The MacGuffin (18 page)

So, as you can see, he was already angry.

“I,” Druff gently reminded Dick when he’d closed the limousine door after himself, “am a public servant. You are a public servant’s servant. No, don’t start just yet. I’ll tell you when.

“Dum dum de dum dum, dum dum?”
the commissioner asked. “I don’t think I quite care for your way with the taxpayers’ horn, Dicky,” he said. (Caring, despite what he’d just said, for it quite a lot, as a matter of fact.) “We aren’t hunters, kid. You didn’t pop by the trailer court to fetch some chum for a ride out to the duck blind. Dum dum de dum dum, dum dum? It’s three-thirty in the morning. You don’t wake neighbors. We ain’t fellows in the same car pool years. Dum dum de dum dum me no dum dum de dum dums, Dum-Dum,” he said so softly he knew Dick had to strain to hear him. And leaned forward and quite casually knocked his chauffeur’s arm from where it still rested along the ledge of the partition.

“Hey,” the man said. “Hey, what the…”

Druff moved the toggle switch that raised the window. “I don’t care to hear it,” he said through the intercom.

“You ready
now?”
the spy asked past what Druff—wondering Is he armed, is he armed? Is he licensed to kill me?—supposed were clenched teeth.

“Check the pressure in the tires,” Druff said.

“What?”

“There’s a pressure gauge in the glove compartment. Check the pressure in the tires.”

“What’s this shit?”

“Do it,” Druff said.

“The hell I’ll do it.”

“Then get out, I’ll drive myself.”

“No way,” spoke up his MacGuffin. “No way. This baby is signed out in the motor pool to
me.
Only me and Doug are authorized to check it out, and I’m the party that’s going to drive it.” Druff was already standing at the driver’s side. He’d opened Dick’s door. “No way,” Dick said, “no goddamn way. I ain’t turning over any fifty-five thousand dollars’ worth of equipment that I’m signed out on and responsible for to some guy who’s high because he just got his ashes hauled. No way!”

“Get out,” Druff said.

“You got a chauffeur’s license? You happen to be packing one of those?
You may be a big-time City Commissioner of Streets, but I’m the cop in this deal and, honest to Christ, you make a move to drive off in this limo without a chauffeur’s license in your wallet and I’ll arrest you.”

But Druff, reaching into the limousine, already had the car phone in his hands, was already through to the sheriff’s office, was already on the line to the dispatcher, when the chauffeur pressed the “disengage” button and broke the connection. “What did you go and do
that
for?” Dick said. “What’s the matter with you? Do you
like
a showdown?” He sounded disappointed. “What’s to be gained? Nobody wins. All that can happen is that somebody’s feelings are going to get hurt and there’s blood on the other fellow’s hands. That’s no way. Ain’t you been a politician long enough to know that much at least? I’ll tell you something, Commissioner. You never asked and I never said, but all those times you ran for an office, I voted for you. I was in your corner. Maybe you didn’t know it but that’s true. I did and I was. Because I thought you were onto something. I really did. Hell,” he said, “you want to drive, drive.” He slid away from the wheel.

Druff made no move to take his place and the chauffeur looked at him expectantly.

“Check the pressure in the tires,” Druff said.

“Oh boy,” said the spy, “you’re really something. I thought we had a moment there, but you’re something. Yeah,” he said, “sure, I’ll check it.” He opened the glove compartment and to Druff’s surprise actually found a pressure gauge there. (Well, Druff thought, it was the MacGuffin. On overtime. Moving his fingers on telephones, riding his tongue, getting him laid, fighting his battles and, now, mining the rich, inexplicable ores of serendipity and golden, incalculable, long-shot, break- the-bank chance. Despite the fact that not half an hour earlier he’d wished it called off, at least suspended, so that he, together with Margaret of all the Boulevards, might make something out of what was left of his life. But it was the old story, wasn’t it? Once out of the bottle you couldn’t turn the genie off, call back a wish, rescind a fate or have ever again the boring old status quo ante. It was magic time, not Kansas anymore, and he had better learn to live with it.)

“They’re fine,” Dick said flatly. “Even the spare. Those guys in the garage,” he said. “We get the credit but they keep us flying. You want to go home now?”

In the back the City Commissioner of Streets made assent with his head and the chauffeur guided the long black limousine out into the traffic.

