The MacGuffin (8 page)

Which
was
pretty much what he said when he finally managed to reach her at her office late in the day.

“Are you calling from your car?”

“No,” Druff said, “why?”

“Ship-to-shore?”

“Of course not.”

“Don’t tell me, you’re in a pay phone.”

“I’m in my office. I’m down at the Hall. Why?”

“Nothing,” Margaret Glorio said, “I was just wondering. You said you’d pursue me, I like to know what I’m up against. Are you connected? Some old-timer with consoles, a finger on the button of devices that lower other devices, projectors that shoot out from the walls, screens that come down from the ceiling—stuff with zoom capability, freeze-frame, special enhancement features that dim the background and highlight only what’s important like a Magic Marker, that can bring out the pores and go in so tight you can make a positive identification of a subject by his dental work? Tell me,” she said, “do you have a code name? Are you one of those guys who can pick up a telephone and have another of those guys killed?”

Was this flirting? Was she flirting with him? Gee, earlier he had come on and now maybe there was possible reciprocal flirting. It was up to Druff, Druff thought, to keep it going. “Fifty’s not out of my love range,” he blurted. “Fifty’s still in my ballpark.”

“What?”

“Ha ha,” Druff said, “that has to be special-ordered. Getting someone killed has to be special-ordered. How about a ‘No Parking’? How about a ‘Tow-Away Zone’?”

“ ‘Su’ad,’ ” Margaret Glorio said suddenly, “isn’t that a restaurant? Are you asking me to have dinner with you?”

“Yes! Sure am, yes!” committed hurriedly the City Commissioner of Streets. “What’s good for you? Sevenish, seven-thirtyίsh? Eightish? Your ish is my command,” joked the man, in the grip of his MacGuffin, who hated to appear ridiculous and despised absurdity. And agreed upon a restaurant and arranged about a time.

So you can just imagine how Druff felt when he finally got home that evening.

Well, it was a good thing he had no appointments that afternoon. That was on the plus side. (Because he’d have been no damn good to the city streets for the remainder of the day if he had.) Fortunate for the commissioner, too, was the fact that when Dick dropped him back at City Hall at around three, he left the car for Doug and asked if he could take the rest of the afternoon off (and wasn’t it interesting that even spies had lives of their own, that they weren’t merely these dedicated automatons interested only in their mission, but, like any civilian, were subject to the toothache or maybe even found they had to lie down for a nap once in a while?), his absence freeing Druff up to make the reservations, get down to the automatic teller—he counted out the money in his wallet, decided the fifty-or-so-dollars wouldn’t be enough if they drank wine or if Margaret was particularly hungry that evening (so far as he knew she’d skipped lunch—a pickle, a few french fries spread out on a napkin, and she was a good-sized girl) because, despite what he’d told her about paper trails, he intended to pay for the evening in cash, and to consider the rest of his plans. The business of the condom, for example.

