family.” As the light blinked on, Jane and John towered and glowered above Jen, who leaned against the door and fended them off, laughingly, with an empty champagne bottle.
“If a yacht is moving at 35 knots per hour and you throw an 120 pound body overboard, how long before anybody notices she’s gone?” Jane wondered aloud.
“Well you need to rework the equation and plug in your friend Whitney,” Jen said. “Because she’s the genius behind Operation Underdog. She’s the mastermind behind the con. She’s spent the last two years kissing ass all the way to the top of Envy, Inc. It was her idea to get trainees to pay to crew a yacht, so clients get free service and Envy earns money plus employer good-will, win-win. They think she walks on water. She has their admiration and more important, she has their trust…”
At this point a monstrous snore interrupted their colloquy and they turned around to see Mr. Nicholson sprawled in an armchair, head thrown back, dead to the world. As they stared, he drew a deep guttural breath, seeming almost to swallow his tongue, which brought him chokingly to life. He opened one blood shot eye.
“Mr. Nicholson!” Jen warbled, hoping he had neither heard nor made sense of their interchange. “We didn’t see you there.”
He closed his eye again. “And yet here I am. And where else would I be? This is the butler’s pantry and I,” he asserted regally, “am the butler.” For no reason at all, he began to sing in a spirited if derisive tenor.
For we shall serve them, serve them, serve them,
We shall serve them all our days.
“The question is,” he said, portentously, “why are you here? When I was your age, I couldn’t follow my father into the pit; Maggie Thatcher was shutting them down. I couldn’t go out to the colonies, we’d given them all back. We had gone off war for the moment, so - my choices were extremely limited. That was thirty years ago. I can’t very well stand up and say this in front of a class, biting the hand that’s feeding me, and so forth, but what in bloody hell are you children thinking? And Americans of all things? You don’t have our ridiculous caste system in your country. Land of the free and all that. Do you really need a broken down son of a Brit to tell you that no sane person with a shred of self-respect should waste their life doing the shit work of others? To each their own shit work, that’s what I say. If everybody cleaned their own toilets we’d be halfway home to something like Eden by now. Did they finish all the bubbly, by the by?”
John checked, holding one dripping bottle up to the light. “Half a tank here.”
“Same,” Jane said, examining the bottle in her ice bucket.
“You clearly stand in need of advice, and after forty years of abstinence I stand in need of a drink. Glasses on the sideboard, my poppets.”
When they each had a flute in hand, he raised his in a toast, “To Mrs. Stevens - prickly as a hedgehog, but possessed of a damned fine bosom. And what’s more, like the miller’s wife in Chaucer, methinks she hath ‘a lickerish eye.’”
“Mrs. Stevens,” the three repeated dubiously.
“You were saying?” Jane prodded the butler, whose eyes had closed again.
“I was?” he sounded confused. “Indeed. Or rather, I already did. You don’t want to end up like me - measuring out your life in other people’s coffee spoons. You can’t have a proper home of your own, you know - and no children, not your own. I hope you don’t have children?” He looked at Jane imploringly.
“No, we’re good to go on that one,” John said brightly. A little too brightly. Jane shot him a dark look.
“After awhile,” Nicholson mused, broodingly, “They’re not human any more. When they get that rich. It separates them. They lose touch. They go blind. After awhile, they don’t care. They become - other. Alien. And that’s dangerous.” He held out his glass, which John instantly refilled.
“Dangerous,” Jen said. “How do you mean? For us? For them?”
“All of the above,” the butler said. He pointed a shaky finger in her general direction. “I direct your attention to Mrs. Stevens again. Her lips may say ‘your obedient servant’ - ah, but her eyes, her eyes say ‘off with their heads.’ I myself left my last position for one reason only. I could no longer fulfill my duties. I began to entertain the most distressing thoughts. I believe the experts have a term for it - ‘homicidal ideation.’ In particular, I became obsessed with a certain episode of an old telly program. One of yours.”
“The Brady Bunch,” Jen guessed. “Or Baywatch.”
“Marcia and homicidal ideation. I can see that,” Jane agreed.
“Kill Marcia if you must,” John said. “But spare Pamela Anderson. I’m shocked, shocked, Sparky. That’s Babewatch to you and me. Did you ever try turning off the sound?”
