Eighteen

Theo ate the cake in the car.

He ate it with the white plastic fork, off the paper plate, on his knees, in the back of the second car, going south down a road so straight and so wide and so empty that it looked like something a child had drawn with a ruler, at fifty miles an hour, with the air conditioning on so high that the cream on the cake had gone stiff by the time he got to the strawberry. It was very good cake. It was the best cake he had ever eaten in a car. He ate all of it, slowly, and then the strawberry, and then he sat with the empty plate on his knees and the fork in his hand and looked out at the desert going by and thought: it was spare.

No reason. It was spare.

Freddie had never in his life given anybody anything for no reason. Freddie had a reason for everything. He had a reason for which shoe he put on first. He was the only person Theo had ever met who could tell you, if you asked, why he had chosen a particular pen, and the answer took four minutes and involved the pen’s grip.

So it was not spare. So it was a plan.

Theo looked at the back of the first car through the windscreen, where Freddie was, and thought about the back of his head, and what it had been doing all day, which was not turning round, very carefully, on purpose, about forty times.

He took his phone out.

He had three messages. He had turned the phone to silent at half past six in the car park and not looked at it since, because you did not look at your phone at a thing with a programme, and now he looked.

Happy birthday love. 18!!! Wear the sunscreen. Eat something. Don’t let them make you stand in the sun. Call me tonight. Mum xxx

happy birthday. youre old now. dad says hes proud of you and i am contractually obliged to say the same. dont do anything i wouldnt do which is nothing. K

Happy birthday son. 18. Proud of you. Dad.

Theo read them all twice.

Then he took his wallet out of his inside pocket and opened it and looked at his driving licence. It was a New Westminster licence, pink and white, with his photograph on it looking as though somebody had just told him a fact about lizards, and HARTIGAN, THEODORE JAMES, and 19 AUG 2013, and nothing else that mattered. He had looked at it a great many times in the last month. He had done the arithmetic on it in his head, on the aeroplane, in the queue, in the lift. He looked at it now and did the arithmetic again, and it came out the same, and he put it away.

In the front seat, Sergeant Kimura said, without turning round, “Good cake?”

“Yeah,” said Theo.

“Good,” said Kimura, and that was all, and he could not tell, from the back of her head, whether she knew, and decided that she did, because she knew everything, and that she was not going to say it either, because nobody was, and that this was, very probably, also part of the plan.

---

The afternoon had three more things on it.

The first was a library on the south side of the city that had been turned into a cooling centre. It was a long low building with a car park and a sign outside that said COOL ZONE with a picture of a polar bear, and inside it was dim and cold and quiet and full of old people sitting in armchairs reading newspapers, and a man asleep under a poster about reading, and a row of children on the floor doing a jigsaw, and volunteers in blue T-shirts handing out water from a cooler on wheels. Freddie went round the armchairs one at a time and asked people how long they had lived in Phoenix and listened to the answers, which were long. A woman of about ninety told him that she had been born in Phoenix in 1941 and had never once lived anywhere with air conditioning until 1966, and that people today did not know they were born. Freddie said that he believed her. She said that he had better.

Theo helped with the cooler. He had not been asked to. There was a volunteer with a bad knee trying to push it across the carpet, and Theo took the handle off her without saying anything and pushed it, and she let him, and after that he handed out water for twenty minutes to people who looked at his suit and then at his face and said thank you, honey, and he said you’re welcome, and it was the most normal twenty minutes he had spent since Sunday.

The second was a fire station.

It was the station of the city’s heat crew, a team that did nothing all summer but go out to people who had collapsed in the heat, and they had a truck with a bath in the back, an actual bath, a big plastic tub that they filled with ice and water, and the crew explained that they put people in it. Freddie asked whether they had ever put anybody in it who had not wanted to go. The captain said all of them. Freddie asked whether it worked. The captain said all of them.

Jack, who had come with them and gone pinker at every stop, stood beside the truck looking at the bath with a longing that was painful to watch.

“No,” said Kimura, behind him, without looking.

“I wasn’t going to,” said Jack.

“No,” said Kimura.

The third was a public pool in the west of the city, full of children, under a sky the colour of a bleached sheet, with lifeguards on tall white chairs under umbrellas, who blew their whistles at everything. Freddie stood at the side of the pool in his suit and talked to the lifeguards about drowning, which was apparently the thing nobody thought about in a desert, and the children in the pool stopped swimming and hung onto the edge in a row and looked at him with their chins on their arms, and one of them said, “Are you the King?” and Freddie said, “Yes,” and the boy said, “Can you swim?” and Freddie said, “Yes,” and the boy said, “Prove it,” and every lifeguard on every white chair turned round and looked at Freddie, and Kimura took one step forward, and Freddie said, “Not today,” and the boy said, “Chicken,” and dropped back into the water, and the whole pool laughed, and Freddie laughed too, which Theo had not seen him do in public since June.

