Happy Dutch and sullen Brits

Funny introduction, a strong comic/ satirical element

 








John de Dangerous
�"a comic spy novel by Alex Roysh
 










            Chapter 1

Happy Dutch and Sullen Brits


    “Shoot, dummy, they’re closing in on us!” John yelled, pushing the heavy boat off the crumbling, stony embankment.
    “But... how?” Carl swaggered at the stern, trying to keep his balance, fumbling with a heavy gun in his shaking hands. “The trigger is stuck!”
 Time was too precious to squander on words, so John dashed to the helm and pressed the starter. Two large red motors at the rear churned and growled, revving loudly and creating a little eddy. Shuddering to life, the sleek boat almost sent Carl�"and his gun�"down into the water. From the opposite river bank, where at least four black motorcycles now crouched, a shot whizzed through the air. Another one followed. A round hole appeared in the middle of the boat’s low windshield, encircled by a crown of shattered, chipped glass.
    John felt that time was running out.

     “Get down! They’ll shoot you in th' head!” he bellowed. Not waiting for a reaction, he pulled his brother down by the jacket. Carl, in his brown tweed suit, thumped onto the wet bottom of the vessel. He was still fumbling with the gun in search of the safety switch.
    “Ching-ching-ching-chinggg!” The assault pistol suddenly woke up. John’s eyes widened, and Carl’s jaw dropped. Four bullets, able to pierce a half-inch thick steel rail, buzzed through the moist air, across the river.
    “It won’t stop!” shrieked Carl, aghast that he had no control over the weapon. He released the trigger, and the salvo halted.
Suddenly there came a loud explosion-like sound from the opposite river bank as the last of the four little steel-headed monsters ricocheted off a scaffolding pipe and knocked the nozzle off of a high-pressure paint hose. The creamy whitewash burst forth through a waving, flagellating, writhing rubber snake. The hose worked itself high into the air, covering everything and everyone yards around with a spacious liquid blanket. It blinded the leather-clad  shooter and covered the bikers’ shiny black hogs with an innocent, profuse, pallid layer of sticky pomade.
    John couldn’t watch the metamorphosis that turned Bandidos into angels. After all, he was steering a hot-blooded, swaying, skipping speed-boat for only the second time in his life.
               ***

    ... It all began just a couple of weeks ago, with one innocent phone call that came during an ordinary Wednesday lunch break.
The slim mobile buzzed imploringly. “Zzzz! Bzzzz-bzzzz! Zummm! Zummm!” It twittered in his side pocket as though trying to skip out onto the unvarnished wooden table.
“Yep?” John answered the call, even though it was during his sacred lunch break. “Oh, hi, Carl! Hello! Haven’t heard from you for years! How’s life? How’s the wife?”
The voice on the other side chuckled. Carl, his older brother, called him every week or so. They had always been friends, and surely not the types who shunned one another. But for John, whose job was to lure new bank clients with a gentle trickle of kind words, then stun them with a waterfall of convincing words, and finally hypnotize them by the glowing sincerity of his expressive sky-blue eyes, all in order to sell them risky papers they mostly didn’t need, such innocent superlatives were daily bread.

After a full morning of speaking in three languages, composing cunning emails, and reviewing dull faxes, John was hungry. Cramming the flat mobile against his ear, he gazed with a craving eye at the two hard-earned pieces of rye bread with tomato and cheese on the stylish plywood tray. Still, he’d never cut a talk short with his brother over something as inconsequential as eating.
He filled his mouth with words instead. “Can we perhaps meet? Always! What? This Friday evening? Of course! No problem! And what’s the emergency that brings you to call me today, might I ask?”
The less wordy person on the other side chuckled again.
“I’ve got a fine new piece of writing,” Carl said, then paused for a moment. “I shall begin work on it today. And... I need your advice.”
“Oh, great, grandiose, excellent!” The superlatives flowed freely now. John had always been an ardent enthusiast for his brother’s writing, ever since Carl had pursued a letters and journalism diploma through a Cambridge college correspondence program.
After listening to a sparkling, half-minute long monologue, Carl chuckled again. The sound of his brother’s laughter snapped John’s mind back to the conversation at hand. “Umm, I’ll help, of course! Should I bring something along? A book, a chart, something?”
“Bring yourself along�"it’s by far enough,” came the reserved brother’s answer, sober but not without humour.
“Ah, come on, if you call me days in advance, it can’t be without a reason!” came John’s teasing reply. “What an advice you need�"cat care, wind energy, Shanghai hedge funds?”
“Well,” Carl began. He wasn’t at all baffled by his brother’s generous offer to help. “If you have some time, you could write down what it means, in your own terms, to be Dutch? I’m set to write a couple of essays on our main twelve features�"seen from the Dutch and the English sides.”
“Sure, of course I’ll do it, no problem. I work best in dozens!” The junior clerk was, in his own eyes, expert on almost any subject under the sun.
Carl, himself a man of few words, smiled�"which John’s mobile phone couldn’t detect. Eloquent and exuberant John, who was able to speak some two hundred words a minute and write just a few less, tried to be helpful at every turn. He’d always been like that, from childhood.
“Great,” he said, ready to finish up this conversation, which was for him very long and hectic�"as conversations with John usually were. “I’ll come along to your place at a quarter past six this Friday after work. Bye.” He hung up.

