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.