The MacGuffin (28 page)

And because they did, Druff, on the street again, who’d just been thinking, hadn’t he, of a sidekick, and what he might pass on to such a fellow if he had one, found himself—because hadn’t he been promised lunch (filet mignon, fresh vegetables, wine, strawberries out of season), which had never materialized, incidentally, and could it have been even three minutes ago he’d been thinking what could be done with the leftovers?—going into this little coffee shop where he sat in a booth wondering while he waited for his food to come—his rare hamburger, his order of fries, his coffee and pie à la mode—whether he should use the pay phone in the entryway to call Dick.

He signaled his waitress.

“Miss,” he said, “do me a favor, will you? There’s this guy I have to call, but, well, to be honest, I’m a little concerned that if I get up and phone him you’ll bring the food while I’m gone and my burger and fries will be cold and all dried out by the time I get back.”

“No problem,” she said. “I’ll watch you through the glass. I’ll wait until I see you’re off the phone before I bring your order.”

“Oh, hey, thanks, that’s very kind,” said Druff, perfectly sincere, on his own turf again, back, that is, with folks who’d never tag him, who couldn’t lay a glove on him, touched, actually moved, by the kindness of shockable, susceptible people. “I appreciate that. I really do.” (This part of the universal synergy too.) And with difficulty leveraged himself out of the booth (the quarters always too close in these places—even for a chap dropping into his clothing—their shallow seats and steep backs, the unyielding Formica tabletop in its wraparound metal trim) and made his way to the pay phone between the lunchroom’s heavy inner and outer glass doors.

“No, I’m sorry,” the woman said, “you must have the wrong number.”

He quoted the number he’d called.

“I’m sorry,” she told him. “There’s no one here by that name.”

Surprised, he checked it in the directory. Though he knew Dick’s number. He
knew
Dick’s number. Hadn’t he occasion to call it a hundred times a year? Sure enough. It was Dick’s number all right.

The waitress smiled at him. She waved. Druff, grinning, nodded acknowledgment.

“But this was an operator-assisted call,” he explained to the woman. “He dialed it himself. It
has
to be the right number.”

Druff could actually hear her turn away from the phone, hear her place her hand over the mouthpiece and, though he couldn’t make out what she was saying, he had a pretty good idea. Get in, he thought, the part about how the operator was a man. Though untrue—he hadn’t gone through any operator—it was, Druff felt, an absolutely telling detail.

She was back on the phone. “Dick says to ask who is this.” Without guilt at having been caught out, or shame, or the slightest indication that her pride had been in any way compromised. Fucking typical, Druff thought.

“This isn’t Polly,” Druff said. “You’re not Dick’s wife.”

“Nolo contendere,”
she said.

Through the glass Druff’s waitress threw him a friendly high sign. The commissioner graciously, broadly, winked. “Tell him,” he said, “it’s his boss.”

He heard her transmit the message. “What,” she said, “what’s that, Dicky? Oh, okay.” She was speaking to him again. “Dick won’t come to the phone on the weekend. He told me to tell you that drivers get days off, too, and that you wouldn’t even be calling him on a Saturday if he was an Orthodox Jew.”

“What,”
Druff said, raising his voice,
“what’s that? What’s he say?”
He looked up. At her station, the waitress, concerned, was staring at him. To reassure her, Druff barely shook his head, like a pitcher shaking off a sign. “Listen,” he said, looking to make friends with the woman in Dick’s apartment, “Miss—” And broke off, paused, waited for her to take the bait. She didn’t. “Won’t he come to the phone
really?
It’s rather important, a matter of quite some interest to him. It won’t take much time. I know it’s Saturday. Of course I do”—and this goes on too, he couldn’t help thinking, that spies get days off—“and I don’t expect him to come fetch me or drive me places. If I had anywhere to go, either I’d drive myself or I’d call a cab. Honest.”

“Oh sure,” she said, “assume I’m not married, just some limousine driver’s tootsie. ‘Miss’ and ‘Mademoiselle’ me. Just go ahead and make out your stereotypes. If it’s convenient for you to think so, you just make up in your head I’m not a respectable mother of twins. Well, my name is Charlotte, incidentally, if you’re so all-fired interested. No, I’m not Polly. I’m not Dick’s wife. Only I don’t know where a person like you would get off. A married man, so-called, traipsing around at all hours of the day and night.”

