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.
PART FIVE
1
Laglichio 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.