Asleep

At twenty-five to eight Sergeant Ruth Kimura looked at her watch for the second time and knew.

She did not know what. She knew the shape of it, the way you know the shape of a thing in a dark room before you find the switch. Fifteen minutes was too long for a lavatory. Fifteen minutes was too long for anything a young man did in a lavatory except be sick, and the King had not looked sick. He had looked, coming across the lawn towards her in the dusk with the lights coming on in the palm trees behind him, like a boy about to tell a lie for the first time in his life and not much enjoying the prospect.

She had seen that face before. She had seen it on her brother, at sixteen, on the stairs.

She opened the door.

The gentlemen’s lavatory of the Arizona Biltmore was long and cool and gold and empty. The doors of the cubicles stood open, all six of them. The basins were dry. At the far end, beyond the last cubicle, a plain door painted the same colour as the wall stood an inch open on its slow hinge, as though it had never quite made up its mind to close behind whoever had last gone through it.

There was a small sign at the height of her knee. STAFF.

Kimura looked at the sign for one second. Then she went through it.

---

The corridor behind the kitchens was loud and hot and smelled of onions, and halfway along it a young man in white was standing against the wall with a tray of small things on sticks held up in front of his chest, not moving, as though he had been put there some minutes ago and had not been told he could stop.

“Sir,” said Kimura.

“Ma’am.”

“A tall young man in grey trousers. Fair. In the last quarter of an hour.”

The young man in white swallowed.

“That way, ma’am,” he said, and pointed with his chin, because his hands were full. “Out the back. He said sorry. He said thank you.” He swallowed again. “Ma’am, was that…”

“No,” said Kimura.

“Okay,” said the young man, very fast. “Okay. Sorry, ma’am.”

At the end of the corridor a fire door was propped open with a bucket, and beyond it the service road went away between walls covered in something purple, to a steel gate standing wide open, and a hut, and in the hut a man with his feet up watching a baseball game on his phone. Kimura stood in the doorway and looked down the road at the open gate for perhaps two seconds, and at the man in the hut, who had not looked up and was not going to, and at the empty pavement beyond the gate going away downhill in the dusk to the main road, where the traffic was.

She did not go down it.

She turned round and went back through the kitchens and up the back stairs to the third floor, two at a time, because there was one thing she had to know before anything else, and it was not on the main road.

---

The King’s suite was at the end of the corridor on the third floor, and the officer who should have been on its door was on the lawn, because the King was on the lawn, because that was the programme.

She let herself in.

The suite was cool and dim, with the curtains drawn against the evening and the air conditioning humming. There was a sitting room, and a bedroom beyond it, and a bathroom beyond that, and she went through all of them, one after another, quickly, without touching anything. The bathroom floor was wet. There was a white shirt on it, crumpled, and water all round the bath, and a plate on the edge of the bath with one slice of hotel cheese on it, and the steam had dried on the mirror in long streaks, as though a great many people had stood in here with the taps running and talked.

In the bedroom his good shoes were on the floor by the wardrobe, where he had kicked them off.

The bed was made. On the white cover, face up, a little to the left of the middle, where somebody had thrown it, lay his phone.

Kimura took her own phone out of her pocket and rang his number.

It rang on the bed. It rang the ring he had never changed, the one it had come with, a sort of bright plinking, the most cheerful sound she had ever heard in her life, in an empty room, and she stood at the foot of the bed with her phone to her ear and listened to it ring in the room and in her ear at the same time, twice, three times, four, until it went to the message, which was his voice, quite calm, saying that this was Frederick and he couldn’t answer but would ring back, which he had recorded at fifteen, and never changed either.

She did not leave a message.

She stood there.

---

The Emperor’s suite was on the same floor, round the corner, at the other end, and Kessler was outside it.

He was standing beside the door with his hands clasped in front of him and his eyes on the wall opposite, very large, very still, in his dark suit, as he always stood, and when Kimura came round the corner at a walk he did not move his head, and did not move his eyes, and did not move anything at all.

She stopped in front of him.

“Herr Kessler.”

“Sergeant.”

“How is His Majesty?”

“His Majesty the Emperor,” said Kessler, to the wall, “is asleep.”

Kimura looked at him.

