Part Two - Chapter Two

Chapter Two

1

Manolo was glad Toot Sweet was driving. She seemed to enjoy the crowds, plus she was personable and an extremely safe driver besides, which always made Manolo’s job a little easier. She had wanted to bring along her eight-year-old daughter, Zsa-Zsa, to ride shotgun, but Manolo nixed the idea. As well behaved as Zsa-Zsa usually was, Manolo didn’t want anything or anyone distracting Toot Sweet while she was out driving the king today. Manolo didn’t need the added worry.

Toot Sweet was wearing her frangipani cologne from the Island Perfume & Soap Factory, as usual (Toot called it “frangipangi”). Manolo complimented her on it, as usual, as she climbed inside the cab. One of these days, he’d just have to run out and buy some for himself.

Manolo could hardly get over Vincent’s bouncy new self. Or could it be some former, repressed self that Manolo was able to glimpse only on occasion. Whatever. No doubt Christopher had something to do with it, Manolo reckoned. Breakfast was even fun today, for a change. Vincent certainly had Margot on the defensive—hands down. (Usually it was the other way around.)

Vincent had insisted on wearing his bulletproof vest and made Christopher wear one, too. And Manolo was wearing his heavy Teutonic breastplate over his caftan. Not only did it afford him some protection, but it was also good for laughs. People always joked that it made him look like a Valkyrie, which Manolo took as a compliment.

The Kingmobile never looked better. Toot of course had run it through the Royal Car Wash on the way round to the Porte-Cochère.

* * *

The Kingmobile consisted of a low-slung Humvee surmounted by a hemispherical bubble of clear bulletproof acrylic. Besides the driver, who of course sat in the driver’s compartment up front, the vehicle could seat four comfortably beneath the dome. The chassis was painted a metallic royal blue, with gold-leaf stripes running down the sides. Two flags bearing the royal coat of arms fluttered up front, one mounted above each headlight.

“Wow! This is cool,” Christopher said as he stepped through the hatch on the side, from which descended a narrow retractable stairway. Once Vincent’s party had taken their seats, Toot secured the hatch, and the stairway automatically ascended back into place. Toot then took her own seat up front.

Inside the domed cabin, four high-backed bucket seats—two front and two rear—were upholstered in soft, royal-blue glove leather. Nestled between each pair of seats was a glove box, two cupholders, and a built-in ashtray and cigarette lighter.

“Well, where to?” Vincent said, settling in. “I thought we’d head south first.”

“Sounds fine to me,” said Christopher.

Vincent picked up a square microphone nestled in a console in front of him, next to a built-in miniature television monitor. “Toot, make a right on Hadrian,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” Toot said, her voice resonating through four speakers installed at intervals about the cabin. And with that, the Kingmobile lurched out of the Porte-Cochère and up the circular drive toward the broad street, which was lined on either side by a row of tall, shapely mahogany trees. The trees were still dripping slightly from an early-morning artificial rain.

“This is the way we walked home last night. Remember?” Vincent said, looking over at Christopher, seated beside him to his right. Manolo was sitting directly behind Vincent, clutching the back of Vincent’s seat.

“Yeah, it just looks a lot different in the daytime,” said Christopher, looking out. A crowd was thronging around the Kingmobile as it crawled down the street; they all smiled and shouted and snapped photographs, although their shouts were barely audible from within the sealed car.

“If I want to talk to the crowd, I flip this,” Vincent said, pointing to a switch on the console. “There’s a loudspeaker behind the front grille.” He then flipped another switch and the cabin resounded with the noise of the crowd.

“Wow!” Christopher said with a start, now gazing east across the semicircular Swan Lake, the straight edge of which flanked the street. A ruddy brick sidewalk fronted the lake, with a black wrought-iron fence running between them, topped with blunted spearheads and lined with bicycles as far as the eye could see. White swan-shaped paddle boats, with seats for two people, dotted the lake. Beyond its curving far side, on a gentle rise, sat a small, ornate palace.

Vincent flipped the switch in the console and the cabin again grew quiet. “That’s the Linderhof,” Vincent said, pointing to the palace, “another one of Ludwig’s fantastic building projects. Linderhof was his favorite palace.”

“I knew that,” Christopher said, smiling over at Vincent. “And the castle is a replica of—let me see if I can say it—Neuschwanstein.”

“Gesundheit,” said Vincent, raising an imaginary glass. “So let’s hear it for the queer king.”

The Kingmobile was now approaching a large crossroads with a tall monument in the middle, fashioned after the Victory Column in Berlin. It was the intersection of the Via Emperor Hadrian and Tchaikovsky Avenue. “There’s Little Berlin off to our right,” Vincent said, poking the car’s dome as he pointed . “And see the living statues and the topiary trees in the park, over there to the left?”

Christopher had seen it all before—on numerous virtual tours by way of the Kings World website—but this was his first actual visit to the island. And as much as the website had impressed him—he worked back in the States as a website designer and webmaster himself—Kings World in reality was nothing short of awesome, including the king himself. “Wow!” said Christopher.

Down on the northwest corner of the intersection stood the baroque Opera House, with its main entrance facing the Victory Column, and catty-cornered from it, also facing the column, stood the rococo Ballet Theater. An electric street car glided west along Tchaikovsky directly ahead of the Kingmobile, coursing around the Victory Column as it went.

“Of course, you won’t see any automobiles here,” Vincent said. “You either walk or ride a bicycle, or you take a rickshaw or a streetcar or the monorail.”

“Unless you’re the king,” Christopher chimed in.

Vincent grinned and pointed to the monorail tracks rising in the distance at the foot of Emperor Hadrian. “And there’s Little Amsterdam over to our left, where the Twisted Tulip is. Remember? And the production studios are over to the right, just south of the big, fan-shaped plaza.”

