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

by Andrew Nicoll

“Oh, Kemali Efendim, if you are safe out of the country, there is nothing they can do to me to make me tell them. One half of the key is useless. Anyway, when you are gone, I will not wait here to be killed. I will take the car and drive as fast as I can to the hills. The Royal Fathers-in-Law fight on. Perhaps they will shoot me. Perhaps they will give me a gun and let me fight on with them. Perhaps they will remember that, like them, I was once a Knight of Skanderbeg.”

  After that they yammered and jabbered at each other in Albanok for a bit and then there were tears and more jabbering and embraces and finally a sharing of cigars before Kemali said, “My boy has returned to me. We go together to the mountains to fight for a free Albania. Thank you, my friends. Now hurry. To the ship. The tide is dropping. Away with you, and Godspeed.”

  He stopped to shake hands with all of us, and I was last in the line. “Goodbye, Your Majesty,” he said. “I have never served, nor could I ever serve, a finer king. I do not think we will meet again in life but, perhaps later, we may share a cigar together—if such things are permitted there.”

  I can admit it now, I had a tear in my eye as I sat on a pile of champagne crates, watching the Rolls bounce down the quayside and disappear into the streets of the town.

  And there was nothing left to say. Like the moment when they lower the coffin into the ground. Like the moment after, “I don’t love you any more.” The bottle was empty. The fire was out. It was time to go and we were leaving as we came, unnoticed, unremarked, but lighter by a camel and a cash box full of good Austrian gold kronen.

  The Professor was lingering on the quayside, one foot on the gangplank and one foot on the harbor wall. I took him gently by the elbow. “Come along, Professor. We should go now.”

  But he turned those fearful spectacles on me again and he said, “I know the combination of the vault.”

  I have often wondered, in the long years since then, what might have happened if he had said that more quietly, so the others had not heard, or if he had waited to say it, waited until he and I were alone or until we were a mile out to sea with the coffee boiling in its pot and a warm bunk calling.

  But that isn’t what happened. Everybody else was there and they looked up when he said it, as if he had rung a bell or sounded a klaxon.

  “You’re lying,” I said.

  “Why should I lie? What would be the point when I could be so easily found out? Even Zogolli understood that eventually.”

  “Zogolli knew only half the combination.”

  “Zogolli knew half and Kemali knew half. Only one man has been in the chamber when both locks were opened. I am that man.”

  “But you are blind.”

  “I still know.”

  “We don’t even know where the vault is.”

  He turned his black glasses toward the town and raised his nose like a hound scenting its prey. “From the entrance of the harbor it is three streets to the left and two streets uphill.”

  “Jesus,” I said. It seemed the only thing to say. I took him by the elbow again. “Come on, Professor. They’ll be on our tails in a moment.”

  He didn’t budge. Instead he swiveled his head away from the town and looked toward the bottom of the gangplank. “Nobody else seems to be in that much of a hurry,” he said.

  He was right. I looked at them and I could see it on their faces. A day ago I might have shouted them down. A day ago I might have told them to shut up and ordered them to cast off. A day ago I was the king.

  Arbuthnot said, “My instructions are simple and broad: to make things hot for the other side. I should think despoiling the Treasury counts.”

  Mrs. MacLeod agreed. “My Companions are loyal but I see no reason why that loyalty should not be rewarded with the gold of our enemies.”

  Max looked at his feet. “I had a lot of silly ideas about a pub in the country. I was going to call it the King Otto.”

  “And I promised myself some new hats,” said Tifty.

  Only Sarah said nothing at all, and I suppose that was as much support as anybody could have asked for. I stood there, looking at her, trying to come up with some kind of sensible reason why we should simply run for our lives but, damn it, I couldn’t think of one. Like the gambler who sees his horse come in one time out of a hundred, we forgot that we had spent the day in a prison cell and we remembered that we had spent the night in a palace and, the longer that I thought about it, the harder it was to say no. Max wanted his little pub in the country, Tifty wanted a new hat—that was all—and all I wanted was Sarah, but we were running away with no more than the clothes on our back in the hope of finding a job in a circus again, maybe, some day. No more palaces for Sarah. No more limousines. Just long years breaking her back, sweeping up horse-apples and sleeping in a narrow bunk. And what about the kids? Why should my kids go without when the man who stole my country got fat on my money—money that could make them into ladies and gentlemen? And there was Sarah in that lovely dress, the last lovely dress she would ever own unless we got some money.

