“It’s kids riding home from delivering pizzas, managers of fast food joints from closing up. Sure,” he said, “these days it’s a service-oriented economy. It’s poor saps on night shifts and minimum wage.”
The City Commissioner of Streets looked away from the traffic and into the sky for a fireball. It was easier to believe in a sneak attack and a mushroom-shaped cloud than in much of this stuff. It was what he’d only recently been telling someone in a dream, that the world was getting away from him, that all its new amenities were overbearing somehow, and seemed, here, at ground level, under the colored, blinking warning lights on the tops of all those tall buildings, beneath the tangled flight paths of all those planes, guiding them, passing them on, like a kind of crowd control.
Druff thought he could see Dick’s eyes watching him in the rearview mirror. He seemed to be waiting for some sort of response. “Well,” he said, “it just seemed to me there was a lot of traffic for this time of night.”
“Sure,” Dick said acidly, “it’s chauffeurs driving their playboy bosses home from a night on the town.” Using the control in the front of the car, he drove the window back up between them.
Druff, in traffic, a bit fearful, isolated in the false, municipally dispensated coze of his glass and leather booth, confused, puzzled by the bad cop/good cop/bad cop avatars of this bad cop and less-than-civil servant, invoking the MacGuffin with fervid, almost hot Hail-Mary hope, thrown by the loyalties, the suspect, undermined, indeterminate allegiances in the general air and who’d, within the hour, arisen from the bed of a buyer to whom, for nothing, he’d given secrets and promised streets and so whose own allegiances were compromised and perhaps, if the MacGuffin in question was an avenging MacGuffin, should maybe have been a touch more chary about just whom he wanted there in the back seat with him, if only because of the old Let-him-who-is-without-sin proprieties and, if he needed other reasons, because, too, he understood about two-edged swords and the hedged consequences of magic, knowing if for no other reason than that he was a fifty-eight-year-old man already disappeared into his tailoring, six-sevenths, at the outside six- sevenths, but, in a guy with his history of blebs and leg stenotics and the long, jammed zippers of his arteries, more likely nine-tenths, more likely ten-elevenths, most likely fifty-eight — sixtieths or even fifty-eight — fifty-ninths gone, that it was easier to spring a rabbit from a hat than to stuff one back in again, but invoking it (Him, Her, the Muse of his plot line) anyway, like some jeopardized Samson shoving the stone furniture around. Because he hadn’t slept, see. Because he hadn’t slept even if within the hour he’d arisen from the Glorio bed and perhaps even scarfed a wee nosh of a nap in an armchair in the Glorio lobby. Because he hadn’t slept and looked like hell and felt like shit and was vulnerable as a chicken to the fox in the front seat. “Cary Grant,” he silently prayed, “thou shouldst be living at this hour!”
And shut his eyes.
When he opened them again he felt, though they’d gone only another two dozen blocks, refreshed. Traffic had considerably thinned, but they were stopped four or five cars back at a signal waiting on a green left-turn arrow.
He lowered Dick’s window.
“Well,” the man said, “what is it this time?”
“I was just thinking,” Druff said, “I have more conversation with you than I do with my wife. We do more bickering, too.”
“You should take that up with your wife.”
“What is it,” Druff said, “how do I explain your nerve? It can’t just be tenure or the peaceable kingdom standoff between public servants, the lion/lamb sleeping arrangements we lay on each other, our mutual in-it-together durance. Sooner or later something stirs the straw. A smell, a sound, a movement, a look.”
“You’re really something, Commissioner. Think you can put me off with your one-on-one, you sweet-talker, you? Is a sound made in the forest if the Lincoln-Douglas takes place and there’s no one to hear? Maybe we never even had this conversation. I mean, why’d you call me? You got two drivers. Why’d you pick me to wake in the middle of the night? You don’t even trust me.”
“The only thing I don’t understand,” said City Commissioner of Streets Druff, “is why anyone would go to such lengths. To put a twenty-four-hour tail on me, we never close. There are jobs in this town that make mine look pathetic. And I’m not so bad. Really,” he said, “I’m not so bad at all. I’m not greedy. I don’t solicit. I never hold my hand out. My policy — I hope you’re getting all this, Dick — has always been you call me up we make an appointment. We meet for drinks, we ask about each other’s kids, we look at one another’s snaps. My God, Dick, sometimes we get so caught up we never even get to the point. That’s happened. That’s happened plenty of times. More than you’d think. Because we’re each too embarrassed, if you take my meaning. Because a fellow thinks his innards are a hideous thing, his secret manners, what he does with his fluids. Jesus, Dick, we come on like we were career diplomats, secretaries of state. All of us, all of us do. Like we had silver hair and cards with our names embossed. Like we shower three times a day and speak only after we’ve tippy-tapped the crystal with our butter knives and have the attention of the table. And even then only to make gracious speeches, to thank our guests for coming and eating up our food. Folks are so shy, Dick. That’s why there’s actually less evil in the world than more.
“And none of us really thinks well of himself. Though we talk a good game and may try to drive our flimsiness off with our self-importance.
“Jesus, is that light stuck, or what? I have a theory that that Su’ad kid might have been killed because something was wrong with the traffic signal. That it wouldn’t turn red on the driver or something, and finally she got impatient, didn’t notice the car — maybe he didn’t have his lights on, maybe one was out, maybe he was just less than that mile from home where they say most automobile accidents take place — and she stepped off the curb without ever seeing it. That’s all that would have had to happen. From then on it’s all bingo bango, that’s all she wrote, good night nurse. Just look at that one up there if you want an example. Honk the horn, see can we get a little action here. Just listen to me, will you. So impatient, and I’m City Commissioner of Streets, for goodness sake.”
“Then why don’t you behave like one?”
Rather than sounding rude, the question, at least its tone, had seemed conciliatory, or as if Dick was waiting for an explanation, anything he could mark down as a mitigating or exculpatory circumstance. Well, the commissioner thought, that seemed fair. He would try to meet them — tired as he was, he was under no illusion any longer, if he ever was, that Dick was working on his own; there had to be at least two of them, at least two, since Dick himself had said that Druff could just as well have called Doug — halfway.
“Would you really have me behave like one?” he asked in what, playing to Dicky’s gallery, he hoped was a sort of wounded wonderment. “I mean would you? I mean, look at me. I mean, even if there are guys in City Hall with juice and firepower to beat the band, I’m Street Czar here. There are no other gods before me in the greater metropolitan area. Along the byways and highways, at least. On the blocks, at a minimum.
“I mean what about cable? Do you know what a cable franchise is worth to a street czar in a market like ours? What just maybe HBO or MTV is going for these days? We ain’t Chicago. Hell, we ain’t Detroit or even Indianapolis. Do you have any idea? Well, you could put your kids through college. You could put your kids’ kids through and have enough left over to buy everyone a fine dress and a nice suit for all their graduations. And I’m not even counting the buck or buck and a half skimmed off the top from the installation fees, or the two or three cents he realizes off every item on every order filled by the Home Shopping, or the penny for postage and handling.