The MacGuffin (2 page)

“I stand by the system. I stand by the system up to my ears.”

“Sir?”

He hadn’t realized he had actually spoken.

“Because, Dick,” he said, putting one past his driver, making the fellow think he hadn’t been paying attention (and maybe he hadn’t; maybe he was figuring the pros and cons, mulling over the offer to become a Counter-Chauffeur in the Counter-Chauffeur Division, weighing his age against his chances), “if the mayor hadn’t appointed me to this job, God knows I couldn’t have made it through another campaign.”

“You, Commissioner? Sure you would. You had a lock on those people. Those people were your people.”

“No,” Druff said, “you can’t think that way. I don’t know, how does anyone declare for the statehouse even? And the federal fellows, how do the federal fellows do it?”

“It’s their calling. Why I drive a limo instead of set up for a taxi.”

“I guess,” Druff said. And then, leaning forward to close down some of the distance between them, “Just between us, Richard. Answer a question?”

“Sir?”

“No no. Between us. Two guys. I’m not City Commissioner of Streets, you’re not my driver.”

“Yeah?”

“What’s the morning line on me?”

“On you, Commish?”

“On Bobbo Druff, yes.”

“Well, to tell you the absolute honest-to-God truth, that you could have been a contender.”

“Ah,” satisfied Bobbo.

“And but so how come?”

“That I’m not? The absolute honest-to-God?”

“Tit for tat.”

“It was all that Inderal I was putting into my system,” he told him, naming the old blood-pressure medication, the drug of choice for anyone—politicians, actors, TV and radio people—who had to speak in public.

“A stand-up guy like you?”

“I missed my hard-ons, yes.”

“You, Commissioner? Stage fright?”

“Jack and Bobby had to have been iron men. Gary Hart.”

“You’re telling me Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan weren’t disaffected, just two jealous husbands?”

Sure, he thought, my ease. That bright, cold composure.

“But I was
at
that debate. You never even broke a sweat,” said the driver.

“That’s right.” Druff remembered. “You
were
there.”

“Jesus,” Dick said, “the time the guy said ‘my opponent,’ and you interrupted him and spelled out your name? And then when he said ‘my opponent’ a second time and you spelled ‘opponent’? My, that was lovely. He didn’t stand a chance. And him screaming ‘Speak to the issues, speak to the issues.’ And you said, ‘The issues? Right,
I’ll
speak to the issues.’ ”

“ ‘Clear the snow,’ ” Druff said, recalling.

“Clear the snow, yeah.”

“ ‘Test for safe chlorine levels in the municipal pools.’ ”

“Yeah,” said his driver, giggling, “the chlorine levels.”

“ ‘Enforce the bus schedules. Rip out all unnecessary stop signs, but plant them like trees wherever there’s been an accident. More time for your nickel on the parking meters.’ ”

“Oh, God yes. ‘More time for your nickel.’ Beautiful lovely. Your famous ‘Fourteen Points.’ Continental Divide politics, watershed rhetoric.
That
caught the old hack off balance,
that
tumbled him.”

“Now now,” Druff, like a pop, remonstrated gently, “language. We don’t say ‘old hack.’ A little generosity, Dick, please. We say ‘old trouper.’ They also serve.”

But didn’t it just, the commissioner thought fondly, cheered by the memory of his inspired old promises. (With an Inderal assist, the soft toxins of his chemical ease, the solid confidence under his evaporated flopsweats like the stout barbecue, cunning pool and beautiful patio furniture on the beautiful patio behind his homely gray fence.) Flabbergasting
his
opponent with a sudden, off-the-cuff agenda, the sweet reasonables of ordinary life; astonishing the reporters there, the wide- eyed ladies and gentlemen of the press patting down their pockets for a spiral notebook or a pen that worked while he, on a roll, continued: “If the able-bodied won’t mow their lawns, the city gets someone on welfare to mow them and presents a bill.” Enforcing the weekend curfew for teenagers at the fast food hangouts. All moving violations to be paid by mail. No more futzing with City Hall’s byzantine arrangements. Free jump starts on cold winter mornings if the temperature hadn’t risen into double digits by 9 a.m. (“It’s all traffic,” he’d told them, “government is all traffic and threats to tow your car.”) “In the fall,” he’d said, and quoted himself directly now, in the car, “in the fall, until the first snow, we come by for regularly scheduled leaf pickups. And haul off your oversize objects too, your ancient washing machine, your moldy box spring and mattress. And, if I’m elected, no one—
no one
—will ever again be required to put anything on the windshield or rear window of his car, safety inspection or tax or city sticker, that has on it any adhesive stronger than the glue on the back of an ordinary envelope.” (“No more senseless scraping!” he’d vowed.)

