The MacGuffin (17 page)

“The traffic signal was itself at fault.

“Lookee here. The timer inside the box was defective. One of Su’ad’s Sunni enemies tampers with the signal so it can’t change colors, the critical wiring on the doodad for Go becomes entangled with the critical wiring on the gizmo for Stop. Your green won’t turn green, your red won’t turn red. It just hangs there on amber. It’s rigged so that both the driver’s and the Shiite’s patience run out at exactly the same time. Mikey starts up, Su’ad starts out. Know what we’re talking about here? Talking about the fatal conditions for bingo bango, good night nurse.

“Oh, I don’t have to spell it out for you. There are hundreds of possibilities, dozens, several.

“Four!

“She was a terrorist. Mikey finds out about it and doesn’t like the idea of becoming involved with someone who spills innocent blood. He runs her over. Open and shut. Prima facie b. b., g. n. n.

“Bear with me. Five and I’m finished.

“Because so far all I’ve presented, no matter how persuasive it’s seemed, has been circumstantial. But five. What about five?

“Suppose as I’ve suggested that Su’ad and Mikey
didn’t
fight. Suppose they didn’t race, the one on foot, the other in the car. Let’s further suppose that no one noticed her at the light and pushed her out into the street and under the wheels of some oncoming car driven by an accomplice. Let’s even suppose that Mikey didn’t run her over. Are you with me so far? All right then. What if there wasn’t even anything wrong with the traffic signal and nobody’s patience ran out, what then? What if she didn’t die at the hands of either mischief or mischance? What if she wasn’t even a terrorist? Or what if she was but Mikey didn’t know it? What if she was a terrorist, but, in the course of reading the American press saw the error of her ways and became so upset with herself that she settled into a deep depression and determined to take her own life? What if she enlisted the aid of our simple, smitten, good-hearted Mikey to help her do herself in?

“What, I ask you, if it was self-murder? What, that is, if it was a case of simple
Su’adicide!

“Think about it.
Think
about it!”

“Wake up, Druff,” said Margaret Glorio, “it’s time to go to school.”

Only he was awake, of course. Had been, sort of, since somewhere between his second and third arguments. Even if he didn’t immediately understand who was shaking him, even if, in his confused, hypnagogic wakefulness, he didn’t always understand where he was, or knew only that it was somewhere dreadfully, disgracefully off-limits, he was awake. Awake enough, at any rate, to recognize his clothes at the foot of the unusual sofa bed, the stylish sheets, awake enough as he stepped into his pants and put on his socks and shoes and buttoned his shirt and tied up his tie and arranged his jacket around him to comprehend where he was, even as he recognized Margaret and recalled their evening together and blew her a kiss, mouthing “Good night, Margaret dearest. I love you, darling. You’ve captured my heart, my heart, and I’ll call you in the morning,” and took in the long, splendid red nightgown that only two or three hours earlier he’d helped to take off her and held as she stepped back and let him behold her glorious ash-blond bush and firm, trained, unforgettable all. Awake enough, even in the dark, to have registered finally what, excited as he’d been by all the stir and jiggle of his glands and all the bumps and grinds of his unprepared imagination, he had not even seen in the light, some tentative, on-trial, thirty- day, money-back guarantee texture to the decor, or, no, nothing on-trial or thirty-day or even guaranteed to it at all, so much as—see how awake, see how fine his fine distinctions—experimental, some run-up-the-flagpole quality, a feel in the furnishings almost of demographics, of customer-satisfaction surveys, almost, that is, as if the buyer, like some hero of science, had first to work out on herself the exact dosages and precise indications of these surroundings, some environment of the new and venturesome, of the questionable and dangerous, he was able to guess at, anxious and hurried as he was, and in the dark, remember, and only from the dark’s graduated, particular finishes and thicknesses, the bold colors of the walls and carpeting, drapes and slipcovers, working up even the studio apartment’s queer lamps and appliances from what appeared to him—or, rather, didn’t even actually appear to him—not even as black shapes finally so much as almost sonar interferences and encumbrances. That’s how awake, that’s how alert! Even as he stepped, intuiting where it would have to be from the room’s dark, almost invisible silhouettes and pitchy mass, directly up to the designer telephone and dialed, by terrible, instinctive, ruinous rote, Dick, his driver, the spy.

