“Jesus!” Jerry Rector said. “God! A sink of the lip slips ships! Does no one here understand that?”
“Someone bring that man a drinky winky,” Dan said, giggling.
“A dry martooni,” said guffawing Hamilton Edgar.
“You’re their guest? You’re their come-in-good-faith, invited comrade?” said Rector. “I’m hep. All right. That’s all right. Nobody tells me anything, but what the heck? That’s jimmy-fine-dandy. Maybe we’re into Plan C or something and someone simply forgot to inform me. I can live with that. You think I can’t live with that? I can live with it. I can live,” the screwball-comedy-dialogue admirer informed them coolly, “with anything you silly fuck wads can throw against me. Follow me,” he said. “The ‘festivities,’ as my new friend here calls them, are in the rabbi’s study.”
It’s cumulative, thought Druff. Whatever they’re on. He already knew it was catching.
“Jerry, man,” Dan said.
“Rector!” said Hamilton Edgar.
“Well, as a matter of fact,” said the commissioner, reminded of that film again, of its holy killer thugs, “as it happens, I am. A politician’s politician, I mean. I define that as anyone in public office who can make news with his mouth.” He was following Jerry Rector. The two other guys were following him. New surroundings were generally a maze to him, not a big plus in the City Commissioner of Streets department, he had to admit. For Druff it was the sewers of Paris all over again, new surroundings. And that went double, he thought, when what was at stake was at once as comic and interesting and possibly dangerous as he only just now understood his situation potentially was.
They went up stairs and down corridors, doing, he felt, these mysterious stations of the Star of David, hearing nothing, passing no one, Druff nervous in the strangely abandoned building (in their odd single file like the forced, time-honored defile of guards with a prisoner) like someone locked for the night in a shut-up office building. (His mazy new surroundings, all the queer, devious landscape and uncharted sewers-of- Paris quality of the apparently vacant temple now somehow powerfully familiar to Druff, as recognizable as the prescriptive tactics of their captured-prisoner maneuvers.) Primarily what he felt was watched.
So he could either catch up with Rector (clearly point man here), seize the cat’s cradle and perhaps change the pattern of the forced march, or he could distract them, as time-honored and in-the-tradition as anything he’d seen yet.
He began to talk.
“Well, I am,” he said. “I do. Make mouth news, I mean. It’s what us pol’s pols are all about. Really. Your kings and your queens, your go-ahead heads of state. Empress to alderman. Lowly streets czars like myself, even.
“Once, would you believe it, it made the papers just because I said I didn’t think it was fair that the City Commissioner of Streets in Tampa — St. Pete had a bigger line in the budget than I did with all my added responsibilities of weather to worry about — snow clearance, ice storms, pothole repair, the wear and tear of a cold climate. You wouldn’t believe what that started! It was good copy for a week. ‘Oh yeah?’ This was my opposite number, the other pol’s pol, the Tampa — St. Petersburg one, answering back through Reuters, United, the Associated Press. ‘Just ask old Jack Frost for me what he’d do after a hurricane hit and he had to lift all that soaked sand up off the highways and push it back on the beaches where it came from? Maybe our budget’s so high here on the Sun Coast because snow melts and sand don’t!’ ‘Snow melts!’ Can you imagine? He had me with the ball in my court. Hey, they could have asked for my resignation. Mouth newsers go right into the doghouse when the cat has their tongue. They were really after me for copy now, the Reuters boys and A.P. people. ‘Tell him,’ I told them, ‘all that talk about the so-called Sun Coast must have gotten in my eyes and blinded me. I forgot Mother Nature had so damn much weather down there that they had to keep giving it names, as if all those storms and hurricanes were like so many children they had to keep track of before it all got away from them.’
“Well, that brought their Chamber of Commerce into it, which was just what I hoped would happen. I took the issue away from him, the pol’s pol guy, and now they were issuing actual denials, putting out that they hadn’t had an out-and-out hurricane in thirteen years, putting out they didn’t expect one for another ten years. They’re quoting the goddamn Farmer’s Almanac, for Christ’s sake, and I’m out of it and live to fight another day.
“Well, it’s the tourism thing of course, their bread and butter. Come back to Jamaica, mon.
“It’s not farfetched,” Druff said. “This is the way they think. What would be water off a duck’s back in any other country changed in ours to landscaping, fountains, the dancing waters.
“Are we there yet? Are we even on the right floor?”
What he’d told them true, never mind he was stalling. Already contemplating other of his mouth campaigns. His newsmaker’s noisemaking. Bobbo Druff’s Greatest Hits. Willing to feed them to them, who would not, he finally understood, be feeding him. (Appetite whetted, peckish as ever.)
Wafted through — because he couldn’t keep track, was loose, without landmark — these featureless halls, at once burdened and more light than was his ordinary nature. Airy, breezy, dangerously glib. And spotted the congregation’s Negro shammes (recognizing him even if he didn’t know the word for him), identifying by the number of keys he wore on his belt who must have been the factotum here, recognizing him for what he was by the little Hebe beanie, the whaddayacallit, yarmulke, on his spiky hair, which, except for the black man, only Hamilton Edgar was wearing.
“Shabbes,” said the black man, greeting them, talking through his hat for Christmas gifts a mile off, and in a different theological venue.
“Shabbes your own self, Richard,” Jerry Rector said.
Druff, edgy, punchy still with his glibness, his touch of fear, having to admire him for that, admitting as much. “That’s right,” he told Jerry Rector when the man had passed them, “I see you’re no pushover. I’ll tell you the truth. Any workman can strike fear into my heart. Whenever one comes to the house it throws me off. I feel I have to justify myself or something. Whatever it is, I don’t care what it is. It could be anyone. Anything. Telephone repairmen, the guy who reads the meter, the gas, the electric, the man who works in the garden or puts in special trees. It’s emasculating, it pulls on a fellow’s balls. ‘I work,’ I want to tell them. ‘I work. I have a job.’ ”
“You do,” the Commissioner of Streets heard Dan humor him. “Doesn’t he, Hamilton?”
“I’ll say.”
“Are we there yet?”
“We’re just now pulling into the station,” Jerry Rector said, and with a key he took from the breast pocket in his suit coat, he opened the door to what Druff supposed was the rabbi’s study.
Which was, well, really something. Better, oh far better, he could see, than his own dusty accommodations — the little theatrical agent’s office beyond the low wooden fence around his own poor municipal digs. Druff, catching Hamilton Edgar’s grin, just perceptibly lowered his head, a submission signal, a vague acknowledgment to a man who’d seen the commissioner’s offices firsthand, that, nerve center for nerve center, the rabbi outclassed him — Druff’s empty good sportsmanship.