Could there be such a malady? Perhaps I had misjudged him. But apart from that, he obviously had a stainless-steel gastrointestinal system.
My back ached. I was tempted to take a kick at the policemen myself, but I was still far from certain as to the rules or lack thereof in this situation. It would take me a while to lose my inhibitions against assaulting officers armed with guns and clubs, though that sort of thing was routine enough back home.
But complaining to the manager of the place one is currently living in is always permissible if not obligatory. I stepped up to the obese person back of the desk.
Before I could speak he crooned, “Ah, now you want a boy.”
I lost such little patience as I had retained. “No, you pederast’s ponce! How dare you accuse me of murder and put me through that humiliation?”
He stared at me for a while, I think to determine whether I was serious, and then he called back the policemen, who were just rolling their bicycles out the door. My heartbeat became irregular. Despite McCoy, were they going to re-arrest me?
But when they reached the desk, the fat man came out from behind his protection and extended his hands.
“It’s the pillory for me, I’m afraid. This gentleman charges me with exaggerated rudeness.”
The constables assumed stern expressions and proceeded to put him into the arrangement of manacles and chains from which I had only lately been freed. I felt no triumph. Indeed, I tried to register my protest—all I wanted was a simple apology and, more important, to establish the truth that those who make accusations should have sound evidence in support—I was about to ask the policemen to free the concierge, but McCoy restrained me.
“Don’t interfere,” said he. “That’s their way. I never make any trouble except when it’s my own ox being gored. Besides, he should be punished. That’s no way to run a hotel.”
The policemen led the fat man away, riding their bikes on either side of him, at none too slow a pace even while still within the hotel, so that he was forced to perform a brisk trot, which was anything but dignified for a man of his bulk.
I said to McCoy, “Those policemen brought their bikes in here? In New York that would make sense, but I thought these people didn’t steal.”
“You haven’t got the right idea yet,” said he. “There’s some theft here. What’s different is that nobody can make a career of it, if he loses a hand for every conviction.”
I took an extra breath. I had heard that that punishment, for which Xenophon had praised the younger Cyrus, was still being exacted in remote regions of Arabia, but in mid-Europe in the late twentieth century? This was turning out to be an appalling little principality.
“But are there still Sebastianers who would risk the loss of a hand for a bicycle, furthermore a bicycle that could easily be traced in so small an area and population?”
“It can’t be news to you that human beings do things at which they can be hurt,” McCoy said, with an appropriately cynical turn at one corner of his mouth. “Maybe because they’ll get hurt.” He frowned. “I wonder whether I need a drink to hold me until we get to the palace.”
“Palace?”
“Uh-huh,” he replied negligently. “The prince has invited us to lunch.”
“The sovereign of Saint Sebastian? This is incredible.”
“Don’t make too much of it,” McCoy said sourly. “Not that many tourists come here, the foreign diplomats left years ago, and he is afraid he might get assassinated if he sees his subjects, so he gets lonely.” He started for the door. There was no one at the hotel desk now that the concierge had been arrested, but that was not my problem.
We got into the car and McCoy drove, inordinately as ever, down the cobblestoned street, all but grazing a skirted priest wearing a wide-brimmed hat and riding a shabby bicycle. In response the man of peace raised a warlike fist. He was thus far the only person I had seen at large.
Soon we entered upon a steep ascent that would have been an effort for a powerful new vehicle. At times the soles of my feet were seemingly higher than my chin, and the ancient car had a deeper cough and a more violent shudder for each yard of the road. But we finally reached the summit and rolled across a paved area large enough to be a parade ground and approached the palace, which without doubt was the castlelike structure I had seen from the air. It was massive and of a chunky stone texture, with narrow slits for windows and a roofline of crenellations, really more of a fortress than a palace, if one thinks ideally of the latter as being characterized first by stateliness.
Sebastian’s robust residence suggested it could hold off an army—not one armed with nuclear weapons, certainly, or perhaps even howitzers, but certainly swords, maces, and battle-axes, and maybe even flintlocks, would be no threat to anyone within its walls.
We arrived before a great entrance gate, but could not use it until its massive door was lowered over the moat, which, probably because I had been staring up, I had not noticed before. McCoy stopped the car by colliding with an abutment. He blew the horn, and hard upon the echo the enormous door, made of thick wood bound and studded with iron, began its creaking descent. I was disappointed, when it was altogether down, not to be able to see into a courtyard, for another large door intruded.
We crossed the drawbridge, found a winding staircase in the tower to the left, and climbed, emerging eventually into a windowless room. As yet we had heard or seen no living thing, but now two men, in even more gaudy operetta uniforms than the police had worn, entered through one of the several doors in the far wall. They were husky young officers with ruddy cheeks; except for their eyes (respectively ferret and hound) and noses (Roman and snub), they might have been twins.
“Good day, Mr. McCoy,” said the one in the lead. “Perhaps you have explained the procedure to Mr. Wren.”
“More or less,” said my companion. He turned to me. “They search you, and then you put on the kimono.”
The second officer assigned himself to me. He was the one with the beady bright eyes and large nose. “How do you do,” said he, clicking his heels. “Mr. Wren. I am Lieutenant Blok. Please to come along to the changing room, if you will.”