“I tried listening to Cosmos, but even Carl Sagan couldn’t save it for me.”
“I was speaking of The Twilight Zone.” Nicholson interrupted, gently. “A little piece called ‘To Serve Man.’”
A moment of silence. Ah yes, the cookbook episode. In which benevolent extraterrestrials are found to have an ulterior motive for befriending earthlings. It was also, Jane recalled, the motto on the military patch of the 509 Stealth Bomber Wing, along with a bit of Latin: “Gustatus Similis Pullus.” Which John had once translated as: “Tastes Like Chicken.” Way back when, that had seemed a harmless inside joke, aimed at conspiracy rubes who imagined Area 51 harbored flying saucers and such. Nowadays…
The spell was broken by a rude and insistent humming noise. Like a Bronx cheer given by an entire hive of killer bees. Jen held up a pager.
“Ask not for whom the buzzer tolls. Master cabin. Deck 4,” Jen said. “See ya.” And, like any good aspirant to the status of human chattel, she was gone.
“Toodles,” Nicholson said, draining his glass and sitting forward to set it on the sideboard. “I think that about covers it. Class dismissed.”
“You need anything before we go?” John said, lingering a minute, torn between pity and fascination. So many tortured souls. So little time. What a world, what a world. Jane was giving the glasses a quick rinse.
“May you ask if I require anything further before you retire?” Nicholson provided the preferred formulation, then sighed and lay back in his chair with the weary air of one whose work is never done. With his eyes closed, John decided, it wasn’t Alec Guinness that Nicholson resembled after all. It was Anthony Hopkins. ‘Remains of the Day’ meets ‘Silence of the Lambs’. “Thank you, no. Except - I trust you will hold our little chat in strictest confidence. Like the young man in the book, I have always felt a special responsibility for the innocent. It’s coming down to them or us, you know. Eat or be eaten.”
“Mums the word,” John assured him, feeling the hair prickling on the back of his neck. Jane slowly met his eyes. Dried her hands. Made a beeline for the door.
“There’s a good lad,” the butler smiled ever so slightly.
“Take it easy, Jeeves,” John said. “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.” Nicholson waved the way royals do, with palm inward and that weird circling motion of the wrist.
“Eat the rich,” he admonished. Merrily. The way some Brits say, “Cheery-bye!”
21 London Calling
“Three please,” Whitney said to the souvenir vendor, and he handed her three miniature Union Jacks emblazoned with a heart and a picture of a smiling couple. John and Jane immediately evinced distaste.
“I don’t do flags,” Jane said, upon being handed hers.
“Unless it comes with a martini the size of a bobby’s helmet,” John was willing to concede, eyeing the headgear of one of London’s finest. There seemed to be an uncommon lot of them. Bobbies, that is. “Unlike some people, I don’t give a damn whether it’s shaken or stirred, as long as there’s plenty of gin.”
“Protective coloration,” Whitney insisted, waving hers. “Think of it as a prop, part of your act. After two weeks
of rehearsal you are almost ready for your first live performance. Strike that. You’re already live and part of a cast of thousands - and you need to be smiling. There are over 1 million public surveillance cameras in this city, many wired for sound, and located everywhere, taxis and public bathrooms included. They’re basically looking for anything menacing, out-of-the-way, or suspicious. Fortunately, at the moment, facial recognition software is expensive and ineffective in a crowd situation. Look suitably overjoyed.”
John and Jane obediently grinned like lunatics and brandished their royal wedding favors.
“Brilliant,” Whitney approved, then dropped her u-class accent and her voice. “Now let’s go case the joint.”
They were in Westminster and so had only to walk a few blocks and cross over Vauxhall Bridge to get the lay of the land and a feel for the heightened security arrangements. As they walked, Whitney began to fill them in on the state of play.
“First off, so far you two are batting a thousand. Way to go! Our IMF friend gave his speech - and it electrified. Inequality, progressive taxation, social safety nets, the whole nine yards. He left no billionaire privilege unscathed. He basically smacked the global rich across the face and called out the last forty years of policy choices as the direct cause of the economic crisis, global misery, and international unrest. The back channels are burning up as the