The Devil's Advocate

By the morning it had been round the world again.

Both telephones had been going against the wood all night, on the two desks, at slightly different pitches, like two things trying to get out of two boxes; and at ten past six, when Frederick picked his up, it said he had a hundred and forty messages, which was fewer than last year, and he found that he minded, and then that he minded minding.

Jack had written at four, which was noon at the New Inn, in capitals.

HANOVER.

HANOVER WHY IS ALEX ON THE FRONT OF THE PAPER IN BIBURY.

MUM HAS PUT HIM BEHIND THE BAR NEXT TO YOU. SHE HAD TO BUY ANOTHER NAIL. SHE SAYS YOU ARE TO BE TOLD YOU HAVE BEEN MOVED UP ONE.

And then, on a line by itself:

he looks like hes doing his tax return on a hill

Theo had written at five, which was eight in New Westminster.

His cuff technique is excellent. One controlled contamination, at the wrist, and the field otherwise sterile. Yours remains the worst I have ever seen. Love to your mum. Tell Alex well done.

Lukas had written once, from Hamburg, at three in the afternoon there.

Right cuff.

The Private Secretary had written at four in the morning New Westminster time, which meant that he had been awake for it again.

The Household has no comment, sir. The Household has learned from a student newspaper this morning the number of the room in which you live, and would be grateful to know whether you had intended it to.

Frederick looked at it for some time. Then he wrote back, It’s a good room, and the answer came in under a minute.

The Household agrees, sir, and has no comment.

On the bed by the door Alexander was sitting up with his own telephone, reading, with his face doing nothing at all.

“Mama has seen it,” he said, without looking up.

“What did she say?”

“She asked whether I had worn the hat.” He scrolled. “The Hofmarschall would like to know whether it was an engagement. If it was, he would like it entered. If it was not, he would like to know what it was.”

“What was it?”

Alexander considered it.

“It was the A,” he said, and put the telephone face down on the desk, square to the edge, and got up. It was a quarter past six, a quarter of an hour later than he had got up on any morning since August, and Frederick noticed, and thought nothing of it, because it was a morning on which everything was a quarter of an hour late.

---

Mr Luna had the Devil’s Advocate spread open on the desk under the lamp at the end of his shift.

Not the city’s paper. The university’s: the students’ daily, which came out every weekday morning from an office in the basement of the student union and lay in a wire rack by the post-room hatch, and which had come out this morning with four pages more than usual, printed in the night. The photograph was the whole top of the front page, across five columns, credited in small type to the woman in the canvas hat and the Arizona Gazette, and above it, in large plain capitals, it said PALO VERDE DOES THE CRACKS, and nothing else; and below the fold, under a smaller headline, there was a column of type with no photograph and no name.

Mr Luna looked at them over his glasses. At both of them.

“Son,” he said. “Son.”

“Good morning, Mr Luna.”

He put one finger on the caption and read it aloud, slowly, as he read the clues.

“A. Hohenzollern. A first-year of Palo Verde Hall.” He looked up at Alexander. “That you?”

“Yes.”

“At the whitewash of the A on Tuesday morning.”

“Yes.”

“Palo Verde does the cracks.”

“We do,” said Alexander.

Mr Luna moved the finger down the page, below the fold, to the column with no name on it, and read the first line of it to himself, with his lips moving very slightly, and then the second, and then he stopped and read the end of the second line again.

“They put the room in,” he said.

“Yes,” said Frederick.

Mr Luna looked at the column for a while longer. Then he folded the paper in half, and in half again, along the creases, with great care, and opened the drawer of the desk, where Frederick could see, under the coffee can of earplugs, last year’s Arizona Gazette, folded the same way, gone yellow at the edges.

He put the new one on top of the old one and shut the drawer.

“That’s two,” said Mr Luna.

---

Rhys read it aloud at breakfast, in the dining hall, at the table by the window with the butte a mile off, in a whisper that could have been heard in Mesa.

“The German Emperor, Alexander I, has been enrolled since August as a first-year student of the University of the March, under the name of A. Hohenzollern, with an intended major in political science.” He looked up. “That’s fine. That’s all fine. He lives in Palo Verde Hall, in room 312, which he shares with the King, George V, who is a second-year student at the university, under the name of F. Hanover, and who is his first cousin.” Rhys put the telephone down on the table. “In room 312.”

“Keep reading,” said Sam.

“The Devil’s Advocate has known these facts since the tenth of October and has not published them, under its standing agreement with the officers of both Households concerning the campus. The photograph on this page was taken on the city’s land, outside that agreement, on a public occasion, and with the Emperor’s name given for the caption by the Emperor. The Devil’s Advocate regards the facts as having been published by the photograph, and publishes them.” Rhys stopped. “By a staff reporter.”

“That’s very correct,” said Sam.

“It’s outrageous.”

“It’s correct. It’s outrageous and it’s correct.” Sam wrote something in the notebook. “The tenth. She’s had it eight days.”

“Who’s had it?”

Frederick looked across the table at Alexander, who was eating a waffle. He was eating it the way he had eaten every waffle since August, cut into the squares the iron had made, one square at a time, from the top left; and he did not look up.