John glanced at the now-silent plastic handset and grinned, too. He himself agreed that he could be a bit verbose, especially compared to his rather tight-lipped brother. He’d once been told that finishing a phone call with him took either a miracle, an act of God (like a bolt of lightning to cut the phone line), or the Napoleonic will necessary to squeeze one’s teeth and simply hang up. His brother specialized in the third.
Suddenly remembering his hunger, John grabbed his sandwich and gave it a good bite. Then, holding it high in one hand, he hurried back to his broad desk and pulled his thickset agenda out from beneath a pile of files and books. He added to his as yet skimpy Friday schedule “Fri wri 12 Dt pt fr Crl! 18:00�"Imp!”
As emotional and passionate as he was unpunctual, John would surely always be late if he didn’t use small tricks such as dropping the quarter hour against himself.

***

John and Carl de Cheesekop were brothers so strikingly different that only a trained artist’s eye could find any similarity, and only their own parents would have the surety to call them siblings. John was as vibrant as mercury, a mid-sized (as he called himself) slender guy with curly dark blond hair, pale blue eyes that never lacked twinkle, and the polished manners of a big bank’s small clerk.
His brother Carl, who was eight years his senior, was almost a head taller. He was built like a heavyweight boxer, with straight chestnut hair and an even straighter way of speaking. Carl was the type of person able to keep silent for three days, if need be, and whose words, when they finally sounded, were few, pithy, and laden with weight. His livelihood required that he be comfortable in his own head for hours on end, as he spent his days poring over drawings of the power plant that he presided over in the southern city of Den Bosch.
It wasn’t that they had nothing in common. Both carried the funny family name of de Cheesekop, and both were born in England, where Carl had also gone to preparatory and secondary school in Reading. Since that time, now a bit remote and forgotten, John went only rarely to the other side of the Channel. His older sibling, however, went there every year to visit his relatives and school friends in the old, longsuffering Mini he garaged there, as well as to visit a small summer cottage he kept up near Dover. He even maintained a British passport.   
As maybe one of a very few people who resided in both southern England and Holland, Carl regarded himself both as a Dutch-speaking Englishman and English-rooted Dutchman�"a man of two cultures, two tongues, and two homelands, lands so close and yet so different. He knew first-hand that the English weren’t snobbish, pharisaic, and I-couldn’t-care-less type roughnecks, and neither were all Dutch nosy, narcissistic, penny-pinching, and beer-guzzling cowards.

The bi-cultural 'Denglishman' was, however, well aware that very few people shared his unique knowledge, or cared to look deeper than the dusty jetsam of clichés heaped up on both shores of the North Sea for centuries. That’s why, as the first dram of ink began to dry on the first page of his first essay’s introduction, Carl clamped his short-clipped engineer’s head with his bulky hands.
“Dash, how little we folks know of each other!” he uttered, barely believing it himself. “And we’re thought to be the closest relatives in the Anglo-German family!”

***

Friday�"oh, thank God for it!�"crept along at the end of the long and hectic week. Now the crowds of hard-working folks in tweeds, uniforms, blouses, and flannel shirts hurried to their four-wheeled ponies or squeezed into the yellow metal boxes that impatiently crouched on snaking rails. On the other end of those rails were two days of freedom�"two days of glorious loafing, shopping, and quarrelling, of doing anything else but the excitingly dreary bread-winning.
In one of those yellow carriages, with half his a*s perched onto the narrow second-class flap seat, sat a well-behaved bank clerk. Though he was still in his jacket and white shirt, he was without a tie, which was, as the tradition obliged, crammed into the side pocket of his briefcase with sheer negligence. Now he was the client, and the humble railwaymen working the passenger cars had to wear ties, shining shoes, and ironed dark blue uniforms. He was the one who people set out to please, at last.
The clerk didn’t care, however, about the railwaymen’s neatness, and didn’t even fret about the so-called speed train’s real speed, now shamefully reduced to that of a lazy camel strolling across a Bedouin village. He was feverishly tapping at his laptop, for just an hour ago he discovered in his agenda a strange entry: “Fri wri 12 Dt pt fr Crl! 18:00�" Imp!” What on earth did it mean? Perhaps the entry was very old, maybe even made years ago; he couldn’t remember when that might have been. Maybe his colleagues had played a joke on him? Suddenly it dawned on him. Oh, holy parakeet, today I’m to receive my brother at home, and my wife hasn’t a clue!
John (for yes, it was John on that slow-moving speed train) reached for his handy and touched the screen to awaken it from its i-slumber. It’s better to call late than never, he thought, hopes of redemption filling his heart. But the cute tablet-like gadget peeped, twinkled its last, and gave up its digital ghost.
“Sheeps!” John lambasted the lifeless mobile with the mightiest swear acceptable in his tweeded circles. Then he rummaged in his slim case for the spare battery, to find only a half pack of hankies, a dried-up sandwich from the previous month, and the latest stock report.
He sighed, scratched his ear, and went on tapping.

***

The screechy yellow multipede with the deep-blue “NS” pattern on the side finally reached its first halting point, flinging its numerous ports open and releasing the sweaty, tired, numb, and glad Friday captives. John flopped his laptop closed and streamed out. He was almost home.
 “Oh, it’s good that Carl called me on Wednesday,” his wife, Sveta, greeted him with a mixed smile and a light sigh. “You’re too busy to even remember your own birthday, let alone a visit�"”
“Hi, treasure,” interrupted John, whose mind was racing too fast to hear what his wife had just said. He hurried in, trying to compensate for his distractedness with a tender kiss and a deep glean in his eye. “Oh, we’ve got a visit! How great!”
A baffled Sveta closed the door behind her quick-footed husband, not knowing whether she should cry, laugh, or both. She looked heavenward and trimmed her ochre-coloured sari, then followed him back to the living room, where prudent Carl had already arrived with his wife.
“Hi, Carl! Hello, Helen!” he greeted the guests, and at once remembered their phone conversation two days ago. “Oh, that was you who called me on Tuesday! And I wrote a twelve-point analysis on long-term investment in Saskatchewan copper mines instead. Sorry, so awfully sorry!”
“No problem,” said Carl, smiling modestly and standing up. He nodded and shook his brother’s outstretched hand. “You’re home now, and that’s what matters.”

