Old Town

At twenty past one in the morning the whole of Old Town was in the street.

Frederick had not known that a town could do this. Every bar on every street had its doors open and its music coming out of them, all of it at once, and every patio was full, and between the patios, on the pavements and in the road, under the street lamps, in the heat, were the people who had just come out of one bar and had not yet gone into the next: hundreds of them, thousands, in shirts and short dresses and baseball caps and cowboy hats, all of them talking at once and none of them going anywhere in particular, like a river that has been let out of a lock and has not yet decided which way is down.

Frederick stood at the corner with his back to a wall and counted.

“Theo.”

“Here.”

“Jack.”

“Here, Hanover.”

“Alexander.”

“Here.”

“Lukas.”

Nothing.

He looked. Theo was beside him with the watch on his chest, lifting it every thirty seconds to read it upside down, like a man who has been given a new thumb. Jack was beside Theo, red in the face from the heat, with his hand on the back of Frederick’s belt, because Frederick had asked him to keep it there and he had said he would have anyway. Alexander was on the other side, with his hands behind his back, looking at the crowd with the exact attentive face of a boy watching a regiment go past.

There was no Lukas.

“Where’s Lukas?” said Frederick.

“He was here,” said Theo. “He was here a second ago. He said something.”

“What did he say?”

Theo thought about it.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It was short.”

---

He had not had a drink all night. That was the thing nobody had told him about having no ID, that by half past one in the morning it made you the responsible adult. Theo was drunk, in the careful, delighted way of a man on the first legal night of his life, and Jack was drunk the way Jack was everything, loudly and kindly, and the two Germans had had nothing but lemonade since eight o’clock and were seventeen, and one of them was an Emperor, which was not the same thing at all as being looked after. And he was eighteen and stone cold sober, at twenty past one in the morning, on a street corner in Scottsdale, with six lemonades in him and four people to keep alive, and nobody to keep him alive at all, because the person whose job it was to do that was somewhere behind them in the dark, probably with his phone in her pocket, getting closer.

He had never been the responsible adult before. He had never been allowed. There had always been somebody standing at the edge of the room whose job it was.

It was, he found, exhausting. He did not know how Castellanos had done it for six years without sitting down.

“Lukas,” he said again, louder, to the crowd.

Six people turned round who were not Lukas.

“Is that your friend?” said a girl in a cowboy hat, pointing back down the street. “The skinny one? He’s in the middle of the road.”

---

He was.

He was standing in the very middle of the street, between the two lines of parked cars, perfectly still, with his hands at his sides, while the crowd went round him on both sides like water going round a post. He was not looking at anything. He was not doing anything. He was standing.

They pushed through to him. It took two minutes.

“Lukas.”

“Yes.”

“What are you doing?”

“Standing still.” Lukas looked at him with mild interest. “When you are lost in a forest, you stand still. You do not go looking for the people who are looking for you. If everybody looks, nobody finds anybody. One person stands still and the others come to him. It is the rule. We learned it in the walking group when we were eight.” He looked at Alexander. “Alex knows.”

“I know,” said Alexander.

“So when I saw that I was lost,” said Lukas, “I stood still. And you came.” He looked round at the four of them. “It worked. That is a fact.”

“This isn’t a forest,” said Jack.

“It is now,” said Lukas, and a man in a cowboy hat with his arm round two women in cowboy hats walked round him on one side and said excuse me, buddy and walked round him on the other, and Lukas did not move.

“I said something,” said Lukas, to Theo. “Before. I said ‘I am going to look at the hitching rail.’ You said ‘okay’.”

“I don’t remember that,” said Theo.

“You said ‘okay’,” said Lukas. “Then I looked at the hitching rail. It was a good hitching rail. It is a legal requirement. Then I was lost.” He considered. “I had thought there might be a horse.”

---

There was not a horse. There was, outside the bar on the corner, a long iron rail on two posts at the edge of the pavement, painted black, with nothing tied to it but a bicycle, and Theo stopped in front of it on the way back with his hand on his chest and his face lit up by something that was not the street lamps.

“That’s the Travellers’ Act,” said Theo.

“The what?” said Jack.

“The Travellers’ Act. Eighteen sixty-four. Every licensed premises in the March has to keep a hitching rail you can reach from the street. For a horse. It’s the law. Castaways has one at every parking space. I read the whole article on the bus.” Theo put his hand on the rail. “It’s still the law. They never took it out. You could ride into Old Town on a horse right now and tie it up here and nobody could stop you.”

