I Served the King of England (9 page)

When the July heat wave came, the boss stopped wheeling around through the
rooms, alcoves, and dining rooms and stayed in his quarters, in a kind of icebox where
the temperature had to be kept below sixty-eight degrees. But though he no longer
wheeled himself along the garden paths, he still seemed able to see us and be
all-powerful.
He attended to things and issued commands and
prohibitions and interdictions with his whistle till it seemed to me that he could say
more with his whistle than by talking. About that time, four foreigners came to live
with us, all the way from Bolivia. With them they had a mysterious suitcase, which they
watched like hawks and even took to bed with them. They all wore black suits and black
hats, and droopy black mustaches, and they even wore black gloves. The suitcase they
were keeping such a close watch on was black too and looked like a small coffin. Now the
free-spending gaiety and debauchery of our nights became a thing of the past. But the
foreigners must have paid well if our boss took them in. One of his peculiarities, and a
peculiarity of the house, was that anyone who stayed here paid as much for garlic soup
and potato pancakes and a glass of sour milk as he would have for oyster and crab washed
down with Heinkel Trocken. And it was the same with the accommodations: even if a guest
snoozed till morning downstairs on the couch, he still had to pay for a whole suite
upstairs. That was one of the glories of our house, the Hotel Tichota. I kept wondering
what they had in that suitcase until one day the leader of the group in black
returned—he was a Jew, a Mr. Salamon—and Zden
ě
k told me that Mr. Salamon had connections in Prague with the
Archbishop himself and that he was requesting the Archbishop, through diplomatic
channels, to consecrate a small gold statue called the
Bambino di Praga
, the
Infant Jesus of Prague, which was supposed to be tremendously popular in South America,
so popular, in fact, that millions of South American Indians wore replicas of it on
chains around their necks and had a legend that
Prague was the most
beautiful city in the world and that the Infant Jesus had gone to school there. This is
why they wanted the Archbishop of Prague himself to bless the Prague
Bambino
,
who weighed six kilograms and was made of pure gold. From then on we all lived for the
glorious moment when the statue would be consecrated. But it wasn’t easy. Next
day, the Prague police showed up, and the division head himself informed the Bolivians
that the Prague underworld already knew about their
Bambino
and that a mob had
come all the way from Poland to steal it. After talking things over, they decided it
would be best to keep the real
Bambino
hidden until the very last moment, and
to have another
Bambino
made of gilded cast iron, at the Republic of
Bolivia’s expense, and they could carry that around with them until the
consecration. The very next day, they brought to the hotel a suitcase that was just as
black as the first one, and when they opened it up, what they saw was so beautiful the
boss himself came out of his specially cooled room just to look at it, to pay his
respects to the
Bambino di Praga
. Then Mr. Salamon began negotiating with the
Archbishop’s consistory, but the Archbishop didn’t want to consecrate the
Bambino
, because the real
Bambino
was already in Prague, and if he
consecrated this one, there would be two of them. I found all this out from Zdenék,
who understood Spanish and German. Zdenék was terribly upset, it was the first time
I’d ever seen him so shaken. On the third day, Mr. Salamon drove up, and you could
see all the way from the station that he was bringing good news because he was standing
up in the car, smiling and waving his hands above his head. He said he’d been
given a good tip. Apparently the Archbishop was fond
of having his
picture taken, so Mr. Salamon proposed that the entire ceremony be filmed as a Gaumont
Newsreel special and then the ceremony could be seen around the world. Wherever there
was a movie house, people would see not just the Archbishop but the
Bambino
and
Saint Vitus’s Cathedral as well and therefore, as Mr. Salamon rightly pointed out,
the church would gain in popularity and its renown would spread to the ends of the
earth. On the day of the ceremonial consecration, the police gave Zdeněk and me the
job of taking the real
Bambino
to the cathedral. The idea was that the
Bolivians, along with the chief of police in formal attire, would carry the imitation
Bambino di Praga
, and Zdenék and I and three detectives disguised as
industrialists would follow inconspicuously behind. The leader of the Bolivian Catholic
group decided I should carry the real
Bambino
on my lap, and so we drove off
from the Hotel Tichota. The detectives turned out to be very jovial fellows. They told
us that when the royal treasury and crown jewels were put on display to the public
they’d dressed up as deacons, wandered around by the side altars, and pretended to
be praying. All the time they were packing revolvers in shoulder holsters like Al
Capone, and when there was a break they had their pictures taken twice with the crown
jewels, disguised as prelates. They couldn’t stop laughing as they told us about
it. I had to show them the
Bambino di Praga
, and eventually we said why not
stop and have Zden
ě
k take our pictures behind a fence,
all in a group with the
Bambino
, using a camera belonging to the plainclothes
cops. Before we arrived, they also told us that whenever there was a state funeral that
members of the government attended, they
had to make sure no
unauthorized persons were allowed in and that no one put a bomb in the flowers, and they
had a special probe which they stuck into all the bouquets and wreaths before the
funeral. They had their pictures taken there too, and they showed us snapshots of
themselves on their knees around a catafalque, leaning on the probe they used to test
the wreaths for hidden bombs. Now they were industrialists in morning suits, and they
were going to kneel and work their way slowly toward the act of consecration so that
they could observe it from three angles, to make sure nothing happened to the
Bambino di Praga
. We drove through Prague, and when we arrived at the
Castle, the Bolivians were waiting for us, and Mr. Salamon took the suitcase and carried
it into the cathedral, and everything was splendid, just like a wedding. The organ
thundered and the prelates in their insignia of office bowed, and Mr. Salamon carried
the
Bambino
down the aisle, and the camera whirred away and captured it all.
