She stood in the middle of the room with a pretty little frown hiding between her eyebrows and, by God, I loved her. I knew I loved her. I knew she was why all those others had been before—so I could tell the difference; so that, when I found Sarah, I would recognize her and know. I knew she was the one I wanted to spend my life with. I knew she was the only one and, if I could not have her, there would be no other. I knew that if she chose to leave my heart would break and I might die of it, but I knew that I would stay and be the king.
I said, “Sarah, throw some stuff in a bag and get ready to leave within the hour.”
That little frown deepened and then it vanished and her eyebrows turned down and she looked like she was trying hard not to look surprised. “Leave? Are we leaving?”
“I’m not. I’m staying. You’re leaving.”
I thought she was going to cry and I hated myself for it. It was like a slap. Her mouth made a little flat “O” and her eyes flicked toward her father, just for a second, as if she was trying to make that link again, the way they did in the circus ring when he knew exactly what she was holding in her hands, when they saw through one another’s eyes and spoke with one another’s voices, but it had gone. He stood, leaning forward on his cane, looking at nothing as if he had no idea that she was even in the room.
“What about all that stuff you said on the boat?”
“What stuff?”
“Stuff about bread on tables and children in schools.”
“I plan to go ahead with those.”
“And the other stuff? The stuff about being the queen. The stuff about light duties. You didn’t mean any of that?”
I couldn’t keep it up after that. I grabbed her by the hand and I held her and I kissed her face. I kissed her face and her eyes and her hair and her mouth and her sweet little nose. “Of course I meant it. But don’t you want to go? Your father thought you wanted to go.”
“Well, I don’t,” she said. “I want to stay here and be the queen. You don’t want to go, do you, Daddy?”
The Professor smiled a smile that glittered like a broken icicle. “Of course not, liebling. Whither thou goest I will go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge. Where you die I will die and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separate you and me.” He reached out and, when she offered her hand, he kissed her fingertips. “Albania is our home now. Otto has work to do and so do you. I misunderstood.”
Sarah said, “Good,” and she rubbed her eyes with the deep folded cuffs of her dressing gown. “God in Heaven, Otto, it’s lucky for you I hadn’t started on my make-up. And if you’ve messed up this hair, there’s going to be hell to pay.” She gave a big sniff. “Ooh, I can’t waste time on this nonsense. I don’t know about you, but I have to get ready for a coronation!” And then she turned and hurried out of the room, as fast as she could shuffle with all that cloth around her feet, and I think she was trying to hide a tear or two as she ran.
The Professor said, “Is she gone?”
Arbuthnot closed the door. “She’s gone.”
“Good. Get the money ready. I will leave right after the coronation.”
I am an old man now, much older than he was then. I’ve seen stuff, a lot of stuff, and I’ve done stuff too, and almost all of it—especially the stuff I’ve done—has made me think a bit less harshly about other people and the stuff they do. I can understand why a man would steal. It might be desperation; it might be greed; it might be the heat of the moment. I don’t know, but I can understand it. I stole a camel and a strongbox once. And I can understand why a man would go with women. It might be desperation; it might be greed; it might be the heat of the moment. Women are pretty nice and, as you know, I’ve been with a few. But I’ve never been able to understand what the Professor did. I couldn’t understand it then and I don’t understand it now. If ever I had had a daughter, my little Aferdita, then nothing would have parted her from me. I would have cared for her and protected her no matter what. No fear could have driven me away from her; no amount of money could have tempted me to give her up. I would have loved her with a fierce love, and I know this because I have loved her fiercely all these years although she was never born. How much more would I have loved her if I had once held her in my arms, if I had kissed her, if I had smelled her?
But the Professor chose to flee from Sarah and I can’t understand why. On the train, when we had our heart to heart, he was ready to face death with Sarah rather than let her face it alone, but when push came to shove maybe his courage failed him. Maybe he was afraid of what might happen to her, not of what might happen to him. Maybe that was what he couldn’t face. Or maybe the thought of a little bit of cash was worth more to him than she was. “Get the money ready.” That’s what he said. Such a tiny little bit of money.
