The MacGuffin (35 page)

“Say,” said the concierge almost pointedly (in light of the puzzles Druff had been putting to himself only moments before), “are you trying to establish an alibi or something?”

“Do you have yesterday’s paper? There’s something I have to check.”

“As it happens,” he said. Stooping, he produced a newspaper from some little cubby behind his desk. Druff thanked him and took it with him to the armchair in which he had dozed off only last night. (Only earlier today, actually, he thought. My God, he thought, I’m observing the unities.) He flipped through the paper, found the announcement of Marvin’s death. Then, turning to some more neutral page, he refolded the newspaper before handing it back to his old friend, the wise-guy concierge.

“Would you call a cab for me?”

“Sure. Where should I tell him you’re going?”

Damn!
thought the Commissioner of Streets and, from his less-than- vast knowledge of the city’s neighborhoods, named a section of town he thought to be in the general vicinity of his destination.

Almost as if he had other fish to fry, the concierge phoned up Druff’s cab and permitted him to leave the building without incident.

The City Commissioner of Streets gave the driver the name of the chapel.

“Wait for me,” he said when they’d pulled up to the funeral parlor, “it doesn’t look as if anybody’s home.”

And thought again,
Damn!
Realizing even as he rang the night bell and waited for someone to come and open the door for him that Macklin had died Thursday, that Catholics didn’t bury on Sunday, that in all likelihood they wouldn’t have waited till Monday, that he’d probably have gone into the ground today. He stood forlornly, conscious of a chill developing in the evening air.

“I’m sorry,” he told the man on duty, “I got into town too late for Marv Macklin’s funeral. Would you happen to know if the family is taking condolence calls? Would you happen to know the address?”

“It just so happens,” the night man told him, echoing the concierge/ doorman of Ms. Glorio’s building.

He told the cabbie and they drove in silence to Mrs. Macklin’s house, Druff chastising himself for his stupidity. And you call yourself a politician! You, City Commissioner of Streets, where’s your vaunted street smarts? You’re supposed to be this big old-school political figure, a man of the wards with turkeys and gift hams in his Christmas and Thanksgiving hampers, how come you don’t know your Catholics? How come it never occurred about Saturday interments? (How come, for that matter, when you got up this morning you didn’t even know it was Saturday? A savvy, moxied-up power broker like you? Or is time so jammed up on you you just don’t bother to keep track any longer?) Have you forgotten everything you ever knew about the political forks? All those precinct clichés, all that district and ward lore? Names of the wives and kiddies in the prominent families, the not-so-prominent, of deadbeat in-laws with input, of ethnic strivers, the police and fire fairs, hinge events in the inner city, graduations, track meets, barbecues?

Where had he been, oh? What had he been doing that he hadn’t had a good idea since the Fourteen Points? (Bringing a marathon to town was a good idea but he’d only been teasing.) And why, since there was no doubt about it now, had they bothered to put spies on him? Was it to discover his incompetence? They could have done that before lunch, they could have done it in an afternoon. A fly on the wall could have done it within buzzing distance of Margaret Glorio’s pallet. Druff knew he was in trouble. It was no good asking MacGuffins to play with him, to go along with him for the ride. But for the life of him, the
life
of him, he couldn’t imagine what he’d done.

Though he knew now what he must do, the only thing he could do. And that he’d have to wait till Monday
to
do. He would have to meet with the mayor and turn in his resignation. He’d have to plead for terms. See could he still get his benefits he resigned in midstream. (Or maybe, they wanted him out bad enough, they’d double-dip him, carry him on phantom books, bench him, pay out his contract, debenture his life, do him up like a human junk bond.) Technically, of course, he hadn’t a leg to stand on. It would all come down to mercy of the court, technically. All his bragging notwithstanding (the buried bodies in the city’s closets), his news was old news. Like John F. Kennedy gossip, Martin Luther King. Or guys in history—Ben Franklin, Abner Doubleday—whose claims of discovery were unproven, a matter of folklore their only standing. Druff’s claims had
no
standing. He knew it. Did his old nemesis, the mayor, know as much? Or was it all, as he now suspected, just some almost good-natured deference they allowed him, the lip service convention paid to myth?

And just who, as far as that’s concerned, was Marvin Macklin anyway?

