The MacGuffin Read Free Page A

been—admittedly—subject to a sort of soft paranoia, all the compounding interest on disappointment, the wear and tear of ambition—hard by, as he was, the thin headwaters of the elderly—and was the first to admit the outrageousness of his surmise and discount the chinks in his argument, discounted his vulnerabilities anyway and suddenly knew the man, his driver, the chauffeur Dick, was some kind of spy.
    Well well well.
    And even appreciated the fact that he ought to have felt flattered. How many men his age had spies on their case? Even when he’d been on the campaign posters and big outdoor advertising there hadn’t been spies. It was a tribute at his time of life. So why, given his blues and vapors, didn’t Dick’s probable double agency perk him right up? Or at the very least offer some red alert of consciousness or push him to action? Why, if after all these years he was finally a target, didn’t he behave like one and get moving?
    Ask him outright, Druff thought. Just put it to him. Say, Why, Dick?
    And would have if, just then, a mounted policeman hadn’t called “Top of the morning there”—they were stopped at a stop sign—to them through the open window of the limousine. Druff turned sideways to wave and return the greeting. (Cops, he thought, in all their supposititious ethnics and green, adoptive blarneys; in their drawled, beefy flagpatch, redneck sheriff's ways; in their designer shades and presumptive cool.)
    “And the same back to you, Offi—” the politician offered when the horse, or what was more likely, the man himself—startled—did this aborted, electric bolt, a maneuver like a double take.
    “Oh,” the cop said recovering, smiling, “it’s you back there, Commissioner. Who’s that up front? Doug-go?”
    “Stosh-o wants to know if it’s Doug-go, Dick-o,” the policeman’s City Commissioner of Streets told the driver, frowning.
    “How you doing?” Dick said.
    “Filling the quotas,” the centaur joked, “no complaints. Ain’t ten A.M. yet, maybe fifteen tourists took my picture. And yourselves?”
    “On the trail of fresh potholes.”
    “Well,” the cop said, “you’ve a grand morning for it.”
    “Just how many people know you and Doug drive each other around?” the commissioner asked when they were again under way. (Under way indeed, thought Druff in the big, nautical-seeming car.)
    “You know,” Dick said, “that’s a question that says something about people’s human condition. Lisher? Lisher,” he repeated. “The roughrider, the steed cop. Well, I’ll tell you something, Commissioner Druff. We get our share. More than our share. It ain’t only cavalry guys up on their coursers see that kind of action. You know how many people during the course of a day regard us as a photo opportunity? If I had a dollar.”
    “Really,” Druff said.
    “Oh,” Dick said, “six bits, four even. You don’t always see this. Often you’ll be indoors on important street business when they come up. They’ll want to know if it’s the mayor’s, the governor’s. They don’t know, it could be their senator’s. Your average citizen is easily impressed but don’t understand his city’s seals from Shinola.”
    Bold, thought Druff. My spy is a bold spy. Indoors on street business.
    Though of course Druff knew—or at least used to—all about photo opportunities—posing with constituents and cronies like Dan Dailey tricked out in a straw boater in a musical. How many rec rooms, he wondered, were still decorated with such pictures, the flash distorting their faces, darkening or overexposing them like flesh in a photograph taken in a nightclub?
    The commissioner dipped a hand into a pocket in the jacket of his suit and withdrew a pouch of chewing tobacco from which he removed, staring steadily into Dick’s eyes in the driver’s rearview mirror, a few dried coca leaves which he put into his mouth, holding them carefully against his gums like some pleasure poultice and