If You're Reading This, I'm Already Dead Page 16

  So there was Kemali looking at me, and me looking at Kemali, and time passing at one speed or another while Zogolli stood puffing on a cheroot and blowing smoke rings at the ceiling.

  I had already worked out that Kemali was no stationmaster. I couldn’t push him aside with the threat of a stern word from the Emperor, but I reckoned he would expect a little bit of righteous indignation and whisker bristling.

  He didn’t get it. Instead I stood up sharply and said, “I see I have been the victim of some kind of practical joke which, you must understand, is as much of an insult to the throne of Turkey, my father and my family as it is to me. I cannot say what the consequences of this may be, but I will exert myself to the utmost to prevent war falling upon the people of Albania as a result of this outrage,” and I clicked my heels together and bowed like a clockwork soldier. “Uncle Vizier, we depart.”

  I think they might have been willing to leave it at that but, while I was standing at the door, waiting for somebody to open it for me, I said, “You realize, of course, this has no effect on your coded instructions whatsoever!”

  I stood looking at the door. It did not open. I said, “The door! Please.”

  “Actually,” said Kemali, “we were wondering what the coded section of your telegrams said.”

  I never even bothered to turn around but stayed ramrodstraight with my back to him. “Don’t say you’ve lost the code books.”

  “Something like that. The confusion of the war. You may imagine how it is, Excellency.”

  “Out of politeness I should pretend that I find myself amazed by your incompetence but, alas, my patience is wearing thin. Now, will you open the door or must I do even that for myself? My command is waiting.”

  “Your Excellency’s command?”

  I turned round with a snarl. “Kemali, the coded section of those telegrams was intended to inform you of the exact time of my arrival and to notify you that all Turkish forces still stationed in Albania have been placed under me. They were to form the core of the army of the free and independent Kingdom of Albania. Now they remain a sword of the great Ottoman Empire, lodged in the heart of this sorry little country.”

  The old man sat down with a thump and I thought Zogolli was going to swallow his cheroot. Kemali said, “Do you intend to occupy Albania again?”

  “A king can hardly ‘occupy’ his own country. On the other hand, I am not a king. I am a pasha, and occupation is what pashas do rather well. Kings are answerable to no one. As pasha, I await my instructions from Constantinople. As I said, I will do my utmost to spare the country.”

  “This is intolerable. Albania is a free and independent nation.”

  I sat down on the edge of his desk. “My friend, any room you are in, there is freedom and independence. Outside that room … nothing. But don’t worry. You have made all the necessary arrangements for a king and, when you do, at last, decide to send for one, who knows, he may even be acceptable to the Turkish forces stationed here. He’s sure to make a far better king than a humble soldier like me ever could. Perhaps Zogolli here—” I reached up, took his dangling cheroot from his open mouth and puffed on it—“perhaps Zogolli would be a good king. What do you think, Zogolli? Would you like that?”

  Zogolli said nothing. He just stood there, looking at me down his long, carrot nose, but when I blew smoke in his face and shouted “Boo!” at him, he almost jumped to the ceiling with terror.

  “Yes,” I said, “I feel sure Zogolli would make an excellent king. Now I have things to be doing.” I took the Professor by the elbow and all but dragged him out the door and into the corridor. “Just keep walking,” I whispered. “We’re getting out of here. Max is in the courtyard with the camel. Get on it and get moving.”

  “But Sarah! Where is Sarah?”

  “Don’t you worry about Sarah. I’m going to get her. We’re not going any place without Sarah.”

  I was trying to hurry down the passage but the old man was like an anchor holding me back and his cane was going tappity-tap on the stone flags, and behind us the sound of chairs being pushed back and men yelling at each other in Albanok and the calm, mellow voice of Kemali and doors slamming and feet hurrying, and up ahead the shape of the castle door with light showing all around it where the winds blew through in winter, and, louder and louder as we walked toward it, the sound of an angry hive—“Ooom-bret, ooombret” over—and over and I knew we were dead, I could hear it in their voices, and when we opened that door there would be nothing but bullets and pitchforks and the last thing I ever saw would be my mate Max with a rope round his neck and Sarah and Tifty tossed around by a pack of savages like broken dolls.

