George Mills (70 page)
“All right,” Moses Magaziner said, “you wanted to see me, see me.”
“All right? Yes? All right? Didn’t you hear anything I said?”
“All right,” Magaziner said.
“Why?” he asked. “Why
you?
”
“You’re the believer,” the Jewish British ambassador dressed like a street Arab said. “You’re the hopeful one. What do you believe? What do you hope?”
“That you’re a spy, that you work for our king. I don’t know, that your eye is on the sparrow.”
“All right,” he said, “I’m a spy, I work for my king. Sure, sometime. Sometime my eye is on the sparrow.”
“I get it,” Mills said. “Good will. Word of mouth. The harem’s best-kept secrets traded for candy.”
“
Schmuck,
” Magaziner said, “have you never measured any despair but your own? Why
not
candy?”
“Why not? Because they don’t
have
secrets.”
“They sleep with the Sultan. What’s the matter with you? You never heard of pillow talk? Look, I’m busy. I’m a man of affairs. It’s already midafternoon. I’ve got a courier waiting and I still haven’t looked at the diplomatic pouch. Tonight Yetta Zemlick and I are entertaining the Spanish embassy, and if I don’t get back soon to approve the arrangements Gelfer Moonshine is going to have conniptions. So don’t hock
me
about likelihoods and probabilities. What do you want?”
“What do you
think
I want, Moses?” Mills cried. “I want to get out of here! I want you to part those eunuchs like the Red Sea!”
“Nah,” he said, “too risky. I’m a foreign national. We ain’t allowed to interfere in the domestic affairs of other empires. Here, have some
halvah.
No, go ahead, there’s plenty more where that came from.”
Mills stared after him as the old man walked off. At the door to the laundry Magaziner turned. “Listen,” he said, “it’s a long shot, longer than you think, not the sure thing, shoe in, when-you-wish-upon-a-star crap you were talking about. His Majesty don’t want you. He wouldn’t authorize air from petty cash to get you back. He still thinks you’re some Pretender or other. Maybe he’s right. He don’t need subjects like you. So it’s a long shot. So long it ain’t even mathematics. But if you ever do manage to escape, drop by the embassy, why don’t you? Maybe I can get you on a ship.”
“I figured it out,” he told Bufesqueu an hour later. “We can make our break. Be ready after dinner.”
“What, tonight? I was going to see Yoyu tonight. Everybody’s going to be there. They say even the Valide Sultan may put in an appearance. They’re expecting me. Why don’t you come too, George? The women are going to play cards. The girl with the lowest score has to take her veil off for ten minutes.”
“I think we can make it. Watch me. Do what I do.”
“Gee, George, it sounds like a nifty plan. It really does. I wish you’d spoken up sooner. The eunuchs have been telling me about this game. It’s supposed to be really something to see.”
“We can get out of here,” Mills said. “The odds are a little tight, but I think we can make it. We just have to be careful not to panic.”
“Hey,” Bufesqueu said, “you didn’t say anything about odds.”
“Forget the odds, Tedor. What were the odds when you took Constantinople? Why do I say Constantinople? You took the whole entire Ottoman Empire that day. What were the odds against that?”
“You know that novice, Debba Bayuda? You know——the tall one. The one they say is this far away from becoming a favorite lady. Well the morning line on old Debba is that she’s almost as gorgeous as she is rotten at cards.”
“How long do you think they’ll leave us alone? Sooner or later they’ve got to castrate us.”
“Yeah,” Bufesqueu said. “In a way you can’t blame them.”
“Are you coming with me?”
“Hey,” Bufesqueu said, “I really wish I could.”
Mills looked at his friend. “If I make it,” he said, “they’ll cut your balls off.”
Bufesqueu, embarrassed, looked down at his shoes. “Yeah, well,” he said shyly, “it’s like part of their dress code.”
Inside the Valide Sultan’s residence Mills squared his shoulders and knocked on the big door in the rear hallway. Beyond it was the short passageway that led to Yildiz Palace. He knocked on it five times rapidly, paused for as long as it took to recite the invocation to Allah that began the evening prayers, then rapped again, slowly, eight more times. Straining, he was just able to make out voices, then, moments later, footsteps. He adjusted his regimentals, the full-dress Janissary uniform laundered now and clean as it had been on the day it was issued.