***

After finishing the moderately Oriental dinner, the ladies lingered around the table, exchanging small talk on furniture, fashion, and the latest tricks for painless leg depilation�"subjects which unite any two women on earth, including the Hindu and Dutch women seated in John’s living room. The brothers climbed up the narrow stairs, where, in the solitude of John’s claustrophobic home office in the attic, the two sat down and looked one another in the eye.
“What’s going on, brother?” John sat at the edge of the chair, as curious as twenty cats, including his own Tabby.
“I’ve won,” began Carl, in a quietly excited tone�"and was at once interrupted by his brother.
“Of course, we always win!” John sprang up from his chair and paced three strides in every direction across the micro-office, wearing the expression of a forward who’d just scored the winning goal. “I mean, we are Cheesekops, and we are Dutch!”
Carl waited until the seemingly endless word-fountain wound down to a low ebb, caught the first pause, and spoke again. “I won a competition held by a group of city councils from Cornwall, Devon, and Sussex. I’ve got the chance to write a series of essays about Holland and the Dutch people.” He thrust his words slowly but strongly through the air, like a fencing champ pushing his rapier to the point, determined to make contact no matter what direction his opponent was flailing.
“Yep, yep, of course!” John finally seemed to turn his attention to the subject at hand.
“Listen, Johnnie,” Carl began slowly. He smiled and opened his voluminous briefcase. “This will be the most challenging thing I’ve ever had to write. I’ve got to select five folks who are good models of the Dutch people. I need to find a southerner, a Fries, an easterner, a northerner, and an Amsterdamer. I�"”

 “And I’m of course an Amsterdamer!” a boisterous John cut his brother short again. “As you know, I’ve lived here for just eight years�"
“If you like.” Carl tilted his head. He didn’t want to pull his brother by the tongue. He decided to let John decide first who he felt himself to be�"an eastern Dutchman by ascension, an Englishman by birth, a west Hollander by upbringing, or still someone else.

“Ugh, well, well,” John’s extra-quick but volatile reasoning seemed to shift directions rapidly, like the rudder of a small yacht caught in the currents of a bay where three seas met. Where am I bound to? he wondered. Of all the places I’ve passed through, which do I stand for? John shook his head, not sure of his answer. “Well, what are the reports about? I’ve forgotten,” he asked, as his racing mind sought some clarity.
 “The essays,” corrected Carl politely. “Well, to make a long story short, I’m to write about the twelve main features of your average middle-class Hollander. What makes them�"or, I suppose, us�"laugh and cry; what makes them happy and mad... you know, what makes them feel distinctly Dutch.”
“Oh,” John answered slowly as he turned this information over in his head. And then, little by little, some warm glitter began to appear in his cool bluish eyes. “What’s it all for, anyways? Are you on a secret fact-finding mission for the British government?”
“Sort of,” Carl grinned very lightly. “To tell you the truth, their officials just want more Dutch tourists to come bolster their economy,” Carl said, and frowned a little. “At least, that’s what I think. They still can’t grasp why three times more English are touring Flanders and Amsterdam than Dutch or Flemish are sightseeing in London. To get more visitors, they decided it would be a good gimmick to first explore them�"that is, us�"to see what makes them tick. And once they know that, then they can lure them over to their side of the channel.”
“And you are just the Dutchman to do it! Yep, that sounds about right. Those English never speak their mind directly,” John said, suddenly smirking with a poisonous sincerity that wasn’t expected from a polite, polished, unpartisan, and apolitical bank savvy. Then his eyes took on their sparkle once more. “Not like we do.”
Carl groaned. “Johnnie, hang on a minute,” Carl said to his dramatic brother, standing up a bit from the chair. He continued in a gentle but serious voice, “Please avoid the ‘we-versus-them’ game; the British already think we Dutch are out to get everyone who is different from us; my essays aren’t aimed at breeding wranglers. So just tell me who you feel you are, and why, and we’ll leave everyone else out of it.”

John stood still, his eyes set upon the small, narrow window cut into the sloping roof. He stared out at the familiar drab, grey blanket of the low, unassuming Holland sky. A couple of greyish-brown seagulls flew in circles.
    His thoughts circled, too�"around his battered ego, which had been laid out to dry by his brother’s wise observation. They whirled around, crooning, screeching, calling out like the seagulls, unfolding before his eyes the dark, unexplored, bottomless sea of his heart. He sighed, glanced at the sky again, and then peered, absent-mindedly, at the wall, as though he might suddenly find the answer written there in some previously unseen letters.
    Now, it was the question that had got him piqued�"a question that needed an answer. He worked, rested, quarrelled, ate, slept, and went on holidays, all without really knowing why he did any of it. He laughed and flirted, swore and dreamed without ever giving any account to why this or that was so. And now, like a bolt of lightning from out of the blue, someone appeared with such a question that mined the very depths of his heart, only for him to discover... what? A glittering planet within his heart, or a self-consuming black hole? He found himself, suddenly, at the misty brink of his own soul, afraid to look, unable to walk away. For the first time in his life, he was afraid of himself.
    If it was anyone but Carl asking such questions, he’d just send them away empty handed. But when his only brother�"an English citizen, a member of the Friends of Holland society, an engineer by training but a journalist at heart�"sat in front of him with  this question in his deep green bespectacled eyes, John knew, deep inside, that he would himself search for the answers, no matter how far down in the depths of his being he needed to dive.
    In fact, in his teen and youth years, he’d reserved such revelations for his priest, but as he grew up, he’d always been too busy to even drop in for a brief visit to the downtown cathedral, let alone to sit on the hard, cold confessional bench and divulge his depths to a yawning, robed stranger who was looking, on the sneak, at his watch.
But he’d risk it now. He’d like to explore himself a bit more. And maybe he’d even share what was inside, too�"but just once in his life, and just to Carl, who could hold his tongue and keep a secret until his last breath. Yep, he’d tell him�"but he wouldn’t permit him to write it down. That was the only way he could feel safe spilling his soul.

