Copyright

The Friday Project An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This ebook first published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2013

Copyright © Ian Thornton 2013

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2013

Ian Thornton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

FIRST EDITION

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007551491

Ebook Edition © NOV 2013 ISBN: 9780007551507

Version: 2015-09-08

To Heather, Laszlo and Clementine

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue:

A Refracted Tale of Two Wordy Old Gentlemen in a Blue Prism

Part One

1 Around the Time When Adolf Was a Glint in His First Cousin’s Eye

2 Pawn to Queen Four

3 Serendipity’s Day Off

4 The Butterflies Flutter By

Part Two

1 Fools Rush In

2 A Vision of Love (Wearing Boxing Gloves)

3 Drago Thoms: Pythagoras, Madness, and an Indian Summer in Bed

4 The Kama Sutra, Ganika, and Russian Vampires

5 We Are the Music Makers. We Are the Dreamers of Dreams.

6 A Sweet Deity of Debauchery

7 A Day (or So) in the Country

8 Just a Lucky Man Who Made the Grade

9 The Accusative Case

10 The Black Hand

11 The Day Abu Hasan Broke Wind

12 A Microcosm of the Apocalypse

13 A Farewell of Scarlet Wax and Gardenia

Part Three

1 And the Ass Saw the Angel

2 It Only Hurts When I Laugh (Part I)

3 The Die Is Cast (aka Les Jeux Sont Faits)

4 The Unlikely Bedfellow

5 “Ciao Bello!”

6 The March of Don Quixote

7 In No-Man’s-Land

8 “A Shadow Can Never Claim the Beauty of the Image”

9 The Birth of Blanche in a Dangerous Ladbroke Grove Pub

10 Cicero’s Fine Oceanarium of Spewed Wonders (1920–1932)

11 Suffragettes, Mermaids, and Hooligans (1932)

12 Let’s Rusticate Again

13 Jackboots, Cleopatra, and the Bearded Lady (1932–1936)

14 The Girl in the Tatty Blue Dress

15 She Had a Most Immoral Eye (1937–1940)

16 Archibald’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

17 Then There Were Three Again

18 Music, Brigadiers, and Marigold (1940)

19 It Only Hurts When I Laugh (Part II)

20 “Gawd Bless Ya, Gav’nah!”

21 A Giant in the Promised Land

22 Pepper’s Ghost, Fluffers, and a Brief Encounter

Part Four

1 “Everybody Ought to Go Careful in a City Like This” (1945)

2 The Return of Abu Hasan

3 The Brigadier’s Au Revoir

4 The Veil

5 A Blue Rose by Any Other Name

6 Dragons, Confucius, and Snooker

7 “I Know Who You Are!”

8 The Death and Life of a Grim Reaper

Epilogue

Notes

Acknowledgments

About the Publisher

Prologue
A Refracted Tale of Two Wordy Old Gentlemen in a Blue Prism

A rural cricket match in buttercup time, seen and heard through the trees; it is surely the loveliest scene in England and the most disarming sound. From the ranks of the unseen dead forever passing along our country lanes, the Englishman falls out for a moment to look over the gate of the cricket field and smile.

—J. M. Barrie

2009. Northern England

I sat with my grandfather Ernest in a very comfortable, spacious ward in the hospital in Goole. The doctors had said that he would not live for much more than a week.

Goole is as Goole sounds, a dirty-gray inland port in Yorkshire not far from England’s east coast. More than one hundred years earlier, Count Dracula might well have grimaced as he passed through, en route from Whitby to Carfax Abbey. Most foreigners (and some southerners) think it is spelled Ghoul, especially after their first, and invariably only, visit. This is where Ernest’s final days were to be spent, though at least the hospital sat at the very edge of town and his window faced the more pleasant countryside.

It had been a rapid decline for a man who, well into his nineties, on the eleventh day of the previous November, had walked the three and three-quarter miles to the train station before daybreak. He had traveled south on three trains of varying decrepitude and two rickety tubes to stand by the Cenotaph on Whitehall with thousands of others. Many were bemedaled, some wheelchaired, but each had a shared something behind the eyes and a similar thought focused just above the horizon, as the high bells of St. Stephen’s in Westminster struck eleven and the nation fell silent. Then, with only tea accompanied by Bovriled and buttered crumpets from the Wolseley on Piccadilly as fuel, he had made the return trip the same day, pushing open, with untroubled lungs, his unlatched door way past the time that saw most decent folks in bed. He had told me that it was the only day he could ever remember when he had not conversed with a single person. He had had his reasons.

Now he tugged at a length of clear plastic tubing, which disappeared under sterile white tape and into the wattle of his forearm; an artificial tributary into the slowing yet still magnificent deep red tide within. He did not appear to be uncomfortable. On the contrary, he exhibited a strong and urgent desire to speak.

He gestured toward the clock above his bed with his right hand. “In the story I am about to tell, please bear in mind the possible minor defects and chronological leaps in the memory of a dying man or two. Exaggeration is naturally occurring in the DNA of the cadaver known as the tale. This is important.” He looked straight at me in the way that he always had, in order to let me know that this part of the game was not to be taken lightly.

I do not paraphrase, for my grandfather spoke this way from as far back as I can recall. His deliberate and florid verbals had always transformed the planning, execution, and completion of what for a young lad might otherwise have been everyday chores, into marvelous adventures of joyous nonsense. He turned tuneless whistles into lush arias effortlessly.

He had been my mentor and teacher, instructing me on how to hold a fish knife, stun a billiard ball. He taught me the subtleties and implications of en passant on the chessboard. He knew whether to introduce the team to the Queen or the Queen to the team. He taught me that the correct answer to “How do you do?” is indeed “How do you do?” Of his early life, I vaguely recall references to his days as an emetic, vicious, ear-tugging martinet of a schoolmaster; his inherited connections to and shares in the Cunard shipping line, gained through an ancestor’s good fortune in a Cape Town card game over ever-cheapening rum with bothersome (but luckily pie-eyed and wobbly) pirates; his junior partnership with Sir Thomas Beecham,¹ England’s greatest-ever conductor and founder of both the Royal and the London Philharmonic orchestras; dinners with royalty, with Niven and Korda, Gielgud and Fonteyn, Olivier and Churchill. I remember framed monochrome photographs of him at that time, as a young man in a Savile Row tuxedo, Jermyn Street cuff links, well-heeled Bond Street shoes, a heavily starched shirt, and a head of black hair expertly topped off with a light Brylcreem.

This did not seem to me to be the same person who, from the boundary rope on summer afternoons of my boyhood, taught me the lengthy names of Welsh railway stations, chuckled at cricketers being struck in the groin or on the backside, and joyously read to me Kipling, Barrie, and The Captain Erasmus Adventurer’s Book for Boys, Daredevils and Young Kings. And he was far from the man who lay before me now, though from the neck up, at least, he appeared unchanged—his matinee idol’s widow’s peak proudly silver, his eyes active and mischievous. The sunken contours of the bedsheets, however, suggested that much of the man I had known all my life was already gone.

I suspected that it was right to remain silent. I thought it misplaced to counter his statement about dying men, for we knew each other too well. He would indeed die, in this bed constructed for such purposes. He would soon be not breathing. And cold. I knew I must simply listen.

I had always loved my grandfather’s stories. At first, I believed them absolutely. Later, I tried to distinguish between truth and fairy tale. I often got this wrong. Of course, I had been spoon-fed cynicism from an early age by Ernest’s wife, Betty, my dear late grandmother, who had told me repeatedly, “Lad! Never believe anything of what you hear, and only half of what you see.”

But of all the stories he ever told me, not one compared to the one he now told me in the last hours of his life. I believed him then. I still believe him.

* * *

It was during a stint as the mayor of Goole that Ernest, a very sprightly eighty-eight, spent two weeks in the hills outside Sarajevo in the sublimely warm and cloudless April of 2003, attempting to find a twin town for his parish. Sarajevo had been chosen for personal reasons; Ernest had recently read his father’s wartime diaries, in which the old city had featured heavily and whose characters had enthralled him.

Very early one Friday morning, Ernest stumbled across a shack in a village destroyed by war, a hermitage surrounded by a sea of flowers, a prism of blues, azures, cobalts, teals, and beryls. Of lilacs and violets.

Ernest recalled with absolute clarity the fine sapphire haze through which he walked. Peeking through a grubby, splintered pane, he saw a small, square room, with unsure blue light leaking in from another window on the opposite wall. An old man was moving slowly within, declaiming loudly enough for Ernest to hear from outside.

“I am the Resurrection.

And I am the Life . . .”

Ernest tapped on the window. The old man stopped moving and turned slowly to him, seeming to beckon him in.

Ernest entered the shack hesitantly. The door opened slowly and required the help of Ernest’s upper arm to overcome the resistance, though there was neither lock nor latch. There were minimal signs of a woman’s recent presence: a tray with two plates, cutlery and an empty goblet, a jug of water, a vase of yellow roses. By them he saw an exquisite old man, with a mournful, creased countenance and worldly-wise eyes that appeared a youthful blue.

“Welcome to my humble abode,” the old man said in a superb English accent. “You might be in a position to help me. The alignment of events is quite remarkable, and I see now perhaps necessary. Are you fond of mathematics, my friend? Symmetry? Patterns? The Laws of Physics? I suspect you think I am a madman. I always proudly confess this to be true. For what is the blasted point otherwise?”

Ernest chuckled, and then chuckled again when he realized that the old man was being totally serious.

“And what about time travel?” the old man continued. “I think I may be about to crack it. Johan Thoms is the name,” he said.

Ernest moved cautiously across the worn boards into an area less cramped by relics and reminders whose relevance he was soon to understand. This old man’s collection appeared to him to encapsulate a life, and to fill his nostrils with a poignant aroma, a scent of a moment in time.

He watched as the man edged forward, barefoot. Barely keeping his balance, he shuffled to a stop. Ernest continued to observe the solitarian.

“These things you see here are my vortex, my portal, a wormhole in the space-time continuum, my passage back in time.”

They heard a noise in the corner of his shack.

“That bastard thug of a rat is back to ruin my day!”

He started to reach for a rusty old fork that lay on the stained sideboard beside him. But before he had managed any back lift with which to propel the missile, the toothy rodent was gone.

“One of these old friends shall allow me to slip through, slip back. My escape route.”

The old man waved at a handful of aged objects, nestled around him in his makeshift hermitage; a trilogy of aged books, some sepia photographs, a wireless radio set, a crystal paperweight within which a bit of paper seemed to float, a battered typewriter, several bound manuscripts, an empty bottle of cologne, a remarkable open sea chest filled with yellowed, crispy letters and powder-blue ones written in the same tidy feminine handwriting. “If I concentrate hard enough at the right time, when the stars are in the right constellation,” he explained to Ernest, “I’m sure I’ll be transported back through history.” Back to the time when the paper was new, without words. To when the ink was royal blue, fresh and wet, still on the nib hovering above the top left corner of the sheet and about to leave its indelible and permanent message.

Johan picked up a handful of the blue sheets, inhaled deeply, a trace of a smile on his lips, and then passed them to Ernest, keeping his eyes on them. Some were addressed in identical fine calligraphy to Miss Blanche de la Peña.

Johan continued. “I shall now glide back to our belle époque. I shall balance the books and save mankind. And this time around I shall perhaps allow myself the small luxury of being with her. I know where and when to find her. Even if I did not, my pulse should be drawn to her conductivity.” Here he paused, closing his eyes and gathering his breath. “This time I shall bathe in her. This time she will be my perpetual banquet of roasted delights and also my scarlet Bacchus with which to wash her own self down. I swear it.” His diatribe gathered momentum and volume, reaching a crescendo. “As a youth, I shall keep one eye on the white June night when we shall meet on the lawns of the Old Sultan’s Palace, but I shall glide there and not burn my precious days en route. I shall bask in the knowledge of devilish, God-given treats ahead to be devoured over decades. She will feel a vampirus coming through time. She will demand it and recognize it when it comes with uncomfortable, pleasurable consternation. Lorelei!”

He paused, and tilted his head back to speak to a higher power.

“Dionysus! Inform those spirits to clear the way, for my dry run is over, and what sort of cretin does not learn by his mistakes, particularly ones of the magnitude and the severity in which I infamously deal?

“I have attempted to cultivate the mythical and elusive Blue Rose of Forgetfulness to erase my memory forever and to therefore discover the ecstatic state of knowing no pain, but I have merely succeeded in shrouding and blanketing the landscape around this hut in a mass of flowers of varying hues of azure. Indeed, the shades of the flora only haunt me more, reminding me of my pivotal summer almost ninety years ago. Time is so short. I have to escape this scabby quod, this jail, this grimmest of prisons which I call my mind, which is right now closing in on the remnants of my consciousness and the shards of my sanity. If only I could find that portal back. For the sake of all mankind.

“I am the Resurrection

And I am the Life.”

He repeated this until his deluded mantra was broken by his own words.

“I have afflicted every soul on this planet. Believers and infidels. Heretics and blasphemers. I defy you to find a life I have not changed or ended. The twentieth century was mine. Just the final Apocalypse to welcome in. Should I have the politeness, should I display the etiquette to die first?”

My grandfather Ernest did nothing all Easter weekend but sit in one of Bosnia’s most dilapidated chairs, in an excuse of a dwelling, with another old man. He did not budge except to urinate and to move his bowels. Uncharacteristically, Ernest hardly said a word himself. He just sat and listened. It was one old gentleman’s story to another; that of the host, a tale which covers a life of over one hundred years; the other not far off, and therefore (as in many biographies and autobiographies) one where a day may seem to last an age and where a decade may slip by within a sentence or paragraph.

