by Mark Helprin
“Yes, we are white people.”
“How did you do that?”
“We were born that way,” Fredericka said.
“You weren’t white yesterday.”
“We washed our faces in the canal after we were robbed,” Fredericka said.
“And that made you white?”
“It washed off the gold.”
“It washed off the gold,” Kitten said to himself, trying to understand. “Was it water from a special place?”
“It was just water, Kitten. You see, Desmond told Desmond that the gold would last far longer than it did.”
“Desmond told Desmond,” Kitten echoed. “You two are so strange. . . .”
Fredericka smiled, the gap in her front teeth just as charming as it had been when she was gold.
“I thought those blue eyes were contacts,” Kitten said. “You, too,” meaning Freddy.
“No, these are our eyes.”
“We got our eyes by washing in the river Oxus and the river Styx,” Freddy added, as a witticism.
“In Maryland, right?” Kitten asked.
“Kitten,” Freddy said with the decisiveness of a soldier who knows that apprehension looms ever greater in the absence of action, “all we need do is go into a house and bring out an objet d’art. If we ride around all day talking about it, it will never happen.”
“This is a big hit,” Kitten said, unbelieving that two novices were unafraid while he, a professional, was, as he put it, real jumpy.
“I have no anxiety,” Freddy said. “Do you, Popeel?”
“Not at all,” Fredericka answered.
“You’ve never done anything like this before?” Kitten asked.
“Never.”
“How can you be so calm?” He rapped his steering wheel, which beeped the horn.
“I was brought up,” Freddy informed him, “not to suffer anxiety about decisive initiative of all types.”
“Okay,” Kitten said, stopping the car. “It’s two blocks down. After the hit, meet me where I showed you on Connecticut Avenue. Be confident. Act like you own the place.”
“We will,” Freddy promised, and as Kitten accelerated away in his half-a-block-long automobile the Prince and Princess of Wales in their shreds walked gracefully down a deserted street, hearts filling with the joy that flows from the sight of beauteous things. Here were noble trees, carefully shaped hedges, old brick and iron in the shapes they had known and loved since birth. Here were pediments, architraves, and plinths. Just the properties and proportions of windows, eaves, French doors, and roof lines were enough to energise and refresh them.
“It’s a pity the Clovis family doesn’t live in a Georgian house,” Freddy said. “I’d enjoy myself much more looting a Robert Adam or a Christopher Wren than a refrigerator turned on its side with trapezoidal windows and dirt on the roof. But what can we do? The great forms speak directly to the heart, but in this age so many people have been robbed of their hearts that they no longer understand what is spoken.”
“I don’t know about you,” Fredericka said with immutable determination, “but I’m looking forward to a trip to the Clovis kitchen.”
“Why not? In for a pound, in for a penny. If we’re going to steal a ten-million-dollar ‘art’ work, we might as well take a chicken leg. I had no inkling how delightful it is to come by one’s food, day by day, with neither money nor assurance. I suppose it’s like hunting or illicit sex.”
She looked at him with an injured expression. Many of her expressions were injured. He had never before realised this. “Just the two of us, Fredericka, in the Clovis kitchen,” he said by way of apology. “Just the two of us. We’re in it together. The pleasure will be ours alone. For the rest of our lives.”
This meant a great deal to her, and when they opened the gate and went up to the Clovis kitchen door, she was happy. Neither of them felt any apprehension about the burglary, perhaps because they had been brought up knowing that they were entitled in the literal sense and also to things in far greater profusion than they had ever been able to take. “I’ll kick in the door,” Freddy said, looking about, “you get to the keypad and disarm the alarm, and I’ll close the door expeditiously. It should take about five seconds. Are you ready?”
She nodded. Then Freddy aimed a martial kick at the lock plate, and the door exploded inward. “I’ve got it,” Fredericka said, arriving at the keypad. Freddy gently closed the door. Even the door frame was undamaged, for the wood had been supple enough to bend so that the deadbolt had simply popped out of the strike. They were in.