  The Professor gripped my arm. “I won’t leave here poorer than I came,” he said. “I won’t. Decide for yourself. I’m going,” and he set off along the quayside, sweeping his cane in front of him as he went.

  Sarah was frantic. “Otto, go after him, please! Hurry!”

  “Max, come on. Arbuthnot, load up the champagne.”

  “The tide is falling fast,” said Mrs. MacLeod. “We leave in one hour—or sooner if we are found out.”

  The Professor was walking as fast as a man with no eyes can walk. I had to go quickly to catch him up and, by the time we reached the harbor gates, Max came running and behind us, far away, Sarah was shouting, “Hurry, Otto.”

  Night and day were all the same to the Professor, and he made his way through the dark streets as easily as if it had been noon. He found the corner of the street with his cane and crossed over, into the shadows of a looming warehouse, and then he was off again, his cane tapping on the walls and ringing out in the silent town like a hammer on an anvil.

  “For God’s sake, Professor, stop that bloody thumping. Here, give me your arm.”

  I took one side and Max took the other but, though we had eyes to see, we were no faster. The Professor was ready to hurry on come what may. He could not see, and that gave him a child’s belief that he could not be seen, but Max and me, we hung to the shadows and made haste slowly, waiting and listening, looking about at every turn, expecting every minute that Varga and his thugs would notice we had gone and start the hunt.

  “Is this the street corner?” the Professor said.

  “Yes.”

  “Then there are two more corners before we turn.”

  We hurried on, across another side street, watching and listening at every step until we found the third street.

  “Uphill here, for two streets,” the Professor said, and—damnation—he was right. There was that little window with its stupid iron bar and the sagging front door held shut by that piddling penny-bazaar lock. Max gave it a push and it opened with the sort of disappointed crunch a customer’s nose makes in the boxing booth when he discovers he’s not quite so tough after all.

  Without another word the Professor plunged into the darkened room, swinging his cane about madly and heading straight for the stairs in the corner of the room. Max and me, we had to strike a match and get the lamp lit and stumble about on that slippery stone staircase and duck through the tunnel and, by the time we did all that, we found the Professor waiting in the deep darkness, like a lost soul seeking admittance at the gates of hell.

  “Speed is of the essence, gentlemen. Time and tide and the terrible Mrs. MacLeod wait for no man.” He herded us with his cane. “Mr. Schlepsig to the left, Mr. Witte to the right. Now, Max, set the dial to zero.”

  “I can’t see. It’s too dark.”

  “Really? I hadn’t noticed. Otto, hold up the lamp. Now can you see? Set the tumbler to zero. Done that?”

  “I think so.”

  “Now turn i
t to forty-one left.”

  Slowly and gently, Max turned the knob.

  “Now nineteen right. Then go left, back to zero, then—”

  “Wait a minute, I can’t keep up.”

  “You have to get this right, Mr. Schlepsig. If you are out by even one dot on the dial, the lock will not open.”

  I put my hand on his shoulder. “You’re doing fine, mate.”

  “My fingers are too big for this stuff, Otto. You do it. I’ll stick to punching people instead.”

  I handed him the lamp and took his place in front of Atlas. “Zero,” I called out.

  “Good,” said the Professor. “Now nineteen right and twenty-seven left and right to zero again.”

  Once upon a time I was sitting in a garden when I looked up and found that a butterfly had chosen just that very moment to land on a rose at the other side of the path, and I wondered if it was the tiny noise of its feet that made me notice it. When I turned the dial to zero again, Atlas made just the exact same noise.

