Princess Izzy and the E Street Shuffle (12 page)

And if Bennett hadn’t gone to the gossip columnist? Secrest worried that contacting him might just give him the idea that
he could. The last thing Secrest wanted was for the person whom she sometimes referred to as “this Geoffrey fellow” to get
involved in the decision. “I hate to think what the lyrics to ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ would do for this situation,” Secrest would
say, barely suppressing a smirk to Isabella, who usually ignored her.

In a sense, Secrest usually ignored Isabella. For while Isabella was dying for news, eager for any tidbit, Secrest passed
on to the private investigator a nonchalant attitude, a spirit of what you might even describe as indifference. The investigator
would call and wax apologetic for not making more progress and ask for more money or for permission to try a new lead, and
Secrest would manage to be encouraging to the point of being discouraging. “Don’t worry so much,” she’d say. “Take your time.
It’s very important that we move slowly on this.”

Secrest told me all of that a few hours after Geoffrey’s funeral. She and I had slipped out to the Garden of Engineering to
get away from the stifling grief inside, though slipping outside didn’t really help, because the whole country was awash in
grief. Not for Geoffrey, of course. But for the future king.

Standing on the patio, we could see the castle courtyard, with the lowered flags and black-draped windows. If we looked to
the west, down the hillside, we could see the darkened, eerily still city below. All the theaters, restaurants, and other
entertainment facilities were closed for a period of national mourning. Litter left over from the processional that morning
fluttered in the empty street. It was a respectful sort of litter. Wadded-up tissues, spent subway passes, a map here, a commemorative
pamphlet there. No soft-drink cans. No hot-dog wrappers. A happy crowd might leave that sort of rubbish, but this crowd had
merely shed some of its sadness. A torn tabloid cover with a black-and-white picture of Rafie was fluttering along the cobblestones
of the courtyard.
OUR LOST PRINCE,
it said.

In the distance, a marquee sign said,
WE MOURN RAFIE
. In smaller letters, it said,
AND HIS PILOT.

Those were the sort of obligatory references made to Geoffrey. People would add his name to convince themselves that they
valued life equally, that they didn’t place a prince above a pilot. Smug women stood up in churches all over the country to
ask for prayers for Geoffrey’s family. “We must remember he died, too,” they would say. They were right, I suppose. Mae—who
vacillated between numbness and violent weeping—certainly needed prayers. But I suspect the women who were standing up in
churches to say so were a little too proud of themselves for pointing this out to their fellow worshippers. I suppose I shouldn’t
say that, because I wasn’t spending a lot of time in churches in those days and don’t have much firsthand knowledge. It’s
just that I’ve always observed that when someone stands up in church and asks that prayers be offered for world peace or homelessness
or the disease of the week, they often seem a bit proud of themselves. “You people are just hoping that the service ends in
time to get home for the football match,” they seem to be saying. “But I have world events on my mind.”

Or humble servants doubling as pilots. Either one.

Perhaps I’m too cynical, but that’s the way I read things.

I was thinking about all of that on the patio as Secrest stood silently next to me, flicking her hands the way ex-smokers
do sometimes in situations that call for a cigarette. She leaned for a moment on the Michelangelo bust and then, seeming to
remember how such casual touching of the bust always bugged Geoffrey, moved away.

Secrest had never really liked Geoffrey. That had been obvious. But he was dead now, and she apparently felt the need to make
up for that, to draw a connection between the two of them, to share in the mourning. Maybe motherhood had softened her up
after all. She started with familiar territory.

“Those damn books,” she said. “Read those royal tell-alls—and who doesn’t these days?—and you get the impression that every
dumb thing a prince or princess has ever done was because of the castle help.”

I sighed.

She squinted into the distance. “Did the queen order a cheeseburger at a kosher restaurant? Did the earl start wearing pinstripes
a season too early? Did their majesties go and have themselves an ugly, stupid child? Well, then it must be the maidservant’s
fault somehow.” Her voice was bitter, but then softened a bit. “Or, you know, the mechanic’s.”

She swallowed hard, looked out over the square. “They’re all about exaggerated crises and manufactured drama, those things,”
she said. “You read them and think that an ill-chosen ball gown or a photograph with an unfortunate nasal shadow was all that
mattered in the world.

