Champagne for One

Beverly Kent, the one with a long narrow face and big ears, cleared his throat. "A little deprivation will be good for us, Mr Robilotti. After all, we understood the protocol when we accepted the invitation."

"Not protocol," Paul Schuster objected. "That’s not what protocol means. I’m surprised at you, Bev. You’ll never be an ambassador if you don’t know what protocol is."

"I never will anyway," Kent declared. "I’m thirty years old, eight years out of college, and what am I? An errand boy in the Mission to the United Nations. So I’m a diplomat? But I ought to know what protocol is better than a promising young corporation lawyer. What do you know about it?"

"Not much." Schuster was sipping coffee. "Not much about it, but I know what it is, and you used it wrong. And you’re wrong about me being a promising young corporation lawyer. Lawyers never promise anything. That’s about as far as I’ve got, but I’m a year younger than you, so there’s hope."

"Hope for who?" Cecil Grantham demanded. "You or the corporations?"

"About that word ‘protocol’," Edwin Laidlaw said, "I can settle that for you. Now that I’m a publisher I’m the last word on words. It comes from two Greek words, prхtos, meaning ‘first’, and kolla, meaning ‘glue’. Now why glue? Because in ancient Greece a prхtokollon was the first leaf, containing an account of the manuscript, glued to a roll of papyrus. Today a protocol may be any one of various kinds of documents-an original draft of something, or an account of some proceeding, or a record of an agreement. That seems to support you, Paul, but Bev has a point, because a protocol can also be a set of rules of etiquette. So you’re both right. This affair this evening does require a special etiquette."

"I’m for Paul," Cecil Grantham declared. "Locking up the booze doesn’t come under etiquette. It comes under tyranny."

Kent turned to me. "What about you, Goodwin? I understand you’re a detective, so maybe you can detect the answer."

I put my coffee cup down. "I’m a little hazy," I said, "as to what you’re after. If you just want to decide whether you used the word ‘protocol’ right, the best plan would be to get the dictionary. There’s one upstairs in the library. But if what you want is brandy, and the cabinet is locked, the best plan would be for one of us to go to a liquor store. There’s one at the corner of Eighty-second and Madison. We could toss up."

"The practical man," Laidlaw said. "The man of action."