She looked at him for some time. He was perhaps fifty, with grey hair cut very short and a face like the end of a wardrobe, and she had worked beside him on two occasions, both of them long, and she had formed the view on both of them that he was the best she had ever seen at the job and that he would have walked into the sea for the boy behind that door. She looked at the door. It was shut. There was no light under it. There was no sound behind it, no television, no running water, no breathing, nothing; it was the shut, dark, total silence of a room with nobody in it at all.

“Asleep,” said Kimura.

“Asleep,” said Kessler. “It is the heat.” He paused. “He has a headache.”

“And Herr Brandt?”

“Herr Brandt,” said Kessler, to the wall, “is seeing to him.”

“In the dark.”

“He is very quiet,” said Kessler.

Somewhere at the far end of the corridor a lift arrived, and pinged, and its doors opened on nobody, and closed again.

Kimura looked at Kessler’s face. It did nothing. It did nothing so completely and with such discipline that she understood, looking at it, that she was looking at the face of a man who had done this before, a long time ago, for somebody else, and had been very good at it then too.

She did not ask him anything else. There was nothing to ask him that he would answer, and nothing he could answer that she did not already know.

“Thank you, Herr Kessler,” she said.

“Sergeant,” said Kessler.

She went back round the corner, and stopped in the empty corridor outside the King’s suite, with her back to the wall, and her own phone in her hand, and looked at her watch.

It was twenty to eight.

---

She gave it nine seconds.

In the first three she saw what would happen if she did it properly. She saw the call to the duty officer in New Westminster, and the duty officer’s call to the Household, and the Household’s call to the private secretary, who would be at dinner, and the private secretary’s call to the Queen, at home in New Westminster, where it was half past ten and she would be going to bed, and the call to the Phoenix police, who would be very good about it and very quick and would have forty cars out within the half hour, and the forty cars, and the radios in the forty cars, and the man in the forty-first car with a scanner and a phone, and the evening news, and the words on the evening news, which she could see quite clearly, in a band along the bottom of the screen, in capital letters, under a picture of a velvet curtain.

In the next three she saw the boy in the dusk on the lawn, coming towards her with that face, saying I’m going to the bathroom, and the other boy, at half past six in the morning in a car park in the desert, with his hands behind his back, waiting for somebody to say it, and nobody saying it, all day, on purpose, because one of them had decided that the first person to say it should have come six thousand miles.

In the last three she thought about what Castellanos would do.

That took the longest. Then it did not take any time at all.

She put her phone to her mouth and pressed the button on the side that went to the detail and nobody else, the three of them on the lawn and the two on the cars.

“Kimura,” she said. “Change of programme.”

There was a pause on the channel. Then, in turn, five voices. Go ahead.

“His Majesty has gone out for the evening,” said Kimura, “with friends. On foot. In the last fifteen minutes. East, I think. I’ll know more in five. Nobody calls the city. Nobody calls the duty officer. Nobody calls home. Nobody calls anybody.” She paused. “If anybody asks, His Majesty has retired. Which he has. From us.”

There was a longer pause on the channel.

“Ma’am,” said one of the voices from the cars, carefully, the voice of a man choosing his words in front of a recording, “does that mean we’re looking for him?”

“It means,” said Kimura, “that we are going to find him, and that when we have found him, nobody will ever have known he was lost.” She looked at the closed door of the King’s suite. “Cars to the front in two minutes. Bring water. Lots of water.”

She let go of the button.

Then she went back into the suite, through the cool dim sitting room into the bedroom, to the foot of the bed, and picked up his phone from the white cover, where it lay face up, a little to the left of the middle.

The screen lit up in her hand. On the lock screen, under the time, was a photograph she had never seen him look at in front of anybody: a kitchen table on a fourth floor, crowded, with plates on it and a radio on the windowsill, and steam on the window, and at the end of the table a woman in an apron with a wooden spoon, laughing.

Under the photograph, from twenty minutes ago, was a single notification, from a contact saved as Mamma.

God natt, älskling. Grattis till Theo från mig.

Kimura had learned enough Swedish in two years to read it. Good night, darling. Happy birthday to Theo from me. She looked at it for a moment. Then she put the King’s phone in her inside pocket, next to her own, and went out, and closed the door behind her, and went down the stairs two at a time.

It was a quarter to eight.