According to my grandfather, Johan claimed to have changed—actually to have destroyed—the twentieth century.

Ernest had hoped to keep the story for a time when we would have an adequate number of days together to record the magnum opus of Johan Thoms. There remained within him a discipline to do things correctly and with due process, though this was marvelously mixed with a sense of the romantic and the truly delicious. My grandfather, the ordered musician, the headmaster, the recounter of fine and giant fables. Time, though, would have her wicked way. And so it was my task, my solemn duty, not only to hear the tale of Johan Thoms, but to complete it. Ernest pleaded with me, “Glide gently, my dear boy. In buttercup times. Down country lanes. Never forgetting to fall out from the ranks, look over that old gate, and to smile.”

Part One

I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I’m old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.

Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

One
Around the Time When Adolf Was a Glint in His First Cousin’s Eye

Give and it shall be given to you. For whatever measure you deal out to others, it will be dealt to you in return.

—Luke 6:38

February 1894. Bosnia

Johan Thoms (pronounced Yo-han Tomes) was born in Argona, a small town twenty-three miles south of Sarajevo, during the hellish depths of winter 1894.

His family was not overly religious. They were, however, surrounded in the village by enough Catholicism to expose Johan osmotically to the curse of guilt.

Johan was an only child, and had been lucky to live through a worrying labor. He was a breach birth, and arrived a month early, on the twelfth of February. He had jaundice and coughed up blood. The umbilical cord was wrapped tight around his neck. Thick black curls crowned his large head. The cause of his parents’ worry was that another boy had been born to them four years earlier in exactly the same manner. He’d shared the same characteristics: the yellow skin, the breach, the cord, the blood, the hair. Carl had not survived. Drago and Elena feared a repeat. It was probably from this fear that there developed an extra-special bond between parents and child.

Johan pulled through. Within three months, he shed his sub-Saharan curls, and he appeared less yellow by the day. With his now fair hair, the blue eyes of his mother, Elena, and the surname Thoms, there was more than a hint in Johan of Aryanesque lineage from Austria and the north. He became almost normal looking.

Johan was happier than most boys, alone with a soccer ball in the street, or a chess set in front of the hearth. Even if he was only playing against himself—usually the domain of the autistic and potentially schizophrenic—he would remain occupied for hours.

He was a smart child, and he went about his boyhood business with a minimum of fuss. If it had not been for the food disappearing from his plate three times daily, his underclothes getting a weekly scrub, and his bedclothes marginally disturbed each morning, his parents might have sworn that they were nursing nothing more than a friendly poltergeist. He was ordinary and unobtrusive. If he was two, three, or even four hours late home from school, he was not missed. Maybe it would have been better for all involved if his lateness—due usually to his error-riddled sense of direction—had been noted.

Maybe then, things would have been different.

* * *

Johan’s father, Drago, was also an only child, born on his parents’ isolated farm near the Serbian border in 1854. He was forty years old by the time young Johan appeared.

Drago resembled a mad professor (which was convenient given that he was one, albeit a fine one). His unruly hair looked like it was always ready for a street battle, and he lacked full vision in his right eye. He loved to don an eye patch, but equally enjoyed switching the patch from one eye to the other, or even to remove it to see people struggle to know into which pupil to look. His poor vision meant he only did this when stationary, to avoid accidents. This was one of his many ideas of fun. Yet his strong, handsome features outweighed his quirks. He was a strapping six foot three and boasted a lean jaw, olive skin, mocha eyes, and a regulation fashion sense. However, he always donned at least one distinctive, unforgettable item on any given day. This might be a solid silver pocket watch (engraved, chiming, charming), or bright red socks; or, to complement a handlebar mustache, he would loop around his sinewy neck a gold chain with a miniature comb attached. He christened the comb “Jezebel” and would run her through his hirsute top lip.

Drago had flat feet and a tendency to waffle on about absolutely nothing for an age, often to complete strangers. But he had a huge heart. The whole town knew it, as he teased and trundled through his daily life without setting their world on fire.

Two
Pawn to Queen Four

Chess is a fairy tale of 1001 blunders.

—Savielly Tartakower

May 1901. Near Sarajevo.

Most adults fell in love with Johan’s deep blue eyes, but his contemporaries at school preferred to concentrate on the size of his ash-blond mopped head, which was larger than average at best. At worst, he resembled a fugitive from Easter Island.

Johan walked with that six-year-old’s nongait, which, accentuated by the size of his head and pipe-cleaner legs, verged on a cute stagger.

Of his two passions, soccer and chess, he was far better at chess. With a ball, his will was strong, but not his art. His feet were way too small to keep his head from overstepping his center of gravity, and down he would come. His stock answer whenever some clever clogs informed him that he had fallen over was to slowly get up, dust himself off, and say that he was merely trying to break a bar of chocolate that he had in his back pocket.

On the chessboard, however, he could be nasty. His innocent blue eyes and waifish body masked a killer instinct. In front of the sixty-four squares, he was closer in spirit to Attila the Hun than to Little Lord Fauntleroy.

It must have been the size of that head.

In Johan’s ninth summer, Senad Pestic, the Bosnian grand master and stooping old Arab, came to a school ten miles away from Johan’s, on the southern slopes of Mount Igman, to play against all the best boys in the area. It was an annual event and Johan’s first time. The matches were scheduled for four-thirty, after school and at forty tables set up in a circle in the main hall.

One of Johan’s uncles, Toothless Mico, usually ferried him to chess meets, but tonight Johan wanted only one person to be there: his mother. She would be so proud of her only child, and the little boy always wanted to please her. But she was too busy selling the fruit of (and for) her feudal boss from a makeshift hut in the town square. He comforted himself that if he continued to progress at the game, before long he would be beating grand masters for fun.

The grand master would play games against all the boys simultaneously. The honor in being the last to lose was immense, and legends could grow around boys who had come close to victory. No one from the area had ever beaten the old genius. Each board had a rudimentary clock to the right of the set, on the old guy’s side, consisting of oversized hourglasses, egg timers, and abaci. Each board had a different-shaped bean counter, loaned from the classrooms. Every time the sands of time ran out on a player, a bean was shifted.

Heads! Johan won the flip of a coin and chose white.

Good versus evil, Johan chanted inside his skull, as if the future of mankind depended on him. Good versus evil.

After twenty revolutions, some boys had been humiliated and were back in the schoolyard kicking their heels or being herded home by their shamed parents. Not Johan Thoms. His stubborn little legs did not even reach the floor from his seat. He pulled his socks up to below his bare knees every ten minutes or so and waited for his enemy to approach. He left one shoelace untied, for that, to the superstitious boy, represented Pestic—“the one Johan Thoms would famously undo.”

The grand master spent more time at Johan’s table than at any of the others, and Johan’s confidence grew as he realized he was at least doing better than his contemporaries.

The little boy (white) had adopted the Oleg Defense. Pestic (black) was wide-eyed at this feisty approach; one had to know the play in depth, its history, its options and permutations, if one were to succeed.

Johan made the crusty old codger scratch his manky head. That, though, could easily have been a flea, causing some bother at the funeral of one of his thousand or so relatives whose ancestors had made this genius their home a decade before.

Johan heard the vile twin curses idi u kurac² and tizi pizdun³ for the first time that day, as Fleabag glanced up to look at Johan’s eyes, right, left, right, left, as if to double-check that the boy knew what he was doing. Young Johan rolled his eyes.

Johan had placed his knights centrally, to offer control of the whole board before a forced exchange from Pestic. Each player was now left with only one.

Pieces were now traded at a steady pace. Johan felt that if he had the choice of either position—his or Pestic’s—he would take his own.

Queens made their way into the action.

Pestic surveyed the battlefield, from a lofty height, in a scabby gray suit with bobbles of worsted around the elbows and collar. His chin shoved through white whiskers. His mouth was uneven, his lips were badly chapped, and his teeth leaned erratically, like brown tombstones. Greasy wisps of gray-and-silver hair grew randomly across his skull. His crown generously shed itself onto the back line of his pawn’s defense. This tall, bent, skinny wretch had clearly thrown his lot into the game he loved. His shirt looked as if some poor soul had tried to scrub it clean. His mauve tie was badly knotted, and was no longer at the apex of his collar as he returned again to Johan. He looked like he had lost a love, and had never recovered. His brown eyes, however, were clear and youthful, and did not hide the fierce intelligence behind them.

* * *

Only half a dozen boys remained.

Old Fleabag now had to pull up a seat for each visit to Johan’s board.

Johan sneaked in a castle maneuver. Fleabag followed. His clock ticked. Both clocks ticked, but Johan’s seemed to him to move in slow motion.

Hmm, thought Johan. Flea by name, flee by nature . . .

Johan’s neurons were firing as he offered an exchange which, when accepted, left the boy a pawn up.

Johan consolidated with a centrally placed queen covering his outlying pieces.

Everything was now under the cover of a compatriot piece. He had never before lined up such a defense (which by its very nature, was morphing into an attack).

Cometh the hour, cometh the urchin.

Johan spotted a trap, revealing an undiscovered check which left him a major piece up, as well as his pawn advantage. He then eagerly exchanged queens, to whittle away any remaining leverage from Fleabag.

If the game had been halted now, Johan Thoms would have been crowned champion. He was way ahead. He (white) held a centrally placed rook, a white-squared bishop, a knight, and five pawns.

Pestic (black) had four pawns, a black-squared bishop, and a rook.

* * *

Evening had arrived. Old Busic, the lazy school janitor and gardener, could be heard whistling out in the entrance, threatening to do his shoddy mopping tasks once the battle was through.

The whistling broke Johan’s now iron concentration, and he looked up to notice that the gathering of parents off to one side had dwindled.

Yet the crowd had added one to its number. She now stood next to Toothless Mico.

It was his mother, Elena Thoms.

Tears almost came to Johan’s eyes as Fleabag once again came to his table, the number of combatants down to just one, Johan himself. Another boy slunk off into the dusk.

Her sparkling blue eyes were damp with tears—“wetter than an otter’s pocket,” she later admitted—which made them twinkle even more. Lazy old Busic, standing by her now, put down his mop and urged on the little lad with a slowly pumping fist.

She had made it after all, Johan thought. She’d had enough confidence in him to know that he would still be alive on the board.

Johan quickly regained his composure, but it was too late. Old Fleabag’s eyes were focused. He had to produce something remarkable. This he did.

Black (Fleabag) played an inspired and sacrificial rook to h3, in a move that would have initially appeared like suicide even to seasoned professionals. Johan, left with no choice if he was to avoid a checkmate at h6, took Fleabag’s rook at h3, aligning his pawns on the outer flank. It was a price worth paying for Fleabag, who advanced his pawn to h6 for a check. Johan was forced to pitch his king back to h4, whereupon the ruthless old genius slid his now proud, erect bishop to f2 for an inspired victory.

The unbeaten grand master never came to any of the schools again. He shuffled off to the hills to be fed on by fleas until his death, hastened by a malicious Kaposi’s sarcoma, whereby the fleas passed on the baton to their counterparts the worms.

Elena had been there long enough to see the grand master crumple in turmoil as the game slid away from him. Her own flesh and blood had sat opposite, shoelaces dangling inches from the dusty boards. Johan had ratcheted up the old man’s misery with remarkable nonchalance. As the minutes had passed by, the old guy had stooped lower and their respective caricatured outlines had become more pronounced against the yellow light at the far end of the hall. Elena witnessed a swift exchange, a change of posture, and, ultimately, a handshake.

Johan did not want to let his mother know how close he had come to winning. She must not think her presence there had put him off. (It may also have been a hint at an almost frantic desire to please his parents, which some might have seen as unhealthy and perhaps even pathological. The frenetic nature of this adorable trait led Johan to miss breaths when he saw his parents’ smiles.) And anyway, if Pestic could pull off a victory from that position, Johan realized, perhaps nothing would have prevented his own brave defeat. He had, however, lasted longer than any other boy; and he suspected that she loved him as much as he loved her.

At checkmate, Johan jumped down from his chair, and discovered that he had left the wrong shoe untied. He landed, leaving the old guy scratching various parts of his fading cadaver. The lad tied his lace and staggered toward his mother and Toothless Mico. An overexcited Busic tried to meet him halfway. Johan sidestepped him almost with grace, and stumbled on toward Elena, who picked him up and squeezed him.

Toothless Mico took them back to Argona. The boy later remembered being happy as he fell asleep in the cart on the dirt track. He woke from time to time with images of a chessboard on the lids of his eyes. When he opened them, the image was transposed onto the stars in the clear night sky.

Mars was his rook, the moon his queen.

He saw an army of a thousand pawns in the celestials, which made him wonder why he was allowed only eight.

Three
Serendipity’s Day Off

It’s too soon to tell.

—Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, when asked by Henry Kissinger if he thought the French Revolution of 1789 had been of benefit to humanity

It was serendipity’s day off,” insisted my grandfather Ernest. “By all rights, Johan Thoms should have been blinded, if not killed, as a seven-year-old.”

June 1901. Near Sarajevo.

Johan’s boyhood nightly routine had been an odd one.