“I liked the one where you promised to pull the cops out of the inner city and put them back into the good neighborhoods,” his chauffeur reminisced.

“Yeah,” said the quite suddenly downed City Commissioner of Streets (who
could
have been a contender), “that was a good one.”

“Yes,” Dick the chauffeur said, “the Fourteen Points. Let’s see now, the snow, the chlorine and stop signs and bus schedules. The parking meters, settling fines. Mowing the lawn, curfews. Jump starting the cars is nine. Leaf pickups, no senseless scraping, cops in the low-crime areas, coming by for the furniture in the alleys. I make that thirteen. Did I mention the parking meters? I think so. That’s thirteen. I leave something out?”

“Deuces and one-eyed Jacks are wild,” the stupid old man said sadly.

“God,” said his driver, “you could have been landslide material.”

“Through every Middlesex village and town.”

“What’s that, a Middlesex village and town?”

“Don’t rightly know.”

So they traveled over the potholes in the park, cruising the wintertime, salt-bruised paving, Druff, withdrawn and brooding in the deep, plush recesses of the outlandish automobile. (Because if you traveled in chauffeured limousines they really oughtn’t to have city seals blazoned on their sides, his department’s blacktop, bulldozer heraldics.)

But Dick wouldn’t let it go, relishing, almost licking, his memory like some kid in a school yard, say, recollecting the best parts in a movie, recounting the combinations, all the “he saids” and “you saids” of their (to hear Dick tell it) mythological confrontation. “Remember, Commissioner? ‘Hell no,’ you told him, ‘I’m not mudslinging. It ain’t even gossip. Gossip would be if I named you your lovers.’ Then you listed the facts and figures for him, all the old trouper’s inadequacies and ineptitudes, so that ‘incompetent’ was the least of it, the part the reporters crossed out when they wrote up the story. Hot damn!”

“Now now,” said City Commissioner of Streets Druff, “it was hardly the Lincoln-Douglas debates.”

“Hardly the Lincoln-Douglas, he says.” And then respectfully, seriously, even gravely, “As close as
this
town gets, Commissioner.”

And Druff, who at his time of life—it was at
least
past late middle age in his head and even later than that in the cut of his cloth, his chest caving behind his shirts, emptying out, and his torso sinking, lowering into trousers rising like a tide and lapping about him like waves—was actually old enough to think “at my time of life” and so may have been—admittedly—subject to a sort of soft paranoia, all the compounding interest on disappointment, the wear and tear of ambition—hard by, as he was, the thin headwaters of the elderly—and was the first to admit the outrageousness of his surmise and discount the chinks in his argument, discounted his vulnerabilities anyway and suddenly knew the man, his driver, the chauffeur Dick, was some kind of spy.

Well well well.

And even appreciated the fact that he ought to have felt flattered. How many men his age had spies on their case? Even when he’d been on the campaign posters and big outdoor advertising there hadn’t been spies. It was a tribute at his time of life. So why, given his blues and vapors, didn’t Dick’s probable double agency perk him right up? Or at the very least offer some red alert of consciousness or push him to action? Why, if after all these years he was finally a target, didn’t he behave like one and get moving?

Ask him outright, Druff thought. Just put it to him. Say, Why, Dick?

And would have if, just then, a mounted policeman hadn’t called “Top of the morning there”—they were stopped at a stop sign—to them through the open window of the limousine. Druff turned sideways to wave and return the greeting. (Cops, he thought, in all their supposititious ethnics and green, adoptive blarneys; in their drawled, beefy flagpatch, redneck sheriff's ways; in their designer shades and presumptive cool.)

“And the same back to you, Offi—” the politician offered when the horse, or what was more likely, the man himself—startled—did this aborted, electric bolt, a maneuver like a double take.

“Oh,” the cop said recovering, smiling, “it’s
you
back there, Commissioner. Who’s that up front? Doug-go?”

“Stosh-o wants to know if it’s Doug-go, Dick-o,” the policeman’s City Commissioner of Streets told the driver, frowning.

“How you doing?” Dick said.

“Filling the quotas,” the centaur joked, “no complaints. Ain’t ten
A.M.
yet, maybe fifteen tourists took my picture. And yourselves?”

