The man behind the desk nodded to a chair opposite. The retainer had returned with a silver coffee service. The Supreme and All-Powerful Ruler of the fourth richest nation in the world watched without speaking as the servant poured two cups of black coffee and the blond man called Lutz laid out the chessmen.
The Ruler won the first three games; halfway through the fourth the black-suited retainer bowed himself in. ‘Your Imperial Majesty. The French gentleman has arrived.’
‘I will see him tomorrow.’ The Ruler’s hand hovered over the chessboard. He looked up at his opponent. ‘Lutz, you are not doing well. You are doing very badly.’ He spoke in English, with a very slight accent. The retainer had withdrawn. ‘Shah-Mak!’ the Ruler added, and allowed himself a small smile; ‘Or, as the English say — “check”!’
Lutz put his head on one side and smiled. ‘How could I win against you?’
‘How could you, indeed?’ said the Ruler. ‘How could anyone?’
Two days later the Frenchman was finally summoned, by telephone, from his room in the Silvretta Hotel in Klosters, to the Serene Presence above the town. No one had been sent to fetch him and he had been obliged to take a taxi for the quarter of a mile from the hotel to the Imperial chalet.
Monsieur Charles Pol was very short and very fat: rolls of flesh squeezed into a shapeless oyster-white suit that had seen better days; a large egg-shaped head decorated with a goatee beard and a lick of hair pasted down across the brow in a kiss-curl. His general demeanour was that of a comic character who had wandered out of an eighteenth-century French farce. It would have required someone with special insight — or equipped with a file containing full details of the Frenchman’s diverse career — to perceive that, behind his grotesque exterior, Charles Pol was a man to be taken seriously.
The Ruler had just such insight and just such a file. The latter lay open on the desk in front of him when Pol was shown in some time after noon, having waited for over two hours downstairs in a restroom used by the bodyguards. The Ruler did not look up. He turned a page of the file, which was bound in plain grey covers and was as thick as a film script, and went on reading. Pol waddled down the length of the room and squeezed himself into the chair opposite his host.
‘You seem to be a man with a great variety of interests, Monsieur Pol,’ the Ruler said at last, in French, still without lifting his head. ‘You have been an anarchist, a Marxist, a Resistance hero, a spy, a bandit, an organizer of terrorism, a financial adventurer with an unsavoury reputation.’ He paused, then slowly raised his eyes. ‘Do I do you justice?’
Pol beamed back at him, his cherry lips showing two pearly-white teeth. The Ruler observed with distaste that there were patches of sweat under the man’s armpits and that the rim of his silk collar was also damp, and not quite clean.
‘It is all surely a matter of interpretation, Your Highness. I have read descriptions of your own career which were certainly accurate, yet far from flattering.’
The Ruler’s face remained quiet and closed. ‘Monsieur, a man in my position quickly wearies of the repetitive lies and propaganda put about by enemies abroad. It is one of the ironies of the modern world that if I were the upstart head of a starving nation who went squealing to the United Nations begging for aid and arms, I should not only be helped — I should be universally respected and admired.
‘But —’ his eyelids drooped with an expression of contemptuous boredom — ‘it is my evident misfortune not only to be the unchallenged ruler of a nation of some thirty million people, whose standard of living is rising faster than any other in the world, but also Supreme Commander of the largest and best equipped army, navy, and air force between the Mediterranean and India. My personal income last year was over 6000 million American dollars. I do not exaggerate when I claim to be the most powerful individual in the world. If I increase my oil revenues by one per cent — five per cent — fifty per cent — I can overnight, affect, distort, even destroy, the whole economic structure of Western civilization. I do not need the flattery of friends. As for the envy and hatred of my enemies —’ he swept his hand dismissively — ‘they do not disturb my sleep, I assure you.’
Monsieur Pol sighed. ‘Are you telling me all this to impress me, Your Majesty? Or because you fear I might be ill informed?’
A faint shadow passed across the Ruler’s face; he tapped the file in front of him. ‘From your record you are a man who has indulged himself in many left-wing causes. I do not expect you to have any love for me, or even appreciate what I have done for my country. Although we have an ancient history, we are also — in the modern world — a very young country. We are no more than a child who is just beginning to walk and speak. And I am that child’s father. In my country we have no parliamentary democracy… That is a luxury we cannot afford. It would be as foolish and as dangerous as allowing a child to play unguarded in a busy street. We also have no inflation, no strikes, no unemployment, one of the greatest social and industrial expansion programmes in the world, and a crime rate that is the lowest in the world.’ He paused, his eyes hooded and unblinking. ‘You are amused, Monsieur Pol?’
Pol gave a massive shrug which split a seam in his jacket. ‘When Your Majesty talks of