The thing about safe sex. It was all over the papers, radio, TV. (Those people always had to have something to scare you with. They’d just come through a winter. All right, it had been a particularly bitter winter, lots of snow, plenty of ice—didn’t Druff have the almost archaeological evidence of his potholes; hadn’t he seen for himself that very day?—but the way the media carried on about windchill factors, hypothermia, frostbite, you’d think they lived at the North Pole. If you weren’t wearing gloves and the temperature outside was fifteen degrees and the windchill was minus twenty-two, in two minutes you would lose all the fingers on both hands. Hypothermia was even worse. Ninety-three percent of your body heat escaped through your head. If the temperature was seven degrees and the windchill was minus thirty-five, and you didn’t have a hat on, your skull could crack open in under five minutes and you could get gangrene in your brain. They were like the sworn political enemies of winter, these weather terrorists. Once, in Detroit on city business inspecting snow-removal equipment, Druff was without his hat and had become so worked up by the weather terrorists on local TV that by the time he was ready to go out to see the people with whom he was meeting, the balding Druff had gone into the bathroom in his hotel room and found the clear plastic shower cap the hotel left for its guests in a little wicker basket along with the soaps and shampoos, conditioners, shoehorns and sewing kits like a hamper for some odd picnic of grooming, and put it on his head. It was the windchill factor’s final factor. In four seconds you looked like an asshole.) So he wasn’t concerned for himself, or for Margaret, or even Rose Helen. He’d been faithful for years, the perfect husband. Hell, it’d been years since he’d even lusted after anyone in his mind, let alone his heart or other organs. (Well, that wasn’t entirely true. There’d been Su’ad—the woman, not the restaurant—that time she’d lectured them in front of the high- intensity lamp, and Su’ad again when Mikey had been preparing to boff her right there practically next to their bedroom. All right, so once with his eyes and once with his ears. Such lust patterns didn’t make him Jack the Ripper. No jury in the world.) And forget needles, he didn’t share
coca
leaves. If anything, his concern about the condom wasn’t a courtesy to any of them so much as a tribute to their times. Speaking for himself, he was clean as a whistle, and doubted—oh, he knew what they said all right, that it cut across class lines, but that was just more windchill factor if you asked him—that the tall, snappy-dressing, frequent-flying Margaret Glorio was any more an Apple Annie of the venereal than he was an Apple Andy. Besides, he didn’t expect they would even get to mess around. This wasn’t any just-in-case scenario he was running through here. (He hadn’t been a teenager for thirty-nine years.) And it wasn’t his credentials as a man-about-town (who’d come on with her, come on strong) he was protecting. He didn’t have to show the flag. (Indeed, he’d be tempted
not
to show it, even if she asked.) No. It was that windchill factor again, the terror anyone could be talked into, the promise he’d made himself in Detroit after only his third second under the shower cap—
that he’d never again voluntarily permit himself to look like an asshole!

And he didn’t. Not to Dick the spy, who, as luck and the gods of Farce would have it, had asked for the rest of the day off. Nor to Mrs. Norman, his secretary/receptionist (and if he was paranoid, tell him what was
that
all about then—the idea that someone could be assigned not one but two—count ’em, two—chauffeurs and security people, actual armed men with real bullets in real guns standing by in the outer office, and have stripped from him—all in the name of cutbacks and economies, of course, but tell
that
to the Marines—sufficient office help, the clerks and administrative assistants and gofers, just your ordinary roster of deserving civil service and spoils appointees like those symbolic elevator operators who still rode up with him in the building’s self-service automatic elevators just, so far as Druff could tell, for the company of the thing, the sociableness, so he wouldn’t have to pass his remarks about the weather or the ball scores to strangers or the empty walls, tell him,
what?).
Certainly not to Doug (not Druff’s second driver so much as Dick’s backup man), who, in Druff’s humble, would not have recognized an asshole if one were sitting on his face.

The man was talking with Mrs. Norman but snapped to a smart attention when Druff appeared.

“Oh, hi, Commissioner,” Doug said agreeably enough, but in odd opposition to the starched formality of his stance, “it’s nice to see you.”

“It’s nice to see you, Doug.”

“Thank you, Mr. Commissioner. How are you, sir?”

“Fine, thanks. Yourself?”

“Oh, it’s not my nature to complain, Commissioner Druff, but I’m all right.”

“That’s good, Doug. That’s good.”

“Are you going out, sir? I’ll bring the car straight around.”

“No, no,” Druff said, “it’s too nice a day. Don’t stir yourself, Doug. I’ll walk.”

“It’s
absolutely
no trouble.” He carefully studied his commissioner. “Of course, it
is
a fine day, and a brisk walk sets a man up. I understand that. I’d only want to make sure you’re not doing this to save
me
effort.”

“Doctor’s orders, Doug.”

“Oh?” said Doug, who, despite the clipped-sounding youthfulness of his name, Druff knew to be his own age, a fellow (clearly a cop, though he had vaguely about him the ingratiating air of a somewhat sinister doorman, an unindicted despoiler of male children, say, and an aura of one already vested but still building his pension, a man always on overtime, whose activities belied the sense one somehow had of him that there was money there somewhere) who seemed to know things about him he’d been at pains to learn. Druff liked him. Probably the man was only a passive-aggressive, a nurser of secret grudges, but Druff had the idea that the city was missing a bet here, that he’d have been a better operative for it than Dick (though he believed all Doug’s oleaginous loomings and hoverings would, in the end, come to nothing, that there’d be no September surprises from that quarter, the guy a classic case of mistaken identity, more a type, finally, than a man).

