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

by Andrew Nicoll

  Very soon we reached the gates of the castle, where there were no guards waiting to be overwhelmed by my wonderfulness, no crowds cheering me through the arch, nobody running around trying to catch the gold coins I scattered as I passed, no camel to help me knock my hat off, just an empty courtyard, ringing with the tramp of boots.

  Varga was gleeful. “Which way to the dungeons?”

  “Dungeons?” said Zogolli. “Why do you want the dungeons?”

  “Where did you think we would be keeping them? What did you think this would mean? You picked your side, Ziggo, but there’s always room in the dungeons for one more if you care to change your mind.”

  Kemali managed an enormous gob on the flagstones. “There’s no room for the likes of him in any dungeon of mine. I refuse to be imprisoned with that traitor.”

  “So that settles it. Now, which way to the dungeons, Ziggo, old boy?”

  Zogolli led the way across the courtyard to a heavy door, but when he got there Varga was trailing behind. “I’m sorry, I was just looking at your nice wall. Isn’t it simply the perfect spot for a firing squad, children? Unless you’ve seen one you’d like better.”

  “All the walls are the same to us,” Kemali said. “Every stone in them is a stone of Albania.” By God I wish I’d said that, but the old man had a way with words that I couldn’t match.

  Varga pulled a face and went to look in the door of the dungeon. “You must be joking. You have got to be joking.” He reached out and pinched Zogolli by the end of his carroty nose. “I want some place to store traitors, but your dungeon seems to be full up already, Ziggo. What’s it full up with, Ziggo? Tell your Uncle Imre!”

  He hauled Zogolli toward him and jammed his head through the door.

  “Champagne,” we heard faintly.

  “Yes, Ziggo, champagne. Your dungeon is full of champagne.”

  “We got it for the coronation. For the celebrations.”

  “Oh, you got it for the celebrations. Well, it’s a simply lovely dungeon you’ve got down there, Ziggo, but don’t you think it might be a little bit cramped with all that lovely champagne in it? Not exactly ideal conditions for storing traitors on the night before their execution.”

  “I don’t mind,” I said.

  “We could move the champagne,” said Zogolli.

  “Oh, we could move the champagne …” Varga sneered back.

  “You mustn’t trouble on my account,” the Professor said.

  Max agreed. “I make my living swallowing swords. I reckon I could manage to swallow a few bottles of champagne tonight.”

  “Or you could swallow a bullet right away,” said Varga. He turned to Zogolli with a sigh. “These things have to be done properly. I promised these people they would be shot at dawn and, damn it all, man, shot at dawn they will be. It’s tradition. And when they are shot, they will not be roaring drunk on champagne.” He seemed bored with squeezing Zogolli’s nose and he let go with a final twist. “Now then, what’s up there?”

  The castle of Durres is blessed with two towers, long, graceful swans’ necks that rise up on either side of the gate, one a little higher than the other. I suppose in years gone by they might have been useful for hurling things off, should uninvited guests come calling. They must have seemed very high and hurling things off them must have seemed very clever, but that was before anybody thought of an airplane.

  “What’s up there?” said Varga, and off he went toward the taller of the two towers with merry cries of, “Come along, children, come along,” while his thugs marched us up the stairs behind him. It was one of those winding stone staircases where almost every step is an odd height, some a little too low, some unexpectedly high—not because the builders did not understand the stonemasons’ art but because they knew it so well. They knew that the garrison of the castle would climb up and down there every day and before too long they would learn the steps of those stairs like the words of a familiar song, but an invader would stumble over their jangling music, just as we did, Varga leading the way, Zogolli behind him and a straggle of soldiers in front and behind, clattering their boots on the stairs, banging their rifles off the narrow walls, with us in the middle, Sarah in her long skirt, the Professor with his cane. But we struggled on, with Zogolli calling out at every floor, as polite and enthusiastic as those lift attendants they used to have at Warenhaus Hermann Tietzl, “Ground floor: guardroom, wood stores, coalsheds. First floor: tools and brushes, offices.”