While she spoke, Druff gazed placidly through the coffee shop’s glass outer door to the quiet, empty, late-afternoon street. It’s like a decompression chamber in here, he thought. With a pay phone and a cigarette machine. When she’d finished, Druff said, “Just tell him it’s a snow day.”

“Wise guy,” Charlotte said.

“No, wait,” he said. (Because he was new at this and didn’t know when to play what he still wasn’t even sure was his trump card. Because City Commissioner of Streets or no City Commissioner of Streets, Druff didn’t even recognize the neighborhood he was in anymore. He was a politician. He knew about fixed elections, what could be done, if necessary, to a voting machine, how any even only decent mechanic could compromise it like a one-armed bandit or rigged roulette wheel. What had any of that to do with MacGuffins? With anything as important and down-to-earth as genuine evil? Because he was new at what he hadn’t even yet begun to understand, and he couldn’t wait. Not that he hadn’t as good a sense of timing as the next man, only that he was impatient, and maybe a little too anxious to have everything done with.) “No, wait,” he repeated. “Ask him if he ever heard of any international rug rings?”

Impatiently, she relayed his question. Then their connection was disengaged and he heard the burr of the dial tone. Saddened, his good name shot, he went back into the restaurant. At his table the hamburger and fries had already been laid down, his coffee. His sandwich, its meat and juices congealed and gray as brainfat, was cold, his saturated fries limp. The ice cream was melted on his pie like a thin white soup. When he was dead none of this would mean anything.

So he set off to buy Rose Helen’s batteries.

It was, as he’d noted, an unfamiliar neighborhood. He was Commissioner of Streets. Of course he recognized the place names. He remembered signing purchase orders for practically every avenue and street he passed, and remembered having authorized the dispatching of crews to probably each of the four corners of this place—to investigate ruptures in the paving, make determinations about the suitability of street signs citizens had requested, to paint white lines and double white lines in the road. Yet he couldn’t say with certainty he’d ever actually been here. He passed commercial districts filled with what were obviously chain stores whose peculiar names he’d never heard before.

And at last came to a place he knew. Indeed to the very pharmacy where only the day before the very pharmacist who served him now had sold him a condom. (From here, he recalled, he was only three blocks from City Hall. He had virtually drifted across the city, doing, it could have been, some rude, off-course, straying, swerving caricature of last night’s false marathon, making good the elaborate lie he had told to his wife, and repeated to his son, about his heroic walk with McIlvoy and Scouffas.) Maybe it was only the fact that he was on
terra firma
again, but he had, too, the same distinct impression of safe conduct he’d had yesterday in this place.

“Do you stock batteries for hearing aids?”

The man, who had a sort of mechanical but, on the whole, rather soft hospital-corners way of moving, turned lightly away from the commissioner and disappeared down an aisle crowded with an assortment of miscellaneous boxes. Druff felt rekindle his old admiration for the pharmacist’s tight-lipped professionalism and efficient, silent ways. (I, he thought, reminded of Charlotte’s bill of particulars, could use me a little of that.) And in moments was back, a variety of batteries extended on a kind of jeweler’s tray for Druff’s inspection.

The City Commissioner of Streets, ignoring them for the moment, attempted to make eye contact.

“You have a choice,” said the pharmacist. “Mercury, zinc, or silver oxide.”

“Three delicious flavors,” Druff said. (Sure it was unwarranted, but maybe the man felt superior. And supposing the druggist’s professionalism wasn’t sincere? Suppose there was something judgmental in it? Maybe the pharmacist even remembered him from the day before? “Yeah,” he could imagine him telling some cop, “that’s him, that’s the one. That’s the old man who came in and bought a rubber off me.” Though Druff, still only on the edge of crime, could not really imagine the circumstances. And, anyway, it was better to needle and do one’s riffs of fluent gabardine than to be brought down—Ham ‘n’ Eggs, his pals; the cold, spoiled food he had left untouched in the coffee shop. It was better to dish it out than receive.) Again he attempted to engage the druggist’s eye. “Too bad you have to work on a Saturday.”

“We keep the same hours as the department stores.”

Druff nodded, then went up practically into the guy’s face, backing off only after it occurred to him that the pharmacist might think he was fishing for compliments on the basis of his purchase yesterday afternoon.

Nah, he thought, he doesn’t remember. Maybe, Friday nights, they get a run on old fuckers. I must be a type. But a type who’d spring for a French letter one day and come back the next for help with his hearing aid? Druff was furious.

