“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!”
And shut his eyes.
When he opened them again he felt, though they’d gone only another two dozen blocks, refreshed. Traffic had considerably thinned, but they were stopped four or five cars back at a signal waiting on a green left-turn arrow.
He lowered Dick’s window.
“Well,” the man said, “what is it this time?”
“I was just thinking,” Druff said, “I have more conversation with you than I do with my wife. We do more bickering, too.”
“You should take that up with your wife.”
“What is it,” Druff said, “how do I explain your nerve? It can’t just be tenure or the peaceable kingdom standoff between public servants, the lion/lamb sleeping arrangements we lay on each other, our mutual in-it-together durance. Sooner or later something stirs the straw. A smell, a sound, a movement, a look.”
“You’re really something, Commissioner. Think you can put me off with your one-on-one, you sweet-talker, you? Is a sound made in the forest if the Lincoln-Douglas takes place and there’s no one to hear? Maybe we never even had this conversation. I mean, why’d you call me? You got two drivers. Why’d you pick me to wake in the middle of the night? You don’t even trust me.”
“The only thing I don’t understand,” said City Commissioner of Streets Druff, “is why anyone would go to such lengths. To put a twenty-four-hour tail on me, we never close. There are jobs in this town that make mine look pathetic. And I’m not so bad. Really,” he said, “I’m not so bad at all. I’m not greedy. I don’t solicit. I never hold my hand out. My policy—I hope you’re getting all this, Dick—has always been you call me up we make an appointment. We meet for drinks, we ask about each other’s kids, we look at one another’s snaps. My God, Dick, sometimes we get so caught up we never even get to the point. That’s happened. That’s happened plenty of times. More than you’d think. Because we’re each too embarrassed, if you take my meaning. Because a fellow thinks his innards are a hideous thing, his secret manners, what he does with his fluids. Jesus, Dick, we come on like we were career diplomats, secretaries of state. All of us, all of us do. Like we had silver hair and cards with our names embossed. Like we shower three times a day and speak only after we’ve tippy-tapped the crystal with our butter knives and have the attention of the table. And even then only to make gracious speeches, to thank our guests for coming and eating up our food. Folks are so shy, Dick. That’s why there’s actually less evil in the world than more.
“And none of us really thinks well of himself. Though we talk a
good game and may try to drive our flimsiness off with our self-importance.
“Jesus, is that light stuck, or what? I have a theory that that Su’ad kid might have been killed because something was wrong with the traffic signal. That it wouldn’t turn red on the driver or something, and finally she got impatient, didn’t notice the car—maybe he didn’t have his lights on, maybe one was out, maybe he was just less than that mile from home where they say most automobile accidents take place—and she stepped off the curb without ever seeing it. That’s all that would have had to happen. From then on it’s all bingo bango, that’s all she wrote, good night nurse. Just look at that one up there if you want an example. Honk the horn, see can we get a little action here. Just listen to me, will you. So impatient, and I’m City Commissioner of Streets, for goodness sake.”
“Then why don’t you behave like one?”
Rather than sounding rude, the question, at least its tone, had seemed conciliatory, or as if Dick was waiting for an explanation, anything he could mark down as a mitigating or exculpatory circumstance. Well, the commissioner thought, that seemed fair. He would try to meet them—tired as he was, he was under no illusion any longer, if he ever was, that Dick was working on his own; there had to be at least two of them, at least two, since Dick himself had said that Druff could just as well have called Doug—halfway.
“Would you really have me behave like one?” he asked in what, playing to Dicky’s gallery, he hoped was a sort of wounded wonderment. “I mean would you? I mean, look at me. I mean, even if there are guys in City Hall with juice and firepower to beat the band, I’m Street Czar here. There are no other gods before me in the greater metropolitan area. Along the byways and highways, at least. On the blocks, at a minimum.