“Yep,” Christopher said, now gazing up through the bubble top at the vast transparent dome enclosing the park.

“But I want to take you someplace special,” Vincent said. “Let’s say we go to Bunkers.”

2

At the foot of Hadrian, the Kingmobile took a left onto Ocean Drive, which at that point girded the island’s southern coastline. It was narrower than Hadrian, bordered on the north by a row of stately Royal Palms and on the south by a low sea wall composed of rough chunks of coral rock, beyond which lay an expanse of sandy beach. And descending upon and embedded in the sea wall, rising some forty-five feet in height, was a sheer wall of shatterproof glass panels which formed the outer margin of the geodesic dome structure.

“That’s fantastic!” Christopher said, gazing though the wall at the sea beyond. Meanwhile dozens of beach-goers began running up to Ocean Drive to greet the Kingmobile, exiting the beach through glass doors located every sixty feet or so along the wall. The Kingmobile slowly made its way through the gathering crowd.

“This road eventually takes us to the South Beach Resort,” Vincent said, “but we’re going to turn off in a second.” He then instructed Toot Sweet to make a left onto Alice B. Toklas. “Bunkers is up ahead on the left.”

* * *

“Watch your head, folks,” Vincent said, lowering his own head as he entered the dark doorway. “It hasn’t changed much in all these years. We try to keep it that way.”

Christopher was still seeing spots from the last round of flash photos, and now it seemed he was going blind. And the black lights up in the ceiling didn’t help.

“It’s dark in here,” Vincent said, “but you’ll get used to it.”

“If you say so,” Christopher said.

Manolo meanwhile bumped his coronet on the overhead soffit. “Mierda!” “Shit!” he called out in Spanish.

Toot Sweet removed her sunglasses and groped along the walls as she entered. “Follow me,” she said, glowing like a hot coal in her phosphorescent orange jumpsuit. With her chunky figure, Toot filled the suit to near capacity.

The bar was done entirely in black, down to the cracked plastic ashtrays. Even the mirrored panels on the walls reflected little but the blackness. And what white light there was emanated but faintly from the frosted plastic ceiling panels above the elongated horseshoe-shaped bar. With Toot at the lead, the party of four slowly, gingerly made their way up to the bar and took four seats in a row.

“At least the chairs in here are comfortable,” Manolo said, plopping himself down into a tall captain’s stool, as did the others.

“Well, what’ll we have?” said Vincent.

Four Kings World dome-maintenance workers (“Domeys,” as they’re called), easily recognizable by their Spider Man jumpsuits, were seated at a table off in one corner, talking about solar panels and satellite dishes and artificial-rain jets and the weather outside the dome (hot and muggy), among other things. They were the only other customers in the bar. To Vincent’s relief, they were drinking non-alcoholic beer and soda.

The bartender meanwhile had materialized out of the shadows and all of a sudden (so it seemed) was standing right in front of them, big fleecy arms folded. He was wearing a black leather vest over his big, exposed chest, which was covered in perfect whorls of lustrous dark hair that descended in a neat, undulating ribbon down to his navel. Below that he was wearing a pair of loose-fitting black and yellow trunks in a Keith Haring–type design.

“Well, hey there, good lookin’,” Vincent said, removing his crown and setting it aside atop the bar. “It’s Rocky, right?”

“No, Rory, man,” the bartender said, dropping napkins down in front of them. “Jeez, how could you forget?!”

Vincent winced and glanced over at Christopher, only to see him gawking up at Rory.

Manolo was quick to change the subject. “I see we have napkins today,” he said, grinning up at the bartender. “Well, isn’t that special.”

“Only for you guys,” Rory said, grinning back. His teeth shone in splendid contrast to the dark stubble covering his rugged, dimpled face.

“Well, I’m driving,” Toot said. “So I guess it’s a smoothie for me.”

“No alcohol for me, thank you,” Christopher said. “Too early.”

“Yeah,” Vincent said. “Smoothies sound good. And how about you, Manolo?”

“Hold it, guys,” Rory chimed in. “This is Bunkers. Hullo!”

* * *

Rory went around the bar lighting hurricane candles while Vincent’s party nursed juices and munched on microwave popcorn. Christopher was studying Rory as he went.

“Hell, we didn’t come here to stare at the bartender’s chest,” Vincent said, stirring his juice with his swizzle stick.

“He’s got a nice butt, too,” Christopher said.

“And great legs,” Manolo said. “Just a little rough a round the edges.”

Christopher looked quizzically over at Manolo.

“Meaning, his personality,” Vincent said.

“Yeah, just like Bunkers,” Manolo said, taking a sip of cranberry.

“Well, they’re getting a new blender whether they want one or not. I hope I made that perfectly clear,” Vincent said, shivering as he took a swig of grapefruit juice. “My, this stuff is sour.”

“My juice is fine,” Christopher said.

“Well, you’re lucky they had pineapple, my friend,” said Vincent aside to Christopher.

“Yeah, what good is having the original, antique blender if it’s broken?” Toot Sweet weighed in, squeezing a limp piece of lime over her tomato juice cocktail.

“Hell, it’s been broken for ten years,” Manolo said.

“Well, it must have slipped my mind then,” Vincent said, shaking his head. “At any rate, it’s time to get with the program!”

* * *

Vincent then went on to tell the story of Bunkers.

“Bunkers is essentially the seed for all of Kings World,” he began. “And it’s where I first met the General.”
“Is this going to be a seminal story?” Christopher said, grinning over at Vincent. “Oops, I meant sentimental.”

“Smart ass!” Vincent said.