First, he would close his eyes and mentally check off each of the continents on his father’s huge ancient globe, which Drago had requisitioned from the school where he worked. The spherical atlas held center stage in the living room, its pink, yellow, and red landmasses enveloped by the blue oceans. The globe also held special status for the boy, as it was larger (however marginally) than his own head. He would spend hours in bed remembering its countries, its capitals, and its seas. As time went by, he increased the difficulty of his nocturnal examinations, testing himself with the capital of Ceylon, the neighboring bodies of water to the Yellow Sea, or the longitudes of Costa Rica’s coastlines. His spongelike brain soaked up everything.

After this initial task, he would transport himself mentally to the side of a deserted rural road. In his reveries, a leaden sky threatened a premature dusk. In a lay-by sat an empty mustard-yellow carriage. The horses had been released. This abandoned cart marked the part of the forest where he would meet his friend. Young Johan then had to stand absolutely motionless next to the wood, and stare in until his pal arrived. This would complete his nightly duties.

His chum was a stag deer, and possessor of the land’s largest antlers—fourteen blades, to be exact. Some nights Johan would lie there for hours, staring at the vivid canvas on the inside of his neuronized eye, awaiting the appearance of the friendly, beckoning deer thirty yards or so into the thick forest. Other nights the deer appeared within minutes, even seconds. Johan had no control. He could only get there and stare into the dense green and brown. But after a glint in the eye and a nod from his imaginary buddy, he would be allowed to enter a restful, deep sleep. If he did not obey these rules, he believed, the world would be nudged off its axis.

* * *

Johan had been visiting the same spot in his mind every night for a couple of years when his parents sent him on a holiday to the countryside. Rudimentary tents; appalling food with grit and burned grass, cremated on campfires; mildly disgusting ditties sung around the campfire every night by the older boys.

On the final afternoon, the group was taken to a local landed estate, where various wild species roamed. It had been a tinderbox of a summer, the hottest in living memory. Ten minutes after arriving, the group was led off to a crumbling canteen at the edge of a lake to hydrate themselves before the afternoon’s exertions. That is, everyone apart from one melon-headed, blue-eyed, stick-legged youth who had spotted one of the most common species in the park, a deer. Johan was in a trance. It was his friend!

At last, he could meet him and talk to him, as he had wished for every night since he could remember.

No one saw the boy stagger off in the opposite direction to the rest of his group. He stumbled in the field’s divots and potholes, like the town drunk leaving the tavern at midnight, toward his buddy. Mothers the world over would have picked him up, wrapped him in cotton wool, and stolen away to the hills with him.

His target was minding his own business, eating grass in the clearing with several other deer. Johan had never been so excited. How come they had not told him he was going to see his friend today? He reached the beast with unusual confidence and speed, and greeted his pal.

“Hello you. I have come to see you. They never told me I was coming; I don’t know if they told you.”

The deer stopped munching for a few seconds and eyed him with mistrust.

“I’m on holiday. I guess you’re on holiday from the woods, too. Sometimes I wait hours for you, but I want you to know that I do not mind,” Johan said.

A couple of the other deer had now raised their heads.

“Do you like it better out here than in the woods?”

No answer.

“Your antlers are bigger than usual.

“It’s so hot today, though. Aren’t you hot under all that fur?”

No answer. Johan moved closer to try to pat the deer but had to delve between his huge antlers to reach the promised land of the beast’s fuzzy forehead. This was permitted for all of two seconds. Johan felt a rush of love, then something else inside his brain. The deer had raised his head back and taken Johan part of the way with him. The antlers ripped deep into the young boy’s head. Johan had whispered the words I love you, as near the deer’s ears as he could. From the canteen, the group gasped as the creature lifted Johan clear of the long grass and catapulted him like a rag doll into an expanse of nettly gorse. Wads of blood caught the light of the sun. The deer volleyed back six feet from the human debris, calmed himself, and carried on grazing. Johan was left facedown, rapidly leaking rhesus positive from his temple. The last thing he remembered thinking before a blackness overtook him was, What have I done to upset my friend? Should I have let him know last night that I was coming?

He did not cry.

* * *

He regained consciousness swaddled in bandages that magnified his large skull. He was in a crisp sterile linen hospital bed, stitched up, wrapped in white, and as high as any seven-year-old could be.

Over the coming days, he started to piece together what had happened. His friend Deer had butted him, punctured his head, and put him firmly on the seat of his little blue shorts. Friends can be so cruel. Every night for almost two weeks after, Johan would return in his mind’s eye to the side of the forest, to the lay-by, next to the mustard carriage, to wait for his friend and forgive him. He needed to apologize for turning up at the park without warning; it had just not been polite. If there was one thing he was learning from his parents, it was the importance of manners.

Johan did not want to lose his best friend. However, over the coming weeks, no matter how long he stayed awake, no visitor came from the woods to tell him everything was all right. Some nights he would not sleep. No deer appeared. The only time he would drift off without Deer’s permission was after the administration of another batch of opiates.

He had been a lucky lad. The antler had entered the skull in that tenderest spot to the north by northwest of the temple. He had come within a fraction of an inch of losing his eye, of permanent brain damage. (This would perhaps explain his tendency later in life to don a pirate’s patch.) The doctors proclaimed it a miracle that he was not dead. While he was being lifted clean off the ground, Johan’s medicine-ball head had acted as a buffer, and so he lived to tell the tale.

* * *

The anguish of Johan’s parents was outweighed only by the relief they felt when it became apparent that this had been one very lucky escape. They battled through all the obvious parental horrors: thoughts of burying him, of no life in his corpse; of his wispy blond hair and tiny fingernails still growing underground, his lips turning green before fully decomposing; of him rotting in a tiny coffin while the world went on in the marketplace and the classroom around their absolute hells. Of placing favorite chess pieces on a fresh mound of earth as they returned each day to stand Johan’s figurine soldiers back up on the sinking turf. Parents are not supposed to put any of their kids into the ground; to have two out of two dead would probably have been too much for Drago and Elena.

The hospital staff adopted Johan Thoms as their mascot. This was the same precocious child who had also almost defeated, and hence retired, the local legend of a chess master. As the story of the weird kid who talked to deer spread, so did the young boy’s influence. This fleeting fame meant he received the best care possible, and was given precedence over the old guys down the hall who could not stop defecating themselves during the day or trying to hump each other during the night, and over the mad old crones on the ground floor, who yelled for the return of infants lost forty years ago, for husbands lost the previous week, for items lost from their stubborn-stained, chin-hugging underwear drawer the previous day. One resourceful lunatica had been stealing these panties with ever-increasing cunning and throwing them in the duck pond in the orchard, at the hindquarters of the hospital.

The ducks soon left.

* * *

When the owner of the estate with the deer park returned from philandering, pinballing, and buggering his way around the gentlemen’s clubs of London’s Soho and Mayfair, a generous donation was made to the hospital.

Of Austrian extraction and a distant cousin of Franz Joseph and the Hapsburgs, Count Erich von Kaunitz XV enjoyed decent relations with Vienna. He was not so sure that this status would be maintained if his nocturnal activities in London were known. He had been well acquainted with the Oscar Wilde crowd. He yearned to be stunningly handsome. As a younger man, Kaunitz had turned a few heads, but the side effects of his excesses could not be masked over à la Dorian Gray. He wanted to have a young maiden swoon at fifty paces, even if it were merely to keep those wagging tongues still. It was, however, the love that dared not speak its name that was the Count’s allure.

Without siblings, the Count had inherited the family fortune. He was ludicrously rich, and was considered by the Hapsburgs to be one of their less formal social bridgeheads in Bosnia. His estate of over three thousand acres was home to hundreds of grazing fourteen-bladed deer, and its palatial castle of white neo-Moorish splendor, all verdigris, garlic-headed domes and proud spires, was superior to any other in the Balkans. Though he tried to pass himself off as one of them, the Count was considered by the locals to be very much part of the well-oiled imperial machine. This he would take any opportunity to rectify. Within days of the Count’s return from England, therefore, the hospital duly received its benefactor at a renaming ceremony attended by the press from Sarajevo and a lone photographer.

As for the young lad, who stared through the small gap in his bandages with the bluest eyes, it was announced that he would receive the antlers of the guilty deer, to have them mounted on a wall. It would be the beast’s turn to be the spit-roasted guest of honor at the Count’s next royal banquet. Johan nearly relapsed when he heard this. He did not want his friend punished, never mind killed for dinner. His insomnia was fueled, and he would lie awake wondering how Deer slept with such an awkward appendage on his head. Johan waited by the forest in the lay-by beside the deserted mustard-yellow carriage to warn his friend, but it was no use. He believed that his pal must be consumed by guilt and must have made his way deep into the forest to pay his penance.

His be-antlered buddy never came to see him ever again.

* * *

The Count told Johan that he was free to visit the castle when he was well again, at any time, although he privately pointed out to the boy’s family that he would require at least four days’ notice. Even more privately, the Count pointed out to his small (yet dependable) circle of servants that this lead time was necessary to clean up the debris of his notorious sodomous gatherings, which lasted for days and covered many acres.

The Count promised that Johan’s family never would want for anything, though he was not writing them into his will. As it turned out, his promise was more of a renewable, inexhaustible as-needed job offer. It really did not seem like much of an offer at the time at all. Yet as the cameras clicked away at the posing Count and a bandaged but standing Johan, the photographer was disturbed by something in his view. He moved around the awkward camera on its clumsy tripod to investigate whatever had landed on his apparatus. He shooed it away.

There was a click, a puff of smoke, and all was done for the day.

It would be about a dozen years before Johan saw his benefactor again, and longer still before it dawned on Johan that Count Kaunitz was one of the most generous and beautiful human beings any one of us could ever wish to meet.

Around the photographer’s head, the butterfly which had briefly rested on the lens flapped its wings and slowly headed toward the pollen-flecked hospital orchard before taking flight on a slow, winding thermal toward Sarajevo, to the north.

* * *

The hospital was sparse. Paint peeled from the walls and the smell of bleach only briefly won its perpetual war over tobacco, vomit, and feces.

One little boy lay there, with a gaping hole in his bulbous head. He was the most grateful recipient of the nurses’ toil and of the generosity of spirit which is unique to their calling, the selfless act of giving care to the injured, sick, and dying. Johan spent many hours watching them as they scurried through the hospital injecting, chatting, and joking to a beat, in order to overcome the horror of their tasks. He would catch them yawning after marathon shifts, or crying after a particular old guy had rattled his last breath. While his friends were being force-fed Catholicism, Orthodoxy, or Islam, it was these women whose impression began to form in him a worldview based on everyday experience.

Johan had started to piece together his own proposition for the nature of things. He had learned at school that humans breathed out just enough carbon dioxide to feed the trees, which in turn returned just the right amount of oxygen for humans. Then there was the sun, which was just far enough away to keep him warm and to grow crops, and to give the world light for enough time to do work and have a bit of play before proffering the night, which loaned just enough darkness to allow sleep, for tomorrow’s energy. If the sun were any closer, life would not be possible; any farther away, he would freeze. There was just enough food on the table for when he was hungry, and if he was thirsty, there was stuff he could pour into his mouth to quench his thirst. If he was cold, there were clothes or a fire, and there was ice for a hot day. He had a soccer ball or a chess set when he was bored. There were those injections and white tablets for when his head hurt. There had been horses to take men around, and now there were engines and automobiles to do it as well. There seemed to be someone for every job. Everything just seemed to work, but was its sheer brilliance by divine design? Or, more likely, was it just too marvelous to have been designed? He started to suspect, with increasing evidence, the latter.

And here were these wonderful women in starched white who would give love and comfort to those with little love and no comfort. He presumed that there were just enough of these generous girls, spread around the globe the right distance apart, that he would never be alone with his pain and would always be clean, surrounded by caring faces and by loving hands, which would put him back together again. The scattering of these angels meant that everywhere had just enough and they were not in excess or shortfall in any one location. The pieces of life’s jigsaw seemed to fall into place, so well designed that there could not possibly be a God who could be doing this. It was just too big a job.

He considered infinity in the other direction, to the smallest particle. If x was an atom, y, cosmic vastness, and z, time, it was just too much. It was miraculous in its nature, in its randomness, in its nondesign. Just one huge coincidence that all seemed to work. From the nurses and their love, he extrapolated a theory that explained everything. It was naive and juvenile (he was just a small boy), but also incredibly neat and real.

The Universe (and everything in it) had been arrived at simply by a series of coincidences—good luck and bad luck, and nothing more. He was convinced of what Caesar had once suspected: that the skies had endured for whatever reason, but that his own future was yet to be determined. His path was in the palm of his own hand. Johan gave God zero credit for life’s canvas and no credit for the oils, which he dreamed of using sometimes liberally, sometimes sparingly, to create a busy yet beautifully arced masterpiece. He would attempt to be measured in his decisions, for he knew that statistics would always be lurking, and would likely kick the fool in the shins. So, having thanked coincidence for delivering him to his current coordinates, Johan would now aim, within the parameters of reason, mathematics, and statistics, to be the Caesar of his own fortunes.

He pondered that he had used up so much of his good luck in surviving a bladed antler in the skull that, if he were to ever again have such a close scrape with death, he would have to run and run and run. He imagined it to be the equivalent of having used up eight feline lives in a single incident. Right now, though, he was grateful to be alive, for he knew that there was no one waiting for him on the other side of that white light.

And so Johan Thoms became Europe’s youngest atheist.

“Does all that God nonsense make sense to you, Dad?” he groggily asked Drago.

