George Mills

by Stanley Elkin

  “Sir! I understand, sir!”

  “Of course you do. Others mightn’t, but you do.”

  “Sir! I do, sir!”

  “Who stuck his hands past the wrists into a colleague’s intestines. Now there’s no need to blush. There’s no reason to go all girly on me, George.”

  “Sir! No reason, sir!”

  “Of course not. You were doing your duty. You were doing your duty in his duty. Do I have it? Is that about it?”

  “Sir! You have it. That’s about it, sir!”

  “Well of course. And we understand that if it weren’t the eve of the Rabaran I wouldn’t be asking you to bathe me?”

  “Sir! We understand, sir!”

  “And that even if it is Rabaran eve we still wouldn’t ask if these were places we could comfortably reach ourselves?”

  “Sir! We understand, sir!”

  “And that I choose you only because you’ve been there before?”

  Requiring that he—the Meat Cut—speak to him in ways that even the King George IV himself would never speak to him. And requiring that Mills answer in ways that King George wouldn’t, indeed couldn’t, ever permit himself to demand. Already aggrieved. Hoping if it weren’t the Meat Cut then some lesser officer, or noncommissioned officer perhaps—a Waiter or Busboy—or even someone from the ranks, a Paradise Dispatcher like himself. Or something to do with the mascot—maybe the mascot was his best bet—Mills commanded to entertain it, to throw sticks for the old blind dog and fetch them himself when the arthritic animal wouldn’t move. (And could imagine that conversation too, not conversation, really, just plain boorish ragging: “Would you look at the bloody-minded beast? Do you see him frolic? Did you e’er see such pep? When Shep goes we won’t even have to replace him. What do you think, Konia? Mills for mascot when old Shep gets demobbed?” “There’s advantages and disadvantages.” “Well I see the advantage. Shep could fetch good as any when he was healthy, but he never did get the hang of throwing. What disadvantage could there be?” “Well, there’s his age.” “His age?” “A human’s lifespan is seven to one compared with a dog’s. Shep’s ninety right now in human terms. Suppose Mills is made mascot, suppose he enjoys it, suppose he takes it in his head he’s only technically human, that only some rare vagary of Nature put him in pants in the first place? My God, don’t you see? He could will himself beast. He’s already five sixths of the way there. On a dog’s diet he could live to be three hundred and fifty!” “There’s that,” Konia’s collaborator admits. “There’s more.” “More, Konia?” “This one don’t have Shep’s temperament. He’s vicious.” Because he’s a living legend by now, so accredited ever since the day the Soup Man chose to single him out for his deeds—of yes, deeds, lifted forever beyond anything as normal as actions or reactions—which is all they were finally: reactions, hard, simple, knee-jerk—and into rhetoric, semiofficial shoptalk, regulation Lister bag company scuttlebutt whenever men stopped by for a cool drink of water—along with Van and Abl Erzuz and Tchambourb and Godukuksbabis and all the rest of that Star Chamber lot of cutthroat bullies.)

  A living legend? A living joke.

  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.)

  A few women and old men returning from market spotted them and were already whispering among themselves, gesturing and, so far at least, only vaguely pointing in their direction. Boys saw them, watched silently, their faces expressionless. Dogs barked. “It better be good,” Mills said into his hand as if he were coughing.

  “Trust me,” Bufesqueu said.

  “Sure,” Mills said, out of sight now of the Janissaries on the battlements but still closely scrutinized by Bufesqueu.

  “When I give the word,” Bufesqueu said.

  “Sure,” Mills said, “the word.” (And thought: The word will be Mills. Hey, everybody, here’s George Mills that you heard so much about. Come and get it!)

  “Just watch me,” Bufesqueu said. “When I give the signal.”

  “When you drop the handkerchief?” Mills said.

  Bufesqueu glanced at him out of the corner of his eye. “Just watch me,” he said.

  They might have been strolling in the park, Bufesqueu slowing his pace and Mills slackening his own in order not to get out in front of him, when Bufesqueu suddenly began to run full out, shouting as he came. “Blitzpounce!” he shouted. “Thrustrush! Raid-grapple!” They were Janissary commands for attack and Bufesqueu was yelling them at the top of his lungs. “Flakshoot!” he screamed. “Swipeslam! Flailshove! Harrywaste!”

  The people divided before them and Mills fell in beside his friend, matching him stride for stride. Bufesqueu continued to shout. “Sallystorm! Knockstrike!” he shouted.

  “Chargepelt!” Mills joined in. “Lungehavoc! Siegescorch!”

  Now the crowd was taking actual flight, disappearing into passageways, alleyways, niches, hiding in the bays and cubbyholes of architecture like matadors behind the barriers in bullrings.

  Leaving Bufesqueu the final word. “Charge, men!” he roared so passionately even Mills looked around to see if they were not the vanguard of a full-fledged invasion.

