The MacGuffin Read Online Free PDF

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.
    And had taken them (though Druff was certain from the way his son beamed up at her during her presentation that he’d heard it before, that he listened to her recitation as if she were his protégée and he’d had a hand in helping