Robilotti said, “Brandy, Hackett.”
Hackett stopped pouring coffee to look at him. “The cabinet is locked, sir.”
“I know it is, but you have a key.”
“No, sir, Mrs Robilotti has it.”
It seemed to me that that called for an embarrassed silence, but Cecil Grantham laughed and said, “Get a hatchet.”
Hackett poured coffee.
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.”