Mediterranean Nights (41 page)

She smiles and shakes her head. ‘No, Nicholas. If I did, you would work here all night. Even after all these years I can't trust you. When you are ready, bed it shall be—but not before.'

He sighs. ‘But, my love, there is always so much to do. If I leave it to others somehow it never seems to get done. What would happen to our work-people if I did not use what little influence I have to better their condition from time to time?'

‘And yet you are faced with another strike.'

‘True. They want a forty-two-hour week now. It seems that they object to working for more than six hours a day. I wonder what they would say if they knew that I work my steady hundred hours a week and more?'

She puts up a hand and strokes his cheek. ‘Nobody who has ever known the real you, Nicholas, could ever help but love you. The trouble is that so few of them ever have the opportunity.'

‘Ah, well.' He laughs quietly. ‘I shall continue as always to do what I can for them. But you are my first care, and if there is no other way in which I can induce you to take care of yourself, I will abandon work for tonight and we will go to bed.'

He moves over to a side-table where a spirit stove, a saucepan, water, lemon, and whiskey are set; and proceeds to make her a hot grog. In light conversation it is conveyed that this is an invariable ritual when she has a cold and that he
will allow nobody to make this specific for his wife but himself.

The grog is made. He presses a bell and she rises from the sofa. Carrying the grog in one hand he offers her his free arm with a courtly little bow. The camera then switches round to a portion of the room unseen before, showing it to be a bigger apartment than might have at first been supposed. Two large double doors are thrown open. Officers and servants in brilliant uniforms are disclosed. A Colonel of the Guards comes forward and salutes. The Grand Chamberlain raps his Rod of Office on the parquet floor. A powdered footman takes the glass of grog. Then, and then only, is it disclosed that this charming homely couple are His Majesty King Nicholas VII of Seravonia and his Queen.

They are conducted through long corridors of the Palace to their apartments. Nicholas bows the Queen into her room and enters the next door along the corridor. A line of half a dozen privates of the Guard stands at attention against the wall opposite the doorways of the two bedrooms, and in front of them, with a drawn sword, a dark, handsome, merry-eyed young officer.

The King pauses for a moment and turning to the Colonel, who is behind him, remarks that he does not remember this young officer's face. The Colonel then presents the officer as Lieutenant Sasha Renescu. It is the first occasion after joining the regiment for him to be honoured with the duty of Officer of the Guard.

The King says a few kind words to him, recalling the fact that he remembers his father, Colonel Gregory Renescu, who lost his life in the first Balkan war, while bringing dispatches of the utmost value to him, then a young Prince commanding one of the Divisions of the Saravonian Army.

We next see the Queen in bed. The King comes in from the adjoining room in his dressing-gown. He sees that she finishes her hot grog, tucks her up and switches out all the lights except that on her bedside table. Then he kisses her and says: ‘If there is anything you want, my love, you have only to call. I shall leave my door ajar and I am quite near.'

She smiles up to him. ‘Dear Nicholas—always quite near.'

The King in his bedroom. As he gets into bed he produces, with a little smile, the big sheaf of papers which he
was not able to finish in his study. He makes himself comfortable in bed and then settles down to work again.

We now see Lieutenant Sasha Renescu walking quietly down the corridor outside the Royal apartment. A private is stationed upon the King's door, another upon the Queen's. With slow steps Sasha goes to the end of the corridor and out through two wide french windows on to a terrace. At the extreme end of the terrace we see a sentry on his beat. Sasha glances the other way and another sentry is approaching from the opposite end of the terrace. The two meet just outside the King's bedroom window, which is next to the lighted one giving on to the corridor, halt, face about, and march off on their beat again.

Another shot of the King. As he deals with his papers he is placing those to which he has attended upon a bedside table. The pile on the counterpane is diminishing. He yawns, but he is still working.

Sasha again in the corridor. Once more we see him walk softly to the french windows. For a moment he leans negligently against the side of the open window and yawns; then goes out on to the terrace.