  “And up here?”

  “Empty.”

  “Not quite high enough. What’s up here?”

  “Nothing. Nothing, so far as I know.”

  Varga kicked at a big oak door bound with iron bands. “Open this.”

  Somebody opened it and we all went inside. It was as empty as an eggshell, with a stone floor and stone arches that rose up three or four times the height of a man and crossed over to form the roof. The walls were completely blank, just plain white plaster, except where the stones of the arches had been left bare, and there was only one window, high up—so high up we couldn’t even see it, but it was there, at the end of a narrow tunnel, cut through the thickness of the wall and down into the room, where a little light came out just below the domed ceiling.

  “What’s upstairs?”

  “Nothing,” said Zogolli. “The stairs go up to the roof.”

  Varga nodded to the sailor by the door. “Go upstairs and check,” and we all waited meekly until the man came back and reported, “Flat stone roof, sir. Walls to waist height all the way round. Excellent views. Ideal guard post.”

  “Wonderful!” Varga turned to us. “Gentlemen, Fräulein, this is where you will spend your last night on earth. I hope you will be very comfortable. I expect you won’t.”

  He herded his sailors down the stairs with just a couple waiting behind to keep us covered as he backed out of the door and closed it with a heavy slam. “Goodnight, children. Sleep well. Put three men on the roof. Damn it, open up again.”

  The door opened and Varga came back, a man behind him swiveling his rifle round the room. “I forgot. One last surprise for you, Witte. Turn round.”

  I was slow to obey.

  “Turn round or I’ll have you shot right now.”

  I did as he said and I felt steel cuffs bite into my wrists.

  “Goodnight, for the last time,” Varga said. “I’m looking forward to shooting you tomorrow, Witte.”

  “Try not to miss this time,” I said. The door slammed and three bolts hammered home.

  We were locked away in a stone prison cell halfway to the moon. Those handcuffs were completely unnecessary but Varga did it anyway, just because he could and because he enjoyed a little bit of pointless cruelty. These days they would probably make him Reichsminister for Kindergartens and he’d feel right at home pulling little girls’ pigtails and giving their baby brothers Chinese burns.

  I wasn’t that bothered—for God’s sake, he was going to shoot me for sure and doing it in handcuffs wasn’t going to make that any worse—but Sarah was upset. When she put her hand on my shoulder she had that hurt look, the same look she had the morning after Mrs. MacLeod came to my cabin, but then it was for her and this time it was for me and her eyes were damp.

  “All right, Otto?”

  “No problem,” I said, and I lay on my back and drew up my legs. I’m not saying it was easy, but I managed to squeeze the loop of my arms over my ass and down my legs and over my boots and, when I sprang to my feet, the cuffs were no longer behind my back. “Ta-daaah!” It was a simple trick for a fit man with an acrobat’s training, and of course my wrists were still chained together, but I was a bit more comfortable and it cheered Sarah up.

  “Oh, well done,” said Arbuthnot, and he gave me a tiny ripple of applause, but he was already on his way to try the door. “Not even a bally keyhole this side, but by the sound of it there’s some pretty hefty ironmongery out there.”

  He turned round and back-heeled the door. It never even shook. He
tried it again.

  “Shut up in there. Try and get some rest. It’ll make the time pass quicker.”

  I felt Sarah’s hand in mine, saying with a touch what we all of us thought: We don’t want the time to pass. We need every second. Time is short. We are going to die.

  Are you thinking that now, friend? You should be.

  Arbuthnot kicked the door again.

  “I thought we told you to shut up.”

  “More than one of them,” Arbuthnot said. “What did she give you?”

  “Who?” I looked at Sarah. “She hasn’t given me anything.”

  “Not Sarah, Grietje.”

  “Who’s Grietje?”

  “Mrs. MacLeod. What did Mrs. MacLeod give you?”

  “She didn’t give me a damned thing.”

  “I saw her. At the church. Just as we were marched off. She touched you and said you had to look nice for your firing squad.”

