“Oho. We know what that means.”
“Cancer.”
“Well, that’s the thing, Dick. There could be incredible spin-offs.”
“Spin-offs from cancer?”
“ ‘Waste-free electronics,’ it says. ‘Powerful new magnets.’ Old Macklin comes back, in eight or nine years they sprinkle his tumors with iron, suck them right up in the Hoover.”
“Really?”
“We ain’t seen nothing yet.”
“Speaking personally, Commissioner, I think I have.”
“You’ve seen squat jackshit, Dick,” the City Commissioner of Streets said. “What there was whizzed by you just like it did me and about everyone else. Oh, you mean corruption, you mean what goes on. I see what you mean. You’re talking about downtown. You’re talking about significant bricks through important windows. You’re talking about bending some colored guy’s head. Watered cement you could go fishing in, swimming, maybe skate on in winter. You’re discussing the hear-no- see-no-speak-no evils — bribery and blackmail raised to the levels of professions. That’s what you’re on about. Forgive me, Dick, but you’re missing the point, I think. You ain’t, you really ain’t. Seen nothing yet, I mean. We’re living on the cusp here. Like guys standing up in canoes in heavy seas. My goodness, the boneyard of history is shtupped with folks like us, knifed on the cutting edge, caught short between technologies.
“What are they going to do, retrain us? You hear they’re going to retrain you, you run for the hills.”
“As a matter of fact,” the chauffeur said, “there was some talk.”
“Yes? What? No, let me guess. They offered to put you into a program where they teach you evasive procedures, bodyguard driving, executive protection. The swerve and dodge skills, all the eat-my-dust, change-directions, push-them-off-the-road ones.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” Dick said. “You heard about that.”
“No. I swear,” Druff said gloomily. “I love it when I guess.”
Because where there’s smoke there’s fire, Druff thought, and now maybe they were going to take his drivers — he had two, Dick was one, Doug the other — away from him. (Besides himself, only the mayor, police and fire commissioners had limos.) And he’d been a show-the-flag sort of commissioner. There were times, plenty of them, when he’d sent a riderless limousine out into the neighborhoods. Or, cloning his power, ventriloquizing it — he and his drivers were more or less the same size — ubiquitized himself, had one of them drive while the other rode statesmanlike in the back, a fleeting, shadowy sit-back stand-in for the commish, his deputized decoy presence, like some false Hitler’s. (Being City Commissioner of Streets was not without its perks and splendors.) Though most of the time, of course, it was really only him, genuine Druff, back there. Well, quite frankly, he rather enjoyed being snatched through the city, siren screaming, Mars light flaming on the roof of the big car, to any emergency which required his attention, or at least his presence — he filled the nooks and crannies of his sinecure like a suit he’d been measured for by tailors — in the streets he commissioned. And delighted in municipal occasion, the reviewing-stand condition. Give him a hot day, a parade, and let him strut his stuff (comfortably in place) on a folding chair, or even along the hardest, backless bench. Despite the fact that his was an appointed position, he had an image of a bleachered, shirtsleeved America. Registered voters were his countrymen, pols his tribe. But had some vague aversion, this niggling atavism in the blood, a soft xenophobia — hey, he knew people who wouldn’t give someone from a different precinct the time of day! — toward the whole participatory democracy thing, the League of Women Voters, proclaimed Independents, reformers, kids better off taking the fresh air outdoors but who volunteered to stuff envelopes instead, man phone banks — airheads with all their muddled notions of good government, the various tony freedoms and constitutional amendments. (He believed in good government. Druff did. Anyone would be a fool not to, but good government was services. It was meat inspectors, guys who checked the restaurants, the building codes. It was the department of sanitation, the fire department, a strong police. It was knowing what to do with the infrastructure, making the trains run on time without harming the Gypsies.)
His ease he meant, taking his ease in the heat. His ease he meant, that he wished he could have over again, like a second chance, his ease he’d have liked to recover, the way some people wanted their youth back. His force and edge and intelligence.
“I stand by the system. I stand by the system up to my ears.”
“Sir?”
He hadn’t realized he had actually spoken.
“Because, Dick,” he said, putting one past his driver, making the fellow think he hadn’t been paying attention (and maybe he hadn’t; maybe he was figuring the pros and cons, mulling over the offer to become a Counter-Chauffeur in the Counter-Chauffeur Division, weighing his age against his chances), “if the mayor hadn’t appointed me to this job, God knows I couldn’t have made it through another campaign.”
“You, Commissioner? Sure you would. You had a lock on those people. Those people were your people.”
“No,” Druff said, “you can’t think that way. I don’t know, how does anyone declare for the statehouse even? And the federal fellows, how do the federal fellows do it?”
“It’s their calling. Why I drive a limo instead of set up for a taxi.”
“I guess,” Druff said. And then, leaning forward to close down some of the distance between them, “Just between us, Richard. Answer a question?”
“Sir?”
“No no. Between us. Two guys. I’m not City Commissioner of Streets, you’re not my driver.”
“Yeah?”
“What’s the morning line on me?”
“On you, Commish?”
“On Bobbo Druff, yes.”
“Well, to tell you the absolute honest-to-God truth, that you could have been a contender.”
“Ah,” satisfied Bobbo.
“And but so how come?”
“That I’m not? The absolute honest-to-God?”
“Tit for tat.”
“It was all that Inderal I was putting into my system,” he told him, naming the old blood-pressure medication, the drug of choice for anyone — politicians, actors, TV and radio people — who had to speak in public.
“A stand-up guy like you?”
“I missed my hard-ons, yes.”
“You, Commissioner? Stage fright?”
“Jack and Bobby had to have been iron men. Gary Hart.”
“You’re telling me Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan weren’t disaffected, just two jealous husbands?”
Sure, he thought, my ease. That bright, cold composure.
“But I was at that debate. You never even broke a sweat,” said the driver.
“That’s right.” Druff remembered. “You were there.”
“Jesus,” Dick said, “the time the guy said ‘my opponent,’ and you interrupted him and spelled out your name? And then when he said ‘my opponent’ a second time and you spelled ‘opponent’? My, that was lovely. He didn’t stand a chance. And him screaming ‘Speak to the issues, speak to the issues.’ And you said, ‘The issues? Right, I’ll speak to the issues.’ ”
“ ‘Clear the snow,’ ” Druff said, recalling.
“Clear the snow, yeah.”
“ ‘Test for safe chlorine levels in the municipal pools.’ ”
“Yeah,” said his driver, giggling, “the chlorine levels.”
“ ‘Enforce the bus schedules. Rip out all unnecessary stop signs, but plant them like trees wherever there’s been an accident. More time for your nickel on the parking meters.’ ”