The Tunnel

There was a door behind the shells.

It was in the north-west corner of the Grotto Hall, in the darkest part of the cave, between two great lumps of plaster rock studded with amethyst, and it was covered in shells like everything else, so that when it was shut it was not a door at all but a piece of wall that happened to have a keyhole in the middle of a scallop. The servants had used it in 1769 to bring the dishes in from the service stair without crossing the hall in sight of the guests. Nobody had used it for anything since the Great War, except Alexander, at twelve, when he was counting the quartz, who had found the keyhole on the second winter and the key on the third, on a nail inside a cupboard in the old silver pantry, on a loop of string with a label on it in a hand from before his grandfather’s time that said Grotte, Nordwest.

He had the key in his hand. He had had it in his hand since the speeches.

He walked to the corner without hurrying. He walked the way he walked at every dinner in the ten minutes between the speeches and the cars, which was slowly, with his hands behind his back, looking at the walls, as though he were inspecting them, because he was always inspecting them, and nobody in the Grotto Hall had ever thought anything of it. Behind him he heard his cousin get up from the table, and Theo, and Jack, and the scrape of three chairs, and his mother’s voice, quite near, saying to the Chancellor’s wife that the children’s ward at the Charité had a new wing, and the general’s voice, further off, saying that the dog had eaten an entire Christmas goose, the whole goose, bones and all, and lived.

Lukas was already in the corner. He was standing in front of the scallop with his back to it and his hands behind his back, as a Page and Gefährte stands, looking at the room.

Alexander put the key in the scallop and turned it.

It turned. It always turned. He had oiled it on the tenth of December and again on the eleventh of January, and the door swung inward on the dark, without a sound, a piece of shell wall with a step behind it going down, and a smell came up out of the step of cold stone and very old dust and, faintly, impossibly, after two hundred and sixty-four years, soup.

He went through. Lukas went through. Behind him he heard his cousin stop.

“Alexander.”

“Come,” said Alexander, from the dark. “It is twenty-one forty. It is on the programme.”

And his cousin came, and Theo came after him, and Jack came last, with the bread roll still in his hand, and Lukas reached past him and pulled the piece of wall shut, and the shells clicked into place, and the Grotto Hall was gone.

---

The stair went down a long way.

It was narrow and stone and it turned on itself twice, and there was no light on it at all except the small light from Theo’s phone, which Theo held up over his head like a man in a mine, and which showed, in its little white circle, the worn hollow in the middle of each step where two hundred years of feet had gone up and down with dishes. Alexander went first. He did not need the light. He had come down this stair in the dark at twelve and at thirteen and at fourteen, the night after his father’s funeral, when he had not wanted to be anywhere that anybody could find him, and he had counted it, forty-one steps, which was the number of the guns, which he had not noticed until he was fifteen and had then thought about for a long time.

At the bottom there was a door, and beyond the door a corridor, and along the corridor, on four iron hooks screwed into the stone, hung four overcoats, and on a nail beyond them hung a fifth.

They were Lukas’s doing. Lukas had brought them down on the sixteenth, one at a time, over the course of an afternoon, under his own coat, from the cloakroom of the house by the lake: a navy one of Alexander’s that he had not worn since he was seventeen, plain, with no insignia and no fur, and a dark grey one of Lukas’s own, and two old ones from the house’s cupboard of things guests had left behind, a brown one and a black one, which would fit anybody of about the right height, and on the nail, because Lukas had not been able to find a fifth, an old green loden cape that had belonged to Alexander’s grandfather and had hung in the gun room for forty years.

“There’s a cape,” said Jack.

“There are four coats and a cape,” said Alexander. “The cape is for whoever is last.”

Jack looked at the cape. Then at the bread roll in his hand. Then, with great dignity, he put the bread roll in his trouser pocket, took the cape off the nail, swung it round himself, and fastened it at the throat with the silver clasp in the shape of a stag’s head that his grandfather had worn to shoot boar on the Schorfheide in 1971.

“I look like a lampshade,” said Jack.

“You look like the King of Bavaria,” said Theo.

“Is that good?”

“Not historically,” said Alexander, and put on the navy coat over the uniform of the First Foot Guards, and buttoned it to the neck, so that nothing showed but the collar, which was red, and the boots, which were black and very shiny and would have to do. His cousin took the black coat. Theo took the brown. Lukas, who had brought them all, took his own, last.