“I know, son. It’s like a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn’t there, but still finding the thing!”

Johan explained his theory of the Universe, which he had dubbed the Immoral Highground, to his father. Drago was proud.

Four
The Butterflies Flutter By

Happiness is like a butterfly, which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

—Nathaniel Hawthorne

My schooldays! The silent gliding on of my existence, the unseen, unfelt progress of my life, from childhood up to youth. Let me think, as I look back upon that flowing water, now a dry channel overgrown with leaves, whether there are any marks along its course, by which I can remember how it ran.”

“David Copperfield?” Ernest asked.

“But of course. Who else?”

* * *

September 1901. Argona.

For a few weeks, Johan lived out the role of minor local celebrity. The bandages came off layer by layer, ultimately revealing a rather normal, if not very lucky, stitched-up young boy. After the interminable summer holiday, he returned to school.

Clusters of children flocked reluctantly to the crumbling schoolyard each morning—less like bees to honey, and more like a hefty trawl of kicking fish. Their uniform khaki trousers and steel-gray shirts sensibly replaced the bleached white of the spring term. With the gray shirts came the unmistakable September nip in the air, and the butterfly nerves of the new term.

Johan had to endure a barrage of teasing about his talking to animals rather than the respect he might have thought he deserved for cheating death, saving the hospital, and becoming friends with European royalty all in one fell swoop.

He would tag along with groups of other boys in the local park, invariably in their wake. The comforting ringing of sublime church bells nearby was enough to send Johan into a deep trance. By the time he would come around, he would find his supposed friends a distant memory, just a small puff of dust where they had stood. He would hear the distant echo of muffled laughter disappearing into the labyrinth of back alleys before he wandered off by himself, seemingly untroubled but still breathing too fast for his own good.

In his solitary walks, he got to know the town by heart. He became a flâneur. Argona was an archaic wonderland, and a safe place in which to grow up. Even the stray dogs bounced around worry-free. Side streets and alleyways, where the bells squeezed and resonated, were wedged between buildings which looked as if they had been there forever. The gargoyles, which seemed to have come straight from a tale by Edgar Allan Poe, glared and spewed not just from towers and eaves, but on door knockers, too, and were carved into the white stone itself. Though supernatural, they lacked any sort of actual threat. Even the abundant ghost stories carried no horror, nor bore any malice.

Argona’s centerpiece was a church dating back to the fourteenth century. Although the cloisters had been destroyed by fire (allegedly during an almighty scrap between God and Lucifer in the fifteenth century), the church had made Argona an important trading center, and it remained a magnificent structure. The rest of the town’s architecture slipstreamed in its former glory.

Old men, when they were not riding through town on trusty, rusty bikes, waited for the last train in faded suits with small trunks. Others sat on the benches around town, considering the club of other old guys doing the same for thousands of miles in every direction. They sat alone, or with a contemporary or a grandson, to whom they repeated exaggerated tales.

In the mornings, the smell of the town’s two bakeries pervaded avenue and nostril. The smells of the late afternoon were of steaming vegetables, infused with roasting meats and paprika from open windows. The Pavlovian clink of cutlery made the children’s mouths water.

The long Argona days gave way to nights of dimly lit taverns, couples kissing in the alleys, and wet cobblestones, to be steamed dry by the morning sun. There was none of the danger of the big city, and if that left the locals a bit naive, then they were more than a little happy. There was an honesty and refreshing plainness to the people, and pretentions were spotted sooner than a degenerate, hungover Austrian count with his fly down.

February 12, 1907

It was his thirteenth birthday, and in the morning he had been playing chess against himself, thinking of talking to deer real or imaginary, and pressing his nose into English literature. Yet he had been unable to fully relax.

He spent his birthday afternoon on his language homework, a thousand words on any subject he chose. He was racking his brains for inspiration, and repeatedly kicking his ball around the garden, when two turquoise butterflies playing tag flew past his nose. He went inside, picked up a pen, and began to write.

One amazingly beautiful creature, many different, unrelated names in different languages, words, all equally charming in their ability to describe it, and all so VERY different.

Mariposa, papillon, butterfly, Schmetterling, borboleta, farfalla, babochka, kupu kupu . . .

The butterfly may well be unique in this characteristic on the planet—not just in the animal kingdom, but in the sphere of the spoken word, Johan Thoms said to himself. He said many things to himself, for his father had taken him to one side as a boy, and with a seriousness Johan could measure in his mind, told him that the man who shows off his intelligence without justification is the same braggard who boasts of the size of his prison cell.

A trawl of Johan’s university library years later would reveal that of the four hundred languages sourced there, no two words for “butterfly” bore any resemblance to each other, not even in such close cousins as Spanish and Portuguese.

“The only commonality is in repeated syllables, meant perhaps to display the symmetry of that fine creature. In Ethiopian, he is the birra birro, in Japanese, the chou chou, and among the Aborigines either the buuja buuja, the malimali, or the man man.” (A very young Johan Thoms made this observation way before a certain Mr. Rorschach thought about boring us rigid with his diagram.)

Johan noted, too, that butterflies always seemed to be around whenever he thought of them. He entitled the essay “The Butterflies Flutter By.”

He was a weird little lad. And, without doubt, a time bomb.

Part Two

Remorse, the fatal egg by pleasure laid.

—William Cowper

One
Fools Rush In

The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef.

—Boswell’s Life of Johnson

September 1912

Johan Thoms packed up his books in Argona. At the age of eighteen, he had been accepted at the University of Sarajevo with the help of a scholarship—a major shaking of the kaleidoscope for young Johan, one might think, but not really. In Sarajevo he was only an hour from his childhood comforts, and he went rushing forward into dusty libraries while clinging to the past, returning at every opportunity to the Womb of Argona (a phrase he also used jokingly to refer to his mother). His determination to enjoy the present seemed to be dogged by his worry about the future and, more specifically, his desire to please his parents. He tried repeatedly to remind himself of his own theory of the Universe, and to live in the present. He tried to tell himself that what was done was done, that what will be was within his own control, and that there was no God to punish him for present, past, or future deeds. Within these seconds, he found peace of mind. However, it would take only somewhere between a fragment of a conversation and the distraction of a passing sparrow to lead his mind astray, and he would have broken his calming promise to himself.

* * *

Chess and soccer finally conceded to books.

Johan’s love of literature had been grounded in summer afternoons in the school glen reading Dickens with his favorite teacher, upon whom he had developed a crush at the age of ten. The class dissected English classics under the apple blossom trees, which in spring were whiter than the students’ bleach-white shirts. Johan was then rarely seen without a scabby novel or a yellowing library newspaper. Often he disagreed fiercely with what he read. When something made sense, he would slowly close his tome, his thumb keeping his spot, and ponder the newly found truth.

In his university years, he adopted the same technique for things with which he did not concur. Finally, differing opinions received more of his attention than those confirming his own often-stubborn beliefs. (Conversely, history professors claim that Pol Pot, Stalin, and Hitler read only books with which they already agreed, giving them an even more distorted vision of the world.)

Johan also stumbled upon a method of recording every required academic (and nonacademic) detail to memory. When his brain could take no more, he would stuff his face with vegetables, seeds, and legumes, pass a massive stool, and by this vacuum, create room for new knowledge. His theory was given extra weight when, at the age of nineteen, he read that Martin Luther had invented the Protestant religion while facilitating an extremely satisfying evacuation of his bowels. When he read The Hound of the Baskervilles, he was stunned to discover that Sherlock Holmes himself noted (on the subject of his Baker Street flat being thick with tobacco smoke), “I find that a concentrated atmosphere helps a concentration of thought. I have not pushed it to the length of getting into a box to think, but that is the logical outcome of my convictions.”

Johan took three seconds out of his life to imagine the fictional English demigod in a tiny fictional WC, a fictional shadow cast by his deerstalker hat, worn at forty-five degrees for the fictional duration of his ponderings.

Johan snapped back to reality as the word deerstalker scuttled through his brain. For what was he himself if not an erstwhile deerstalker? He wondered where his old pal Deer was now, and then asked himself if he thought he was normal.

He shuddered.

* * *

Johan Thoms found Anton Chekhov interminably dull and depressing, but knew that the old Russian had every reason to be down.

The French, he concluded, were far too pretentious, but then, like the rest of civilization, Johan didn’t gravitate toward them as a people anyway. Victor Hugo and Baudelaire were excused. When Johan read of a trial over the publication of Madame Bovary, Flaubert too found favor. He was granted special status when Johan read the judge’s summing up: “No gauze for him, no veils—he gives us nature in all her nudity and crudity.”

Anything banned or censored found its way onto Johan’s dustless shelves: Huckleberry Finn, The Scarlet Letter, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Moll Flanders, and, latterly, Candide.

Goethe, Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Mary Shelley, Keats, Andersen, Zola, Yeats, Marlowe.

He worshipped Darwin for debunking God’s good book. Johan Thoms even shared a birthday with Darwin.

The work of Robert Louis Stevenson amazed Johan. He would enjoy many afternoon discussions of Stevenson with his personal tutor, Professor Tiberius Novac. Their main bone of contention involved Jekyll and Hyde. The professor insisted it was a tale of Victorian double standards. Johan found this far too obvious, and (not that he agreed with Stevenson) observed an anti-Darwinist angle to the story, the worrying implications of meddling with nature. When they weren’t discussing books, Johan was crushing Novac at chess. Tiberius would close his oak study door upon his student’s departure, locking in the magical smell of old volumes, and mop his brow as young Master Thoms marched proudly down the stone hallways.

On glorious afternoons in the fall of ’12 and spring of ’13, Johan and Novac would billet themselves out on the quadrangle lawn under the monkey puzzle trees. They were shaded, too, by the white berry tree, and enveloped in Moroccan jasmine, early spring breezes, and Johan’s budding optimism. In their discussions, Johan reveled in playing the role of Devil’s avocado (Ernest assured me that Johan did not mean to be funny here—his English was indeed flawed, albeit very rarely).

Novac tended to just smile and inhale the scent of a young yellow rosebush over his left shoulder.

Johan realized on one of these afternoons that the theory he had hatched in the hospital all those years before dovetailed perfectly with his disapproval of the Church.

“Life is all just either good luck or bad luck. If those idiots needed something to believe in for their afterlife and salvation, it only means that they are hedging their guilty bets. Ironically, they are the ones, their minds clouded with fear and guilt, who are unable to see the real beauty of the most wonderful coincidence in the Universe. And that is the Universe itself. These religious types, perversely, are too afraid to enjoy this wonderful set of moments, too constipated to witness the greatest glory. And so I resolve to make the present my god.”

Before the hour was up, he was once again either rushing into the future or pondering the past.

* * *

In the early days of college, Johan saw more of the night than he did of the day, and he discovered the wonder of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. He did not see only night in it. He also saw the absolute beauty of the love story, and wondered if he would ever experience a love that transcended continents, time, and, indeed, lifetimes. For this he hoped, even though his heart broke for the Transylvanian. He knew that should he stumble across such marvelous misfortune, his own would break as well.

* * *

Johan was way ahead in his schooling. He excelled in languages, and was tutored in Italian, German, Spanish, French, and English. He was soon soaking up literature in all these foreign tongues. He loved how the English refused to compromise with their own translation of bon appétit, recognizing thus with irony that their skills lay not in the culinary arena. He loved Germanic word order, and the implications of placing the verb at the end of a sentence. Everyone would have to be polite and to listen to the full statement without the infernal “May I interject?” although it didn’t seem to have had much effect on Prussian and Teutonic behavior, hubris, and propensity to war.

On the sports field he started to grow into his body. Girls began to notice him.

He had lost his virginity on a cold November day at the age of fourteen to a beauty, Ellen, from the neighboring village. It had been a sublimely unremarkable event. Near the end of his first term at university, he dropped “The Ugly Duckling” on his study desk and ran off to meet a petite, brown-eyed brunette, who would annoyingly insist on inserting her long fingernails into the unsuspecting youth’s urethra. He hoped that this was not normal behavior and that he’d just stumbled upon a degenerate lover, albeit a feisty and infinitely kissable one.

* * *

These seemed halcyon days, although he suffered many dark moments. He lost a series of good friends through accident and illness. The loss of each would, it seemed to his seedling paranoia, follow either a disagreement with Johan, or was bizarrely connected to his reading material at that time.

The news of one friend’s drowning reached Johan as he was reading Herman Melville. While engrossed in Thomas Hardy, he learned of two friends’ simultaneous end, one in a coal-mining accident, the other ravaged by wild dogs in the hills.

A pal who claimed he was possessed by the devil committed suicide as Johan neared the fulcrum of Goethe’s Faust.

An ex-girlfriend gave in to the desperate complications brought on by syphilis as Johan waded through Madame Bovary.

An English nautical friend went down with his ship when Johan had barely begun Robinson Crusoe and was still fifteen pages from the end of Conrad’s The Nigger of the Narcissus. The statistics were now suggesting to him that this might be more than coincidence: he might have developed a reverse Midas touch.

* * *

Johan’s best chum at university was William Atticus Forsythe Cartwright, a confident, ebullient Englishman studying psychology and philosophy. Johan became heavily anglicized in his chum’s presence, earning himself an English nickname—“Bighead”—as well as the Spanish “El Capitán,” which originated in his choice of cologne, a spicy number with a hint of oak from a local bespokerie.

Johan mimicked his pal, subconsciously adopting his physical mannerisms, his English turns of phrase, and his fondness for filth and crassness.