Six feet below the balustrade we see a garden; a lovely girl in evening dress is standing below. Sasha sees her, his eye brightens, he leans over the balustrade and whistles softly.

The girl looks up. She smiles a little and comes forward into the light which streams out from the corridor window behind him.

‘Who are you?' he inquires, ‘and how did you get in?'

She replies that she lives in the Palace and is the daughter of one of the chamberlains.

She is so lovely that he is quite certain that he could never have forgotten her face if he had once seen it among those of the ladies of the Court. She reassures him by saying that she has only just returned from living, for the past year, with her aunt in England. That is why he would not have seen her before.

‘What are you doing up so late?' he asks softly.

‘I could not sleep,' she tells him. ‘And at night the garden is so lovely.'

They talk for a little, the usual position of such scenes
being reversed in this instance. He is on the balcony and she is in the garden below.

The King is shown again, his work completed. He slips all the papers in a drawer beside the bed, gets out, tiptoes over to the communicating door which leads to his wife's room, listens for a moment, smiles to himself then gets back into bed and switches off the light.

The terrace again. The two sentries are at the extreme limits of their beat. Sasha glances over his shoulder down the corridor. The two other sentries are standing rigid at attention before the doors of the Royal apartments. With a little laugh he flings his leg over the balustrade and slips down into the garden beside the girl. They begin to walk up and down beneath the terrace. He glances up from time to time keeping a watchful eye upon the two sentries who pace backwards and forwards to meet every few minutes and turn about before the King's window. We then see him whisper something into the girl's ear. She gives a low delicious gurgle of laughter and presses his arm.

The scene moves to some high bushes. Behind these are four men in dark clothes. Of the two foremost, one is a tall, powerfully-built middle-aged man. He is bare-headed and has an exceptionally high bald forehead, wisps of grey straggling hair fall from the back and sides of his head on to his collar. The other is a young man dressed in ragged clothes, his face has the semi-imbecile look of a cretin or one who has been drugged. His eyes are round and staring. In his hand he holds a big automatic. He stands quite rigid and motionless as the elder man points through the bushes to the balcony and whispers in his ear. The two other men stand alert and watchful behind them.

As the elderly man points through the bushes to the balcony, we see Sasha and the girl walking up and down beneath it. The distance of their beat has considerably increased. They come towards the bushes where the four men are crouching and pass them. Suddenly the two rear men of the group spring out and strike Sasha down from behind with bludgeons. The girl runs off into the gardens. The elderly man points again excitedly at the balcony. The two sentries are now at the extremities of their beat. The young drugged-looking man rushes forward, his eyes fixed and unblinking as
though he were in a hypnotic trance. He scrambles up over the low balustrade on to the terrace and hurls himself in through the darkened window of the King's bedroom.

The King's bedroom. ‘Shot' from behind his bed. The windows come crashing open. We see the blinding flash of shots as the assassin fires towards the bed. In those brief spurts of light we catch a glimpse of the King's face as he starts up awake and flings himself off the bed on to the floor at its far side from the window.

The door bursts open. The sentry from the corridor comes rushing in. The two sentries on the balcony appear in the window and seize the assassin. The lights go on. The Queen is standing in the doorway. The King hurries over to her. She sways into his arms and almost faints. We see the would-be assassin dumb, animal-eyed, passive, apparently almost unconscious of his surroundings, being hustled away by the guards.

The Queen's bedroom. She is again in bed. The King bends over her solicitously.

‘There, there, my love,' he comforts her.

‘But, Nicholas…' her distress is pathetic. ‘One day they will get you, and then the whole world will go dark for me.'

He laughs a little. ‘No, no, you must not distress yourself. It is just part of my business to be shot at occasionally, just as a sea captain must risk the storm which sinks his ship or a miner take the chance that one day he will be entombed by an explosion. These mixed races in our country—one does what one can—but it is impossible to please them all.'