Trusting to luck—ha, ha ha—Druff figured it would all fall into place once he got there.

He paid and tipped the driver. Who, along with almost everyone else among Druff’s encounters that day, didn’t know him from Adam. As he in turn, even as they rode up the driveway, passing the automobiles parked there (eclectic—a limousine, expensive German and Italian jobs, some mid-list G.M.’s, a Ford Tempo or two, a Chevy Nova), and he left the taxi and went up to knock on the large double doors of the imposing brick house (quite, he thought, like Rose Helen’s old sorority), didn’t recognize it, knew only that he’d never been there before.

The taxi had left. It was too late to withdraw.

A butler came to the door. A butler.

“Macklin’s?” Druff hesitantly asked.

“The family is in the drawing room, sir,” the butler said. (A mourner’s black arm band attached to the sleeve of the butler’s uniform surprised Druff, lending to the occasion a quality of a kind of official corporate woe, rather like the players on a professional football or baseball team donning some black badge of collective tribute for a dead colleague.) The man stepped deftly aside for him, almost as if it were a tight squeeze and he were permitting Druff right-of-way in the narrow passageway of a Pullman car.

“That way?” Druff said.

“Yes, sir. Go right on in.”

He started in the direction of the drawing room. Well, Druff thought, it wasn’t a wake. There wouldn’t be clog dancers. All he heard through the room’s cracked doors was indistinct voices, vague figures moving dimly about all he saw. Where was he? How did he know that name?

He recognized it, recalled he’d fixed the fellow’s given name to the surname Dick had spoken when he’d mentioned the death. Everything else was a blank. It really
was
time Druff offered his resignation. Where was he? Who was Marvin Macklin? Some big contributor? Some old opponent? Or just one of those famous buried bodies Druff’s kind so liked to brag about? Well, sure, thought Druff,
now!

And caught himself grinning and paused to adjust his demeanor. Well, he thought, you haven’t
quite
lost it, have you, old-timer? You’re still savvy enough to recall you don’t march to the muffled drums with a shit-eating grin all over your face. And had this sudden, bleak take on himself—his worn, now scruffy suit, rumpled from a day in the weather, creased from sitting prim on toilet seats in rabbis’ studies, squeezing into tight restaurant booths, from lying in it across a sofa along a lady’s lap, strewing its component parts down in passionate abandon, stretching its coat out to cover himself and tucking its sleeves under his body to create some snug illusion.
From getting in and out of it so often!
And his cuffs, his poor shot shirt cuffs grubby with grime, the streets’,
his
streets’ contributory grease and air. Though on the other hand, he thought, he would almost certainly look more the mourner than any of them. Sure. He was dressed for it, struck just exactly the correct note of stale, unshaven grief, and probably gave off—his unfed breath—some quality of aged, fermenting fruit.

This bleak but fitting take, he thought, and decided not to bother to pat himself down or buff his uppers against the cloth of his trouser legs. Fixing only his expression, neutering it, balancing upon it a kind of shy politeness, he carefully presented himself to the drawing room.

Aiming himself, as best he could determine, straight for the doyenne here, the widow Macklin herself. (Still enough of the politician to do that much at least, following some spoor of bereavement, of hysteria, to pick from a crowded room the one dressed in the most suitable black, the one with the twisted handkerchief, the one—by God, he was still at least a
little
good!—with the palest cheeks, whose makeup had sustained the heaviest losses, whose face powder had been practically rubbed off by hugs and the cheek-to-cheeks as effectively as if soap and water had been applied to them.) Trusting in his on-again, off-again MacGuffin not to trip him up, let him down, not to cheapen things by turning him over to farce, play him for a fool, having him make up to some wracked sister, some distant, dithered cousin. Consoling the maid.

He picked his woman, found his man.

“Paula,” he told her boldly (recalling this detail from the little death squib in the paper), “Bob Druff. I’m
so
sorry. What can I say at a time like this?”

“I know,” she said, reflexively touching the handkerchief to her nose. “Thank you for coming, Mr. Druff. Marvin would have appreciated it.”

“I apologize for not being at the funeral,” he said. “I only just found out.”

“Yes,” she said, “thank you. It was a shock to us all.”

“At least his suffering is over.”

“Do you think so?”

