever think of that?

  So let’s suppose she’s actually managed to deliver the message. What if Montalban wasn’t interested? What if he didn’t come? Come to that, what if he hadn’t actually discovered an antidote to the Smell? That didn’t bear thinking about; nor was it logical. If he was able to pass freely in normal human society, it stood to reason that he’d come up with something that dealt with the problem, even if it was only exceptionally pungent pipe tobacco. Except that they had all tried that, and it was a washout like everything else; and since Matthias had got to like the horrible stuff, there was something else they had all had to learn to put up with.

  Now if there’s one other thing we have all had to learn, Vanderdecker said to himself as he leaned on the rail and watched the seagulls veering away in shocked disgust, it’s tolerance. With the exceptions of needled beer and country and western music, we’ve learned to tolerate pretty well everything on the surface of the earth. We don’t mind being spat at, shot at, hosed down with water-cannon, exorcised and thrown out of Berni Inns. We can handle Sebastian’s suicide attempts, Cornelius’s snoring, Johannes’s toenail-clipping, Pieter Pretorius’s whistling, Antonius’s conversation and chess playing, pretty well everything about the cook, with nothing more than a resigned shrug and a little therapeutic muttering. In a world which still hasn’t grown out of killing people for adhering to the wrong religion, political party or football team, this is no small achievement. A bit like Buddhism, Vanderdecker considered, without all that sitting about and humming.

  And after all this time, what else would we do? Vanderdecker blew his nose thoughtfully, for this was something he had managed to keep from reflecting on for several centuries. What would it be like not being on this ship, or for that matter not being at all? The second part of that enquiry he could dismiss at once; it’s impossible to imagine not being at all, and probably just as well. But suppose we can somehow get shot of the smell, what would we do?

  The Flying Dutchman smiled. It’s typical, of course, he said to himself, that I saw “we” after so many years of all being in the same boat, we poor fools share a collective consciousness that you don’t get anywhere else in the animal kingdom. True, we all dislike each other intensely, or tell ourselves that we do: but the arm probably hates the hand, and no doubt the toes say cutting things about the ankle behind its back. We are the creations, as well as the victims, of our common experience. I can’t see us ever splitting up, or admitting anyone else to our society. Particularly not the latter; by the time we’d all grown used to the newcomer’s own particular habits, he or she would long since have died of old age.

  But that’s what I’ve tried to do, Vanderdecker contradicted himself, by enlisting Jane as an ally. Well, someone had to do the job; we can’t and she was prepared to, so don’t knock it. On the other hand, it was no end of a pleasant change to say more than three words together to someone I hadn’t been through the War of the Spanish Succession with. But what about when the novelty wore off? It’s different talking to Antonius; in our various conversations over the years, we must have used every conceivable combination of the few thousand words that make up his simian vocabulary. I can predict exactly what Antonius will say in any given situation, and I h
ave got through the phase of wanting to push him in the sea every time he opens his mouth. Nothing he can say can do more than mildly bewilder me. That’s a rather comforting thought, in a way, and to a greater or lesser extent it goes for everyone else on the ship. Why throw all that away and jeopardise a unique relationship, just for the chance of a chat or two with someone who’ll be dead and gone in another seventy-odd years? Seventy years, after all, is no time at all; it took Antonius longer than that to do his last jigsaw puzzle.

  “Captain.” Talk of the Devil. “I’ve been thinking.”

  “Good for you, Antonius. How do you like it?”

  Antonius looked at him. “Like what, captain?”

  “Thinking.”

  The great brows furrowed, the massive boom of the beam-engine slowly began to move. “How do you mean, captain?”

  “Nothing, Antonius,” Vanderdecker said. “Forget I spoke. What were you going to say?”

  “Well,” said the first mate diffidently, “me and the lads were asking ourselves, what’s going to happen? If that Montalban actually has invented something. I mean, what do we all do then?”

  Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, muttered the Eying Dutchman to himself, not to mention idiots. “That’s a very good question, Antonius,” he replied, “a very good question indeed.”

  “Is it?” Antonius looked pleased. “Well, what is going to happen, then?”

  “Has it occurred to you,” Vanderdecker said, “that I don’t know?”

  “No,” Antonius replied, and Vanderdecker believed him. He discovered a lump in his throat that hadn’t been there before. “I mean,” said Antonius, “it isn’t going to change things, is it?”