  “You can’t possibly know this,” I told the Professor.

  “And yet, I do.”

  “It’s impossible.”

  “We shall see in a moment. Turn the other dial, Otto.”

  Max held up the lamp and we began again.

  “Set the dial to zero. Now forty-one left. Right nineteen. Left back to zero. Right nineteen. Left twenty-seven. Right zero.”

  “That’s exactly the same,” I said.

  “And that’s how I know I am right. Zogolli and Kemali both knew only half the code. We saw that today. Kemali was ready to die to keep his secret, but Zogolli was afraid his ignorance would be exposed. Yet, when they were with me here, they each did exactly the same thing. Each man turned his dial by exactly the same number of clicks. It follows, therefore, that each must have chosen a pattern of numbers which could be referred to and recalled but which was not personal to them. Something with six figures. Something like the latitude and longitude of Durres, which, as any schoolboy knows, is forty-one degrees, nineteen minutes and zero seconds north, nineteen degrees, twenty-seven minutes and zero seconds west. Open the door, Otto.”

  Max held the lamp high. I tugged on the great polished ship’s wheel handle and, by God, he was right. The door swung open with a little gasp of wind, as quiet and gentle as a duchess’s fart.

  The Professor jabbed at the air with his cane. “Gentlemen, the money is this way, I believe.”

  So there we were, in the vault, surrounded by all that money and the personal armory of one of Albania’s leading entrepreneurs, perhaps more successful than I had been but certainly deader, and all we had to do was work out how much we could carry away.

  The money was lying there in those long wooden cases and they were heavy enough but, by God, they were awkward to handle, and anybody could see they were designed for two men to carry. One set of arms simply wasn’t long enough to reach both ends of the box. We experimented a little and it might have been possible, just about, for a man to take a handle in each fist and drag two boxes away, but we had the stairs to consider and, once we were out in the street, the noise would have been spectacular. Time was pressing. We had to get back to the boat.

  The Professor said, “I fear two boxes is the most we can manage. If we form a chain, the man in the middle can hold the handles of two boxes and the men at either end can share the load.”

  “I suppose I’d better go in the middle,” Max said.

  And then we heard it, that nasty, whiny, sing-song voice again. “Ooh, Maxxie, you’re always showing off your muscles. Come out and show your Uncle Imre—you too, Witte.”

  Max dropped the crate of cash he was holding, went out into the passage and I followed.

  “That’s close enough,” said Varga. He was completely alone, but he had found a replacement for the pistol we took off him in Fiume.

  “What now?” I said. “Another duel?”

  “Oh, don’t be so bloody stupid. You’ve had several chances to kill me already, and anyway, you are still under sentence of death for treason. One wall is as good as another, and a wall in a cellar is better than most. Keep your hands up.”

  “How the hell did you find us?” I said.

  “Too easy. As soon as the Zeppelin blew up, I knew you were to blame, and the only possible way out of the country is on my lovely yacht, so I left my men to carry on putting out fires and shoveling up the cinders of our honored dead and I told them to join me at the harbor later. I got there just in time to see you leaving.

  “Why would you leave? What could possibly tempt you to abandon your escape attempt halfway, and why burden yourself with a blind man? There could be only one answer. Now, tell your cripple friend to come out of there and be shot nicely, or I’ll lock him in and come back for the money in a month or two.”

  The Professor did as he was told only, when he appeared in the door of the vault, he had thrown away his cane and, instead, he had a rifle firmly at his shoulder.

  Varga laughed. You couldn’t blame him, but when he laughed the Professor turned directly toward him. Varga stopped laughing. He ducked down and moved to the other side of the passage and, silently, he raised his pistol. The Professor shot him through the chest.

  The noise of it was appalling. That sudden explosion. That bang. The metallic ring. The flash. The smoke. The chemical, burning smell. Everything roaring inside that tiny stone tunnel. Varga was flung back against the wall, slumped there with his legs at peculiar angles, sitting on one foot, the other leg stuck out in front of him and the whole of his shirt front black with blood. He looked down and dabbled his fingers in the mess and then he looked right at me and said, “I. But.” And he died.

