The MacGuffin (7 page)

“Blackmail?”

“No, of course not. Your innocence of it. I guess what’s slowing you down is your suspicion I’m not really a public man. Well, you have my card, but that could be counterfeit. There are dozens of ways to check me out. Find out who authorizes snow removals in your neighborhood. You drive a car in this city, next time you come to a detour look at the chap’s name on the bottom of the legend apologizing for the delay and thanking you for your patience.
I
know. Are you on the tax rolls? The city sends out a calendar with the names of its officials and little photographic insets of what we look like.

“Listen, Margaret, I know you’re anxious to get back to work, I don’t want to hold you up. Check me out. If I’m who I say I am, you’ll know it’s all right for us to get it on. Once we start sneaking around together I’ll be buying you gifts, we’ll be checking into motels. I’ll be laying down a paper trail Hansel and Gretel could follow out of the woods in the dark better than crumbs. Oh, way better. (Birds peck up crumbs quick as snap.) Don’t you see? I
love
public life. You’d have me over a barrel. You’d
have
my old ass.”

“Why are you standing here saying these things to me?”

“I’ve reason to believe,” Druff said reasonably, “that my limousine is wired, that my car phone is tapped.”

“They keep a record of your calls to Time and Temperature?”

“They stoop at nothing.” She laughed, Druff taking her hilarity as the first good sign for his suit’s success since his confirmed presentiment about her age. Then and there he would have pressed her to make an assignation with him but she continued laughing. “What,” Druff said, “what?”

“Nothing,” she managed. “I was just wondering, what are they going to make of your telling some guy with a car phone in Massachusetts or Texas that he sounds like he’s just next door?”

“That was a heart’s confidence, Margaret,” he said, pretending offense. “I was letting you in on something,” he said stiffly, stooping at nothing in his own right and, then, drawing himself up, asked again if she would be his mistress.

“No.”

“To me you’re beautiful, Margaret, well above the usual normal, but face it, you’re a woman of a certain age. All right, it’s no secret. I’m not exactly your customary foot-sweeper, but you think I don’t have needs? If not, tell me, what do you think dirty old men are for?”

“Please,” she said, not smiling anymore, though forced to maintain a sort of ceremonial cheerfulness by the proximity of the various men and women, colleagues, supposed Druff, coming in and out of her building, an early cast-iron skyscraper in what was left of the city’s garment district, with huge windows and even more fretwork ornamenting it than the iron script that ran along the sides of City Hall like a kind of reductive Arabic.

“Tell me, yes or no, will you be my mistress?”

“No.”

“I mean to pursue you then, Miss Glorio. You haven’t heard the last of Bobbo Druff.”

“I’ll report you,” she warned as Druff turned and walked away from her. “I’ll turn you in.”

“Hah!” Druff barked without looking back. “You haven’t got the goods on me yet.”

This is what he thought about while he went up to the limo and climbed in: that he’d come on. That he’d come on strong. Like a fool, but strong. That however ineffective he may have been, he
had
come on. That was the thing. He discounted his foolishness, his ineffectuality, his age and marital status, his awry, skewed dress, as, earlier, he’d discounted his fragility. He had come on. His cards on the table. On the table? All
over
the place. It was the
strength
of his appeal that mattered, that gave at least a little of the lie to what he’d felt in the changing room at Brooks Brothers, before his devastated reflection in their three-way mirrors, within hearing of other people’s kibitzing, other men’s flatterers. And how about that quickstep when he hopped out of the car, when he scooted after Margaret in double time—
double time
—drawing off energy from those threatened old alacrity reserves? He meant it when he said what he’d said about the paper trail, about buying back a little relented life at the expense of scandal. Do all men feel as innocent as me, he wondered, when they’ve had it with their honor? Do they strain so against the laws of their MacGuffins? And I wonder, he wondered, if it’s love, time or only the threat of death that’s got me hopping?

