Smoke

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Couldn’t it be set so we could hide . . .”

  This was going to go on. Now that the woman was not moving, and with that security guard so damn close, these diamonds would soon become noticeable. Freddie looked all around, becoming desperate, and near the front door he spied a fairly large trash can with an open top and black plastic liner. It was just a few feet away. Freddie leaped over there, stuck his hands down in among all the papers and plastic cups, and waited while the woman and her guide continued to discuss whether or not the flawed aquamarine was worth a return visit.

  This was a bad situation. Of course, Freddie could merely open his hands and permit the diamonds to fall away into the trash, then saunter off unseen to try again, but he was so close. If only this woman would forget the aquamarine, just forget it.

  In the meantime, people were coming in and going out, many of them brushing very close to Freddie. He didn’t dare tuck in behind any of those exiting black coats, not with these handfuls of electric light, to stand out against the black like moons in the night sky.

  At last, the tall pale man’s views prevailed. He and the gaudy woman moved forward, and as they passed Freddie he yanked his hands out of the trash, causing a minor volcano in there, and put them back close to the woman’s dress, where they belonged. (The Security guard glared briefly at the trash can, knowing something had happened but not sure what.)

  But now there was a real problem. Three in the vestibule was a rather tight squeeze, and the security arrangements here included that the street-side gate, which opened outward, would not work until the inner door, which opened inward, was closed. Also, the tall pale man, being a gentleman, held the inner door open for the lady, then followed her through the doorway, much too close for Freddie to sandwich in between. Freddie had to duck under the gentleman’s door-holding arm, scoot through the narrow space between the gentleman’s left leg and the closing door, hold the glittery little sausages of diamond right down at floor level, and remain hunkered in the same position in the corner until the door closed and the gate opened.

  The woman had some sort of problem getting through the gate. She stuttered and skipped, the tall pale man backed up, Freddie bounced off him, and the man turned to frown directly into Freddie’s face from one foot away. Then the woman called something and the man turned back, expression bewildered and dissatisfied as he moved forward through the gate to the sidewalk, where he promptly and firmly slammed the gate shut before Freddie could get through.

  Well, shit. That was vindictive. Freddie stood there, looking out at the sidewalk, but there was nothing to be done, no way to got out there until someone else came along, to persuade the guard to hit that button. In the meantime, waiting, Freddie stood with his hands in the corner next to the hinged side of the gate, hiding the diamonds from passersby, while nothing at all happened for minute after minute.

  Come on, will ya? Somebody’s got to pass through here, in or out, either way. In the meantime, since this was merely an iron-barred gate that the breeze (if not Freddie) could go through, he was beginning to get a little chilly (June is June, but naked is naked), while the bottoms of his feet were chafed and sore (who knew what they might have picked up?) and his hands were tired of making fists. Looking catty-corner through the gate, he could see the van down there, just beyond the fire hydrant and the roofing-company truck, and from time to time he could even see Peg move her head inside there, looking back, wondering how he was doing, looking for him even though she knew she wouldn’t be able to see him.

  A customer. An Arab, in a white head towel and a long gleaming gray robe. He had appeared just outside the gate and stopped to press the button there.

  Freddie looked at him, and his heart sank. This was a large Arab, a hugely fat man who, in the pearly gray robe, looked mostly like a diving bell. He would fill this damn vestibule all by himself. How was Freddie to get by him and out of here?

  The hell with it, that was how. The nasty buzzer sounded, but before the Arab could pull on the gate Freddie pushed against it, shoving it out forcefully, holding it wide open as he sidled through between the iron bars and the very large customer.

  Who looked at the door in surprise, and then in pleasure. An innovation, since last he was here! A self-opening door, as in the supermarket! Very good!

  Smiling, the Arab entered the vestibule, as Freddie released the door and ran for the van, juking and jinking through the broken field of pedestrians, his hands with their packs of diamonds held down at his sides at thigh level, where people were not likely to be looking when he went by. And when that Arab left DIAMOND EXCHANGE, he’d probably whomp his big belly a good one against that gate when it didn’t open, wouldn’t he? Ah, well.