He led me to one of the doors. McCoy, lurching along behind the other officer, gave me a smirk. The changing room was a small chamber furnished with a chair and a plain table that held what looked like a stack of navy-blue towels.
I stood there and did nothing for a while, not knowing quite what the drill was, and not wanting to be notably quick in stripping myself before a man.
As if reading me, Blok after a moment asked politely, “Would you prefer a female guard?”
Funny, but this offer did not seem as flattering to my sense of my own virility as it might have. “Certainly not,” I replied, and in no time at all was down to my briefs—the rather gaudily striped pair I had purchased, for a song, from a sidewalk vendor’s cardboard box on Fourteenth Street: how could I have known, upon donning them two mornings ago, that they would not be doffed until I was in a castle in a foreign land, about to meet an absolute monarch?
As each of my few articles of clothing came off it was handed to Lieutenant Blok, who examined it carefully. He now received my socks, which after two days might well have been a bit high.
“You must understand,” I said to this spotless officer in his shining boots, “I was whisked over here—” and then I remembered that as a secret agent I should probably not volunteer such details, though Rasmussen, with the same negligence that had characterized this assignment from the first, had failed to give me any such instructions. “I’m an impulsive traveler,” I said. “I jumped on the plane before I had a chance to shower.”
Blok made no reply, just continued solemnly to inspect the socks—as if one could conceal a lethal weapon there, despite the sizable hole in each toe.
And I’m sorry to say that I finally had to surrender even the striped drawers for the same search, and then was obliged to bend and spread my nether cheeks, should I be concealing a
vial of explosive.
3
WHEN BLOK FINISHED HIS inspection he bowed and left the room, and immediately in came a little officer resplendent in braid and wearing a sword. He clicked his heels.
“Mr. Wren, I am General Anton Popescu, commander of the Life Guards.” He took from the table what turned out to be, when unfolded, a rather handsome ankle-length robe of thick soft stuff, a kind of velour without excessive sheen, in a blue I now would call not quite as dark as navy. I put on this garment with considerable relief, and was next provided with a pair of sandals of soft black calfskin, soled with crepe rubber.
When I was dressed, the little general, who wore the thinnest of mustaches and whose hair was brilliantined and parted in the middle, opened the door through which he had come, bowed, and swept me onward with an expansive gesture. I found myself in a marble-floored corridor, the walls of which were lined with magnificent tapestries.
McCoy was waiting there, wearing a robe like mine. He said sardonically, “I see you weren’t carrying a grenade up your keister.”
I addressed the general. “These tapestries are splendid.”
“Indeed they are,” he told me. “When Leo the Tenth heard about them he demanded that Raphael make similar designs for the Vatican.”
“Do you mean—”
“To be sure,” said Popescu. “And for those the master was paid ten thousand ducats. These he did for the rewards of piety and the gratitude of Sebastian the Fifteenth.”
“The history of this country goes back that far?”
“Good gracious,” said Popescu, running a finger along one side of his mustache. “This country was venerable by the time of the Renaissance. There were Sebastianers who went on the First Crusade with Walter the Penniless, though to be sure few survived the journey through Bulgaria. They were wont to plunder the lands they passed through, you see, and sometimes the people who lived there took countermeasures. Sebastian the Third himself went to the Fourth Crusade: his Byzantine souvenirs can be found amidst the palace collections.”
As I dimly remembered, the Fourth was the farcical crusade: en route to smite the infidels, the Western Europeans stopped off to assault their fellow Christians at Byzantium and sack that great city. But it would scarcely be politic to make this point at that moment. Instead I indicated the nearest tapestry, on which was depicted a kneeling haloed individual about to have his brains bashed out by the boulder held high over the head of the person behind him.
“Who’s that poor devil?”
“Saint Stephen, being stoned,” said the general. “You know those old martyrs!”
McCoy was either blasé from having seen the tapestries too often or, more likely, had no taste for the fine arts. He was biting his lip and staring longingly down the corridor towards what one would assume was the expected source of his next drink: he had not had one for a good twenty minutes.
We went through a doorway into a large chamber, the walls of which were lined with dark-red silk against which were hung ornately framed oils, all of which were immediately recognizable.
I asked Popescu, “Isn’t that a copy of ‘Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer’?” The original of which was of course one of the Metropolitan’s most publicized possessions.
“In fact,” said the little general, wiggling his mustache-lined upper lip, “this is the original, done by Rembrandt for his patron Prince Sebastian the Nineteenth. If you have seen another elsewhere in the world, it is surely derivative of this.”
“Rembrandt was here?”
“Ah, my friend,” sighed Popescu, “he was but one of the many painters to the court of Saint Sebastian.”
I stared at the other walls, recognizing Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” and then one of the finest of the many portraits of Philip IV done by the great master whom he kept at the Spanish court.
“Velásquez was one of them?”
“Certainly,” said the general, indicating the polished brass plate on the picture frame.
I peered in close-up and read, “Portrait of Sebastian XV, by Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velásquez, 1599-1660.”