I could hardly bear to look at him. None of us could. He was suddenly embarrassing, as if we had noticed for the first time that he was a cripple.
You don’t need eyes to know when you are being watched, and he must have felt us turning our gaze away from him. “I must prepare,” he said. “I will wait in my room until it’s time to leave for the ceremony.”
Arbuthnot opened the door as he approached and the Professor paused on the threshold, swinging his cane to tap it against the doorposts, and went out into the corridor.
When he was gone, Arbuthnot said, “Is it too early for a brandy?”
“It’s never too early for a brandy,” Max said, and he took the last, half-empty bottle out of the cabinet by my bed.
I didn’t say anything. I just drank.
We didn’t hang about over the brandy. There are two kinds of drink: the kind you want and the kind you need. This was the second kind, and you don’t hang about with those. I had a bad taste in my mouth and I wanted the brandy to take it away. Anyway, we all had things to do, boots to polish, brass to burnish, horses to brush, epaulets to buff and magnificent whiskers to curl—all except me, of course.
I had nothing to do but to read, over and over, the two sheets of paper which Kemali had written out for me to guide me through the ceremonial of the coronation. There is no prompter’s box at a coronation, no matter how incompetent the actors, but the more I tried to learn my lines, the less they stuck in my head. Orders of precedence, who stood where, who moved, who kept still, where they moved to, who said what, when the music played, where to go in the processions … none of it made any sense and it wasn’t fair. Those flaming Albanoks had been practicing for months, learning their dance steps off by heart, but it was all new to me and, quite frankly, I couldn’t keep up so I decided not to bother.
The little china clock on the mantelpiece was striking the half-hour when Arbuthnot knocked at my door and came in.
“They found you a new fez,” he said. “We can’t have you riding through town bareheaded like a beggar.”
I must say it was much nicer than the one Sarah had knocked up for me on board the yacht, with a fancy sparkler stuck on the front which must have been several times more valuable than the one I was wearing on my chest.
I put it on, slowly, two-handed, just the way I’d put on the crown of Skanderbeg, squaring it up across my brow, and I must admit I was thinking of the time I would take it off again, the time I would stand to wear my crown.
I drew myself up to my full height and I gave my jacket a bit of a tug. “How do I look?”
“Very smart, old boy. I think we’re ready for the off.”
I walked out the door, pulling my gloves on so they were tight and smooth, just as they should be, and Arbuthnot came on a pace or two behind, spurs a-jingle, tall and rangy, with the look of a man who knew his business. That uniform of his had seen better days, but stretched over his broad shoulders, with his epaulets gleaming, by God, he looked the part.
“You’ll be fine,” he said, as if he could tell from my back that I might waver a little, as if he could sense that I was making a little extra effort to be brave and firm and
upright, like a man on his way to have his head taken off instead of having a crown put on.
The whole house was silent, not a Sunday-afternoon silent, not even a middle-of-the-night silent, but a stoppedclock silent, the kind of silence you get in the circus when the kid on the high wire starts to fall, the silence that comes in the moment after everyone breathes in and before the moment that they start to scream. It was a moment like that, and when we got to the top of the stairs, Arbuthnot and me—no, when I got to the top of the stairs—the moment burst.