A large man dressed in a fantastical costume was standing on the other side of the big oak door. The Palace Invigilator. Two armed guards stood behind him, their rifles pointed at George’s chest.
Mills held up his empty hands and turned in a slow circle.
“You’re a Janissary,” the Invigilator said.
“These are my campaigns,” Mills said. “Khash, Bejestan, Krym and Inebolu. Victories at Khash and Krym, wounded in Bejestan, taken prisoner at Inebolu.”
“Where are your ribbons?” the Invigilator demanded.
He looked at the citations stitched on the guards’ uniforms, the medals and chains of entitlement that hung from the Invigilator’s neck.
“Burned ’em,” Mills said. “Burned the ribbons and buried the medals when I disgraced myself at Inebolu by being captured instead of outright killed.”
“Escaped or ransomed?” the Invigilator said.
“Exchanged,” Mills said, “for thirty-seven lads from the enemy side.”
The guards murmured to each other. The Invigilator hushed them and turned back to face Mills. “You came through the doorway of our Sultan’s mother,” he said harshly.
“ ‘As did my father, so does his son,’ ” Mills said, quoting the proverb.
The Invigilator nodded. “State your business,” he said with some kindness.
“Mind yours!” Mills shot back.
“Put up your rifles,” the Invigilator commanded the guards. “I’d better get the Imperial Chatelain,” he told Mills.
The guards came to attention as Mills and the Invigilator brushed past them, Mills slightly in the lead, the Invigilator studying him from behind to see, in a final test, if he could thread his way through the complicated building to the office of the Imperial Chatelain.
Near the grand staircase—he was trading on instinct now, not only what he remembered of the palace on his single brief visit there almost two years before, and not even only what he had pieced together from the hours and hours of protocol lessons he’d attended (“I’m told that if one is observant,” an instructor had mentioned in class, “he can read the rugs as savage Indians might follow trails in a forest.” Fringe, it had to do with fringe, fringe and color, Mills thought, but couldn’t remember
what
it had to do with fringe and color, and then, where the fringe seemed thickest and whitest, actually inspired, thinking: Of
course!
It would be lushest where it was least traveled), but some felt tickle in the guts and blood, his way suffused with actual magnetic essences, some lodestar ceremony of the atmosphere that pulled at the hairs on his legs and guided and tugged his bowels—he could no longer hear them behind him.
Mills turned round. The Invigilator, halted with the guards at a crossroads of corridors, had drawn his scimitar. One guard’s rifle was aimed at his head, the other’s trained dead center on his belly.
“Kill him,” the Invigilator said, “he doesn’t know the way.”
Mills closed his eyes.
(“ ’Corze Oy ‘uz prayn,” Mills would say later. “ ’Corze Oy ’uz prayn ’n’ didn’ evern know who I erz prayn
at!
Jeezers er Arler er de Jew Gard eiver. ’Corze Oy ’uz prayn ’n yer natchurl instink whan yer makin’ yer praise is ter shut yer eyes ’corze yer don’ wan’ ter be lookern hat de Lord’s own face when yer aksin’ ’im ter save yer arse! ’Corze dat’s protcool, ’corze dat’s protcool, too. Yer nose in de dirty ’n der arse what wants savin’ up hin de hair like soom fooking flame held up in de sky like han off’rin’. ’Corze dere ain’t nought han athist ’n Vauxhall. Nill nought none, I don’ care whatcher say. ’N it’s on’y just Mum Nature’s own natchurl protcool yer shoot fram yer eyes whan yer prayn yer praise. Ye loook away joost like yerd loook way from sun. ’N de protcool oov Christers de same. Kneelern, ’ead bowed, er beatin’ yer titties.
All
of it protcool. Protcool ev’y time. Why Gard deigned, I guess, ter gimme ’is Sign.”)
“
Hold!
” Mills hollered before they could fire. “I’ve stripped her bed!” he told them in protocol.
“Hold your fire!” the Invigilator said, countermanding his earlier order. “Go,” he told one of the guards, “check.” Which was protocol too.
The guard was back in minutes. He carried his rifle, barrel pointing toward the floor. Behind him a trail of undischarged shells lay scattered on the runner. He had unbuttoned the flap of his ammunition pocket and was disposing of the last of his shells when the other guard saw him and began to do the same. The guard who had gone to check nodded gravely, and the Invigilator lay his scimitar across the strip of Oriental carpet where he stood. Which was also protocol.
