Termination Shock

Louisiana

Willem drove down in a rented pickup truck and rendezvoused with the caravan during a pit stop at a bend in the river near College Station. He sat down with the queen inside a screen house that the Boskeys had pitched on a sandbar. They reviewed the various large and small affairs of the House of Orange.

They began with what was urgent and nearby—chiefly the two wounded members of the group in hospital in Waco. Lennert, he reported, would be fine, though he had a few months of physical therapy ahead of him. He would be on medical leave for a while and so he would have to fly back to the Netherlands once the doctors had cleared him for travel.

Sending out a replacement bodyguard would be complicated and slow, and so Amelia would have to shoulder that responsibility alone for the time being. Security chieftains at home weren’t happy about any of this and so Willem was having to devote a lot of time to calming them down. Amelia had her hands full working out backup plans to be implemented in case various contingencies arose.

Johan was going to be as fine as it was possible for a concussion victim to be, but the plane he’d been sent here to co-pilot no longer existed and so there was no point in keeping him in Texas. Tomorrow he’d be on a KLM flight back to Amsterdam.

Authorities in Waco were only just beginning the investigation of the crash. Sooner or later they’d want to interview “the pilot” but they had surprisingly little actual power. No crime had been committed; they couldn’t arrest anyone, couldn’t force Saskia to give information even if they knew where she was.

They then moved on to the quotidian tasks of the royal household that they would have talked about had they been at home: preparations for the Budget Day Speech in a couple of weeks, various upcoming appearances, and the never-ending flow of royal correspondence. So familiar were these tasks that it almost became possible to forget that they were not in the queen’s office at Noordeinde Palace in The Hague. But then a pause in the conversation brought them back to the here and now, and they sat there quietly for a few moments hearing the cacophony of the bugs and the frogs, the soft liquid sound of the running river.

“Is there anything else?” Willem asked. For he could tell something was on the tip of her tongue.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you sort of an odd question.”

“Ask away.”

“Brazos,” she said, looking out over the river. “Why does the name sound so familiar to me? What am I missing?”

“You’ve been seeing the word on financial statements ever since you became old enough to read them,” Willem said.

“Bingo! So I’m not crazy.”

Willem shook his head. “On the contrary.”

“So my next question is . . .”

“At the place where this river empties into the Gulf of Mexico,” Willem said, “south of Houston, there are some mounds—natural formations—rich in sulfur. At the beginning of the twentieth century some businessmen started a company called Brazos Sulfur to mine those deposits. There was a lot of crossover between those guys and early oilmen. This was the era when the oil industry was just going ballistic around here.”

“The gushers you see in old photos.”

“Spindletop and all that. The origin of Gulf and Texaco and others.”

“You are a gusher of obscure industrial history, Willem!”

“You’re too kind. The only reason I know any of this is that it came to light during the last few weeks when I was putting together that packet of information about Dr. Schmidt.”

“How is T.R. mixed up in it?”

“His great-grandfather Karl Schmidt was one of the founders of Brazos Sulfur. As well as an oilman. That’s how T.R. got his name. Karl was an admirer of Teddy Roosevelt. Named his son—Dr. Schmidt’s grandfather—after him.”

“All right,” Saskia said, “so I’m getting the picture of how it all started, more than a century ago. But why would I be seeing the word ‘Brazos’ on financial statements? I’m not aware of any investments in sulfur mines.”

Willem nodded. “But you are aware, if I may make a blindingly obvious point, that your family from the very beginning were investors in Royal Dutch Shell.”

“It just came up in conversation,” Saskia said drily.

Willem nodded. “If you follow the history of Brazos Sulfur through the twentieth century, it expands to other domes—those sulfur-rich mounds—in the Gulf Coast and then diversifies to other minerals. Manganese, nickel, potash. Kaolin, which is a kind of fancy clay used to make paint and diarrhea medicine. So about as unglamorous as you can get.”

“How is sulfur used?”

“Tires and fertilizer.”

“I see your point about the glamour.”

“They changed the name to Brazos Mining. They went wherever the minerals were. There’s not a lot of margin in clay and potash. They ended up in places like Cuba. Congo. Indonesia.”

“Ah,” Saskia said, “now it’s all starting to come together.”

“Like a lot of other Western companies they got kicked out of former colonies during the post-war period. Castro kicked them out of Cuba and so on. But they have, I guess you could say, tendrils all over the place—interlocking boards of directors with oil companies. Connections to big establishment figures—Rockefellers, Bushes, and so on. During the 1960s, after they’d been kicked out of Cuba and the Congo, they got wind that a geologist from our country had climbed the highest mountain in New Guinea—which is on the formerly Dutch half of the island—and seen a huge mineral deposit. Mostly copper. But where there’s copper there’s probably gold. The scale of it was unbelievable. Just sitting there in plain sight.”

