The Great and Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms
Johan Thoms (pronounced Yo-han Tomes) was born in Argona, a small town twenty-three miles south of Sarajevo, during the hellish depths of winter 1894.Little did he know that his inability to reverse a car would change the course of 20th Century History forever…Johan Thoms is poised for greatness. A promising student at the University of Sarajevo, he is young, brilliant, and in love with the beautiful Lorelei Ribeiro. He can outwit chess masters, quote the Kama Sutra, and converse with dukes and drunkards alike. But he cannot drive a car in reverse. And as with so much in the life of Johan Thoms, this seemingly insignificant detail will prove to be much more than it appears. On the morning of June 28, 1914, Johan takes his place as the chauffeur to Franz Ferdinand and the royal entourage and, with one wrong turn, he forever alters the course of history.
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The Friday Project An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
This ebook first published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2013
Copyright © Ian Thornton 2013
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2013
Ian Thornton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
FIRST EDITION
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007551491
Ebook Edition © NOV 2013 ISBN: 9780007551507
Version: 2015-09-08
To Heather, Laszlo and Clementine
Contents
Copyright
Prologue:
A Refracted Tale of Two Wordy Old Gentlemen in a Blue Prism
Part One
1 Around the Time When Adolf Was a Glint in His First Cousin’s Eye
2 Pawn to Queen Four
3 Serendipity’s Day Off
4 The Butterflies Flutter By
Part Two
1 Fools Rush In
2 A Vision of Love (Wearing Boxing Gloves)
3 Drago Thoms: Pythagoras, Madness, and an Indian Summer in Bed
4 The Kama Sutra, Ganika, and Russian Vampires
5 We Are the Music Makers. We Are the Dreamers of Dreams.
6 A Sweet Deity of Debauchery
7 A Day (or So) in the Country
8 Just a Lucky Man Who Made the Grade
9 The Accusative Case
10 The Black Hand
11 The Day Abu Hasan Broke Wind
12 A Microcosm of the Apocalypse
13 A Farewell of Scarlet Wax and Gardenia
Part Three
1 And the Ass Saw the Angel
2 It Only Hurts When I Laugh (Part I)
3 The Die Is Cast (aka Les Jeux Sont Faits)
4 The Unlikely Bedfellow
5 “Ciao Bello!”
6 The March of Don Quixote
7 In No-Man’s-Land
8 “A Shadow Can Never Claim the Beauty of the Image”
9 The Birth of Blanche in a Dangerous Ladbroke Grove Pub
10 Cicero’s Fine Oceanarium of Spewed Wonders (1920–1932)
11 Suffragettes, Mermaids, and Hooligans (1932)
12 Let’s Rusticate Again
13 Jackboots, Cleopatra, and the Bearded Lady (1932–1936)
14 The Girl in the Tatty Blue Dress
15 She Had a Most Immoral Eye (1937–1940)
16 Archibald’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
17 Then There Were Three Again
18 Music, Brigadiers, and Marigold (1940)
19 It Only Hurts When I Laugh (Part II)
20 “Gawd Bless Ya, Gav’nah!”
21 A Giant in the Promised Land
22 Pepper’s Ghost, Fluffers, and a Brief Encounter
Part Four
1 “Everybody Ought to Go Careful in a City Like This” (1945)
2 The Return of Abu Hasan
3 The Brigadier’s Au Revoir
4 The Veil
5 A Blue Rose by Any Other Name
6 Dragons, Confucius, and Snooker
7 “I Know Who You Are!”
8 The Death and Life of a Grim Reaper
Epilogue
Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Publisher
A rural cricket match in buttercup time, seen and heard through the trees; it is surely the loveliest scene in England and the most disarming sound. From the ranks of the unseen dead forever passing along our country lanes, the Englishman falls out for a moment to look over the gate of the cricket field and smile.
—J. M. Barrie
2009. Northern England
I sat with my grandfather Ernest in a very comfortable, spacious ward in the hospital in Goole. The doctors had said that he would not live for much more than a week.
Goole is as Goole sounds, a dirty-gray inland port in Yorkshire not far from England’s east coast. More than one hundred years earlier, Count Dracula might well have grimaced as he passed through, en route from Whitby to Carfax Abbey. Most foreigners (and some southerners) think it is spelled Ghoul, especially after their first, and invariably only, visit. This is where Ernest’s final days were to be spent, though at least the hospital sat at the very edge of town and his window faced the more pleasant countryside.
It had been a rapid decline for a man who, well into his nineties, on the eleventh day of the previous November, had walked the three and three-quarter miles to the train station before daybreak. He had traveled south on three trains of varying decrepitude and two rickety tubes to stand by the Cenotaph on Whitehall with thousands of others. Many were bemedaled, some wheelchaired, but each had a shared something behind the eyes and a similar thought focused just above the horizon, as the high bells of St. Stephen’s in Westminster struck eleven and the nation fell silent. Then, with only tea accompanied by Bovriled and buttered crumpets from the Wolseley on Piccadilly as fuel, he had made the return trip the same day, pushing open, with untroubled lungs, his unlatched door way past the time that saw most decent folks in bed. He had told me that it was the only day he could ever remember when he had not conversed with a single person. He had had his reasons.