  Freddie reached the van. He bunked the window with his elbow bone, not wanting to raise a visible cluster of diamonds to window height, and inside he saw Peg leap, startled, then stare at him—through him, around him—and push the button to lower the window.

  Freddie turned to the van and raised his hands. He knew there was no point in shielding the movement with his body, it was just habit; nevertheless, he shielded the movement with his invisible body as he lifted both hands, stuck them through the open window, and dropped a lot of diamonds onto Peg’s lap. “Yike!” Peg said.

  Passersby would have seen, if anything, a flash, come and gone. “Hide them,” Freddie advised.

  Peg brushed at her lap with both hands, while saying, “Should I open the side door?”

  “Not yet.” She couldn’t see him grin, but he grinned anyway. Maybe she’d be able to hear the grin in his voice. “I’m not done,” he said.

  She stared toward his voice, which meant that actually she looked at his mouth. “Freddie? Why not?”

  Now that all the disasters had been avoided, now that he’d been freed from the vestibule, now that no one had seen the floating diamonds and grabbed him by the wrist, Freddie was feeling a sudden elation. The nervousness was gone, the apprehension was gone, the—whatchacallit—stage fright was gone. Now that he’d done it, Freddie was really ready to do it. This was a long block, a street full of trade, a street full of commerce. A street full of diamonds.

  “I’m gonna do it again, Peg,” Freddie said. You could hear the grin in his voice. “This is fun!”

  10

  It was five days after his meeting with the two burglar-doping researchers—and a further confirming meeting here in the office later that day with their astonishingly translucent cats—that Mordon Leethe got to meet at last with his ultimate authority, the CEO of NAABOR, his lord and master. It had been clear to him from the outset—as clear as those cats—that this situation could not be resolved or made use of at any lower level.

  The initial problem was, the situation could also not be described at any lower level—this was not news that Mordon wanted publicly aired. But unless he could explain to an entire ladder of underlings just why he wanted a private meeting with Jack Fullerton the Fourth, the boss of all bosses, they wouldn’t approve it. Sarcasm, anger, cold aloofness, and vague threat were the tools Mordon had used in lieu of candor—the last arrow in his quiver anyway, under any circumstances—and at last, on Friday afternoon, a reluctant PPS (personal private secretary) had informed Mordon that Mr. Fullerton would see him for thirty minutes on Monday morning, promptly at eleven.

  CEOs understand the word promptly differently from thee and me. Mordon arrived at five before the hour, and was ushered into Jack the Fourth’s football-field office in the World Trade Center at ten past the hour, to find its owner not yet there. Mordon refused an underling’s offers of coffee, tea, seltzer, or diet soft drink, and contented himself (if that’s the right word) with standing near the windows, gazing out at the broken playground of New Jersey across the broad sweep of heaving gunk of New York Harbor until twenty past, when the click of a door opening far behind him caused him to turn about, an obsequious oil automatically filming his face.

  Mordon watched as Jack Fullerton the Fourth wheezed himself in
to a room, carrying his oxygen machine in a Pebble Beach tote bag at his side, the slender plastic tube snaking up out of the bag and up along his back and over his shoulder, to cross his face just above the lip, extending a pair of tendrils into Jack the Fourth’s nostrils on the way by to provide him the extra oxygen he now required, then back over his other shoulder and thus downward once more into the machine in the tote bag. Some users wear that tube as though it’s a great unfair weight, pressing them down, down into the cold earth, long before their time; on others it becomes a ludicrous mustache, imitation Hitler, forcing the victim to poke fun at himself in addition to being sick as a dog; but on Jack the Fourth, with his heavy shoulders and glowering eyes and broad forehead and dissatisfied thick mouth and pugnacious stance, the translucent line of plastic bringing oxygen to his emphysemaclenched lungs was borne like a military decoration, perhaps awarded by the French: Prix de Nez, First Class.