“In one of the least accessible places on Earth!” Saskia protested.

Willem nodded. “And at extremely high altitude to boot. They didn’t have a prayer of getting to it without local knowledge and connections. So Brazos Mining put together a joint venture with Shell—which I need hardly tell you knew everything there was to know about doing business in the Dutch East Indies—and created Brazos RoDuSh, which went on to create—”

“The world’s largest open pit mine on the top of a mountain surrounded by the New Guinea jungle!” Saskia now knew exactly what Willem was talking about. The place was famous for its hugeness and infamous for political reasons.

“Exactly.”

“I own part of that.”

Willem nodded. “You have owned part of it since you became old enough to own things. Brazos RoDuSh has appeared somewhere on every financial statement you have ever read.”

“How are they doing?” Saskia asked. She was trying to be mischievous. But it didn’t come through. She winked at Willem. But maybe it just looked like she was trying to get a trickle of sweat out of her eye. She really needed to work on her ability to project puckish wit. Maybe it would help if she were actually more witty.

“I won’t go over the politics, the history with you,” Willem began.

“Of Indonesia and West Papua and all that.”

He nodded. “But the Asian economic book created a fantastically huge demand for copper and so they quintupled their value in a short period of time. More recently as you know there has been trouble in Papua and the stock has performed less admirably.”

“But . . . bringing it all back to the here and now . . . T.R. Schmidt is also an investor in Brazos RoDuSh?”

“He was born there.”

“In New Guinea!?”

Willem nodded. “Dr. Schmidt inherited a significant interest in the company from a generation-skipping trust set up by his grandfather in the 1970s. His chain of restaurants and gas stations was funded by the windfall when copper prices went through the roof.”

Saskia looked out over the river and pondered it. “And I naively imagined he was a homespun Texas oilman.”

“He is,” Willem said, “but homespun Texas oilmen really got around during the second half of the twentieth century.”

“Even to mountaintops in Papua.”

Willem nodded and sat back in his folding chair to signal a change of subject. “Now, speaking of Indonesia, and white people who ended up there. If it is really your intention to proceed to Houston this way—”

“It is,” she confirmed. “I can always change the plan, right? Highways and hotels are only a few minutes’ drive away at any point.”

“The hotels are full. The highways are running in the wrong direction.”

“So be it then! We are caught in the middle of a natural disaster. We can’t go back home. There’s nothing to do in Houston until the storm blows over.”

“In that case, I feel a certain obligation to go see my father.”

“Of course! But what is the weather like where he lives?”

“There was rain yesterday but it is clearing up now. I could leave immediately. Drive through the night. Be at his place for breakfast.”

“I should write him a note,” the queen said and reached for a sheet of the royal stationery: a ream of printer paper Willem had scored at Staples.

“Thank you, Uwe Maj . . .” Willem caught himself just in time, and forced himself to say, “Saskia. He will be most honored.”

Willem’s grandfather Johannes Castelein was a Dutch petroleum engineer who was sent over to what was then the Dutch East Indies in 1930 to work for Shell. He was assigned to a port town in East Java. This had a large enough expat community to support a school to which most of the local Dutch and mixed-race population, as well as Chinese merchants, sent their children. He met, fell in love with, and married Greta, who was a teacher there. They had three children during the 1930s: Ruud, a boy born in 1932; Mina, a girl in 1934; and Hendrik, Willem’s father, in 1937.

When the Netherlands fell to Hitler in 1940, contact between it and the Dutch East Indies was lost. The Dutch surrendered the Indies to Japan in 1942. Anyone in the military became a POW and ended up in especially bad places such as the railway project that later became the subject of The Bridge on the River Kwai. Adult civilians were sorted according to both gender and blood quantum. Johannes was totok—pure Dutch. Greta was an Indo—mixed European and Indonesian. The Japanese High Command “invited” them to place themselves under Japanese jurisdiction at “protection centers”—separate camps for adult males on the one hand, women and children on the other.