He can talk to me like this, mused the commissioner, because he’s civil service. But he’s right, Druff thought, push should never be allowed to come to shove. And marveled at how infrequently it did. How civil the civil service, he contemplated. How difficult it is to fire anyone in it. And, oh, the genius of men’s imaginings, and was astonished at the world’s astute behaviors, the sweet models of its arrangements and gracious systems. We take care of our own, they seemed to say. And meant it. They did. Everywhere a dependent, low-born incompetence, the slow, the dull, the stolid, the vicious, the crass. The foolish and crazy. The soft, flawed and fallible serving the fuddled. The cunning timeserver side by side with the simple drudge, sharing the planet with the sane and sober, with the dedicated, with the seers and masters. We take care of our own. Come one, come all! was life’s stirring cry. And offered its generous tit to any mouth that would have it. Sure, Druff thought, that’s why he can lip off to me like this. I can’t fire his rascal ass and the cocksucker knows it. He knows how many forms I’d have to fill out. He knows all the supporting letters I’d need to get together for his file. He knows all the hearings and committee meetings I’d be calling down on my head!

And just then felt the presence of his own body, a kind of electric thrill. He felt palpitations. His knees went weak and he was momentarily light-headed. Gee, he thought, and I
won
that round, and wondered how his driver must be feeling. Perhaps it was the lateness of the hour, but suddenly Druff felt a sort of tenderness toward his old friend, the constituent in his corner from way back when. Dick the Spy was disappointed in him, stunned. Obviously he hadn’t known it wasn’t only Druff he was up against, but Druff’s MacGuffin too, the jujitsu leverages theatrics gave a fellow. He never had a chance, the commissioner gloated, then suddenly remembered the case of nerves he’d experienced, was still, to judge from the dryness of his mouth and the trembling hands folded in his lap, experiencing. If the chauffeur should come at him now it was Druff who wouldn’t stand a chance. The MacGuffin was gone. He was forsaken, abandoned. If he could only get some rest it might return. (Having a MacGuffin took it out of you. It certainly wasn’t for the fainthearted, and Druff realized it was a good thing Dick had backed down about the tire pressure thing. Because if he hadn’t it would probably be the City Commissioner who’d be driving now, and he knew this was exactly the wrong time for him to be operating heavy machinery.) My God, he thought, returned from his parenthesis and in the world again and, picking up on an idea he’d had in this same limousine that very morning—well yesterday, actually, but since he’d last been home—not only am I going stupid, I’m getting crazy!

He wondered if he shouldn’t attempt some rapprochement with the driver, at least lower the window which separated them. Then thought no, it was a bad idea, a sign of weakness, the worst thing he could do. Let Druff sit in aloof luxury, distant, behind bulletproof glass, pulled along his streets like a Caesar in a Triumph. Meanwhile, meanwhile, the dirty son of a bitch could plot to his traitorous, mingy little heart’s content. It would keep him occupied.

So, feigning indifference, Druff sat back, inappetent, a commissioner most high, vaguely colonial, almost military, a visiting fireman, a “Guv,” any touring, pidgin-English’d muckamuck and grand panjandrum, in fact, who ever showed the flag or put a dinner jacket on in the jungle. Reviewing his Streets and—What’s this? What’s this? What’s wrong with this picture?

Amazed. Flabbergast. Astonished.

Maybe they’d gone five blocks. It was almost four o’clock in the morning. It could have been rush hour. Well, not rush hour but the nervous edge of it, rush hour’s fuzzy, fish-nor-fowl atemporal margins. The traffic of people who want to beat the traffic. And drove with the same jumpy, tailgating, lane-changing abandon. These people might have been refugees, the first to hear news of a disaster on the Emergency Broadcast Band. Were enemy planes on their way to drop the Big One? Had there been an “event” at the nuclear power station? Was it meltdown? Had a freight car been derailed, was it bleeding toxic waste? Druff, attempting to switch the radio on, fumbled with some controls. He touched the eject button on the tape deck. He pressed “open” and the drawer on the compact disc player slid out. Perhaps the driver controlled the radio. Druff lowered the window between them. “Quick,” he said, “turn on the radio.” Music from an easy-listening station filled the car. “No,” Druff said, “change the station. See if there’s news.”

“News on the hour,” the chauffeur said.

“Just
see.”

It was all music on FM. On AM it was mostly music with an occasional talk or call-in show.

“What’s happening?” Druff asked. “Where’s all this traffic coming from?”

“Which traffic?”

“What do you mean ‘what traffic?’
This
traffic! Just look at these streets. If it isn’t bumper-to-bumper yet, it’s damn near. I’ve never seen it like this.”

Dick said nothing.

“I wonder where the traffic came from,” the commissioner muttered and almost pressed his face against the window. It was as if he were in some principal city he’d heard about but never seen. It was as if he were taking in the sights. He stared in wonder at lines of automobiles stopped at cross streets waiting for the lights to change, at individual cars jimmying their way into the flow, from curbs, from alleys and parking garages. On either side of him he could see drivers and passengers in other vehicles glance his way as they pulled alongside him and tried to make out who was riding in the important-looking limo. He stared back as curiously. It was the middle of the goddamn night. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “What’s going on?”

“It’s a service economy,” Dick snapped waspishly. “In case you haven’t heard.”

“It’s the middle of the night,” he told the man. “In case you haven’t noticed.”

