Moreover, the Lord said, because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched-forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet.
—Isaiah 3:1
June 16, 1913
Johan lay horizontal on his favorite window ledge in his chambers, with a hefty Egyptian cushion behind his bulbous head, soaking in volume three of the Kama Sutra. The sun turned his face a soft brown.
Three slow, light, effeminate knocks landed on his door. It was not the day for the cleaner to mop his floors. Johan jumped down and glided gently to open the door. He was met by a vision of shocking-pink cuffs, pale skin, thinning reddish hair, and bulging green eyes.
The Count stood five foot eight in his stacked-heeled, perpetually new shoes. He was just months from his fortieth birthday, and his most time-consuming pastime, aside from learning Eastern religions, was attempting to maintain his youth. Sadly for him, his hedonistic lifestyle did not dovetail with his efforts. (“My ying is outweighing my yang again,” he said.) This did not stop his being pampered by an array of bemused stylists and fledgling pedicurists more suited to Cleopatra than a Teutonic twentieth-century count.
The visitor held out an elevated and angled hand.
“The Fifteenth Count of Kaunitz. I think it’s fifteen. To the rescue.”
Johan had hardly expected this when he had written to royalty for help.
Johan held out a hand to shake in the normal fashion. For a few seconds, neither moved, and an impasse looked inevitable. They met in the middle.
“Johan Thoms, but then I guess you know that.” Johan showed neither airs nor graces, allowing Kaunitz not an inch in his attempt to foist his lofty social position upon him. “A pleasure to meet you, and a bit of a surprise.”
“Ah yes, it sounded like you were in need, so why not do away with convention? I have made a living out of doing away with convention! Did you know that, young Johan?” The Count’s arms flailed and his eyes flirted.
Johan did not know whether it would be rude to laugh, but he almost could not help himself.
The Count, for his part, was delighted with what he had found. Firm young student, almost touching six feet without shoes, with possibly a brain to match his looks, and piercing blue eyes that reminded him of the North, of the Vaterland, die Heimat.
O Sweet Deity of Debauchery. I owe you! The warmth of an unblemished and virginal young boy. He silently began to formulate a strategy to corrupt the (perceived) pureness of his newly acquired charge.
Rather than keep the Count in his small dorm, Johan suggested a stroll round the grounds to discuss their business. The Count tried to keep a lid on his flirtations. Johan, for his part, was keen to point out that it was not charity that he sought, for the work ethic instilled by his father, Drago, would not allow this.
“Well, I have odd jobs around the estate, but your being here at school sort of excludes you from those.”
“What about anything here in the city? You must have some contacts?”
“I have many, but I am not sure what they would require.” The Count paused. “I will summon Wilfried and have him contact his Man Servants’ Union, put the word out that way. Come!”
Fifteen minutes later, the angular Wilfried departed from the front of the university in the back of a chauffeur-driven car, commandeered from the dean, with a list of addresses in his hand.
“And don’t come back until you have good news for Johan!” the Count shrieked after him.
“Come! Let’s have some lunch. You must be starving to death, look at you.” He prodded the young man under the ribs. “You are all skin and bones! I know the perfect place. Let us get some real meat into you, boy. Follow me.”
Johan had no real choice in the matter. They marched off together in the direction of the Town Hall, Johan praying he would not be spotted by Bill Cartwright.
Every few yards, the Count could not resist a skip.
All his still-illegal dreams were perhaps coming true.
* * *
The city’s main artery, the Appel Quay, which hugs the river, was quiet, and seemed to move at slow motion in the heat of the afternoon.
The Count was parading his prey along the quay, though it was unlikely that any of his degenerate cohorts would be seen alive in daylight.
They entered the restaurant. The Count’s family had known the owners of Troika for generations, as the family had supplied the venison to the kitchens. This entitled Kaunitz to the royal treatment he always craved but failed to achieve in a land notoriously homophobic and increasingly anti-Prussian.
As for Johan, it had been many years since he had last been so close to a deer. Various heads of the beasts were mounted on the walls.
“It’s good I no longer count them as friends,” Johan said.
“Yes, I’m sorry. I was wondering about that. We were already on the way.”
They discussed Drago’s mental issues (Johan was quietly proud of them), Johan’s studies (they were thoroughly enjoyable), and the activities of the Black Hand (as individuals, they were not to be crossed at any time of day anywhere, even with a bunch of pals around, but Johan dismissed them as a serious political force, which surprised Kaunitz; the Count thought for a moment of delving further, but his mind wandered).
Johan had his food ordered for him by Kaunitz, in a limp display of authority. The borscht, which took an age to arrive, was the deepest beetroot red and gloopy. The inside of the venison was a soft pink, but still oozed a scarlet spill on its first tender cut. Kaunitz moved in his seat.