“Could they stop you going into the bar?” said Jack.

“No. That’s the point. A traveller’s entitled to the rail and a drink.” Theo frowned. “Or water. For the horse. The older version says a trough.”

“Where’s the trough?”

They looked. There was no trough.

“That’s a scandal,” said Jack, with great satisfaction. “That’s a real scandal. Somebody should write to somebody.”

“Nobody’s had a horse here since about 1950,” said Frederick.

“Then they should get one,” said Theo. “On my birthday. I want a horse to tie to the rail. That’s my birthday wish. I didn’t have one before and now I do.” He turned round. “Freddie. You’re the King. Can you get me a horse?”

“Not at half past one in the morning.”

“What’s the use of you,” said Theo, and kissed the hitching rail, quite seriously, on the top, and stood back from it with tears in his eyes, and said “the Travellers’ Act,” again, very softly, to himself, as if it were the name of a girl.

---

They lost Alexander at twenty-six minutes past one.

Frederick knew the time exactly because Theo told him, lifting the watch on his chest, the moment they noticed. They had come round a corner into a wider street where the crowd was thicker, a street of bars with their doors open and the music coming out of all of them at once and staff in black T-shirts on stools in the doorways, looking at licences with torches, and Frederick had turned to count, and had counted to three, and stopped.

“Where’s Alexander?”

“He was here,” said Theo.

“Everybody was here,” said Jack. “Everybody’s always here until they aren’t. That’s the whole problem with people.”

“Lukas,” said Frederick. “Where would he go?”

Lukas looked at him with his pale considering face.

“He would not go anywhere,” he said. “He does not go. He has never in his life gone anywhere on his own. He has never been allowed.” He looked at the crowd. “If he is not here, he has been taken somewhere. Or he has decided something.”

“Decided what?”

“I do not know,” said Lukas. “He does not tell me. He decides things and then he does them and then he tells me afterwards in a letter.”

Frederick looked at the crowd and felt, for the first time all night, something cold go down the middle of his back, under the shirt, through the heat. He had lost the German Emperor. He had taken the German Emperor out of the Arizona Biltmore on a bus without his detail, and Kessler had covered for them, and now, at twenty-six minutes past one in the morning on a street in Old Town Scottsdale, among three thousand people in cowboy hats, he had lost him, and somewhere in Berlin, where it was half past ten in the morning, a Chancellor was at his desk who did not know yet that his Emperor was missing and that it was the King of the United Kingdom of America’s fault.

“Stand still,” said Lukas.

“What?”

“Stand still. All of us. It is the rule.”

So they stood still. The four of them, in a row, on the pavement outside a bar with its doors open, with the crowd going round them on both sides, perfectly still, Frederick and Jack and Theo and Lukas, in the heat, at half past one in the morning, not looking for anybody, and a man walking past with a slice of pizza said are you guys a performance piece and Theo said yes and the man gave him a pound, and Theo looked at the head on it, and at Frederick, and put it in his pocket without a word.

They stood for a minute and a half.

Alexander did not come to them.

“The rule doesn’t work,” said Jack.

“The rule works,” said Lukas. “He is not following it. That is a different problem.” He looked up the street. “There.”

---

He was on the next corner, under a street lamp, outside a shut shoe shop, talking to a policeman.

It was a Scottsdale policeman, in the dark short-sleeved uniform, a big friendly man of about fifty with a grey moustache and a notebook, and he had the notebook open on his knee, with one foot up on the low wall in front of the shoe shop, and he was drawing in it. Alexander was standing beside him, very upright, with his hands behind his back, leaning very slightly forward from the waist to look at the drawing, with the expression of a staff officer being shown a map of a campaign.

Frederick stopped.

“Don’t,” said Jack, at his shoulder. “Don’t go running up. If you go running up it looks like something.”

“It is something.”

“It doesn’t have to look like something,” said Jack, who had pulled pints for a policeman every Friday night of his life and knew. “Walk. Like you’re bored. Like you’ve lost a mate and you’re not bothered.”

They walked. Like they were bored. Frederick had never walked like he was bored in his life and did not know how, and so he walked the way he walked up the aisle at Westminster, which was not right, and Jack hissed slower, and he walked slower.

”… and then you go left,” the policeman was saying, as they came up, “at the corner here, past the place with the big sign, and you go about a block and a half, and you’ll see it, it’s on the little street, the plaza, it’s the island bar, you’ll hear it before you see it. You can’t miss it. Well. People miss it. People miss everything at this time of night. But you won’t miss it, because I’ve drawn it.” He tore the page out of the notebook and gave it to Alexander. “There. That’s you. That X. And that’s Giligin’s.”

