Nowhere (22 page)

As I passed the school I glanced through the glass-paneled front doors and saw that the audience was once again entering the auditorium from the hall or lobby. It would seem as if news of the revolution had not yet reached them—or they were simply indifferent to it.

But changes had already been made at the hotel. For one, its name, according to the replaced brass plate on either side of the entrance, was now The Hotel Blond. I was confronted by the concierge, whose hair was now a mass of tight yellow curls and who had exchanged his tailcoat for a resplendent uniform tunic, draped with braid and bearing an embroidered legend on the left breast: again “The Hotel Blond.” I suspected that he had not only been the classic concierge in serving as police spy, but had typified the traditional police spy by being a double agent.

“Halt!” he cried from behind the desk. “Your identification!”

“Come off it.”

He flushed and brought, from under the counter, the Luger he had drawn on me once before, then with his free hand he banged the little domed bell before him. In a moment the bellboy appeared, the same whose flesh he had tried to sell me on numerous occasions. The concierge ordered him to search my person, which the lad proceeded to do, and though presumably a catamite he was discreet enough with his hands. He wore the old uniform with a newly embroidered Hotel Blond breast patch.

Next the concierge lifted the telephone and tried to reach the police but had no success. Lowering the instrument, he spoke to me as if I might be sympathetic.

“I suppose we must be patient. The changeover is not quite complete.”

I asked sourly, “What are you charging me with this time?”

“Refusal to identify yourself to an officer.”

“You’re an officer?”

“Do you not see my uniform?”

“It’s the costume of a hotel flunky!” I cried. “Whom are you trying to fool?”

“I’m afraid your troubles are growing,” he said with false regret. “
Everybody
in any kind of uniform is perforce an officer of the Revolution. It is a grave offense to insult one of us.”

“Just a moment. A mailman is an officer?”

“Certainly. As is a nurse.” He moved his heavy head from side to side. I suspected that though obviously he had been prepared with clothing and signplates, the Revolution had caught him with insufficient time in which to bleach his dark-dyed hair and that that which crowned his skull was a wig.

“This bellboy wears a uniform!” I pointed out.

“And he’s an officer,” shouted the concierge.

“Do you admit that the last time I saw you, a scant few hours ago, you showed quite another attitude towards the Blonds?”

He addressed the lad, who had withdrawn from me. “Lieutenant, what was consistently my position on the Blonds when they were a despised and oppressed minority?”

The boy clicked his heels. “Sir, you always admired them and in so doing took an enormous risk.”

“There you are,” the concierge said smugly.

I grimaced. “Your effrontery is breathtaking. As to the ‘lieutenant’ here, how recently was it that you were trying to peddle him for sexual purposes?”

“Oho.” The large man moaned in pleasurable anticipation. “I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes when I get hold of the police! Sexual inversion is of course counterrevolutionary, as is indecency with respect to a minor. The lieutenant is but seventeen years old. To have made importunities to him is the foulest of crimes.... Indeed, you are such a heinous criminal, all in all, that I am justified, as a colonel in the Revolutionary Blond Army, to sentence you to death on my own authority.” He raised the Luger to point at my head. It might have been a bluff, as so many things proved to be in Saint Sebastian, but I was not inclined to put him to the test.

Fortunately, I did not have to, for Clyde McCoy reeled into the lobby at that moment, leaned across the counter and disarmed the concierge, and spoke to me.

“
There
you are. I’ve been lookin’ for you, sport. Thought you might have located a source for something to drink by now.”

“You haven’t heard of the revolution?”

“Huh? Oh, that. That’s
their
business.”

“What will become of the prince, do you think?”

McCoy shrugged. “They’ll probably knock him off.” He took the clip from the Luger and returned the weapon to the concierge, who smiled obsequiously and thanked him. The bellhop had disappeared.

“You are curiously unimpressed,” I told the veteran correspondent. “You don’t expect your own status to be altered?”

McCoy gave me his bleary eye. “I took the poet’s advice many years ago and abandoned excessive expectation about anything. That philosophy has left me untouched by human hands, if you know what I mean.”

“But with all respect, McCoy, is that any way to live?”

He groaned. “You call this living? I haven’t had a drink for an hour!”

“The Blonds have closed the wine shops and taverns?”

He squinted at me. “Is
that
the reason? I thought they just ran out of goods, which happens a lot. The distillery breaks down.” He turned and lurched towards the door. “Come on.”

In truth, I had nothing better to do, not to mention that in such a time I felt secure in McCoy’s presence, the drunk tending to enjoy the status of a holy idiot in most cultures or anyway someone who is given a wide berth (except on the iconoclastic pavements of the Big Apple, where he might well be set on fire).

I followed McCoy out to his car and was about to take my chances with the passenger’s door when he directed me to enter by way of the window. I did so, sliding headfirst through the aperture, then falling inside. Meanwhile he inserted himself behind the steering wheel, and soon we were roaring and rattling up the hills towards the palace.

When I saw what our destination would be, I asked, “You think it’s the opportune time to go there?”

“Damn right,” said McCoy, setting his jaw. “I’m not going to let them get away with this Prohibition shit.”

“You can stop them?”

He scowled at the windshield. “I’m an American, for Christ sake.”

It was so strange nowadays to hear the term used in that way—though it was no doubt routine in the movies shown by the priest.

We gained the summit and shortly thereafter scraped to a stop against the wall overlooking the moat. We left the car and climbed the spiral staircase in the tower. The old journalist displayed an impressive spryness. No doubt he was energized by the expectation of getting a drink from the stores of the deposed monarch.

When we reached those corridors through which I had been conducted by General Popescu on my previous visit to the palace, I saw that the walls had been denuded of the so-called Old Masters.

We still had not seen a Blond, or, for that matter, anyone from the ancien régime, but when we finally reached the first of what had formerly been the sumptuously furnished antechambers to the throne room but now was empty except for a desk of gray metal, atop and around which were a number of matching accessories, intercom, wastecan, telephone, there sat a young fair-haired woman. She wore a suit of some gray material with a slight sheen, a white blouse, and a black bow tie. Her hair was pulled into a tight bun at her nape. She was wearing no jewelry and no makeup.

I had assumed that McCoy would continue and perhaps even intensify the truculence with which he had greeted my suggestion that the new leaders were teetotalers, but in fact he now turned on an old-fashioned charm, or in any event, what he obviously intended to be taken as such.

“Sweetie,” he crooned, so to speak quasimodoing his body, lowering his head to leer on the level of her own, “Could I ask you kindly to let me see Who’s in Charge?”

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.