  “Right, Professor,” I said, “here we go!” and I gave the castle door a kick and walked out, ready to die like the king I never was.

  It was like opening the door of an oven. The bright light of the courtyard and then the chanting, “Ooom-bret, ooom-bret” like a punch in the face. I’ve heard it since. I’ve heard it again, that same rhythmic, rocking chant. I’ve seen it in the newsreels. I’ve seen the crowds surging around an open-topped car. I’ve seen the night sky lit up with thousands of burning torches and I’ve heard that empty, hungry howl again. It is an ugly thing. “Ooom-bret, ooom-bret …” But then they saw us and it changed and, for just a second there was silence and then wild, crazy cheering and mad, screaming delight.

  The Professor was pulling on my sleeve. “Mbret means ‘the king.’ They are calling for their king. They want you for the king, Otto!”

  I pushed my fingers through my hair, tugged my tunic down, shot my cuffs, tried to look a little more kingly and a little less like somebody who was getting ready to run for his life and I waved at the crowd with my famous, toffee-paper wave. And then Kemali and Zogolli and the rest of them came out of the door and joined us at the top of the castle steps.

  “Do you hear them?” I said. “Do you?”

  Kemali said nothing.

  “Maybe you should tell them that you didn’t ask me to be king. Maybe you should tell them you are waiting for a better offer—or you could give them Zogolli instead and see how they like that.”

  “I think we both know that the king of the Albanians is already standing here and he is not my good friend Zogolli.” Kemali offered me his hand again. “Welcome to your kingdom, Your Majesty.”

  When we shook hands the crowd went insane. Delighted gunshots started going off all over the courtyard and the crowd scattered as a gigantic Rolls-Royce came skidding through the castle gates with bandits hanging all over it, filling the running boards and clinging to the roof and a troop of wild horsemen clattering alongside, guns popping like carnival fireworks.

  I saw my mate Max fighting his way up the stairs to stand beside me as the bullets were going off, ready to put himself in the way of trouble, when a man with a bigger brain and a smaller heart—which is ninety-nine men out of a hundred—would have done their best to go the other way. But he was still smiling.

  “This is it, Otto. We gave it our best shot. Nobody’s fault. Just the roll of the dice.” He took my hand and said, “It’s been a treat. See you soon.”

  “But they like us! They like us! They don’t want to kill us. They want me for their king.”

  Max wasn’t paying any attention and I doubt if he could hear me anyway, what with the gunfire and the shouting and the men on their horses chasing our camel round and round on the cobbles. He turned to face the stairs, where half a dozen ugly thugs who smelled like a goat shed and made the Companions of the Rosy Hours look like prima ballerinas were coming up to greet us.

  He grabbed the first one by the throat and pushed him over the balustrade, down into the courtyard below, where the roof of the Rolls-Royce broke his fall. The second he lifted bodily and swung over his head while knives and pistols and good gold coin came raining down from the bloke’s pockets and he wriggled and he screamed and cursed. I don’t know what Max planned to do with him, whether he planned to throw the bloke down on his mates o
r whether he planned to stand there like a colossus, holding an armed man over his head while his body was riddled with bullets, but—as you already know very well—no bullets came. Instead, the ugly, goat-smelling men stopped in their tracks, put their guns away and broke out into applause with a stream of Albanok that sounded like a bucket of gravel sieved through barbed wire.

  “I have no idea what they just said,” said the Professor.

  “Warlords from the north,” said Kemali. “Five clans of them. It’s a difficult dialect, but they seem to like your friend. They admire his strength and they wish to put their swords at the service of the King of Albania. Also the hetman of each clan offers a daughter to Your Majesty. The girls are in the automobile—which is a little bent. It appears Your Majesty will have a harem after all.”

  “Well, that’s good news,” said Max.

  “Yes,” I said. “So you can put that bloke down now.”