“I mean what about cable? Do you know what a cable franchise is worth to a street czar in a market like ours? What just maybe HBO or MTV is going for these days? We ain’t Chicago. Hell, we ain’t Detroit or even Indianapolis. Do you have any idea? Well, you could put your kids through college. You could put your kids’ kids through and have enough left over to buy everyone a fine dress and a nice suit for all their graduations. And I’m not even counting the buck or buck and a half skimmed off the top from the installation fees, or the two or three cents he realizes off every item on every order filled by the Home Shopping, or the penny for postage and handling.
“There are people who have founded fortunes, Dick, from behaving like City Commissioners of Streets. And I’ll tell you the truth—we’re telling the truth here, we’re telling the truth, we’re clearing the air—sometimes I wish I’d been more like them. Sometimes I wish I could have put my scruples behind me and gone for the mink fur with the chinchilla lining and just chucked the good gray Republican cloth or never claimed it again when it went to the dry cleaners. Rose Helen might have been a happier woman today if I had, Mikey a different young man.
“Well,” Druff said, “if wishes were horses beggars would ride. What’s done’s done, right, Dick?”
The left-turn arrow had come and gone and now they were waiting for it again. Only one car was in front of them.
“Oh,” Druff said comfortably, “my intention isn’t to whitewash myself.—Someone really ought to make a note of that signal. The timing’s off. And that’s another thing, one more area a City Commissioner of Streets could clean up, could pull it in plenty, make it worth his while to have his own gnome in Zurich. Because location’s what it’s all about to the merchants.”
“Location.”
“I agree with you,” Druff said. “If he’s on his toes the first thing a merchant does when he opens up in a new location is try and get next to someone like me—get him to fiddle with the traffic patterns, hold the Right or Left Turn on Green Arrow Only burning forever if it favors his shop, snuff it like that one there if it doesn’t. Did you know, Richard, that out in San Francisco, out in San Francisco, Chinatown is where it is today because back in the twenties the City Commissioner of Streets threw in his lot with the egg-roll interests and created it entirely out of traffic flow?
“So behave like a City Commissioner of Streets? Come on, kid, why not tell me to put a patch over my eye, wear my hand in a hook, my leg in a peg, and go for a pirate?”
They were still at the goddamn light, still waiting on the green arrow, almost posed there like racers waiting for a checkered flag, Druff smarting under the pressure of his own blocked flight path. “Jesus,” he said cunningly, “there’s all the latest wrinkles. There’s CDs back here and practically a microwave to boil my soup. Ain’t there a damn siren on this thing?”
“There’s a siren.” The chauffeur in him sounded almost miffed that Druff didn’t know the equipment.
“Use it, then,” commanded the City Commissioner of Streets.
“Use it? What about Dum dum de dum dum? What about the neighbors?”
“Screw the neighbors. Use it. Step on it. Take me home.”
Almost wearily the man made a show of producing a Mars light from somewhere beneath the dash and slapping it on the roof.
“Turn it on. Use it. Let’s get out of here.” Druff lowered all the limousine’s windows. Instantly they were awash in piercing sound, noise.
“So what do you have on me?” Druff suddenly demanded, enraged, furious, startling his spy. “What do you have on me besides the crap I’ve been handing you to take up your time and run out your tape?”
He’d pulled down one of the jump seats and moved into it. He’d leaned his head through the partition opened between them and was speaking devastating, incriminating things in a normal voice directly into his driver’s head, decibels beneath the ability of any sound equipment to register it against the continuous crescendo of the siren. “Just what, eh? What? The sexual goods? Big deal. Everyone alive has sexual goods. If they never even raised a hard-on they have them. There are no eunuch hearts. There ain’t a pussy living could pass a white-glove inspection. Not inside your maiden aunt in old lace and mothballs. Not under your mommy before she met your daddy. The sexual goods is just what’s baked inside all those innards I was trying to tell you about.
“So just what? Tell me what you’re looking for, maybe I can help you find it.