At the age of ten, Ruud, Hendrik’s older brother, was classified as an adult male and sent to the same camp as Johannes. The boy died the next year of bacterial dysentery. Greta, the daughter, Mina, and Hendrik were sent to a camp where conditions were a little better, at least during the first year. As the war dragged on, however, they kept getting shuffled to worse and worse places, losing possessions at every step. By the time 1945 rolled around, eight-year-old Hendrik had acquired a specialty in climbing trees, where he would beat and shake the branches until creatures fell out of them: big ungainly birds, snakes, monkeys, insects. He would look down to see the women of the camp converging on the fresh meat to beat it to death, tear it to shreds, and fight over the shreds. He watched it with a certain detachment born of the fact that he was up there munching on tree snails, lizards, and large bugs that his mother had encouraged him to harvest and to keep for himself. Meanwhile, down on the ground, Greta and her sister Alexandra, who had ended up in the same camp, worked out a way to cook up a sort of porridge from the prodigious quantities of lice harvested from the heads and bodies of camp inmates. It was sterile, since it was thoroughly cooked, and it seemed to have some nutrients. As a result of these measures, Hendrik grew big, strong, and troublesome enough that in mid-1945 he was deemed an adult one year ahead of schedule and shipped off to a men’s camp. He never saw his mother, Greta, again. Years would pass before he saw his aunt Alexandra and sister Mina.

Conditions were generally much worse at the men’s camp, but some of the older men looked after him and kept him alive through the end of the war a few months later. The Japanese guards enforced a brutal disciplinary regime. The inmates had adapted to it as best they could by using a system of code words. “Oranje boven” (Orange on top) was a slogan that in happier times might be chanted at football matches, but here was muttered as an affirmation of continued loyalty to the House of Orange.

At war’s end, during a chaotic few weeks of being shuffled from place to place, Hendrik encountered his father, alive, but sick and emaciated, as they were being loaded into boxcars. It ended somehow with the two of them finding their way back to their house in East Java. This was half burned down and stripped of all items that could be moved. They lived in the ruins for a few months trying to figure out what had become of Greta, Alexandra, and Mina. The answer turned out to be that the women had wound up in a camp in western Java, surrounded by increasingly hostile and aggressive Indonesian bravos: teenaged males who had grown their hair long and ran around in packs brandishing bamboo spears with sharp, hardened tips, and sometimes more advanced weapons that they had acquired from the Japanese. This period was named bersiap, meaning, roughly, “get ready” or “be prepared.” What they were getting prepared for was to run all the Europeans, as well as the Europeanized Indos and the Chinese, out of the Indies for good and make it an independent country. Loudspeakers were nailed up to trees and strung together with wires so that rousing speeches by Sukarno could be broadcast everywhere. They naturally focused their attentions on the camps into which the Japanese had conveniently rounded up all the people they didn’t like. At first these were still guarded by the Japanese—who had no way of getting home—and later by Gurkhas and Sikhs parachuted in by the Brits, who were supposed to be in charge of the place until further arrangements could be made. Those camps, as bad as they still were, were safer than anywhere else.

In their little enclave in East Java, across the bay from the Royal Dutch Shell petroleum docks, Johannes and Hendrik felt comparatively safe for the time being. Johannes renewed an old friendship with the Kuoks, a local Chinese family who before the war had found a niche as middlemen, buying the produce of the interior and selling it to overseas customers. Feeling threatened by the overall climate, and now effectively stateless, they wanted guns to protect themselves. Johannes knew how to get them, exploiting his privileged status, and traded some to the Kuoks for food, which they still knew how to obtain from their connections in plantations up-country.

In time they got word that Greta, Alexandra, and Mina had been evacuated by their Gurkha and Sikh protectors to a more easily defended location closer to what was then called Batavia and would soon be called Jakarta. Johannes reckoned that he would be able to reach the place via railway and, along with Hendrik, set out to do just that. The journey was halting as the train kept getting held up in provincial towns by local gangs of revolutionaries. In some places a kind of order was being maintained by what would eventually become the government of Indonesia, or by vestigial British or Dutch forces. Other places it seemed more like mob rule. As anyone who wasn’t deaf could tell, the latter were communicating up and down the line by the “coconut telegraph,” which was a traditional system of sending information from village to village by beating on hollow logs.

In one of those towns, all the European-looking passengers were marched off and made to run a gantlet of thrusting spears and thudding clubs into the town square. Hendrik and other children and women were separated from adult males, who could be heard screaming. The next, and last, time that Hendrik saw his father, Johannes was kneeling naked in the town square. He was blindfolded. On closer inspection, he was bandaged over the eye sockets, and the bandage was soaked and streaming with blood, because his eyes had been gouged out and tossed into a bucket along with a lot of other eyes of the wrong color. One of the young rebels had got a samurai sword and was going down the line cutting heads off. Johannes’s last words were “Leve de Koningin!” (“Long live the Queen!”).

Whatever plan their captors might have had for the women and children never came to pass as word of the situation somehow got out to better-armed and more disciplined Indonesians who released them from the crowded cells where they had been detained and sent them back whence they’d come on the next train. Thus did nine-year-old Hendrik become effectively a member of the Kuok family. They took him in and made up a Chinese name for him: Eng, which was easy for him to remember (it meant “scary” or “spooky” in Dutch) and to pronounce. Anyone could see at a glance that he was Indo and not Chinese, but there was nothing they could do about that.

