His Majesty, Bunker Bean

In the flickering penumbra of a nation still dizzy from the Great War, a mouse-quiet office clerk named Bunker Bean—stooped shoulders, ink-stained cuffs, pulse set to stenographic rhythm—discovers that his blood might once have coursed through the veins of Ramses the Great and, more recently, the Little Corporal himself. The revelation arrives via Prof. Balthasar, a velvet-coated occult raconteur who smells of candle smoke and old libraries. Under hypnosis Bean’s spine straightens; his pupils dilate like dark suns. By day he still taps at keys, but by gas-lit night he prowls the magnate Jim Breede’s baroque mansion, courting the jazz-dizzy heiress known only as “The Flapper,” her pearls clacking like brittle laughter. A ten-thousand-dollar legacy—dripping with the grease of distant relatives—becomes seed money for a speculative bonanza that showers millions upon our reborn pharaoh. He buys his own mummy (or the story of one), marries the heiress beneath a confetti of ticker-tape, then learns that his heraldic past is moonshine. Yet the mirage has already re-engineered his marrow: belief, not lineage, forges monarchs.