The black leather tunic was skin-tight with a high round black leather collar. The black leather pants were skintight. The black leather jackboots flared above the knee, and the black leather military cap rose high in front with a massive silver skull mounted over the visor. A black leather trenchcoat was to be worn at all times, indoors and out, as were black leather gloves long enough to reveal no flesh at the wrists.
An animal skin would be thrown over the right shoulder and gathered together by a silver skull on the left hip. The rank and file would wear leopard skins, the officers tiger, he himself, as king of the jungle, lion.
The belt of the trenchcoat would be a heavy silver chain. Hanging from it would be a large spiked mace and a rusty straight razor in a thick cylindrical black leather sheath, a leather blackjack, a black leather fist and a long black leather truncheon.
Loops of heavy silver chain would gird the chest between medals awarded for merit, the medals depicting stags and stallions and bulls, wolves and jackals and hyenas. A large silver skull would hang around the neck on a silver chain.
His own uniform would have gold everywhere instead of silver.
Ceremonies?
They would be held exclusively at night, by torchlight, his men facing him in perfect lines and ranks. The ceremonies would consist of him ranting at the top of his lungs, strutting back and forth, while the men listened. He would deliver interminable speeches detailing all his theories and concepts, talking as long as he liked about whatever he liked, while the massed corps remained rigidly at attention, expressionless, the slightest movement by anyone cause for immediate disgrace and expulsion. Then when it suited him he would distribute awards for obedience and give everyone minute instructions about what they were going to do next.
An elite private army. Spiked maces and skulls and truncheons, fists and black leather by torchlight, iron discipline.
Nubar completed his plan in his tower room late on a Sunday night. For the third time that evening he mixed equal amounts of sulphur and lead and iron and arsenic, copper sulphate and mercury and opium.
Tomorrow he would have to return to the unsettling reports from Jerusalem, but now at least he was at peace with himself.
Nubar marched to the window and stood with his hands on his hips staring defiantly out at the darkness, at nothing, profoundly immersed in visions of order and obedience and deeply satisfied with himself, unaware that his old friend Mahmud would be responsible for both the initial success and the sordid destruction of the Albanian Sacred Band.
He had first met Mahmud when he was twelve and Mahmud a year older.
In the spring of that year Sophia had vacationed in Rhodes. One evening at sunset on the walls of the Crusader fortress there, Sophia had chanced to fall into conversation with another tourist, an elderly princess connected to the Afghan royal family. The two old women took an immediate liking to one another and retired to Sophia's hotel to dine. The princess was on her way to the Riviera but promised to stop in Albania on her return in September, bringing with her a young grandson as a playmate for Nubar.
When they arrived at the castle Nubar thought the Afghan prince looked much more than a year his senior. Mahmud was a head taller than he was, his voice had deepened and there was hair growing on his flabby chest. Nubar, still without body hair and speaking in a high squeaky voice, hid in the castle in embarrassment and refused to come out and play.
At the time Nubar was fascinated with bad Albanian poetry as a result of having met a man named Arnauti, a young French national of Albanian descent who had shown him a battered yellow volume of his poems while passing through the country on his way to Alexandria. The poems were grossly sentimental but they had beguiled Nubar and he was now writing poems himself, imitating Arnauti by cramming his verses with the names of rare minerals and semiprecious stones, a device Arnauti had developed to make commonplace colors seem exotic.
After hiding for several days Nubar finally agreed to show Mahmud his poems. Mahmud said he liked them very much. The boys began giggling and before long they were panting together on a couch, whispering lurid accounts of real and imagined experiences with animals and household objects and adult male servants.
Of all Mahmud's tales the one that intrigued Nubar the most was his account of an exclusive medical clinic outside of Kabul. Nubar had never been treated in a hospital and the descriptions of somber men in white coats, coming and going with strange instruments, fascinated him.
When he was eleven, it seemed, Mahmud had begun to manifest signs of a nervous disorder. He laughed hysterically at inappropriate moments and then broke into tears for no apparent reason. Afghan specialists were called in and diagnosed dementia praecox with possible overlays of adolescent catatonia.
The psychiatric clinic on the outskirts of Kabul was recommended for intensive observation.
Mahmud spent the next year and a half at the clinic, which was situated in a pastoral setting that included brooks and ponds, sheep and goats and many wild flowers. Every morning the doctors treated him with hypnotism and every afternoon his mother faithfully visited him, to take him for a walk on the grounds of the clinic. But no progress was made. If anything Mahmud wept more violently and laughed more inappropriately.
One fine sunny day Mahmud had been out for the usual afternoon walk with his mother when a doctor had stumbled upon them behind a bush next to a bubbling brook. The doctor had suddenly begun shouting at his mother and angrily waving his arms.
What are you doing, woman? yelled the doctor.
Mahmud was lying on his back in the grass giggling inaudibly, gazing up at the rays of sun slanting through the bush while his kneeling mother performed fellatio on him. His mother, an unsophisticated Tadzhik woman whom his father had married for political reasons, raised her head in confusion and wiped her mouth.
But he began to cry, she said simply. I always do this when he cries. Look, now he's smiling again.
Which Mahmud was, although the vacant leer on his face dangerously resembled the demented grin of a congenital idiot. His mother was immediately hustled out of the clinic and told she could never return.
Within a month Mahmud was pronounced cured and sent to the Riviera with relatives for a rest The Albanian sojourn of the Afghan princess and her grandson ended in late October. They left the castle to return to Afghanistan and there the elderly princess soon died from a concussion suffered when her horse went out of control on a cliff. Nubar wrote to his friend once or twice but Mahmud was too lazy to answer. So Nubar knew nothing of him until he turned up in Albania unexpectedly in the autumn of 1929, in disgrace, his furtive note to Nubar from a cheap hotel in Tiranë saying that he had just arrived in the country and was badly in need of help.
Nubar went to the shabby hotel in Tiranë and found his old friend stretched out on a filthy bed, dressed in the shapeless costume of a Turkish peasant. After a separation of ten years, they embraced with tears.
Mahmud then produced a bottle of cheap mulberry raki from under the bed and went on to give an account of himself.
It seemed the coming world economic crisis had already been anticipated in the palaces of the Afghan royal family. Various speculative ventures were collapsing and Mahmud had been implicated in a plot to poison the minister of finance, his parental uncle, with whom he had been maintaining a secret sexual relationship in order to gain access to economic information.
Mahmud had just managed to flee the country in disguise, traveling overland by way of Baku and Odessa, distributing heavy bribes along the way, his uncle's jewels and some other valuables he had stolen at the last moment. He still had a small income from a few holdings on the Riviera, but it was absolutely essential that he go into hiding in some obscure place until the scandal was forgotten at home.