The Last Instance

The clock on the tower of the Red Town Hall struck midnight as they crossed the Spandauer Strasse, and Alexander stopped in the middle of the road to count it.

He had not meant to stop. He had meant to cross, because the lights were green and the programme had them at the corner of the Waisenstrasse at two minutes past, but the first stroke came down out of the dark over the roofs, very deep and very slow, from the tower of red brick that the city had built itself in 1869 to show the King that it could, and his feet stopped of their own accord on the tramlines and he stood and counted. The others stopped round him. A taxi went past them with its horn going. Twelve.

“That’s it, then,” said Theo. “It’s not your birthday any more.”

Alexander looked up at the tower, and at the clock face, lit, with its gold hands together at the top.

“It does not count,” he said, “until I have been to sleep.”

Theo looked at him.

“That’s mine,” said Theo. “I said that. In Coach House. To the woman behind the bar.”

“I know. I was standing behind you with a lemonade.” Alexander started walking again, across the tramlines, to the far pavement. “I have been waiting a year and five months to use it.”

---

The Waisenstrasse was a short crooked street of old houses behind the Klosterstrasse, and along one side of it ran a wall. It was not much of a wall. It was a long low stretch of rough grey stone, patched with brick, about the height of a man, with grass growing out of the top of it under the snow, and it was the last piece of the wall that had been built round Berlin in the thirteenth century, when Berlin was a market town on a sandbank in a river and had needed one. Everything else of it had gone. This piece had stayed because houses had been built against it, and the houses had held it up, and it had held them up, for seven hundred years, which Alexander thought was the only possible definition of a successful constitutional arrangement.

And against the wall, at the end of the street, holding it up, stood the oldest inn in Berlin.

It was a narrow house of three storeys with a steep roof and small windows with yellow light in them, and a sign over the door in old lettering, Zur letzten Instanz. The Last Instance. The court of last resort. The story was that in the old days, when the city court was round the corner, the people who had been to law over a fence or a cow or a debt would come here afterwards, both sides, and settle it over a beer, and that this was the last instance, after the court, and the only one that ever settled anything. It said 1621 on the wall beside the door, in iron numbers. Alexander had been told at school that the true date was later and the story was invented and the iron numbers were from 1924. He had decided, at the time, that it did not matter, and that an inn which had been the last instance for a hundred years was the last instance whatever the numbers said.

He pushed open the door.

---

It was very small and very hot and very old, and it was full of wood. There was wood on the walls, dark and carved, and wood on the ceiling in beams, and a wooden counter at one side with a brass rail, and wooden tables in wooden booths, and on the wall at the back, the thing everybody came to see, a great stove of green tiles, glazed, the height of a man and a half, standing out from the wall like a person, with a bench round its foot, glowing. The story was that Napoleon had sat at that stove in 1806 and warmed his hands. There was a plaque. Alexander did not believe the plaque either. He did not think the French had been in Berlin long enough in 1806 to find the Waisenstrasse.

It was half full. It was midnight on Kingdom Day and the people in it were older than the people in the Meierei, and quieter, and drinking out of smaller glasses, and they did not stop when the door opened. They looked up, most of them, because the door had let in the cold; and then a few of them kept looking; and then a man at the counter put down his glass.

Alexander did not wait to see the rest. He had seen it three times now. He took his cousin by the elbow, through the black overcoat, and steered him past the counter and down the narrow room between the booths to the back, to the green stove, where the bench round its foot was empty because it was so hot nobody could sit there for more than ten minutes, and sat him down on it, in the heat, with his back to the room.

“Sit here,” he said. “Face the stove.”

His cousin sat, and faced the stove. The others sat round him on the bench. Jack unfastened the stag at his throat and let the cape fall back off his shoulders, gasping, as the heat reached him.

“It’s like being cooked,” said Jack.

“That is what it is for,” said Alexander. “Napoleon sat here.”

“Did he?”

“No.”

---

It made no difference.

They had been on the bench by the stove for four minutes, long enough for a waiter in a long white apron to come and take an order for five beers and go away again without looking twice at anybody, which Alexander had allowed himself to hope might mean something; and then a man got up from a booth near the counter and came down the room.