  “And I’m telling you she gave me nothing.”

  Arbuthnot looked at me with a patient look and began passing his hands over my tunic with a pickpocket’s grace. “Why don’t you people notice anything? You look but you don’t see; you hear but you don’t listen.”

  I pushed him away with my chained hands. “Sod that. Never mind wasting time telling me how useless I am, what about this new king? Otto Witte … Wilhelm von Weide. Why am I here?”

  “Did you think it was your idea?”

  “I thought it was my idea,” Sarah said.

  “It’s a coincidence,” Arbuthnot said.

  “Shit.”

  “Coincidence. That’s all. These things happen. What are the chances—” he ran his hands over my breast pocket, lifted the flap, dipped inside—“that the Central Powers would choose a king with the same name as yours—or nearly the same name as yours? What are the chances that you should bear such a resemblance to a rival claimant?”

  “For God’s sake, the man I resemble doesn’t even exist. I don’t resemble anybody but myself.”

  “Coincidence, that’s all.” He went on patting me down. “What do you want to believe? That innumerable clerks from the Secret Intelligence Service of His Majesty’s Committee of Imperial Defense sat in London, scouring cuttings from hundreds of small-town newspapers from across Germany, from all over Austria and Moravia and Bohemia and Hungary, looking for a likely candidate, and that they picked you? You, an unheard of acrobat in an unknown circus troupe, wandering round the backwaters of the Habsburg Empire? And you think that, somehow, those hundreds of laboring clerks used the combined resources of the greatest empire the world has ever known to send you wandering across Europe, that they mobilized the Companions of the Rosy Hours to speed your passage, all in the hopes that, armed with no more than native cunning, you might install yourself as king and all while you never suspected a thing, all while you thought it was your own idea? Is that what you choose to believe?” Arbuthnot had almost run out of places to rub. He folded two fingers of each hand and slid them under the epaulets of my tunic. “Aha!” and then, like a stage magician or an uncle at a Christmas party, he produced … “Grietje’s hatpin. She took it out. She didn’t put it in again and she gave it to you. That was very good. I never spotted it and I was watching hard.”

  “But she abandoned us,” I said.

  “Oh, wake up, old man. She turned what was left of Varga’s brain to mush, she got the most powerful clan chiefs in the country away to safety and she extracted Countess Gourdas who, I feel sure, is even now helping to create a diversion.”

  “Then why, for Christ’s sake, didn’t she save Sarah too?”

  Arbuthnot jabbed the point of Mrs. MacLeod’s hatpin into the lock of my handcuffs. “I don’t think you would have been too happy at the prospect of Miss von Mesmer causing a diversion of that type, now would you, Otto?” The left handcuff clicked open. “This one will be a little quicker. It’s just a matter of … there.”

  The cuffs rattled on the stone floor and, naturally, since my hands were free again, I used them to hold Sarah.

  “I’d have done it, Otto,” she said. “I’d do it for you.”

  Arbuthnot waited quietly for a bit. Embarrassed, like Max and the Professor, the way we had been when Zogolli broke down sniveling in the church. That was something we should not have seen. We were intruders there and they felt themselves intruders in the private place which Sarah and I had built for ourselves in the space of our arms.

  “Otto,” Arbuthnot called us back into the cell. “Otto, believe me, Mrs. MacLeod is out there fighting. The Companions will flock to her, but at dawn tomorrow she will abandon the fight and think of nothing but saving her own soft, pearly skin. If you don’t want to watch Sarah walk to the wall in the morning, we have got to get out of this room. Now think, man.”

  Faintly, from far away, we heard a sound like the beating of swans’ wings approaching.

