I was in Pest when this story began. No doubt about that. I was in Pest and I’d had a couple of beers and I’d had a bit of fun with a pretty girl and I’d come bouncing out on to the pavement like a bat out of hell. It was a bright sunny day in May. Or June. Or August. Well, in the summer, definitely, and I took off down the road like a rabbit running from a fox.

It didn’t take long before I got to the river, all green and sparkling, with queues of barges moving up and down it and the sides all built up with big stone blocks. The place was heaving—people rushing back and forth, carts loaded with stuff and horses tramping like marching soldiers, and fancy coaches, all shiny and painted, with their spindly little wheels and matched pairs trotting along on dancers’ legs, footmen on the back making solemn faces and grand ladies inside with their big hats and pretty dresses, peeking out from behind their gloves at me and wondering. Believe me, the toffs are the worst of the lot. Don’t you go thinking that they’re any better than that landlord’s daughter. Look at Tifty—not that I’m judging. Anyway, everybody in Pest was heading for the same place, all of them crowding along the riverbank to the big bridge—I forget what they call it, but it’s all hung with these huge, great, square-linked chains, enormous things with enormous stone lions at either end. It’s a very handsome thing. Or it was.

So everybody in Pest was crowding on to this bridge to get to Buda and everybody in Buda was trying to get to Pest. It was a very handy thing, that bridge, and when I got to the other side I climbed the stone stairs that wind up the side of the hill, right the way to the top. It’s lovely up there, all those little streets and the arches and the palaces and the music hall where Beethoven played and the spun candy towers and the views all around. I remember one little place with a tavern where we used to go sometimes and, marching all along the walls, a whole parade of stone lions, right up to the corner where two poor lions had to share one head. But I didn’t have time to stop for a drink. I ran along the little streets, across the square beside that big church and through the gate in the town wall at the other side. That’s all I remember—not that it’s the end of the story, but I couldn’t tell you exactly where I went after that. I couldn’t draw you a map. All I know is it was quicker to run up one side of Buda hill and down the other than it was to run round to the flat field where we had our tent.

Oh, my friend, that tent. I miss that tent. Sometimes, you know, I go there still in dreams. The smell of it, the lamps hung all around the ring, the straw, the sawdust, the animals, the noises they made, the way they smelled, the warmth of them, the heat of their bodies—you have no idea how damned hot a tiger is—the drums and the music, the girls all dressed up, and my friends. I see them now. I see them just as they were. Night after night they stand there smiling. My old mate Max throws back the tent flap and suddenly the shadows are bright with his lantern and he beckons me inside and they are all standing there waiting, Max and the Professor and Tifty and Sarah. My Sarah. Sometimes I wonder if that’s what it might be like. On a night like tonight, when a big black exploding piano comes crashing through the roof, or some other night when my heart just seizes up and the blood stops moving in my veins, I wonder if it might be like that, if I might find myself walking across a shadowed field toward the light of a lantern that’s shining out from a warm tent, with my good friends waiting inside. Sometimes I wonder that and then I wake up in my little narrow bed, in my little tin house, and it’s dark and all the blankets have fallen off and, in the space of a night, I have grown old.

But not then. Then I was young.

I must have run for miles by the time I got to the tent and I don’t think I’d even broken a sweat and, when I arrived, Tifty was standing there in her pink tights, looking like a Roman statue.

She had that smile on her face, that naughty smile she used to get when the nights were cold and she needed a cuddle.

I smiled back.

Tifty smiled some more. She had a lovely smile. She was a lovely girl, but it wasn’t all that long since the cellar of the beer hall and I suppose I could have managed something, a little something, but time was really getting short and we had a show to put on.

Tifty was still smiling.

“What?” I said.

“Oh, nothing,” she said. And she went away across the sawdust ring, carrying a bucket of horse-apples and swaying like a palm tree on a desert island.

Well, I kept on walking through the tent after her. I had things to do, stuff to get ready, fancy painted barrels for balancing on, seesaws for bouncing, that kind of thing, and then there was Max grinning at me like a bear having a seizure.

Now I’m not stupid. I could tell something was going on, so I said, “What?” again. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on, Max. What’s up?”

“Nothing.” But it was all he could do to stop from bursting out laughing.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Look, I had a bit of a tumble with that barmaid, all right. Is that it? You’d’ve done the same. Is that what this is about?”

Max looked astonished. “You never did!”

“Yes, I did.”

“You lucky bugger. You lucky, dirty bugger.” But he wasn’t angry or jealous. We were friends. He was just congratulating me. It’s no loss what a friend gets, that’s what we used to say.

“So it’s not that?” I said.

“No.”

“What then?”

Max made his big bear grin again and he said, “You’re in the paper, mate,” and then he reached backward, took the rolled-up newspaper out of his back pocket and handed it to me.

