Free The MacGuffin by Stanley Elkin Page A

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