  The trouble was it was a city, that as they cleared one street their sheer noise attracted new groups in the next. The good part was the new groups saw the old ones disperse, and, when the pair was close enough for their war cries to be distinguished, they’d already gotten the message and begun to scatter. There wasn’t a soul in the streets who hadn’t himself either been beaten by a Janissary or known or heard about someone who had. Beaten or killed, beaten and killed. So what worked in their favor was history, time’s and memory’s bad press.

  And they looked as they advanced like engines of destruction, like some great avenging avalanche of trouble and death, some spilled Vesuvius of molten bad news and worse intentions. Guzo Sanbanna himself was a witness that day and later admitted that it seemed to him that nothing, no one, could have stopped them. “I ran myself,” Guzo would say, “with one thought for my life and another for my profits!”

  The trouble was they were only human first and Janissaries second. That the spirit was willing but the flesh was an old story. That charges like theirs, even with the adrenalin flowing like a chemical bonanza, could not be maintained. Already Mills was winded, already Bufesqueu was. The good part was traffic was already beginning to back up, that, seeing the townspeople scatter, lunging recklessly in front of the rearing nags, drivers and passengers alike called from their carriages to the fleeing crowds. Mills could hear them. And the isolated replies of brave men: “An attack,” they called back over their shoulders as they fled. “Janissaries,” they shouted, “the entire force.” “Janissaries, including that legion recalled from Africa.” “Janissaries!” they cried. “Janissaries on a rampage! They’ve overturned their soup kettles in the square!” “I heard someone say that Mills himself is leading the charge!”

  So what they had going for them was rumor, rumor and panic and the prepped fear which greased them, which perspired imaginations all round—so alarmed were the Constantinopolans that out of some inspired sense of emergency the news was passed instantly from neighbor to neighbor, leaping neighborhoods, entire arrondissements and administrative quadrants of the city, flashed across the Bosporus from Europe to Asia so that they already knew at Yildiz Palace—and caused what had only been a traffic jam to become a sort of evacuation.

  The trouble was they were exhausted. For two blocks now they had ceased their war cries altogether and for once they had seemed, had anyone troubled to look, more the pursued than the pursuers. For half a block—Mills had pulled up first—they had stopped running entirely. Winded, they leaned up against a shop window and vomited. The clerks and people who’d run inside to escape might have captured and killed them easily but their sudden appearance on the other side of the glass had only served to startle and frighten them further. Perhaps they thought that the vomit and spew which issued so violently from their stomachs and throats was only a sort of Janissary way of spitting. At any rate, no one thought to investigate when Mills and Bufesqueu pulled away from the window and staggered on a few steps. “What——what,” Mills panted through the foul bile that burned his throat, “do we——do we do now?” And Bufesqueu, who did not have the strength to reply, pointed vaguely toward the road.

  Where doors hung ajar on abandoned carriages and the driverless horses that pulled them backed and filled or turned
halfway round in the street to stare into the faces of other horses, milling about, or frozen in maneuvers—they seemed more burdened now that their drivers and passengers had quit them, hobbled by their loose reins like so many leathery trip wires and the dead weight of their vehicles—which gave them the actual appearance of loiterers.

  Mills understood at once. Thinking: Here’s something I can do. Here’s something I can do if I can still do it. “All right,” he told Bufesqueu, indicating the Overland, “go on, get in.”

  But Bufesqueu pulled the shades and slammed the carriage doors shut and climbed up to sit beside Mills on the driver’s bench.

  “Great,” George said. “Two Janissaries. Now we make twice as big a target.”

  “Someone who knows the city has to tell you where to go. I pulled the shades.”

  “Fine,” George Mills said. “Now the sun won’t fade the upholstery.”

  “I pulled the shades,” he repeated. “They’ll think we’re carrying God knows who. The Soup Man himself probably. Turn left,” Bufesqueu said. “Make a right at that mosque.”

  No one stopped them. No one interfered. Everyone had heard of the invasion and thought that the two Janissaries topside the Overland with its tightly drawn shades drove God knew who, the Soup Man himself probably.

  Bufesqueu directed Mills past the logjam of vehicles and into the broader avenues. He told him which turn-off to take in traffic circles, guided him into narrow lanes that widened into grand boulevards. Mills was actually beginning to enjoy the ride when Bufesqueu instructed him to pull up before a thick wrought-iron gate surrounded on all sides by a high stone wall. “All right,” he said. “You can stop now. We’re there.”

  Mills did not yet know that it was the harem of Yildiz Palace.

  Guards were there to challenge them. They stared at the Janissaries’ uniforms.

  “You girls want something?” one said, leveling his rifle at them.

  “Hey you,” Bufesqueu said, “watch your language. All we ever did was swear off. We never took no low shave like the rest of you capons.” Mills poked Bufesqueu with his elbow.