But it was no damned good. I can read well enough. I am neither stupid nor ignorant but, unless it was coming from an angry daddy stamping down the stairs, that Hungarish stuff made no sense to me and I knew it made no more sense to Max.

Max said, “Page three.”

I opened the paper but there was nothing to see. Just a jangle of letters that would make your eyes hurt. I said, “Stop messing about,” and I gave him his paper back.

But by then Tifty had come back from emptying the horse-apples and she said, “Darling, it’s quite true.” With an elegant finger she pointed to a picture in the middle of the page. “That’s you, darling, isn’t it? Now what have you been up to? Have you been naughty, darling? Tell Tifty.”

“No, I have not been ‘naughty.’ Well, a little bit naughty—” they laughed then, Tifty and Max—“but nothing that would get me in the papers.”

“Silly Otto,” she said. “Tifty’s just teasing.” She was trailing her fingertip over my ear. “Darling, you know how Tifty likes to tease.” I did know. There was this thing she did with that finger. I’ll tell you about that later. Maybe. “Darling,” she said, “did you forget that this is my native land and this is my native—” tapping that lovely finger on Max’s paper again—“tongue?”

“That’s still not my picture,” I said.

“Are you sure? Really sure?”

“What’s it say, Tifty?”

“Oh, darling, it’s a very boring article. Very boring. Nobody would ever have read it if your picture hadn’t been at the top of it.”

“Tifty, what’s it say?”

“My dear, if you must know it says, ‘Albánok keres új király’” Tifty had a voice like fairy bells dipped in rum and smoked out of a meerschaum pipe. If anybody else said something like that it would sound like a bag of marbles falling in a tin bath. She could say it and make it sound like angels kissing your ears.

Still, I was getting impatient and it must have shown in my eyes.

Tifty said, “It means, ‘Albanians seeking a new king.’” And then she read out the whole thing, all about this silly little country that nobody ever heard of before, the haunt of pirates and bandits and how it used to be under the heel of the barbarous Turk but now it was breaking free and it was looking for a king.

“And it seems they have chosen you, darling. It is you,” she said.

Max said, “Looks like you.”

“It does, you know,” said Tifty.

“It’s nothing like me.”

“We can settle it,” Max said.

“We can settle it,” Tifty said.

Now, we never argued, my friends and me, but if there was ever a disagreement, we knew how to settle it; we’d ask Professor von Mesmer. So that’s what we did. We all of us trooped out of the tent and round the back to the caravans. Sarah was just going up the steps when we arrived, carrying a tray with her father’s coffee on it, and Tifty asked if we could see him. That’s how it was. You couldn’t just walk in on Professor von Mesmer.

“Just a moment,” Sarah said. She went inside with the coffee tray and, a little bit later, he came out on her arm.

They say the doctors have this trick where they make you look at ink blots and decide how mad you are by what you can see there. The Professor wore eyeglasses like great round pools of ink. I won’t tell you what I saw there in case those doctors decide to lock me up. Nothing good. Like an evil butterfly clamped across his face where his eyes should be.

He got to the bottom of his caravan steps and he leaned on his cane and he said, “How can I help you?”

Bold as brass, Max steps up and holds out the paper. “Settle an argument,” he said. “Is this Otto or is this not Otto?”

The Professor knew there was something there. He felt the weight of it in the air against his skin or he heard it where the smell of Tifty’s perfume should be or something, but he knew and he put his hand out in front of him, but Max was too slow. Max was always slow, and he just waited that little bit too long so the Professor was left waving his arm about, snatching at nothing, looking like a cripple.

“Sorry,” Max said, and gave him the paper and that was even worse somehow.

“What am I looking at?”

Max said, “It’s a picture of Otto.”

But the Professor ignored him. “What am I looking at?” he said.

It was Sarah he was talking to. She stood behind him, her lips close to his ear. She said, “It’s a newspaper picture of a man. He is not yet forty. He has sharp eyes, quite a nice nose, not too big, not too small, a thick neck—he looks strong—he has a fantastic mustache that curls like a great sea wave and he’s wearing a fez.”

The Professor said, “It bears an astonishing resemblance to our own dear Otto,” and he said it like Moses coming down the mountain with the Law of God tucked under his arm.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t even own a fez.”

Tifty said, “Darling, according to the paper he’s wearing the fez because he’s another of those barbarous Turks. His name is Halim Eddine, the son of the Sultan, and they have offered him the throne of Albania.”

“They must like him a lot.”

“According to the paper they like him enough to give him the Imperial treasury too. And a harem.”

“They must like him an awful lot.”

“Darling, they’ve never met him. They’ve never even seen him—except in newspaper pictures.”

“He looks just like you,” Max said. And the Professor said, “You could certainly fool me.”

And Sarah said, “It’s just like the story in the picture show.”

So I said, “Is it far?”