she’d asked for one. She would never do that. But because when you were a first responder at a disaster and suddenly you noticed the queen was standing right there, you delivered a status report.
A police officer was headed right toward him unreeling a roll of yellow crowd control tape and giving him the stink eye. Willem dodged out of his way. Then he reached into the breast pocket of his suit jacket—he was no longer dressing like a random Texan—and pulled out a laminated security credential with an orange lanyard, which he slipped around his neck. No one was actually going to inspect it, but merely being a man of a certain age in a suit and an overcoat with a badge on a lanyard would afford him respect and access in whatever order was going to be imposed upon this chaos.
Press, as such, were only beginning to arrive. At first they would focus on documenting the tragedy and the efforts of the first responders. Inevitably there would be photographs of the queen and the princess. Random people on social media would post pictures of their own. What would those pictures show? A self-absorbed, out-of-touch monarch getting in the way of rescue operations? Or a woman of the people doing what any norMAL person would do in the wake of a disaster?
What was needed? Where was this operation understaffed?
Willem’s eye was drawn to a flatbed truck with military markings, cruising at a walking pace down a track in the lee of the dune. Soldiers were rolling boxes over the tailgate, depositing them on the sand every few meters. Willem had no idea what was in them.
A few moments later Willem was down below with the queen. She’d had the good sense to back off a few paces and let the first responders do the melancholy—and quite physically demanding—work of wrestling dead surfers into body bags. He said to her, “We need to get you away from the dead people. How about opening some boxes?”
“Yes,” she said, “set it up. Something that is actually helpful, please. We are going to try to find Lotte’s friend.”
He turned away and sent a two-word message:
> Need Fenna.
Then he went back to his official role of being as cold-blooded as was humanly possible.
He went and looked at the boxes that had been dumped out of the truck. They were labeled and barcoded in a way that was opaque to him.
Not far away, three people in reflective vests were standing around one of the boxes talking and pointing. He walked right up to them. Probably because of the suit and the lanyard, they stopped talking and looked at him. They were sipping coffee from go cups, in the manner of persons who had only just now showed up for work. “What is all this stuff and why is it here?” Willem asked. Anywhere else this might have come across as gruff, but it was how Dutch people communicated.
“Pop-up shelters, folding chairs and tables, emergency blankets, plastic ponchos, snacks,” said the oldest of the group, an Indo woman with graying hair in a ponytail.
Willem guessed, “Planned response to mass casualty events.”
“Yes. Lots of people are going to show up here in the next few hours. It’s going to rain. We need to keep those people sheltered but out of the way of the rescue operation. Workers need to be fed, to use the toilet, wash their hands. Victims need to re-connect with families.”
Willem nodded. “Do you need volunteers to help set this stuff up?”
Sizing him up, the woman replied using an Indonesian idiom that, roughly translated into English, meant fuck yes. The other two confirmed it with nods and expressions of relief.
Willem found Queen Frederika and Princess Charlotte a short distance from where he’d last seen them, in the lee of the dune. The princess was on her knees in the sand, hugging a boy in a wet suit who was seated on the ground looking stunned. Her friend Toon, apparently. He was flecked with foam, looking like a penguin chick covered with down. To borrow a phrase Willem had recently heard from Rufus, Toon looked like he’d seen some shit. The queen went over, bent down, and clasped the boy’s hand. People
were taking pictures that would no doubt be up on social media within moments. That was fine. She looked a bit of a mess but no one would hold it against her.
After a decent amount of time had been spent on this project of letting the wayward Toon know how happy they were to see him alive, Willem got the royals moving in the direction of where volunteers were wanted. The security team naturally came along with them. This triggered a sort of herd instinct among those onlookers who were just milling around anyway, since they had been ejected from the top of the dune by the police. Space available for random citizens was shrinking, as lanes were staked out for heavy equipment trundling in from the city: red trucks with long multi-jointed cherry pickers that could reach down into the foam, ambulances, and so on. The royals might be doing the aid workers a favor just by drawing a few people away toward the rear. Which was the message Willem would put out later today on every social media outlet he had access to when anti-royalist cranks began slinging their mud at Queen Frederika. His phone was already buzzing with alerts. He piped the feed to his glasses. As he strolled along in the rearguard of this growing crew of volunteers, he scrolled through freshly posted images of the queen clasping Toon’s hand.