It was 109 degrees at four o’clock.

Nobody said it at the library. Nobody said it at the fire station. Nobody said it at the pool. Theo had stopped expecting anybody to say it at about the time of the bath in the back of the truck, and had settled into it, the way you settle into a seat on a long flight, and decided that it was fine, and that eighteen was only a number, and that a plaque with the date on it was quite a lot, when you thought about it, for a birthday, and that he had had cake, and that his mother had put three kisses.

He thought about the back of Freddie’s head, which had still not turned round.

He thought: it’s a plan. It’s definitely a plan.

---

They came back into the lobby of the Arizona Biltmore at five past five.

It was the most beautiful building Theo had ever been inside, and he had been inside a great many by now, including Westminster Abbey, which had a better ceiling, and Columbia Palace, which had more stairs. The Biltmore was made of blocks, pale gold blocks with a pattern pressed into them, hundreds of thousands of them, stacked into walls and pillars and ceilings, so that the whole place looked as though it had been built out of the same small beautiful thing over and over again by somebody very patient, and the lobby was long and low and dim and full of gold light, and cold, so cold that after the afternoon it felt like walking into a lake.

There were two people sitting on a sofa in the middle of it.

They were sitting the way nobody else in the lobby was sitting, one of them very upright, with his hands on his knees and a jacket on, in August, in Phoenix, and the other one beside him, slumped, with his legs out in front of him and his hands in his pockets, looking at the ceiling. Between them, on the sofa, was a white cardboard cake box. Standing behind the sofa, very large and very still, in a dark suit, looking at nothing, was a man Theo knew from Potsdam: Kessler, who stood behind Alexander the way Castellanos used to stand behind Freddie, as though he had been built there.

Theo stopped walking.

The upright one stood up.

“Theo,” said the German Emperor.

“Alex,” said Theo, which he had never called him in his life, and had no idea where it had come from.

The other one stood up too, without hurry, and took his hands out of his pockets, and looked at Theo across the lobby with his head slightly on one side, and said, in his flat, careful, eastern English:

“The knees.”

“The back of the head,” said Theo.

“Good,” said Lukas Brandt, and came round the sofa, and held out his hand, and Theo shook it, and then Lukas did a thing Theo had never seen him do, which was to put his other hand on Theo’s shoulder for a second, briefly, the way you might steady somebody on a boat, and take it away again.

“Herzlichen Glückwunsch,” said Alexander, behind him. “Happy birthday, Theo. I have been asked to say that first, before anybody else does, and I have been sitting on this sofa for forty minutes waiting to say it, and I would like you to know that I have said it.”

Theo looked at him.

Then he turned round and looked at Freddie, who was standing just inside the doors with Jack and Kimura, and whose face was doing the thing it did when it had been holding something since half past six in the morning and had just put it down.

“You,” said Theo.

“Me,” said Freddie.

“You told everybody not to say it.”

“I told everybody not to say it.”

“Why?”

“So that the first person who said it,” said Freddie, “would have come six thousand miles to say it.”

There was a short silence in the lobby of the Arizona Biltmore. A woman at the desk had stopped typing. A man with a luggage trolley had stopped with it.

“Five thousand seven hundred,” said Lukas. “From Berlin. I checked.”

“That’s six thousand,” said Freddie.

“It is not,” said Lukas.

Theo did not say anything. He found that he could not. He looked at Alexander, upright, in his jacket, and at Lukas, and at Kessler behind the sofa looking at nothing, and at the white box on the sofa, and back at Freddie, and something happened in his chest that he was not going to let happen in the lobby of a hotel, and he looked very hard at the ceiling, at all the small gold blocks, until it stopped.

“What’s in the box?” he said, at last.

Alexander looked at the box.

“It was,” he said, with great precision, “a Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte. A Black Forest gateau. It was made in Berlin by the best pastry cook in Berlin, in the night, and it came on the aeroplane in a cold box on Lukas’s knees, and it was perfect at Sky Harbor at half past eleven.” He paused. “Then it was in the boot of Kessler’s car.”

Behind the sofa, Kessler’s face did not move by a single muscle.

“For how long?” said Theo.

“Since half past eleven,” said Alexander. “We were not allowed to bring it into the hotel until you arrived. It is a surprise. Kessler kept the car in the shade.” He looked at the box with great dignity. “There is no shade.”

Lukas lifted the lid.

Inside the box was a dark brown lake. In the middle of the lake, very small, like the last survivor of a shipwreck, floated a single cherry.

They all looked at it.

“It’s the best cake I’ve ever seen,” said Theo, and meant it, and found that he was laughing, in the lobby, helplessly, at a German cake that had drowned, and that the others were laughing too, even Alexander, in the high, surprised way he laughed, and even, for one second, behind the sofa, very slightly, at one corner of the mouth, Kessler.