As they found out later, Mother Greta, while climbing over a wall topped with broken glass, cut her hand. The wound became septic and she died. Sister Mina at that point became, for all practical purposes, the daughter of Aunt Alexandra. They made it to a better-protected site in Batavia whence the British evacuated them to a camp in Australia.

That was a much better situation than what faced the Kuok clan during the struggle for Indonesian independence, which consumed most of the second half of the 1940s. The port city where they lived became the focus of a lot of fighting, including aerial and naval bombardment. Their family compound, after being heavily damaged, was expropriated. So they moved to a plantation up in the hills where they had business dealings going back several generations. This area later became the locus of insurgent and counterinsurgent warfare. Some Dutch commandos parachuted in and used it as a base of operations for a few days until new orders came in over the wireless and they abruptly departed. Indonesian freedom fighters, who had been watching all this from only a few hundred meters away, then moved in and conducted what were known euphemistically as “reprisals.” The only females who survived the reprisals were those who had the presence of mind to flee into the jungle at the first sign of trouble. Hendrik, who put his tree-climbing skills to good use, saw some of the reprisals from a distance and still refused to talk about them. He, a few girls, and “Rudy” Kuok, a relatively senior member of the clan, escaped with the clothes on their backs and eventually found their way to an enclave on the coast that was still under Dutch military control. Hendrik at this point stopped claiming to be Eng Kuok and identified himself as Hendrik Castelein, a Dutch boy, and told the whole story. They were evacuated by ship to the Dutch base at Ambon, a predominantly Christian island to the east.

In 1951, Hendrik, at the age of fourteen, was given an opportunity to be “repatriated” (though he had never been there) to the Netherlands. He seized it, bidding a fond farewell to the Kuoks (who by that point had moved on to New Guinea) and traveling alone halfway around the world. He got off the boat in Rotterdam and was greeted by volunteers who settled him in a town in the southern part of the country, Zeeland. There he became a ward of an orphanage attached to a local church. He enrolled in a trade school, where he was found to have a knack for technical drawing.

Two years later, the unlucky combination of a high tide, a low pressure system, and a big storm sent a surge of water down the North Sea. It burst through flood control works in the Netherlands, England, and other countries that had the misfortune to lie in its path. Thousands died in the floods. In the Netherlands, which suffered by far the most fatalities, the disaster had the same historical resonance as did 9/11 for Americans. It led to a vast program of flood control infrastructure-building. Hendrik, however, missed out on all that, because, in the wake of the disaster, he moved to America. A Dutch Reformed church on the southern fringes of Chicago had agreed to sponsor him. He was hired as a draftsman by a steel mill just across the border in Indiana. Once he was established, with a job and a house, he sent a telegram to a Kuok in Taiwan, which in due course made its way to New Guinea, and a year later he was married to Isabella (“Bel”) Kuok, a childhood sweetheart with whom he had been maintaining a long-distance relationship. Willem was their first child. Later they had three more.

The household, in the suburban no-man’s-land between the South Side of Chicago and the heavy-industrial powerhouse of northwest Indiana, was Americanized, but Willem grew up bilingual in English and Dutch. From time to time the family would make weekend forays into Chicago’s Chinatown, but Bel spoke the wrong dialect and so it was a foreign place to her. Willem did learn how to read many Chinese characters, albeit in the traditional form still used in Taiwan.

He held dual Dutch and American citizenship. In high school he went to the Netherlands for what was supposed to be one semester. In effect, though, he had never returned. His great-aunt Alexandra and his aunt Mina had ended up in The Hague. They were happy to have him in their home, and he was happy to be in a place where his complicated ancestry was not considered remarkable. In The Hague, he was just another Indo. Not only that, but there was also a community of Chinese-Dutch in the area who had more in common with the Kuoks, including some mutual acquaintances and business connections in Southeast Asia. And, finally, there were openly gay people, and Willem was gay. So after that, when he went back to America, he did so not as an American coming home, but as a Dutchman crossing the sea to pay a visit to his foreign relatives. High school led to university, and that led to grad school at Oxford, and a Ph.D. in foreign relations, specializing in the intricacies of the world that the Kuoks still, to this day, lived in.

So much for the first half of Willem’s life (or so he’d conceived of it in the days when he’d imagined that life was basically over at sixty). Returning to the Netherlands after a brief postdoc stint in China, he’d got caught up in politics and surprised himself by getting elected to a parliamentary post. He was a member of the center-right party that was almost always part of every governing coalition and that accounted for many cabinet members. Re-elected a few years later, he found himself with a junior cabinet position relating to defense. And this developed into a career that accounted for much of the “second half” of his life. For decades he had reliably been re-elected and served in various posts mostly related to intelligence, foreign affairs, or defense. His name had been mentioned from time to time as a possible minister of defense or even prime minister, but he had never really sought that level of responsibility. Not until 2006 had there been an openly gay cabinet minister, so there was that.