“No one ever writes our story. I’ll tell you that much. They don’t write about how we curtsy ourselves silly and whisper during
transatlantic phone calls with trashy American detectives to keep the college flames secret. Or how we miss our son’s primary
school graduation because Her Highness has some sort of hat emergency.”

If I hadn’t been so sad and tired, I would have smiled at that. Her son was under four months old, and she was already worrying
about missing his primary school graduation.

Secrest lowered her voice. “Or sock crisis.” She looked down at her black skirt, flicked a bit of lint off it. “No one writes
about how we have to just straighten our backs and steel our nerves when the tabs come out, because if the news isn’t good,
they’re sure to blame us. If some grand duke gets caught urinating on the Princess Grace Memorial Rosebush, it can’t be his
own fault. That’s for sure. He must have been given some ‘bad advice.’

“And now,” she said, “look at what happened to Geoffrey.” She paused respectfully and looked at me, then the ground.

I nodded but didn’t meet her eyes. I didn’t want to go into all this. I just kept looking off in the distance.

“I didn’t want him to move to the castle,” she said, sounding old and bone-tired. “I thought it was a bad idea. I kept my
eye on him, that’s for sure. I let him know if he was spending too much time with the princess alone. If he was flaunting
his influence too much. If he wasn’t spending enough time with the cars. I wasn’t shy, you know that.”

She looked at me again. I said nothing, and that seemed enough.

“I was right, of course.” She nodded as if to affirm this to herself. “But I suppose I could have been kinder to him. It wasn’t
ever personal, you know? It wasn’t his fault. I was just trying to protect the princess. Do you think he understood that?”
She turned to me. Tears streamed down her face.

I thought,
What difference does it make now?
I thought,
How could he possibly have understood that?
I thought,
When did it become my job to make you feel better?

I said, “He probably understood.”

And then I changed the subject. I asked her how she finally found Jimmy Bennett.

E
thelbald Candeloro is not what he seems. I planned to avoid telling you that. I’m not in the habit of hurting the innocent,
and Ethelbald truly is an innocent in all this. He is absolutely critical to almost every turn of events in this story, but
still ultimately a bystander. Everything he wrote, everything he said, everything he caused to happen or not to happen—it
was all accidental. He was not trying to save lives or ruin souls. He did not know the havoc he created until years later,
and he could hardly believe it then. He was just trying to do his job, trying to please the bosses and keep the raises coming.

He could not have imagined how his words would come to haunt Isabella. Arguably as naive as Isabella herself, he did not dare
flatter himself by thinking the princess would care one way or another what he thought of her clothes or her vacation choices
or her college boyfriends. He could not fathom that anything he wrote really affected the royal family, and he would have
been even more hard-pressed to imagine that his words had jerked a simple American couple out of their ordinary lives and
taken them on a magnificent and fateful ride.

He was just trying to pay the bills. At least that is the way he would have put it. He had, after all, a leased Bisba convertible,
the deluxe model, and a hefty mortgage on a penthouse spread in one of the most built-up and prestigious corners of Bisbania’s
Highlands neighborhood, which was nestled in the mountainous foothills and overlooked the sea. (Not all that far from Lady
Carissa’s home, actually—a constant source of worriment to the queen right up until the lady’s death.) Rumor had it that he
shared that penthouse with a steady stream of lovely young women who had expensive tastes.

But the rumor wasn’t true. That is part of his secret. Though not the worst of it. Or perhaps I should not use “worst,” an
obviously value-laden word. Because the secret is not really shameful, at least not in my opinion. But I suppose any secret,
if big enough and kept long enough, eventually becomes shameful. For example, there is absolutely nothing wrong with holding
an office-administration degree from the seaside campus of Bisbania Community College, though it does have a party-hearty
reputation compared to the more “serious” South Main Street campus. But to hold such a degree and to tell people that you
have a master’s in journalism from the College of Peter and Catherine the Greats, and to further describe that school as “the
William and Mary of South America”?
That
is shameful. Especially when no such school even exists. And now you know another part of Ethelbald’s secret, though that
is still not what I will describe as “the worst”—a judgmental phrasing I am using only for lack of a better word, you understand.
(And please don’t pretend to be surprised that the tabloid editors didn’t check out his résumé.)

