Okay, he thinks. Swell. Why not? So be it. I’m your man. Fine. I’m your dogsbody. Of course. You want me to bath down the whole naked, goddamn garrison? Every last mutt and horse on campus and all the slops in all the tripe barrels and offal buckets, too, by running them bit by fucking bit through the blue collar saliva in my poor man’s mouth? Sir! If that’s what you want, sir!
And is as close at this moment to harboring a pure revolutionary thought as anyone in the entire history of the world.
And is still waiting on the Meat Cut for the man’s command, which he still hopes will be as devastating as the officer can make it, and prays that he still has whatever it takes neither to blench nor blink when he finally hears it.
He finally hears it.
He blenches. He blinks.
“Mills,” says the Meat Cut. “I say, George, why don’t you take the rest of the day off and go into town for a bit? Take your friend with you.”
“Sir? Into town, sir? Town?”
“Dress uniforms. To show the flag. Take your pal, you know, the one that survived. Bufesqueu. Take Bufesqueu.”
It didn’t need newspapers, it didn’t need periodicals, it didn’t need chalk talks or elaborate background briefings by the officers. It didn’t even need the barracks wisdom and tittle-tattle of a Bufesqueu for Mills to understand that they had just been condemned to death. There were no provisions in the military code for Janissaries to be discharged. (There were Paradise Dispatchers in Mills’s own company in their seventies and eighties.) The reasons were obvious and, in an odd way, peculiarly compassionate.
It was not just that a veteran Janissary, celibate, old, failing and without family, ill equipped to do business in the outside world, would be lost as a civilian. He would be torn to shreds. This much came through the crazy pep talks of the Soup Man. They were despised as much as they were feared. This was their glory, their elitism.
And Mills well enough understood their ultimate mission. They all did. It was not so much to protect the state as to suppress the people. Indeed — those frequent demonstrations against the government — it was to suppress the state as well. (Though Mills had never seen it, there was something that terrified people and government both: the symbolic moment of Janissary rage when the troopers hauled the tremendous cauldrons in which they boiled soup out of the mess and into the square and upended them.) At the height of their strength two centuries earlier there had been upward of a hundred and thirty thousand troops in the Corps. Now there were barely five thousand, all of them concentrated in the huge and possibly impenetrable fortress where Mills had trained and until now lived as a prisoner. But this was the point. Not that their ranks had been diminished by a hundred and twenty-five thousand men, but that with two hundred years to work it out, a hostile government had been unable to abolish an organization of just five thousand that it openly feared and had little use for — except on those occasions when it meant to punish the people.
So they would be killed. Certainly Mills would be. He was the living legend after all. At least so far. Bufesqueu himself had said as much.
“How do they know?” Mills asked.
“How do we get hashish? How do we get halvah? Where do the fashions come from the fellows like to wear at parties? How do we get the forbidden boozes? Where do the rifles come from?”
“We don’t have rifles.”
“We don’t, no. The officers do. To use against us if we make trouble.” And when George looked at him in disbelief, Bufesqueu went on. “Kiddo, kiddo, it’s a Byzantine world. There’s plots and intrigues under every fez. There’s bucks to be made and merchants to make them. You want to know the real reason our outfit still exists?”
“We’re the greatest fighting force in the world.”
“The real reason.”
“That is the real reason. Man for man and hand to hand no one can touch us.”
“Listen to this bird,” Bufesqueu said. “He’s marching off to a town where the first guy to spot him will already be thinking not how to kill him but how best to dispose of his body after he’s dead, and his heart’s in his head and his head’s up his ass. What, you’re a snowman? You got coals for eyes? Open them up, you’re melting. Kickbacks!”
“Kickbacks?”
“Sure kickbacks, of course kickbacks! Kickback kickbucks! The fix is in. The fix has always been in. The two-hundred-year-old fix. The peddlers vigorish the Busboy, the Busboy kicks back to the Steam Table Man, the Steam Table gives to the Meat Cut, the Meat Cut slices off a piece for the Soup Man, the Soup Man ladles it out to the Grand Vizier, the Grand Vizier sees to the Sultan and the Sultan gave at the office. And that’s why we continue to exist! You know what’s the best business there is?”
“I don’t know anything,” George Mills said.
“The best business there is is a deprived, captive population. A prison’s a good business. A garrison like ours is. Mom and Pop stores on desert islands.”
“If you’re so smart why ain’t you rich?”
“I am rich. They say they let you keep Khoraghisinian’s bribegold.”
“They say I captured it in a fair fight,” Mills said gloomily.
“More snowmen.”
“But me? How would they know about me?”
“In town you mean? The good people who want to kill you, who want to hide your face?”
“Yes.”
“George, George, those walls only look impenetrable.”
“Money talks.”
“Talks? It sings soprano. But it didn’t need any money to make you famous. Penny dreadfuls tell your story. There’s broadsides and chapbooks and solos for cello. The ruthless, Christian Janissary from Blighty Limey Land. The folks hate you, Mills!”
“I’m done for.”
“Nah, I have a plan.”
They were caparisoned, their formal uniforms more like frock than battle dress. In their flaring knee-length skirts and high bodices they seemed rather like warriors on vases, urns. Percale as sheet or pillowslip, even their fabrics felt sumptuary, voluptuous. Though he had the reputation, Mills did not feel vicious. And if he’d had no knowledge of what Bufesqueu had described as the Janissary’s Byzantine arrangements — indeed, he’d only first heard of them moments before — he felt, in his Attic, high-stepper uniform, more raiment than clothing, more gown than garment, oddly venal, sharp and shady. (Already memorizing it, figuring ways it could be rendered.) But then, recalling his jeopardy — Bufesqueu he figured was there for the ride, along as a witness, no more (suspicion reinforcing his new Tammany heart) — chiefly he felt foolish, vulnerable as a traffic cop. “Oh yes?” Mills said. “A plan?”
They were on the open plain that ringed their fort — men watched from the ramparts and parapets — land that had once been valuable and held some of the city’s most venerable buildings. As recently as Mills’s induction the year before, a sort of grandstand and playing field had stood there, but over the years, as the original defilement became a parade ground, the parade ground an entrenchment, the entrenchment a breastworks, the breastworks a camp, the camp a fortification and the fortification the fortress that the Janissaries now permanently occupied, there had been a sort of piecemeal retreat, gradual as balding, of the old residences and public buildings. Now, however, they left the open area and entered the city proper, slicing into it through a failing neighborhood. Here, Mills guessed, the vendors and profiteers lived whom Bufesqueu said supplied his colleagues with their black market contraband. (I didn’t know, he thought. Sitting aloof and ignorant on my double bribegold. Starving for halvah and they didn’t even tell me, wouldn’t, not even Bufesqueu. Sent to halvah Coventry.)