Shirley

by Howard Fast

  “Thank you,” said James Charles. “It’s very good of you. I don’t know how you could be so casual about it?”

  “About what?”

  “Myself,” said James Charles. “You don’t really know me.”

  “You’re hungry,” Shirley shrugged. “Even if you are a louse, you are still hungry.”

  “You’re pulling my leg now.”

  “Sure, I’m pulling your leg,” Shirley said. “How do you like your eggs—soft or hard, turned or sunny side up?”

  Shirley had emptied her own plate, and she sat back and smoked a cigarette and watched James Charles finish the loaf of white bread with his third glass of milk. When she suggested more eggs, he shook his head and apologized for making a pig of himself.

  “If I could stay as skinny as you and eat like that, I’d do the same, James Charles, believe me.”

  “You don’t have to call me James Charles.”

  “I’m leaving off the Alexander.”

  “I see.”

  “That’s a sort of a joke,” Shirley said. “It’s not really funny, just an attempt to be funny. It’s a character defect of mine. Some girls cry. I try to be a female Danny Kaye. You heard of Danny Kaye?”

  “Oh yes—in the cinema?”

  “That’s right. In the cinema. He gets more laughs than Joe Louis.”

  “Oh? But you said Joe Louis was a boxer?”

  Shirley started to say, “Drop dead,” swallowed her words and said instead, “Don’t trouble yourself about that. We got all those questions to answer.”

  “Yes, of course. I’m still amazed at the way you are, because you don’t really know me, do you? I mean, I could be like Seppi—one of them.”

  “You mean a killer?”

  He nodded seriously. Shirley nodded just as seriously and said that she would take her chances.

  “It’s very decent of you,” he said. “Please believe me, Miss Campbel. I’m not one of them.”

  “I believe you. That makes you happy? All right—now suppose you tell me who you are and what you are. You’re English, aren’t you?”

  “No. I was educated in England, but I’m not English. I come from a place called Montort. You’ve heard of it?”

  Shirley shook her head and said that now they could start clean. “We balance Joe Louis and Minetta Street with Montort. Where is it?”

  “Well, it’s in Spain, so as to speak—but not really. I mean just as a location. One small section of the border touches France. It’s in the Pyrenees, so that places it on the northern border of Spain and just south of France.”

  “And what is it?” Shirley asked.

  “What is it? I don’t understand.”

  “A city, a village—what?”

  “I see what you mean.” He smiled almost apologetically. “No, it’s a country. Or was. A very small country, by your standards. It occupies a single valley, seven and a half miles at its longest point and five miles at its widest. So that would give it a land area a little less than twice your Manhattan Island—not very large, you see. In precise terms, it should be called a principality, since it was recognized as such originally by Henry of Navarre, who placed it under his protection and included it as royal fief.”

  “And exactly what is a principality?” Shirley asked.

  “Simply a place that’s governed by a prince—in the old-fashioned usage.”

  “And that’s where you come from?”

  “That’s where I come from,” he nodded.

  “And what are you? Why is it important to kill you? Why are they giving me such a rough time because I look like your cousin Carlotta? What have you done?”

  “It’s not so much what I’ve done as what I am,” James Charles said. “I’m the last surviving member of my family, the Bernards. I’m the hereditary prince.”

  “You’re the hereditary prince,” Shirley said.

  “That’s right,” he nodded sadly. “I’m the prince—or the prince-pretender, to put it correctly. I don’t have a penny to my name. I own the clothes on my back, no more, and I have only an outside chance of living through the next twenty-four hours. But I’m the prince.”

  “I’m listening,” Shirley said.

  “It’s a long and not very pleasant story, if you want to hear it?”

  “I do want to hear it,” Shirley said. “I can’t think of anything else I want to hear as much. In fact, it will do you good to listen too.”

  Watching him carefully, she put out her cigarette and considered the whole question before she decided to put the dishes in the sink.

  “It doesn’t figure, a prince sitting in a kitchen. Not one as small as this, anyway. I can see one of them big castle kitchens, like they always have in The Three Musketeers, so they can fight across the table. Did you live in a castle?” She was clearing the table as she spoke.

  “Never been in one. I’m a sort of a bargain-basement prince, you see. I hope you believe me?”

  “At this point, I’m ready to believe anything, James Charles. Anything at all.”

  “You don’t have to call me James Charles, Miss Campbel. No one ever did.”

  “You don’t have to call me Miss Campbel. You know, it’s spelled with one L. C-a-m-p-b-e-l. Do you mind?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “That’s good. You know, you’re awful polite, even for a prince. Well, my name’s Shirley. When anyone asks me how is that, I tell them it’s a generic name in the part of the Bronx I come from. That proves I’m not uneducated, only ignorant, and I don’t often get frazzled like this, except when I’m sitting with a prince. That only happens on off weeks. So you call me Shirley, and I’ll call you Jimmy. Now go into the living room and sit in the armchair. It took me twenty-two weeks to pay off that armchair, and every time I made a payment, I asked myself what on earth I needed it for. Now I got the answer. I needed it for visiting princes. I’ll finish cleaning the table.”

