The MacGuffin

by Stanley Elkin

  “Sure,” said his man to his man. “They’ll say anything. Even when there ain’t anything in it for them, even when they don’t stand to gain. ‘I’m forty-four,’ she says.”

  “She is forty-four.”

  “Yeah?” said the chauffeur. “Mikey said she’s fifty.”

  “Mikey said?”

  “Well, wasn’t she a friend of that Arab who died? I thought I recognized her. Ain’t that why we gave her the lift?”

  Who’s drawing out whom here, wondered the City Commissioner of Streets, and found the switch on the control panel which sent the glass partition window up. “Here I go again,” his driver had just time enough to say before he was shut away, “off to Coventry.”

  It was a cheerful enough remark but Druff could have slapped the side of his own head with the heel of his own hand, mentally cuffing himself in abrupt, classic realization, stagy awareness. (Actually seeing himself do it, the self-deprecating code gesture, the slammed clarity of his damning Dummkopf! theatrics, and even time to wonder why it was that for all their direct, stripped meaning, efficient, he supposed, as cursing, one rarely observed—and never executed—such things in real life. All one’s performances—he was a pol, close to government, privy to the high dramatics—blackmail, bribery, kickbacks and fraud, of course, but the hard-core rough stuff, too; the fires, he meant, the betrayals and anguish for which government, which made the laws and set the rules, had all the hottest tickets and best seats—all that devastating hard stuff, the gossip, rattling bones and smoking guns they did for each other, and which, he’d come to see, was a kind of professional courtesy, a sort of common currency, their mutual, collective corruption not only leveling the playing field but, by piquing each other’s interest, actually mining it—held in refined check not because one was naturally refined but because it just never really occurred to a fellow that these gestures were available to anyone but actors. So, at least till now, he’d never rubbed his chin to draw forth his thoughts, never torn at his hair or thrown up his hands in despair, couldn’t recall when he’d last touched thumb and forefinger to the inside corners of his eyes to ease fatigue. Nor had he ever sighed or touched the back of his hand to his forehead and brought on a swoon. He’d never swooned.) It was too powerful a vocabulary to have been deprived of. Now, possessed by his MacGuffins, and handed things to think about, he was aware of himself performing several of these gestures at once, caught out in some frenzy of squirming and thrashing, and actually administering those hard, initial, thumping salutes to the delayed consciousness that slept in both temples, pummeling them, right temple, left temple, as though he had water in his ears. (While meanwhile, back inside the transparent overlays of his parallel parentheses, he was suddenly appreciative of what he hadn’t appreciated before—that it was no mere showy false modesty which brought on these blows, that the Sherlocks who usually took them must usually have meant them, that it all had been plain as the nose, that if it’d been a snake on their face, it would have bit them!)

  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 n
ormal, 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.

  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.