Regardless, his dedication to his work wasn’t about the debt or the fine living. Let’s be honest. Few people work hard for
such things. There are exceptions, I’m sure, but most people who want fine living are not willing to work for it. Ask yourself
this: What is fine about a life of hard work? So if you see a well-paid parliamentary lobbyist or an extravagantly successful
stockbroker who tells people—his wife most of all—that he works eighty-hour weeks and he gives up the vacations and he stays
indoors on nice days to pay for the home and the car and the catered parties and the imported, monogrammed sheets, be skeptical.
This is not a person who would be a missionary if only it paid better. He likes the work. On some level, he loves what he
does. He enjoys the job or he enjoys the prestige or he enjoys the excuse to be away from his wife and children. No one, at
least no one who is observant and aware and awake, works through a spring day for penthouse money. That is something you do
for groceries or something you do for love. No “extra” is worth it.

At least that is the case, I will argue, with Ethelbald. He didn’t care about the Bisba and the penthouse. He enjoyed them.
Who wouldn’t? But he did not dish dirt on the royal family in order to live better. His motivation was good old-fashioned
professional pride. It was his job to dish dirt, so he served it up as regularly as he could. I suppose he possessed a little
of that Bisbanian work ethic that the Chamber of Commerce was always touting in efforts to attract new industry.

He rather enjoyed, simply enough, having the opportunity to comment on the ups and downs of the royal family. That’s all.
In some basic, uncomplicated way, he found the task pleasant and even interesting. He meant no harm. Not even when he called
the queen names. Not even when he questioned the parentage of the king’s brother.

Somehow, Ethelbald did not see such comments as truly personal. He figured the royal family knew that, that they understood
it was part of the bargain. You don’t get to be queen without having someone pointing out that your ankles are thick and that
your son is rather dim. You can’t be the brother to the king and not expect people to comment on the way you resemble the
bodyguard who was once assigned to your mother. In some vague and idiotic way, Ethelbald actually thought the royal family
must enjoy such gossip, the way he enjoyed really nasty hate mail.

And he did enjoy hate mail. Nothing pleased him like getting notes from readers who questioned his intelligence, his qualifications,
or his logic. Journalists, see, are not like normal people. We—and I use “we” because once a journalist, always a journalist—ask
tough questions and second-guess everything and always ask for proof. No one gets a free ride with us. And true to the way
we treat others, we develop a tough skin ourselves. So when you write a newspaper reporter a letter that says, “You are biased
and wrong and pathetic and ugly,” the reporter is not hurt. Instead, she passes the letter around to colleagues and laughs
and posts it on the wall next to her desk and figures that if she hadn’t angered someone, then she hadn’t done her job. We’re
an odd lot.

So when Ethelbald, who had a lively style of writing that tended to agitate people and encourage them to fire off responses,
would get a good hate letter, it would make his day. The more incoherently they babbled, the better.

He liked the one that said: “You sniveley little bastard commie. How dare you criticize the royal ankles of Her Majesty the
Queen? I’d like to see your ankles. Thicker than a Clydesdale’s I’m guessing. I can tell by looking at that jowl in your photograph
that you’d need thick ankles to hold up that thick head of yours.”

And he loved the one that said: “I am sick and tired of you and your paper trying to push your anti-monarchist agenda on the
country. We know full well you were all educated at fancy schools with French teachers and that you all drive Eastern European
cars. Get a real job.”

And he absolutely cherished the letter from an American immigrant who displayed the extreme and inexplicable loyalty to the
royal family that only immigrants can muster, and who was angry about a column in which Ethelbald called the king “overly
simple and slightly ugly.” The former American had, in addition to a convert’s loyalty to the country, an American’s misunderstanding
of the name Ethelbald, which is a fine traditional name given to firstborn Bisbanian sons for hundreds of years, but which,
to an American ear, sounds a little like Ethel, the name best associated with chunky, middle-aged sitcom women.