  Be funny. Tell me a joke. Come on, make me laugh. Now! You can’t do it, can you? So imagine if your life depended on it. Imagine if somebody told you they were going to shoot the woman you loved unless you told a joke—now, right now! Or in five minutes or five hours or five days. The mind dries up in the face of something like that, shrivels like moth wings in a candle flame, so imagine how I felt. Find a way out, Otto, that’s all you’ve got to do. You’re locked in a room at the top of Rapunzel’s tower, armed with nothing more than a borrowed hatpin, the door is locked with giant iron bolts, there are armed men outside and, if you somehow manage to escape, they will shoot you and everybody you know and love but, on the other hand, if you don’t escape, they will shoot you and everybody you know and love. Answer on only one side of the paper. Time starts NOW!

  And I couldn’t think of the answer. I couldn’t think of the answer. I couldn’t think of the answer. There was nothing in my head but that thumping, whistling beat over and over like an executioner taking endless practice swings of the ax.

  “What the hell is that bloody noise?” but before anybody could answer me, we heard Varga running up the stairs, gasping out orders as he came: “Get out of my way. Move. Move. What is that stupid bastard doing? Make him stand off. He has to stand off. And they can’t tether to this tower.” He went running on up toward the roof, yelling as he went, “Not this tower! Not this tower! This is a verdammte prison. The other tower!”

  And then I knew what to do. Not down, but up. Out of Rapunzel’s tower, into the Zeppelin and away on the clouds. All I had to do was get out of the room and get Sarah out of the room and her father and Kemali and Max and Arbuthnot, get them all out of the room and have them wait on the roof while I boarded a Zeppelin full of armed men, overpowered them and stole their airship. Then all I would have to do was haul my friends aboard and fly away to freedom. I’m sorry, I had no better idea.

  “Max,” I said, “get me up to that window.”

  That was a piece of cake for Max. He cupped his hands into a stirrup and bounced me up the wall.

  “Down again. I should take my jacket off.”

  Max put me on the floor, took my jacket, hung it in his teeth and cupped his hands again. He would have thrown me up and down that wall all day if I’d asked him. He was like that and, with Max holding my heels, I reached the gap under the window easily.

  It was a sort of a square tunnel, about twice as long as me and not much broader than my shoulders, sloping up to a window, an ordinary little window with a wooden frame and no bars. The masons hadn’t bothered to finish it off too carefully. It was nice and rough and that made for an easy climb, but Max would never fit. I knew at once that Max would never fit. He’d get the rest of us up there. Max would stand there and lift me up, he’d lift Sarah and her father and Kemali and Arbuthnot, and then he’d sit down quietly and wait to be shot if I asked him, if I just explained that, “Sorry, mate, you’ll never squeeze in, but me and the others, we might have a chance.” He’d give us a hand up and say, “It’s no loss what a friend gets. Good luck!”

  I wasn’t halfway up the tunne
l when I knew we couldn’t do that. I’d rather be shot with Max a hundred times than let him be shot once alone and, anyway, Sarah wouldn’t go without him. She was down there in that room, as terrified as I was, being brave for my sake, for the sake of her father, clenching her teeth together to keep from screaming, and I knew very well that scared her more than the thought of a firing squad. She was scared to scream because she knew that, if she started to scream, she wouldn’t stop until they stopped her with a bullet. She was afraid of breaking like Zogolli. She was more afraid of that than of anything, and I knew because I was afraid of that too.

  I reached the window. It was just a little thing, split into four panes, one of them cracked, and the wood was dried out and papery since it was so high up in the tower and so far away down an awkward tunnel that nobody had ever thought to give it a lick of paint or a rub of oil. It was old and done for all right, but I’m damned if I could get it open. Lying there in that stone shaft, facing up to the sky, I could see nothing but clouds passing by and I could touch the frame of the window, I could get my hands on it, but if I tried to push it open, I just ended up pushing myself back down the tunnel. I tried to hold on with the toes of my boots. I tried to brace myself against the walls with my elbows, but nothing worked. The harder I pushed, the further backward I fell, and the old window stayed stuck.

  “What can you see, Otto?”

  “Not much. I’m coming back down. Stand clear.”

  I let go of the sides and slid down the tunnel. Falling out was even easier than climbing in. I even managed to keep my legs straight and my feet together when I landed. “There’s a window,” I said.