Then Alexander took the second programme out of his breast pocket, through the gap in the buttons, and unfolded it in the light of Theo’s phone, and looked at it, and folded it again, and put it back.

“Twenty-one forty-two,” he said. “This way.”

---

The passage ran under the road.

That was the point of it. The Neues Palais had been built by a King who did not want to smell his own dinner being cooked, so he had put the kitchens across the road in the Communs, two great buildings with colonnades on the other side of the Mopke, which was the strip of road and grass in front of the palace, and had dug a passage under the road to join them, so that the soup could come across under the ground on trolleys without the smell of it ever reaching the windows. The passage was brick, arched, a little taller than a man, and lit at long intervals by old electric bulbs in iron cages, which somebody in the Hofmarschall’s office kept working for reasons that had never been explained, perhaps simply because they had always been kept working, and down the middle of the brick floor ran two thin iron rails, very old, worn silver on top, along which the trolleys had run.

It was four hundred and forty steps long. Alexander had counted it at twelve.

They walked along it in a line, five of them, in four overcoats and a cape, under the caged bulbs, over the rails, in the cold, and their footsteps went away from them down the brick in front and came back from behind, so that it sounded like ten people, and then like twenty, and nobody spoke for the first hundred steps, because it was not the kind of place where you spoke.

Then Theo said, very quietly, “It smells of soup.”

“It always has,” said Alexander.

“How can it still smell of soup?”

“I do not know. I asked the Hofmarschall when I was twelve. He said that a passage built for soup will always smell of soup, and that this was one of the facts of the Neues Palais that it was best not to examine.” He walked on. “He also said that I was not to come down here. I said that I would not. That was the first lie I ever told him.”

“Was it the last?”

Alexander thought about it, honestly, walking.

“Until tonight,” he said.

---

Halfway along, under the middle of the road, his cousin fell into step beside him.

He did it without saying anything, the way he did things, and for a while they walked together between the rails without speaking, under the bulbs, with the others a few paces behind, Jack’s cape swishing, Theo’s light going on and off as he checked his phone.

“Kimura,” said his cousin, at last.

“Yes.”

“She’s going to be really angry.”

“She is going to be correctly angry,” said Alexander. “That is different. She is going to be angry for exactly as long as is professionally necessary and then she is going to find us, because she has found you before, and she is going to stand at the top of whatever we are at the top of with Kessler beside her, and she is going to say nothing, because she will have nothing to say that she has not said before.” He walked on. “I have allowed for it.”

“You’ve allowed for Kimura.”

“I have allowed for Kimura and for Kessler together. They know how we think. Kessler taught me how to think about where a person would go if he did not want to be found. He taught me when I was fourteen, in case anybody ever took me, so that I would know how they would think. He was very thorough.” He paused. “I have used it the other way round. I hope he will be proud.”

His cousin looked at him sideways, under a bulb.

“You’ve really thought about this.”

“For five weeks. Every night. In the dome.”

“Why?”

Alexander did not answer at once. They walked under two bulbs, and over the rails, and the passage went on in front of them, brick and brick and brick, toward a door he could not see yet.

“Because of Phoenix,” he said. “You took me to Phoenix. I want to take you somewhere.”

His cousin did not say anything to that for a long time. Then, very quietly, so that the others could not hear it, he said: “You didn’t take me to Phoenix. Theo did. On a bus.”

“I know. That is why it is my turn.”

---

At the end of the passage there was a door, and beyond the door a stair going up, and at the top of the stair the kitchens of the Communs, which had not been kitchens for a hundred years and were now offices, the offices of the Prussian secretariat, which Alexander knew, because he was the King of Prussia and the Prussian secretariat sent him the blue box; and the offices were dark, and empty, because it was Kingdom Day and a public holiday and the Prussian civil service did not work on Kingdom Day under any circumstances, not even for the King of Prussia, which was in a regulation of 1871 that Alexander had always been fond of.

They went through the dark offices in a line, past desks and filing cabinets and a coffee machine with its light on, and a photograph of Alexander on the wall, at fourteen, in a uniform, looking at the camera as though it owed him money, which Jack stopped in front of, in the cape, and looked at for a long moment in the light from the window, and then looked at Alexander, and then at the photograph again.

“You were furious,” said Jack.

“I was fourteen,” said Alexander. “My father had died seventeen days before. They gave me the uniform an hour before the photograph.” He did not stop walking. “It is on every office wall in Prussia. I have asked them to change it four times.”

