Stanley Elkin - The MacGuffin

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?”

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.