She nodded crisply and bent over a chart that lay flat on the desk pad. She stabbed at a certain place with the eraser of an unsharpened pencil. “I can give you five oh five P.M., Wednesday the twenty-fourth.”
“Honey,” said McCoy, “that’s next week.”
“It’s next month.”
“Now, darling,” said the veteran newsman, “I’m Clyde McCoy, pool correspondent for a number of important American wire services and TV and radio networks. I’m sure you folks would want me to give you a good send-off in the dispatches I send back to the States.”
“One moment, sir,” said the receptionist, and she threw a switch on the intercom and spoke into it so rapidly that I could not grasp a word. She was answered with a grunt.
She nodded. “You may proceed.”
“Thank you, snookums,” said McCoy, and we opened the door behind her and entered the next room. This was another of the chambers that had been hung with the royal collection of bogus paintings. Like the one we had just left, it was now furnished only with a metal desk. Behind this one sat a young man dressed in a suit of the same material as that of the girl next door, a white shirt, and a black bow tie. He was ex-Lieutenant Blok, of the old palace guard, the officer who had strip-searched me just that morning. His hair was now blond.
He asked brightly, with a touch of arrogance, “May I help you?”
McCoy used another style this time. He swaggered up and rested one buttock on the edge of the desk. “Maybe you can, sonny-boy, maybe you just can. I wanna see the Big Fellow.”
“And who would that—”
But McCoy interrupted with a pointing finger. “Just call me through, junior, and I won’t report you for having pecker tracks on your fly.” He winked, got up, and did not bother to wait for Blok to execute the orders; the latter at the moment was conducting an anxious inspection of his trousers.
In the third room, the last of the antechambers, was an exceptionally large and husky man, whose blond hair was clipped close to his outsized skull. He looked uncomfortable in the gray suit and black bow tie and out of place at a desk.
He asked, in the hostility-tinged though technically neutral voice of a professional in the craft of bringing people to, or keeping them in, order, “What do you fellows want?”
The versatile McCoy made another change of tone or tune. He barked, “You call this security?”
The big man’s eyes lost half their diameter. “What do you call it?”
“Swiss cheese,” said the journalist. He pulled a pen from an inside pocket of his wretched jacket and pointed it at the large Blond. “If this was a gun, you’d be a memory.”
“Yeah, but you wouldn’t get any further unless I pressed this button,” the large man said, reaching under the desktop.
McCoy found a piece of paper in his breast pocket and unfolded it. “All right. That’ll go in my report.”
“Report?”
“He and I are doing a security check,” said McCoy, nodding at me. “You just squeak through—unless I decide otherwise.” He put the paper onto the desk and scribbled on it. “Now hit the button.”
The big man did as asked. One of the double doors swung open, and we passed into what had formerly been the throne room of Sebastian XXIII.
Now the long chamber was in the process of being subdivided, like one of those contemporary office floors, by the introduction of standing panels of opaque corrugated plastic. An army of carpenters was so occupied. Meanwhile desks were in place, in a regular pattern throughout the vast room, and gray-suited Blond functionaries were already seated at them. Every one at whom I looked was speaking on the telephone, perhaps to a colleague in the same room, for when one hung up, the rest of them did the same. The throne was gone, as was even the dais on which it had stood. The entire corps of gray suits was now, simultaneously, stapling sheaves of paper.
I stopped at one desk and asked, “Where’s Olga?”
“Olga who?” The young woman continued to use the stapler.
“Then who’s in charge?”
“Of which department?”
“The whole country.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” said she. “That’s not my job.”
I started to leave, but on second thought tarried to ask, “What is your job?”
She put a finger to her cheek. “I haven’t been told yet. I was just hired.”
“At the end of the day?” I asked. “Without warning? I see a movie, and when I come out, a revolution has occurred?”
She gave me a sympathetic sad smile. “I don’t know about that. But as my old teacher, Sister Therese, used to say, ‘In the movies you lose all track of time, don’t you?’ ”
I left her. It was then that I observed that McCoy was no longer in the vicinity. I scanned the area but saw only gray suits and workmen carrying panels of corrugated plastic.
I left the throne room and went through more barren halls, looked into more chambers, and saw more gray desks and people who, except for their hair, matched them, and now computer terminals were beginning to appear on the desktops, but I did not encounter anyone from the ruling group of Blonds whom I had met in the subterranean room at the fireworks factory. To the naked eye this revolution looked as though it had succeeded only in transforming the palace into a branch of IBM.
Finally, in one of the marble corridors I met someone I recognized: Popescu, now apparently an ex-general, for he was wearing coveralls and pushing a longhandled broom.
I had no wish to embarrass him, but I was desperate for news as to what had taken place. “General,” I said, “I—”
Tears sprang from his eyes. He dropped his broom and embraced me. “You remembered! Oh, how kind!”
“It was only this morning,” I said. I stepped back: he stank of sweat. “Was there much fighting? Did you resist? Is the prince dead?”
Popescu shrugged. “It was astonishingly quick. It happened after lunch, when we were all taking our siestas.”
“But the palace guard?”