“There’s been a girl along the back wall of Tolliver,” said Frederick. “Since last week. I’ve seen her through the door when I leave him there.”

“With a pencil,” said Alexander, to the waffle. “Behind her ear.”

“You knew?”

“I noticed her on the eleventh. She has not written anything down in the room since. That is how I knew she had it.” He ate a square. “One writes in the room if one does not yet know.”

Rhys looked at him with his mouth slightly open.

“You knew she had it and you painted the A in a white shirt.”

“I painted the A in the shirt I had programmed,” said Alexander. “She would have had it either way.”

---

The dining hall had it on the wall.

The television in the corner over the coffee had the ABC on with the sound off, and the two presenters on their sofa in front of a young man on a hill looking at his wrist, enormous, and every so often one of them turned round and looked at it and shook her head, smiling. The line of words along the bottom said GERMAN EMPEROR A FIRST-YEAR AT TEMPE: PALACE “HAS NO COMMENT”, and then BERLIN: “A PRIVATE MATTER”, and then the weather, which was eighty-five.

And at the table by the coffee there were eight juniors in maroon sweatshirts, and Frederick knew them; they were the same eight.

They put down their forks as Alexander went past with his coffee. They held up their right arms. On every right wrist, across the cuff of the sweatshirt, there was a single stripe, drawn in maroon marker, a quarter of an inch wide, straight, as though it had been ruled; and they held them up in front of them with perfectly straight faces, as eight people hold up their hands to be counted.

Alexander stopped.

He stood in the middle of the dining hall with his coffee and looked at the eight wrists. Frederick saw him not know what to do. It was the first time in his life Frederick had seen it happen to him in public, and it lasted perhaps two seconds, and it was the best two seconds of the week.

“Hold yours up,” said Frederick, behind him.

“Mine is on a hanger.”

“Hold it up anyway.”

Alexander put the coffee down on the end of their table, square to the edge, and held up his right wrist, in a clean blue shirt, buttoned, with nothing on the cuff at all; and held it there, exactly, for as long as they held theirs.

The table cheered, and went back to its eggs.

---

The floor found out about both of them at once.

It found out in the corridor at half past eight, between the stairs and the showers, from twenty telephones; and Frederick, coming back up the forty-five steps for his Spanish book, walked into it as into a room where everybody has just stopped talking.

They were standing in their doorways. The boy from 305, who had borrowed the pencil sharpener every evening since the first week, the little steel one from Potsdam with the crank, and brought it back every morning with a note on it that said THANKS ALEX, was standing outside 312 with the sharpener held out in front of him in both hands, like something being returned to a church.

“Dude,” he said, to Frederick. “I didn’t know. I swear to God.”

“It’s all right.”

“I put it in my mouth once. When I was carrying a lamp.” He held it out further. “Is that, like, treason?”

“It’s a sharpener,” said Frederick. “Keep borrowing it.”

“Is that, like, an order?”

The door of 312 opened behind Frederick, and Alexander came out with his bag, and the corridor went absolutely still.

He looked at the boy from 305, and at the sharpener.

“Good morning,” said Alexander. “Please keep borrowing it. Please return it in the morning. You may leave out the note if you wish.” He considered. “I should prefer the note.”

The boy from 305 stood and held the sharpener and looked at the German Emperor, and his face did several things, slowly, and settled.

“Okay,” he said. “Cool. Thanks, Alex.” And then, in agony: “Is it still Alex?”

“It is on the door,” said Alexander.

---

Further down, by the door of 308, Makayla had Lena against the noticeboard.

Not physically. Makayla was five foot two and from Kingman, and had a voice that had been developed for calling across a high-school car park, and she was standing in front of Lena with her telephone held up between them like a warrant, and Lena, who was shorter, was standing with her back to the noticeboard and a paper cup of tea, looking at her with perfect patience.

“Are you a cop?” said Makayla.

“I am a student of nutrition,” said Lena.

“You said you were an exchange student.”

“I am also that.”

“You have a gun?”

“No,” said Lena. This was true; Frederick had asked, in August, and Kessler had said sir in a way that meant the question was not one for the corridor. “I have a complaint to Residence Life, in draft, about the frequency with which the second ring is now cleaned. Would you like to read it?”

Makayla looked at her for a long moment.

“You’ve been sleeping four feet from me for two months.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve been sleeping four feet from a German cop.”

“You snore,” said Lena, kindly. “In the key of D. I have not reported it.”

In the doorway of 314 Felix was standing with a screwdriver, because Felix was always standing somewhere with a screwdriver, and a freshman from the other end, a tall girl with a lacrosse stick, looked at him and said, “Oh my God. Are you a cop too?”

“I am engineering,” said Felix.

“Is everyone?”

Kessler came out of 314 behind him, with his bag, and his lanyard, and his face, and walked between them down the corridor to the stairs without looking at anyone, and the whole of the third floor of Palo Verde Hall watched him go by in silence, the way a field watches a cloud.

“Is Kessler, like…” said the girl with the lacrosse stick.

“Kessler is a first-year,” said Alexander.

---

The girl in 304 was the last to find out, and she found out about the wrong one.