“What an age to wait! Not that I am complaining!” the Count said. “I think they must have been to my place to catch it.” Leaning toward Johan, he added, “Talking of my place, you MUST come visit.”
“That would be nice.” The Count, Johan thought, seemed to be overlooking the reason for their relationship, which was business, not pleasure.
Kaunitz changed the subject.
“It is called Troika here, because troika, as well as meaning ‘three,’ is also the name of the most famous bear in Russia, a bear of great strength, a bear of great wisdom, and we all know the Russian Bear is not a speedy sort when it comes to turning itself around. A bit like Chef, clearly! So, it is superb essen, but equine cries to Catherine the Great, they make you wait for it.”
Now, the Count, thankfully having shed his pink jacket, preferred not to eat, but to sit and watch his new friend, as if, it seemed to Johan, he were fattening him up for market.
As Johan masticated the second-to-final chunk of finest heavily peppered venison, Wilfried entered holding a stack of notes and messages.
The sweat on the butler’s head was rapidly mopped away by both Wilfried himself and an eager-to-please waiter, who received a quick bony jab to the midriff and a minitorrent of mumbled, clipped abuse. The waiter backed off.
“Well, what do we have?” Kaunitz demanded.
“Various situations, yet many are not in Sarajevo and others are for skilled staff. Some are not available for a couple of months. Some are probably below your, erm . . . Herr Thoms’s requirements.”
“Well, don’t waste our time with those. What do you think there could be, so we may actually help this fine young man, as opposed to simply have my brutal beasts try to kill him. I am quite, quite positive that he would rather be wandering by the Miljacka with a bunch of jocular young chums and a fine bottle of rosé. Come on, man!”
Wilfried bit his tongue and mopped his brow again. “The municipality needs three police officers.”
“Yuk!” yelled Kaunitz. “Horrible and ignorant brutes who only want to stop people’s fun. Untermensch! Next.”
Wilfried turned to the next note in his pile. “Your old friend, General Oskar Potiorek. Very, very good pay. All I know is that it is something to do with the council . . . or, more specifically, their ladies.”
This final word changed Kaunitz’s look of joy to one of disgust. Johan turned to the Count. Kaunitz had no real choice but to agree.
“Very well, what would Potiorek prefer us to do?”
“He has invited you to his mansion house at the Konak for six this evening to discuss the duties.”
“Excellent. We will be there for six-thirty,” the Count said, and motioned to the waiter for two shot glasses to be filled.
He glanced at his pocket watch. It was almost four.
“You will need to dress for this, Johan, but regulation is adequate. Na zdarovye.”
“Na zdarovye and thank you, Count.”
The waiter was still on hand to yet again refill the eggcups with clear liquid. Wilfried frowned. After the shots were gone, his disdainful brow creased even more deeply.
Johan was pleased with the sound of the work.
With school now over for the summer, he was rid of the burden of college examinations. His only scholarly duty for the summer came in the form of an extensive reading list, which he could complete with one eye closed over a rainy weekend in late August. If his theory was right, the vacuum created by his lack of activity the rest of the summer would require commensurate mental stimulation.
The potential drawback was how it might encroach on his planned sojourns to Vienna to molest Lorelei, or on his availability to be pestered should she come to him. Lorelei’s movements were at least less inhibited than his. The cost of travel was to her negligible, given her connections through the embassy and the railways of Southern Europe. He now had his own high-up connections and was hobnobbing with royalty, though he sensed that any favors from Kaunitz were dependent on what was in it for Kaunitz. A limp slap on his back jolted him back from his daydreaming.
“Come, chum!” Kaunitz said. “Let’s make you presentable for the General. You look like an unmade bed, my boy.”
Johan was taken off to the Count’s personal tailor, Schneider.
“That’s more like it,” announced Kaunitz an hour or so later. “The General can be a bit of an old stick-in-the-mud. Nouveau Austria! But, oh my! You do scrub up like an absolute dream, Johan Thoms!”
* * *
In 1913, Oskar Potiorek, General of the Austrian Army, was billeted in Sarajevo. His mansion, the Konak, nestled in the upmarket district of Bistrik, south of the central Miljacka. Johan had heard of the majesty within the Konak, but had never dreamed he would ever be behind its forty-foot walls as a guest of the General. It was all the more bizarre that he was going there because of his father’s psychosis-inducing obsession with Pythagoras. The Konak, a haunt of extreme beauty, was the fourth Saraj. The Saraj (the genesis of the name Sarajevo) were constructed by the Turks from which to rule the city in the sixteenth century. The first three were destroyed before or by the Great Fire of 1879, leaving in isolation the bewildering Renaissance allure of the Konak. It remained for many decades the only three-floor building in the city, which underlined its authority. It became the residence for royal guests to the city, until Potiorek commandeered it for himself.
On the stroke of six-thirty, the dean’s car entered the grounds between the two stone lions on either side of the front gates, and through a small squadron of Austrian infantry.