“Oh, I noticed,” Dick said. “I noticed, all right. I notice lots of things.”

“I notice,” Druff said coolly, restoring a proper pH balance to their relationship, but then, unwilling to take him on in his condition, added, “I still don’t understand about the traffic.”

“Well, it’s the nurses,” said the spy.

“The nurses.”

“Changing shifts. The nurses changing shifts.”

Druff, no stranger to hospitals—his several pneumothoraxes, his heart bypass surgery—said, “They come on at seven in the morning, at three in the afternoon. They come on at eleven at night.”

“That’s all changed,” his driver said companionably. “They come on at three in the morning, and again at eleven. They come on at seven at night. It’s experimental. It plays hell with their menses unless they have the middle shift, the eleven-to-seven one, but the thinking today is that PMS gives them an edge. It’s supposed to be good for the patients.”

“Is this true?”

“It would be easy enough to check out, wouldn’t it?” Dick said smugly.

“Don’t you worry,” the commissioner said, “I’m
going
to check it out.”

“Do that,” Dick said.

“They can’t all be nurses.”

“Of course they aren’t all nurses. They’re bakers. Haven’t you noticed the rolls and bread taste better recently? Sweeter? Fresher? It used to be the bakers came in at two, two-thirty to heat up their ovens, roll out their doughs. Now they go in an hour later, more. It’s cutthroat but it’s the consumer who benefits. The deliverymen couldn’t care less. They get to sleep an extra hour, so the Teamsters got no kick coming either.”

He
had
noticed. The bread
did
taste better.

“It’s nurses and bakers,” Druff said.

“It’s nurses and bakers. It’s guys who roll up your morning paper and stick them in those little plastic wrappers.
There’s
an industry that’s tripled in the last few years.”

“Tripled.”

“Sure,” Dick said.
“The New York Times
gets delivered nationwide.
The Wall Street Journal, USA Today.
At
least
tripled. And what about the guys who have to drive their trucks to the airport to pick up those papers when they come in on the flights? And what about the guys who service those trucks? Or the men and women who print up the wrappers or carry them to the distributors?

“It’s kids riding home from delivering pizzas, managers of fast food joints from closing up. Sure,” he said, “these days it’s a service-oriented economy. It’s poor saps on night shifts and minimum wage.”

The City Commissioner of Streets looked away from the traffic and into the sky for a fireball. It was easier to believe in a sneak attack and a mushroom-shaped cloud than in much of this stuff. It was what he’d only recently been telling someone in a dream, that the world was getting away from him, that all its new amenities were overbearing somehow, and seemed, here, at ground level, under the colored, blinking warning lights on the tops of all those tall buildings, beneath the tangled flight paths of all those planes, guiding them, passing them on, like a kind of crowd control.

Druff thought he could see Dick’s eyes watching him in the rearview mirror. He seemed to be waiting for some sort of response. “Well,” he said, “it just seemed to me there was a lot of traffic for this time of night.”

“Sure,” Dick said acidly, “it’s chauffeurs driving their playboy bosses home from a night on the town.” Using the control in the front of the car, he drove the window back up between them.

Druff, in traffic, a bit fearful, isolated in the false, municipally dispensated coze of his glass and leather booth, confused, puzzled by the bad cop/good cop/bad cop avatars of this bad cop and less-than-civil servant, invoking the MacGuffin with fervid, almost hot Hail-Mary hope, thrown by the loyalties, the suspect, undermined, indeterminate allegiances in the general air and who’d, within the hour, arisen from the bed of a buyer to whom, for nothing, he’d given secrets and promised streets and so whose own allegiances were compromised and perhaps, if the MacGuffin in question was an avenging MacGuffin, should maybe have been a touch more chary about just whom he wanted there in the back seat with him, if only because of the old Let-him-who-is-without-sin proprieties and, if he needed other reasons, because, too, he understood about two-edged swords and the hedged consequences of magic, knowing if for no other reason than that he was a fifty-eight-year-old man already disappeared into his tailoring, six-sevenths, at the
outside
six- sevenths, but, in a guy with his history of blebs and leg stenotics and the long, jammed zippers of his arteries, more likely nine-tenths, more likely ten-elevenths, most likely fifty-eight–sixtieths or even fifty-eight–fifty-ninths gone, that it was easier to spring a rabbit from a hat than to stuff one back in again, but invoking it (Him, Her, the Muse of his plot line) anyway, like some jeopardized Samson shoving the stone furniture around. Because he hadn’t slept, see. Because he hadn’t slept even if within the hour he’d arisen from the Glorio bed and perhaps even scarfed a wee nosh of a nap in an armchair in the Glorio lobby. Because he hadn’t slept and looked like hell and felt like shit and was vulnerable as a chicken to the fox in the front seat. “Cary Grant,” he silently prayed, “thou shouldst be living at this hour!”