The Number on the Front

At a quarter to six he changed his trousers, and moved the coins.

There were twenty of them, in the pocket of the travelling trousers on the chair. He had taken them on Monday morning, before the cars, from the blue dish that Bridget kept by the north-wing kitchen door for the window cleaner and the man who brought the eggs, while Bridget stood at the sink with her back to him and did not see him do it, in the way that Bridget did not see things. He had taken twenty because twenty had seemed like a great deal. He moved them now, a handful at a time, into the right-hand pocket of the grey trousers that had been laid out on the bed for the reception, beside the phone.

He kept one back and looked at it in his palm.

They were the new ones. They had been in circulation for a little under two years, and he had still not got used to them, and he did not think he ever would. On each of them, in profile, facing right, crowned with nothing, with a sort of determined look about the jaw that he did not recognise and that the Mint had assured him was there, was his own head, at sixteen, with GEORGIVS V D G REX round the edge.

He had never paid for anything with one. He had never paid for anything with anything. He did not carry a wallet. There had never been anything to put in one: no money, because somebody else paid; no cards, because nobody could issue him one; no licence, because the only one he had was British, from Cirencester, and in a drawer in London; no photographs, because there were photographs of him everywhere and he did not need to carry any more. Kimura carried what he needed. Before Kimura, Castellanos had. He had gone eighteen years with empty pockets and had not once noticed until now, standing by a bed in Phoenix with a pocketful of coins that had his own face on them.

He put the last one in with the others.

He thought he might need them. He did not know what for.

On the bed, beside where the trousers had been, his phone lit up with something from the press office about the evening news and the curtain, and he looked at it, and did not pick it up, and went out.

---

The reception was on the lawn.

It was 106 degrees at six o’clock, which the man from the hotel said was cooler than yesterday, as though this should be a comfort. The lawn was very green and very flat and very wet, because it was watered, Frederick was told, three times a day, and it steamed slightly under the misters, which ran along a frame above it and put out a fine spray that turned to nothing a foot above people’s heads. There were lights in the palm trees. There was a table of small things on sticks, and another of drinks, and a quartet of students from the university playing something by Mozart very fast, as though they wanted to get it over with before the instruments melted.

The Household had asked whom he would like at the reception, and he had said the people from the day, and the Household, being the Household, had invited the people from the day and also about two hundred other people. So there were the March’s people and the city’s people in their good clothes, and there were also the heat crew from the fire station, in clean uniforms, standing in a group by the drinks with the expression of men who have seen the bath and know what it is for; and the lifeguards from the pool, very brown, in shirts with collars, looking uncomfortable in shoes; and the volunteers from the cooling centre in their blue T-shirts; and Bea from the canteen, in a green dress, with her husband, who was a large silent man in a bolo tie; and Superintendent Herrera, in a jacket, with his wife.

Mrs Herrera was small, and round, and very upright, and wore a navy dress with white spots on it, and came across the lawn to Frederick with her husband behind her like a woman crossing a battlefield to accept a surrender.

“Sir,” said Superintendent Herrera. “My wife. Carmen.”

“Mrs Herrera,” said Frederick. “It was the best curtain I’ve ever opened.”

Mrs Herrera looked up at him. She was about the height of his chest.

“It was the rail,” she said.

“It was the rail.”

“I told him,” she said, without looking at her husband. “I told him in July. I said, the brass will go in the heat. I said, put it up in the morning. He said the city put it up when the city puts things up.” She looked at the King of fourteen countries with enormous satisfaction. “The city,” she said, “put it up at six.”

“It was the rail,” said Superintendent Herrera, faintly, to nobody.

“Your boy,” said Mrs Herrera. “The one who lifted it.”

“Theo.”

“Theo.” She nodded once. “He has good hands. You tell him. Good hands. He handled my dress like a nurse.”

“His mother’s a nurse,” said Frederick.

“Of course she is,” said Mrs Herrera, as though that settled everything, and patted his arm, twice, and took her husband away to the small things on sticks.

---

Alexander was at the reception for exactly seventy minutes.

He stood near Theo, upright, in his jacket, holding a glass of something orange with a straw in it, and was introduced to a great many people as a friend of Theo’s from Germany, which was true, and which caused nobody to look at him twice, because nobody at a reception in Phoenix in August had any idea what the German Emperor looked like out of uniform, and the German Emperor, out of uniform, at seventeen, holding an orange drink with a straw, looked like a well-brought-up exchange student who was about to ask where the lavatories were.

At ten past seven Kessler came across the lawn.

He came the way he did everything, without hurry and without any visible effort, a very large man in a dark suit who seemed, as he walked, to be taking up no room at all, and he stopped beside Alexander and bent his head and said something in German, and Alexander nodded, and put down his orange drink on a passing tray, and touched his own temple, briefly, with two fingers, as if remembering something unpleasant.

