Once, twice as an adult—the moment with Annie Oakley, for instance—Wilhelm felt he had escaped again. Recently, with the all-but-literal weight of the planet descending upon him, he had called his advisers to canvass the newspapers and the streets in search of some entertainment to relieve him. That a Wild West show was coming seemed like a blessing. He had ordered his family to come with him, describing in no uncertain terms that they would all have fun. Now.

His pageboy returned, trotting down the aisle, then bowing down so that his back was horizontal to the earth. There was enough gold at the Julius Strum for two days of war.

“Two days!” Wilhelm exclaimed. “Two days?” Reflexively, his hand went to his head for the protection of his helmet. When it touched the wool of his civilian-style hat, he winced. Germany was completely unprepared. His people would be destroyed. An unfamiliar discomfort, beginning in his stomach, flushed quickly up his throat. Force of will prevented tears from forming. What would happen to his subjects?

The Cossacks, or at least those playing them, removed their sabers and spun them higher and higher into the air in perfect parabolas, catching the sabers each time, no matter how far forward their gallops had taken them. Their faces, which he had first taken as the weathered result of the steppes, suggested instead humid summers in the forests of the great Iroquois Nation, the Five Tribes. This was the era he liked best, the brutal life, a confederacy of warriors whose empire was the largest on the continent, whose prisoners were tortured over great fires and dishonored if they dared cry out in pain.

And now they were playing Cossacks.

“Wo ist Wild Duncan Cody?” He asked this of no one in particular, his voice the reasonable monotone of a man descending into fury.

Cody, it turned out, was preparing for his act. In the canvas tent, among the partitions of the dressing rooms, whose airless confines parlayed body heat into a fine mist, Duncan was emptying a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. The poster said “Shooting While Drunk.” He wasn’t going to lie to the audience.

He believed the campfire adage that if you could lie on the ground without holding on, you weren’t truly drunk. He reached for a three-quarters-finished bottle of Sunny Brook, but knocked the bottle off the makeup table. Its cap bounced away; its contents burbled into the dirt.

Then, remarkably, he was on the field, looking across the detritus of the melons cleaved by Cossack scimitars, which rested among the splintered sugarcanes destroyed by the vaqueros’ horses’ hooves. There was the pioneer cabin, ready to go alight; there was the Wells Fargo wagon, soon to meet its doom. All around were targets: clay pigeons awaiting their catapult, glass balls to be launched in the air, bull’s-eyes and piñatas made to explode confetti when struck with a bullet.