If You're Reading This, I'm Already Dead

by Andrew Nicoll

  Max took that as a personal affront. He stood in the passage with his legs out behind him and his hands flat on the camel’s hairy chest and he pushed and he heaved and he said, “Come on, boy. This is embarrassing. You’re giving me a right showing-up here. Come on, boy, back up.”

  My mate Max was a professional strongman, remember. He bent iron bars in half for a living. He lifted stuff. But that camel would not shift. He planted his big hairy feet on the stone floor and he refused to move. There was a lot of grunting and snorting, mainly from Max, it has to be said, and the rest of us stood around not really knowing what to do when, all of a sudden, the camel let go about a gallon of red-hot piss. Now I’m not very sure whether it was the effort of wrestling with Max that brought that on or whether it was intended as a bitter camel insult, but tactically it was a mistake. It made the flagstones slippy and the camel’s back feet began to slide. By the time he noticed what was happening and started scrabbling around to get a grip, it was too late. Max started going forward and the camel started going back and the camel went back and Max went forward and they came rattling down the alley together, one in front of the other like a train, so Tifty had to grab the Professor and jump out of the way as the camel went crashing backward through a pair of double doors and Max went falling forward, still holding the bridle, sliding on his belly through a lake of camel urine. Well, I don’t say it was the funniest thing I ever saw, but by God it was hard not to laugh.

  And somehow, whatever it was that had made us walk in silence up that little lane and left us with nothing to say to one another, even while Max was wrestling with the camel like Jacob wrestling with the angel, whatever it was that had suddenly settled between us just because Sarah called me “love,” was just as suddenly swept away again, as easily as that door was swept aside by the camel’s ass.

  Tifty loved me, I have no doubt of that because I loved her, but she could never say it because the next night she would be loving Max.

  Max loved me, that’s for sure, and I loved him, but we never said it because we were men and mates and that’s not what mates do.

  The Professor really didn’t care whether I lived or died, but he loved Sarah. It was for Sarah’s sake alone that he had come along, after all, because he was her father and he planned to die at her side. He loved her ferociously, but he had heard her use that word to another man. Do you think fathers feel that betrayal less keenly than husbands?

  No, all of us needed a little time to make sense of what had been said, which, after all, was much, much more serious than what had been done, and Max, my mate Max, made things normal again. The bursting of that door, the hingebouncing clatter of it, sorted us out the way a bang of the fist on top of the wireless will do it. Max retuned us. Max got us back on the station again. Same old program as before, playing the same old music, just coming through a bit clearer than it was.

  Not that everybody was delighted by our arrival. In the moment that the camel burst backward through the door, a flood of angry little men with the look of Gypsy brigands came pouring through the gap like bees from a hive.

  There was a lot of shouting which made no sense to me, but it sounded like, “What the hell are you doing in the cellar with my daughter?” in Hungarish and, when Max got to his feet and pulled the camel back through the doorway, several angry hairy men came with it, yelling and screaming.

  There was no reasoning with them. I had no way of explaining that our camel had slipped in its own piss and broken their door by accident, and we couldn’t even walk away since they were blocking the alley in one direction and it was too tight for the camel the other way.

  The Professor said, “I’m very sorry, my boy, but I can’t make out precisely what they are saying. There’s something Turkish about it, although it’s not Turkish, and I’m nearly sure they said they are going to kill you. Or maybe us.”

  Just then, the smallest of the hairy men reached over his shoulder into his shirt collar and, when his hand came back, it was holding an open razor which he laid over the camel’s family jewels. He grinned with both of his yellow teeth but, luckily for him, Max was at the other end of the camel and he couldn’t see what was going on or at least half of those teeth would have ended up on the floor. But Max was yelling and shouting and the hairy men were shouting back and the girls were getting jumpy and the camel was looking agitated and it seemed to me there was always the danger of an unexpected bodily function, which would not have been good, and Varga, the little coward, had wormed his way behind me and got his back against the wall and, in short, it looked as if something was about to kick off until, all of a sudden, a pair of milk-white hands appeared, barely showing over the heads of the crowd and clapping together—clappity-clap—like a teacher demanding quiet in the classroom.