Then Kessler straightened up and turned to the people nearest, and to Kimura, who was standing six feet behind Frederick with her hands folded, and said, in English, quite clearly, in the voice of a man reading out a train cancellation:

“His Majesty the Emperor has a headache. He is going up.”

“I’m sorry to hear it,” said Kimura.

“It is the heat,” said Kessler.

“It is,” said Kimura.

They looked at each other for perhaps a second and a half. Frederick, who was not looking at either of them and was talking to a lifeguard about the backstroke, felt it go past him like a draught.

Alexander went up. Kessler went with him. They went across the lawn and into the building by the doors under the arcade, an upright boy with a headache and a very large man, and did not look back, and Lukas, a minute later, put down a plate with three small things on sticks on it and said to nobody in particular, “I will see to His Majesty,” and went after them, at a normal walk, with his hands in his pockets.

At a quarter past seven Jack went to the lavatory.

He announced it. He announced it to Kimura, specifically, because Theo had told him to, standing in front of her with his face the colour of a postbox and saying, “Excuse me, I’m just going to the gents, it’s the sun, I’ve gone a bit,” and making a gesture at his own head that could have meant anything, and Kimura looked at him, at his face, at the colour of it, with something that on anybody else would have been sympathy, and said, “Drink some water,” and he said, “Yeah,” and went.

At twenty past seven Theo went to phone his mother.

He did not announce it to Kimura. He announced it to Frederick, in front of Kimura, standing at Frederick’s shoulder and saying, quite low, “I’m just going to ring Mum, she said to ring,” and Frederick said, “Of course,” and Theo went, across the lawn, in his good suit, with his phone in his hand, and Frederick watched him go, and did not look at Kimura, and felt her not look at him.

That left Frederick.

He stood on the lawn, in 105 degrees, with the misters hissing and the quartet going very fast through the last movement of something, and the lights coming on in the palm trees one after another, and a lifeguard telling him about a boy who had once tried to swim the length of the pool underwater on a bet and very nearly had, and he thought about the next thirty seconds of his life, and found that he was more frightened than he had been at the plaque, or at the Abbey, or at the bottom of the hill in Santa Monica with the water coming in.

He said goodbye to the lifeguard.

He turned round.

Sergeant Kimura was six feet away, where she always was, with her hands folded in front of her and her face doing nothing at all. She had a short black fringe and a small scar through one eyebrow that she had got, she had told him once, falling off a bicycle at the age of nine, and she was looking at him with the slight, patient, interested expression of a woman who had been told a joke and was deciding whether to laugh.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” said Frederick.

“I’ll walk you,” said Kimura.

“It’s twenty yards.”

“I know where it is.” She unfolded her hands. “I’ll walk you.”

---

The gentlemen’s lavatory at the Arizona Biltmore was at the end of a short corridor off the arcade, and it had a heavy wooden door with a brass plate on it that said GENTLEMEN in the same pattern as the blocks, and Kimura walked him to it at exactly the distance she always walked, and stopped outside it, and turned round, with her back to the door, and folded her hands again, and looked down the corridor.

“I’ll be here,” she said.

“Thank you,” said Frederick.

He went in.

It was a long room, cool, tiled in pale gold, with a row of basins under a long mirror and a row of cubicles with doors to the floor, and at the far end of it, beyond the last cubicle, exactly where Theo had said it would be, there was a second door.

It was a plain door, painted the same pale gold as the wall, with no plate on it, and a push bar, and a small sign, at the height of a man’s knee, that said STAFF.

Theo had found it at a quarter to six. Theo had walked the whole of the ground floor of the hotel in twenty minutes, in his good suit, with his phone in his hand as if he were looking for signal, while Frederick changed his trousers and moved his coins. Theo had come back up to the suite and said, standing in the doorway, the gents off the arcade has two doors, the other one goes to the corridor behind the kitchens, the corridor goes to the service road, the service road goes to a gate, the gate is open from six till nine for the deliveries, and there’s a man on it who’s watching a baseball game on his phone, and Frederick had looked at him as though he were a field marshal.

Frederick stood in the gentlemen’s lavatory of the Arizona Biltmore, in his grey trousers with twenty pound coins in the pocket, and looked at the door that said STAFF.

He thought about Kimura, six feet away on the other side of a heavy wooden door with a brass plate on it, with her hands folded, looking down a corridor.

He thought about the fact that he was eighteen, and that he had been King in his own right for two years and three months, and that in all of that time he had never once gone through a door without somebody knowing which door it was.

He thought about Theo, standing in a car park at half past six that morning, waiting for somebody to say it.