The hall of my palazzo was jammed with people: soldiers more or less in uniform, bashi-bazouks and fathers-in-law with their troops of mustachioed brigands crowded round the door. Every step of the grand staircase had a lancer standing on it as an honor guard, every one of them with a brass helmet, polished thin and gleaming like the sun, and horsehair plumes hanging down his neck and black shiny boots up over his knees, and every one of them holding a pig-sticker that scraped my ceiling or threatened my lovely chandelier. There were packs of kids jammed between the lancers’ feet, with more of them at the bottom of the stairs—little girls in dresses holding baskets of flowers and, in amongst them, the palazzo staff, maids in mob caps looking pink and prim and starched and well worth a try and the cook and his boy and God alone knows all who else, people I’d never seen before, butlers and under-butlers and grooms and boots and footmen, I can’t begin to guess who or how many, and there, at the foot of the stairs was my Sarah, so small, so lovely, in a hat that would knock your eye out and a long lilac dress that fitted her the way the petals fit a rose before it opens. God knows where she found it—maybe on some foraging expedition through the wardrobes of the palazzo—but she looked magnificent, and Tifty was there and Mrs. MacLeod and even the girls of the harem, all done up to the nines. I saw Sarah and only Sarah. She raised her eyes to the top of the stairs and looked up at me from under the brim of that fabulous hat and I saw her and she saw me, not a man playing at dressing up but me, Otto, a man who was striving to be all that a king should be, for her sake and then, like I said, the moment burst. The whole place went crazy with cheering and shouting, mad clapping and a lot of shouted “Mbrets,” which I took to be kind sentiments regarding my longevity. They wanted this to work. They wished me well. They believed in me and they wanted it to be true just as much as I did.
I came down the stairs between my rows of lancers as they struggled not to watch me pass and stand, eyes front, looking grim-faced, and there was Sarah, clapping madder than all the rest, with Tifty beside her, arm in arm with Max, and both of them clapping and Tifty jiggling deliciously as she clapped, and Mrs. MacLeod and the harem girls and the Professor too, because he meant it, however much he begrudged it, or because he lacked the courage to defy a mob, even a mob as genteel as this one.
It fell on me like a sudden shower of rain. I was standing, drenched in a torrent, a cataract of applause, but it was more than that. It was pride. It was hope. It was love.
At the bottom of the stairs I took Sarah by the hand and kissed her, just once, just a little bit, but it was enough to set the cheering off again—even from the fathers-in-law, who clapped me on the back and yelled garlicky congratulations at me and clearly didn’t care how many girls I kissed so long as I got round to their girls eventually.
We went out together, hand in hand, into the sunshine of a day as bright and warm as memory can create, with woolly clouds unraveling across the sky while sunbeams shot them full of holes, with the trees full of singing birds and the garden full of blooming flowers, but we had to part again so that Sarah and the others could join the parade.
We knew a bit about parades, my friends and me. We’d been in a few in our time, although this one had not so many camels and elephants and a damned sight more horses than what we were used to.
Zogolli was there, dancing around like a headless chicken, shouting orders through his long carrot nose. He was as much use as a glass hammer but, somehow or other, he got it done.
The Albanoks had managed to find a couple of landaus from someplace or other, possibly on loan from some of the best and finest families of smugglers that the country had to offer. Sarah, Tifty, Mrs. MacLeod and the Professor filled one of those, with the harem girls squeezed into the other, and God help the poor soul jammed in next to Aferdita.
Then my lancers came clattering down the stairs in their big unbending boots, dipping their spears as they passed through the doorway, and they began to form up.
The ladies’ coaches each had a guard of two shining cavalrymen, with two more to ride beside the Rolls where a lot of official-looking blokes in very glum top hats were saving a place for Zogolli. Half the rest went to the front of the queue, down at the end of the drive, and they fell in behind the marching band at the head of the procession, just ahead of a flag party of soldiers parading the national banner and a seething mass of brigands and bashi-bazouks which the fathers-in-law were struggling to herd. The other half of the detachment went to the rear and formed up behind me. I expected Max and Arbuthnot to ride beside me, as they had in the morning, but after Max gave me a hand up to the saddle, they went back a little ahead of the cavalry guard but behind me.
“It’s not me they want to look at,” Max said. “And, anyway, it’ll give the assassins a clear shot.”