He was old. He was tall and thin and very straight, with white hair brushed back from a high forehead and a thin white moustache, in a dark suit with a waistcoat and a watch chain and a black tie with a small silver pin in it, and he walked with a stick that he did not seem to need, and he came down the length of the Last Instance between the booths without hurrying, and stopped at the end of the bench by the stove, and looked down at the back of the King of Hanover’s head.

His cousin, feeling it, turned round.

The old man looked at him for some time. Then he put his stick in his left hand, and with his right took a small glass from the waiter, who had come up behind him with it on a tray, a glass of something clear on a short stem, and held it out.

“Majestät,” he said. And then, in an English that was very precise and very old-fashioned, the English of a man who had learned it from books in the nineteen-fifties: “I am Senatspräsident Ackermann, retired, of the Kammergericht. I sat on that court for thirty-one years. The highest court of appeal in this city.” He held the glass a little further out. “In August I watched you on the television pull beer for our Emperor in a public house in your capital, and I said to my wife, that is the first thing I have seen a head of state do in thirty years that I would have done myself.” He paused. “My wife is dead. But she agreed with me. I would like you to drink this. It is Korn. It is what we drink at the end of a case.”

His cousin stood up. He stood up from the bench in the heat of the stove, because the old man was standing, and took the glass, and looked at it, and over it, briefly, at Alexander.

“Four,” said Alexander, to the stove.

His cousin drank it. He drank it in one, because the old man was watching and because that was clearly how it was drunk, and Alexander watched his eyes fill, and his face go red to the collar, and stay there, and he said, in a voice that was not quite his own: “Danke.”

“Bitte,” said Senatspräsident Ackermann, and looked pleased, and then looked at the bench beside the King, where Alexander was sitting, in the navy coat buttoned to the neck, with the red collar of the First Foot Guards showing at the throat.

He looked at the collar. He looked at the face. He looked at it, Alexander thought, quite carefully, the way a judge looks at a witness: the narrow pale face, the fair hair, the eyes, which were grey and exact and had been called, in one newspaper, the eyes of a boy reading the small print on his own coronation.

“And you,” said the old man, “are a student.”

Alexander considered this honestly.

“Ja,” he said, which was, in a sense, true. He was a student of everything. He had been a student of everything since he was six.

“Law?”

“Ja.” That was also true. He had read more law than any law student in Prussia. He had read it because it was in the boxes.

“Good.” The old man nodded, slowly, and lowered himself, with the stick, on to the end of the bench by the stove, in the heat, beside the German Emperor, as an old judge sits down beside a young student, with the comfortable certainty of a man who has found somebody to talk to. “Then you will know about the Falk case.”

---

Alexander knew about the Falk case.

He knew about it the way a man knows about the room he was born in. In the autumn of 2028, when he was fourteen, the Regency Council had dismissed the Minister-President of Prussia, Dr Johanna Falk, in his name, and he had minuted his opposition to it in writing, at the table, in front of the nine members of the Council, in a hand that was still trying to be his own; and the minute had become public; and the Prussian Constitutional Court had held the dismissal void on the ninth of October, and restored Falk, to a House that could no longer confirm anybody. He had read every page of the judgment. He had read it eleven times. He had it in a drawer.

“Ja,” he said. “I know about it.”

“A boy of fourteen,” said Senatspräsident Ackermann, “minuted his opposition. In writing. At the table. Against nine grown men and women who had the powers he did not have, exercising them in his name, without his consent.” He leaned on his stick in the heat of the stove and looked at the green tiles, and his face, in the glow, was the face of a man looking at a case he had never sat on and would have liked to. “Do you know what I thought, when I read that? I thought: that boy has understood the whole of it. The whole of the constitution. At fourteen. He has understood that the powers are his even when he may not use them, and that a man may not be stopped from saying so.” He shook his head slowly. “I wrote to him.”

Alexander sat very still on the bench.

“Did he answer?” he said.

“A secretary answered,” said the old man. “A very correct letter, on the imperial paper, thanking me for my kind words, which His Majesty had read with interest.” He smiled faintly. “I have been a judge for thirty-one years. I know what read with interest means. It means it went in a box.”