Alexander took the page in both hands, by the bottom, with two fingers, as if it had been handed to him at a ceremony.

“Thank you,” said Alexander. “That is extremely clear.”

“You’re welcome.” The policeman put his foot down off the wall and looked at him. “Where you from, son?”

“Germany.”

“Germany! Long way from home.”

“Yes,” said Alexander.

“What part?”

Alexander considered this, in the way he considered everything, honestly, for a long moment.

“All of it,” he said.

The policeman laughed. It was a big friendly laugh and he meant every bit of it.

“All of it! I like that. My grandmother was from Bavaria. Little place in the mountains. She’d say that too. All of it.” He put his notebook away. “You here on your own?”

“No. I am with friends.” Alexander turned his head and found them, standing in a row three yards off, being bored. “Those are my friends.”

The policeman looked at them. At a tall fair young man in a white shirt standing very straight, a boy with a red face and a big grin, a boy with an upside-down watch pinned to his chest, and a thin pale boy perfectly still.

“Huh,” said the policeman. He looked at Frederick for a moment, the way people had been looking at him all night, at the eyes, as if he reminded him of somebody on a calendar. Then he let it go, the way they had all let it go, as if, Frederick thought, he had seen a great many tall fair young men in white shirts in Old Town in his time and none of them had ever been anybody. “Your buddy here was asking the way to Giligin’s. He was very polite about it. I don’t get polite, this time of night. I get a lot of things this time of night. I don’t get polite.” He looked at the four of them. “You all got somebody looking out for you tonight? Somebody sober?”

“Yes,” said Frederick.

“Who?”

“Me.”

The policeman looked at him, and at his face, and at whatever was on it, which Frederick did not know, and nodded slowly.

“Okay,” said the policeman. “Good. You look like you mean it. Drink some water. All of you. It’s still ninety-two.” He nodded to Alexander. “Enjoy the rest of your trip. Say hi to Germany.”

“I will,” said Alexander, with absolute sincerity, “say hi to all of it.”

---

They went left, at the corner, past the place with the big sign, in a row, with Alexander at the front holding the policeman’s map in front of him in both hands, by the bottom, and the rest of them following.

“You decided something,” said Lukas, at his side.

“Yes.”

“What?”

“I decided,” said Alexander, “that I had never in my life asked a policeman for directions. I have been given directions by policemen. They walk in front of the car on a motorcycle. But I have never asked.” He looked at the map. “So I asked. It was very interesting. He drew it himself.”

“You could have told us,” said Frederick.

“I would have,” said Alexander, “in a letter.”

Down the side of the street, a long way back, going slowly, the dark people carrier came along the kerb with its engine running and its lights off, and stopped when they stopped, and moved when they moved.

“Kessler saw all of it,” said Lukas.

“Kessler,” said Alexander, “will say nothing. Kessler says nothing about anything. It is the best thing about him.” He turned the map round. “Left. Then about a block and a half. Then the little street.” He looked up. “There.”

---

Winfield Scott Plaza was a short lane of low buildings, single-storey and two, in the oldest part of the town, and at twenty-five to two in the morning it was quieter than any street they had come through, and nearly dark, with most of its windows shut, except for one.

The one had its door open, and the light inside still yellow, not white, and music coming out of it still, and voices, and a sound of something wooden going round, clicking, slowing down, and then a cheer.

Theo stopped dead on the pavement and put his hand on the watch on his chest.

“One thirty-five,” said Theo. “An hour and twenty-five minutes.”

“An hour and twenty-five minutes of what?”

“Of being open,” said Theo. “It’s open till three. It’s got a wheel.” He turned round to the four of them on the pavement in the heat, with his face shining, eighteen years and nineteen hours old and every second of it lit up. “Freddie. It’s the last bar of my birthday. And we found it. With a map. From a policeman.”

“Alexander found it,” said Frederick.

“I followed a map,” said Alexander. “Anybody can follow a map. The policeman found it.”

“Then to the policeman,” said Theo, “and to the alphabet, and to the Travellers’ Act, and to the horse I’m not getting.” He looked at the door. “Come on. Before somebody closes it.”

And he went in at the open door, into the yellow light and the music and the sound of the wheel, and the other four went in after him, one at a time, Frederick last, holding the door, looking back once, down the dark lane, at nothing at all, and then going in.