  Jack Fullerton the Fourth had been chief executive officer of NAABOR the last seven years, having assumed the title after the cardiac-disease death of his uncle, Jim Fullerton the Third, who had himself taken over the helm nineteen years earlier, upon the lung-cancer demise of his cousin Tom Fullerton, Jr. All in all, the Fullerton family had for almost the entire length of the twentieth century controlled what had originally been National Tobacco, then (after the merger with American Leaf) N&A Tobacco, then (after the absorption of the Canadian firm Allied Paper Products) N.A.A. Corporation, then (after the horizontal expansions of the fifties and sixties) N.A.A. Brands of Raleigh, then (after a Madison Avenue face-lift) NAABOR.

  Jack the Fourth was accompanied everywhere these days by two “assistants.” These assistants knew nothing about corporate work, but were well skilled both as nurses and as bodyguards. The dark suits and conservative neckties they wore did not disguise their true callings, but did at least serve to soften their professional silence and alertness, and distract from their bulging muscles and bulging coats.

  This trio made its laborious way across the lush expanse of Virgin Mary–blue carpet toward the broad clean desk at the far end, Jack the Fourth not yet attempting to speak but contenting himself along the way with a nod and a small two-finger salute in Mordon’s direction, to which Mordon responded by nodding his head, smiling his mouth, and wagging his tail.

  At last seated at his desk, tote bag on the floor at his side, assistants in armchairs behind him and to his right, Jack the Fourth wheezed three or four times, then nodded at Mordon once more and gestured at the comfortable chair just across the desk. “Thank you, Jack,” said Mordon, coming over to settle himself into the chair (Jack liked imitation informality). “You’re looking well,” he lied.

  “Had a good enough night,” Jack the Fourth wheezed. “Had a good enough shit this morning.” His voice was like the wind in the upper reaches of a deconsecrated cathedral, possibly one where the nuns had all been raped and murdered and raped.

  “That’s good,” Mordon said, expressing interest.

  Jack the Fourth brooded at Mordon. “Haven’t seen you since the victory party,” he wheezed, “when we whupped the widows and orphans.”

  “Grand days,” Mordon agreed.

  Jack the Fourth’s interest in small talk had never been very strong. “Cartwright tells me,” he wheezed, “you want to talk about something, but you won’t tell him what it is.”

  “Jack,” Mordon said, with a significant look at the assistants, “I won’t tell anybody on this earth but you what it is.”

  Jack the Fourth fixed Mordon with a watery but cold eye. “You aren’t about to suggest,” he wheezed, “that my assistants leave us alone in here.”

  Mordon at once shifted ground. “Not at all, Jack,” he said. He had no idea if Jack the Fourth felt he might need his assistants to protect him from murderous attack from Mordon Leethe, or if he simply had in mind their nursing skills: CPR, all that. In any event, Mordon smoothly said, “I just wanted you to hear it first. After that, of course I’ll be guided by your decision.”

  “Fire away,” Jack the Fourth wheezed, opening a desk drawer and removing a fresh pack of cigarettes.

  While his CEO’s shaky fingers worked on opening the package, Mordon said, “We fund, under our American Tobacco Research Institute arm, two blue-sky medical researchers named Loomis and Heimhocker.”

  “Do we.” Jack the Fourth’s clean nails scrabbled at the cigarette pack, finally breaking through.

  “They’ve been studying melanoma.”

  Jack the Fourth tapped a cigarette loose, while that word circled down into his brain, searching for a definition with which to mate. Got it; Jack the Fourth frowned massively at Mordon. “Melanoma! What the fuck for?”

  “Research.”

  Jack the Fourth held up the cigarette for Mordon to see. “Let them make these fuckers less lethal,” he advised. “Melanoma! Who gives a fuck about melanoma?”

  “I think,” Mordon said carefully, not knowing how much Jack the Fourth wanted to know about his own business, “I think it’s mostly window dressing.”

  Again, Jack the Fourth thought that over, while one of his assistants took his cigarette, lit it for him, and gave it back. Taking a drag, coughing his guts out, heaving in the chair, tapping ash that didn’t yet exist into the hubcap-size clean ashtray on his desk, at last he wheezed, in utter disgust, “Public relations,” much as another man might have said, “There’s vomit on this seat.”

  “Yes, Jack,” Mordon said. “A smoke screen, you might say.”

  “That’s not bad.” Jack wheezed a chuckle.