  “Time to go,” the Professor said. He slung his rifle across his chest and went back into the vault for a moment and, when he came back, he was dragging a case of money behind him.

  But Max and me, we hadn’t moved from the spot. We were standing there, a noise like cymbals in our ears, looking down at Varga all twisted up on the floor and rivers of blood running down the passage, making snaky runnels in the dust.

  “We have to go. Get another box of money and grab a gun. Varga’s friends are going to the harbor. Come on.”

  I pointed at Varga. “How?” I said.

  “He was going to kill you. He was going to kill you and he was going to kill Max and he was going to kill me and, after that, I assume he was going to keep the vault for himself. We don’t have time for this.”

  “How?” I said again.

  The Professor took off his spectacles and smashed them against the wall. “Don’t tell me you believed all that ‘blind cripple’ shit. Don’t tell me you were taken in by the mind-reading act. Don’t tell me you swallowed all that stuff about longitude and latitude. I knew the combination because I watched them, Otto. I can see!”

  There were so many things I wanted to ask. How long he had lived that way, how he had borne it, how he had managed to keep up the pretense, whether Sarah knew, how he could have existed for even a moment without turning to his beautiful daughter and simply looking at her.

  More than anything else I wanted to know whether shutting yourself in darkness for years at a time left a mark on the soul, but I had seen him kill a man and I think I already knew the answer to that question.

  We dragged Varga’s body into the vault, bumping it over the iron lip of the door which, of course, had never once tripped the Professor up, and we left him there for anybody who might care to find him. Maybe Kemali and Zogolli came back. Maybe they buried him. Maybe he’s still down there, rotting away to his bones, locked inside an impenetrable mausoleum, surrounded by weapons and treasure like one of those old Egyptian Pharaohs.

  It was a difficult journey back to the street. The Professor already had a rifle and he showed us how to use one. How to snap in the magazine. How to move your thumb so that the leaf-shaped safety catch would click into place and show a dot of black enamel or a dot of red.

  And then we each took a rif
le, me and my mate Max, and I went in front with the lamp in my right hand, reaching back to the rope handle of the first cash box with my left, and the Professor went at the back and Max came in the middle, with a hand on the box in front and a hand on the box behind.

  The money wasn’t all that heavy, not for me and Max anyway, but the boxes were long and difficult to handle. I had the lamp so I could see where I was going and the Professor had already proved that he could manage pretty well without it, but we had to keep stopping so he could swap hands and then, on the stairs, the crates were too long to go round the turns so there was more stopping and I had to put the lamp down and get the crates stood on end and manhandle them round the corners and then pick the lamp up and start again, and all the while our rifles were swinging about and getting in the way.

  By the time we climbed the last stair into the little cellar, with its busted door hanging open to the street, I was running with sweat and the Professor was gasping and blowing like a walrus.

  I took out my watch. “We’ve got fifteen minutes left before Mrs. MacLeod casts off.”

  “If we’re not there, Sarah won’t go with her,” the Professor said.

  “I hope to God she does. Do you really want her hanging about on the quayside when Varga’s men bowl up?”

  The crates bashed off the broken door as we went out into the street. I put mine down. “Wait. I want to look.”

  Max and the Professor stood in the shadows, Max because he would do anything I ever asked him to do, the Professor because he was still catching his breath, and they waited while I went to the street corner and scouted. The roads were deserted. The terrified Albanoks had locked themselves away, waiting for the next tide of war to wash over their houses, and if Varga’s men were on patrol, they had not found their way to the Treasury. Not yet anyway.

  I hurried back. “The coast is clear,” I said. “I think we should go by the back roads, stay in the lanes for a bit and then cut down to the harbor.”

  The Professor picked up his money box again. “There is no time. We have twelve minutes left. We must go by the most direct route we can and then, if we don’t keep our appointment, at least the others may see us and delay a little.”