“I don’t mean
my
doctor’s orders. Your generic doctor’s generic orders. Me, I’m fine. My clothes don’t hang right is all,” Druff reassured.

And Doug, considering, measuring Druff, sizing him up, apparently bought it. “Have a good walk then, Mr. Commissioner,” Doug said in his cop-cum-doorman’s negligibly effacing and commanding way, putting Mrs. Norman on hold, putting, Druff suspected,
everything
on hold; so long as the commissioner still sauntered to the door, not permitting, as if it were in his power, even a phone to ring. Druff had the sense that he was being safely conducted across a street while traffic waited.

Not even to the pharmacist in the drugstore a good three blocks from City Hall from whom Druff bought the condoms. Or at least any
particular
asshole. Who you would think ought to know better. I mean, Druff meant, a fifty-eight-year-old guy with an ill-hanging suit on him and probably plenty more just like it home in the closet, who wasn’t even trying to appear casual, but simply, quite casually appears and bellies up to the counter requiring a packet of condoms? That was the word Druff used, “packet.” Meaning to imply by his carefully chosen diminutive just that. No in-for-a-penny-in-for-a-pound largesse here, only the smallest quantity that could possibly be purchased, as if whatever fling the fifty-eight-year-old type was contemplating was just that, too. A fling and, judging by the size of his order, possibly his last? Not even, mind you, as any high school boy would, specifying a brand? What, this
isn’t
an asshole? Just selling the so apparently hopeful last-flinging old-timer the generic packet of condoms he asked for, and maybe (because Druff would in his place if Druff were the pharmacist and the pharmacist the customer in the ill-hanging clothes) hoping that the condom would hang better on him than the clothes did. But then again, Druff knew, the man was a professional, and a professional—his license was right up there on the counter like a framed picture of the wife and kids—keeps his feelings to himself. So he could be wrong, Druff thought. Maybe he
did
look like an asshole.

But (if you didn’t count the druggist) only to himself. And not because of the couple of condoms safe in his suit pocket next to the coca leaves (the condoms he knew he would not have a chance to use once even, and then throw away, throwing them away first, before they were used,
or
seen, like the flag he knew he not only didn’t have to show but wouldn’t even if he’d had to;
hey,
he was a guy who covered the bases, even if, not quite respectably he
did
have a spy, even if, he not only had a spy but maybe a MacGuffin, too, and certainly plenty of humbug in his heart) but because of the FTD flowers already on their way to Margaret Glorio’s home address.

So you can imagine how he felt. You can just imagine.

On the one hand anticipate, rampant with a kind of self-regard. In a way, he was already half in love with Miss Glorio, not for her perceived qualities (which he didn’t know about yet anyway) so much as for those which the contemplation of a relationship induced and released, or induced and released again, in Druff. Why, love, even half- love, was heady, hearty stuff, like the drugged aromatics of chemical flowers or the recovered toxins of adolescence. Thinking of it that way, years wilted from him, he filled his suits. He felt a sort of strutting potency and would have liked to get another gander at himself in Brooks Brothers glass. Love, contemplated Druff, was good for the gander, and the commissioner, like some world-class cuckold, had a temporary respite from the ordinary anxieties of ego, self-consciousness, was even enough liberated from himself to permit himself to regard—it was a festival of regard—some things which might please Margaret. Would she go to the fights or enjoy a day at the track? Was she a good sport, he meant, some down-and-dirty lady, the kind who would appreciate the unraveled arcana of a dope sheet? Because he could go that way, teach her the Racing Form, coach her in the codes of a low art, the stats, weights and measures of a compromised metrics, then tell her to forget all she’d learned, and to learn something new—that all bets were sucker bets, that the ponies in this town were fixed, that it was as well to know who was into whom—better!—than all the histories of all the horses in the field. And wasn’t this thrilling information too, to have this lowdown, this insider’s window on the world? He was sure it was the same in Sportswear, he’d tell her, and that he would be just as surprised to have
his
assumptions challenged, all the old warrants. Wasn’t it, wasn’t it thrilling? And then he would take her with him to the paddock for some private discussions because, he’d confide, you didn’t dope the horses so much as bet on those already doped. He longed to bring her along, a girlfriend like the son he’d always wanted.