Kimura was not laughing.

Kimura was looking at Kessler.

---

At twenty past five there were five people in the bathroom of the King’s suite on the third floor, and two of the taps were running.

Freddie had turned them on. It was something Castellanos had told him once, years ago, as a joke, that if you wanted to say something in a hotel without being overheard you ran the taps, and Freddie had never forgotten it, and had clearly never had occasion to try it, and was now trying it with tremendous seriousness, the hot tap in the basin and the cold tap in the bath. The room filled slowly with steam from one and noise from the other.

Jack was lying in the bath.

He had got into it fully dressed, in Freddie’s trousers and his own shirt, the moment they came into the suite, and turned the cold tap on, and lain down in the running water with his head on the end and his eyes shut, and said, I’m not getting out, Hanover, I want you to know I am never getting out, and nobody had argued with him.

Alexander sat on the closed lid of the lavatory, upright, with his hands on his knees.

Lukas sat on the edge of the bath with his feet in the water beside Jack’s knees, having taken off his shoes and socks without asking, and was eating a slice of hotel cheese from a plate he had found in the suite.

Theo leaned against the door.

Freddie stood in the middle of the room, in his shirt, which was a fresh one, having changed it two minutes ago, and threw the old one on the floor, and looked at all of them.

“Right,” he said. “I promised Theo the best eighteenth in history.”

“When?” said Theo.

“In June. At the graduation. You were asleep.”

“Then it doesn’t count.”

“It counts,” said Freddie. “I promised it in my head. Out loud. In the car. You were asleep against the window.” He took a folded sheet of paper out of his back pocket, which turned out to be the programme for the water works, and unfolded it, and turned it over, and on the back of it, in his small, square, careful hand, was a list. “Tonight. After the reception. You’re eighteen. It’s legal. There’s a bar on McDowell Road with a quiz on Tuesdays. There’s a bar in Old Town with a wheel. There’s one that’s been open since 1959. There are about forty in Old Town. I’ve written down six.”

Theo looked at the list.

“Freddie,” he said. “The reception’s till half past seven.”

“Yes.”

“And after the reception you’re going to bed. It says so. It’s on the thing.” He nodded at the folded programme. “Twenty-one hundred hours, His Majesty retires.”

“Yes.”

“With a detail on the door. Like always. Kimura on the door. Like always.”

“Yes,” said Freddie. “That’s the bit I haven’t worked out.”

Theo looked at him.

He looked at him for a long time, in the steam, with the taps running and Jack breathing peacefully in the bath like a man in a coffin, and Lukas eating cheese, and Alexander upright on the lavatory lid watching them both with the expression of somebody at a play.

“You haven’t worked out,” said Theo slowly, “how to get out of a hotel.”

“No.”

“You’ve got a list of six bars and a German Emperor and a drowned cake, and you haven’t worked out how to get out of the hotel.”

“It’s a very well-guarded hotel,” said Freddie, with dignity.

From the lavatory lid, Alexander said, “Kessler will say that I have a headache and have gone up. He has agreed. He is the only one of us who has done this before.” He paused. “He would like me to say that he has not agreed to anything and has heard nothing.”

“Fine,” said Freddie. “That’s you. And then there’s me, and Kimura, and the cars, and the drivers, and the door.”

Theo looked at the list again. He looked at the addresses on it. McDowell Road. Old Town. Indian School Road. He looked at the map of the Valley in his head, the one he had looked at on the aeroplane, the way he always looked at a map of anywhere he was going, which was to find the lines.

“Valley Metro,” he said.

Freddie looked at him.

“What’s Valley Metro?”

“It’s a bus,” said Theo.

There was a silence in the bathroom. The taps ran.

“We can’t take a bus,” said Freddie.

“You can’t,” said Theo. “I can.”

He took his wallet out of his inside pocket, and out of the wallet, from behind the driving licence that said eighteen, he took a plastic card, and held it up between two fingers, in the steam, so that they could all see it.

It had a picture of a cactus on it. A saguaro, with its arms up.

“I bought it at the airport yesterday,” said Theo. “With twenty pounds on it.”

Freddie stared at the card.

“Why?” he said.

“You always buy the card,” said Theo.

In the bath, without opening his eyes, Jack began, slowly, to laugh, and the water went over the edge onto the floor, and Lukas lifted his feet out of it, and Alexander, on the lavatory lid, looked at the card with an expression of the most profound respect, the way he looked at the moons of Jupiter, and Freddie stood in the middle of the steam with his list in his hand and looked at Theo Hartigan as though he had never seen him before in his life.

“There’s a stop on Camelback Road,” said Theo. “Bottom of the drive. It goes east.”

It was twenty-five past five.

The reception was at six.