“Well,” Druff said, and broke off mindlessly. He smiled ambiguously, nodded politely from his thin store of boyish reserve, and withdrew. Retreated, he wondered? Routed, he thought. Backing off from the woman who seemed to gaze down at him from the high ground of her power in the room, he made his way to the bar where he poured a drink for his empty stomach, then pulled himself to a neutral corner, the far, unoccupied end of a genuinely immense sofa on which, Druff observed only after he’d joined him, his mayor was already seated. The very man he’d been thinking about it couldn’t have been fifteen minutes ago.
Don’t tell
me
there’s no God!
Druff thought.
Or at least that my life ain’t haunted!
Before he was able even to acknowledge him, however, he heard his name being summoned, pronounced in just precisely that curious tone (only reversed) of vocal conjure he himself had employed with Dick when he’d mused aloud, “Macklin, Macklin… Marvin Macklin?”

“Druff, Druff. Commissioner Druff?”

It was the widow addressing him. At full room temperature.

“Why yes,” said the City Commissioner of Streets.

“Isn’t there some scandal?”

“No,” he said, “I don’t think so.”

“I thought there was a scandal.”

“No,” Druff said. “But I know where the body is buried. Oh,” he told Macklin’s widow, “sorry.”

“No problem,” she said, and Druff wondered if that famous hankie he’d looked for and which she’d touched to her nose wasn’t perhaps used just to blot a cold or tap the itch of an allergy.

Druff thought he recognized a tentative, amused but sycophantic wheeze or snort.

“Is that Doug?” he said.

“Yes, sir, Commissioner. Top that off for you, sir?” And there he was suddenly, practically up in the commissioner’s face, extending the very same bottle of rye from which Druff had just serviced himself, dressed in the suit Druff had seen when he had called on Doug a few hours earlier. This was Druff’s thinking: Doug had made a day of it. He’d been at the funeral home, gone on to the cemetery, returned to his apartment to shower and prepare for an evening chez Macklin. Then this was: if Doug had been at the funeral home and gone on to the cemetery, why Dick must have, too. And, if he had, then perhaps he
hadn’t
been home when Druff called from the restaurant. Then, frightfully,
this:
the Charlotte person had been left behind. To be there in case the commissioner called. What terrified him now was that whatever it was it turned out they were trying to pin on him, so many were in on it. Not a ring, no conspiracy or compact, plot, scheme, plan, deal or design, but a cabal, out and out. And, indeed, this is exactly Druff’s feeling, that he’s stumbled into a cabala. Was it devil worship here? Some soiled, municipal arcana? Whatever, it was certainly widespread. Widespread and up-front.

“We see each other socially only at funerals, ceremonial evenings when the family has us in,” Doug explained quietly as he filled Druff’s glass. “You sure you don’t want any ice, Commissioner? No extra charge.” What he was saying seemed at absurd odds with the man’s take-charge moves, his expansive, liberal ways with their liquor, their ice. “I’m not saying folks don’t kick the bucket often enough for my tastes. That would be callous. It would be stupid and mean. But there ought to be a middle ground.”

“Death vigils?”

“There you go.”

There was a sound of a sort of muted, general amusement throughout the room. Druff hadn’t looked around yet, had still to take a census in the room, large almost as one of the public rooms on a cruise ship, but he’d a sense that when he did there’d be many here he already knew. Mr. Mayor, of course. Dick, perhaps. Dan, Ham, Jerry Rector. The doorman-cum-concierge, taking some well-deserved time off from his duties, might even be there. Maybe Mikey, maybe Margaret. Maybe the colored guy from the synagogue. His waitress. The pharmacist, perhaps. Edouvard Mrentzharev. The guy who’d given him a ride in the pickup. Neighbors, joggers he’d passed in the streets. (It could happen. If they were tailing him, why not?)

He recalled all the fat hints so freely given, the warm, warmer!
hot!
tips Ham and his pals had been so careful to pass him. (Which was what troubled him about this caper, that no one connected with it—it was almost his style with Meg Glorio—bothered to cover their ass.)

So he did, he looked around. He sought out familiar faces, but they were strangers. Only Doug. Only the mayor.

Maybe Mrs. Macklin was a mind reader.

“It’s been a long evening,” she said to Druff. “Yours must be the third wave.”