Bill Cartwright was the son of a diplomat, the right-hand man to the British ambassador to Bosnia. The family came from Huddersfield in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Billy had been a well-spoken youth, but chose to discard his demeanor of privilege. Instead he presented himself as a rough-edged commoner with a broad northern twang and a penchant for the extreme, the hyperbolic, and the damned-right crude. Cartwright was fascinated by the struggles of the workers; he harbored thoughts of revolution. He had been removed from his English boarding school at the age of twelve after one daft prank too many. The final straw involved a bizarre attempt to prove a theorem on probability. Billy had pondered the twin questions of why bread would always seem to fall butter side down and why a cat always landed on its feet. The youth had therefore strapped a slice of bread (butter side up) to a cat’s back and dropped the feline from three floors up in his dormitory, to see which prevailed, the butter or the cat’s paws. The headmaster’s report had jolted Billy’s father into bringing the boy within his paternal reach in Sarajevo, where Billy regularly received an eardrum-rattling clip to the skull. Billy wore each as a badge of honor, for he claimed they all just reminded him that he was alive.

Two
A Vision of Love (Wearing Boxing Gloves)

The female praying mantis devours the male,

While they are mating,

The male sometimes continues copulating,

Even after the female has bitten off his head

and part of his upper torso.

—Tom Waits, “Army Ants”

June 8, 1913. 12:30 P.M.

Sarajevo’s Madresa is one of the oldest seats of learning in Europe. Its theology and law faculties date to 1551. They were built concurrently with the Gazi Husrev Beys mosque, arguably the finest structure of its type in Europe, which housed a wonderfully liberal form of Islam. A more recent addition to the university, in 1878, on extra acreage on the western edge of the city, hugged the River Miljacka. This school was quadrangled around botanical gardens of stunning neoclassical beauty, with sunken gardens and Greek pillars. Ancient ornate tombs, graves, plinth stones, and crosses, each unique, finely littered the gardens, alongside a single white berry tree and a perpetually splashing fountain. Thirty-five-foot ceilings, cool, tiled mosaics, and hardwood staircases twenty feet wide adorned the inside of the building. The main entrance resembled the illegitimate child of the courthouse in New Orleans and the Theatre Royal, Haymarket (an admirable ancestry). The western wing was strangely Moorish in design, but integrated well, as the Muslims had integrated with the Catholics and the Orthodox in the city itself.

Johan Thoms and Billy Cartwright spent many a warm afternoon in informal psychiatric session in the quadrangle, their couch the billiard-baize, manicured lawn. Here Bill poked and prodded at Johan’s mind, initially for a case study, and then out of curiosity, in friendship, and for fun. Staring up at the swaying blossoms and the monkey puzzle trees that bordered the quad, with the azure expanse beyond, Johan was more than happy to be a relaxed guinea pig for his friend. These sessions went uninterrupted unless a pretty young girl wandered by.

“Simply functional,” observed Johan of a girl’s pigtails.

“Blasphemers and infidels. Degenerates and heretics. What a joy!”

“You, my friend, are a malodorous ne’er-do-well!”

“Could not agree more, my friend,” said Billy. “I’d be like a damned bulldog with its face in a bucket of porridge.”

This boy banter went on for most of the afternoon, and well into the summer holidays. Johan reckoned there was nothing wrong with having good friends with whom to mull over the sweetest of subjects in the June sunshine at the age of nineteen, without a care in the world.

“Oh, my word! How would you like to wear THAT as a hat?” said Billy as a heavily pregnant beauty passed by.

“I have a feeling that I would not take it off even for dinner at the dean’s.”

“I am sure the dean would be quite chuffed about that.”

“I am not indulging that old rotter. And at his age, I am sure he would have certain . . . problems.”

“Like an oyster in a keyhole.”

“You mean like playing billiards with a rope.”

They rolled around in fits of giggles.

The early summer sun warmed their young faces and started to turn them an even tan.

Three girls passed within close enough range for their scent of new white soap and the final drops from a dewberry perfume bottle to pique the boys’ olfactory nerves. Then it was gone, and impossible to recapture. But that was their intention, of course, and far more romantic than new perfume and old soap. Johan swept blades of freshly cut grass from his sun-faded dress shoe to make his gawping more subtle. For that is what they wanted. Subtle was important. Politely doffing the cap to Aphrodite.

“It is a good job I don’t believe in heaven, William my friend, because acquainting with you leaves me not a cat in hell’s chance.”

“By George, you believe in heaven all right. It was in that coffeehouse five minutes ago, still in your nostrils right now. And within a breadth of a cat’s cock hair of you five seconds ago. So do not give me that twaddle! They love it. Look at them, and acting as if they had just finished choir practice.”

Billy stared at the woman, daydreaming, for more than a few seconds.

“Stop right now!” he said. “I must think of something else before I go crazy and they drag me off to the Old Pajama Club to be straitjacketed, drip-fed bromide, and cold-showered all damned summer.”

They both knew that Johan was by no means as promiscuous as his pal. It was not for the lack of opportunity, it was for the lack of opportunism. Billy was making the most of his psychiatric studies in a very practical way. He could pick out a girl’s desires and needs. He read her body language, and learned which buttons to press in order to achieve his wicked, wicked goal.

Johan, on the other hand, from his studies, knew the practicality of the past participle of “to wiggle” in Italian. He knew that the title Our Mutual Friend was an illogical use of English; that Our Friend in Common was grammatically correct; and that Dickens had indeed made this error on purpose. He knew it was possible to have three consecutive e’s in the same word in French (La femme était créée pour servir l’homme) and the Time-Manner-Place rule in German (Ich bin um neun Uhr mit dem Zug nach Halle gefahren).

Billy knew which chemicals a girl’s brain would release to make her want whoever or whatever had given her the pleasure.

“It’s called oxytocin, Thoms. A pituitary hormone stimulates uterine muscle contractions. The hormone of love, the sugarcoating the ladies need to reproduce. Oxytocin is Darwinism at work. The desire for intercourse is the genius of genus. I heard that in a lecture yesterday. It’s been oxytocin that has led us as humans to do it face-to-face for forty thousand years. You know, the only other creature on the planet to do it in the same manner is the bonobo chimp. Adorable little blighter lives in the Congo, apparently, Johan. Did you know that?”

“I am all ears.”

“Ha! A bit like the bonobo chimp, then,” Bill said. “Where would you be without me, old chap? Hmm? Ignorant about chimps, for one!”

And so they rambled on as another sublime afternoon wound to a close. The sun disappeared behind the wondrous stone palace that was the dean’s house. Billy tapped Johan on the shoulder and proposed:

“Come on, let’s go have a martini. The burlesque girls start at midnight. Let’s get drunk first. How about a sweaty flagon of self-respect for me and a shot of dignity for your good self?”

“It’s a deal.”

They marched off to cause trouble with total malice aforethought, discussing Chaucer and the genius genesis of the word fuck.

* * *

William Atticus Forsythe Cartwright was a strapping six-foot-three man mountain in his bare bear feet. Long wavy hair rested on his broad shoulders. He sported, as usual, a crisp white linen shirt, top button undone, and a claret tie of subtle pattern and (subliminally Freudian) large, fat knot, which just kept his shirt collar from informality. When shirtless, he was identifiable by a tattoo on his thighlike left biceps: a swooping swallow with Billy’s name beneath it reminded him of the impetuous nature of youth in general and, more specifically, his own.

It was a short walk of twenty minutes from the university quadrangle along the Appel Quay by the gushing Miljacka to their favorite bar in the old town of Bascarsija, the “marketplace.” Thirty minutes after entering the area, they were still cutting a swath through its maze, famed for the spiced aromas emanating from ovens stuffed with tray after tray of cevapcici, the local staple of minced beef, potato, and onion wrapped in thick dough. It seemed that Bascarsija was made up of a hundred back alleys, yet was strangely ordered. Each nook and ginnel housed a particular trade, be it the butcher, the antiquarian bookseller (saffah), or the dealer in copper, wood, fruit, Turkish tobacco hookah pipes, cowbells, coffee shops, shoes, meats, rugs (kilims) from Persia, Moorish fezzes or apotropaic jewelry, to ward off evil spirits.

They walked through the bohemian medieval backstreets, soaking in the incongruous backdrop of evening prayer as smoke filled the charmed alleys. It was on a similar evening not many weeks before this (Johan was mid–Dorian Gray) when Bill Cartwright had first introduced his good friend to la fée verte, the green fairy. We all have our favorite vice, which can often be the very thing we should, on all accounts, avoid. The mirth we find may have a quite devilish draw, likely to increase our intake and thereby the chances of ultimate destruction; but she is as alluring as a cruel princess. Johan’s poison proved to be the particularly malicious absinthe.

Their destination now was the Old Sultan’s Palace, one of the oldest buildings in the city, dating back to the 1500s. Perched on the hills to the east, and of a white Moorish design, it seemed to come straight out of The Thief of Bagdad. Sunset gave it an air of the regal, of high society. However, it showed its true colors at about eight in the morning, when the debris and detritus of the night littered its wonderful halls and lush gardens. Prostitutes, clients, deserters, deadbeats, drunks, lesbians, fiends, crazies, vagrants, homosexuals, opium addicts, soldiers, vampires, suicide cases, police chiefs, gamblers, and weirdos. Squadrons of sozzled barbarians. The obese, fantasists, elitists, illusionists, and delusionists. Cheats, frauds, judges, mentals, judgmentals, and fiddlers. The grim of mind and the loose of faculty. The pompous and the snaggletoothed, the bothersome and the prejudiced. All were there.

After a wait of no more than five minutes at the edge of Bascarsija, an omnibus picked the boys up and started its trundle down the boulevard. It was sticky and stinky in the bus, with only standing room for newcomers. It spewed them out at the top of the hill.

The light was fading as the lads approached the Old Sultan’s Palace. The Old Sultan of Byzantium was rumored to have been an ally of Kubla Khan himself. Centuries before, he had positioned his harem of two hundred or more nubile women here. Back in 1575, by order of the Sultan (buyurultus), the girls lived only with the city’s eunuchs, the best physician in the land, and His Highness himself. Here, he decreed his own, albeit slightly less grandiose, Xanadu.

“Pah! It was just a fad and a fashion among these sultan chaps. Bloody show-offs,” Bill said.

* * *

They walked along the stony driveway up to the mansion. Johan felt they were entering a bygone age, that time was standing still for them, as it does when one is nineteen. The clatter of the loose stones under their Oxford brogues invited them into a different world, and offered the promise of being an adult.

This was their time, for this was (metaphorically) the Saturday lunchtime of their youth. They cast no shadow.

That evening, the Old Sultan’s Palace heaved under a weighty Moorish mystery. Weird attracted exquisite in a perpetual wave of self-fueling cosines and logarithms. The palace remains to this day a venue of staggering beauty, full of time-slip corridors, medieval arches, and cul-de-sacs where amazed visitors’ pocket watches stop.

They were drawn to the yellow lights through the grandiose Persian arches on the rear lawn. An energy emanated from there, and given the nature of energies, archways, and lights, boys are duty bound to inspect.

Billy whittled on half philosophically, half rhetorically, in Johan’s ear.

“But, Thoms, old bean. If a man says something in a forest, and a woman is not there to hear it, is he still wrong?”

No answer.

On the other side of the arch, a party was in full flow. Black ties and white tuxedos, white and black evening dresses, and waiters. Johan tried to put his finger on the energy as they entered the fray.

“Keep your pecker up.”

“Keep YOUR pecker out.”

This was their routine as they telepathically divided to conquer.

Johan heard few Bosnian or even European accents. Most of the party-goers, he realized, were Americans. There seemed to be something distinct about this party, something which he could not quite identify. Was it their New World energy, with their modern haircuts, their lack of walrus mustaches and beards?

Perhaps it was the more modern music or a strange dance he had never seen before. Or was it the stench of wealth which pervaded the air?

Or was it . . . Holy Jesus . . . was it the most absolute beauty with whom he found himself faced?

Seconds of silence ticked by. If absolute zero is minus 273 degrees Celsius, then this was an absolute silence. The absolute of that silence was equaled only by the absolute of the blackness in her eyes.

Her lips were a scarlet sofa in an ivory palace.

Johan’s embarrassing lack of words was broken by the familiar voice of Professor Tiberius Novac. The rest of the world had continued while Johan had disappeared into his cataleptic trance. Worse than that, the woman had simply stared at this fool.

He sort of heard the prof’s words, nudging the stem of his cerebral cortex.

“Johan Thoms! My boy! What an absolute pleasure! What brings you to a party for the American ambassador? Do you know him, my boy? You ARE a dark horse, aren’t you!” A gentle tap to the shin from the outside of his tutor’s well-polished dress shoe was not enough. The dusky beauty suppressed a laugh.

“But who is SHE?” blurted Johan, totally forgetting his place, stumbling in and out of his body.

“She? She? She? Who is she? The cat’s mother?” corrected Tiberius. The same tutor who had been run ragged in a literary discussion by Johan not three days before was now correcting the scholar’s usually impeccable manners.

She, it transpired, was an American living in Vienna, the widow of a diplomat who had found a watery grave with the Titanic the previous year, one of the unfortunates forced to listen to the band play.

She seemed to be in her late twenties perhaps early thirties, and possessed a hypnotic beauty that would take young Johan tens of years to absorb. The experienced coyness of her initial smile, the way her front teeth half bit into the side of her nether lip, her perfectly measured handshake, revealed everything Johan needed to see, but hid enough to make his deviant blood boil.