The younger de Cheesekop shook out his unruly curls. “I agree,” he stated and smiled, modestly but determinedly, “if the interview can remain anonymous.”
“Of course, Johnnie,” Carl said and smiled, then shifted a bit on his chair. “I should have known that you’d never leave me out in the cold!”
“Fine, let’s get started. Where shall I begin?” As usual, John dove into his role too quickly. Starting a new project with John was like going away for a weekend with the kitchen faucet left open.
Carl smiled, having expected nothing less. He grabbed his briefcase and took out a couple of sheets of paper. “Well, to put it in technical terms, I need your ‘core dump’; that is, what do you really think and feel? Give me a bare truth, or at least something truth-like.”  
John’s eyes grew large, then shifted to the window again. He didn't know how to start, so broad the first question was. Carl caught the mood.
“Okay, let’s try it this way: just tell me what makes you happy, and then we’ll talk about equality, open-mindedness, money, faith, weather, government, justice and crime, work relations, foreigners and neighbours, sport, and culture�"”
“We Dutch are always happy,” John cut in and declared with sudden surety. Not waiting for the end of the extensive list, John grabbed the first question like a hungry tiger would grab a bullock�"with a self-increasing appetite and energy. “It’s a well-known fact. Our excellent social security and tax systems make life in Holland a never-ending pleasure!”
Carl chuckled, but said nothing. He opened his case and fetched a pen, then carefully etched a few choice words. He’d known his younger brother long enough to know how to filter some three-quarters of his word-waterfall away and grab the rare pearls in the bottomless spill of his vocabulary. He was also carrying his dictaphone, but the costly apparatus wasn’t yet switched on; he didn’t want to scare off his brother’s carefree torrent of thoughts.
“Well, few things are never ending,” John continued, always keen to react to the slightest change in his customer’s mood�"and now, of course, it was as if he was no longer standing in front of his only brother, but making a presentation before a client. “But one variable is constantly true: we’re always happy. With our jobs, our weather, our culture, and our tolerance of everything�"except intolerance. Unlike those sullen English, or arrogant French, we’re endlessly satisfied with our bright politicians, our countless bike paths that almost reach the Mediterranean, our superior public health system, our harmless army, our invincible sports champs�"”
Suddenly, Carl lifted his hand and John stopped short. The gesture was too much like the one of a customer who didn’t want his bank clerk to propose too rigorous a refinancing plan.
“Yes?” John asked haltingly, with well-trained politeness and well-hidden irritation.
“Johnnie,” began Carl with angelic patience, “ ‘we’ is too broad a term here. It’s too general, too cliché.  Just tell me, what makes you happy? Just you. And without the ‘we-against-them’ angle.”
“Fine, fine, no problem.” John switched to a more personal tone, but suddenly lost a good chunk of his runaway eloquence. “Me, well, for me...” he trailed off. He looked again out the tiny window, where even the birds had run for cover. He shook his head, then went on, “Carl, this part you don’t write down, okay?” He gave his head one vigorous nod to point out he really meant it. “First, let me tell you honestly who I am: I’m a bit Catholic, a bit of a believer but mostly an agnostic, and also a bit of a workaholic. I don’t do too much digging into the abysmal depths of politics or philosophy, but I do have very good insight into the shallow depths of my wallet.”
“That’s good!” Carl automatically grabbed for his pen, but then, catching John’s serious gaze, he placed it back down with a sour face. “Shouldn’t that be written down?” he asked, with the tiny hope that John would change his mind.
“Nope,” John shrugged. “That’s too real to sound true.” He went on, “That’s just what makes me�"yes, me�"so happy: I don’t think too much. Otherwise I’d go nuts, you grab?”
Carl nodded, looking down at his pen, which had only made a few cursory marks on the virgin-white sheet of paper. Well, I guess journalism isn’t so easy, if you take it seriously, he decided. Little wonder they told me that writing a good report is as tricky as launching a rocket ship. “But,” Carl began, scratching his ear, “when you’re ready, you’ll tell me something just as truthful, right?”

His younger brother smiled, sighed heavily, and crossed his hands. “What do you mean by the truth?” he asked, no longer looking at his interviewer, with a Hamlet-like air. “Can you tell me? Or, if you can’t, who can? Is there anyone in this world who can speak to what the truth is? Is it what you see as such, or what is accepted as such, or what is forced at you by society, by special-interest groups, by religions, by the media? Is it what’s stuffed down your throat by a bunch of rotten-through politicians or the high-brow high priests of science? What on earth is the truth?”
“That’s good!” applauded Carl, and up went the pen, a slight twinkle appearing in the older brother’s eyes.
“That ain’t for the public, either,” John said and shook his head. “It’s too brave.”
“Oh.” The older brother took off his clean glasses and cleaned them again. A pity, he thought. “All right,” he said, nodding slowly, “what’s the truth for you, then�"if I dare even ask?”    
“Well,” John began, putting his hands in the large pockets of his jacket and pacing the pocket-sized attic once again, agitated by the sincerity of his sudden outburst, “I still believe that truth�"the truth�"does exist somewhere, although I have yet to meet anyone who knew it, and maybe I’ll never meet anyone who knows it. As for me, it’s just there, like the metric standard in Paris, or natural laws like gravity. If the�"the�"truth is gone, lost, forgotten, or whatever, then... then everything is one patched-up rubbish heap. A truth is what sounds good to me; that’s what suits me now. A truth is... well, it’s a  commodity. It’s pumped up, portioned out, measured carefully, mixed with half-lies and anything else, made into a slop cocktail, wrapped up in platitudes or whatever else tastes good, and sold wholesale and retail. And, when that is sold, then I’m sold out, too. Price-tagged at a pence apiece.”
“That’s quite a thought,” Carl commented as he lifted his bushy brows. “You’ve never told me before. Now this I have to write down!” He began covering the paper with tight lines of scrupulous handwriting.

