sound of a postman’s head making contact with a Scots pine brought Vanderdecker out of his reverie. He was being antisocial again. Time to move on.
While he had been away, the crew had passed the time by going for a swim in the sea. Complete immersion in seawater did nothing to impede the communication of the smell, but it did make you feel better. Now the water around Dounreay has been declared completely safe by NIREX, which may be taken to mean that it’s about as safe as a gavotte in a minefield; but from the point of view of Vanderdecker’s crew, this was a point in its favour. They could bathe in it with a clean conscience if it was polluted already.
By some strange accident of chance, it was Antonius, the first mate, who noticed it first; and this in spite of the fact that the odds against Antonius noticing anything at any given time are so astronomical as to be beyond calculation. The next person to notice it was Sebastian van Dooming. He only noticed it because after his ninth attempt to drown himself he was so short of breath that he was inhaling air like a vacuum-pump. Then Pieter and Dirk Pretorius noticed it, and they pointed it out to Jan Christian Duysberg. He in turn mentioned it to Wilhelm Triegaart, who told him that he was imagining things. In short, by the time Vanderdecker returned, everyone was aware of it. They all decided to tell their captain at the same time.
“Hold on, will you?” Vanderdecker said. There was a brief but total silence, and then everyone started talking again.
“Quiet!” A man who has just spent five minutes talking into a British Telecom payphone is not afraid to raise his voice. “Sebastian,” he said, choosing someone at random, “can you please tell me what’s going on?”
“It’s the smell, captain,” replied the spokesman. “It’s gone.”
Vanderdecker stared. Then he sniffed so violently that he almost dislocated his windpipe.
“When did this happen?” he asked quietly.
“Must have been when we were all swimming in the water, captain,” Sebastian said.
“You don’t say.” Vanderdecker closed his eyes, buried his nose in Antonius’s doublet and concentrated. There was still a whiff of it there, but it was very faint. “This water here?”
“That’s right,” several voices assured him. Others urged him to try it for himself. They didn’t want to be rude, they said, but he smelt awful.
Vanderdecker needed no second invitation. He pulled off his shirt and trousers and jumped into the sea.
“I do believe you’re right,” he said, a quarter of an hour later. They were back on board ship again by this stage. The ship itself was as bad as ever, but what could you expect? “It’s definitely still there, but it’s faded a hell of a lot.”
“What d’you think’s happened?” asked the first mate anxiously. “What’s going on?”
Vanderdecker had a shrewd idea that it wasn’t a coincidence. He didn’t know much about these things, but it stood to reason that the sea next to a power station absorbs quite a fair amount of any escaping vapours or things of that sort. Until a few days ago, Professor Montalban had been doing experiments inside that very same power station. If that’s a coincidence, Vanderdecker said to himself, then I’m not a Dutchman.
An hour later, it had worn off. The cloud of avaricious gulls which had formed over the ship suddenly evaporated. The fumes from Wilhelm Triegaart’s repulsive pipe were once again the sweetest-smelling things on the ship. Because he had had his immersion later than the others, Vanderdecker was slightly more wholesome than they were; only slightly. He would still have been barred from any fashionable sewer as a health hazard.
Vanderdecker said, “Get me all the empty barrels you can find. Then fill them up in the sea where you lot were all having your swim.”
Antonius, who was a conscientious man, felt it his duty to point out to Vanderdecker that you can’t drink seawater. Vanderdecker ignored him politely. He was thinking again.
It no longer matters, he said to himself. Geneva can be on top of the Alps for all I care—if we can keep ourselves from smelling for just a couple of days, we could make it to Geneva and go see Montalban.
While we’re on the subject of coincidences, how else would you account for the fact that the Dow Jones’ second biggest slide in twenty years started that same afternoon?
The most direct route by sea from Dounreay to Geneva, so to speak, is straight down the North Sea and into the Channel. Vanderdecker, however, was extremely unhappy about going anywhere near the Channel now that it was so depressingly full of ships. He made for Den Helder.
Yet another of these wretched coincidences; MV
“Now then,” said Mr Gleeson, “the Vanderdecker Policy.”
Mr Gleeson was not what Jane had expected, but then she shouldn’t have expected him to be; not if she’d thought about it for a moment. What she should have expected was an extraordinary man; and for all his shortcomings, he was certainly that.
He was short; maybe half an inch shorter than Jane, who was a quintessential size 12. He was round but not fat, and his head had hair in more or less the same way a mountain has grass—sparse and short and harassed- looking. He had bright, quick, precise eyes and a smile that told you that he would make jokes but not laugh at yours. As to ninety per cent of him he looked like somebody’s nice uncle. The other ten per cent, you felt, was probably pure barracuda.
“I don’t know,” said Mr Gleeson, “how much you’ve found out for yourself, so I’d better start at the beginning. Would you like something before we start? Cup of tea? Gin and tonic? Sherry?”
Jane had never been in Mr Gleeson’s office before, and she didn’t feel at all comfortable. It was an unsettling place—just comfortable enough to make you start to feel at home, and just businesslike enough to make you suddenly realise that you weren’t. Jane had the perception to understand that this effect was deliberate.
“No, thank you;” she said. Her mouth was like emery paper. Mr Gleeson reclined in his chair and looked at his fingernails for a moment. “The Vanderdecker Policy,” he said, “is the single most important secret in the world. I don’t want to worry you unduly, but when you leave this office tonight you’ll be taking with you enough information to wipe out every major financial institution and destabilise every economy in the world. I just thought you ought to know that. You can keep a secret, can’t you?”
Jane mumbled that she could. Mr Gleeson nodded. He accepted her word on this point. He was a good judge of character, and could read people.
“Actually,” he continued, “the risk involved in telling you this is minimal, because if you leaked it to anybody they wouldn’t believe you. I’m not sure they’d even believe me. Or the President of the United States, for that matter. When you actually come face to face with the true story, it’s so completely incredible that you could publish it in the
Mr Gleeson scratched his ear slowly and gently, as if this was a very delicate and difficult feat to perform and required all his concentration. Then he leaned forward.
“So that you can understand what I’m going to say,” he continued, “I’d better just fill you in on the history of this firm’s most important client. You don’t need me to tell you that that’s the National Lombard Bank. It’s a very old bank; in fact it’s the oldest bank of all. To be honest with you, nobody knows exactly when it was founded; it started off as a large number of silver pennies in a sock belonging to an Italian merchant who was too fat to go to the Crusades in person, but was alive to the fantastic commercial opportunity they presented. These silver pennies bred many other silver pennies during the Siege of Jerusalem that the sock was too small to contain them all, and the Italian merchant, or his grandson or whoever it was, built a bank instead and kept them in that. Spiritually,
