She had been getting prepped in one of the vast echoing rooms at the top of the stairs. Fenna, and the fashion designer responsible for the dress, had established their respective base camps at one end of this space. At the other, Saskia was having an unexpected last-minute checkin with Ruud.
Ruud was the prime minister. Technically speaking, he was her prime minister. He’d popped in through the back door with an emended copy of the speech.
“We did not expect,” Ruud said, “that this thing was actually going to go into operation.”
He did not even need to specify that “this thing” was the Biggest Gun in the World.
Saskia sighed. “We didn’t expect a lot of things.” She was referring to the pigs. This had been much on her mind of late. Everyone who knew about the plane crash was still waiting for the other shoe to drop. But apparently in Texas you could just crash jet airplanes, shoot it out with giant predators on the tarmac, set fire to the wreckage, and flee, and no one would get particularly excited about it. The story had simply disappeared. No one cared. The government of the Netherlands, eight thousand kilometers away, was the closest thing to adult supervision in the matter. They had taken the action of grounding Saskia pending the completion of what was promised to be a discreet, yet thorough, investigation.
They had the power to do this. To ground Saskia, that is. She couldn’t blame them really. The deal was that the monarch was personally above reproach, but the PM was responsible. She could go out and murder someone and the prime minister would take the heat. Oh, he wouldn’t go to jail, but he’d have to resign and the government would fall along with him. So her very inviolability created a peculiar co-dependency with the PM. Whenever they felt like it, the Dutch government could cut the budget and curtail the powers—what was left of them, anyway—of the royals. Saskia—the whole monarchy, really—served at their pleasure. If she behaved in a way that created serious inconvenience for them—forcing PMs to fall on their swords and governments to collapse—consequences would follow. She and Ruud had daggers at each other’s throats. Not because they were dagger-to-the-throat kinds of people—Ruud was the very definition of a Euro-technocrat—but because that’s how the Grondwet had been written.
Ruud was a few years older than her, but other than a few lines in his face, seemed to have stopped aging at thirty-nine. If his hair was graying, he hid it by shaving his head. His rimless glasses were nearly invisible and didn’t seem to actually do anything—what
sort of prescription was that, anyway? A strict one-beer-a-day policy combined with intermittent fasting and lots of bicycling made things very easy for whatever tailor was putting together his wardrobe of black, navy blue, and charcoal suits.
“Are you talking about the plane?” he said. “Last I heard, the insurance company—”
“They are no longer claiming that feral swine are an act of God. They will pay for the plane. If they don’t, I will just liquidate some of my Shell stock and pay for it out of pocket, just to make this go away. They won’t have to sue Waco for not properly maintaining the fence.”
“Fence?”
Saskia tried to suppress a sigh. Usually, Ruud was better prepared. “The fence that the pigs went under. To get on the runway and crash the plane.”
Ruud was momentarily torn between the fascinating and distracting topic of the jet/pig/alligator thing in Waco, and why he was actually here. He looked vaguely out a volleyball-court-sized window into a sea of orange-clad Dutch royalists. One could sense the prime ministerial superego calling to him faintly, as if from a great distance: Ruud! Ruud! Come back to me! It is Budget Day!
And then he was back. “I’m talking about—”
“I know what you’re talking about.”
“We thought we were being very clever. What we expected was that you, in your capacity as a private citizen, would accept this invitation to go to some dinners and parties in Texas and view this experimental curiosity that T.R. was fooling around with on his farm.”
“Ranch.”
“Whatever. Then you would come back and we would talk about it and I would decide, in consultation with the Council of Ministers of course, what position we ought to adopt.”
“It did actually seem like a reasonable plan a month ago,” Saskia said.
“We did not expect,” Ruud said, slapping the palm of one hand with the revised draft of the speech, “that it would go into operation.
Full round-the-clock operation! Actually re-engineering the climate of the whole planet!”