  The hairy men fell silent like good little boys and they stood aside to make way for a tiny woman, covered from head to foot in gold-embroidered Arab robes with her face hidden under a veil. She hissed at them in that strange language that the Professor could not understand and then she went, “Ffshhhhht! Ffshhhhht!” and clapped her hands again and they all retreated, backing away through the broken door, smiling as they folded their razors away and—here’s the thing—bowing as they went.

  The veiled woman said, “I have told them that you will pay for the damage in coins of gold and that you require food for a party of six. It is even now in preparation.”

  “And for the camel,” Max said.

  “And brandy,” Varga said.

  “These too will be provided. All things will be provided for those who can pay. All things.” Then she held out her hand and she said, “These men know me as the Eye of the Dawn and obey me. You may address me as Mrs. Margaretha MacLeod. Welcome.”

  I took her hand and kissed her gently on the fingertips. “Thank you for coming to our rescue,” I said. “I am the Graf von Mucklenburg, Keeper of the Camels of His Imperial Majesty, the Emperor Franz Josef,” which was quite a grand claim but not quite as grand as being “the Eye of the Dawn.”

  Anyway, it failed to impress her. “The Graf von Mucklenberg?” she said. And she gave a little titter. “No, you’re not, you silly boy. You are Otto Witte, acrobat of Hamburg, newly arrived from Budapest by way of Fiume. Come in and eat. We’ve been expecting you.”

  You might imagine how much of a surprise that was to me. I like to think that nowadays I would take a shock like that on the chin, since I am a good deal older and I have got used to the idea that—while I am pretty smart—there are other people who are much smarter than I am. We learn these things as we go along and some of them take a while. First comes the terrible knowledge that we can live without our mothers. Then we begin to understand that we will die one day and then, very gradually, we realize that we can be outsmarted. Beyond that, a very few of us achieve the great insight that there are other people in the world besides ourselves. These people are called “saints” and they are usually made to pay. Since the bombs have been quiet for a bit and there is just the slimmest of chances that I might live through the night after all, I will leave you to judge how far down the path of enlightenment our great leader has trod. Enough said.

  So, there I was, my jaw dropping to the floor, following on behind Mrs. MacLeod like a stunned ox and asking myself over and over how she knew so much about me and never thinking who it was that knew so much or why a Scotchwoman was talking Scotch to a band of Gypsy brigands in a hidden courtyard of Dubrovnik.

  The others were just as amazed and just as worried—all except for Varga who was laughing like a drain. “See? I knew it all along. Didn’t I say it? I knew you were no gentleman. I knew it.”

  But my mate Max gripped him warmly by the cravat and said, “Listen! It doesn’t matter whether he’s a grand duke or a gutter sweeper, he still took you on and he beat you fair and square. Now get in there and eat.”

  We all trooped in through the broken green doors and we found ourselves in a narrow courtyard, crowded with people. At one side there wa
s a platform—not what you would call a stage—covered in Gypsy brigands, each of them armed with a musical instrument—drums and shawms and violins and clarinets and tiny fairy bells and accordions—but there were so many of them in the orchestra that they spilled off on to the floor, where they sat round in untidy heaps, tuning up or sharpening long, thin daggers.

  At the other side of the courtyard there was a house, three or four stories high with all its windows hidden behind pierced sandalwood shutters, but the ground floor was open, with square wooden pillars holding the front of the house up and a kind of a veranda covered in fancy rugs and pillows.

  Waiters in baggy trousers were running up and down the front steps and disappearing into the building or running out again with great round trays loaded with food for the dozens of customers crammed around the tables that filled the place.