“Hello?” came the worried, sleep-ridden voice, so thickly accented with semiconsciousness that Druff almost couldn’t quite recognize it at first and paused, waiting for it to go on. “Hello? Hello? Who’s this, who’s there?” Gradually the cop’s voice came into rich, angry focus. “Is that you again? Give me a break. How many the fuck times I have to tell you don’t call me. You know what time it is? Hello? Come on, what is it? What shit did you get into now? All right, all right, I ain’t mad. If you’re calling this time of night you probably got a reason. What is it this time, you dent a fender, scratch the paint, run a stop? Man, they’re gonna lift your license one of these days. They’re gonna strip you of your privileges.”

Druff, furious, said calmly, “It’s your employer, Bobbo Druff. It’s your City Commissioner of Streets.” He gave Margaret Glorio’s address, even the number of her apartment. (See how awake? See how alert?) “But I’ll wait in the lobby,” he said. “Stop by the canopy at the front of the building. Don’t leave the car. I’ll see the limousine and come out.”

Ms. Glorio had turned on a freestanding leather lamp beside the sofa bed.

“Gee,” she said, “and here I thought I was under no obligation. No salesman would call, or telltale, embarrassing taxis show up at the door. Here I thought my reputation was all safe and sound and that Mary Sally—what’s your wife’s name again?”

“Rose Helen.”

“And that Alice Nancy wouldn’t have a clue about what’s going on in our sordid little lives. Oh well,” she said, “I guess Mother was right. It’ll have to be heaven that protects the working girl, after all. Because God knows the gentlemen callers don’t seem to have a handle on it.”

“I got a little confused,” Druff said. “I called him by mistake.”

“Hey,” Margaret Glorio said, “we make mistakes. Who’s perfect? Any volunteers? It’s just that at this point in my life, maybe just a couple notches up from the last thing I need, right around, oh, bad news from the Pap smear, say, or a failing score on my mammogram, would be an embittered wife hanging around trying to scratch my eyes out, throwing acid onto the drapes and furniture, making scenes.”

“That won’t happen.”

“No.”

“It won’t.”

“I know that.”

He was afraid she was telling him she wouldn’t see him again. It was a terrible time to press his case. “I’ll call you in the morning,” he said.

“It ain’t the romantic dinners,” she said. “It isn’t the flowers.—Oh,” she said, “that reminds me. I never thanked you.” Druff body- Englished it was unimportant, that there was nothing to thank him for. “No,” she said, “it was sweet. An orchid corsage. I might even have worn it. It’s just that I thought the prom wasn’t till next week.—Where was I, what was I saying? Oh yes, it’s not the dinners, it isn’t the flowers. It’s not even the lovemaking. It’s always that damn extra hour that gets us into trouble. You sweet-talkers with your ‘hour, up, dressed and out of here’ routines. That’s where you do us in.”

She liked him. She did. Otherwise, why would she waste time on him with
her
routines? She liked him, all right. Druff could tell. He guessed it was as good a time as any to get going. He let himself out, but turned first in the doorway. “I have a feeling,” he said, “I may have talked in my sleep. I hope I didn’t disturb you.”

And desperately hoped he hadn’t, that he’d dreamed his hypnagogic state, only dreamed he wasn’t entirely dreaming. It was very important now to clear the decks, get on with his grace period, be rid of his MacGuffin.

“Disturb me? Of course not. It’s that Mikey’s pants you seem to be in, who you’re giving the hard times. You’d best leave,” she said. “Your man will be waiting.”

In the lobby, Druff waited for Dick in a comfortable armchair near the night doorman’s station. He didn’t, of course, intend to rouse him—the fellow was dozing in front of a bank of closed-circuit television monitors—but for reasons he didn’t entirely understand would have welcomed his attention. He glanced about to see if there might not be one of those logs even employees had to sign when they entered or left a building after hours.

Now he was entirely alert. Really. He would probably pay for it in the morning but he didn’t see how he’d be able to sleep tonight. Indeed, he was so excited he thought he would probably wake Rose Helen when he got home. He would never deliberately hurt her or say anything which might cause her a moment’s anxiety, but he didn’t see how, after a day and night like this had been, he could be expected just to go home and get into bed as though nothing had happened. Whatever else, they were friends, even best friends—whatever happened between himself and the Avenue of the Boulevard of Margaret Glorio Street, nothing, at least so far as Druff was concerned, could change that—and best friends were there for each other. They clipped each other on the chin and rifled each other’s pants for car keys if one was sober and the other too drunk to drive. That was the nature of friendship, he thought. All real buddies were drinking buddies finally. Intoxication investigators, they stood guard, kept this hold-hand vigil at each other’s bedsides, or over each other’s sprees. They were the fail-safes of tipsy hearts. Of pie-eyed heads.