Because it was
all
protocol. The thirteen knocks on the door, the Invigilator’s protocol questions and Mills’s protocol claims—his burning the ribbons and burying the medals—the fantastical man’s protocol harshness when Mills said he’d been exchanged for thirty-seven of the Empire’s enemies and his protocol kindness in response to the Janissary’s protocol proverb. Because it was
all
protocol. Mills’s protocol rudeness, the protocol moment of protocol truth when they’d let Mills precede them (because an honest subject would know the way without being told), all of it, all protocol. Because you couldn’t draw two unprotocol’d breaths in a row in this, or, for Mills’s money, any other empire either, which was why he’d granted to God what everybody agreed belonged to God——the Sign, the providential deign-given Sign, which was only careful planning, knowing one’s onions, the known onions of protocol, knowing it was tradition, going back centuries, thirteen could be, maybe more, and that the first to learn of a royal’s death had the right to strip the bed, signifying not only grief but continuity too, and not only grief and continuity, but the grief part absolutely of the highest, purest order, pure because often as not removed from all consanguineous ties and arrangements, the shrill, pure grief of subjects, bystanders, citizens——good clean taxpayer grief!
Because it was
all
protocol, and why
wouldn’t
Mills know about it? Since it was for people like him that protocol was invented, back doors and servants’ entrances, folks on whom the protocol was piled sky high, who walked around stooped over from its weight, the burden of so much precedence and protocol turning their stances into the very image of a protocol’d people, like men and women carrying each other miles piggyback. Why
shouldn’t
he know? Learn? Be on a perpetual lookout for dead royals? (Hadn’t Moses Magaziner himself quoted odds so long they would be outside the realm of what wouldn’t even be mathematics?) Strip their beds and tell the first one he saw higher than he but still low enough in the order for it not to matter much to, someone “without” anything really at stake—and this was where the continuity part came in—the bad news?
So they changed places. Mills and the Invigilator, Mills and the guards. Not physically of course, though the shoe was sure enough on the other foot, but psychologically, Mills no longer responsible by law and protocol to the guards and Invigilator—in theory the grief getting precedence now, the upper hand—just four guys, two pairs of bereaved working stiffs too shocked, again in theory, to know what they were doing, even though what they were doing was their duty. Because grief was the ultimate duty sanctioned, even ordained, by protocol.
“You’ll want to let the Grand Vizier know,” a guard said solemnly. (Because it was
all
protocol.)
“What?” Mills said. “Oh. Yeah. Right.”
“He’s left for the night,” the Invigilator told him sadly.
“I can’t still catch him?”
“He was going to the country,” the other guard said. “To his residence there.”
“I hate to have to be the one …”
The guards nodded. The Invigilator put his hand on Mills’s arm.
So he protocol’d his way out the front door of Yildiz Palace and was protocol’d into an Imperial coach standing in the spectacular driveway and told the driver to take him to the British embassy, where he asked for and was granted a political sanctuary which was never violated the whole two months it took Moses Magaziner to get him aboard a French ship which was bound (since Magaziner had said “my” and not “our” king, and evidently Mills really was no longer a British citizen) for America.
Which was also protocol.
L
aglichio sued the black furniture removal company and obtained a restraining order. His lawyer argued that Laglichio’s civil rights had been violated, that he was being prevented from doing business in the projects and black neighborhoods strictly on the basis of race. The judge agreed and, in addition to issuing the restraining order, awarded Laglichio damages.
“Landmark decision, Prince,” Laglichio remarked to Bob, the dashiki’d warrior who had tried to bust his truck. “What do you say, George? The system works.”
So Mills was once again employed full time, though he found that, having been away from it so long, he was no longer in shape. His back troubled him, his breath was short.
“You wouldn’t think,” he told Louise, “such shabby stakes and sticks could weigh so much.”
“Get out of it, George,” Louise said. “Why don’t you talk to some of your new contacts? You could ask Mr. Claunch if he’s got anything for you. Even Cornell could probably put you in the way of something. And Sam, Mr. Glazer, is settled as dean now at the university. He probably has lots of influence. I’m sure he could get you a position with maintenance or housekeeping.”
“Buildings and grounds. He already offered.”
“Buildings and grounds,” Louise said. “He offered?”
“He said I could work indoors in winter and keep warm, and outdoors in summer and get my fresh air.”