The Business

CHAPTER TWO

'Well, thanks for the ride.'

Raymond grinned. 'It was a pleasure having you in the back, Ms Telman.' He squeezed my hand rather harder than a normal handshake would have called for, then tipped his cap and swung his lithe form back into the Lexus. I permitted myself the briefest of lingering glances and a sigh, then followed the two footmen carrying my luggage into the vast symphony in grey stone that was Blysecrag House, while the car crunched over the pale stones of the driveway and set off back through the deer-scattered parklands and forests for the main road.

'Kate! My girl! Good to see you!' Dressed in well-worn tweeds, waving a shepherd's crook with the thoughtless abandon of one brought up all his life under extravagantly high ceilings, attended by a brace of gangling wolfhounds leaving a double trail of whiskery grey hairs and saliva across the parquet, his own white hair seeming to float uncombed around his head as though in only casual contact with his scalp, Freddy Ferrindonald advanced down the length of the entrance hall, laughing, arms held wide.

He was lit from the side by the wintry sunlight pouring through a two-storey-high stained-glass window depicting a Victorian steel works; all gaudy reds, splashing oranges and sparking yellows with great roils of belching smoke issuing from huge machines, and small hunched human figures barely visible beneath the fumes and sparks.

A self-consciously eccentric dashing English toff of the old school, Uncle Freddy was genuinely an adopted uncle of mine, as he was a step-brother of Mrs Telman's, a familial relationship that he had never let stand in the way of sharing with me the odd toothily leering sexual innuendo, or giving my bum the occasional pat. Still, he was a laugh and — maybe because like me he didn't have much in the way of real family — we'd always got on surprisingly well.

'Welcome back!' Freddy hugged me as enthusiastically as his thin frame and eighty-plus years would allow, then held me at arm's length and looked me down and up. 'You're looking as lovely as ever.'

'As are you, Uncle Freddy.'

He seemed to find this hilarious, laughing loud enough to raise an echo from the tiered upper galleries of the hall and exposing a wealth of variously angled and diversely coloured teeth. He put an arm round my shoulder and walked with me towards the distant foothills of the main staircase.

Miss Heggies appeared. Miss Heggies was the housekeeper of Blysecrag. She was small but formidable, with grey bunned hair, a steely stare, lips the colour and fullness of a small elastic band, artificial eyebrows and a voice to etch titanium. She also gave the impression of having a combined Transporter Room and Tardis buried somewhere in the house at her command, as she seemed to possess the gift of materialising at will wherever and whenever she wanted. The only difference was that in Star Trek or Doctor Who there was a cheesy sound effect and a vaguely human-shaped shimmer — or the sudden appearance of a Metropolitan Police box — to give you a few seconds' warning; Miss H had perfected the art of arriving instantly and without a sound.

'Ah, Miss H,' Uncle Freddy called out. 'Where's the lovely Kate billeted?'

Miss Heggies nodded to the expectant-looking footmen with my cases. 'Ms Telman's in the Richmond room,' she told them.

'Miss Heggies,' I said, with a nod and what I hoped looked like a respectful smile. Miss H is the sort of person it pays to keep in with.

'Ms Telman. Welcome back.' Miss Heggies allowed her head to incline downwards by about a degree, while the corners of her mouth twitched. This was her equivalent of a floor-deep curtsy and a broad but bashful grin. I felt truly honoured. We started up the stairs.

I threw open the tall windows and stepped out on to the balcony, hugging myself as I drank in the cold air beneath a clear, cobalt sky. My breath smoked in front of me. Beyond the stone balustrade the view dropped sharply away in a series of sculpted terraces dotted with lawns, flower-beds, pools and waterfalls to the wooded floor of the valley where a few loops of river sparkled through the trees before decanting into the broad lake to my right, at the centre of which a single huge fountain towered. On all sides, the parkland spread away to the hills and crags beyond.

Looking along the cliff edge the house was perched upon, I could see a long structure like the top part of a crane laid along the lawn and jutting out over the drop. Steam drifted over it from behind, its rear obscured by a towered and crenellated wing of the house.

I rubbed my upper arms through my jacket and blouse, realising that I was smiling broadly at the view.

