He sensed her caution and gave a disarming shrug. “Pardon me,” he said, “but that is what we’re here to talk about, is it not?”
“Did you know who was invited?” Saskia asked.
“Not until fifteen minutes ago. London, Singapore, Venice, the Netherlands, and of course Houston. What do they all have in common?”
“Other than the obvious? That they are all under dire threat from rising sea level?”
“But so is Bangladesh. The Marshall Islands. Why aren’t they here?”
“Money,” Saskia said, gazing at a beautiful set of cuff links on the wrists of one of the London contingent. His French cuffs had, of course, been tailored so that one of them was slightly larger to accommodate his massive wristwatch. A side benefit of being a queen was that you didn’t even have to pretend to be impressed by that stuff.
“To join the club,” Michiel said, extending one hand palm up, discreetly taking in the room, “I infer that you must be under dire threat—but you must also have the money and let’s call it the technocratic mentality needed to take effective action.”
Saskia made a mental note to ask Amelia to run a check on this guy and find out whether he had any fascist affiliations.
“Does Venice?” Saskia asked. As long as they were being blunt.
“Officially? No. Oh, it’s under threat, to be sure. But it’s just another cash-strapped modern city. Part of a country that pays lip service to climate orthodoxy. As does the Netherlands.”
She didn’t need to ask what Michiel meant by climate orthodoxy. Even if she weren’t the head of state of a very Green country, she got an earful of it almost every day from Lotte.
“But . . . if you were here in some official capacity, I imagine you’d have told me a little more about yourself,” she said.
“Venice doesn’t have monarchs, so we have to make do,” Michiel said, gesturing to himself in a self-deprecating way. “But the money, the technocratic will to power—those aren’t going to come from the Italian government, as you well know.”
She just looked at him expectantly. Her instinct was to say little until she got the background check back from Amelia.
“Look,” Michiel said with a shrug, “someone like you will want to have an explanation of who and what I am. That is only fair and reasonable. We should get out ahead of that and not let it develop into a source of confusion. But perhaps you’ll agree that this cocktail party isn’t the place or time.”
“I do agree and will take that as an offer for us to find some place and time that is better.”
“Done. I do not have a staff per se, but am accompanied by my sister and my aunt. We shall work it out with Dr. Castelein.”
“It has been a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Michiel.”
“The pleasure is all mine, Your Majesty,” he returned, and excused himself.
Verdict: Michiel was low drag （though it might be weird having his sister around）， very high lift, but only on the condition that he wasn’t some kind of fascist. The Netherlands too had its share of far-right characters, and Saskia had to be careful about even being seen talking to someone like that. So the verdict was out until Amelia （and the larger Dutch security apparatus at home） could figure out who the hell this guy was.
“Ex-footballer for AC Milan,” Willem said, after Michiel was out of earshot.
“Ah. I thought he looked familiar.”
“Played for a few seasons. Not a big star but had a good run. Parlayed it into some endorsements. You’ve seen his face on ads for fancy watches in duty-free shops. From an old Venetian family, as it turns out.”
It remained only to make some sort of contact with the Brits. Saskia dispatched Alastair, who knew some of the lord mayor’s entourage through City connections. He came back a few minutes later with a pair of white men in tow: a mop-topped blond （medium
drag, medium lift, too young） who looked like he’d stepped right off an Oxford or Cambridge quad, and a posh and podgy sort in his fifties （probably low drag, but zero lift）。 This was the guy whose cuff links—made from Roman coins, it turned out—had caught her eye earlier. His name tag identified him as Mark Furlong. “Bob’s knackered,” he announced. “Just useless. Too much free Beaujolais on the Gulfstream.”
A moment passed while Saskia re-calibrated her conversational brain for this kind of highly layered and ironic talk. In some ways it was more difficult than learning a foreign language. Which was sort of the point; you couldn’t be part of this social class unless you got it. “Bob”—Robert Watts, the Right Honorable the Lord Mayor of London—was a teetotaler. He had blown up a marriage and a job by drinking too much, then sworn off the booze and put his life back together and gotten married to Daia Chand, a British journalist. The assertion by Mark Furlong—a trusted member of Bob’s inner circle—that he’d been incapacitated by too much free Beaujolais on the Gulfstream was under no circumstances to be taken at face value. It was, first of all, a joke that derived its humorous payload from being so utterly outrageous in its falsity. But for the hearer to get the joke they’d have to know Bob at least well enough to know that he was—extremely unusually for a man in his role—an absolute teetotaler. Anyone so ill-informed or credulous as to actually believe this slander would be left out in the cold, operating on bad information. In due time they might work out that they’d committed the monstrous faux pas of taking at face value what had been meant as an ironic witticism and have the good grace to throw themselves in front of a Tube train at Bank. Further embroidering on all this was Mark’s specification of Beaujolais as the drink in question, that being seen, by a certain class of drinker, as an inexpensive and faddish vintage for lightweights. The mention of the Gulfstream was a lovely touch. Mark was basically remarking on how absurd it was for people to travel that way. So the underlying reality was that Mark was a profoundly decent man who knew and loved Bob but couldn’t bring himself to say as much.