The Emperor's Shift

Alexander had brought his own apron.

He had brought it from Potsdam in the luggage, in tissue paper, in a box, and he took it out of the box in the flat above Eight Bars at half past five on Monday the sixteenth of August and shook it out, and it was black, and long, and starched so stiff that it stood up for a moment on its own before it fell, and it had embroidered on the bib, small, in silver thread, the black eagle.

“It was made for me,” said Alexander, “in July. By the Hofschneider. I explained what it was for.” He put it on. “He asked whether I was certain.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I had never been more certain of anything.” Alexander tied the strings behind him, very precisely, in a bow with two exactly equal loops, without looking. “He said, then Your Majesty will be the best-dressed barman in the history of the world.” He looked down at the eagle. “I think he was upset.”

Lukas Brandt, in the doorway of the kitchen, in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and no apron at all, because, he had said on the aeroplane, a barback did not need one, looked at the German Emperor in his starched black apron with the eagle on it, and did not say anything, because it was not yet evening.

---

He had read the manual.

He had read it twice, on the aeroplane, on Sunday, from Berlin, all nine pages and twenty-eight rules, and the minutes of forty-three meetings, which Mr Quennell had sent him in July in a sealed envelope through the diplomatic bag with a covering note that said for information, and he had made notes. He had a notebook, small, black, and in it, in his small upright hand, he had written out every rule that applied to the Sovereign behind a bar, and then a second column, headed Applies to me?, and gone through them, one by one, with Lukas, at thirty-nine thousand feet over the Atlantic, deciding.

“Rule One,” he said, on Monday at a quarter to six, behind the bar of Eight Bars, with the notebook open on the counter beside the till. “The King shall not be tipped. I am not the King. I am an Emperor.” He looked at the column. “I have decided that I may be tipped.”

“The Treasury takes it,” said Frederick.

“Not my tips. Your Treasury has no jurisdiction over an Emperor.” Alexander turned the page. “I have consulted my own Treasury. They say they will not claim it. They say it would be undignified.” He turned another page. “Rule Two. Proof of age. I am eighteen. I have a coin.” He took one out of the pocket of the apron. It was a German mark, and it had on it, in profile, looking left, a young man with very straight hair and an expression of extreme seriousness. “It was struck in 2029. I was fifteen. I sat for it for four hours.” He looked at it. “I look like a man who is about to give somebody very bad news.”

“Mine took three.”

“Then you were more interesting,” said the German Emperor, and put the coin back.

---

He had practised the angle for a month.

Frederick found this out at six o’clock, when Mrs Merriweather rang the brass bell and opened the door, and the queue, which went down Garfield Street past the trestle tables already set out for Thursday, under the lights in the plane trees, all the way to the church, began to come in, and the first person to the bar was Mr Delgado, who had been first in the queue since half past two, and who said, “A bitter, Your Majesty,” and Alexander said, “Gern,” and took a glass, and pulled.

It was perfect.

It was at exactly forty-five degrees. It hit the side of the glass, not the bottom. The glass came up as it filled, smoothly, without hurry, and the head rose, and stopped, a finger deep, flat as a coin. Alexander took the glass from under the tap and put it on a mat in front of Mr Delgado in one movement and said, “Zwei Pfund vierzig,” and then, “Two pounds forty,” and Mr Delgado, who had been at Eight Bars since 1983, looked at the pint, and then at the Emperor, and then at the King, who was standing a yard away behind the bar watching, and said:

“That’s better than yours.”

“I know.”

“That’s better than your dad’s.”

“I know.”

Mr Delgado picked it up, and drank about a third of it, and put it down, and looked at it again, with an expression that Frederick had seen on his face once before, in December, when he had fished an almond out of a glass of glögg and been told it was supposed to be there.

“How long’s he been doing this?” said Mr Delgado.

“A month,” said Alexander, who had heard. “In the Neues Palais. In the old kitchen. The Hofmarschall had a tap installed. It was connected to a barrel in the cellar from 1769.” He took the next glass. “I pulled two hundred pints a day. For thirty-one days. Lukas drank some of them.” He pulled. “Most of them we poured away. It was a great waste. The Hofmarschall wept.”

