If You're Reading This, I'm Already Dead by Andrew Nicoll

Author:Andrew Nicoll [Nicoll, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781623652500
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2013-07-08T16:00:00+00:00

So that was how me and Max came to be in the royal apartments discussing my government’s policy on the supply of harems.

After my public acclaim and once Kemali came to realize that he really didn’t have much say in the matter, it was all pretty straightforward. The warlords kicked their girls out of the Rolls so one of them could lie on the back seat and use his feet to push the dents out of the roof, and then I got on board for a stately progress through town to the palazzo that had been set aside for me. Naturally there was no room for Max and the others. I had to sit there, all alone in the back seat with nobody for company except a driver who smelt like ripe cheese and big hairy men with bad teeth hanging on the running boards to keep the crowds back. Using my patented “Angry Hungarian Daddy” method, I was able to translate their pleas for more royal cash to be flung out the windows, but I just smiled and waved and told them cordially to get stuffed in a language they could not understand.

It took a couple of runs before the rest of the royal party was able to join me in my palace, so I had the place to myself for a bit and I went off to hunt for secret passages. I didn’t find any. It was all pretty much as I’d expected: a pleasant, comfortable palazzo up a drive with a grand, central lobby and fancy curving staircases and a hole in the roof where the early-evening sun peeped through, courtesy of the beastly Serbs. It could be fixed and I’ve slept in worse places. This is one.

I walked along the upper landing and counted sixteen rooms on two wings with statues and paintings and pianos and fancy fireplaces and beds big enough to hold a dance in. Downstairs there was a ballroom with a chandelier as big as the moon, all wrapped in dust sheets and dangling from the roof like a hanged ghost, and a dining room with a table the size of an ocean liner and chairs lined up all around it and, beyond that, the kitchens with copper pans swinging from hooks and chattering at me as I passed and an iron range that filled the whole back wall. It was stone cold, of course, and I was tempted to get it lit, but really that’s not the sort of thing a king’s supposed to do. In fact, I doubt if a real king would have the first idea how to start a fire. That’s what you have servants for. So I didn’t bother in case it gave me away. Not being helpless is a sure sign of not being a king.

When I heard a car horn and the sound of tires on gravel I went back to the lobby so I could stand on the stair looking stately and, sure enough, a

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