This was Blysecrag. It was begun in the early eighteen hundreds by the local duke, who was determined to create one of the great houses of England. He was responsible for the huge reservoir created in the hills five miles to the north of the house, which — via two valley-spanning aqueducts and a network of canals, cisterns and balancing reservoirs — supplied the water, and the pressure for the various water features in the house and grounds, of which the tall fountain in the lake was but the most immediately obvious.

The duke devoted all his time to the construction of the building but neglected to maintain the fortune that was supposed to pay for it. He duly went bankrupt. The estate was purchased by Hieronymus Cowle, an eccentric from a local mill-owning family who had made a second fortune in railways. He judged the already vast and rambling half-built structure to be a decent start, but insufficiently ambitious; many more architects, landscape gardeners, hydrologists, engineers, stone masons and artists would have to be thrown at the project.

By the time Hieronymus had finished, Blysecrag boasted three hundred rooms, eighteen towers, two miles of cellars, five lifts, thirty dumb-waiter shafts, a similar number of laundry-delivery elevators disguised as wardrobes, a water-powered funicular linking the house to its own railway branch line, a six-hundred seat underground theatre with a hydraulically driven revolving stage, numerous fountains and a mile-long reflecting lake. The place was equipped with a variety of systems for communicating with the staff, plus a pressurised petroleum-vapour lighting system powered by an early hydraulic turbine.

Hieronymus died before he could move in. His son, Bardolphe, spent most of the rest of the family fortune indulging passions for gambling and aviation; he converted one of the ballrooms into a casino and adapted the reflecting lake — which was handily aligned with the prevailing westerlies — into a landing lake for his seaplane and, near one end of the lake, up a short incline, had installed the world's first land-based steam-powered catapult on the cliff edge, to launch the aircraft. It was this structure I could see from the balcony of my room, wreathed in steam.. Uncle Freddy had just had it restored to working order.

Not content with being able to land his seaplane during the day, Bardolphe had devised a system of coal-gas pipes set just beneath the surface of the mile-long lake to release bubbles of methane which could be ignited during the hours of darkness to provide a flare-path for night landings. He died in the fall of 1913 trying to make his first such landing; apparently the wind blew out half the plumes of burning gas and ignited several piles of leaves at the side of the lake, causing him to fly towards the trees to one side and collide with the top of an ornamental pagoda. He was buried in a coffin that looked like a roulette table, housed within a seaplane-shaped mausoleum on the hillside looking over the lake and the house.

Blysecrag was used as a convalescent hospital during the Great War, then it and the estate fell into disrepair as the Cowle family struggled to cope with the ruinous costs of upkeep. It was an army training centre during the Second World War, then the Ministry of Defence sold it to us in 1949; we too used it as a training centre. Uncle Freddy bought it from the company in the late fifties and has lived here since the early sixties. The Business started the refurbishments but he completed them; the restoration of the steam catapult and the reflecting lake's underwater lighting system, recently converted to run on North Sea gas, was all his doing.

I returned inside and closed the windows. The servants had hung my suit carrier in one of the two huge wardrobes and left my other bags on the bed. I looked around but there was no TV in here: Uncle Freddy thought he was making a huge concession to modern technology by having a special room to watch television in. Blysecrag had speaking tubes, servant-signal wires, pneumatic delivery tubes, a domestic telegraph system and its own baroquely complicated field-telephone-based intercom network, but only a handful of TVs, and they were mostly in the servants' quarters. I'm a news junkie; normally the first thing I do in a hotel room is switch on the TV and find CNN or Bloomberg. Never mind. I shivered in my clothes, just briefly. Here I was in a huge house stuffed with antiques and swarming with servants, waiting for the vastly rich and powerful to arrive, and it was all entirely familiar to me. I had one of those moments when I reminded myself how fortunate I'd been, and how privileged I had become.

As usual the first thing I unpacked, even before my toiletries bag, was a little netsuke monkey with a dolorous expression and eyes made from tiny chips of red glass. I placed it on the bedside table. I set the monkey — usually along with my watch and a torch — by my bed wherever I am in the world, so that I always have something familiar to look at when I first wake up. The sad-faced little figure was one of the first presents I ever bought myself after I left school. Embedded in its base is a thirty-five-year-old pre-decimal coin; the same twelve-sided thruppenny bit that Mrs Telman handed to me from her gleaming black limousine that wet Saturday afternoon in 1968.