It was well known that no one should keep General Potiorek waiting.
Johan tried his best not to look intimidated by his surroundings.
He first saw the General’s gargantuan walrus mustache from forty yards as Potiorek prowled the grounds at the back of the Konak. The old soldier spun around.
This could be interesting, thought Johan as he pondered the contrast between count and general. But then there was probably more sodomy in the army than anywhere else in Austria.
“Kaunitz! Late!”
An awkward silence.
“General. I am grateful that you were able to see me. How are things with those dastardly Black Handers? When are we going to swat them, like the pesky flies they are?”
The General mumbled into his hairy top lip some Prussian inanities that seemed to lack verbs of any kind. Johan understood the morsel-like clues because his German was excellent, perhaps better than Potiorek’s.
“Him?” The General finally gestured toward Johan while looking at Kaunitz.
“Johan Thoms, sir,” Johan replied confidently on his own behalf. The General seemed taken aback by the boy’s initiative, for his eyebrows were raised and his mouth open.
“Let’s make brief.” This was his most constructed sentence. “Need man. Do not like . . . kept waiting by . . . by . . . by certain . . . [mumble mumble something homophobic]. You? Drive?”
He spoke, Johan thought, like he was sending a telegram with a limited amount of coins in his pocket.
“Yes, sir,” Johan replied. The General already seemed to like Johan infinitely more than he did the Count as he eyed him up and down with nodding approval.
“Good. Your lineage? What?”
“Excuse me, sir?”
“Bloody Slav, bloody Serb. How much? In you?”
“Great-grandmother knew one once. Not for long, though.”
“Good. Turk?”
“She would not speak to them at all.”
“Even better. In! Friday six A.M. Report. Müller front gate. Ninety-five forints* month.”
“Kaunitz. Müller now. State room.”
“Danke, Herr General. You simply must come visit the estate soon for some shooting,” Kaunitz replied, flouncing into the shade of the mansion’s splendor to meet Müller, who, Johan later learned, ran the Konak’s nonmilitary affairs.
Potiorek did not acknowledge Kaunitz’s invitation.
Johan’s eyes were semiglazed from the thought of the money and his family’s relief, their pride. The political intrigue thrilled him. So did the surroundings.
Gastronomically, sociologically, sartorially, and financially, it had been a damned fine day.
* * *
Johan slumped onto his bed that night delighted with himself. He had never felt more powerful.
He would attend the Count’s estate the following morning to discover the full nature of his duties. A car would be waiting for him at seven A.M. by the Registrar’s office. He would take breakfast with Kaunitz and discuss the General’s job.
Bill knocked and entered his pal’s dorm, and Johan filled him in on the day’s proceedings, and on the impending doom of the next day.
“Just don’t wash your old chap,” Bill suggested.
“He is NOT going to have his way with me. And anyway, I have the job now. I could just turn up on Friday at the Konak, ask for Müller. Kaunitz could put the kibosh on it, though. Those Austrians are all lodges and Gesellschaften.”
“You have no choice. You go. You fulfill your obligations, and you do not let him sodomize you. Simple.”
“I fear it won’t be that easy. I mean, he can’t rape me. But that does not mean it is going to be a relaxed day in the country.”
“It rarely is that easy, el Capitán. And you could do Wurst.” Bill laughed.
Johan scowled and narrowed his eyes.
“Funny. I hate it when people laugh at their own very poor jokes. And at the expense of a friend.”
“That’s what makes it funny. Because you’re hardly on your knees, are you? If you’ll excuse the phrase. You’re working at the Konak, for ninety-five forints a month. A tab at the President, and your friend in Suite Thirty. Driving for the Walrus. A sugar daddy buying you new clothes at Schneider’s; eating at the best restaurants in the city—Troika, for God’s sake. Private drivers. Country estates. You deserve to be laughed at, you rotter! You deserve to be rogered, and damned hard, too! Just one day with a funny-dressed kraut in the country and you are in the clear, el Capitán! Then you have nothing really to worry about other than to roll around all summer with your very own Statue of Liberty.”
Johan dropped a recently received telegram on the chest of the prostrate Bill and paced the room.
“She is back in on Wednesday,” he said. “Weird times, Billy. Weird times.”
“From the ridiculous to the sublime. Wonderful times, I would say. Revel in them, man. Every single moment. You will look back in years to come and see these as your golden days.”
“I am going to, Bill. I am going to try . . .”
He picked up his dorm keys, whispering to himself:
Glide gently, I know . . . Glide gently!
And then, more audibly:
“Come on, I need to go outside. I need some fresh air.”
And off they went, Johan wondering what sort of future he was making for himself.
* There were roughly two English crowns and just over two American dollars to a forint in 1913. The inflated pay was a reflection of Masonic-like machinations, and also of a possible level of responsibility Johan may not have been expecting.