“It’s not for me,” he said. “It’s for another party. Look. See? Nothing up this ear, nothing up that one.”

“Sir,” said the pharmacist.

“Or maybe you think I left it in my other suit. Is that what you’re thinking? Turn around then. No, go on. It’s all right. Go on, turn around,” demanded crazy Druff, the political liability. “Say something in your softest voice. See if I don’t pick it up.”

“Siir,”
the pharmacist, still facing him, protested.

“No, really. Go on.” Sighing, the druggist started to turn. “You
sighed!”
Druff jumped in. “There. You just sighed. I
heard
you. Would a deaf-o pick up on something like that?”

“No, I suppose not,” the druggist said quietly, his back to the commissioner and looking, in his strictly cosmetic white lab coat, like an actor in a holdup. Catching Druff off guard.

“Oh hey,” the City Commissioner of Streets said, “I’m sorry. Look, turn, face me again. It’s not what you think. I’m not normally like this. I’m under a strain. It’s a long story, but don’t worry, I won’t bore you with it. There’s no excuse for my behavior. None whatsoever. Well, there
is,
but there wouldn’t be any excuse for me unloading it on you. There could never be any excuse for that. Let’s just say I’m off my feed. And I am, too. Waitress in a coffee shop deliberately brought me my hamburger and fries after I specifically asked her to wait until
after
I’d placed this call. Then I got hassled about the call (which, incidentally, was totally unsatisfactory) and, when I got back, there it all was, everything I’d asked her to—I sound a little nutso to you, don’t I?”

“No, not at all.”

“Well, you’re humoring me. In your place I’d probably do the same. Well, I
would
do the same. No probably to it.” (God, Druff was thinking, how do I get out of this? I’ll probably have to send this guy flowers to make it up to him.) “Now,” he said, “about those batteries…”

The druggist held out the tray and Druff touched one of the batteries, tumbling it with his finger as one might roll diamonds on a black cloth. “That one’s a mercury,” the pharmacist said and Druff snapped his hand back.

“Jeez,” he said, “mercury. That’s the shit fucks the tuna fish, ain’t it? Imagine what it’d do if it leaked into your ear.” (Thinking this is how I make it up to him, not how I get out of it.) “I guess the zinc,” Druff said. “Half a dozen.”

The pharmacist nodded. “They’re a little more expensive, but they drain down more slowly than those others when not in use.”

Druff sorry to have gotten off on the wrong foot with him. Admiring, if not exactly liking him, his command of the hardware, his vast inventory, better than Druff’s. Who barely recognized the names of the streets and was lost altogether in the neighborhoods. And who now, the zincs locked into three blister packs inside the pharmacy’s little plastic tote he carries in his hand, aimless and feeling vaguely abandoned on what have proved to be his rambling, roved and drifting highways and byways, a mite dizzy from all the unexpected topspin of his swerved, off-course tangentials and the almost random eccentrics of his wide, bent bearings, his sideslips and compromised trajectory, his mangled yaw and imperfect pitch, what he’s increasingly come to think of as the open itinerary of his private detective’s route on what he cannot stop himself from thinking of as a late, MacGuffin-forsaken Saturday afternoon, realizes he has to choose. What’s it to be then, eh? In the absence of Ol’ MacGuffin, come, he supposes, to represent the spirit of narrative in his life (sort of), shut down for the weekend (more or less), nothing was pushing him, slamming him off the dime. There was, that is, no gun at his head just now. And so, unless he’s to go home (not, he’s sure, such a bad idea, and doesn’t he, incidentally, have Rose Helen’s hearing-aid equipment right there on his person to turn his divagations into at least the look of an errand?), he is suddenly faced (if he doesn’t count the batteries) for the first time today with the problem of destination.

Druff (influenced by hunger, the pull of the turkey working in the oven, the built-ins and add-ons of Rose Helen’s robust fixings) examined his options. To his mind he had three. He could go home. Two, he could pay a call on Margaret Glorio, maybe kill two birds, pitch a little woo if he was lucky, and pull a surprise carpet inspection. Or he could drop in on Doug, his backup limo driver. Where in God’s name, he wondered, did
that
one come from? And determined at once, since he couldn’t answer this perfectly reasonable question, to get his ass over to Doug’s. Well, why not? It was out of his hands now. He was working on instinct. Surrendered, handed over, going with the flow, which, in the absence of MacGuffin, was all he could use for narrative spirit, a gun at his head, the wild tumult, the pushing and shoving at the top of his dime.