“Who’s after my job? You ain’t the private sector, you aren’t the type. Who’s after my job? Is it Basset in Parks? Murphy in Hospital Administration? Who are my enemies here? Give me a clue. Sounds like? Is it Roth from Sanitation? Stern out of Water Treatment, De Conde from the art museum, someone on the school board? Somebody else? Is it Lap, the alderman? Yalom, the comptroller? Just who am I up against? What? Because ain’t we pals, don’t we go back, aren’t we thick? I’d tell you. Honest injun I would. I’d tell you who you were up against. I will, as a matter of fact. You’re up against me. Look for me on the monuments, I’ll be waiting for you. Look for me up along the ledges. Down by the railroad tracks where the freight trains live. Among the struts and spars and webbing on the spans above the rivers. Expect me in the cages of the tigers and the bear pits at the zoo. I’ll be right there behind you on the newspaper that lines the bottom of the bird cage. We’re into melodrama here, turf, putsch and the Higher Bullshit. Look for me backstage, on the catwalks, in the costume jewelry on the heavy chandelier dangling from the ceiling of the opera house.”
Despite what the Mars light and siren seemed to be saying, they were proceeding slowly, moving along barely faster than the pace of a float in a parade. The chauffeur seemed cowed and interested. Druff was moved, very excited. Past four, almost into false dawn, after the heaviest date he’d ever had, and him fifty-eight already, practically pushing sixty, and that meal heavy too for a man in his delicate position on the actuarial tables, Druff was feeling and talking like the old Bobbo again. He took another reading of their stately pace, noted its discrepancy with the terrific sound they made, the bewildered responses of what was left of the traffic. This was MacGuffin. This was MacGuffin, too, he thought. These odd displacements, the skewed idiosyncratic angle of their en
gagement.
Dick said something the commissioner couldn’t hear. Druff asked him to please turn off the siren, how did he expect to be heard over all that racket.
“I think you are,” Dick said, “if you want to know.”
Druff didn’t follow him, listened for hints in the tone of his voice, from which, like the stilled siren, all hostility seemed to have been drained. Indeed, they seemed to have exchanged moods—Dick, exhausted, now as worried and wounded as the commissioner had been twenty minutes earlier, puzzling the traffic, parsing the now-you-see-it- now-you-don’t essence of his fled MacGuffin. It’s what Dick might have been doing, lying back, nursing his abeyant energy, waiting for the proper growing conditions of a fallow strength. His voice was not just polite, it was courteous, almost obsequious. Like the fearful voice of a fallen foe. He would tell Druff anything he wanted to know. What Druff wanted to know was the question to the answer he had just provoked. Dick the Spy, who seemed to know so much about him, evidently knew this, too. “I said I think you are. You asked for an enemies list. You’d have to be on it. In my opinion. Right up there.”
“Jeez,” said Druff, “out of the mouths of babes.”
And, turning around on the jump seat, sat back. Leaning his head against the window between them, closed again, resting his hair, leaving greasy trace elements from Glorio’s bed—hair tars, soured breath shellacs, lamb and soufflé resins, love-nest suets—on the rapidly amortizing municipal glass. He was so tired. He couldn’t remember when he’d been so tired. And rode braincase to braincase with the driver, only the partition intervening. He could have been more comfortable, of course, if he’d stretched out on the long leather back seat, but it was worth his life to move just then. He just couldn’t do it, it just wasn’t in him. When, he wondered, did those guys in the movies catch catnaps? Always on the go, on the run, making a moving target of themselves. All that going, going, going, all that stress. Boy, thought Druff, it took a heap of living to make a heap of living. A man his age? Was it worth it? Yeah, he thought, tasting Glorio’s glorious gall again, her mouth gone off like laundry. But recognizing the pattern now, the dangerous action/respite pulses of adventure, would not permit himself to drift off. That’s why he sat in the jump seat. That’s why he pulled himself up.
The MacGuffin Page 15