“Wait,” said Freddy, holding up his index finger, lifting his eyes, and listening. “There’s no sound. Perhaps the system wasn’t armed, but, then again, it may be silent. Enter the code and be prepared to cancel it.”
Fredericka entered 4020 Off. Marina Clovis was a tractor heiress, and in her family’s glory days the 4020 was a popular tractor. Nothing happened except a chirp. Freddy told Fredericka to hit 4020 Away, which she did, and the system came up armed. “Forty twenty Off,” he said. She complied, eliciting a series of chirps.
“That’s strange,” Fredericka said. “It wasn’t on. Do you think someone’s home?”
“Let’s find out,” Freddy said. “Hello? Hello?” He marched through the house, calling out, “Hello! Hello! We’ve come to check the flexes and points, and the door was wide open. Is anyone home? Hello! Local authority here to check flexes and points. Is anyone there?”
No one was. “They forgot to turn on the alarm,” Freddy said. “That means they may realise it and come back.”
“I doubt it,” Fredericka offered. “Just after they’d left, perhaps, but if relatively soon they hadn’t remembered what they’d done, they would have become unconcerned. That’s why houses explode when the cookers have been pumping gas into them since boiling over at breakfast.”
“You’re probably right. Shall we eat first?”
WHEN THE CLOVISES came up the walk, having left their board meeting after remembering that neither of them had turned on the alarm, two people in shredded clothes and outlandish headgear were seated at the kitchen island partaking of cold filet mignon with Acapulco lime chutney, French bread, salade aux tomates, and lots and lots of Champagne. Freddy and Fredericka had been thirsty all day, and fortunately the refrigerator contained a row of Dom Pérignon magnums, from which they had conscripted and nearly drained two. Perhaps because of this, they took the return of the masters of the house more lightly than they might have. “Look,” said Fredericka, “here come the Cleavises.”
“The Clovises.”
“Whoever they are. What shall we do?”
“We’re servants.”
“You may be,” she said, “but I’m no servant to any Cleavises or anyone else. I’m the goddamned princess of you know what.”
“I went out on enough moonlighted catering jobs with the palace staff to know exactly how to be servile and obsequious. You do it your way, and I’ll do it mine.”
“As always,” she answered, the Champagne having brought out some hostility, as in a grave rubbing.
The door opened and the Clovises entered. Although they were startled to see two very large, oddly attired strangers drinking their Champagne and eating their filet mignon, Freddy and Fredericka’s absolute ease made the Clovises think that they had overlooked some sort of new organisation accomplished by the servants.
“Didn’t you used to work for Ladislas and Fifi Brown-Vanilla? Did Velda arrange for you to be here?” Marina Clovis asked, half deferentially and half as a challenge.
“Indeed,” said Freddy. “It was Velda, Velda, Velda, a better man than I, the regimental Inca, with a finger in the pie. Though I’ve belted her and flayed her, by the living god that made her, she always gave that good old Inca try.”
“Are you . . . Arthur? Is he? Are you part of the Inca community?”
“Can’t you tell?” Freddy asked, with the manner of his father dressing down a page. It was the Champagne. �
��I am Tuhalpac Amaru, Velda’s cousin. But she,” meaning Fredericka, “is Woffe Ababa, an Ethiopian.”
“Arthur, they’ve got blue eyes and they’re tall,” Marina Clovis said under her breath.
“I heard that. I’m Anglo-Inca, and she’s Ethiopian of Icelandic extraction.”
“Why are you drinking our Champagne?” Arthur Clovis finally weighed in, belligerently, his last belligerence of the evening.
“Why do you bloody think we’re drinking your Champagne? We’re bloody thirsty, that’s why,” Freddy said, jumping up to his great height, with a foot added by his Jamaican hat. He towered over the Clovises and was much bigger in every way. “Considering,” Freddy went on, “that every social-climbing bastard ever born comes to nick our Champagne, which flows like a river and bankrupts us out of house and home, what are two lousy magna?”
