Which might, thought Druff, explain, I betcha, the power fantasies, all that If-I-Were-King subjunctivication of his life.
Only it wasn’t Bobbo the Roman Numeral I in those fantasies, but Bobbo, Prez of the Free World As We Know It. An American first, pictures don’t lie. That was no crown on his head, it was a straw boater; no throne under his ass, a folding chair. RD to the constituents, those who’d put him into office and those who’d voted against him. RD in the black banners of the national press. RD’S STUBBED TOE TO COME OFF! RD DRAWS DEEP BREATH SMELLING FLOWER, COLLAPSES LUNG! RD REPORTS HARD-ON, MAY RUN FOR SECOND TERM!
And it wasn’t always, or even all that often, in terms of headlines that RD appeared to himself. No no. He knew, was on talking terms with, his priorities. Heady, daring stuff. Missions to bring the hostages out. And had worked out position papers not only on the emergencies but on the back burners too, credits to Canada for dropping acid rain on their forests and wildlife, how to accommodate revolutions in place, what to do about an ailing dollar, how to deal with the burdens of secrecy in a dangerous world — Why, go public! All sorts of innovative shit.
For one thing, he would allow no one to run for office — this was complicated and controversial and would almost certainly require a constitutional amendment — who was not fluent in Japanese or some other language du jour.
Am I ridiculous? Well, I don’t mean to be.
Dick, Druff thought suddenly, his spy and sometime chauffeur, had probably soft-soaped the security guy in the outer office, sent him to lunch, and was probably his guardbody now.
And laws? The laws in his country would be the best on the books. Free speech, free press, the right to worship where one pleased, everything state-of-the-art in those departments. Holland couldn’t hold a candle. But that was only the beginning. Because, face it, how often, how often really, did the average man have this stuff jeopardized? And how many times in the course of a normal, decently led life did your garden variety citizen have to worry about a Miranda decision and the safeguards against self-incrimination and all the rest of the illegal- search-and seizure-provisos and stipulations? Because didn’t it finally come down to what he told his constituents, the good folks who’d put him in the White House in the first place, that government mostly was traffic and threats to tow? It has nothing to do with you, my fellow Americans. (Except for the fact that I’m its ruler and have to give its dinner parties, it has scarcely bugger squat jack all to do with me!) And that’s why I’ve convened this Constitutional Convention, my ladies and gentlemen, to see if after two hundred and some years since its founding we can’t put together some laws that might actually mean something to the man in the street. We will, and right in front of the gaze of an interested world, now turn our attention to those areas of governance which have been too long neglected. For this purpose I will, and in the not-too-distant, be naming a blue-ribbon committee to consider subjects such as Used Car Law, Points and Closing Law, Improper Credit Card Charges Law, Bank Statement Error and Utilities Bills Law, and the Rules of Guarantee, Warranty, and 7/70,000. In addition, a special Presidential Oversight Commission will be addressing everything ever written into a lease pertaining to the payment of the last month’s rent in advance — Rent Deposit Law. Because, well, to tell you the truth, my people, you don’t all that many of you look like Virginia gent farmers and country-fed, all-purpose, Jeffersonian aristoi to me, or even, when it comes right down, artisans and mechanics either. Good night and God bless.
Druff enjoyed these reveries, the long stretch of his incorporeal cock-and-bull pipe-dream life. It wasn’t even wishful thinking. Not the press-conferenced, carefully worded announcement of his candidacy, or his campaign speeches, or the debates, or his acceptance speech, or even his address to the nation when he took the oath of office at his inaugural. None of it was. Indeed, it was only a sort of mental doodling, what you catch yourself doing with a pencil while the other guy is speaking. There was nothing ta-pocketa-pocketa about it. The only voice, the only sound he heard, was his own.
(And didn’t it really come down, always, to one tired man’s extinguished or diminishing capacities? Because, like he said, enough had already happened to him. If the truth were known, if nominated he would not run, if elected he would not serve.)
Now, about that dead Lebanese girl.
He didn’t actually mean kickback, not kickback as in payoff. He supposed (on closer examination) he meant something fishy, things rotten in Denmark. It mightn’t be bucks changing hands here (though money, Druff knew, along with that attenuated man’s diminishing capacities and Druff’s old rule of traffic and threats to tow, was what it almost always came down to) but the buck, some paper trail of deniability. What was all that malarkey about municipal stone and neutral architectural styles? Or the bag guy’s conditions, his objection to using any but city contractors, the dig about that traffic signal being an attractive nuisance? Druff was an old-timer, that rotten fish-stink he smelled was probably only just ass. No matter how you covered it, or what you covered it with, a little something always came through.
“By God, Mrs. Norman,” he told his receptionist/secretary over the intercom, “the thing I can’t take about this job is the machinations. I mean, I’m a politician, a political appointee anyway, you think I’d be used to it. I sure as hell ought to be, but all this cat-and-mouse gives me the headache. Look up”—he read a business card—“Hamilton Edgar, for me, will you, kid? See can you find out when his appointment was scheduled?”
“Hamilton Edgar?”
“The lawyer the university sent out. When did he go on our dance card?”
He heard male laughter.
“That you out there, Double-O-Seven?”
“It’s Dick, Commissioner.”
“Carry on, then.”
“He phoned this morning, sir.”
“Ah,” Druff said.
“Is that important, Commissioner?”
“Don’t rightly know, Dick, can’t rightly say. I’ll tell you this much — hold on a min. Who else is out there besides you and Mrs. Norman? Any armed folks?”
“No sir, Commissioner, just me and Mrs. Norman.”
“Do you want me to come in, Commissioner Druff?”
“What’s that, Mrs. Norman? No no,” the commissioner said, “it’s getting on toward quiet time.”
Now, thought Druff, about that dead Lebanese girl. About that dead Lebanese girl really.
He knew her. Well, knew her. He’d met her. She’d been out to the house a couple of times. Mikey had brought her over. (His son Michael. Thirty years old his last birthday, it was Michael himself who insisted people still call him Mikey. I told you, Druff thought, enough has already happened to me.) And introduced him to Su’ad al-Najaf. (“Call her Suzy, Daddy.”) This would have been months before the accident. A woman in one of those massive, all-in veil/shawl/head-to-toe arrangements — what were they, chadors? — all wrapped up like the Nun of the World. She reminded him of that spokesterrorist on TV in the days of the Carter administration — the Georgian was right, RD thought; he’d have handled it about the same way himself — when Iran held the fifty-two American hostages, the one always out by the embassy gates where the demonstrators shouted their slogans. “Mary” her name was, always set off in quotes as though the networks were protecting the innocent. This one was a sloganeer, too. She had her own Fourteen Points. More, probably.