“On the trail of fresh potholes.”

“Well,” the cop said, “you’ve a grand morning for it.”

“Just how many people know you and Doug drive each other around?” the commissioner asked when they were again under way. (Under way indeed, thought Druff in the big, nautical-seeming car.)

“You know,” Dick said, “that’s a question that says something about people’s human condition. Lisher? Lisher,” he repeated. “The roughrider, the steed cop. Well, I’ll tell you something, Commissioner Druff. We get our share. More than our share. It ain’t only cavalry guys up on their coursers see that kind of action. You know how many people during the course of a day regard us as a photo opportunity? If I had a dollar.”

“Really,” Druff said.

“Oh,” Dick said, “six bits, four even. You don’t always see this. Often you’ll be indoors on important street business when they come up. They’ll want to know if it’s the mayor’s, the governor’s. They don’t know, it could be their senator’s. Your average citizen is easily impressed but don’t understand his city’s seals from Shinola.”

Bold, thought Druff. My spy is a bold spy. Indoors on street business.

Though of course Druff knew—or at least used to—all about photo opportunities—posing with constituents and cronies like Dan Dailey tricked out in a straw boater in a musical. How many rec rooms, he wondered, were still decorated with such pictures, the flash distorting their faces, darkening or overexposing them like flesh in a photograph taken in a nightclub?

The commissioner dipped a hand into a pocket in the jacket of his suit and withdrew a pouch of chewing tobacco from which he removed, staring steadily into Dick’s eyes in the driver’s rearview mirror, a few dried coca leaves which he put into his mouth, holding them carefully against his gums like some pleasure poultice and allowing the bolus of leaves to fill with syrups from his gums and face before he began to grind it in his jaws. (A cousin in Peru sent him the stuff in two-pound cans of mountain-grown coffee once or twice a year.)

“How can you stand to chew that shit?” Under his crowns Druff had the decayed and withered posts of an Indian, brown, twiglike teeth. “No,” Dick said, “really, how can you? These days they blow Tops even in the majors.”

“That’s because they’re superstitious,” the commissioner said. “They cut it with the gum and chew each other’s pictures on the baseball cards.”

(At fifty-eight, he liked to get high. He loved the euphoria, of course, the sidebars of music and landscape, everywhere beauty arranged, composed as a photograph; loved the concentration, his lasered focus, the sense drugs gave him of recovered obsession, the small motor movements of the will, his resumed patience with the world, with everything, even the pure plain humanness of his mistakes, his kid’s, his city’s, the tolerance and good intentions dope revealed to him. Though this, doing numbers on the job, was a new wrinkle.)

“What gets me,” Dick said, “I never see you spit.”

Druff spit on the floor of the limo. “Play ball,” he said.

“You’re the commissioner,” said the spy.

And, energy up, told his driver they’d discovered enough potholes for one day, that one day they’d be remembered as the Lewis and Clark of potholes and that they should proceed to City Hall.

Less than fifteen minutes later they were there.

The City Hall in Druff’s city had been built in 1871. It was a tall, narrow structure of dressed limestone, four stories high and only eight windows across, a classical descending hodgepodge of balustrades, cornices, dentils, friezes, keystones and quoins. There were engaged columns between the arched, Italianate windows. There were crests and garlands, a portico with a pediment like a diving platform on which stood a statue of the founder of the department store City Hall had originally been. (Some air of the mercantile about it still, of emporium and records filed years, or of some great commodity exchange, furs, even diamonds, or cotton, or tobacco factorage, something if not actually anachronistic about the place then at least geographically off, as if Druff’s city were three or four hundred miles south of where it really was.)

Druff’s rooms on the fourth floor reminded him of theatrical agents’ or producers’ offices in old thirties films. (When he thought of them he saw them in black and white.) A gate, activated by a buzzer, opened in the low wooden railing that separated the public from the private suites and offices, a toy obstacle, some playpen of the governmental, civil, decorous, beyond which young hopefuls (in those old movies) cooled their heels while waiting not for the appointments which even they knew they would not be given, but for fabulous breaks in the routine, three minutes of extemporaneous, gift democracy to show their stuff when the door to the sanctum opened and Ziegfeld appeared. Which now, since San Francisco, since Harvey Milk and Mayor Moscone, didn’t happen so much. An armed security guard posted outside the little low fence mitigated the old honorable ambience of the place. Up in smoke, gone with the hopefuls themselves. Unless something was on the chest and burning the heels of the security guard too.