John watched his brother’s miniature cursive with growing dread, afraid he’d divulged too much, wanting to speed back into his safe, shallow shell.
Carl looked up and smiled, his hand still busy tracing miniature moguls across the white landscape. “Go on, please�"what makes you happy?”
“Well,” John replied, “happiness�"for me�"means that you don’t care too much, that you don’t dig all the time for the truth, or don’t whine in its absence. Happiness isn’t really about the truth at all,” John continued, gaining speed now, “it’s about the lack of unhappiness. That’s logical, isn’t it?”
“Umph,” Carl grunted, and, putting his finger to his chin, wrote down a couple more words. “Well?”
“Happiness is easy,” John went on, walking around the micro-room, spinning his jacket button, “because you don’t have to set a standard for it, or search for its absolute form.”
“But some do,” the interviewer piped up, then touched his solid-looking tortoise shell glasses.
“Well, not me. Searching for absolute bliss is for dopes. I’m just too practical.” John waved his hand in the air and went on, “I also studied logic at university, so I know that, unlike the truth, which is objective, happiness is subjective�"a feeling. It’s as fickle and changeable as a rainbow. What’s great for one person is obnoxious for the other. One person might be happy on a mountaintop, while his neighbour loathes any trace of snow�"and so on to infinity, right?”
“Yep,” Carl affirmed, then busied himself writing again, the pen dancing in his stumpy fingers.
“So, in a way, you choose whether to be happy or not�"at a certain level, of course. I mean, you need to have a decent food, decent clothes, and a salary that your wife wouldn’t sneer at.” He stopped and glanced through the roof window as though searching for words, then went on. “A middle Dutch, like me, is notorious for happiness. He’s happy with his wife or his girlfriend, if he has one, or he’s happy without a wife or a girlfriend. Same with friends�"the fewer friends he has, the fewer problems and expenses, you know?”
Carl nodded, his hand working double-time to keep up with his brother’s speedy word engine of a mouth.
 “He’s happy with surprise or planned kids. He’s happy with his work, his house, his loans and mortgages, and at times he’s even happy with their rates,” John giggled, then continued. “He’s happy with his tiny car and its tired tires, with the noisy sparrows outside and the cheeky flies inside. He’s happy with the snoring of his neighbour, which he can hear from the other side of his bedroom’s thin wall, and he’s happy with the fickle weather. He’s even happy with the constant traffic jams, though he’d be happier still if he were squeezed of all his coffee money first, then squeezed onto buses, trams, and trains.”
At the moment, Carl couldn’t hold back a short bark of laughter. He’d heard about that recently-abandoned kilometre tax idea, which would have vacuumed out the pockets of motorists or driven them into the creaky yellow rail boxes with the lapidary “NS” sign.
“Sorry,” the elder brother corrected both his glasses and his un-journalistic outburst. “Please go on.”