  All these people must have been sitting there in obedient silence while we stumbled about outside, waiting, listening, holding their breaths, but now the whole place was yelling and screaming, shouting orders for food, demanding coffee, sucking blue smoke from hubble-bubble pipes and blowing it up to the open sky, rattling dice down on backgammon boards and kvetching about the score. I was impressed. That silence showed a certain amount of military discipline and, more than that, it meant they knew we were there all along, just as Mrs. MacLeod said.

  She signaled to one of her Gypsy brigands, who led the camel away to the stables—but not before Max took its saddlebags off and laid them across his own shoulders. My mate Max wasn’t going to leave the cash box any place he couldn’t see it. We followed on behind Mrs. MacLeod, threading our way between the tables toward the veranda, where a long man with a henna-red beard and a jaw like a wolf was lying amongst the carpets and the cushions, smiling at us as we came.

  He stood up to meet us, bending a little to Mrs. MacLeod as she passed and offering his hand while she sank, crosslegged, into a bank of richly patterned cloth. By God, he was a tall man. I might have been standing on the bottom step, but he was big and he was wiry. When he shook my hand, the arm that fell from his cloak was hard and stringy, like one of those fancy Italian hams you used to see hanging in the delicatessens in the old days, and he had a grip like a pair of nutcrackers.

  “Witte,” he said, “lovely to meet you at last.”

  And then, because I was still too busy gaping to say anything, he greeted the girls, bending to kiss their hands so his fiery beard brushed their fingers. “Miss Von Mesmer. Countess Gourdas, I am enchanted. Ladies, if there is anything you wish for your comfort, you need only say.”

  I was past being surprised that he knew all our names.

  “Professor, welcome. May I help you to a seat? Let’s put you here and get you some coffee. Herr Fregattenkapitän Varga, good afternoon. Schlepsig. Glad to meet you.”

  He got us all arranged, sitting on the floor on cushions around a low table, a thing like a huge brass gong set on little turned legs with a fancy enamel coffee pot and a stack of tiny cups, like porcelain eyebaths waiting to be filled. The long red wolf scattered the cups around the table and began to pour.

  Nobody drank.

  “Please take a little. It will refresh you. It’s quite safe. You are quite safe. Food is being prepared for you. We can offer you anything you require.” Then he leaned back on a huge cushion, resting on one elbow with his legs folded up underneath him like a spider waiting to pounce, and lifted one of the tiny cups to his mouth. When he put it back on the table, it was empty.

  Still nobody drank. Is there anything more terrifying than the reassurance that you are not about to be killed? But I snatched my cup from the table and swallowed it down. It was like a mouthful of fire and I could feel the skin peeling off the roof of my mouth, but I was damned if he was going to show me up.

  “Oh, bravo!” said Mrs. MacLeod from behind her veil.

  “You see? Nothing to fear,” said the long man.

  The others began to sip their coffee, but he and I simply sat there, on opposite sides of the table, looking at each other, and it was no easy task looking at him, believe me.

  His eyes … I don’t know what it was about them. His eyes were like a desert or a mountain top. Not empty eyes, not dead, but he had looked at terrible things that had left them scoured and rubbed clean. They say the eyes are the windows of the soul. Well, the soul that looked out of those eyes was blown along on a cold, dry wind, screaming at the world as it went. Martyr, monk or maniac, I was never very sure what he was, but whatever he was, it showed in his terrible eyes.

  I dropped my gaze, but he waited until I looked back again before he spoke.

  “So, I understand you are the rightful King of Albania.”

  “Is there any brandy?” Varga said. “Do you have any brandy?”

  Mrs. MacLeod raised a slim, pale arm, all a-clatter with bangles, clicked her fingers and muttered something at the brigand who raced to attend her. It gave me a moment to think.

  I said, “You seem to know an awful lot about my business, but I don’t even know your name.”