Uncle Freddy wanted to fish. I dressed in some old jeans, a sensible shirt and a thick woolly jumper I found in a drawer; the house provided a life-jacket-equipped waistcoat with too many pockets, and a pair of thigh-length waders. An ancient jeep driven with geriatric abandon by Uncle Freddy himself bounced us down a grassy track to a boathouse by the broad lake with the fountain; the pair of wolfhounds bounded after us, scattering spittle to either side as they ran. In the boathouse we picked up two old cane rods and the rest of the paraphernalia associated with fly fishing.

'Are we likely to catch anything at this time of year?' I asked as we tramped along the shore, loosely accompanied by the dogs.

'Good God, no!' Uncle Freddy said, and laughed.

We waded into shady shallows not far from where the river met the lake down an ornamental weir decorated with chubby stone cherubs.

'Well, the bastards are up to something,' Freddy said, casting far out into the gentle current. I had told him about my visit to Silex Systems and the odd behaviour of Messrs Rix and Henderson concerning the locked door. He glanced at me. ' As long as you're sure you're not imagining all this.'

'I'm sure,' I told him. 'They were both perfectly polite, but I could tell they really didn't want me there. I felt about as welcome as a mole on a bowling green.'

'Ha.'

'I took another look at the plant's figures afterwards,' I said, making a reasonable cast myself. 'They show some odd fluctuations. They're like an oil painting: the further away you stand, the more convincing they look, but get up close and you can see all the brushstrokes, all the little blobby bits stuck on.'

'What the hell can they be up to?' Uncle Freddy said, sounding exasperated. 'Could they have another production line going in there? Could they be building their own chips and selling them independently?'

'I thought about that. Finished chips are worth more than their weight in gold, more than industrial diamonds, but I don't see how they could have hidden the capital plant. The raw-materials purchases would barely show in petty cash, but the machines, the whole line…they can't have hidden that.'

'Silex. They're not wholly owned, are they?'

I shook my head. 'Equal forty-eight per cent with Ligence US. The other four per cent is owned by the employees. Rix and Henderson are our guys, but via Mr Hazleton.'

'Shit,' Uncle Freddy said. Mr Hazleton is a Level One executive; a single level above Uncle Freddy and the highest of the high, one of the all-but-untouchable principal players of our company and a full member of the Board. He would be showing up later on today with some of the other power players. Uncle Freddy — a frustrated Level One man if ever there was one — harboured certain resentments concerning Mr Hazleton. 'Do we have a legal route in there?' he asked.

'Only through Hazleton,' I told him. 'Or another Level One intervening.'

Uncle Freddy snorted derisively.

'Otherwise we'd have to wait until the elections next year,' I said. 'Though we'd have to start campaigning now. And I've no idea who might be plausible replacements.' (I'll have to explain about these elections later.)

'We should just get a chap in there,' Uncle Freddy said.

'I think so. Want me to talk to somebody?'

'Yes. Get a fellow from one of the European offices. Somebody who knows what they're doing. Scottish, I suppose, but not based there, or London.'

'I think there's someone in Brussels who might do. If you'll authorise it I'll see if I can persuade Security to put them on secondment.'

'Right you are. Yes. Think that's the least we should do.' Then Uncle Freddy's line, until that point lying in a lazily straightening S shape across the ruffled waters, jerked suddenly and disappeared under the surface. He looked surprised. 'Well, I'll be—!' he exclaimed, and braked the suddenly spinning reel.

'Let's hope that's a good omen,' I said.

The Business has understandings with several states and regimes, and over the centuries we'd carved out our own little territories in various places. We have, for example, a small factory in the US military base on Cuba at Guantanamo, which produces the only authentic Cuban cigars it is more-or-less legal to sell in the US (though they're so exclusive and expensive, and their production legality so ticklish, they're never advertised. Rumour has it that it was one of those which President Clinton… well, never mind).

Usefully close to Guantanamo is the small Bahamanian island of Great Inagua, which is not truly independent but has its own semi-autonomous parliament; we have interests there, too. On the US mainland, we own a couple of casinos and a few other business ventures in the Rez (as it's usually called; formally it's the Wolf Bend Native American Reservation) in a desolate corner of Idaho where — again conveniently — the full remit of US law does not apply.

