I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal

in fact, that millions of South American Indians wore replicas of it on
     chains around their necks and had a legend thatPrague was the most
     beautiful city in the world and that the Infant Jesus had gone to school there. This is
     why they wanted the Archbishop of Prague himself to bless the Prague
Bambino
,
     who weighed six kilograms and was made of pure gold. From then on we all lived for the
     glorious moment when the statue would be consecrated. But it wasn’t easy. Next
     day, the Prague police showed up, and the division head himself informed the Bolivians
     that the Prague underworld already knew about their
Bambino
and that a mob had
     come all the way from Poland to steal it. After talking things over, they decided it
     would be best to keep the real
Bambino
hidden until the very last moment, and
     to have another
Bambino
made of gilded cast iron, at the Republic of
     Bolivia’s expense, and they could carry that around with them until the
     consecration. The very next day, they brought to the hotel a suitcase that was just as
     black as the first one, and when they opened it up, what they saw was so beautiful the
     boss himself came out of his specially cooled room just to look at it, to pay his
     respects to the
Bambino di Praga
. Then Mr. Salamon began negotiating with the
     Archbishop’s consistory, but the Archbishop didn’t want to consecrate the
Bambino
, because the real
Bambino
was already in Prague, and if he
     consecrated this one, there would be two of them. I found all this out from Zdenék,
     who understood Spanish and German. Zdenék was terribly upset, it was the first time
     I’d ever seen him so shaken. On the third day, Mr. Salamon drove up, and you could
     see all the way from the station that he was bringing good news because he was standing
     up in the car, smiling and waving his hands above his head. He said he’d been
     given a good tip. Apparently the Archbishop was fondof having his
     picture taken, so Mr. Salamon proposed that the entire ceremony be filmed as a Gaumont
     Newsreel special and then the ceremony could be seen around the world. Wherever there
     was a movie house, people would see not just the Archbishop but the
Bambino
and
     Saint Vitus’s Cathedral as well and therefore, as Mr. Salamon rightly pointed out,
     the church would gain in popularity and its renown would spread to the ends of the
     earth. On the day of the ceremonial consecration, the police gave Zdeněk and me the
     job of taking the real
Bambino
to the cathedral. The idea was that the
     Bolivians, along with the chief of police in formal attire, would carry the imitation
Bambino di Praga
, and Zdenék and I and three detectives disguised as
     industrialists would follow inconspicuously behind. The leader of the Bolivian Catholic
     group decided I should carry the real
Bambino
on my lap, and so we drove off
     from the Hotel Tichota. The detectives turned out to be very jovial fellows. They told
     us that when the royal treasury and crown jewels were put on display to the public
     they’d dressed up as deacons, wandered around by the side altars, and pretended to
     be praying. All the time they were packing revolvers in shoulder holsters like Al
     Capone, and when there was a break they had their pictures taken twice with the crown
     jewels, disguised as prelates. They couldn’t stop laughing as they told us about
     it. I had to show them the
Bambino di Praga
, and eventually we said why not
     stop and have Zden ě k take our pictures behind a fence,
     all in a group with the
Bambino
, using a camera belonging to the plainclothes
     cops. Before we arrived, they also told us that whenever there was a state funeral that
     members of the government attended, theyhad to make sure no
     unauthorized persons were allowed in and that no one put a bomb in the flowers, and they
     had a special probe which they stuck into all the bouquets and wreaths before the
     funeral. They had their pictures taken there too, and