But the positions in which he had served had placed him in frequent contact with the reigning monarchs, who received regular briefings on the matters for which Willem was responsible. They got to know him, and to like him. The story had got round of the manner of Johannes Castelein’s death, and his last words. With that in his family background, no one could be seen as more Dutch than Willem. But his multi-racialness, his childhood in America, and his sexuality made him interesting: just the embodiment of the modern Netherlands that the House of Orange would want to have around the palace as proof of relevancy and with-it-ness. So as the “second half” of his life drew to a close and he found himself as vigorous as he had been at thirty, with his faculties intact, and with absolutely no interest in retiring, he had entered their service.

He’d thought the pickup truck a quirky, ironic choice when he’d picked it out in Waco. He’d taken a selfie with it to share with Remi, his husband. Since then, though, he’d learned that it served as camouflage in these parts. No one would look twice at a white pickup. His tailored suits and polished shoes had been destroyed in the crash. He had gone on a shopping spree in the menswear section at Walmart. In those clothes, driving that vehicle, he drew very little attention as he drove across East Texas and Louisiana, making only brief stops for food, gasoline, and toilet.

Hendrik and Bel had learned very early that there was a thing called the Illinois Central Railroad that would enable them to escape the brutality of Chicago winters. Merely by purchasing affordable tickets and hopping on a train at Chicago’s Union Station, they could doze off as the frozen corn stubble of Illinois glided past the windows and wake up in the nearly tropical environment of the Delta.

During the industrial boom years before the 1974 oil shock, Hendrik had climbed the ladder to management just as adroitly as he had once clambered up trees in Javanese concentration camps. And no one knew how to pinch pennies better than a survivor. They bought a piece of land outside of New Orleans, improved it (meaning that they filled in wetlands), sold half of it off at a profit, and, not long after the turn of the century, retired to the other half. Bel had come down with dementia and passed away a few years ago. Willem’s youngest sister, Jenny, fleeing a bad marriage, had moved in as caretaker. Various members of the overseas Kuok clan moved in and out, pitching in on household chores while using the property as a U.S. base of operations for more or less complicated endeavors the details of which Willem made no real effort to stay abreast of. All he knew, and all he cared about, was that someone was always around to keep an eye on Hendrik and help him out of a jam, should he get into one. Which he never did.

You got to the house by driving through the suburban development that had been erected on the portion of the land that Hendrik and Bel had sold. At the end of a curving subdivision street the trees closed in over a road that had suddenly reverted to gravel, and a slow crunching drive through a tunnel of dark green led to a gate flanked by ornamental lions. The gate wasn’t locked. Willem felt the truck gaining a few all-important inches of altitude as things opened up and the sun illuminated stripes of orange zinnias flanking the driveway. Bel had established the tradition of planting these every year. In Indonesia before the war, Dutch colonists and loyal Indos had grown them as a symbol of national pride. In America they were a ubiquitous garden plant. The symbolism of the color would be lost on most people here, but Willem of all people knew what it meant.

The driveway looped around in front of an old two-story house, torn down in sections over the years and rebuilt out of cinder block because of termites. Father rarely ventured upstairs anymore, but wings had been added to the house at ground level. Willem parked his truck at the base of a flagpole flying the Dutch tricolor beneath a larger Stars and Stripes. Before shutting off the engine he sat there for a minute, letting the A/C run, and using PanScan—one of several competing apps in the anonymized contact tracing space—to check his immunological status versus that of everyone currently in the house. Since Willem was the interloper, he was the most likely to be bringing new viral strains in to this household.

Eventually the app produced a little map of the property, showing icons for everyone there, color-coded based on epidemiological risk. The upshot was that Willem could get by without a mask provided he kept his distance from Hendrik. Oh, and if he ventured upstairs he should put a mask on because there was a Kuok in the second bedroom on the left whose recent exposure history was almost as colorful as Willem’s.

Accordingly he and his father sat two meters apart in a gazebo in the snatch of mowed lawn between the house and the bank where the property plunged into the bayou. It was screened—everything here had to be—but a faint breeze moved through it and Willem made sure he was downwind of his father. Hendrik always had a walker near to hand, in case he should require it, but could easily move a few steps unassisted. He sat down at the gazebo’s cast-concrete table. Jenny brought out soft drinks on a tray. Hendrik raised a sweating glass of seltzer. Willem did likewise. They pantomimed clinking them together. “To the queen!” Hendrik said.

“The queen.”

