MAD MAX AND THE BLUNDERDOME

I am reading an e-mail from Mr Emmanuel Jefferson, a new friend from Khayelitsha, South Africa (what would the world be without e-mail? Answer, significantly better). He begs my pardon if he has offended me, but he says that this is ‘because of the situation in the world today and not being sure of your reaction.’ Well, the world today has declined since the world yesterday, and the world tomorrow will probably decline further, so my reaction is, as it has been for some considerable time now, that I wish it were 1968. I do not know Mr Jefferson intimately enough to apprise him of this opinion, so will remain quiescent for the time being. It turns out that Emmanuel is a ‘consultant and broker,’ who was hired (and well paid) in 2002 by an Australian businessman, Mr Max Kraft Hans, a most un-dinkum-like name, in order to broker an investment deal between that antipodean worthy and an oil company representative in Venezuela. From here on, the matter becomes extremely complicated, if not impenetrable. As I understand it, the contract ran for five years until 2007. On conclusion, there was a settlement due to both parties. They decided to receive same in used banknotes, to avoid investment tax, payable to the American Inland Revenue service. The Australian, using his first of two fictitious names, which we shall take for the purposes of this missive to be Mr Max Kraft Cheese, invested his share in the Raiffeisenbank Bank, Austria, located at 5500 Bischofshofen, Radstadt. Later in 2007, Mad Max withdrew his stash and moved it to a ‘private diplomatic storage box’ in Liechtenstein. All of the special secret codes as well as the keys to the box were handed over to Emmanuel for safekeeping, but two signatories had to be available before these could be opened and the money handed over. Max, Emmanuel, and the Austrian banker, a beefy chap with a shaving brush in his hat, whom we shall call Herr von Strudel, were due to open the box and collect the spoils in November 2007. Rather carelessly, Max and von Strudel were then killed in a road accident. As might be expected, this left Emmanuel ‘devastated and confused’, two rather contradictory emotions, and, of course, now unable to open the box and take the money. Finally, this very day, he turns to me for help. He wants me to replace Max and von Strudel as the second signatory and to go out to Liechtenstein with him to claim the contents of the deposit storage box. Incredibly, I am able to do this, Emmanuel suggests, because Max’s second false name on the deeds to the private box just happened to be ‘Ron Hardwick.’ If such a coincidence were replicated in the National Lottery, I would be a trillionaire within minutes. Bizarrely, it seems that Emmanuel has had some difficulty in finding any reliable person with the same nomenclature as I to collect these consignments until he came across my details, presumably filed under ‘Reliable Persons: letter H.’ The plot is lifted straight out of the wonderful Sherlock Homes adventures of ‘The Red-Headed League’ and, later, ‘The Three Garridebs,’ except for the part about Holmes releasing details of his bank account and credit card. Even the great Sir Arthur couldn’t invent anything like the Mad Max farrago, not even for the doltish Brigadier Gerard.