“Lorelei, please meet Johan Thoms. Johan, this is Lorelei Ribeiro, with the American embassy in Vienna.”

“Yes, errrm, it is, isn’t it?” Johan mumbled as he struggled for breath.

His member did, however, show signs of life.

He caught himself staring at her small chest. Lorelei Ribeiro caught him and smiled to herself. He felt like he had been struck. It was a vision of love, wearing boxing gloves! (This Venus’s grandfather, he would learn later, had been a renowned pugilist back in the States.)

“Ermmmm. Hello, Lorelei,” he managed.

“Pleased to make your acquaintance, Johan Thoms, I am sure. And who is your friend?” she added. He glanced down at his tentlike crotch before he realized she was referring to someone else.

“Oh yes, of course, this is William Cartwright,” who had appeared at Johan’s shoulder.

“Bill, this is . . . ermmm . . . Lorelei, Mrs. Ribeiro from the Vienna embassy . . . in America.”

Johan’s next fifteen minutes were a blur, and even if he had wanted to (and he had wanted to, he assured Ernest) he could not for the life of him recall the conversation, or even if he had been part of one, or whether he had been in a trance. All he could recall was taking a trip into the noirish eyes of the woman in front of him.

Later, when he asked her to remind him (or, more accurately, to inform him) of the content of their first discussion, Lorelei would giggle, and mercilessly tease him by telling him a completely different version of events every time, with that wicked glint in her eye.

He was aware he had been impaired by a couple of ales. And what does alcohol do, other than have the effect of a truth serum?

He noticed that Professor Tiberius Novac moved slightly to his right to leave these two to their own devices. He could be quite devious (what Bill would have described as “mauve”) at times, but he was fond of his protégé. Novac had been grabbed by some desperate old battle-ax from the British Consul, after a bit of Balkan rough in her bed. She clung to him like a barnacle to a tugboat, had eyebrows like a couple of baby raccoons in awkward repose, and danced like a giraffe with the staggers. This had made surveillance on Johan difficult. When his student pressed him afterward for details, he struggled to offer anything really substantial, for he, too, had swallowed some gin, as one had to in order to face the aging beast from London.

(“She had a face like a blind cobbler’s thumb,” he admitted to Johan later. “But, my boy, was she a cracker with the gaslight out!”)

* * *

By the time he came around, Johan had lost Lorelei.

He sought Novac, but the English vulturette was circling, craving her pound of flesh—or more, if her luck was in. Novac was inching backward, avoiding her cabbagey breath.

Cartwright staggered toward Johan from the crowd.

“Did you see her?” Johan whispered.

His spirit had been kidnapped.

“What are you talking about?” His eyes widened. “Please don’t tell me you have been hooked? I thought you were made of finer stuff, old bean!”

“I blew it.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ!”

Professor Novac butted in between the two troublemakers and cringed.

“I think you quoted some Shakespeare at her. I am so sorry.” He winked.

Johan threw his hands over his face.

“Oh, balls! What must she think of me?”

“Do not worry, boy. I am sure it was the ‘Happy days seeking such happy nights’ line. Not a bad choice, even if I say so myself. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of defenseless honesty.”

“Yes, but what good is that right now? She’s with some fool somewhere. And this is not the first mistaken impulse of an undisciplined heart.”

“Johan! You cannot think like that, or you will drive yourself mad. Jealousy is the worst of traits. It may be based in love, but it is never less than ultimate destruction. Leave it at the door, with your cane and your hound. She is a beautiful woman, and attention is bound to come her way. It comes with the territory, my boy. What the hand possesses, the soul never pines for. If it is meant to happen, it will. It’s like looking for a fifty-forint note on the floor. Que sera, sera. And, my boy, the tone should always be set by Caesar!”

Tiberius’s words of wisdom comforted Johan. He tried his best to believe him.

“At least mine didn’t have a cleft palate and a lazy eye!” he said.

Cartwright guffawed.

* * *

The party was thinning as Professor Novac bade his farewell, with his banshee-cum-gargoyle in tow.

“Oh yes, and one more thing, Johan, that I recall.”

“Yes?” said the young scholar.

Tiberius leaned forward and said quietly into his student’s left ear, “I think I heard you mumble something to her which doubled me up. I should describe it as a guttural growl.”

He leaned in a bit farther and whispered.

Johan Thoms turned June-tuxedo white when he learned of the shocking desire he had expressed. He went to sit down, before he fell down.

He had to stop drinking that stuff!

* * *

Tiberius Novac could be a brute sometimes. After his next tutorial, and perhaps to console Johan, Prof gave away a little more of his eavesdropping, and told the boy he had wonderfully, and with blind poise, stopped Lorelei from stepping on and killing a worm on the palace’s lawn.

Lorelei had then quoted, word-perfectly, a poem by Dorothy Parker.

“It costs me never a stab nor squirm

To tread by chance upon a worm.

“Aha, my little dear,” I say,

“Your clan will pay me back one day!”*

Lorelei and Dorothy Parker were great friends. It was Lorelei who made the introduction to Robert Benchley, who gave Parker her first column in Vanity Fair and her major break. Lorelei had also first shown Parker through the front door of the Algonquin Hotel, and the two ladies shared many an evening, as well as a wit, a beauty, and a style all of their own.

With a confidence one can often only paradoxically achieve in a gutless trance, Johan Thoms had volleyed back with his own second verse, off a martini-stained cuff. He started with a steadying prefix.

“Yes, but . . .”

He straightened his collar, ran a hand through his handsome hair, and added his impromptu reply.

“Yet should one escape by being cremated,

One’s respite is just belated.

Some clod will throw one’s ashes out.

And frenzied worms shall scream and shout.”

Touché!

He had winked, taken a slug from his glass, and carried on in his trance. Gibbering wreck, to poet genius, back to gibbering wreck. Lorelei had been transfixed, and the deal was as good as done.

* Although published much later, in 1927, the poem had been part of Dorothy’s repertoire for many years.

Three
Drago Thoms: Pythagoras, Madness, and an Indian Summer in Bed

I shall confine myself neither to Horace’s rules nor to any man’s rules that has ever lived.

—Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

June 9, 1913

Four hours after Johan’s initial encounter with Lorelei and three hundred yards from the front gates of the palace, the heavens opened. It was as if God had turned on a pipe in the ceiling above a film set as Johan plowed on, unsteadily but with a steady determination. He was soaked to the bone, but he pictured Lorelei caught in the downpour, and smiled; when he stumbled ankle-deep into a puddle as he neared the Miljacka, he merely chuckled.

It was almost daylight. Normal people were already rising to go to their work, and bakers had been hard at it for hours already. Soon everyone would be scuttling around in their raincoats, their hats, their umbrellas. It made him feel sad to the pit of his stomach. Their routine, their normality—this was not where he was heading in his life. He segued off into a long train of thought on his deep hatred for umbrellas. He had thoroughly despised them ever since during a force-seven mistral, he had witnessed a young couple kebabed by an errant beach parasol while they were harmlessly copulating. Was the loss of dozens of eyes every year really a price worth paying to avoid a few thousand head colds? What sort of selfish fool would risk others’ eyes with such abandon, just to stay dry? (He had recently read in a science journal that every year, on average, sixty-three eyes were lost to umbrella spikes, but by only sixty-two people. Was someone actually unfortunate enough to lose both? If so, was this in the same incident? Or, even more worrying, two separate ones?)

“So little kindness in the world today,” he muttered. “So little thought for others.”

Then he heard himself repeating, “Bastard umbrellas, bastard umbrellas,” and shook his head to clear it.

He was almost at his dorm. He pulled out his key and slunk into the wonderful old building. The birds nesting in the ivy were tuning up for the day.

Five minutes later, Johan Thoms was on his sheltered balcony, dried off, naked on his back, fast asleep.

* * *

Moments after he awoke, Johan found himself watching a lone and final drop of rainwater overstay its welcome on the nearest leaf of ivy.

Johan turned his head away, and saw that an envelope had been slipped beneath his door. He climbed down from his perch in the window, and slid in bare feet across the shiny floorboards, as if he were ice-skating on the River Miljacka at Christmas. It was with far less grace than he wished. He could glide only three feet in his dormroom. Still, for a split second, he could pretend that he was capable of more elegance.

A line came into his head, one that in the past had seemed to leave a deep, unshiftable hollow feeling. He knew he was guilty of trying to live too fast, of wishing his life away. Yet this time the line was not unwelcome, for it reminded him of the beauty of his life right now:

“Glide gently, thus forever glide.”

He reached the doorway unscathed and picked up the envelope. The handwriting was his mother’s, and an underlying sense of dread and worry made him pause. He could not think why—he often received letters from her.

He hurriedly slipped his letter opener into the right-hand side, and flicked it open with a swish of the wrist.

Dear Johan,

Bad news, I am afraid. Your father has lost his job.

So, I hate to put this on you, son, but we need your help.

We all know how important your studies are to you (and therefore to us) and we love you for this, so God forbid they be affected.

Your father sends his love. As do I (of course).

With all my heart,Your Mama xxx

He closed the letter slowly and slipped it back into the envelope, staring straight ahead.

* * *

At night, Johan’s father, Drago, used to tell the boy fairy tales. The magical stories of Hans Christian Andersen and Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm would bring each day to a close. Drago then would return to one of his three favorite hobbies: campanology, constructing matchstick models, and collecting pinecones.

Every morning, Drago rose at six minutes past six. He showered in cold water for nine minutes. He ate a bowl of cold salted porridge. He imbibed two glasses of tepid water. He tried to put a comb through his crazy locks after he’d shaved his beard, already heavy after twenty-four hours. Johan used to love rubbing his face against his father’s five-o’clock shadow, begging his dad to give him a chin pie.

Drago left the house on the stroke of eight every morning and walked (always without an umbrella, for he, like Johan, suspected them of mischief) the two miles to school. He taught an array of subjects to an array of ages, but his lectures were always met with enthusiasm, for they were delivered at an impeccably high level.

He was a jack of all trades and a master of many: languages to philosophy, sciences to the arts.

He remembered every pupil he had ever had, their quirks and their strengths. He had a private joke with each of them. This endeared him to everyone at the school.

He instilled the love of knowledge into his own flesh and blood, too. Many evenings, Johan and Drago had sat by the fire in the living room of the old house in Argona as Drago set his eight-year-old boy mathematical problems of increasingly tough proportions, and within three years, high-end calculus, integration, differentiation, coefficients, constants, cosines, sines, tangents, and logarithms. Sheets covered by sigmas or dy/dx’s would be strewn across the deep red hearth rug, spilling over onto the surrounding mahogany floorboards. Pythagoras’s theorem on right-angled triangles followed. Then Drago passed on Pythagoras’s lesser-known theorem on beans. It is lesser known for very good reasons, for Pythagoras’s better work was—at this stage—well behind him.

Pythagoras reviled beans, for, they say, beans reminded him of testicles. Drago called it frijolophobia. Pythagoras developed an acute case of it, and could not even say the word bean.

Beans, however, just made Drago Thoms fart like a clogged sink.

* * *

THE BRIEF, YET VITAL STORY OF DRAGO’S OBSESSION WITH PYTHAGORAS

Pythagoras founded his own Orphic cult in Greece in 530 BC. His main and hugely controversial theory centered on the existence of zero. Previously, there had been no concept of zero. Greek digits had started with “one,” because who would take “zero” goats, “zero” donkeys to market?

Pythagoras proposed the existence of zero, and with it came its inevitable inverse of infinity. And if one believes in God, then one has to accept that there is a Satan. This, along with the predictable cyclical nature of mathematics, undermined the teachings of the Scriptures and the possibility of any all-seeing deity. It was heresy.

Society became split. Pythagoras and his Orphist followers broke away. They fled Greece and settled in the ancient city of Crotone, southern Italy, where they could live in relative safety from their now sworn enemies within the old order.

They really should have stuck to mathematics. Many of Pythagoras’s followers were forced to take vows of silence and to observe bizarre customs, which included the outlawing of beans. Initially, the word bean was banned. Later, all verbal communication was forbidden, apart from within the higher order.

Birds, particularly male swallows, were never allowed in any house.

Any dropped objects, particularly food, were never to be picked up. This, they believed, was bad luck. They would instead invite Pythagoras’s favorite hound, Braco, into the dining hall after each meal, to clean the floor of any tidbits. During thunderstorms, one’s feet had to remain on the ground. Any imprint of the body on bedclothes had to be smoothed out.

The pursuing zealots tracked down the heretic to his enclave in Crotone. They were feeling murderous, but in a way that only a lynch mob of very understanding, tolerant religious fundamentalists can be.

Some they slaughtered within the city walls, and they left some others castrated in the dusty streets. Then they chased Pythagoras and the rest out of Crotone. When the castrated victims rediscovered their vocal cords, Pythagoras was well out of town and making his escape. He came to, of all places, a bean field, which he had to cross in order to survive. His remaining trickle of fickle followers trampled through the crop; only Pythagoras had the conviction not to cross, not to make a Faustian pact with the diabolical bean.

And so he was cut down at the edge of the bean field, screaming anti-legume propaganda until his last breath. And THAT was the end of one of the greatest mathematical brains and maddest men the world had ever known.

* * *

It was Drago’s obsession with Pythagoras which eventually tipped him into his very own deep-trenched psychosis.