They drank. Of course, they would hold the entire conversation in Dutch. “She sends this,” Willem said, and slid the queen’s note across the table. Hendrik somewhat laboriously fished out glasses and put them on, then unfolded the note and read it, as if it were an everyday occurrence for him to sit out in his gazebo perusing correspondence from crowned heads of Europe.

“She’s here,” he observed. He’d guessed as much from the date, or some other detail in what was written there.

“Yes, I came over with her yesterday.”

“A secret.” For Hendrik read all the Dutch news and would have known months in advance of an official visit; he’d have been at the airport with a bushel of orange zinnias balanced on the crossbar of his walker.

“Yes.”

“Unusual.”

“These are unusual times, Father.”

“The hurricane?”

“A coincidence. An unlucky one—it fouled up all our plans! But it gave me a free day to come and see you!”

This weak effort to change the subject was batted away by Hendrik. “If it has nothing to do with the hurricane, then what causes you to speak of ‘unusual times’ in such a significant way? What in addition is unusual?”

Now Willem had to struggle with conflicting notions around secret-keeping.

For Willem even to preface what he was about to say with “Don’t tell anyone this” or “what I’m about to tell you is sensitive information” would earn him the verbal equivalent of a spanking from his father. Its secrecy was so patently obvious that to mention it would be implicitly to suggest that Hendrik was senile.

He turned away from his father’s glare and nodded toward the dark trees growing up out of the bayou. “How long before all that is underwater?” he asked.

There was a long silence, if you could call the singing of birds, the buzzing of cicadas, the stridor of frogs by that name.

“So it’s about that,” Hendrik said, with a finally something is going to be done about it air. “What is she going to do?”

“Well, it’s a constitutional monarchy, father, she has strictly limited—”

“Don’t give me that.”

Willem actually had to suppress a teenager-like eye roll. “It is, Father,” he insisted. “It’s not as though she has secret superpowers above and beyond what is stipulated in the Grondwet.”

“What’s the point of having her around then?”

They had come to an impasse. Not for the first time. Willem knew where this was going. If he kept pushing back, Father would crush him by telling the story about Opa and the samurai sword. Johannes, at the end, had been loyal to the queen. Not to the elected representatives in the States General, or the words of the Grondwet—the Dutch constitution.

And it wasn’t as if Hendrik were some kind of knuckle-dragging throwback. Or, come to think of it, maybe he was; but a lot of people in the Netherlands were too. So it was good in a way for Willem to be having this conversation here and now. Hendrik could serve as a stand-in for a large slice of the electorate back home.

He nodded toward the wall of trees and vines that rose up, just a few meters away, out of the more low-lying part of the property. “This is all going to be flooded. You know it.”

“Of course. I may not have a Ph.D. but I understand the greenhouse effect, I see the water rising with my own eyes.”

“Are you ready for it? Truly ready?”

“I’m ready to piss,” Hendrik said. “While I’m doing that, go up to the attic. Come down and tell me what you see.”

Hendrik only became irritated when Willem tried to assist him with his walker, so Willem left him to his own devices and went ahead of him into the house. He walked through the living room, noting with approval that it was rigged for flood conditions: the floors were tile, laid over a concrete floor slab, softened here and there with rugs that could be spirited away to higher ground when the water came. The hallway leading from there to the stairs was lined with framed mementoes: photographs, clippings, medals, pressed flowers, and so on. It all trended strongly royalist. A large part of what Queen Frederika and her predecessors did for a living was ritual commemoration of wars and tragedies. All the Dutch people who had suffered and died in camps had received letters, medals, and so on. Their remains had been collected from shallow makeshift graves where possible and put in proper cemeteries where kings and queens went and laid wreaths and gave speeches on special days. To organize such observances, to make sure they came off well and that no one was carelessly forgotten, was a part of Willem’s job. He didn’t handle the details personally, but he supervised the people who did. It was routine work that flowed along, day to day, like water in a canal, forgotten as soon as gone by. So it was always a little weird to visit a house like this one and see many such moments frozen in time and memorialized on someone’s wall. Even—especially—when that someone was your father. Some of the yellowed newspaper clippings, inevitably, showed younger versions of Willem, when he had more hair, posing on the steps of this or that palace with members of Dutch cabinets past, or with royals. He tried not to dwell on these.

He ascended the stairs, which were water- and termite-proof concrete below but gave way to wood above the first landing. Hendrik probably came up here once a year, if that. The bedrooms changed their purpose as younger members of the clan rotated in and out. One of them had been taken over by sewing projects. Another was plastered with posters of K-Pop stars. He felt as if he were intruding on the lives and business operations of shirttail relatives he barely knew.