  She wiped the table clean and then went into the living room and asked him whether he smoked. He shook his head.

  “My friend Cynthia,” Shirley said, “she’ll chop my head off because I don’t call you Your Highness. On such questions, my friend Cynthia is very formal. I’m different, I guess I suffer from some kind of mental latitude or lassitude, I guess. Maybe from both.” She curled up on the couch and nodded. “Go ahead. I’m listening.”

  “I’ll try to tell it so it makes sense, Miss Campbel—”

  “Call me Shirley. I’ll call you Prince.”

  “Shirley. I think it’s a rather nice name, you know. Well—I was born in Montort, but I haven’t any memories of it. I don’t know any more about what it’s really like than you do. You see, I was born in 1940, soon after the end of the Spanish Civil War, and when I was three months old, my mother took me to England. Do you know much about the Spanish Civil War?”

  Shirley shook her head, watching the prince intently.

  “Well, it was a long, complex affair, and we haven’t time to go into it. Sufficient to say, it was the worst and bloodiest thing that ever happened to Spain, and Spain has never been a stranger to bad things or bloodshed. Through the course of the war, my father remained neutral. There was nothing else he could do. He had no army in Montort, no defenses of any kind, only a single constable who would take care of things if some of the villagers had too much of a Saturday night and disturbed the peace. The entire population was less than nine hundred, most of them peasants who had not altered their way of living very much in the past thousand years. So he remained neutral. At least until the end of the war. Then Franco was victorious, and remnants of the Republican troops were attempting to escape across the Pyrenees into France. Some of them were wounded and others sick and exhausted, and it meant death if they fell into the hands of the Falange. My father would have had a heart of stone to turn them away. He didn’t have a heart of stone. He had a very kind heart, as I am told—you see, I never saw him.”

  “Well, he sheltered as many as he could, cared for them and th
en let them cross the border into France without returning to Spain. I told you, I think, that about a mile of the border touched French soil. I guess my father’s sympathies were always with the Republican side—but doing this, he earned the undying enmity of Franco. He knew it was only a matter of time before something happened, and as soon as I was old enough to be moved—I was three months then—he sent me to England with my mother. My cousin Carlotta, who was a year older than I, was in Paris, where her mother was living. Her father was already dead. He was my father’s younger brother, and he was a colonel in the Republican army. He was killed in the first year of the war. Then, about five months after we reached England, my father was murdered. We never discovered who the murderer was, but my mother never doubted that the Falange had a hand in it. After that, we were urged by Franco to return. He pledged our safety and promised to install me as prince and appoint a regent to govern our little domain—”

  “How old were you then?” Shirley interrupted.

  “About a year, I suppose.”

  “That’s younger than Kennedy,” Shirley said. “Were they serious? Did they think so highly of youth?”

  “In a way. I would have stayed in my pram, and the regent would have done what governing there was to do, at least until I came of age. But my mother believed that they wanted us back there only to be rid of us, as they got rid of my father, and she refused to return. Then things happened. They blocked whatever money we had in Spain. They cooked up a damage suit by a British tourist, who claimed that he was injured in Montort through the negligence of the principality—only he was not a tourist at all—and there was a tremendous judgment out of that lawsuit. We had money in Switzerland. They bribed people, forged papers and cleaned out our account there. So we became quite poor. Somehow, we managed in a kind of shabby gentility. When I was fourteen, my mother died of pneumonia. She was rather frail, and the English climate had never agreed with her. I was at Eton then, a British private school, which we call a public school—”

  “I’ve heard about Eton,” Shirley nodded. “It may surprise you—but I have.”

  “My mother left a tiny trust fund that saw me through Eton and saw me out of the place with about twenty pounds in my pocket—a bit more than I ever had in my pockets since then.”

  “But you came from a royal family,” Shirley pointed out. “Do you mean to tell me that the British would just let you starve?”

  “They don’t have a fund for indigent ex-nobility, native or otherwise. You see, Britain fairly teems with the species, and there are more ex-princes around, White Russian and otherwise, than you can shake a stick at. Add to that the fact that we are not by any means a royal family—far from it. We have never been connected, either by blood or marriage, with any of the royal lines of Europe, and since my great-grandfather’s time, we have not even married into the dubious nobility of France or Spain. My great-grandfather found his wife in Wichita, Kansas, when he was on a hunting trip to the Great Plains here. He killed seven of your bison, and he was very proud of it, I hear, and he brought home as his wife a woman called Saidy-Lou Benson, who provided Paris and Madrid with half a century of gossip, and who was quite beautiful but of doubtful virtue and family. Since then, we have married people instead of titles, and as nobility, we hardly rate at all. So I’m not much of a prince, Shirley.”

  “You’re the only prince I ever had,” Shirley shrugged. “I don’t know about London, but the fact of the matter is that you’re the only prince I have ever seen or spoken to. When something’s in short supply, you can’t be choosy.”

  She smiled at him. “I don’t really mean that. You got to get used to me.” His face fell, and she added quickly, “I know—you have an appointment to be killed tomorrow. But if by accident we should both be alive next week, we’ll be introduced. I’ll introduce you to Cynthia, so she can introduce you to me formally, and then we can get to know each other. I’m joshing,” she added, “believe me. Go on. It’s all there except one thing. Why are they trying to kill us?”