“Oh, I didn’t know,” Arthur said pusillanimously.
“Do you think it’s fair?” Freddy asked.
“What’s fair?”
“That everyone,” Freddy said, waving his right arm back and forth drunkenly, like a madman directing traffic, “drinks our Champagne and never says thank you—as if it comes from trees.”
“As if it grows on a vine,” Fredericka added, smugly.
“Of course it’s not fair,” Marina Clovis agreed, like the psychology major she once had been, and the coward she was.
Freddy took a long drink. He was under a great deal of strain, but he did notice Arthur Clovis moving toward the keypad, sideways, like a prodigiously slow crab. “Oh oh ah,” said Freddy. “I see that, Arthur. I know everything there is to know about panic buttons. My family had them when they were velvet ropes.” Arthur stopped moving, and smiled. “Where are some more of these wonderful Argentine steak knives?” Freddy asked rhetorically.
“How does he know that?” Marina whispered to her husband. “It’s not written on them that they’re Argentine, and they cost a hundred and fifty dollars apiece.”
“Here,” Freddy said, opening a drawer and taking one up. “We have them, too. They’re perfectly balanced and tempered. Arthur, attention!” He raised his arm and threw the knife into the wall next to the keypad. It went in up to its little nickel hilt. “Wallboard,” said Freddy. “Wallboard . . . is for poor people.”
“I didn’t know you could do that, Freddy. I mean, I didn’t know you could do that . . . Moofoomooach.”
“Yes, Mrs Moofoomooach. I practise in the Orangery, in the corner opposite the harpsichord.”
“Who are you?” Arthur Clovis asked, screwing up his face in irritation and amazement.
“I’ll tell you who I am,” Freddy said crisply but over-emotionally. “I am a person whose various kitchens have walls of stone.”
“That’s who you are?”
“And I can throw knives as if I’d been brought up in the circus.”
“Yes, but you’re not above the law,” Marina said defiantly.
“I am above the law, quite above the law, in many respects. If, for example, I were to kill you and I were sent to gaol, I would be allowed to take my clothes with me, and I have enough cummerbunds to string together so that I could lower myself to the ground even if my cell were at the top of your Empire State Building.”
The Clovises were breathing hard, terrified of his inexplicableness.
“So sit down and shut up, and speak only when spoken to.”
“Freddy, that’s not nice. It’s their house.”
“They’re prisoners of war.”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“I’m not absurd, they’re absurd. Look at the house they live in.”
“We really don’t have that much money,” Marina Clovis stated reflexively.
“I can see that,” Freddy said, but they thought it was sarcasm.
“Really, we don’t. We gave most of our wealth to the foundation.”
“With what intent?” asked Freddy, who knew all about foundations.
“To help animals.”
“That’s nice,” Fredericka commented.
“Help them do what?” Freddy asked.
“Live more productive lives.”
“Give more milk? Fatten up?”
“Oh no, of course not.”
“What’s this, then?” asked Freddy, pointing to what was left of his filet mignon.
“That’s meat,” Marina Clovis answered, “but it’s for guests. We don’t eat meat, and we endowed the Clovis Foundation for Research in Animal Psychiatry.”
Freddy thought about this for a moment. “Of what use would a psychiatrist be to an animal? Animals cannot speak.”
“Children can’t speak, either,” said Marina Clovis, triumphantly, “and they have psychiatrists.”
“What do you mean, ‘children can’t speak’?”
“Well, not like adults.”
“At the Clovis Foundation,” Freddy asked in a scathing tone undermined by the huge gap in his teeth, “do a bunch of Freudians analyse chickens who are neurotic because they’re fryers and they want to be broilers?”
“Chickens have just as much right to medical care as you do,” Marina Clovis told him.
“What about sea anemones?”
“Why not?”
“Because sea anemones cannot have psychiatric problems.”
“How would you know, not being a sea anemone?”
“How would you, not being a sea anemone, know they did?”
“Better safe than sorry,” Marina said. “We are the world leader in cat biofeedback.”
