“No,” said Carolus.
“Doing. Why this chap’s been on the job for the last six months and there’s twenty-five thousand dollars reward out for him. Yacht raiding, that’s what he’s been doing, down the coast. Holding up pleasure yachts, comes along in a high power motor boat sometimes and sometimes he uses a fishing boat and no one knows where he changes ship or how he does it or how many are working with him.”
“Oh,” said Carolus. “Well he’s doing nothing new. If you were as old as I am, you’d remember Mullins, away back in the middle ’nineties, he used to do the same thing. Got caught and I forget what they gave him. There’s nothing new under the sun.”
“Well, they hadn’t wireless in the middle ’nineties,” said Abrahams, “and wireless doesn’t hold Vanderdecken, he skips over it or gets under it. Dutch Pete is his real name, they say, but someone labeled him Vanderdecken from the ‘Flying Dutchman’.”
“I know all about the fellow,” cut in Hank Fisher, “know him from his toe-nails up. He’s precious small potatoes, too. Lord, what a lot of misinformation manages to get about. Dutch Pete wasn’t his name to start with, either. Amsterdam Joe was his name. He came from Hamburg and started here loading grain at Brookland Creek, then he got loose on the front—in with McKay and that lot—managed a whisky joint and got in trouble over something or other, and squared it and got into the Fish Patrol and got fired for colluding with the Greeks in setting Chinese sturgeon lines. Then, after the war, he managed to get some sort of an old boat and cleared out of here. He’s down south and I could put my finger on him if I wanted to. Shark fishing is what he started on and he’s held up a two cent yacht or two, there’s no doubt about that, but as for motor boats and Flying Dutchmen, that’s all the newspaper talk. They’ve embroidered on him till he looks like a king. Dutch Pete was a different chap altogether, but he’s not about now. I saw him shot. It was in a dust-up at San Leandro.”
“Have you seen the papers this morning?” asked Abrahams.
“Nope.”
“Well, Vanderdecken, or Amsterdam Joe, or whatever you call him, has held up the Satanita as she was coming up from Avalon. She’s no two cent yacht, she’s all of eight hundred tons. He went through her and skipped with ten thousand dollars’ worth of stuff.”
“Give us the yarn,” said Hank.