We are the only non-governmental organisation to have a permanent base on Antarctica, in Kronprinsesse Euphemia Land, between Dronning Maud Land and Coates Land. Purchased from Argentina during the Junta, this is the closest we've come so far to having our own statelet and has the handy attribute of being both excruciatingly remote and effectively beyond the reach of international law. The more lurid company rumours have characterised Kronprinsesse Euphemia Land as our Siberia; our very own gulag. However, no one I know has ever heard of anybody being sent there against their will, so I reckon it's just a story to help keep people well behaved.

A few places have — for an arrangement, for services rendered or just outright bribes — allowed some of our most senior people to become accredited diplomats; hence our interest in the fate of General Pinochet, who was travelling on a supposedly diplomatic passport when he was arrested in London.

This seems to be the latest fad with our Level One execs; in the past we never used to bother. Perhaps it is simply that when you're so rich you can buy anything, all that's left is stuff that money normally can't buy. My own theory is that one of our Level One people bumped into a high-ranking Catholic at a party once and discovered he was talking to a Knight of Malta, accredited through the Vatican to all the best diplomatic courts (Lee Iacocca, for example).

This would leave our Level One exec at a disadvantage, because only Catholics can become Knights of Malta, and there is a strict rule in the Business that all executives — anybody above Level Six — must renounce all religious affiliations, the better to devote themselves to pursuing a life dedicated to Mammon. Anyway, some of our Level Ones possess diplomatic passports from some of the world's less savoury regimes, like Iraq and Myanmar, while some sport papers from places so little known that even experienced customs and immigration officers have been known to have to refer to their reference books to find them: places like Dasah, a trucial state on a small island in the Persian Gulf, or Thulahn, a mountainous principality between Sikkim and Bhutan, or the Zoroastrian People's Republic of Inner Magadan, between the Sea of Okhotsk and the Arctic Ocean, or San Borodin, the only independent Canary Isle.

These arrangements are useful, but they're expensive and fragile — regimes change, and if we can buy them now, who might buy them tomorrow? So there's another wheeze on the horizon; a fix for all this. We intend to buy our own state, outright.

Quite apart from giving us access to all the diplomatic passports we might reasonably require and allowing us unrestricted use of that perfect smuggling route called the diplomatic bag, we would also finally have what, according to some of the more enthusiastic Level Ones, we really need: a seat at the United Nations.

The candidate is the island of Fenua Ua, part of the Society Islands group in the South Pacific. Fenua Ua has one inhabited island, two mined-out guano outcrops, and no natural resources apart from lots of sun, sand and salt and some only arguably edible spiny fish. They were once so desperate to generate income from any source at all they invited the French to come and blow up nuclear bombs beneath them, but the French refused. They used to have to import water. They now have a desalination plant but the water still tastes, apparently, on the salty side.

Their power plant works only intermittently, there is no natural harbour on the main island, barely space for a proper airport and the reefs make it impossible for cruise ships to call even if they want to (and as Fenua Ua is devoid of natural wonders and possesses no native culture whatsoever except that based around the removal of the spines from spiny fish, they don't want to).

The place's most pressing problem is that there is no ground on Fenua Ua higher than a metre and a half above sea level, and while its reefs protect the main island from waves and the Pacific swell, they will not be able to counter the effects of global warming. In fifty years' time, if present trends continue, the place will be mostly under water and the capital will look like Venice during an Adriatic storm surge.

The deal being suggested is that if we'll build them a sea wall which will girdle the whole island, the Fenua Uans will let us take control of the entire state. As there are only thirty-five hundred dispirited Fenua Uans, it has proved quite easy to bribe almost all of them. Three referenda in the last five years have backed our plans, by a huge majority.

This was, though, not proving an easy deal to complete. Various governments had got wind of the transaction and had been quietly trying to block it, offering various amounts of aid, trading credits and personal financial sweeteners to the Fenua Ua government. The US, the UK, Japan and France had proved particularly stubborn, and while we hadn't parted with any serious money yet — just a few skiing holidays in Gstaad, a motor cruiser or two, a couple of apartments in Miami and a few other expensive gifts — we'd invested a great deal of effort in all this, only to find that every time we thought we were on the brink of closing the deal, the Fenua Ua government came up with another objection, or pointed out that the French had promised to build them an international airport, or the Japanese would finance a better desalination plant or the US had offered them their own nuclear power station or the British had suggested they might be able to arrange a visit by Prince Charles. However, according to the rumours I'd been hearing over the last few weeks, perhaps there had been some resolution of the problem at last, because the meeting at Blysecrag had seemingly been set up to bring the whole matter to a head. Pens might well be wielded, hearty handshakes shared and leather-bound document wallets exchanged, perhaps — I thought as I stood there in my waders watching Uncle Freddy reel in a lively little trout — that very evening.

