“He works very hard. I think he did not have much schooling. He came from the court of Abdul Hamid when he was sixteen—you remember the comitadj told you—and he has been fighting ever since. He came to Tirana last December when there was the strike.”
“No, Rexh! A strike? In Tirana?”
“It is a long story, Mrs. Lane. If you would have a coffee with me, I would tell it all.”
We left the others wandering down the Durazzo road and back, and sat at a little table beneath a plane tree by the white arches of the café. A waiter brought us cups of Turkish coffee, and while the crowd went slowly past us and bursts of Albanian song came through the open windows and a great yellow moon rose behind the white minaret, Rexh told the tale of the first strike in Albanian history.
“It was at the time of the Merdite trouble. I do not know what you have heard of the Republic of the Merdite; it was a Serbian plan to get the Merdite country. The people were starving, and the Serbs promised them corn, and I think there was money for the Merdite chiefs, because some of them signed a paper that said there was a Republic of the Merdite and the Serbs sent that paper to Europe. Then other chiefs fought these chiefs that signed it, and the Serbs came in, and Ahmet Bey Mati was sent with our soldiers to fight the Serbs. It is five days to the Merdite, when the trails are good.
“You know, Mrs. Lane, Albania has no king. We have four regents, that we call quarter-kings. We laugh when we say it. ‘There goes a quarter-king,’ we say. There are the Ministers elected by Parliament, and their chief, the Prime Minister; they are the real kings. They do things, and then afterward the quarter-kings have to say, ‘Yes, that is what we would have done.’
“While Ahmet Bey was gone to the Merdite with all our soldiers, there were only three quarter-kings in Tirana. One was gone to Geneva; he was a good one. One that was here was a good one. One was a friend of Castoldi, the Italian. No good Albanian, Mrs. Lane, is a friend of Italy. And the last quarter-king, he was from Dibra, and wanted to fight the Serbs.
“And while there were no soldiers here, secretly at midnight thirty men with rifles came into Tirana, and went to the house of Pandeli Evangeli, the Prime Minister. They went in over the walls and through the windows. They pointed their rifles at Pandeli and said, ‘Resign.’ So he resigned. Then he called for a horse and went home to Valona.
“In the morning there was no Prime Minister. And Parliament was not in session. Do you understand, Mrs. Lane?”
I understood. Thus easily—if surmise could be believed—Italy had captured the Albanian government. Two of the three quarter-kings controlled the situation, and one of them was a Gheg. If he were given his head, Italy had only to await the outbreak of violence between the chiefs who wanted war on Serbia and those who were clamoring for peace, and then march in with her authority from the League of Nations to bring law and order into lawless Albania. “What happened, Rexh?”