There were those locals who would suggest that in order for Drago to arrive at the front doors of madness, the journey need be neither long nor arduous. It was less a prolonged and tortured ride, and more a popping around the corner for a pint of milk. The effects on his family (and the unsuspecting world), however, would be catastrophic.

* * *

Drago, although fully versed in the hypotheses of Pythagoras, refused to subscribe to any of his teachings. He started to eat beans with every meal.

Before long, he would have bouts of eating ONLY beans, and beans of every breed. He became prolifically flatulent, often attempting traditional folk tunes with his emissions. Pythagoras became his nemesis, his Professor Moriarty.

Drago’s physical health began to deteriorate. His face was gaunt and shadowy. He became a bean expert, and grew beans in any spare patch of land or any darkened cupboard.

The vitamin deficiency from his bean-only intake progressed; previous eccentricities were magnified and new ones multiplied by his physical decline. His colleagues, who still had enormous respect for the man, tried to intervene, but the madness was taking over his behavior. He would be found carrying out more of the very acts against which Pythagoras had rebelled.

For example, during a thunderstorm, Drago would be found not only NOT touching the ground, but climbing trees or, worse, sitting on the roof of the house with his arms wrapped around his knees, his chin resting on them. He refused to use bedsheets, for fear of rising with them uncrumpled. He left beans in every room. He laid them out in a circle around the house and wore them on strings around his neck and wrists.

Furthermore, when he was at the dinner table, he would clumsily, but purposefully, knock food and utensils onto the floor, and slowly pick them up with a wide grin.

Johan’s mother, Elena, consulted her closest friends and then a doctor. She was concerned, more so when he started to leave all the windows open and, with bread and seeds, enticed into their house birds of every genus.

At school, meanwhile, any kind of quiet was a sign to Drago that his pupils were being tempted into a Pythagorean vow of silence. One member of the class always had to be talking, humming, whistling, or singing. Drago did not sleep night after night for fear of silence.

After many such sleepless nights, Drago began talking to himself on the way to school and around the grounds. This was simply not tolerable, so the headmaster took action. He successfully packaged the move as offering Drago a sabbatical to further his anti-Pythagorean studies. He was even afforded a meager pension, sold to him as a “study wage.”

For this, the Thoms family was eternally grateful, for during his sabbatical, Drago’s behavior was at least predictable.

So what if they had to tolerate swallows (and other hungry birds) in the house? Clarence, the ginger tomcat, was delighted, until, having won many battles, he lost the war. He was slung out on his furry ear for helping himself to one too many feathery enemies.

Because their child had left home, Elena could enjoy bedclothes in the relative sanity of a spare room. She and Drago did remain sexually active, though. Drago’s dedication to his research strangely concentrated his libidinal reserves, which were thrust upon and into an initially disturbed Elena. They regressed into humping like street dogs. Drago considered employing a cheap pianist to prevent a lack of noise.

The name Pythagoras was banned from the household, referred to only in Macbeth fashion, as “the Greek.”

Elena eventually embraced the new Drago, especially as much of his attention was now directed toward her. How many of her friends could boast of exploits such as theirs?

“The older the violin, the sweeter the music,” Drago would claim.

Having the house to themselves afforded them luxuries in their sexual deeds. Having her anal area dive-bombed by wild birds searching for crumbs while she fellated Drago was, however, a bridge too far.

Well, at least, at first.

* * *

So when, in June 1913, a letter arrived at the ancient University of Sarajevo addressed to Johan Thoms, it urged the recipient to consider making a small sacrifice for the greater familial good.

Johan considered bar work (he had made plenty of contacts from his time spent on the other side), laboring (but he was too uncoordinated to be of much use, those skinny matchstick legs and small feet), but it would really be more a question of what he could find.

He then recalled a summer over a decade before, when a wealthy young nobleman offered help of any kind should he or his family ever require it. He was still owed by the crazed, philandering, bug-eyed, buggering count whose buck had once almost taken the young lad’s eye and his life. It was time for Count Sodom to make good on his promise. Johan went to his old oak study desk, pulled out a yellowed notebook, and flicked through it. He came to a page written in a childish scrawl, very much that of a seven-year-old. Johan Thoms then took out his best writing paper, pen, and inkpot and started to write:

Dear Count,

I hope you may remember me . . .

Four
The Kama Sutra, Ganika, and Russian Vampires

Take the Kama Sutra. How many people died from the Kama Sutra, as opposed to the Bible? Who wins?

—Frank Zappa

June 9, 1913

After he had written his note, Johan Thoms spent the next part of the searing June day that followed reading and rereading a rare copy of the Kama Sutra, one of the first ever published in English, part of a trilogy. He had procured the collection by a stroke of luck. The tutor who had lent it to him lost his job at the college for exposing himself to a group of visiting nuns from County Cork. The professor fled the university in shame before Johan could return the books.

The books were to become Johan’s lifelong companions, to accompany him throughout his adventures as he traversed the continent and zigzagged his way through a self-induced mayhem. The trilogy (along with a number of other objects collected around this time) would then become the focus for his final whirlpool of psychosis. But I am rushing ahead.

The edition was a beauty, printed on thick paper. Its white vellum binding, trimmed with gold, boasted the original extended title:

The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana

Translated from the Sanscrit

In Seven Parts, with Preface, Introduction and Concluding Remarks

The inside cover offered further intrigue and mystery:

Cosmopoli: 1883; for the Kama Shastra Society of London and Benares, and for private circulation only

(Bizarrely, Vatsyayana always claimed that he was celibate.)

The other books Johan had inherited from his nun-loving mentor bore equally intriguing titles.

Ananga-Ranga and the Hindu Art of Love

Translated from the Sanscrit and annotated by A.F.F. and B.F.R.

1885

and

The Perfumed Garden of the Sheikh Nefzaoui

Or the Arab Art of Love, sixteenth century

Translated from the French Version of the Arabian MS.

1886

Johan set about slow foreplay with the books, studying them tantrically. Intrigued by the genre, and knowing that barely a thousand copies had been published of Richard F. Burton’s unsurpassed translations, he then scoured the college and the city’s secondhand bookstores for a copy of The Arabian Nights. He would eventually find a copy under the pillow of the woman who would change his life. In fact, she had already set about this particular task, just hours before, at that hotbed of Oriental debauchery and degeneracy, the Old Sultan’s Palace.

Lorelei Ribeiro was currently lying in a cool bath in Suite 30 of the Hotel President, not more than three-quarters of a mile from where Johan was slowly digesting the ins and outs of coitus. Rolling around in the relaxing waters of her tub, this rare beauty would have been a picture for any man (as well as most women, hermaphrodites, and eunuchs) to behold. The bathtub brimmed with scented oils of gardenia and ylang-ylang. The smooth, dark skin of her legs shone with the oil as the back of her knees rested on the rim of the tub, her glistening fetlocks and feet dangling akimbo on the outside. Her head lay back, submerged to her brow. The ceiling fan whirred above enviously.

When Lorelei eventually did get out of her bath, with fingers still not crinkled, it was to head to her bed and the breakfast tray of luscious fruits and cold coffee which the room-service staff had left an hour previously. She sat on the white duvet in her bathrobe, towel wrapped on her head, and poured a healthy dose of strong cold coffee into her mouth. She turned on the gramophone and listened. A soothing harp filled the room, from deep shag carpets to palatial ceiling.

* * *

Later, in the heat of the afternoon, Lorelei flounced around Bascarsija and along the banks of the Miljacka, a glorious swathe in white, turning heads all along her route. Wives smacked husbands’ arms. Cars narrowly avoided hitting each other; trees braced themselves for a sudden strike from a fender. The early-afternoon temperature peaked and the locals sweated; the day seemed to stand still for a few minutes, as only summer days can. When Lorelei eventually sauntered back into the cool of the President’s lobby, the ceiling fans were rotating at full tilt, struggling against the early-evening southern European heat.

She instructed the bellhop to come to her floor, and the lift crawled upward, opening onto the third floor hallway, with its deep cream carpets centrally laid on dark brown oak floorboards. The sturdy white walls and high ceilings were interrupted by grainy sepia photographs of mustachioed young men in all-in-one swimsuits and of bonneted ladies in fields of knee-high daisies. One of the ladies showed just a hint of breast. This forced Lorelei to look twice as she stepped out, for the President did have the reputation of being a liberal spot.

The cage door closed behind her. Lorelei dispensed with her shoes. Her feet enjoyed the luxury of the crushed rugs en route to her suite. Manicured phalanges fingered the cold key into the lock.

* * *

Lorelei observed the evening’s arrival from her balcony. The quiet luxury inside the President was at odds with the smoky, squawking city. Both had once been heavily influenced by Islam and by the Turks. The hotel’s mystic Eastern design had evolved, however, into lush cream-and-scarlet carpets, deep mahogany pillars, hygienic modern conveniences, and Western ways. These now were juxtaposed with a metropolis still populated with ancient mosques and bearded street traders, apparently stubbornly lingering from the sixteenth century.

She looked at her thin gold wristwatch and involuntarily slowed her pace. Meanwhile, in the lobby, three dark-suited gentlemen removed their hats, announced their arrival, and headed for the bar.

Forty minutes later, in Suite 30, diamond earrings were clipped and cramponned, a sweet musk of Lyonnais parfum was pumped at the regulatory nine inches, and long black silk gloves were fixed. The thickness of the deep aqua curtains, twenty feet high, now kept out the evening buzz. An envelope had been pushed under Lorelei’s door announcing the arrival of her dinner guests.

Lorelei gathered herself. She headed for the door, head tilted, swaying elegantly.

* * *

The boys walked eagerly over cobbles, but not eagerly enough to prevent Bill from yawning as Johan outlined the theory of the sixty-four practices of the Kama Sutra. A woman who gained mastery of all sixty-four crafts was respected, took her place in a male-dominated world, and became known as a ganika. Bill told him to shut up, but Johan kept the word on his lips.

“Ganika, ganika, ganika . . .”

They entered a trinket-filled, rouge-lit taberne, and Cartwright bought two steins of cold pilsner. Even before he had settled into his seat, he started into a mad monologue. Five minutes passed before Johan realized he had not heard one single word.

“Never mind that, Billy Boy,” Johan interrupted. “Come on. Drink up.”

Johan was in a rush again. His nervous and sometimes infectiously uncomfortable energy was getting the better of him as he whispered to himself some words that kept repeating in his mind.

Glide gently, thus forever glide.

They soon emptied their glasses and disappeared down a side street, into the shadows of the gathered dusk.

“Bon vivants! Good livers!” Johan yelled as their glasses met in the next bar.

Johan told himself he was feeling happy, and bookmarked it for future reference so that he would not feel guilty about letting such a moment slip by him.

Glide gently, El Capitán! Glide gently!

* * *

Mario Srna, Lorelei’s closest ally in the embassy in Vienna, hosted a relaxed dinner at a fine Russian establishment, Troika, just two blocks from the President. Besides Lorelei, Srna’s guests were two old pals from the consulate. The dinner lasted a pleasant two hours, consisting of a deep scarlet beetroot borscht, heavily peppered, followed by sublime roast venison, locally bred from the grounds of the Count of Kaunitz himself—an eccentric, but owner of the finest beasts in the land.

Srna was even offered the animal’s head for his wall as a souvenir, a tradition of the time. He cordially accepted, as he was a gentleman with impeccable etiquette. To turn it down would have been an insult. The head was to be delivered to his town house in Vienna.

Srna was a slight, youthful forty-six-year-old, with clever brown eyes and a peerless generosity of spirit rare among diplomats. He was ambitious, but he achieved what he did through talent, quality, and vision, not Machiavellian techniques. Lorelei looked up to him, yet he was reliant on her as his eyes and his confidante.

The dinner guests were James Whitt and Herb LaRoux, from Boise, Idaho, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, respectively. They contributed adequate tales from the professional field and above-average insight into the realpolitik of Europe and the raping of Africa. They did a fine impression of homosexual twins who were attached at the hip and dressed like each other for reasons over and above cordiality. Srna suggested this to Lorelei as Tweedledee and Tweedledum disappeared off together for a second time.

“Silly fool!” answered Lorelei. “They are smoking opium in the back.”

Srna had had no idea.

“Don’t look so shocked, Mario, you big dummy,” she said, smiling. “Even Queen Victoria used to do it, you know that!”

“That is German propaganda, Lorelei!”

“It is NOT. And she was German, remember! Even Conan Doyle has Sherlock Holmes doing something like it to chase down Moriarty. They say he is addicted. Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The sucking of youth and never seeing daylight. It’s the height of fashion in London, and don’t look so prudish! If you want to be shocked, I will tell you what Prince Albert once had done to his bratwurst!”

When Lorelei had finished telling him, Mario Srna’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. He announced that he needed another vodka. The other two dinner guests meandered back from behind a thick curtain in lazy unison. “Na Zdarovye.”

“Vodka is always best tasted at a healthy distance from Moscow!” announced Srna philosophically. “Vodka tasted in Moscow means an imminent visit to the ballet, lurking around some ridiculously icy corner. And endless dishes of potatoes. And Chekhov. Don’t even get me started on Chekhov. Anton, the Darling of the Criminally Depressed and the Champion of Suicidally Dull Birds.”

“Here’s to Anton! na zdarovye, everyone!”

More of the iced firewater thawed any remaining inhibitions. The waiters turned a blind eye to the mild anti-Russianisms around the table (for they themselves were there in Sarajevo for a good reason, and it was not the love of their motherland).