He went through the door.

---

The corridor behind the kitchens smelled of onions and bleach and was full of steel trolleys and noise, and a man in white with a tray of small things on sticks looked at him going past and said, “Hey,” and then, a second later, looking at his face, “Oh,” and then nothing at all, and flattened himself against the wall with his tray held up like a shield. Frederick said, “Sorry, thank you, sorry,” and kept walking, the way you walk when you have decided that if you walk as though you belong somewhere then you do. At the end of the corridor there was a fire door propped open with a bucket, and beyond it the evening, and the heat came through the gap like a hand.

The service road ran along the back of the hotel between high walls covered in something purple that was flowering, and he took off his tie as he walked and put it in his jacket pocket, and at the end of it was a gate, a wide steel one on wheels, standing open, with a small hut beside it, and in the hut a man in a security guard’s shirt with his feet up, watching a baseball game on his phone.

Four people were standing on the far side of the gate, on the pavement, in the last of the light.

Theo, with his phone. Jack, pink, with a bottle of water. Lukas, with his hands in his pockets. Alexander, upright, in his jacket, with a headache.

Frederick walked past the hut.

The man in the hut did not look up. On his phone somebody hit something, and a crowd roared, and the man said, “Come on,” to the phone, with great feeling, and Frederick walked through the open gate and out onto the pavement, and stopped, and stood with the others, and nobody said anything.

They had not planned what to say.

“Right,” said Theo, at last. “It’s that way. Down the hill. Ten minutes.”

“It’s a hundred and five degrees,” said Jack.

“Then nine,” said Theo.

They walked.

They walked down the long drive between the palm trees and the oleanders, five young men in good shoes and good trousers and shirts already sticking to their backs, going downhill in a line, not fast, not slow, the pace you would walk to somebody’s door, and the sky going from gold to peach above the mountains in the west, and the heat coming up off the pavement through their soles. Alexander, after visibly considering it for some time, undid one button of his own jacket, and then, after some more time, a second, and walked on with the air of a man who has gone too far and does not care.

Nobody followed them.

Nobody shouted. No car came down the drive behind them. Frederick listened for it all the way, the sound of tyres, the sound of a voice he knew saying his name in the tone she used, and it did not come, and every step that it did not come made the next one stranger.

At the bottom of the drive there was a road, wide and loud, with traffic in both directions and the lights of shops and petrol stations going away to the east, and on the near side of it, fifty yards along, a bus shelter: a roof on four posts with a bench in it and a lit sign on a pole.

They stood under the roof. It made no difference to the heat at all. Frederick took off his jacket at last and put it over his arm.

“How do you know which one?” said Frederick.

“It says on the front,” said Theo.

“What does it say?”

“The number. And where it’s going.” Theo looked down the road to the west, where the traffic came from, with his hand up against the low sun. “That one.”

A bus was coming. It was a long white bus with a blue stripe and a lit sign over the windscreen, and it came down the road towards them through the shimmer off the tarmac like something arriving out of a mirage, and the sign over the windscreen, as it came, resolved itself: a number, and a word, and then another word that scrolled across and was gone.

“Is that ours?” said Alexander.

“That’s ours,” said Theo.

The bus pulled in. It knelt, with a long sigh, the whole front of it lowering itself towards the kerb like a camel. The doors opened. The cold came out, and then the heat went in after it.

Theo got on first. He held the cactus card against a little square on a post by the driver, and the post beeped, and he said to the driver, “Five, please,” and held it against the square four more times, beep, beep, beep, beep, and the driver, a man of about forty with a moustache and a cool box on the floor by his feet, looked at the card and at Theo and then down the steps at the four people behind him, in their suits, outside a hotel, at half past seven on a Tuesday evening in August.

He looked at Jack, pink.

He looked at Lukas, with his hands in his pockets.

He looked at Alexander, upright, in his jacket, with two buttons undone.

He looked at Frederick.

He looked at Frederick for about a second and a half. His face did nothing at all. Then he looked forward through his windscreen at the road, and put both hands on the wheel, and said, to the windscreen, in the voice of a man who has been driving a bus for twenty years and has decided, in that time, to find out as little as possible about anybody:

“Move on down, please.”

They moved on down.

The doors closed behind them with a sigh. The bus stood up. Frederick, walking down the aisle towards the long seat at the back, with his jacket over his arm and his tie in the pocket and twenty coins with his own face on them in his trousers, felt it pull out from the kerb and into the traffic, going east, into the evening, and he sat down on the hot vinyl at the back beside the window and looked out at the road.

Behind them, at the top of the hill, the hotel stood in its palm trees with its lights coming on, and nobody came out of it.

It was half past seven.