The ceremony was like a High Mass, and Mr. Salamon knelt most devoutly of all, and we
slowly approached the altar on our knees, and everything was alive with flowers and gold
leaf and the choir sang the Missa Solemnis, and at the very climax the cameraman gave
the sign, the
Bambino
was consecrated, and an ordinary object became a
devotional article, because it was blessed by the Archbishop and now radiated
supernatural power and could bestow grace. When the Mass was over and the Archbishop had
retired to the sacristy, the vicar of the chapter led Mr. Salamon in after him. Mr.
Salamon was just slipping his wallet back into his coat as he came back out, so he must
have donated a large check in the name of the Bolivian government for
repairs to the church, or perhaps there had also been a fee for the consecration.
Then I saw the ambassador of the Bolivian Republic carrying the
Bambino
back up
the aisle of the cathedral while the organ played and the choir sang. Again the cars
arrived and the
Bambino
was put away, but this time we didn’t take
anything with us, and everyone, including the ambassador and the whole entourage, drove
off to the Hotel Steiner, while we went home to get everything ready for the farewell
banquet that night. When the Bolivians arrived at ten o’clock, it was the first
time they could really relax, and they began to drink champagne and brandy and eat
oysters and chicken, and at midnight three cars arrived with some dancers from the
operetta, and we had more work and more people that night than we ever had before. The
Chief of Police, who knew all about our place, left the counterfeit
Bambino
on
the mantelpiece of the men’s room, and he secretly took the real
Bambino
,
the consecrated
Bambino
, away to the playhouse, where he casually placed it
among the dolls, puppets, jump ropes, and toy drums. Then they all drank, and the naked
dancers danced around the counterfeit
Bambino
until dawn, when it was time for
the ambassador to go back to his residence and the representatives of Bolivia to go to
the airport and head home. The Chief of Police brought the real
Bambino
back to
the hotel, but luckily Mr. Salamon looked into the suitcase, because in all the fun and
confusion the Chief of Police had put a beautiful doll in a Moravian Slovak folk costume
in the suitcase by mistake. They all ran back to the playhouse, and there lay the
Bambino
among the toy drums and three other dolls, so they snatched up the
consecrated
Bambino
, put back the doll, and drove off to
Prague. Three days later, we heard that the Bolivians had to delay their flight. To
mislead thieves, they left the counterfeit
Bambino
outside the entrance to the
airport. At first a cleaning lady stuck it among some box trees, but when the members of
the delegation, led by Mr. Salamon, were safely on board the plane, they opened the
suitcase and discovered that what they had with them was not the real golden
Bambino
blessed by the Archbishop but the gilded cast-iron one. They rushed
out to look for the real
Bambino
just as a porter was asking people whose
suitcase this was. When no one claimed it, he left the
Bambino
standing on the
pavement, and just then the Bolivian delegation came rushing up and grabbed the
suitcase. After they hefted it, they breathed sighs of relief, opened it up and saw that
it was the real
Bambino
. Then they rushed back to the airplane to take off for
Paris and, from there, back to their own country with the
Bambino
, who
according to the South American Indian legend had gone to school in Prague, and Prague,
according to the same legend, is the oldest city in the world.