'Ah,' said Uncle Freddy, throwing the car into a corner and twirling the steering-wheel until his arms were crossed. The Ferrari went briefly sideways and teetered on the edge of a spin. 'Come on, come on, old girl,' Uncle Freddy muttered; not to me, to the car. I clutched my purse to my chest and felt my legs pull up instinctively, squeezing the shiny shopping-bags behind my calves in the footwell. We continued to head for the hedge for what felt like a few seconds, then the Daytona seemed to gather itself just at the apex of the corner and its long red bonnet lifted as we roared on down the resulting straight. Cars were Uncle Freddy's weakness: the old stables at Blysecrag contained a collection of exotic automobiles — some of them very fast — that would have shamed most motor museums.

We were on our way back from Harrogate, which was about forty minutes' drive from Blysecrag, or half an hour if you drove like Uncle Freddy. He had offered to drive me into town to pick up a new dress for the formal dinner that evening. I had forgotten quite how enthusiastic a driver he could be. We had been talking — on my part largely to take my mind off the mortal peril Uncle Freddy appeared to be intent on putting us both in — about the Fenua Ua situation and I had expressed the cautious hope as detailed above that things might be settled tonight.

Then Uncle Freddy had said, 'Ah,' in that particular tone that made my heart seem to sink, while at the same time my curiosity suddenly awoke, sniffing something major.

I had been trying to distract myself from Uncle F's driving by counting the money I'd withdrawn from a couple of cash machines in Harrogate. The developed world divides people neatly into two camps: those who get nervous when they have too much money on them (in case they lose it or get mugged), and those who get nervous when they don't have enough (in case they miss a bargain). I am firmly of the second school, and my lower limit of nervousness seems to be way, way above most people's higher one. I tend to lose a lot in currency conversion charges but I'm never short of a bob or two. I blame my upbringing. I looked up from my purse at Uncle Freddy. 'Ah?' I said.

'You bugger,' Uncle Freddy said, under his breath, as a tractor blocked the road ahead and a stream of cars coming in the opposite direction prevented him overtaking. He looked at me and smiled. 'Suppose you might as well be told now as later,' he said.

'What?'

'We're not really interested in Fenua Ua.'

I stared at him. I put the cash away, not fully counted. 'What?' I said flatly.

'It's all a blind, Kate. A distraction.'

'A distraction.'

'Yup.'

'For what?'

'For the real negotiations.'

'The real negotiations.' I felt like an idiot. All I seemed to be able to do was repeat what Uncle Freddy was saying.

'Yup,' he said again, throwing the Ferrari into a gap in the traffic and past the tractor. 'The place we're really buying is Thulahn.'

'Thulahn?' This was the tiny Himalayan principality with which we had — I had thought until now — a very limited understanding; just the usual money for diplomatic passports deal. Uncle Freddy had mentioned the day before on the telephone that Suvinder Dzung, the current Prince of Thulahn, would be in attendance at Blysecrag over the weekend, but I hadn't thought any more about this, beyond reconciling myself to an evening of unsubtle flirting and increasingly outrageous offers of jewels and royal yaks if I'd leave my door unlocked that night.

'Thulahn,' Uncle Freddy said. 'We're buying Thulahn. That's how we get our seat at the UN.'

'And Fenua Ua?'

'Oh, that's only ever been to throw the other seats off the scent.'

At this point I had better make clear that during the last decade or so, when the idea of buying our own country and securing our own place at the UN had been gaining popularity amongst the high-ups, we seemed to have started referring to sovereign states as seats.

'What, right from the start?'

'Oh, yes,' Uncle Freddy said airily. 'While we got quietly on with the negotiations with the Thulahnese, we've been paying a chap in the American State Department a handsome sum every month to make sure they keep coming up with new ways of preventing us buying Fenua Ua. But I mean, pwah!' At this point Uncle Freddy puffed his cheeks out and lifted both hands from the wheel in a dangerously Italianate gesture. 'Who'd really want Fenua Ua?'