“Undoubtedly there would have been bloodshed had they been attacked with routine weapons, but you could well imagine how terrifying it was to confront an invasion of moving-men carrying metal office furniture and computer equipment, followed by one shock wave after another of clerks wearing vulgar lounge suits cut from synthetic stuff, and black bow ties.”
“The prince was captured?”
“One assumes so,” said the ex-general. “One is reluctant to ask too many questions. I trust I won’t be harmed if I do a good job at this.” He brandished his broom and even managed a smile.
“Would you know a big Blond named Olga?”
He shook his head.
“She was the leader of the liberation movement.”
“I’m afraid I’ve never heard of it.”
With some impatience I said, “They’re the people who made the revolution. You know, the Blonds.”
“Not this revolution, with all respect.”
“But all the people working here have fair hair.”
“Indeed. As everyone knows, Blonds make the best bureaucrats. They have the sort of docile temperament that is ideal in such a situation, and are especially good at such routine tasks as using the telephone, the Wheeldex, and the computer terminal.”
“Then who did lead the takeover? Who’s the boss now?”
“Gregor.”
“Who in the world is he?”
“He’s the man in charge,” Popescu said curtly, and began to apply his broom to the floor between us. “He’d not be likely to notice anyone in my lowly position: at least, I pray he won’t.” He gave me a fearful wince and moved on.
“But I’m an American,” I cried. “Where can I find him?”
He told me which turns to make, then returned to sweeping the floor he had lately strode in polished boots. I followed his directions, arriving at last at a suite of interconnecting rooms, the last of which was made, walls, floor, and the stupendously large bathtub embedded in the latter, of white m
arble with prominent blue veins.
An obese body was lowering itself into the tub as I entered.
Obviously these were the royal quarters, and the prince was quite OK, though apparently not attended by any of his former people or anyone else.
“Your Royal Highness!” I began to apologize.
But I had had a rear view. When the huge rump had disappeared below the surface of the water, followed by half the massive block of flesh that formed his back—the oversized tub must have been a yard deep—the head turned and the profile I saw was not that of Prince Sebastian but rather that of my acquaintance from the Hotel Bristol, the enormous and silent but affable lover of Caruso and pesto!
He now spoke for the first time. “Meester Ran. Please to take seat.” He gestured at a scroll-armed bench, a kind of Roman thing, against the nearest marble wall. His accent was not Italian.
I did as asked and said, “You are Gregor?”
His body made a movement that caused the water to be agitated briefly. “And you,” he asked, “are from the Firm?”
I neither confirmed nor denied this as he found a sponge and a cake of soap in niches in the tub above the waterline, and began to abrade one against the other.
Instead I asked, “I am told that you are running this thing.”
He made a moue. “I halp Sebastiani pipples.”
“The Blonds?”
“Bluns, everybody.” He had worked up a supply of lather sufficiently generous to hide his hands.
“But you are not yourself a Sebastianer.”
“Nor you,” said he.
“That’s true, but I haven’t made a revolution.”
He began to soap his shoulders and hairy upper chest with the lather-laden sponge. “Not ravolution, but improved efficiency.”
“What have you done with the prince?”
“He laft.”
“Where was he taken?”
Gregor began to work soap into the thick black hair atop his head. “Wherever he wants.”
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Gregor,” said he. He left his soapy scalp to pick up the floating sponge and push it in my direction. “Wash my beck.”
I rose abruptly, but rather to show my resentment than to obey his command. “While the liberation movement was playing its naïve little game, you simply walked in and took over the country, didn’t you? But what I want to know is, why? Surely you must have seen that it is a place of no consequence in the greater scheme of things.”
He smiled broadly, displaying the gold teeth at either end of his dental range. “You was going to.” He shook the sponge at me again. “Scrob my beck!”
“The joke’s on you,” I said. “I was just about to make my final report that the place is worthless. You’ve got a white elephant on your hands. Don’t you know that nobody works? Most of the populace spends its days at the movies, and the economy runs on credit. The country’s too small to be of strategic value and has no useful raw materials. What can you use it for?”
“Example of democracy in action,” said he. He gave me a stare of some duration, then whistled and in a moment and from nowhere appeared three stocky men with the faces of plug-uglies. They stood glowering at me. They were not Blonds. They were much more formidable-looking than the old black-suited secret police of Helmut’s.
I went to the tub, crouched on the marble floor, and accepted the sponge, which under the circumstances felt slimy but probably was not literally so, and did as ordered. He had quite a growth of hair on his shoulder blades.
“Is that sufficient?” I asked after I had scrubbed for a while.
“Sure,” said Gregor.
I returned the sponge to him and got to my feet.
“See,” he said, grinning up at me. “I ain’t so bed a guy! At least you din’t never have to wash my balls!” He laughed so heartily that he almost lowered his face into the lathered water. When he recovered his breath he said, “So you can go in peace, Ran. Sebastiani Airline got a night flight leaves one hour. So long and have a nice day.”
“I’m being expelled?”
“I don’t believe you was ever here, you know?” Gregor said, not unkindly. As one might say, he was only doing his job.
“Well, obviously you’ve won,” I said, “though I’m not sure how or what. Do you intend to put a lot of people to death as counterrevolutionaries?”