---

Lukas Brandt was a very good barback.

That was the first thing Frederick noticed, at about half past six, and it surprised him more than the Emperor did. He had not known what a barback was until Alexander had written the word in a letter in June, and had had to look it up: the person behind the bar who was not serving, who carried and fetched and cleared and changed and stocked, who brought up the crates from the cellar and took down the empties and wiped and washed and kept the ice full and the lemons cut, so that the person serving never had to stop. In Eight Bars, all year, there had not been one. There had been the King and Theo and, for six weeks, the Duke, and they had all done everything, badly.

Lukas did everything, well, and silently, and was everywhere.

He came up from the cellar with a crate of tonic at the exact moment the last bottle of tonic was opened. He took the empties off the bar before the person who had drunk them had put them down. He cut the lemons, at the end of the bar by the hatch, beside Kimura, into slices of identical thickness, with a small knife he had evidently brought from Potsdam, and he did not drop a single one, and he did not speak, because it was not yet his time to speak, and he did not, as far as Frederick could see, look at anything except the next thing that needed doing, which he always seemed to know about before it needed doing.

Kimura watched him for twenty minutes.

Then she turned round on her stool, for the first time that evening, and looked at him, cutting lemons, and said, very quietly, so that only Frederick heard:

“That’s how it’s done.”

---

By eight o’clock, Alexander had pulled two hundred and four pints.

They were all perfect. Every one. Kimura had the count on her beer mat and Theo had the timing on his watch, and both of them reported, at eight, independently, that every pint the German Emperor had pulled that evening had taken between eleven and twelve seconds from the moment the glass went under the tap to the moment it went on the mat, and had a head on it between nine and eleven millimetres deep, and had been set down on the mat in the exact centre, so that the edge of the glass was the same distance from the edge of the mat all the way round, and that there had not been a single exception.

And Eight Bars did not like it.

Frederick felt it before he understood it. It was the way the room had gone. Eight Bars on a Monday in August, with two hundred people in it and a queue down the street to the church and an Emperor behind the bar, should have been loud. It was loud. But under the loudness there was something else, something uneasy, the feeling of a room in which something was slightly wrong and nobody could say what. People took their pints from Alexander and looked at them and said thank you and went back to their booths and drank them, and looked at them again, and did not quite seem to know what to do.

“They’re scared,” said Theo, at a quarter past eight, at the end of the bar, beside Frederick, washing glasses.

“Of what?”

“Of the pints.” Theo held one up. “They’re all the same. Every one. You can’t tell them apart.” He put it down. “When you pour, they’re all different. Some of them are bad. Some of them are nearly all right. Once a week one of them’s good, and everybody cheers. Mr Abernathy marks them.” He looked down the bar at Alexander, pulling the two hundred and fifth, at exactly forty-five degrees, in his starched black apron with the eagle. “There’s nothing to mark.”

---

At a quarter past eight, Mr Abernathy came in.

He came in on his stick, with Mrs Abernathy, slowly, and the queue at the door let him through, and the bar let him through, and he came down the length of it to the stool, the third from the window, which had been kept empty since six even with an Emperor behind the bar, and sat on it, and hooked the stick over the edge of the counter, and looked up, and saw the German Emperor.

Alexander saw him.

He had been told about Mr Abernathy. He had been told about him in letters, in the diplomatic bag, every month since September: the stool and the red pen and the beer mats and the C plus and see me, and April, and the handwriting going downhill, and the roll, read on the King’s birthday. He had read every one of those letters twice. And he put down the glass he was holding, and came down the bar, and stopped in front of the stool, and inclined his head, very slightly, which was a thing the German Emperor did for very few people.

“Herr Abernathy,” he said.

“Your Majesty.”

“May I pull you a pint?”

Mr Abernathy considered the German Emperor in his black apron with the silver eagle on the bib.

“If you would,” he said.

Alexander pulled it. Eleven seconds and a half. Forty-five degrees. The side, not the bottom. The glass coming up. The head, ten millimetres. The mat. The exact centre.

Mr Abernathy looked at it.

He looked at it. Then he drank about a quarter of it, and put it down exactly on the mat, and took out the red pen, and uncapped it, and moved the glass two inches to the left, and wrote.

