Douglas Adams - The Salmon of Doubt

The previous Thursday’s (they had each come in at the end of the week, three of them on a Thursday, four on a Friday) was for .3,232.57. The week before it had been .3,319.14. And so on.

Dirk stood up and took a deep breath. What the hell was going on? He felt that his whole world was spinning very slowly in what was, as far as he could judge, an anticlockwise direction. That prompted a vague recollection that the last time he had drunk any tequila, it had made his world spin slowly in a clockwise direction. That was obviously what he needed if he was going to be able to think about this clearly. He rummaged hurriedly through a cupboard full of dusty nine-tenths empty bottles of half-forgotten rums and whiskies and found some. A half-full bottle of mezcal. He poured himself a finger in the bottom of a teacup and hurriedly returned to his statements, suddenly panicking in case the figures vanished while he wasn’t looking.

They were still there. Irregularly large sums regularly paid in. His head began to swim again. What were they? Interest payments that had been accidentally credited to the wrong account? If they were interest payments, that would account for the fluctuations in the amounts. But it still didn’t make sense for the simple reason that over .3,000 interest a week represented the interest on two or three million pounds and was not the sort of thing that the owner of such an amount of money was going to allow to be misplaced, let alone for seven weeks in a row. He took a pull on the mezcal. It marched around his mouth waving its fists, waited a moment or two, and then started to beat up his brain. He wasn’t thinking rationally about this, he realised. The problem was that they were his own accounts, and he was used to reading other people’s. Since they were his own, it was in fact possible for him just to phone up the bank and ask. Except that, of course, they’d be closed now. And he had a horrible feeling that if he phoned them up, the response would be “Whoops, sorry, wrong account. Thank you for bringing this error to our attention. How stupid of us to imagine that this money could possibly belong to you.” Obviously he had to try to work out where it was from before he asked the bank. In fact he had to get the money out of the bank before he asked them. He probably had to get to Fiji or somewhere before he asked them.

Except—suppose the money continued to come in? On reapplying his attention to the papers, he realised something else that would have occurred to him straightaway if he hadn’t been so flustered. There was, of course, a code next to each entry. The purpose of the code was to tell him what kind of entry it was.

He looked the code up. Easy. Each payment had reached his account by international transfer.

That would also account for the fluctuations. International exchange rates. If the same amount of a foreign currency was being transferred each week, then the variations in the rate would ensure that a slightly differing amount actually arrived on each occasion. It would also explain why it didn’t arrive on exactly the same day each week. Although it only took less than a second to make a computerised international transfer of money, the banks liked to make as much fuss as they possibly could about it so that the funds would swill around profitably in their system for a while.

But which country were the payments coming from? And why?

“Kevin,” said the Irish-Swedish voice. “Kieran.”

“Oh, shut up!” shouted Dirk suddenly.

That provoked a response. The small border terrier lying, perplexed, in a basket in the corner of the room looked up excitedly and yipped with pleasure. It had not reacted at all to any of the names that the elderly computer on the table next to it had been reciting from a text file of babies’ names, but the creature obviously just enjoyed being told to shut up and was keen for more. “Kimberly,” said the computer. Nothing. The dog with no name looked disappointed.

“Kirby.”

“Kirk.” The dog slowly settled back down into its basket of old newspapers and resumed its previous posture of baffled distress.

Old newspapers. That was what Dirk needed.

A couple of hours later he had the answer, or at least some kind of an answer. Nothing that went so far as to make any kind of actual sense, but enough to make Dirk feel an encouraging surge of excitement: he had managed to unlock a part of the puzzle. How big a part he didn’t know. As yet he had no idea how big a puzzle he was dealing with. No idea at all.

He had collected a representative sample of the newspapers of the last few weeks from under the dog, under the sofa, under his bed, scattered around the bathroom, and, crucially, had managed to secure two damp but vital copies of the Financial Times from an old tramp in return for a blanket, some cider, and a copy of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. An odd request, he thought, as he walked back from the tiny scrap of park, but probably no odder than his. He was constantly reminded of how startlingly different a place the world was when viewed from a point only three feet to the left.

Using the figures from the papers, he was able to construct a map of the movements of each of the world’s major currencies over the last few weeks and see how they compared with the fluctuations in the amounts that had been paid into his account every week. The answer sprang into focus immediately. U.S.

dollars. Five thousand of them, to be precise. If $5,000 had been transferred from the U.S. to the U.K.

every week, then it would have arrived as more or less exactly the amounts that had been showing up in his account. Eureka. Time for a celebratory fridge raid.

Dirk hunkered down in front of the TV with three slices of cold pizza and a can of beer, put on the radio as well, and also a ZZ Top CD. He needed to think. Someone was paying him $5,000 a week, and had been doing so for seven weeks. This was astounding news. He ruminated on his pizza. Not only that, but he was being paid by someone in America. He took another bite, rich in cheese, pepperoni, spicy minced beef, anchovy, and egg. He hadn’t spent much time in America and didn’t know anyone there—or indeed anywhere else on the Earth’s crust—who would be wantonly shoveling unsolicited bucks at him like this. Another thought struck him, but this time it wasn’t about the money. A ZZ Top song about TV

dinners made him think for a moment about his pizza, and he looked at it with sudden puzzlement.

Cheese, pepperoni, spicy minced beef, anchovy, and egg. No wonder he’d had indigestion today. The other three slices were what he’d had for breakfast. It was a combination to which he, probably uniquely in all the world, was addicted, and which he had some months ago forsworn because his gut couldn’t cope with it anymore. He hadn’t thought twice about it when he’d blundered across it in the fridge this morning because it was exactly the sort of thing a person liked to find in a fridge. It hadn’t occurred to him to ask who had put it there. But it hadn’t been him.

He disposed of the half-masticated gungey bits and then examined the two remaining slices. There was nothing unusual or suspicious about them at all. It was exactly the pizza he regularly used to eat until he made himself give it up. He phoned his local pizza restaurant and asked them if anybody else had been in to buy a pizza with that particular combination of toppings. “Ah, you’re the bloke who has the gastricciana, are you?” said the pizza chef.

“The what?”

“It’s what we call it. No, mate, nobody else has ever bought that wonderful combination, believe me.”

Dirk felt somewhat dissatisfied with aspects of this conversation, but he let it pass. He put the phone down thoughtfully. He felt that something very strange was going on and he didn’t know what.