“Well, let’s take a look at John Everyman for a minute.” John seemed to be impressing even himself with his soliloquy by now, “a Spartan, sporty, Dutch Jan Kaas, unlike a picky, beer-bellied, British John Bull, can be happy with almost nothing. Very, very few things are needed: a stable and well-paid job, a decent house in a low-crime quarter, and a reliable, low-taxed, new, inexpensive, large, economic, and powerful car.” He listed the items on his fingers, barely stopping for breath. “Also, a lovely, never grumbling, always content, industrious, smiling, and well-clothed woman at home, and a good deal of policemen on the streets, some fifty thousand on your account, a friendly boss at work, at a job that is well paid and not too tiresome.”
As Carl scribbled feverishly, John gave up counting on his hands but continued unabated.
“A holiday in France once a year, at times a lottery win, some respect from your colleagues, a good TV program every Saturday, cozy furniture at home and in your office, a bit more sunshine in the summer, a bit less cold in the winter, tastier and cheaper food in the markets, more victories by the orange football team, less dog poop on the grass, more grass in the cities, more trains, and cheaper trains, too, and trains with softer seats and with fewer vandals...” His voice was picking up speed with each item. “And no extra hours of work on the weekend, but a salary raise every year, and fewer computer problems, more TV programs, and cheaper TV cable, and cleaner streets, with more nice smiling girls and fewer bums on them, and more light in the evening, and less traffic, more freedom, more good music on the radio, fewer taxes, more benefits...” By now John’s point-form list had taken on the speed of a busy sewing machine.
“Hang on a moment! I’ve run out of paper,” protested Carl, who managed to write down nearly the whole litany and gazed at the endless list from beneath his glasses. “You call this a bit?”
“Hmmm, what have I already said?” John scratched his chin and looked over his brother’s shoulder. “Huh,” he said, impressed. “And I’ve only just begun.”
“Go on, then!” Carl nodded. An interview is just to get down the basic ideas. Later we’ll do the editing, he thought. Echoes of the lessons he’d learned at journalism school fluttered up from some corner of his memory.
“Fine. Now, let me tell you why we Dutch are happy. It comes quite naturally! First off, we live in a very stable state, with a century-old, firm, and humane democracy. This may sound boring, but we also have a pretty monarchy at the same time, and that royal family is a source of happiness for millions.”
Carl chuckled, opened and closed his mouth, and bit his lip. He was silently recalling how one royal recently said that ‘de’ Dutchman doesn’t, as such, exist. Carl lifted his index finger.
“Yes?” John stopped, his eyes shining brightly. By now he was ready to answer on any subject, from astronomy to hyenacology, from chemistry to deep-sea fishing.
“You know the name of the Crown Prince’s wife, of course?” asked Carl, who seemed slightly dubious about his brother’s newly professed admiration of the royals.
“Oh, certainly! Even a five-year-old, woken up in the middle of a dead sleep at midnight, could tell you the name of that beautiful lady!” John seemed even taller when he spoke with such reverence. “She’s... hmm .. ugh... Her name is Mathilde!”
“Ouch!” Carl covered his mouth again.
John thrust all ten fingers deep into his abundant curls, trying perhaps to push some lazy memory neurons into action. “Well?” he glanced at Carl.
“Almost.” The tortoise-shell glasses shimmered diplomatically, even though Mathilde was the princess of Belgium. “But you’re happy with the royal house, aren’t you?”
“Absolutely!” John was glad to spring back onto his horse. “You can’t compare that well-behaved and generous family with their British or Belgian counterparts, where one scandal just chases another.”
“Johnnie, none of this ‘we-and�"they’ stuff, remember?” reminded the budding newsman for the third time.
“Sorry, sorry.” The patriotic clerk trimmed his non-existent necktie and placed his hand, in a vaguely royal gesture, in the inside pocket of his jacket. “Of course... Now, back to happiness. Next to royalty and politics, I’m so happy that nothing ever happens here in Holland.”
“Huh?” Carl gulped. He set his pen down and fixed his wary eyes on his younger brother.
“Well, nothing bad happens, I mean. Nothing big, nothing special�"and isn’t such nothingness a source of bliss?” As he spoke, John seemed to be almost persuading himself that boredom is a disguised happiness. He nodded in agreement with his own voice. “No wars, no big scandals, no overly hideous crimes; everything is planned, measured, foreseen, and prescribed centuries ahead, so that nothing could possibly go wrong. Isn’t that lovely?”
           “I guess,” Carl assented. He noted a couple of words on his paper, shaking his head slightly and wondering how one could be both bored and happy. It’s the same concept as eating a stale cake, right? he wondered. He cleared his throat and ploughed forward. “And, if�"or when�"something happens, are you... less happy?” asked Carl, swallowing the too-heavy word ‘unhappy’ at the last moment.
“Ummm, yes, I suppose that’s so.” John pinched his chin, then rubbed his ear. “Most big events are bad�"they’re either a political murder or a bank crunch. So a happy nothing is better than an unhappy something. You see?”

He stood still for a moment, suddenly feeling petty and exposed, like a hermit crab caught by a petulant child and pulled too far from its safe shell. He wanted to go back in time, to twenty-four years ago when happiness was more than nothingness.
“John, Carl, come down for a tea!” came the melodious voice of his wife. It couldn’t have sounded at a better moment. The brothers eagerly trod down the narrow steps; the intense mental work had made them both hungry, and they were surely ready for a pause.

***

Once on the main floor, John felt better. Seeing his wife, who was still smiling after a pleasant chat with Helen, he felt almost happy�"or, at least, as happy as a middle Dutchman should feel. He was even ready to take some initiative.
“Tell me, darling, are you happy?” he chirped as he sauntered to the table where tea and coffee stood. He grabbed a cup and sipped the light brown liquid, then shuddered. It didn’t taste like coffee.  
“That’s Carl’s tea with milk!” protested Sveta, pouting. Their small kettle only held enough water for four cups, and now she’d have to set it on the heat again. What nonsense, she thought to herself in silent fury. The electricity bills are already through the roof without these shenanigans!
“I can drink coffee,” Carl said, quick to offer a blameless shortcut. “It’s no problem.”
“And you drink up the tea,” Sveta ordered John with a mix of passing anger, relief, and pity that her husband was still kidding around at the age of thirty-four. No longer seeing red, she said, “Did you ask me something?”
“Yeah,” John replied, eager to get back to the real issue at hand. He put the cup back on the table, plopped himself down on his seat, and snatched a big piece of cake from the dessert plate, bypassing the saucers that had been stacked neatly next to the cake platter by his tidy wife. En route to his gaping mouth, the long piece of moist chocolate cake broke in the middle. Half of it landed straight in his cup of tea, creating a little tidal wave of brown liquid laced with gingerbread crumbs.
“Argh!” exclaimed Sveta, Carl, and Helen at once. John reached for a fork and attempted to prong the brown floating mass and salvage it from its hot bath.
“Come on,” said the brown-skinned woman as she grabbed the fork and the cup and hurried to the kitchen, herself ready to boil over from helpless anger. “Now please sit and wait for your coffee, okay?”
John nodded and sat down with the face of a truant schoolboy caught by the council clerk on the street. He hid his wet, tea-stained hands under the table and resisted, with all his willpower, the sweet temptation to wipe them clean with the virgin-white cloth. He didn’t dare to repeat his question to Sveta.    