He wrote for longer than usual. He wrote slowly, the letters going straight along the line, and when he had finished he capped the pen, and moved the glass back, and did not say anything, and the whole of Eight Bars, which had gone quiet when the Emperor came down the bar, waited.

Alexander did not look at the mat. He had been told, in the letters, that you did not look at the mat while Mr Abernathy was there. He went back up the bar and pulled the next pint.

Frederick looked.

On the beer mat, in red, it said:

A+.

And then, under it, smaller, in the same straight hand:

Head: perfect. Temperature: perfect. Angle: perfect. Placement: perfect. Time: perfect. I have been marking pints in this bar for eleven years and I have never before awarded this mark, and I do not like it. A pint that is perfect every time is not a pint, it is a measurement. Your Majesty is a very fine scientist. See me.

---

Alexander read it at ten.

He read it at the end of the bar, by the hatch, where Lukas was cutting lemons, when the queue had thinned a little and Theo had brought him the mat on a tray, the way the mats went down the bar when Mr Abernathy wanted somebody to read one, and he stood behind the bar of Eight Bars in his starched black apron and read it twice, without any expression at all, and then put it down on the counter, face up, beside the till, and stood looking at it.

“I do not like it,” he said.

“He means it as a compliment,” said Frederick.

“He does not.” Alexander did not look up from the mat. “He means it exactly as he has written it. He is a scientist. I know how scientists write.” He was quiet for a moment. “He means that I have done it correctly, and that doing it correctly is not the point, and that I have spent a month in the old kitchen of the Neues Palais learning to do it correctly, two hundred times a day, and that I have therefore learned the wrong thing.” He looked up at last. “He means that I am a very good Emperor and a very bad barman.”

“He doesn’t mean that.”

“He does,” said Alexander. “And he is right.” He picked up the mat. “I came to see what I was visiting. I thought it was a bar. It is not a bar. It is the mistakes.” He looked down the length of Eight Bars, at the wall of forty-nine photographs, every one of them of something going wrong, the first keg and the Minister and the coin and the feathers and the six and the tea on the King’s shoe. “You have spent a year being bad at something in front of people. And they have come every night to watch you be bad at it. And then, once a week, one of your pints is good, and they cheer.” He put the mat in the pocket of his apron. “I have been good at everything since I was fourteen. I was not allowed to be anything else. And nobody has ever once cheered.”

Frederick did not say anything.

At the end of the bar, by the hatch, Lukas Brandt put down his small knife, beside a row of lemon slices of identical thickness, and looked up, and it was ten o’clock in the evening, and it was his time.

“Then pull a bad one,” said Lukas.

Alexander turned round and looked at him.

Lukas did not say anything else. He picked up his knife and went back to the lemons.

---

Alexander looked at the tap for a long time.

Then he took a glass, and held it under the tap of the bitter, and did not hold it at forty-five degrees. He held it at about sixty. Straight onto the bottom. And he pulled, and did not straighten the glass as it filled, and the beer hit the bottom of the glass and went mad, and foamed up, and came up over the top, and down the side, and onto his hand, and onto the starched black apron with the silver eagle on the bib, and onto the floor of Eight Bars, where it joined, in spirit, eleven months of other people’s mistakes, and Alexander stood there with it running down his wrist and looked at it with an expression of total, wondering astonishment, as though he had discovered a new star.

The whole of Eight Bars had seen it.

There was a silence. Then, from the booth by the pool table, from Mr Delgado, who had been at Eight Bars since 1983 and had fished an almond out of a glass of glögg and been given the recipe on a beer mat in a language he could not read, a sound.

He cheered.

And Eight Bars cheered with him. All of it, two hundred people and the queue in the door and the queue on the pavement, who could not see but could hear, and the cheer went down Garfield Street past the trestle tables to the church, and the German Emperor stood behind the bar of a dive in the Fourth Ward with beer down the front of his apron and his mouth slightly open, being cheered for a mistake for the first time in his life, and his face, which had been composed since he was fourteen, did something it had not done since he was fourteen, which was nothing it had decided to do.

At the till, the flash went off.

It was the fiftieth.