Lindsey sat down on the mossy wall. “Ah, screw the speech. You probably already know this anyway,” she said, nodding toward Colin. “But I’ll tell the story: the Archduke was born in December 1863 in Austria. His uncle was the emperor Francis Joseph, but being the Austro-Hungarian emperor’s nephew don’t matter much. Unless, say, the emperor’s only son, Rudolph, happens to shoot himself in the head—which is what, in fact, happened in 1889. All of a sudden, Franz Ferdinand was next in line for the throne.”
“They called Franz ‘the loneliest man in Vienna,”’ Colin said to Hassan.
“Yeah, well no one liked him because he was a total nerd,” Lindsey said, “except he was one of those nerds who isn’t even very smart. Your average inbred ninety-six-pound weakling type. His family thought he was a liberal wuss; Viennese society thought he was an idiot—like an actual tongue-hanging-out-of-your-mouth idiot. And then he went and made matters worse by marrying for love. He married this girl named Sophie in 1900, and everyone thought she was just totally low-rent. But, you know, in the guy’s defense, he really loved her. That’s what I never tell in the tour, but from everything I’ve read about Franzy, he and Sophie had about the happiest marriage in the whole history of royalty. It’s sort of a cute story, except for how on their fourteenth wedding anniversary—June twenty-eighth, 1914—they were both shot dead in Sarajevo. The emperor had them buried outside of Vienna. He didn’t even bother to attend the funeral. But he cared enough about his nephew to go ahead and start World War I, which he did by declaring war on Serbia a month later.” She stood up. “Thus ends the tour.” She smiled. “Tips are appreciated.”
Colin and Hassan clapped politely, and then Colin walked over to the obelisk, which read only: ARCHDUKE FRANZ FERDINAND. 1863–1914. LIE LIGHTLY UPON HIM EARTH, THO’ HE / LAID MANY A HEAVY BURDEN UPON THEE.
Heavy burdens, indeed—millions of them. Colin reached out and felt the granite, cool despite the hot sun. And what had the Archduke Franz Ferdinand done that he might have done differently? If he hadn’t obsessed over love, hadn’t been so tactless, so whiny, so nerdy—maybe if he hadn’t been, Colin thought, so much like me. . .
In the end, the Archduke had two problems: no one gave a shit about him (at least not till his corpse started a war), and one day he got a piece taken out of his middle.
But now Colin would fill his own hole and make people stand up and take notice of him. He would stay special, use his talent to do something more interesting and important than anagramming and translating Latin. And yes, again the Eureka washed over him, the yes-yes-yes of it. He would use his past—and the Archduke’s past, and the whole endless past—to inform the future. He would impress Katherine XIX—she had always loved the idea of him being a genius—and he would make the world safer for Dumpees everywhere. He would matter.
From which reverie he was awoken by Hassan asking, “So how the fug did a perfectly good Austrian Archduke end up in Shitsberg, Tennessee?”
“We bought him,” Lindsey Lee Wells said. “Around 1921. The owner of the castle where he was buried needed money and put him up for sale. And we bought him.”
“How much did a dead Archduke cost in those days?” Hassan wondered.
“’Bout thirty-five hundred bucks, they say.”
“That’s a lot of money,” Colin said, his hand still on the granite obelisk. “The dollar rose by a factor of more than ten between 1920 and now, so that’s more than thirty-five thousand dollars in today’s dollars. A lot of tours at eleven bucks apiece.”
Lindsey Lee Wells rolled her eyes. “Okay, okay—I am sufficiently impressed. Enough already. You know, we got these things down here—I don’t know if you have ’em where you’re from, but they’re called calculators, and they can do all that work for you.”
“I wasn’t trying to impress anyone,” Colin insisted defensively.
And then Lindsey’s eyes lit up and she cupped her hands over her mouth and shouted, “Hey!” Three guys and one girl were trudging up the slope, just their heads visible. “Kids from school,” Lindsey explained. “And my boyfriend.” Lindsey Lee Wells took off running toward them. Hassan and Colin stood still, and began chatting quickly back and forth.
Hassan said, “I’m a Kuwaiti exchange student; my dad’s an oil baron.”
Colin shook his head. “Too obvious. I’m a Spaniard. A refugee. My parents were murdered by Basque separatists.”