  So that was how me and Max came to be in the royal apartments discussing my government’s policy on the supply of harems.

  After my public acclaim and once Kemali came to realize that he really didn’t have much say in the matter, it was all pretty straightforward. The warlords kicked their girls out of the Rolls so one of them could lie on the back seat and use his feet to push the dents out of the roof, and then I got on board for a stately progress through town to the palazzo that had been set aside for me. Naturally there was no room for Max and the others. I had to sit there, all alone in the back seat with nobody for company except a driver who smelt like ripe cheese and big hairy men with bad teeth hanging on the running boards to keep the crowds back. Using my patented “Angry Hungarian Daddy” method, I was able to translate their pleas for more royal cash to be flung out the windows, but I just smiled and waved and told them cordially to get stuffed in a language they could not understand.

  It took a couple of runs before the rest of the royal party was able to join me in my palace, so I had the place to myself for a bit and I went off to hunt for secret passages. I didn’t find any. It was all pretty much as I’d expected: a pleasant, comfortable palazzo up a drive with a grand, central lobby and fancy curving staircases and a hole in the roof where the early-evening sun peeped through, courtesy of the beastly Serbs. It could be fixed and I’ve slept in worse places. This is one.

  I walked along the upper landing and counted sixteen rooms on two wings with statues and paintings and pianos and fancy fireplaces and beds big enough to hold a dance in. Downstairs there was a ballroom with a chandelier as big as the moon, all wrapped in dust sheets and dangling from the roof like a hanged ghost, and a dining room with a table the size of an ocean liner and chairs lined up all around it and, beyond that, the kitchens with copper pans swinging from hooks and chattering at me as I passed and an iron range that filled the whole back wall. It was stone cold, of course, and I was tempted to get it lit, but really that’s not the sort of thing a king’s supposed to do. In fact, I doubt if a real king would have the first idea how to start a fire. That’s what you have servants for. So I didn’t bother in case it gave me away. Not being helpless is a sure sign of not being a king.

  When I heard a car horn and the sound of tires on gravel I went back to the lobby so I could stand on the stair looking stately and, sure enough, a few seconds later the door swung open and the smell of goats and wet dog and cheese came flooding in ahead of a lot of hairy Albanoks wrapped in greasy sheepskins.

  Max was bobbing about in the middle of them like a cork in the ocean, complaining bitterly that he had been forcibly parted from his camel, and Kemali was there, a huge handkerchief clapped across his nose against the stench while, in the light of the headlamps, I could see soldiers helping to unload the girls from the back of a cart.

  Kemali took his handkerchief away from his nose just long enough to wave it at me. “Excellency, Excellency, we must begin the arrangements for your coronation. There is much to discuss.”

  “Must it be now?”

  “Time is pressing, Excellency.”

  “But I have so many other concerns.”

  “What could be more important than your coronation?”

  “Many things, Kemali. For example, I seem to have mislaid my grand vizier.”

  “He’s outside. I saw him earlier.”

  “My camel has vanished.”

  “At the castle, Excellency.”

  “Don’t we have stables here at the palace? I need to make arrangements for the accommodation of my staff: my uncle, my manservant and, of course, my women.”

  “Your entire household has been transported.”

  “Then I hope my household has been expanded to include a cook, because I’m starving and my dinner is far more pressing than my coronation but, of all the pressing concerns which beset the King of Albania, the first and the most pressing is that the royal apartments are full of large hairy men.”

  “Excellency, they insisted on coming. But naturally there is a cook. Several cooks. The warlords and their followers expect to be fed. There are duties of hospitality.”

  “Kemali, if I was forced to endure that intolerable smell, I promise you I could not keep down a bite. Make them go away. Promise them all the raki they can drink, enough to drown themselves in, enough to wash away that vile stench, and put it on my account, but for God’s sake tell them it’s up at the castle.”

  “Yes, Excellency. If it means we can, at last, discuss matters of state.”

  He did. He was nothing if not helpful, old Kemali. He climbed up the stairs behind me and banged his cane on the banister until the yelling and screaming died down and then he made his announcement.