PanScan was nagging him to put on an N95 mask. He did so. The app had tagged an individual in the second bedroom on the left as an epidemiological risk. His curiosity had been aroused. Who here could possibly be in the same league as Willem? He advanced down the hall to the point where he could look into the open door.

His arrival was no surprise to the young woman sitting there behind a desk consisting of a door on sawhorses. She’d been tracking his approach and put on a mask herself. She stood up as he came into view and made a slight sort of bow. “Uncle Willem!” she said in Dutch. “It is good to see you! Sorry about”—and she gestured to her mask.

Willem had the awkward feeling that he should know who this young lady was. Clearly not a native Dutch speaker, and yet she’d gone to some effort to learn the language. Her accent was somewhere between English and Chinese. She’d decorated the room with maps of Southeast Asia and a fax machine—the only operational fax machine Willem had seen in maybe two decades.

“You’ve changed so much!” he said in English. Stalling for time. He hadn’t the faintest idea who she was. “Between that and the mask, I’m afraid—”

“Beatrix,” she said. “Beatrix Kuok. Great-grandniece of your mother, Bel. I guess that makes us . . .” She turned her hands up. Her eyes were smiling. Kids these days were good at emoting through masks.

“First cousins twice removed,” Willem said. “Or something like that.”

“Well, it’s good to see you!” Beatrix said. “I only met you once before at the family reunion after your mother passed. I probably just looked like one of a hundred little kids running around.”

The most prominent thing in the room was a huge map of the western half of the island of New Guinea. Even the name of which was controversial. “New Guinea” was as colonial as you could get—Europeans naming an Asian colony after an African colony! Indonesia had named it Irian Jaya. The people who were indigenous to it preferred Papua. Beatrix, he was pretty sure, was a Papua kind of gal. Yes, she’d actually taped a sheet of paper over the map’s title so that it wouldn’t draw unwanted notice during Zoom calls. The map was a real beauty, making use of shading and color to show altitude and topography. The mountainous spine of the island, running generally east–west, was its most conspicuous feature. To the south of that, various river valleys coursed down through dark green valleys toward the shallow sea that separated the island from the north coast of Australia. She’d stuck yellow notes and little colored arrows to it. Most of those were strung out along a particular valley. They clustered most densely at a site about halfway between the mountain crest and the sea.

“What do we hear from Tuaba?” Willem asked, nodding at it.

“Uncle Ed is hanging in there. Business is good even if the politics are a nightmare. Just keeping his head down, you know. Most of the younger generation are . . . like me, I guess you could say.”

“Looking for opportunities outside of Papua.”

“Yeah. Mostly in Taiwan or Oz. Me, I graduated from law school in June and I’m taking a gap year doing, I guess you could say, activism.”

“My god, how can I be that old!?” Willem exclaimed, and laughed. “Where did you go to law school? Congratulations.”

“U.T.” Beatrix seemed abashed that she’d inadvertently caused Willem to feel old.

“Austin.”

“Yes.”

Another awkward pause. They could have talked for hours now. But Hendrik was waiting. And clever noises kept emanating from Beatrix’s computer. Notifications and such.

“I want to give you a card of someone I work with in the Netherlands,” Beatrix decided; and Willem got the impression that the decision had been an important one for her. “Just in case you ever want to, I don’t know, have coffee or something. She’s in The Hague.” She shuffled through some papers on her door desk and came up with a document—a hard copy of a report, with a nice cover. A business card was clipped to it. She pulled that off and handed it to Willem.

“Oh, I’ve heard of her! Of course! And the org,” Willem said.

Idil Warsame was a Dutch woman of Somalian ancestry, daughter of refugees, a relentless campaigner for human rights in formerly colonized countries. She worked for a nonprofit that had attracted a lot of money from philanthropists in the tech world.

Willem looked up at Beatrix. The mask of course made it difficult to read her face, but the eyes were alert and intent. She very much wanted to know how Willem was going to respond to the fact that Beatrix was in cahoots with Idil Warsame. For the politics were devilish. As a Black Dutchwoman, Idil was a lightning rod for issues around immigration. Hendrik himself—awaiting Willem’s return down in the gazebo—took a dim view of letting such people settle in the Netherlands.

But it wasn’t a straight left/right thing either. Idil had been outspoken about rights violations by postcolonial governments. Her stand against female genital mutilation in East Africa had earned her twenty-four-hour police protection against possible attempts on her life by enraged traditionalists. She had no time for woke Westerners who wanted to decolonize everything.

“Way to go,” he said. “You’re doing the family proud.”

The look on her face told him that this was the right thing to say.

“Come to the Netherlands,” he suggested. “We’ll all have rijsttafel together, and talk of Papua.”

“It was good to see you, Uncle Willem!”