  “You—well, you, Shirley, because you look like Carlotta.”

  “You said that Carlotta was dead.”

  “She is—but apparently they’re not sure. Carlotta’s mother died when she was twelve, and then she came to live with my mother in England. Then she was put into a school in Wales. Eventually, she became involved with a much older man, went off with him and then was abandoned by him. She was often sad and depressed, and when the affair was over, she found herself alone in Paris, friendless and penniless. Well, she killed herself. It was six months before the French police managed to find me, through Scotland Yard. She had no other relatives, and when she died, I had none.”

  “All right,” Shirley agreed. “Carlotta is dead. I feel sorry for her. Why have they decided to kill me instead?”

  “Because you look like Carlotta.”

  “So maybe a thousand people look like Carlotta. All they got to do is go to the French cops and get the proof.”

  “Yes,” the boy agreed. “They can get the proof that someone called Carlotta de Bernard died. But they can’t look at her. Meanwhile, as much as I have been able to find out, a Spanish olive grower came here to look into the question of plastic containers for olive oil. He was being shown through the place where you work, and he saw you. He decided you were Carlotta.”

  “Who is he?”

  “I don’t know—any more than I know who they are. When I got out of Eton, I found a job with a private family as tutor to two small children—a rather lonely place on the coast. I was walking along the cliffs one day when a car drove up. Two men jumped out, backed me up to the cliff with guns and then knocked me over. I was five months in the hospital after that. Once I had gone over the cliff, they went away and left me for dead.”

  “Poor kid,” Shirley said. “My heart goes out to you.”

  “The next time,” he went on methodically, “was a few months after I left the hospital. A car tried to run me down. I avoided it. A few days later, the same thing happened. I was terribly frightened.”

  “I should hope so,” Shirley said.

  “Dreams, nightmares—I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t walk through the streets without reacting like a frightened animal to every sound and motion. It was pretty awful.”

  “Did you go to the cops?”

  “Yes, I went to Scotland Yard. They had my story about the cliff, and I think they only half believed that. It was much easier for them to accept the fact that I had fallen over. The attempts by the cars they put down to my imagination. Oh, I was treated properly then, I assure you. They were quite polite and decent about the whole thing—because when you have a title, even the shabbiest kind of title—they are going to be pleasant to you. They listened to everything I had to say, and the more I said, the more I realized that I had absolutely no proof of anything, not even who I was.”

  “How could you not have proof of who you were?”

  He smiled sheepishly and nodded. “There it is,” he shrugged. “I neglected to tell you that when I was at the bottom of that cliff and left for dead, my pockets were emptied. The next day, as I learned, the same two men turned up at the house where I was employed, gave them some cock and bull story about my being called away, presented a note in a decent imitation of my handwriting and walked off with everything I had in the world. I told the police about that, and they were very patient and said they would look into the matter and check it out at Eton and some other places I suggested, and that meanwhile I could have a talk with the police psychiatrist, if I wished. Well, I did feel that I was going out of my mind, but I didn’t look for any help from a psychiatrist. Anyway, I’m a coward when it comes to facing up to something, and I had no desire for a psychiatrist to probe around in what passed for my mind. So they sent me to the Foreign Office instead, and I spoke to a man there who dealt with matters on the Iberian Peninsula. After I had told my story, he stared at me rather peculiarly for a while, and then, with a good deal of kindness, he informed me that
Prince James Charles Alexander had returned to Montort a year before this—or almost immediately after I was knocked over the cliff. I guess he could have been nasty about it, but he chose to regard me as some sort of poor idiot. He did warn me, however, that I was doing myself no good by going around and spreading wild and improbable stories, and that if I was, as I claimed, a resident alien in Great Britain, I could do myself a great deal of harm. He took down my address and said they would look into the matter, and that was that.”

  “And who was this prince who returned to Montort?”

  “I have no idea, and it doesn’t really matter. Someone they put up to it. There was no difficulty involved for them. They had all my papers, and no one in Montort had ever seen me.”

  “And who are they?”

  “I wondered about that. I had a sort of a job then, part-time tutor at a small private school in Kensington. It paid just barely enough to keep body and soul together, but it allowed me to live. Well, I went on teaching there for the next five weeks or so, and during that time, some of the situation was clarified. I came across an article in The Times about Montort. It seems that they had uncovered a very large and workable deposit of manganese there. Manganese is a very valuable and fairly rare mineral, and it seems to be essential to the technology of our times. There has always been a good deal of manganese in the Pyrenees, but not in workable quantities. The manganese find in Montort was one of the most important in modern times, and worth heaven knows how many millions. This discovery elevated Montort from the status of an obscure and unimportant principality to a vital bone of contention between Spain and France. Both were claiming the place, and meanwhile the hereditary prince had returned, apparently under the sponsorship of whoever was cleaning up the manganese—”

  “But who are they?” Shirley insisted. “You must know something. Who was the olive grower at Bushwick Brothers? Who kept you prisoner? Where did Seppi come from?”