The chauffeur got out to crank the Rolls and it started first time. Zogolli stood on the palazzo steps waving his top hat like a lunatic until he was satisfied his signal had been seen, then running to take his place in the car. From the end of the drive we heard the noise of a drum—boof-boof-boof—an explosion of cymbals, the drum again boof-boof and then music, or something very like music, in slow march time. We couldn’t march, of course, not until the band had started, not until the lancers had moved off, reining in their chargers to stop them treading on the heels of the bandsmen, not until the soldiers of the flag party had started, facing to the front, eyes darting to the side of the road, looking out for sweethearts looking out for them and brigands and bashi-bazouks shambling along like a troop of monkeys, scratching themselves and baring their teeth at the crowds and breaking ranks and running about, though the Royal Fathers-in-Law on their shaggy ponies damned near broke their horse whips trying to keep them in line. No, the last of us could not move until the first of us was well under way, so I sat there on my great tall steeple-legged horse, striving to look grim and kingly, checking and rechecking that I had remembered to bring that special saddlebag while Sarah looked up at me from her landau, smiling from under her hat and blowing me little kisses and waving me secret waves with twiddles of her elegantly gloved fingers and trying to make me laugh until, at last, we were off.
But progress was slow. By God, progress was slow. I couldn’t see why until I reached the end of the drive and joined the long, snaking parade out on the street and then, from up on my horse, I could see the man at the front of the queue, the bandmaster leading his band, but he was nothing like the one in Fiume, the man that Max had punched out for poking his camel.
This bloke was like no other bandmaster I ever saw. He wore a tall white hat and a long coat, trailing the ground as he walked, all covered in fancy frogging and open at the front so it flapped about as he went. He carried a big stick, like the rest of his tribe, but instead of marching like any sensible bandmaster would march, instead of a nice show-offish goosestep, he stood with his legs apart and rocked. One foot came up, the other stayed down and he swiveled on that heel and spun halfway to the right. Then he did the same thing with the other foot, and spun halfway to the left, walking along like a pair of open scissors so that, like a ship tacking in a headwind, he made progress by going off to one side and then off to the other, when any sensible person would just have gone straight ahead.
Still, nobody else seemed to mind, in fact the Albanoks lining the roadside would probably have been put out if he had chosen not to march like a lunatic, and I suppose it all added to the general gaiety of the occasion. It certainly slowed our stately progress
, which was another bonus for the waiting Albanoks, since it gave them more time to gaze in awe and wonderment at me as I brought joy and sunshine into their otherwise dreary lives.
After all that had happened and everything we had been through, it was hard to remember we had been in the country for only a few hours, but that was long enough to bring the people into town in droves.
When we clattered through the streets together that morning the town seemed almost as dead as it was when we first arrived but, quite clearly, the wise old Albanoks had simply been lying late with their pretty wives, recovering from all the fun of the night before and getting ready for another day of fun to come. But now the shutters had been flung back and the windows opened. Now the streets were filled with bright, shiny, well-scrubbed Albanoks, old men who rejoiced to see their day of deliverance had come at last, apple-cheeked children screaming for joy and waving little paper flags they had colored for themselves, proud fathers who knew they were standing in the dawn of a bright new day for their country. They cheered, they threw flowers, they sang songs I could not understand—the songs they had sung in whispers during the years of their bondage, songs which sustained them, songs they sang now as free men, songs of love, and I loved them back for the sake of those songs and I knew it would be nothing less than a joy to rule these people.
On and on we went, I don’t know where, but by winding routes through the city so that everybody in the town could get a good look at us. Slowly, slowly we went, with the bandmaster waddling at the front of the procession and that strange, reedy, whining music trailing in ribbons around us all the way.
The procession took so long that any sensible person would have had their fill of us by the time we finally passed but, no, the Albanoks stood and cheered until the last of the lancers had gone by and then ran ahead to see us go by again, which was nice, but then I was so damned handsome and Sarah was so damned pretty it would have been nothing less than a criminal waste to stop looking at us. Also I suppose there were more than a few men in the crowd who had noticed Tifty and imagined themselves throwing sugar lumps down that magnificent cleavage. God knows I had. They cheered and they waved and I smiled with no more than a regal enthusiasm and waved back with my patented toffee-paper wave when, really, I wanted to get down off my horse and shake every one of them by the hand, kiss every girl in the crowd and say, “Look at this! Can you believe it? I’m the king! I’m the King of the bloody Albanoks!”
If You're Reading This, I'm Already Dead Page 22