“Do you mean fur balls?”
“I mean, however you may mock me, serious study into the. . . .”
“You don’t study into something, you make a study of it.”
“Oh! A pedantic burglar. How lucky we are. That aside, we are on the cutting edge.” She swallowed in fear of what she had said. “We developed Clovis B, which cures feline baldness.”
Freddy stared at her in as much disbelief as she had for him. “That’s important,” he said. “Think of all the poor bald cats to whom you have given hope. You should know that I have developed Freddy A, which shuts up fat super-spoiled matrons with intelligence quotients of less than fifty.”
Marina, who in her anxiety had heard imprecisely, and thought Freddy had been referring to her age, said, “Forty-six! In fact.”
“I don’t think so, milady. I’d say about twenty-three.”
“Thank you,” said Marina, softening unbelievably.
“Please,” said Arthur Clovis, “take anything you want. I swear, we won’t tell the police. You can lock us in the closet. We won’t get out for days.”
“How will you eat?” asked Fredericka.
“We’ll bring cookies and sandwiches.”
“We’re only going to take one thing,” Freddy announced, “and then, in a year or so, you’ll receive five times its market value either of today or then, whichever is higher. We are not thieves, we are borrowers.”
“You’re borrowers.”
“Yes, and we don’t care if you tell the police or not. We walk upon this earth with virtual invincibility. We are not who we are, you don’t know us, and we don’t give a fig.”
“Arthur, they’re completely psychotic. They’re going to kill us,” Marina whispered, but Freddy heard.
“We’re not going to kill you, but we would like to kill your decorator. Look at this place. It’s all of fashion. It all comes from cheap magazines. Have you ever looked at such magazines from the past? It makes you dizzy with revulsion. Everything seems like a conspiracy that failed, and of course it did, as the conspirators’ prime value is simply to move en masse from one craze to another. I wonder where in the world there is a hole big enough to swallow all the granite countertops that in a few years will be marching out of kitchens like an army of the dead. Other than with the addition of modern appliances, the kitchens in my houses have hardly changed since eighteen forty.”
“Oh, stop it, Freddy. You’re insufferable when you get thi
s way. Leave these poor pathetic people alone. You mustn’t torment them just because they’re of low station. It must be the Champagne. You rail against the low aristocracy every time you have a drink.”
The Clovises knitted their brows like cavemen. They really had no idea what was going on. All kinds of permutations raced through their minds, but in the end they suspected that they were hallucinating. “Are you Jamaicans?” Arthur asked.
“Speak when spoken to!” Fredericka commanded. “And it’s ‘Your Royal Highness.’ ”
“No,” said Freddy, “not here.”
“You will address me,” Fredericka ordered Arthur Clovis, correcting herself, “as Popeel.”
The Champagne made Freddy and Fredericka forget the presence of their captives, whose eyes were fastened upon the royal couple as if with glue. “You, Moofoomooach,” Fredericka said, “are simply too aggressive.”
“You’re the one who screamed at the peasants.”
“You started it. I think it’s because you model yourself after George the Third.”
“What’s wrong with that? He was a great and gracious king, the most learned king, a good man, in the wrong time, who happened to have been ill.”
“Granted, but modelling oneself after someone who is ill is asking for trouble, isn’t it? And all you do is get into trouble.”
“Name one instance.”
“Freddy, I could name a thousand instances.”
“Moofoomooach,” he corrected.
“Moofoomooach,” she continued.
“No you can’t.”
“Yes I can.”
“Name one, then. Go ahead.”
“When you thought the Australian High Commissioner had bought a residence next to the lands of Moocock, and threw boomerangs at him and sang ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down,’ but it wasn’t the Australian High Commissioner, it was the Papal Legate.”
“How was I to know?”
“For one, he was African. The Australian High Commissioner would not be African.”
“Why not? We’re African.”
“No we’re not.”
“Yes we are.”
“No, we’re not. Arthur?” Fredericka asked, “are we African?”