He smirked. “You got crazy ideas. We ain’t going kill anybody. Put them to work on public projects! Make life better for pipples.”
“What kind of work?”
“Farmss.”
“Huh.” I tweaked my chin. “I never thought about it—there’s a New Yorker for you—but obviously they must have some domestic sources for food, since I was told they didn’t import much.”
“Nice farmss beyond airport,” said Gregor. “All the way to the base of mountains, and farmers work hard, don’t sit in movies all day. We make more farmers.”
This was beginning to make sense. “And if you grow a surplus of food, you’ll export it, no doubt?”
Gregor rose dripping from the tub. He had a remarkable body, fat but not soft; perhaps when younger he had been one of the super-heavyweight power-lifters for which his culture was famous. I half expected him to order me to give him a toweling, but I was wrong. He had a nice sense of proportion; he had already made his humiliating point.
He answered my question. “They don’t need all the food they got. They going to plant flowers.”
“I’ll be damned. You’re not going aesthetic, are you, Gregor?”
“Poppies,” said he, with a slow smug smile.
I was even more damned now, but I did not say so. Instead I chuckled humorlessly. “I didn’t know you guys use the stuff.”
“Not us,” said Gregor. “But you sure as shit will!” Now his laughter was so violent as to shake his vast body, watching which was as if to await an eruption of Mount Saint Helens. The marble room continued to ring for some time after he had stopped. His bravos were slow to join him in mirth, no doubt because they were deficient in English, but one of them brought him a towel.
Unfortunately I had no rejoinder, expecting as I did that the Western world would end not with a whimper but a fix. I changed the subject. “Mind telling me what became of Sebastian’s collection of art?”
“Confiscated,” Gregor answered. “Is nawt right for one man to have all expensive stuff. Give to pipples.” He spread wide his treetrunk legs and went between them and under the great projection of his belly to dry his crotch, vigorously tumbling his genitals in a towel.
“But which people?”
“Hell’s bells,” said he. “We are all pipples, ain’t we?”
He did not seem to be aware that the artworks were counterfeit. It was my one pitiful score off him and secret at that, but it was a point on which to leave.
“Good-bye, Gregor. I can’t say it’s been a pleasure, though to be courteous I suppose I should thank you for the pesto. Where’d you learn to make that?”
“Travel lots of places,” said he, gesturing. “Gosh, I like to pick up some culture. Food! Opera!” He abraded his breech with the towel. “See you next place, Ran.”
“Only in the funny papers, Gregor,” said I. “I’m not a pro at this. I know it’ll give you only more contempt for me to hear it, but I’m essentially a playwright.”
He was drying his armpits. “Hey,” he cried, “you could stay here and write some plays.”
My chance had come at last! Who knows what might have become of me had he not added, “Nice plays to show pipples how to behave themselves.”
“Pity,” I said, “but my work is the degenerate stuff that would have just the opposite effect: Manhattan slice-of-life, characters who pay two-thirds of their income for an uncomfortable apartment and the remainder to a psychiatrist, who forsake parents, spouses, close friends, to search for someone who can really love them.”
He put a twist of towel into one ear socket. “Be good for bad ex
amples.”
“I doubt it. See, I make them sympathetic. I’m afraid I would be a subversive element.”
He scowled at me. “In all the world, only an American would boast of that.”
“Then maybe there’s still some slight hope for us.” I left before he could change his mind.
10
IN MY EAGERNESS TO leave the palace I forgot about McCoy and remembered him again only when I saw his car just across the drawbridge. He was sitting behind the wheel, drinking from the neck of a magnum.
He grimaced at me as I slithered into the car via the window. “This was all that’s left. They already poured out most of the old brandy and other spirits. They got gangs at work on that, at the drains of the royal laundry. Fucking barbarians!”
“I’m supposed to leave the country on the next plane,” I told him. “You’d better come along.”
He let some more wine run down his throat and made a pickleface. He handed the bottle to me. “Did this go bad? Taste it.”
I did as asked, then looked at the label: it was the legendary Romanée-Conti, the biggest of the reds, too costly for anyone but reigning monarchs, sitcom stars, and defense counsel for the downtrodden. “It’s just too good for you, McCoy. What about leaving Saint Sebastian?”
He reclaimed the bottle. “God, I don’t know. And leave everything I’ve built up over the years?”
“Which is what? A crummy hotel room?”
“Shit, I’m not ready to go Stateside just yet.”
“It’s been forty years since that war ended!”
He gulped some more wine. “I wonder if Time or the AP could use a Continental smut correspondent on a regular basis?”
“You could always ask,” I said. “But let’s get going. I’m supposed to catch the plane within an hour.” I told him about Gregor.
“One of the things I’d miss is this old bucket of bolts. I hear they got all-metal station wagons now—?”
“Yes, I think since before I was born. No doubt you’ll find everything has been changed since you left, but the same is probably true of every other place. I hear Paris and London have been stacked with glass skyscrapers since I was there on summer vacation, via Icelandic Airlines, less than twenty years ago.” McCoy’s presence brought out the nostalgia in me.