Absolute Friends [antikvár]

On the day his destiny returned to claim him, Ted Mundy was sporting a bowler hat and balancing on a soapbox in one of Mad King Ludwig's Castles in Bavaria. It wasn't a classic bowler, more your Laurel and Hardy than Savile Row. It wasn't an English hat, despite the Union Jack blazoned in Orientai silk on the handkerchief pocket of his elderly tweed jacket. The maker's grease-stained label on the inside of the crown proclaimed it to be the work of Messrs. Steinmatzky and Sons, of Vienna.And since it wasn't his own hat as he hastened to explain to any luckless stranger, preferably female, who fell victim to his boundless accessibility neither was it a piece of self-castigation. "It's a hat of office, madam," he would insist, garrulously begging her pardon in a set piece he had off perfectly. "A gem of history, briefly entrusted to me by générations of previous incumbents of my post wander-ing scholars, poets, dreamers, men of the cloth and every man jack of us a loyal servant of the late King Ludwig hah!" The hah! perhaps being some kind of involuntary