So of
course
he would wake Rose Helen. Of course he would. He needed the company. And out of good, simple reciprocal fellowship give her details of his evening with Scouffas and McIlvoy, the one, of all things, a clubfoot, the other, for all he’d practically invented the degree- of-difficulty device that marched around through the city with them and that poor McIlvoy had trouble adjusting in the dark whenever his clubfoot pal, Scouffas, who actually wore it, was thrown too much off the track by his hobbled leg, making the loyal companion’s loyal deferentials, resetting the damn thing, factoring in all the dipsy doodles of friendship and love. Who knew? Perhaps they were lovers. Who knew? (See? See what Druff meant? Druff meant. There for each other. Joining the divergences, the pal Scouffas’s couldn’t-be-helped, staggered meanderings, McIlvoy at pains—he had severe astigmatism, you should have seen his glasses; Coke bottles? try ice cubes, why don’t you, you want an idea—to make the fine, tight Kentucky windage corrections and allowances that crippled-up old Scouffas caused to be required to be made whenever he took six or seven steps forward and went half, or one, or one and a half steps to what wasn’t even always the side, but more often than not some even-more-difficult-to-figure bias.) Regaling her, his best friend, Rose Helen, with tales of his evening, giving as good as he got, possibly even better than he got because old Rose Helen, the wife, the best friend, rousted from sleep at whatever the ungodly hour was, maybe—possibly probably—wouldn’t even know that she was on duty.

So regaling her, giving Scouffas the clubfoot and McIlvoy—this detail a surprise because normally you’d expect it would be the other way around—the thick Greek accent you couldn’t cut with a knife. What the hell, these extra flourishes, they were what best friends did for each other. Considerations no different in kind, really, from McIlvoy’s for Scouffas when the former—not permitted, friends of that order of magnitude don’t “permit”—encouraged the latter to tramp about, pacing off the marathon with the delicate thingamajig it had taken him years to perfect attached to his old friend’s clubfoot. Regaling her—she’d be laughing along with him by now—reinventing the invention he’d invented, perfecting it for Beverly Susan because friendship was a two-way street and, after all, it was really Rachel Joanne’s sleep that had been broken into and, appearances notwithstanding, Marsha Sandra who was doing the driving; on good old Pamela Ruth’s watch that he’d had the one-too-many that sounded all that red-alert friendship in the first place.

Regaling her. Perhaps not even what you could honestly call out-and- out lying. All the best details true on one level, at least spiritually true, a sort of projected, sublimated truth. That part about the possibility that Scouffas and McIlvoy might have been lovers. This, Rose Helen’s atten- tiveness here, where Druff needed her most. Segueing from the speculation to the possibility, the possibility to the likelihood, the likelihood to the certainty it was so, and Druff portraying in the crudest but most necessary code the validity of every possible detail. Taking her into the studio apartment they kept because they were on the road so much of the year pacing out marathons. Speculating about the high-tech furniture they probably had, their stylish, red silk pajamas. Regaling. Making it clear. Regaling. Regaling and relishing.

“Hey. Hey, mister. There’s some limo outside honking his horn.”

“What? What’s that?” asked Druff, shaken from sleep by the doorman.

“Yeah, he’s been making a racket. He’s going to wake the neighborhood. I see he’s from the city, but my first duty’s to the building. Could you go out and get him to stop?”

So he was already angry, at himself for calling his spy, for the rote instincts and reflexes that lived in his hands and, independent of his intentions, pushed the buttons on his telephones for him, at the chauffeur, who, wakened from sleep, had blithely seemed to acknowledge all Druff’s troubled suspicions, at the chauffeur again for having been indiscreet with the city’s limousine.

The doorman was right. Druff could hear the chipper, almost larky soundings of the limousine’s horn. Not leaning on it, mind, which might almost have been extenuated by urgency, pressing business, perhaps—though this was a stretch—the saving of lives, but the brash, overly confident
“Who,
who owns this town?
We,
we own this town!” laid- back, boom-box musings of street punks and gang toughs. Steamed and double-steamed not because the man was out of uniform—
Druff
was out of uniform—or because he did not get out from behind the wheel and run around the side of the car to open the door for him, but because of the arm, thrown over the seat, across the lowered window partition, that loud arm that spoke contemptuous volumes, that, well, practically fucking smirked at him, God damn it, and which, were it longer or not too much of an effort for the chauffeur to get it to move, might have doubled itself up at the elbow and nudged him in the ribs. Was he winking? Was the son of a bitch winking? Was it some sexual high sign the brute was throwing at him off his fingers?