“Why haven’t they?”

“Because the regulations say that the official portrait is changed when the sovereign commissions a new one,” said Alexander, “and I have never commissioned one, because I would have to sit for it.” He opened the door at the end of the last office on to a back corridor, and a back stair, and at the bottom of the back stair a door with a bar across it. “It is a trap I made myself. Most of them are.”

He put his hand on the bar.

“Twenty-one forty-seven,” said Theo, behind him, from the phone.

“Then the car is a minute early,” said Alexander, and pushed the bar, and the door opened outward on to the cold.

---

The back of the Communs gave on to a yard, and the yard on to a wall, and in the wall a gate, iron, and beyond the gate a lane, unlit, with the black trees of the park on the other side of it and the snow lying on the verges, blue in the dark. And in the lane, outside the gate, with its engine running and its lights on and the smoke from its exhaust going straight up into the still air, there was a cream-coloured taxi.

It had been booked by Lukas. It had been booked on the twenty-second of December, by telephone, from the call box at Potsdam station, for twenty-one forty-eight on the eighteenth of January, in the name of Brandt, for five passengers, from the back gate of the Communs to the Meierei in the Neuer Garten. Lukas had told the dispatcher it was a birthday. The dispatcher had said, Lukas reported, that it was Kingdom Day and the meters would be on the holiday rate, and Lukas had said that this was acceptable, and the dispatcher had asked whose birthday, and Lukas had said, after a pause that he had described to Alexander afterwards as the longest of his life, a friend’s.

The driver got out.

He was a big man of fifty with a grey beard and a knitted hat and a fleece over a cardigan over a shirt, and he came round the front of the taxi in the snow and opened the back door for them, and looked at the five of them coming out of the gate in a line in four overcoats and a loden cape, and nodded at Lukas, and nodded at Theo, and nodded at Jack in the cape with only the faintest movement of the eyebrows, and nodded at Alexander, as you nod at a passenger, without looking twice.

Then he looked at Alexander’s cousin.

He stopped. He stood in the snow by the open door of his taxi with his hand on the top of the door and looked at the tall fair young man in the black overcoat, and Alexander watched his face, and saw it happen there, slowly and then all at once, the way the light comes up in the dome when you open the slit: the eyes widening, and the beard moving, and the mouth opening inside it.

“Nee,” said the driver. “Nee, ne.” And then, in English, very carefully, with tremendous delight, as though he had been practising it since August: “You are the barman.”

His cousin looked at Alexander.

Alexander looked straight ahead at the open door of the taxi and said nothing at all.

“I saw you,” said the driver. “On the television. In August. With the apron. With the bell. For the Kaiser.” He put his hand on his heart, over the fleece. “My wife, she says to me, look, look, Günther, that is the King of England, and he is pulling the beer for our Kaiser, in a pub, in America, in a pub, Günther, and I say, no, that is not possible, and she says, look, and I look, and it is.” He shook his head slowly, in the snow, with wonder. “In a pub.”

“It’s a dive,” said Jack, from inside the cape. “Technically.”

The driver did not hear him. He was holding the door open, very wide, with great ceremony, and bowing, a little, from the waist, in his knitted hat, to the King of Great Britain, Hanover, America and eleven other countries, who got into the back of the taxi in the black overcoat, carefully, because there is no way to get into the back of a taxi with dignity while being bowed to, and sat down, and Theo got in after him, and Lukas, and Jack, in the cape, sideways.

Alexander got into the front.

The driver shut all the doors and came round and got in beside him and did up his seat belt and put the taxi in gear, and then sat for a moment with his hands on the wheel and looked in the mirror at the back seat, and his face in the mirror was shining.

“Meierei,” he said. “Neuer Garten. For a birthday.” He looked at Alexander beside him, briefly, politely, the way you look at the passenger in the front, without interest. “Whose birthday?”

Alexander looked straight ahead through the windscreen at the lane, and the snow, and the black trees.

“A friend’s,” he said.

The taxi pulled away from the back gate of the Communs at twenty-one forty-nine, which was a minute behind the programme, and the first minute it had slipped; and in the mirror on his side Alexander watched the wall of the Communs go away behind them, and the lamps of the Neues Palais beyond it, all lit, and somewhere in them, in a hall of shells, a man with a face like the end of a wardrobe coming back from the cars.