'I thought the actual place was irrelevant. I thought it was the seat at the UN that mattered.'

'Yes, but if you're going to buy somewhere you might as well buy somewhere decent, don't you think?'

'Decent? Thulahn's a dump!' (I'd been there.) 'They've so little flat land their single landing strip has to double up as their football park; the time I went we nearly crashed on our first attempt because they'd forgotten to remove one of the goalposts. The royal palace is heated by smouldering yak dung, Uncle Freddy.' (Well, bits had been.) 'Their national sport is emigration.'

'Ah, but it's very high, you see. No danger from global warming there, oh, no. Also very survivable in the event of a meteorite strike or that sort of thing, apparently. And we'll be levelling off one of their mountains to make a proper airport. Plan is to carve out lots of caverns and tunnels and shift a lot of archive stuff there from Switzerland. There's quite a lot of hydroelectric power, they tell me, but we've got a nuclear plant we bought last year from Pakistan just waiting to be installed. Oh, come on, get out the bloody way!'

This last was addressed to the rear of a caravan blocking our progress.

I sat and thought while Uncle Freddy fretted and fumed. Thulahn. Well, why not?

I said, 'The Fenua Uans will be upset.'

'They've done very well out of us. And we shan't be making a big fuss about buying Thulahn. We can keep the charade going with Fenua Ua until they have their airport or water plant or whatever from one of the other seats.'

'But in one generation they'll be under water.'

'They'll all be able to afford yachts, thanks to us.'

'I'm sure that will come as a great comfort to them.'

'Ah, bugger you,' Uncle Freddy muttered, and sent us slingshotting past the caravan; a car approaching flashed its lights at us. 'And you,' Uncle Freddy said, before throwing the Ferrari into the fluted entrance to Blysecrag's estate. 'Excuse my French,' he said to me. Gravel made a noise like hail in the wheel arches as the car fishtailed back and forth before straightening, finding the tarmac that started at the gatehouse. and roaring on down the drive.

I checked the time difference and then called one of my girlfriends in California.

'Luce?'

'Kate. How ya doin', hon?'

'Oh, fine and dandy. You?'

'Well as can be expected, given my boss-bitch from hell just beat me at squash.'

'How politic of you to let her triumph. I thought your boss was a guy.'

'No. It's Deana Markins.'

'Who?'

'Deana Markins. You know her. You met her at Ming's. Last New Year. Remember?'

'No.'

'The girls' night out?'

'Hmm.'

'You remember. We were splitting the check but they gave it to Penelope Ives because she was sitting at the head of the table and you said, Oh my God, they billed Penny!'

'Ah, that night.'

'Well, her, anyway. Oh, and my cat's in cat hospital.'

'Oh dear. What's wrong with Squeamish?'

'Serial fur balls. That's already more than you want to know, believe me. You still in Braveheart territory? They cun take ourr lives but they'll neverr take us serriously.'

'Luce, I swear you must have your own dialogue coach as well as personal fitness trainer. But no, I'm in Yorkshire, England.'

'What? This at the mega-house that belongs to your uncle?'

'The same.'

'Any chance your beloved will be there?'

'There, maybe; available, I doubt it.'

'What's his name again?'

'Gosh, I don't think I ever told you it.'

'Na, you didn't, did you? You're so cagey, Kate. So defensive. You should open up more.'

'That's what I keep offering to do for this guy.'

'Slut.'

'Chance would be a fine thing. But never mind.'

'One day your prince will come, kid.'

'Yeah. Funnily enough, tomorrow a real prince does arrive. Guy called Suvinder Dzung. I may have mentioned him.'

'Oh, yeah, the guy who made a pass at you in the scullery.'

'Well, it was the orangery, but, yes, that's my boy. I don't think that's why I've been invited, but I'm still just a little suspicious I'll only be there to keep him entertained.'

'This the Himalayan guy?'

'Well, as in hailing from, not in physical appearance. Yes.'

'So he's a prince of this place?'

'Yes.'

'But I thought he was the ruler.'

'He is.'

'So how come this guy's called a prince if he's the ruler? How come he's not the king?'

'No idea. I guess it's a principality, not a kingdom. No, hold on, Uncle F said it was something about his mother. She's still alive, but he was married briefly, so she's not the queen, but at the same time he's not the king. Or something. But, frankly, who gives a fuck? Not I.'

'Amen.'