And now, back in the limousine (which
was
ridiculous—and why hadn’t he acknowledged
that
one when she was drawing up her bill of particulars against him and he was conceding to her accusations right and left; what would it have cost him?—and not only ridiculous but an environment whose charms he’d tired of long ago, charms that had, quite simply, worn off, worn out: the mystery of the controls, the appeal of the electric toggles for the windows and door locks, of the sunroof, the lights and air-conditioning and heat; the novelty jump seats he couldn’t remember anyone ever having sat in, the recessed armrests and all the straps and sequestered little lamps, all the hidden niches where the ashtrays went, the substantial, cumulative candlepower of the concealed cigar lighters, the tucked-away speakers for the radio, the secret drop-down desktop, and all the rest of the wet-bar, cable-TV-ready built-ins, the whole thing bristling with as much expendable latency as a hotel room or a compartment on a train), Druff contemplated old Dick suspiciously, trying, as neutrally as he could, to stare the man down in the same rearview mirror in which his driver had bullied
him
earlier, spying and smiling down on the cute couple they made, in his old-timey all-the-world-loves-a-lover mode.

“Women,” Dick offered as if the word were the concluding point in some telling, elegant argument.

Druff determined to stay the course, decided to stare him down by drawing him out.

“Women?” Druff repeated as if he were unfamiliar with the term, as though Dick had called out the name of some strange creature spotted in the road, the commissioner actually turning his head for a moment.

“Sure,” said
his
man to
his
man. “They’ll say anything. Even when there ain’t anything in it for them, even when they don’t stand to gain. ‘I’m forty-four,’ she says.”

“She
is
forty-four.”

“Yeah?” said the chauffeur. “Mikey said she’s fifty.”

“Mikey said?”

“Well, wasn’t she a friend of that Arab who died? I thought I recognized her. Ain’t that why we gave her the lift?”

Who’s drawing out whom here, wondered the City Commissioner of Streets, and found the switch on the control panel which sent the glass partition window up. “Here I go again,” his driver had just time enough to say before he was shut away, “off to Coventry.”

It was a cheerful enough remark but Druff could have slapped the side of his own head with the heel of his own hand, mentally cuffing himself in abrupt, classic realization, stagy awareness. (Actually seeing himself do it, the self-deprecating code gesture, the slammed clarity of his damning
Dummkopf!
theatrics, and even time to wonder why it was that for all their direct, stripped meaning, efficient, he supposed, as cursing, one rarely observed—and never executed—such things in real life. All one’s performances—he was a pol, close to government, privy to the high dramatics—blackmail, bribery, kickbacks and fraud, of course, but the hard-core rough stuff, too; the fires, he meant, the betrayals and anguish for which government, which made the laws and set the rules, had all the hottest tickets and best seats—all that devastating hard stuff, the gossip, rattling bones and smoking guns they did for each other, and which, he’d come to see, was a kind of professional courtesy, a sort of common currency, their mutual, collective corruption not only leveling the playing field but, by piquing each other’s interest, actually mining it—held in refined check not because one was naturally refined but because it just never really occurred to a fellow that these gestures were available to anyone but actors. So, at least till now, he’d never rubbed his chin to draw forth his thoughts, never torn at his hair or thrown up his hands in despair, couldn’t recall when he’d last touched thumb and forefinger to the inside corners of his eyes to ease fatigue. Nor had he ever sighed or touched the back of his hand to his forehead and brought on a swoon. He’d never swooned.) It was too powerful a vocabulary to have been deprived of. Now, possessed by his MacGuffins, and handed things to think about, he was aware of himself performing several of these gestures at once, caught out in some frenzy of squirming and thrashing, and actually administering those hard, initial, thumping salutes to the delayed consciousness that slept in both temples, pummeling them, right temple, left temple, as though he had water in his ears. (While meanwhile, back inside the transparent overlays of his parallel parentheses, he was suddenly appreciative of what he hadn’t appreciated before—that it was no mere showy false modesty which brought on these blows, that the Sherlocks who usually took them must usually have meant them, that it all
had
been plain as the nose, that if it’d been a snake on their face, it
would
have bit them!)

That window was
closed.
Druff had deliberately shut it himself when they’d entered the car. (Wasn’t that just what he’d been referencing moments before when he’d referred to the “mystery of the controls”—the queer, international graphics for limousines he’d never quite mastered? Sure, he remembered fumbling for the switch, recalled that it didn’t go up at first, moving it so it did only on a second or third try.) So it was closed all during their—well, his—sexual banter on the ride out to her office. What did he
mean, “ ‘
I’m forty-four,’ she says“? They’d been speaking softly in the rear of the big, ridiculous car. How had Dick heard her? Unless what he’d told her outside her office building was actually so, that the limo was wired, that partition or no partition their voices came across to the dirty little spy fuck like people’s on a radio call-in show. It must be so. The bug just some additional municipal mod con add-on he hadn’t known about. (
“Glasnost glasnost glasnost,”
mumbled President Druff in a language du jour.) Which meant, Druff, groaning—gestures of humiliation here: thrashing, squirming—knew, Dick had probably heard it all, everything, his plaintive pleas and come-on, his absurd claims about his low awe threshold, even his solemn invitation to be blackmailed by her, though he was sure that that proposition at least had been delivered out on the street, beyond the range of his city’s—his party’s?—high-tech doodads. What the hell? It all was it all. His ass was in the wrong hands. Dick and the operatives had it.