After this cacophony, which exposed the sheer absence of any trace of haute-couture in John and Sveta’s home life, some small talk ensued�"but hardly enough to cover up the strained air and soothe Sveta’s sad face and taut nerves. She had tried her best to present their family of two as orderly, happy, well behaved, and well off, and John messed it all up... as usual. She was by now quite angry, and, pouting, she silently nodded at the oily platitudes the guests spread over the suddenly ruffled sea of the evening.
Carl thought for a minute, then put his cup on the table and cleared his throat. In his years and seminars at journalism school, he had learned a bit about the easing up of tense situations. According to the statistics, every third interview is as tense as a tightrope walk in the middle of the night. He tried to make use of his education.
 “It’s a fine sunset out there. Why don’t we go for a walk?” he asked with the air of an office worm who’d spent the last five days in a glass cage and was yearning for a gulp of precious fresh air.
“Oh, I don’t think I’m up to one,” replied Sveta at once. “Sorry, I’m just too tired.” She sought Helen’s eyes in the manner of a woman reaching to gain another lady’s unspoken agreement. After all, unspoken words are the firmest, aren’t they?
“Why don’t you guys take a walk?” suggested Helen agreeably, deftly reading the various shades of the mood in the room. “We’re due to babble a bit more, right Sveta? We haven’t seen one another in such a long time.”
John lifted his head and almost jumped out of his seat like a grasshopper before an approaching mower. “That’s a grandiose idea!” he declared, giving into the urge and wiping his hands with a decorative napkin that Sveta reserved only for guests. “Let’s go, Carl!”
“Shows how much you love me,” Sveta mumbled. She sighed and retreated back to the kitchen to switch off the now-useless coffee machine and spare a couple of pricey watts.
Carl, who himself wasn’t sure if he’d spoken out of turn, glanced at his wife. She silently replied with a slight twinkle and a half smile. In their language, learned over eighteen years of marriage, that look meant ‘Go, I’ll take care of this.’

***

The door had barely closed behind their four shuffling shoes when John’s head lifted and his eyes began to shine. Like his own unpredictable tomcat who always remained a bit wild inside, he often felt more at ease outside of his house than he did within its walls. Feeling like his old self immediately, John realized that he and his brother had a mission to fulfil that night: the happiness that was within a finger’s reach of every Dutchman had to be confirmed this very evening�"fully, decisively, and at once.
“You know what, Carl?” John stuck both his hands in the pockets of his casual jacket, which was adorned with uneven patches of light brown leather at both elbows. “I’ll bet you two hundred Euros against one that of all the people we meet on this street, nine out of ten of them would be happy through and through.”
“Ha!” Carl scratched his solid chin and adjusted his tortoise-shell glasses. “Then I guess you’re very soon to be poorer by two green bills,” Carl teased, although both brothers knew that no money would ever be exchanged for one of their friendly bets.
  “You’ll see in less than two minutes how much more sincere we Dutch are. A cold-blooded Brit would just mumble, ‘Are you from the press?’, hide behind his devious small talk, then shrug and walk away, whereas any warm-blooded Hollander would pop up with a straight, sincere reply. Now let me show you!” When John was set in motion, he could only be stopped by an oversized bulldozer.
Carl rubbed his chin again. He didn’t want to chase such frivolities now. He was charged with finding reliable information, and such cavalry charges on innocent passers-by weren’t his style. Plus, who in his right mind would answer such a personal question right in the middle of the street?
While the older brother thought without action, the younger acted without much thought�"or so it seemed. John spotted their first victim of happiness research: a chap of around fifty who waddled, whistling to himself, behind his sniffing dog. John rushed into action.
“Good evening, sir!” John called as he nodded and smiled with the innocent air of an uninvited Good Samaritan. “Can I ask you something?”
“Hmmm?” replied the older man, measuring John from top to bottom with a suspicious gaze. “Well, alright.”
“Are you happy, sir?” asked John straight away. The question fell heavily like an uninvited mustard drop on a cherry cake, and both men felt it. The dog growled.
“Hmmm?” repeated the victim, shrugging and placing the leash in his other hand. “Are you from the press? Happy or not, it’s my business, not yours.” From behind his well-fitted deadpan mask, resentment and anger started to show.
The quadruped growled again and pulled his master away. John and Carl were left standing between the dusty pavement and the littered lawn. John followed the retreating man with his eyes, thinking guiltily that he’d perhaps victimised him into a still more unhappy state by asking such deep, direct stuff.
He turned back to Carl. “Know what?” he said. He wouldn’t resign himself so easily. “Maybe it would be better if we asked the question together. What do you think? You have a sort of journalistic air, and that makes everyone sincere, right?”          

Carl attempted to hide his chuckle, trying not to offend his hot-headed helper.              “People are sincere when they are at home behind closed doors, or at a bar with a couple of chums,” he said with the philosophic air of a slightly bored world-savant. “And we’re not at any of these places.”    
“No problem,” John said and shook his head. His enthusiasm had only cooled by a tiny milligrade so far. “Some folks are just more sincere than the others.”
“Like who?” Carl raised his brown brows.
“Taxi drivers, postmen, hairdressers, firemen,” numbered John, bending his fingers one after another and talking slowly as if to a child. “Also, farmers, seamen, fighter pilots, and cabaret dancers. And barkeepers, construction workers, and... and drunken politicians!” With no more fingers left to bend, he glanced up into the air as though trying to spot a sincere fighter pilot to shout his question to.
Carl shook his head with a bemused smile. “Well, around here, where would you find any farmers, cabaret dancers, or seamen? We’re miles away from any sea or farm.”
“Eh, yeah, but... there’s a taxi!” John spotted their next candidate�"a taxi driver who, by all of John’s figuring, should be both happy and sincere. He pulled Carl by the sleeve so hard that it almost ripped. “Come along!”