“This is remarkable,” I disingenuously noted. “Are you aware that this very face, in its many depictions, is elsewhere in the world invariably believed to be that of the Spanish monarch Philip the Fourth?”
The general gestured. “It does not surprise me at all. There have been many such misrepresentations throughout the centuries. No doubt it should be flattering to know that the world so envies us.”
I nodded at the “Botticelli” across the room. “Now, that superb canvas is elsewhere called ‘Birth of Venus’ and sometimes, jocularly, ‘Venus on the Half Shell.’ ” Popescu remained sober. “I believe it is the Uffizi which has an excellent example of it, which, naïfs or prevaricators, they call the original that came from the brush of the sublime Sandro.”
The general shrugged with all of his tense little body. “There you are, eh? And don’t ever think those wily Florentines naïve, my dear chap! Though it is true enough that Sebastian the Fourteenth more than once made an ass of Lorenzo, who between you and me was not all that Magnificent.... As everyone knows, the model for that picture was Queen Sebastiana the Third, done by Botticelli when he was her court painter and perhaps something more.” He gave me a significantly cocked eyebrow.
“Remarkable! A nude depiction of a reigning princess?”
General Popescu smiled in pride. “Our rulers have often been notable for their lack of shame.”
“They’ve all been called Sebastian or the female version?”
“No,” said Popescu. “There have been Maximilians, Ferdinands, and at least one Igor.”
“And surely amongst the princesses’ names were Isabella and Carlotta?”
“Indeed,” said the general. “I see you’ve done your homework.”
We went through two more rooms hung with the pictorial treasures of the Renaissance. McCoy had long since disappeared.
Finally Popescu said, “Forgive me, but I must take you to the prince. He does not care to wait for his meals!”
He led me to a doorway and stepped aside. I went through it and was met by a horse-faced lackey wearing a green tailcoat, buff knee-breeches, white stockings, and buckled shoes. He held a tall staff, which, as I stepped across the threshold, he lifted and thumped buttfirst upon the floor.
He cried, “Mr. Russel Wren!”
Good gravy, I was in the throne room! There, at the far end of a crimson runner, on a three-stepped stage, sat Prince Sebastian XXIII, or anyway it was to be presumed that the distant figure was he: I would have to walk an eighth of a mile to be certain, between two ranks of trumpeters who, hard on the final echo of the stentorian announcement of my name, raised their golden instruments to their lips and began to sound a deafening fanfare. When these musicians were at last done, my head remained, for almost the entire trip down the carpet, as a cymbal newly struck, and the prince was a growing but tremulous image, so agitated was my vision.
He wore a golden crown and red, ermine-trimmed robe.
As I reached the last ten feet of the red runner, it occurred to me that I must make the traditional gesture of obeisance that was probably expected of everyone, even an American democrat, who finds himself before a throne, but still shaky from the fanfare and utterly unprepared for this moment—wretched Rasmussen, to ship me over without adequate training!—I made a fool of myself: I forgot about bowing, which in fact I had not done since appearing, with powdered hair, in a grammar-school re-enactment of Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown, and instead plucked an imaginary skirt at either side of mid-thigh while dipping at one knee. In a word, I curtsied.
This performance was greeted with explosive laughter from the throne. “How do you do, Mr. Wren,” said the prince, still shaking with mirth. “Welcome to my country.”
“Thank you, sir.”
His plump face was the kind that one assumed had been almost beautiful as a boy, and he still had rosy cheeks an
d long-lashed dark eyes. With a hand to steady his crown, he now stood up. He looked to be of medium height. The long red robe concealed the particulars of his body, but there could be no doubt that he was very corpulent.
“Shall we go to lunch,” he said, without the implication of a question mark. Lifting the robe slightly, so that the hem would not trip him up, he descended the stairs. When he stood beside me I saw that he was not nearly so tall as I had supposed when viewing him from a lower level: the eminence and the long robe had created an illusion. In reality he was much shorter than I. Which is not, however, to say he lacked that mysterious presence called royal.
A liveried lackey preceded us to the dining room, which was not so far distant from the throne room as I should have supposed, given the size of the palace. The dining room itself was enormous, with a table long enough to have fed dozens. A little army of formally dressed servitors was lined up in silent ranks.
An aged man, festooned with gold chains and keys, shuffled up to meet his sovereign. But what he had to say was reproving. “You shouldn’t be wearing that crown. It’s not at all the thing to wear at table, it really isn’t.”
“You old fool,” Sebastian said, “it’s my crown and I’ll wear it when I please. Don’t interfere or I’ll have you flayed.” So much for the words: his delivery, uncertain and even a bit fearful, was at odds with them.
The old man came forward then and, putting out his tremulous hands, took the crown from the prince’s head. “Now, you just eat your lunch like a good boy, and we’ll say no more about it.” He gestured to one of the servingpeople, a young man with large ears, and gave him the crown, which was golden and encrusted with bright gems. It was the first I had ever seen in use, and frankly it did not altogether escape vulgarity: the jewels looked synthetic.
Sebastian made no resistance, but he stamped his foot once his head was bare. “I did so want to wear it for once while eating. You are a withered old person, a feebleminded dotard.” His short dark hair showed the impress of the crown.