‘But, Nicholas, I'm terrified for you. This is the second attempt in six months.'

He shakes his head. ‘You need have no real fear for me, Caroline. These Terrorists are cowards. The leaders would not dare to take a chance themselves. They fasten upon some poor disappointed student who has failed to pass his exams and thinks that he has some grievance. They then drug him with hashish until he does not know what he is about. This poor fellow tonight was half-stupid with the drug, and it is always so. That is why they so rarely hit their mark even at close range. Why, if you threw your knitting needle at a man a dozen feet away you could not fail to hit him. But they always miss. Nothing but an accident,
my dear, will make you free to marry that handsome Grand Chamberlain of mine, I promise you.'

‘Oh, Nicholas, how can you?'

‘I mean it, Caroline. That is why, when the Purity League sent the new petition to the Chamber that I should tighten up the laws about the smuggling of drugs I postponed the issue for the fourteenth time. I could hardly say that to do so would not be healthy for myself.'

‘Nicholas, be serious.'

‘I am, my dear. I believe in drugs in moderation, and for that reason I am now going to give you just half a grain of medinal to make you sleep.'

He takes a bottle of tablets from the cupboard, pours out a glass of water, and we then fade out, too.

The corridor. Lieutenant Sasha Renescu stands half-dazed against the wall, his hair is dishevelled, a little rivulet of blood runs down his cheek. Opposite to him is his Colonel, livid with rage. The Colonel tears off the young officer's single decoration and flings it on the floor. He then tears off his epaulettes and, snatching his sword out of its scabbard, breaks it across his knee. As he does so, the King, in his dressing-gown, comes out from the Queen's door into the corridor and with a shrewd eye takes in the scene.

The two officers spring to attention. The King beckons the young Lieutenant into his bedroom. The Colonel remains in the corridor, mute and furious.

The King is seated on the edge of his bed. Sasha stands at attention before him.

‘You know, my boy, that this will mean court martial and the loss of your commission,' the King says kindly. ‘For the protection of the State we cannot afford to allow such culpable negligence upon the part of an Officer of the Guard to be overlooked. By your own confession you were talking to some young woman in the garden, it seems, when you should have been watching while I slept.'

Sasha murmurs an assent, and the King then goes on to say that in view of the service rendered by the boy's father he does not wish to be unduly harsh. If Sasha wishes, although he may no longer serve him as an officer, he may serve him privately and thus, after a period, earn reinstatement to his
rank. Sasha, overcome with repentance at his folly, springs at the chance.

The King then tells him that, although he does not fear assassination for himself, he does fear death at the hands of the Terrorists on account of the nation. His premature death would destroy all the good work which he is trying to do, and one day, even if it is by a stray bullet, he feels certain that they will get him if they are not suppressed. He has his secret police, but the trouble is that the Terrorist organisation knows them just as the cleverest criminals in Europe know the leading detectives among the police, so their sphere of activity is limited. Here is an opportunity to try to find out who the leaders are from a completely different angle. A young officer who has been cashiered at the beginning of his career for something which he might well feel to be only a slight negligence. It should be readily accepted by them that he has reason for a grievance and that his misfortune may have slightly turned his brain. Is Sasha prepared, therefore, to serve his King by endeavouring to get accepted by these people as one of themselves, find out who the real leaders are and enable the Government to crush the mainspring of the organisation once and for all?

Sasha accepts the dangerous mission. He is only too willing to do anything to repair the blunder that he has made.

The King then tells Sasha that should he succeed in obtaining any useful information he is not to communicate with the police but write to Hans Kartoff, whose private address is No. 7, Tiergarten Gasser. Hans Kartoff is the King's personal valet and will pass the information direct to him immediately.

Sasha repeats the address. The King leads him to the door and opening it says coldly to the Colonel:

‘It is our desire that this officer shall be placed under close arrest and, after the due formalities have been observed, it is quite obvious that we shall no longer require his services.'