The two stepped down a short set of stairs and leaned next to a dark blue Mercedes with light blue taxi plates. The mood inside the car was strikingly different from the drab boredom of the evening outside, as rowdy Arabic music blasted from the oversized speakers. A dark-haired man was seated on the leather seat behind the shaded glass, chomping on a falafel and nodding to the music. John glanced at Carl, then knocked on the glass.
“Salaam!” the cabbie called, lowering the window. He gazed up at the two suited folks who didn’t look like they were at all interested in a taxi ride. “What’s up?”
  “Can I ask you something?” John shouted, trying to overpower the oriental beat.
  “Sure! Of course you can ask me everything, friend!” said the driver with an Arabic accent, turning down the volume.
“Are you... happy, sir?” John repeated his question to the cab driver.
“Eh?” the driver raised his raven-coloured brows. He had heard a lot in his life behind the wheel, but not that. He scratched his round, close-cropped hair, knit his right brow, and replied, “Eh, sirs, know what? You can make me happy�"it’s just so simple. I’ve got no clients tomorrow morning. Would you book a trip to the airport, sirs?” He smiled broadly, with the knack of a Marrakesh stall-keeper who knew how to milk an extra dirham from a gaping tourist.
John gulped and glanced at his brother. Carl cleared his throat and subtly shook his head�"he’d come with his own car and didn’t need any taxis in the morning, no matter how important their present mission was. John sighed.
“Thank you, sir,” he said to the seemingly happy driver. “Goodbye!”
“Bye!” The cabbie grinned, and knocked on his forehead with his finger in a gesture that clearly meant, ‘Why would you dummies trouble a hungry man?’ He turned up his Arabic beats and rolled up his window.
The brothers stumbled back. John’s once-feverish wish to uncover sincere happiness in nine out of ten passers by had cooled to the level of a lukewarm pizza forgotten on the table by spoiled kids at a party. He suddenly didn’t know what to say, and didn’t want to question anyone anymore. He wanted to go back, but not back home. Back somewhere he’d never been, or maybe back to his childhood. Oh, man, he thought. Now I’m really cracking up!
“Well, at least we got out for a walk,” Carl tried to pad his brother’s raw feelings a bit. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen John fall, in the twinkling of an eye, from bliss to an abyss.
John nodded, sadly. Again, he was on the receiving side of comfort.
 Carl’s ability to tread a stable ‘golden-middle’ had long been a source of John’s envy, and now, the old feeling was biting him again. His older brother, it seemed to John, had always been smarter, knew more, and performed better. And although John, at the moment, earned nearly twice as much, this grand fact alone failed to make the younger brother content, let alone... happy.

“Excuse me, sirs, but is that Volcanusdreef?” a dull, weak voice asked them from behind. Carl and John turned around. A man holding a long white walking stick in his pale hand stood on the pavement behind them, gazing ahead of him at nothing in particular.
“Yes,” replied John at once. He knew this vicinity a bit, of course.
“Can you help me to the other side, please?” came the stranger’s next request.
“Surely!” John took the blind man by the elbow and together they strolled across the street. Strangely, John was sure he’d never seen this man in the neighbourhood before. Well, the blind are mostly stay-at-homes, he reasoned.
“Thank you, sir.”
John felt the weak but warm hand shake his own cold one, and a feeling of real, simple-hearted joy passed between them. “You’ve saved me from having to walk all the way around to the traffic lights. Goodbye, and thank you greatly.”
 John looked at the opposite curb and called, awkwardly.
“A tree grows over there, just in front of where you’re standing.”
“I know sir, I know!” the weaker voice replied. “On this side, I’m at home.”
John strolled back and stood next to his silent brother-cum-interviewer. Both brothers eyed the slightly hunched man tip-tapping his white walking stick down the other side of the street. They’d already known that happy folks could be blinded by their joy, but suddenly they realized that the opposite could also be true ...
For a while, the men walked home in silence. Their first ad hoc interview session had run aground, then swerved aside like a kayak stuck in an eddy on a mountain river. The two masters of words�"one spoken, one written�"kept silent.

Yet still, a voice revealed itself clear as day to the younger brother. A funny, mischievous sun ray opened a little door in the underside of a silver-splotched cloud and patted John’s cheek and smoothed his ruffled hair.
Then it swiftly turned around and said, unheard but very well understood, “Hi there! My name is Silver Cloud. I watch over the blind and the seeing, over the bad and the less bad. I can be your friend, if you want. I can warm up smiles, wipe tears, and exchange fears for fun. I fill dark and empty homes and hearts with my gold and silver light. No one knows when I’ll come, stay, or leave, but I’m never far away, even when I can’t be seen. Bye!”
The uninvited guest waved his warm, narrow hand. John felt the little ray’s palm very briefly on his left shoulder, and then on his thin, agile lips a cautious smile began to appear ...
    

Author's Note

Is the comic element not too strong for a 'typical' crime novel?

Reviews

[KAOlmsted]

"With no more fingers left to bend, he glanced up into the air as though trying to spot a sincere fighter pilot to shout his question to."

By far, my favorite line in the entire piece, and yes...they all glared at me for laughing out loud!! I definitely see the humor, what I don't see is the crime. I appreciate the whole happiness debate, but I wonder if it would serve you better to pare it down a bit and get back to the action. You got my interest piqued with your first paragraphs, bumping along in the speed boat, firing automatic weapons, people chasing and shooting...and then you dropped me in the proverbial molasses bath. As I said, I liked the debate, you've got a great talent there, but get me back to the action ;-)
-kimmer

[KAOlmsted]

I didn't quite finish it, I got to the part where John and Carl go for a walk, but what I have read so far I genuinely like. I laughed out loud a couple of times, earning me a few sideways glances from the other patrons in the library--an unfortunate lack of wi-fi at my marina forces me to soak up civilization in five hour increments and I am governed by the posted hours, so I will be brief.

I found John's speech about happiness to be rather Dostoyevsky-esque--and not in a bad way. And as that is about all I've read, I will reserve further comment for when I can complete the chapter. I really did just want to say, thanks for posting this, I will read it all--eventually.

-kimmer