The maître d’ and his tuxedoed crew had started to resemble a cape of vampires. As more vodka was ordered, they gathered at the exits of the large, ancient banqueting hall, now serving only the diplomats’ table. Each had the obligatory widow’s peak and a stare that concentrated somewhere through the eyes and fifty feet beyond the skull of the person he was addressing. Any one of them could have been two hundred and fifty years old while appearing to be fifty. They served everything with a worrying lack of garlic and generous helpings of gloopy Romanian Cabernets. The maître d’ had them all under his control, though his well-practiced misogynist focus was on Lorelei. And to hell with tradition. If, back in the land of his forefathers, the Mad Monk Rasputin could have made passionate, unholy, and hairy love to his queen, and in turn, his queen, Catherine, reputedly died under the weight of an eager, yet somewhat intrigued, copulating stallion, then certainly this beauty might grace his tables and imbibe his vodka. The clear liquid reappeared from an inexhaustible source behind the bloodred curtains.

Srna’s imaginings were elsewhere. Why had Prince Albert done THAT to himself? he thought.

* * *

The fuel from the fine vodka had led the foursome out of the clutches of the polite vampires and into a den of vice. The Cellar sat three meandering city blocks away, and down a side street.

There they took their place around a circular table and ordered overpriced champagne. The conversation swayed pendulously between world politics and a cheaper form of prostitution—the one on offer not twenty feet away. The Cellar also hosted a shockingly untalented, overmaquillaged French cabaret chanteuse, called Dorithe, who croaked a ghastly libretto. According to Herb, her tone resembled that of a goose farting in the fog.

* * *

Meanwhile, more absinthe was firing up the boys as they headed back toward the palace. The streets were quiet.

They pondered the wisdom of their trek to the Old Sultan’s.

“I know! Follow me.” Johan pulled his friend to the left, away from the empty boulevard.

* * *

A fine and fragrant lady of the night muscled in between the twins and whispered in Herb’s ear. He looked interested.

A burst of laughter echoed as Srna gave them all his best impression of the perpetually furious, energetically uncomfortable, and supremely crazy Indian diplomat from Vienna, Mr. Rajee. It was his party piece. It was a good one.

* * *

The door opened. The boys entered the Cellar.

There, at the first table they were set to walk past, were three smartly dressed, drunk men and a girl whom Johan recognized, her pupils as black as the Earl of Hell’s riding boots.

Oh God! Concentrate! Johan, concentrate!

Johan moved directly toward the table from where the laughter came.

Aphrodite had surely seen him.

Five
We Are the Music Makers. We Are the Dreamers of Dreams.

Oh! Pleasant exercise of hope and joy!

For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood

Upon our side, we who were strong in love!

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven!

—William Wordsworth

Early hours June 10, 1913. Sarajevo.

Lorelei Ribeiro indeed recognized Johan Thoms straightaway.

She motioned him forward, gesturing to Herb to make way for the two strays.

Introductions were made in English. This time it was Bill’s turn to play the drunken fool as Herb announced;

“I’m ’merican.”

“You are a merkin?”⁴ Bill spluttered. “He’s a fucking merkin!”

He had tried to whisper this in Johan’s ear, but everyone had overheard. None of the men knew it referred to a certain kind of hairpiece. Lorelei, however, smirked. Johan and Bill took their places at the table, glancing around at the assortment of female detritus scattered around the Cellar.

“It’s like the bloody Crimea in here,” Bill said.

The boys nodded their heads in appreciation to the host, Srna, who remained as well groomed as a cat, and as well preserved as black-currant jam.

Johan was no longer the gibbering wreck of the night before. He held the ensuing conversation with his elders in the palm of his hand, moving it skillfully to include each present. He inquired politely as to James’s home state of Idaho, engaged Mario on the family tree of the Srna clan in Sarajevo, and delved for details of New Orleans from Herb.

“The French Quarter is one place I would truly love to visit one day.”

“It’s one mad place, son,” Herb agreed, with heavy eyelids.

“I have an invitation from the owner of the Napoleon House to stay whenever I want. His son is in the same faculty as I. Do you know of the place, sir? It’s on St. Louis and Chartres, I think.” He pronounced the street names as a local would have.

“Every one in the quarter knows the Napoleon House. Best bourbon sours this side of the Mississippi, and the other side, too, I’d hazard a guess. I’ve climbed that crooked old staircase myself on a couple of occasions, to untold treasures above,” Herb said, with a weary bullishness.

“And are there really vampires there?” Johan attempted to rerail the conversation in front of the lady. Lorelei squirmed in her seat.

“There’s every sort of vampire and weird creature of the night in the Easy. Odd critters from seaboard to west head to N’awlins for their crazy antics. It’s why I left, sir. They’ll get you in the end,” Herb said. “You should take your friend up on the offer. There ain’t nowhere like it.”

“And the black magic?”

“As I said, those weirdos get up to everythin’. Voodoo shit is just the start of things. Snakes and skulls make ’em live forever. But make ’em look like they eaten’ nothing but bones for a year a’ Sundays.”

“I prefer the Garden District,” interjected the beauty to Herb’s right. “Those mansions are haunted, for sure.” Her features lit up, and the reflection of a candle danced in her black eyes. Herb took this distraction as his chance to excuse himself and headed toward a darkened arch. James followed him, slowly.

Cartwright and Srna were discussing the rights and wrongs of duels and satisfaction, and Johan was left face-to-face once again with Lorelei.

“So, we meet again,” was Johan’s opening gambit. At least it was in English and the words were in the right order.

“A pleasure.” Lorelei advanced her metaphorical pawn forward one space.

“May I excuse myself for last night? I don’t know what came over me,” Johan said, but with enough confidence so that she might think he was not a complete moron. So far so good.

“That’s all right. It happens,” she answered in vermouth tones with a tilt of the head which implied that it was not the first time she had had such an effect on man or boy, but it also suggested that she quite enjoyed it.

They had the next twenty minutes all to themselves.

Soon the American boys were meandering back to the table, stopping to ogle young ladies and engage them in a confused dialogue. Lorelei leaned forward and, with her left hand under the table, grabbed Johan’s crotch.

An awkward pause followed. Lorelei grinned.

“What is that perfume?” was all that the youth could manage.

“It is called Chance.” With her right hand, she twisted his shirt collar and top buttons a half turn, and with her black eyes she glared deep into his dilated pupils.

“And YES, Johan Thoms. You have one.”

She bit her bottom lip, just to the left, and slowly blinked.

Johan was reduced to rubble. Luckily, his groin also felt like a chunk of masonry.

Herb yelled for more drinks and asked the new guests if they would care to join him. Johan pondered, for the sake of his performance, whether he should further imbibe. He wanted to file this in his memory for later perusal.

“Yes, please, actually. I’ll take a bourbon sour, Herb. Thank you,” said Johan.

Bill yelled to a passing waiter, “Make that two, please.” He glanced to the right to see Lorelei removing her hand.

Perfect, Bill thought, and he winked at his pal.

Generous to a fault, Srna demanded more champagne, and then he continued his tête-à-tête with Bill on Serbian expansionist policy.

Meanwhile, there was a more important agenda on a different Eastern Front. To Cartwright’s right, Lorelei was twitching in her seat. She rubbed Johan’s bare shin with her warm foot.

Later, Johan only recalled noting his own gratitude toward Srna for allowing the obvious frisson to flourish.

The next thing he knew, he was alone with Lorelei. He was kissing her, up against giant wrought-iron gates leading to a darkened courtyard. Darkened, but for the softest of yellow lights coming from two or three windows on different floors.

Fade-out.

The next thing he recalled, they were in an elevator, black trestle closing behind them.

Fade-out.

A knock on the door and two glasses of champagne, with a strawberry in each flute, entered on a solid silver platter, followed by the night porter, all beady eyes and a center parting. The room was luxury.

Fade-out.

A relaxed, naked Lorelei facing him on her back on the bed, head nearest to him, as he staggered off to urinate. She smiled at him as he left the room. He recalled that he had remembered to raise the toilet seat before he’d peed.

(His father had drilled it into him to put the seat back down afterward, in case the female in question were married. For if she were and the seat were left raised, then there would be one malicious, vengeance-seeking husband hiding in the closet for his next visit, clutching a saber—precisely the one thing one would not want to meet in a state of undress and/or arousal.)

In the bathroom, his erection had posed a problem. He did not want to miss the bowl and piss all over her floor, though it was more likely to hit the back of the wall six feet up right now.

He considered doing a handstand and giggled to himself.

In his dorm he had perfected the art of knowing exactly where to stand with a full-blown one (adjacent to the gray-cracking porcelain sink). As he started to urinate and turgidity decreased, he would slowly inch forward, shuffling, in order to maintain bull’s-eye into the center of the bowl. Now, he would have to replicate this skill in a bathroom of untried dimensions.

“Bang on!” he whispered.

Not a drop even touched the porcelain as he smiled at the splashing: he had been a real success in the bathroom. But he could not recall much about what had happened in the bedroom.

These were his main recollections of his first evening with Lorelei Ribeiro. Johan Thoms was still very much a boy.

* * *

The following three days, Lorelei’s last in Sarajevo, were spent in the confines of her suite. Lorelei and Johan ventured into the old town for just one dinner, into an unseasonably chilly evening.

Their venue that night became their restaurant of choice whenever Lorelei would return to this, Johan’s city. Taberne Parioli—named after the hamlet in Italy where the owner had met and fallen in love with his wife in the winter of ’89—was, it seemed, a place for young chaps looking to impress their belles. It had only six tables. Three of these adorned the ivy-covered balcony, from which the patrons were able to acknowledge some of their fellow burgers of the old town and ignore the rest down a long unwelcoming Balkan nose. The owners loved their cuisine and never looked down any sort of nose at anyone. Johan recalled fondly the owner’s wife, her generosity, her love of providing for her extended family of satisfied guests, bringing out the desire-fused dishes created by her beau, who perpetually and profusely sweated away in the back of the establishment.

“Are you frightened of me?” Lorelei had asked out of the blue.

There had been a split-second pause before Johan offered, “No, why?”

On their first anniversary, back at the same spot, equally out of the blue, he would admit, “Yes, of course, I was.”

She laughed at him. She had, of course, known.

Back in the President, supplies of food, coffee, and other liquid refreshment were delivered to the vast mahogany writing desk in her suite.

This was a novel experience for both of them. Johan was not used to spending the next day, never mind three days, with a conquest, though he hardly saw Lorelei as a conquest—more as a monumental work in progress.

For Lorelei, this was the first time since her husband had perished that she had slept with a man. A woman, yes, but not a man.

These details had come to light as Johan had gradually wound down over the days to talk at ease with her and had become almost himself. As his nerves had dissipated, Lorelei had found him increasingly charming, funny, and intelligent. She had laughed.

It would be twelve months, however, before she actually realized that Johan had not been circumcised, for she would never see anything but a turgid member. In her presence it would always be thus. They say the Queen of England perceives and therefore believes that the world smells of fresh paint, for there is always some poor sod twenty yards in front of her with a brush and a large pot, slapping it on at velocity. So it was (sort of) with Lorelei and Johan.

* * *

Srna was to have accompanied Lorelei back to Vienna, but he had gone back one day earlier than planned (but only once he was convinced that Lorelei had wanted to stay in Sarajevo). Always the gent, Srna reassured her that none of this would be mentioned in Austria. She trusted him implicitly. He had prepaid her departure with a bank draft from the American embassy, allowing her to simply stroll and saunter out of the President as she wished. This she knew how to do.

Johan accompanied her to the station and threatened to get on the train with her. She joked and called him “a stupid boy,” though she was confident that he could be groomed—and that soon they would share a great love (which, according to the hyperbolic Cartwright, was “to make Krakatoa look like an abbey candle”).

The train door closed, the whistle blew, and she was gone, to the north.

Six
A Sweet Deity of Debauchery

Moreover, the Lord said, because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched-forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet.

—Isaiah 3:1

June 16, 1913

Johan lay horizontal on his favorite window ledge in his chambers, with a hefty Egyptian cushion behind his bulbous head, soaking in volume three of the Kama Sutra. The sun turned his face a soft brown.

Three slow, light, effeminate knocks landed on his door. It was not the day for the cleaner to mop his floors. Johan jumped down and glided gently to open the door. He was met by a vision of shocking-pink cuffs, pale skin, thinning reddish hair, and bulging green eyes.

The Count stood five foot eight in his stacked-heeled, perpetually new shoes. He was just months from his fortieth birthday, and his most time-consuming pastime, aside from learning Eastern religions, was attempting to maintain his youth. Sadly for him, his hedonistic lifestyle did not dovetail with his efforts. (“My ying is outweighing my yang again,” he said.) This did not stop his being pampered by an array of bemused stylists and fledgling pedicurists more suited to Cleopatra than a Teutonic twentieth-century count.

The visitor held out an elevated and angled hand.

“The Fifteenth Count of Kaunitz. I think it’s fifteen. To the rescue.”

Johan had hardly expected this when he had written to royalty for help.

Johan held out a hand to shake in the normal fashion. For a few seconds, neither moved, and an impasse looked inevitable. They met in the middle.

“Johan Thoms, but then I guess you know that.” Johan showed neither airs nor graces, allowing Kaunitz not an inch in his attempt to foist his lofty social position upon him. “A pleasure to meet you, and a bit of a surprise.”

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