  I could tell from the cheering that they were pleased, but still they didn’t go home. A couple of them rushed past me, picked poor Kemali up by the lapels and carried him back down the stairs with his cane waving in one hand and his top hat waving in the other as he yelled, “They are delighted, Excellency. They offer thanks. They bless your name—and they demand that I accompany them as a hostage. I will tell the guards to remain with you.”

  And so he left, carried out the same door he came in at five minutes before and back to the same castle in the same Rolls-Royce but, even then, not all the Albanoks went with him. My seven new fathers-in-law lingered about in the lobby saying goodbye to their daughters, “Get good sons. Do as your mother said and you will end up as the favorite wife. I have to go and do some serious drinking now and, after that, we’ve got a war to fight,” and then they crowded out the door with a lot of handshaking and some breathtakingly foul embraces.

  With the Albanok warlords gone I was all alone with my new brides—apart from my mate Max and a bloke with a knife stuck in his belt who was wandering round opening doors accompanied by two boys carrying a lot of chickens and stuff.

  “He must be the cook,” said Max.

  “For God’s sake, help him find the kitchen,” I said. “It’s through there,” and I waved vaguely in the right direction.

  So, after that, I really was alone with my harem and, once I’d got over the smell, I had to admit they were as choice a string of fillies as you could have asked for. They lined themselves up on the polished marble floor and they knew how to fall in a lot better than that guard of honor I’d met in the morning. A couple of them were just schoolgirls and they were obviously going to have to be excused from the parade for a few years at least, but the others were more than acceptable and in a range of colors and sizes suitable for any occasion.

  I walked down the line to introduce myself, “Hello, I’m Otto. I’m the king.” I put out my hand, but the first in the queue had no idea what to do with it. She looked at me and she looked at my hand and then she looked at her own feet, so I reached out and put her hand in mine. You would’ve thought I’d wired her up to a battery. She jumped about a foot in the air and all the other girls shrieked—and then burst out into giggles. Well, they caught on pretty quick and the second one took my hand with no prompting and the little sisters joined in and the
giggling got worse and, when I gave my whiskers a bit of a curl they damn near swooned away. The last in the line had a real twinkle in her eye—I’d seen that look before and it needed no translation. By God, she was a healthy-looking, well-fed girl with a balcony you could’ve used for reviewing the troops and an ass on her, well, you might have cut steaks off it. She didn’t wait to be asked but stuck her hand out and, when I shook it, she laughed, way down deep in her throat.

  “Listen, liebling,” I said, “if you think holding hands is racy, I can tell you, you’re in for a treat with Otto.” And then, because she was gorgeous and because she was saucy but, mostly, because I could, I got a grip of her backside and I gave it a good squeeze. “Just you wait and see what I’ve got planned for you.”

  “So what have you got planned for her, Otto? Why don’t you tell us all about it?” And there was Sarah, standing in the doorway with her dad, Mrs. MacLeod and Tifty and, behind them, the sergeant of the guard, a long, tall man, grinning a wolfish grin.

  So, like I said, that was how me and Max came to be in the royal apartments discussing my government’s policy on the supply of harems.

  He arrived at my room with a plateful of chicken in one hand and two bottles of brandy threaded through the fingers of the other so he had to do back-heeled kicks against the door instead of knocking.

  You might think that two bottles sounds excessive, but we were like kids in a sweet shop and, anyway, I damn well needed it.

  Sarah was not pleased when she caught me sweet-talking that fat girl. Not pleased at all. If she had gone off like a rocket I think I could have stood it better but she didn’t do that. That wasn’t Sarah’s way. She was hurt and she went all silent and frosty, colder than a witch’s tit, all sharp and icy. Raging would have been easier to cope with but she just stood there, her eyes sparkling, waiting for me to say something while her dad glared at me with those hideous blank blue-black window panes and Mrs. MacLeod smiled her clever smile and Arbuthnot stood there in his ragged Albanok uniform, trying hard not to laugh.