“Well,” Druff answered her question, “I’m more an official than a politician.”
“An official,” she said, and Druff smelled her light, liquored breath, pleasant drafts like lovely, discrete things boxed, bottled, packaged, wrapped. Sheets, say, banded in boxes, or the stripped scent of perfume on the ground floor of a department store, sealed candy at the confectioner’s, unopened cartons of cigarettes at the tobacconist’s. Pungencies, the sweet, substantive zephyrs of bakery.
Uh oh and uh oh, thought Druff, and placed a few loose coca leaves onto his tongue from the stash in his pocket.
“Well, tell me,” said the tall, blond stranger, “how official are you? Could you have me arrested?”
“I could get you a ‘No Parking’ sign for the front of your house, or ‘Quiet Please, Hospital Zone.’ ‘Slow. Children Crossing.’ ” Then — perhaps it was the additional coca leaves kicking in — he said, “You’re here on the tour, right?”
“The tour?”
“You’re between planes. You saw notices for the city’s hot new ‘Change planes in our town and we’ll show you a time’ campaign. You had a four-hour layover and figured, ‘What the hell, I’ll go for it’ and hopped on the free luxury tour bus.”
“This happens? I pay taxes for this boondoggle?”
“Well,” Druff said, “it’s still in the planning stages. I’m trying the idea out on folks, getting their reactions, taking a straw vote. Vox pop. It’s not very scientific, I don’t suppose.”
By the time Druff’s turkey club came, the coca leaves had taken the edge off his appetite and he thought they were on easy enough terms to offer the woman his sandwich. She refused, but accepted the pickle and agreed to eat some french fries, which Druff spread out on a napkin for her. He asked if he could pick up her bar tab but she declined. He told her his name and identified himself as City Commissioner of Streets, and she told Druff she was Margaret Glorio, a freelance buyer of men’s sportswear for some of the city’s chain department stores. She worked for herself. They exchanged cards, and he undertook to identify many of the people in the room for her. He’d actually turned around on his bar stool and was pointing.
“Nobody, no one, nobody, no one,” Druff said as if he was counting.
Several of Druff’s best friends in the world looked up and waved.
“Oh,” Druff said, “the little unassuming fella in the corner?”
“That one?”
“That one.”
“Oh.”
“Curator of the art museum.”
“Really?”
“They’re cold. What you have to understand is I’m happily married thirty-six years. Nothing that happens between us is going to change that. You ought to know that going in. Want some more fries?”
“No thank you.”
“As it happens, I’ve just come from doing some shopping myself. Brooks Brothers? Oh, I suppose you get weary of hearing that after you’ve just told folks you’re a buyer for the major chains, but do I look like someone who’d lie about his haberdashery? Besides, it’s not sportswear I’ve been looking at anyway, it’s a suit. Not even your field.”
“Are you really the street commissioner?”
“Sure as Langello there’s the county coroner,” Druff told her, indicating the man Toober had placed at Druff’s table.
“He’s county coroner?”
“Like to meet him? Want to shake his hand?”
“I see no need,” Miss Glorio said, adding she’d never been much of a voter in the local elections and that if a suspicious transmission on her automobile hadn’t caused her to bring the car back to the dealer she’d never have discovered this restaurant or known it was a hangout for local politicians.
“Local elections, local politicians,” Druff said, “you make us all sound like the Great Gildersleeve. See Superintendent of Schools Carlin? No, over there. Right, that one. You wouldn’t think it to look at him but he’s in charge of a budget of over a hundred million dollars a year.”
She was trying to catch the bartender’s eye. Druff, a little belligerent, tendered one superbly inflected cough and the fellow came at once. He presented Druff the checks. She started to object but the City Commissioner of Streets overrode her and handed the man money for both their bills. He wouldn’t even let her get the tip, Druff said.
“Look…” she objected.
“Nonsense,” he said. “Fire Chief, Sewers and Mains, Chief of Police,” Druff said, taking her arm and indicating these various public servants as he nodded to them and steered Margaret Glorio toward the door. “Assemblyman, assemblyman, head of the zoo,” he said. “You may be an arbiter of taste, but these fellows are the knights and paladins. — Our town,” he said. He brought her to the curb where Dick, in his twin capacity of chauffeur and spy, was illegally parked in the limo, and waited while the man came out from behind his driver’s seat, touched his hand to his cap to the lady and held the door open for them, crisply shutting it when they were seated. “Women don’t usually go for a street commish,” Druff confided. “Nine times out of ten they’d rather have an alderman. Blunt, visible power’s the aphrodisiac in this trade.”
“I’d rather have an alderman,” Miss Glorio said.
“There’s a cellular telephone in this limo,” Druff said. “Want to call the dealer, see what’s what with your transmission?”
“I don’t know what I’m doing here. What do you mean you’re married, that I ought to know that going in? I’m not going in anywhere, you’re not sweeping anyone off her feet.”
“Look, I’ll show you.” He picked up the handset and called Time and Temperature. “It’s seventy-one degrees,” he reported to the woman, “it’s two-sixteen.” He proposed ringing it again and letting her hear for herself. “Boy that gives me a kick,” he said. “Look, I even have call waiting. I don’t care, I don’t think I’ll ever get over it. I’m old enough to be from a generation that still marveled that there were car radios. The clarity of long-distance calls astonished us. ‘Gee,’ we’d say to the people of our time one and two thousand miles across the country, ‘you sound like you’re right next door.’ But this is even better. We’re in a moving car, for goodness sake. I can call long-distance, I can call long-distance to someone in another moving car.”
“Why? What would you say?”
“I don’t know, that they sound like they’re right next door. It’s the idea of the thing. I don’t know, maybe I just have a lower awe threshold than the next guy, maybe that’s what keeps me feeling young,” lied the City Commissioner of Streets, who felt neither awe nor youth, who’d heard — and at once had registered — Margaret Glorio’s remark that he wasn’t sweeping anyone off her feet, and whose insistent, meaningless, imperturbable charm rolled off his tongue as casually as a campaign promise and who, by engaging her in conversation in the restaurant in the first place, and paying her check, and by saying outlandish things to her and practically hijacking her into his municipal limousine, had merely meant to keep the MacGuffins coming, though he realized, of course, that it was alien to the form to volunteer, even to intercede, that one didn’t go prancing after a fate or it wasn’t a fate anymore, only one more misplaced obsession. Still, the commissioner reasoned, adding his driver’s admission earlier that morning that the city was talking about transferring him (and Dick’s being there, in the outer office, standing in for the regular security guy, soaking up Druff’s interoffice communications with Mrs. Norman) and the man’s unaccustomed solicitousness (the chauffeur’s buttered bushwah about Druff’s Fourteen Points) to the coincidence of his son’s having kept company with the hit-and-run-over Su’ad, and the city’s and university’s nervousness about the incident, even the usurpation of his table at Toober’s (what had he been, fifteen minutes late? twenty?), even the restaurateur’s little hesitation step when Druff had offered to sit at the bar and even (though here, Druff had to admit, he was probably stretching) the treatment he’d received when he went to claim his suit, there was enough circumstantial affront to warrant Druff’s aroused suspicions. Well, worse cases had been made. Though, if only to be fair to the rest of them — to Toober, to Dick, to Mrs. Norman, to Hamilton Edgar, to his son and the unnamed co- conspirator hustling alterations at Brooks Brothers — didn’t Druff have to wonder that if a little mid-life crisis might not be entirely unwelcome, then how much more agreeably might a bit of actual, flat-out Sturm and endgame Drang strike his fancy? (And wasn’t this the true reason most guys didn’t hit their tragic stride until they were old?)