  “But the point is, they’ve been working on two formulas to reduce skin pigmentation—it doesn’t matter, it’s just something to do with their research—and they both work pretty well, to the extent that they turn you translucent.”

  “Trans”—hack hack hack herack hok hok hok HOK HOK hack hack hack hack—“lucent? What do you mean?”

  “Well, these researchers gave the formulas to their cats, one each, and now you can see through the cats.”

  Jack the Fourth waved smoke away from his face with his free hand. “You mean they’re invisible?”

  “No, you can see them, the shapes of them, sort of grayish, but you can see through them. They’re like”—Mordon pointed at the air between himself and his master—“they’re like smoke.”

  Jack the Fourth shook his big head. “I’m not following this. They want to make cigarettes out of cats?”

  “No, no, I—”

  “Not that I’d be against it,” Jack wheezed, “if they were lower in tar and nicotine. But you’ve got to factor in those damn animal-rights people, you know, they’re much nastier than the human-rights people, human beings mean nothing to them.”

  “The cats,” Mordon said firmly, “were merely an early part of the experiment.”

  Jack the Fourth considered that. “Do cats get skin cancer?”

  “Not as far as I know. Jack, could I just tell you about this?”

  “I think you’d better.”

  “They have these two formulas,” Mordon said, and held his hands up as though they gripped test tubes. “They have to experiment with them,” and he poured the test tube contents onto the carpet. “They experimented on their cats,” and he spread his hands, palms up, forgiving the researchers on behalf of animal-rights activists everywhere. “But now,” and he brought his hands together as though hiding a baseball greased with illegal spit, “they need to experiment on human beings.”

  “I won’t be a part of that,” Jack the Fourth wheezed. “They’ll have to go offshore for that. Set them up a dummy corporation.”

  “Well, they already did it,” Mordon said, dropping his hands into his lap, and jutting his jaw forward like Il Duce. “They caught a burglar, tested one of the formulas on him, locked him up—very ineptly, I might say—and the burglar took the other formula, thinking it was the antidote, and escaped.”

  “Probably dead in a ditch somewhere,” Jack the Fourth commented, and paused to cou
gh before adding, “No legal problem I can see. Not for us.”

  “No, Jack,” Mordon said, and his hands reappeared, to conduct the slow movement of a sextet. “The researchers say it’s almost impossible the burglar’s dead. I wouldn’t come here, Jack, to talk to you about a dead burglar.”

  “I would hope not.” Jack the Fourth took a puff, strangled, retched, coughed his guts out, lost his oxygen tube out of his nose, replaced it with the help of both calm assistants, blew his nose on a Kleenex out of a desk drawer, wiped his eyes on another Kleenex, gasped and panted a while, clutched the arms of his chair as though it were mounted on the rear of a sports-fishing boat in a heavy sea, and at last wheezed, “Well, Mordon, if they don’t think this burglar’s dead, what do they think he is?”

  “Invisible.”

  For a long moment, there was silence in the room. Jack the Fourth didn’t wheeze. The assistants even looked at one another, briefly. Then, with a long shuddering inhalation, very like a death rattle, Jack the Fourth wheezed, “Invisible?”

  “They can’t be sure, of course, but it seems very likely.”

  “Invisible. Not smoke, not . . . ghostly. Somebody you can’t see at all.”

  “Yes.”

  “Hmmm,” wheezed Jack the Fourth.

  Briskly, Mordon said, “We’re pretty sure he left fingerprints at the researchers’ place. He’s a burglar, he’ll have a record. We don’t want to make an official complaint in this case, Jack, but surely we know someone somewhere in law enforcement—”

  “We know half the fucking Senate,” Jack the Fourth wheezed.

  “Half the Senate, Jack,” Mordon said, “is on the wrong side of the law. We need a lawman, someone with access to the FBI’s fingerprint files—”

  “You want this invisible man.”

  “You want him, Jack,” Mordon said. “He’ll work for us, if we give him the right inducement. The fly on the wall, Jack. In jury deliberations, in advertising-campaign strategy sessions, in closed congressional hearings, in private pricing discussions . . .”