Backing out into the hallway, Willem found his way to the place where a pull-chain dangled from a long trapdoor in the ceiling. He reached up and drew it down, half expecting a rain of dust and bat shit to fall on his face. But it was all clean. Dutch clean. An aluminum stairway unfolded. A light came on automatically, giving him a view of the rafters and plywood that made up the underside of the roof. He ascended the stairs. The temperature shot up as his head rose clear of the attic floor. About half the space was occupied by plastic storage boxes, bug- and weatherproof, old documents and clothes dimly visible through milky polyethylene. But the area right around the trapdoor had been kept open. There was a five-gallon food-grade plastic pail of potable water; a box of military rations; a small gun safe, which presumably contained a handgun; a first-aid kit; and an axe. Not a dingy old heirloom, wood-handled and rust-patinaed, but one that looked like it had been sourced from Home Depot ten minutes ago, with a handle of bright orange plastic (of course it would be orange) and acres of safety warnings and liability disclaimers.

“I’m guessing it’s about the axe,” he said, when he had returned from that little excursion. Hendrik was done pissing and was killing time watching a Dutch soccer game on his phone.

Hendrik, clearly disgusted by the progress of the game, put the phone down and nodded. “I never told the story because I knew it would upset Bel. But the Watersnoodramp” (by which he meant the disastrous flood of 1953) “came during the night, and by the time we were aware of it the downstairs was already awash. So we remained upstairs, naturally.”

“Naturally.”

“Because you expect the water to go away, or for someone to come and help you, and you just aren’t thinking straight. But then we had to get up on the beds, because it had come up that far. Then up on top of the dressers. Finally we waded to the ladder that went to the attic, and we climbed up there, thinking we were safe. But in fact we realized we had put ourselves in terrible danger because from the attic there was no escape. No windows or trapdoors. We did not fully realize it until the water came up to the level of the attic floor. And it kept rising.”

“You’re right. This would have made Mother very upset if you had told her,” said Willem who was breaking a sweat just listening to it.

“I swam for it,” Hendrik said. “Stripped off my pajamas, dove into that cold water, felt my way to a window, smashed it out, then went through and got up to the surface where I could breathe.” He held up one arm to display a scar. Of course, it had been prominent the whole time Willem had been alive, but Father had always vaguely chalked it up to his eventful youth. “I was then able to climb right up onto the roof and pry up some of the tiles to make a little hole. It didn’t make a difference because that was when the water stopped rising, but”—he shrugged—“it made the people inside feel better. And it gave me something to do.”

“So now you keep an axe in the attic.”

“Yes. Not an original idea, by the way. Many people around here do the same. Especially since Katrina.”

Willem was accustomed to his father’s roundabout way of conveying important lessons through these kinds of nonverbal signals. A brainy youngster could always argue with a parental statement, especially when the kid was a native English speaker running rings around his immigrant dad. But you couldn’t argue with an axe in the attic.

“All right,” he said agreeably, “so you do take the threat of rising water seriously.”

“As how could I not!” Hendrik scoffed. Before his father could get going on the Watersnoodramp, Willem nodded vigorously and stretched out his hands in surrender. “What are we going to do about it is the question.”

“We, as a civilization? About global climate change?”

“I know, right? Too vague! Too much diffusion of responsibility. Too much politics.”

Hendrik cursed under his breath at the mere mention of politics and inhaled as if to deliver some remarks on that topic. Willem waved him off: “Instead ask, what are Dutch people going to do specifically about rising sea level and suddenly it is simpler and clearer, no? Instead of the whole world—the United Nations and all that—it’s just the Netherlands. And instead of all the detailed ramifications of greenhouse gases and climate change, we are talking of one issue that is clear and concrete: rising sea level.” Willem again nodded toward the bayou. “No one can argue with that. And for us, obviously, it is life or death. We fix the problem or our country ceases to exist. So that makes it very clear.”

“Not so clear that the politicians can’t fuck it up,” Hendrik pointed out.

“I don’t work for a politician, as it turns out.”

“But you just finished giving me a lecture on the limits of her power. The Grondwet and all that.”

“And you responded, Father, by telling me about the non-political ways that the monarch can inspire and lead people.” Unspoken, as always—because it didn’t need to be said—was Johannes on his knees, blind, hearing the faint whistle of the descending blade.

“So the question we are here to explore,” Willem went on, “is whether a moment has arrived when the queen can play a role in leading the nation out of grave peril—without overstepping constitutional bounds.”

“It is a good question to explore, to be sure,” Hendrik said, after a little pause to consider it. “But why are you exploring it in Texas?”

“Good question,” Willem said. “The answer is, there’s a man down in Houston who had the presence of mind, a few years ago, to put an axe in the world’s attic. We are here to find out whether the moment has arrived to pick it up.”