I Served the King of England

I was always lucky in my bad luck. I left the Hotel Tichota in tears,
because the boss thought I’d deliberately caused the mixup between the real
Bambino di Praga
and the counterfeit one, that I’d set the whole
thing up just to get my hands on six kilos of gold, though it hadn’t been me at
all, and so another waiter showed up with a suitcase, and off I went to Prague, but
right there in the station I had the good luck to run into Mr. Walden. He was setting
off to cover his territory, and his assistant was with him, the sad man who carried the
scale and the salami slicer in a bundle on his back, and Mr. Walden wrote me a letter of
recommendation to the Hotel Paris. He must have been fond of me because as I said
good-bye to him again he patted me on the head and kept saying, Poor little fellow, just
stick to it. You’re small so you’ve got to try hard to
make something of yourself, poor lad. I’ll look you up. By this time he was
shouting, and I stood there waving until the train was long out of sight. So there I
was, on the threshold of another adventure. As a matter of fact the Hotel Tichota had
begun to scare me. It started when I noticed that the porter had a cat that would hang
around, waiting for him to come back from his night labors, or she would sit in the
courtyard and watch him split wood, and that cat meant the world to him, he even slept
with her, but then a tomcat started coming around and she went off with the tomcat and
didn’t come home. The porter became thin and pale and he looked everywhere for his
beloved cat, until finally she came home again. The porter had a habit of talking to
himself. Whenever I walked past him, I could hear how the unbelievable came true,
because from these soliloquies of his I learned that he’d been in jail, that
he’d chopped up a gendarme who was having an affair with his wife and given the
wife such a thrashing with a rope they had to take her to the hospital, and so he got
five years. One of his cellmates was a thug from Žižkov who’d sent his
little girl for beer and when the kid lost the change from a fifty he got so mad he took
his daughter’s arm, laid it across a block of wood, and chopped her hand off. That
was the first time the unbelievable came true. His other cellmate was someone who had
caught his wife with a traveling salesman and killed her with an ax, then cut out her
vagina and told the salesman to eat it or else be killed with the ax, but the salesman
died from the sheer horror of it anyway, and the murderer turned himself in, and so the
unbelievable came true again. The third time the unbelievable came true was the
porter’s own case, because
he’d trusted his wife, but
when he saw her with the gendarme he split the gendarme’s shoulder open with an
ax, and the gendarme shot him in the leg and our porter got five years. Anyway, one time
the tomcat came right up to the porter’s cat, and the porter held the tomcat
against the wall with a brick and chopped through its spine with his ax. His cat began
to mourn, but the porter squeezed the tomcat into kind of a screened-in grilled window
and left it there dying for two days, then he threw his cat out. The cat paced up and
down by the wall, but he wouldn’t let her come home, and finally she disappeared.
I suspect the porter killed her too. He was a gentle and sensitive soul, and therefore
had a short temper, which is why he went straight after everything with an ax, both his
wife and the cat, because he was horribly jealous of the gendarme and the tomcat. At his
trial he said he was sorry he hadn’t split the gendarme’s head open helmet
and all while he was at it, because the gendarme had been in his wife’s bed with
his helmet on, wearing his holster and pistol. It was this same porter who invented the
story that I’d tried to steal the
Bambino di Praga
, and he told the boss
that I hadn’t a thought in my head except to get rich quick, even if it meant
committing a crime. The boss was upset because whatever the porter said was gospel and,
besides, no one would ever challenge him since he was as strong as five grown men. One
afternoon I had found the porter sitting in the children’s playhouse doing
something, playing with the dolls and teddy bears, perhaps, and he told me he
didn’t want to see me go into that playhouse again, the way he’d seen me
there once with Zden
ě
k, because he wouldn’t want
the unbelievable to come true for the fourth time. Then he
told me
how the tomcat had lain in agony for two days with a severed spine right next to my
little room, and every time I passed by he’d remind me, pointing at the
tomcat’s mummified corpse, that this was how everyone who sinned in his
eyes—and he gestured with two fingers at his own eyes—ended up. If there
wasn’t any other reason, he’d get me because I’d played with his
dolls, and for that he might not kill me on the spot, but I’d be sure to die a
slow death, just like the tomcat. Now, at the railroad station, I realized just what a
creature of habit my six months at the Hotel Tichota had made me, because the conductors
blew their whistles, the passengers climbed aboard, the conductors whistled signals to
the dispatcher, and I found myself running from one conductor to another asking what my
orders were. And when the dispatcher blew his whistle to alert the conductors, and all
the doors were closed, I ran up to him and asked politely, May I be of service? So the
train carried Mr. Walden away, and I walked across the intersections of Prague, and
twice a traffic cop blew his whistle so loudly that I ran up, put my suitcase down on
his foot, and asked, May I be of service? And so I walked on until I came to the Hotel
Paris.