She came out of her room at a quarter to nine in her pyjamas with her telephone and stood and looked at it, and at the two paper suns on the door of 312, ALEX and the space where FRED had been until about two o’clock that morning, and at Frederick, who was locking the door, and back at her telephone.

“Wait,” she said.

Frederick waited.

“Wait. Fred Fred? The Fred on the door? The one that keeps going missing?”

“Yes.”

“You’re the King?”

“Yes.”

“I thought…” She looked at her telephone again, at the photograph, and at the caption. “I thought he was the King. Since August. Because of how he talks. I thought you were, like, his guy.” She looked at Frederick in his maroon T-shirt with a hole in the hem. “His assistant.”

“No.”

“You carry his coffee.”

“He carries mine on Thursdays,” said Frederick. “We take turns.”

The girl in 304 looked at him for a long time.

“This floor,” she said at last, with deep feeling, “is so fucked up,” and went back into her room and shut the door, and opened it again. “Sorry. Your Majesty. Is that… Do I say that?”

“Fred.”

“Fred.” She shut the door again.

---

From the window at the end of the corridor he could see the low building across the road with the dentist’s sign, and above it, on the second floor, the row of windows, and one of them with its blind exactly half down.

As he looked at it, it went down an inch.

That was all. There was no text. There had been one this year, in August, and there would not be another; Kimura had said three was enough, and she had meant it, and she had sent one more anyway, and now there was only the blind, which went down an inch whenever somebody on the third floor of Palo Verde Hall looked at it, as though it had been asked a question and was declining to answer.

“She saw you look,” said Sam, coming up beside him with the umbrella.

“Did she know? About the girl. That the Devil’s Advocate had it.”

Sam looked at the blind.

“She knows what’s on the campus,” he said. “The arrangement covers the campus. The butte’s not campus.” He paused. “She’d have known the girl had it, and that she was holding it, and that she’d hold it as long as it was campus. And she’d have known the A was on Tuesday.”

“Then why didn’t she…”

“Stop him painting the A?” Sam put the umbrella up, indoors, for no reason, and took it down again. “Would you have let her?”

Frederick looked at the blind, and did not answer.

---

He saw the girl with the pencil at half past two, on the mall, in the shade of the arcade outside the library.

She was sitting on the low wall with a sandwich and a notebook, a student of about twenty with the pencil behind her right ear, and she looked up as he came along the arcade, and saw him, and did not move.

He stopped. He had not meant to.

She looked at him. She did not take the pencil from behind her ear. She did not pick up the notebook, which lay closed on the wall beside the sandwich, with a rubber band round it.

“You held it,” said Frederick.

“For eight days,” said the girl. “It was a campus story. It wasn’t mine to run till it wasn’t.” She considered him. “He gave his name. I was standing next to her when she asked.”

“I know. I was at the rope.”

“I know you were at the rope.” She looked at him a moment longer, as Mrs Montoya had looked at the cuff. “Are you going to ask me not to write anything else?”

Frederick thought about it, standing in the shade of the arcade with his Spanish book.

“No,” he said. “It’s your paper.”

The girl with the pencil looked at him for about four seconds, which seemed to be the length of time that people from newspapers looked at things.

“Yes,” she said. “It is.”

She picked up her sandwich, and did not write anything down, and he went on along the arcade to Spanish, and was nine minutes late, and did not mind.

---

At four o’clock the door of 312 opened without a knock, as it opened every afternoon at four, and Tyler came in with his hood up and a bottle of Glacier in each hand, and his headphones round his neck, from Ironwood, across campus, where Brayden Kish of Mesa had been talking, by Tyler’s account, since Thursday the seventeenth of August without a break.

He sat down on the floor between the beds with his back against the window bed, where he sat, and opened one of the bottles, and looked at Alexander at the desk by the door, and at Frederick on the window bed, and took out his telephone.

He held it up. On it was the photograph.

“Dude,” said Tyler, to Alexander. “You’re in the paper.”

“Yes,” said Alexander.

Tyler moved his thumb on the screen. The column with no name came up under it. He read some of it, slowly, with his lips moving very slightly, as Mr Luna had; and then he looked up, at Frederick, and back at Alexander, and at the space on the door where the sun that said FRED was not.

“Both of you,” said Tyler.

“Yes,” said Frederick.

Tyler considered this for some time. It was the longest Frederick had ever seen him consider anything that was not on a screen. He looked at the two of them, the one at the desk with the pencil and the one on the bed with the Spanish book, and at the box from Berlin on the desk, grey, with the red seal cut, and at the steel sharpener with the crank, which the boy from 305 had put back on the corner of the desk with a note on it that said THANKS ALEX (YOUR MAJESTY?).

“Sick,” said Tyler.

He put the headphones on. He drank some Glacier. In a minute, on his telephone, held flat on his knee, the small sounds began of whatever he was doing on it, which he did not explain and nobody asked him to.

Alexander looked at the note on the sharpener for a long time. Then he took the pencil and, under YOUR MAJESTY?, in the square hand, very small, wrote No, and laid the pencil down beside it, parallel to the edge of the desk, and went back to the box.