“Perhaps,” said Alexander, “he did read it.”

“Perhaps.” The old man shrugged. “It does not matter. It was right, what he did, and I said so, and that is all a judge may do. Say so.” He looked at Alexander sideways, in the glow, kindly. “You have a good face for a lawyer, young man. Very serious. You will do well. Do not go into the government. Go to the bench. On the bench nobody can dismiss you.”

Across the stove, his cousin, still red from the Korn, was looking at Alexander with an expression of the most profound and complicated interest. Jack had his hand over his mouth. Theo was very carefully studying the tiles of the stove. Lukas was looking at the old man with his steady grey eyes and had folded his hands in his lap and was quite still, the way he was still in the dome when something was crossing the slit that he did not want to miss.

“Thank you,” said Alexander. “I will think about it.”

---

The letter had come in October 2028, eleven days after the judgment.

He remembered it now, on the bench by the stove, all of it, clearly, as he remembered every paper that had come to him: two sides, in black ink, in a hand like a row of iron railings, on the paper of a private house in Charlottenburg, from a Senatspräsident a. D., retired, of the Kammergericht, a name he had not known. It had come in the red box with forty-one other letters about the judgment, and he had read all forty-two, twice, at the desk in the dome, at fourteen, in the cold, because nobody had told him he did not have to; and the forty-one others had said that he was a brave boy, or a foolish boy, or a puppet, or a danger, or God’s instrument, or his father’s son. This one had said that he had understood the whole of the constitution at fourteen and that it was right, and that a judge could do no more than say so.

He had read it a third time. He had not read anything a third time before.

Then he had given it to the secretary, with the others, to be answered, as the rule was, because a sovereign does not answer letters about a case in his own hand while the parties can still use it; and the secretary had answered it, correctly, with interest; and Alexander had gone back up to the dome and sat in the cold and wished, for the first time in his life, that he could break a rule.

He had not broken it. He had kept it. He had kept every rule there was for four years and three months, until twenty to ten this evening, in a hall of shells.

He looked at the old man beside him on the bench, in the heat of the stove, leaning on his stick, with his watch chain and his silver pin and his face like a row of iron railings.

“Herr Senatspräsident,” he said.

“Mm.”

“I think he read it three times.”

The old man turned his head and looked at him, sharply, the way he must have looked down from the bench of the Kammergericht at a witness who had said something he had not expected.

“What makes you say that?”

“Because it was the only one that was right,” said Alexander. “Out of all of them. And he would have known it was.”

Senatspräsident Ackermann looked at him for a long time, in the glow of the stove. Something moved behind his eyes, very far back, and then went still again, the way a fish goes still in deep water when it has decided not to rise.

“Perhaps,” he said at last. “Perhaps he did.” He put both hands on the top of his stick and stood up, slowly, from the bench. “I am going home. It is past midnight and I am eighty-four and it is no longer anybody’s birthday.” He looked down at Alexander. “Go to the bench, young man. I mean it.”

“I will think about it,” said Alexander again.

The old man nodded to the King of Hanover, gravely, and to the table, and went away up the room with his stick, between the booths, and out of the door of the Last Instance into the Waisenstrasse, into the snow, and did not look back.

---

Nobody said anything for a while.

“Twenty-five past twelve,” said Theo at last, from his phone, very carefully, because somebody had to.

“He knew,” said Jack. “Didn’t he. At the end. He knew.”

“He did not know,” said Alexander. He stood up from the bench and took out the programme and the pencil and made a small tick beside Zur letzten Instanz, with 00.02 in brackets beside it, the same size as the others. “He may have wondered. It is a judge’s job to wonder. But he did not know, and he did not ask, and he will not.” He folded the paper. “That is what a court of last resort is for.”

His cousin was looking at him from the bench by the stove, still red to the collar from the Korn, with the empty glass in his hand.

“You answered him,” said his cousin. “Just now. After four years. Without telling him.”

“Yes,” said Alexander.

“Is that allowed?”

Alexander thought about it, buttoning the navy coat to the neck over the red collar, in the heat of a green stove that Napoleon had never sat at, in an inn that was not as old as it said.

“It is the last instance,” he said. “Nothing that happens here is appealable.”