“Something wrong, Commissioner?” Dick had lowered the glass partition a couple of ticks.

“What?”

“I see you wriggling around back there is all. Anything wrong?”

“Just easing my piles.”

“I didn’t know you had piles, Commissioner Druff.”

“Yeah, well, there’s a lot about me you don’t know.” Sure there is, he thought. My best color, my favorite song.

In the mirror the son of a bitch was smiling. Was he smiling?

And, troubled, considered going for the coca leaves. What would that make it, three times today? Four? In for a penny, in for a pound, he thought, and then and there would have stuck in his thumb and pulled out the plums but Dick was watching him narrowly in the mirror. He folded his hands in his lap and sat up straight. What a good boy am I, he pleased, then wondered abruptly, What’s wrong with this picture? And was reminded that the glob of spit was gone, vanished from the floor of the limo as if it had not been. Unless the lady had spiked it on the heel of her shoe and taken it with her, Dick—he was a plainclothes policeman after all—had probably tweezered it up and stuck it into one of those clear little evidence baggies cops always seemed to carry around with them. He could have done it when Druff was off in the restaurant with Glorio the enchantress. Hell, he could’ve done it when he dropped Druff at City Hall that morning. Most likely Druff’s saliva was off even now being tested for steroids, HIV shit and coca leaves in some special, same-day-service spit lab. Can they do that? Don’t they have to tell you first, wondered the man from UNCLE.

Then this in his head, who was on a roll: “Mikey said…” (And just who was and who wasn’t going by the book now? Was Dick moonlighting, was he hiring himself out? Because Druff was damned if he could recall the boy ever saying, “Big date tonight, Pop” and asking for the keys to the limo.
He
didn’t even have keys to the limo, had never actually driven the damn thing.) And was really steamed now, not with his son, or even Dick, so much as with Margaret Glorio. What was she, toying with him, playing him for a fool? Listen, she was a grown woman, he was pretty much a non-chauvinistic, macho-neutral, fairly progressive sort of fellow—what, he wasn’t? someone with
his
Inderal levels?—and understood she was perfectly within her rights to spurn him, even to scorn him. That was one thing. It was another entirely to mess with the signs or crap on the karma. She must have seen how he’d lit up when she’d said she was forty-four. Surely she had. And fifty—if that’s what she was—wasn’t out of his love range. It was what he said Or thought anyway—that if he had somehow managed to get hers right—whose judgment in that area normally extended only to whether or not people were old enough to vote—it would be a major auspice, magic’s happy green go-ahead. (He didn’t mean to seem ridiculous, he
didn’t.
He
despised
absurdity, the absurd. He wouldn’t split hairs, but this was a MacGuffìn thing now, out of his hands.) Steamed. Outraged, in fact. So much so he was tempted to pick up the car phone and call her. Just let her have it. Right there in the limo, Dick’s bugs and satellite dishes notwithstanding, or even his snoop’s eyes working Druff’s moving room in the rearview mirror. And might have. (Anyhow, what goods could they have had on him? He’d never been a
chazzer.
He honored sealed bids, and if he did a favor now and then it was rarely for cash. Oh, when he was a councilman, a few bucks here and there for the war chest maybe, but he was cleaner than most on that score. Your average traffic cop did better business.) So if he managed—
just
managed—to stay off the airwaves it had to be the humiliation factors at work, merely your normal, good old old-fashioned pants-down, open- fly apprehensions. But it was a struggle. How he longed to ring her up. “Look,” he’d say, “are you forty-four years old or what? Don’t lie to me, I could run a credit check on you like that. I’m a public official. I could punch up your Social Security file, your IRS one. Forget confidentiality. I have my own personal sunshine laws. I could bring the FBI in on this, the driver’s license people. Does the name Su’ad mean anything to you?”