  “Names are a confusion and I pick up so many. I wander about. I stop for a night in this village or that and in the morning I find myself with somebody else’s coat and a new name. So far as I know, you have only two, and look at the mess that’s landed you in already.”

  “Tell me one of them.”

  “At home, amongst my own people, they call me Sandy Arbuthnot.”

  I felt the Professor suddenly stiffen beside me but he said nothing.

  “An Englishman then?”

  “Not quite, Mr. Witte. A Scotsman. Some would say that’s a thousand times better or a hundred times worse. I make no such claim.”

  “Scotch. Like Mrs. MacLeod.”

  “Oh no. Mrs. MacLeod is Dutch. Only her name is Scottish. Our connection is purely professional … most of the time.”

  She gave another of her little titters.

  “And may I ask how you earn your bread?”

  “Well, not by jumping through hoops in a circus ring, Mr. Witte—although there’s nothing wrong with that. No, I go to and fro in the earth, and walk up and down in it, you might say and I keep my ears open as I go. It’s how I came to hear about you.”

  Varga’s brandy had arrived. He pulled the cork with his teeth and set about emptying the bottle, filling cup after tiny cup in quick succession. Tifty finished her coffee and held her hand out with an expression of boredom, but her cup rattled against the bottle as he poured.

  “What have you heard?”

  “That you’re the next King of Albania, of course. Not that I knew it straight away. Sometimes a strange little bit of information comes along and it means nothing, then another piece of the picture falls into place, and another and then all becomes clear. First there was all that strange telegraph traffic announcing that the little Turkish prince was on his way. But why from Budapest? Of course, none of that would have meant anything but for the code. I must admit I’ve scratched my head over that, Mr. Witte. Very good stuff. I can’t make head nor tail of it. Then some anxious signaling from your navy chums, Mr. Varga. That lovely yacht of yours has gone missing and the story of your unfortunate duel has got out, I’m afraid. Your colleagues fear you may have taken her out and sunk her out of shame. In fact, I rather think they expect it.”

  “Fat chance,” said Varga, and he poured himself another brandy.

  Mrs. MacLeod laughed one of those frozen little laughs again, like hailstones tinkling over broken ribs.

  “Very wise,” said the long man. “Anyway, then we heard about a robbery at a circus in Budapest. A great deal of money stolen and a missing camel—perhaps the same camel that was seen at Fiume. Everything began to make sense. Budapest. Coded telegrams. A camel traveling south with the Graf von Mucklenberg and his party. And then your description circulated, Mr. Witte. You bear an astonishing resemblance to that Turk, you know. All the pieces fit. Clearly, you are the next King of Albania, which is disappointing as I was rather ho
ping to do that job myself.”

  “Please don’t let me stop you.”

  “I’m afraid it’s quite impossible. Your code has ruined it for everybody. The Turk himself may have some trouble getting crowned because of that.”

  I looked around the courtyard. “Surely, with this army of yours, you could be on the throne by tomorrow afternoon.”

  Mrs. MacLeod laughed out loud and the long man said, “Oh, Mr. Witte, an army is no good. Armies require supplies and orders and communications. Armies can be repulsed. Armies can be engaged with and battled. But a few resourceful friends could slip into Albania like the rain. And we are not an army. We never go together but we are never apart. A few here, a few there, we know one another intimately but we have never met, each one of them is a brother to me and none of them has ever heard of me, wherever they sleep—in a shepherd’s hut in the mountains, in the mansion of the Bey—I am with them, always and everywhere, they obey me instantly and I issue no commands. We are not an army, Mr. Witte. We are—”

  “I know who you are,” said the Professor. “For God’s sake, Otto, give him Albania. Give him the camel, give him the money, give him anything he wants and let’s get out of here.”

  Mrs. MacLeod said, “If we wanted those things, don’t you think your throat would be cut by now?”

  “You could have a go,” said Max.

  Mrs. MacLeod turned to the long man. “Oh, I like him. Look at the muscles on that one.”