Smoke

by Donald E. Westlake

  Edmond said, “I could draw up a preliminary agreement for you all right now. There’d be profit in it, too, of course, for all of you. Film and television rights, a sort of super magic act onstage—”

  “You’re gonna make a freak show outta me?”

  “Oh, hardly anything that tasteless,” Edmond assured him.

  “The rose room was nice, wasn’t it?” David asked. “You wouldn’t mind staying there again, would you?”

  “You could put the door back on,” Peter said.

  “Your girlfriend could come visit you all you wanted,” David said.

  “We’ll study you,” Peter said, “we’ll show you to the scientific community and we’ll all study you, we’ll study the effects, and I’m sure we’ll find the antidote in no time.”

  “That’s right,” David said, blinking, looking hangdog.

  “You’re lying, aren’t you?”

  “Freddie, what else are you going to do?” Peter demanded.

  “Stay the way I am.” The bravado obvious in that voice, he went on, “I’m doing okay, don’t worry about me.”

  David said, “The policeman will get you, the really nasty one,” and Peter said, “They know about the robberies you did.”

  “What robberies?”

  “The fur place, and the diamond place. You can’t wear gloves, Freddie, you leave fingerprints wherever you go.”

  “What?” The discorporate voice sounded more exasperated than ever. “Invisible hands leave prints?”

  “I’m afraid so, yes,” Peter said.

  “Goddam it!”

  A champagne bottle lifted itself out of its icer, rose into the air, and tilted itself upside down. They all heard the glug-glug-glug, and they all watched in astonishment as the amber fluid flowed down a twisty curvy route through the air and made a bowl of itself three feet from the ground.

  The bottle lowered, and waved around. The swallowed champagne moved tidally, like the sea. “Son of a bitch!” Freddie cried, and the bottle leaped crash back into the water and ice, without breaking. “You are some goddam guys,” Freddie snarled.

  Peter said, “Freddie, for your own good, please don’t leave,” and David said, “We’re on your side, honest we are.”

  Everybody watched the bowl of champagne.

  “With friends like you . . .” said the bitter voice. The bowl moved toward the door. “Good-bye.”

  “Wait!” cried David, and Peter cried, “Stop him!”

  “Harvey!” shouted Martin. “Har—wait! That’s very very valuable!”

  A Ming vase had just jumped up from its stand and hung in midair over by the door. The visible people in the room were all frozen in odd postures, half-seated and half-standing. Martin’s hand was out imploringly toward the vase.

  This tableau lasted one second, two seconds, and then the voice cried, “You’ll want to catch it, then!” and the vase went arching up into the air in the middle of the room.

  Everybody ran for it, arms outstretched. Everybody crashed into everybody else, and the vase crashed into the floor. Everybody stared at four hundred thousand dollars in tiny pieces, and the front door slammed.

  45

  Roving the outside of the house, while the thirteen pursuers went haring off in all directions—or, hounding off in all directions, since they kept baying at one another—Freddie felt a deep and total bitterness, very unlike his normally sunny personality. He had to keep reminding himself that violence wasn’t part of his MO. Right now, he wanted to bust up a lot more than some stupid vase that wasn’t good for anything but to throw your old pennies in.

  He couldn’t leave here, not yet; he was stuck in this place for a while. They were all running around, hither and yon, beating the bushes with brooms and cue sticks, looking for that telltale bowl of champagne, and every once in a while finding it: “There he is! There he is!” And off he would bound once more.

  He shouldn’t have drunk the champagne. The news had just been so sudden and so bad, that was all. The realization of what had been done to him, and why.

  In the first place, and he couldn’t really articulate this very well, but he instinctively understood it, in the first place, this was a matter of class. Not sexual orientation, that wasn’t the issue here. What they’d done to Freddie, those two doctors, they would not have done to anybody they considered their equal, and it wouldn’t matter if the guy swung this way or that way or both ways or no way at all. They had looked upon Freddie as being underclass or lower class or working class or however they might choose to phrase it, and therefore they could treat him any damn way they wanted because the civilized rules didn’t apply.

  That’s right. The civilized rules only applied to people who talked like them, had their kind of education, read the same newspapers and magazines, had the same attitudes toward things, including the attitudes toward people like Freddie. To know that you’ve been fucked over not because science needed it, or nobody else was available, or it was the luck of the draw, but only because you’re scum, can take some getting used to, and can move a nonviolent guy very near to the edge of the envelope of his MO.

  In the second place, Peg. Already, he and she were about to begin a trial separation just because of the way he already was, and figuring this problem had to be temporary and sooner or later he’d be getting back his regular self again. And now what? How could he tell Peg he didn’t have a regular self anymore? She’d have to write him off, wouldn’t she? Give up on him entirely, find some other guy she could look at over a candlelit table. Leave him completely alone.

  He wasn’t exactly in a state to meet girls, was he?

  Over there by the house, they were coming to the conclusion that he’d gotten away. He couldn’t leave the property yet, though, and in any case he was in no hurry to go away from here, to go anywhere, to do anything; not with what he knew now.

  He kept roaming, wishing the champagne would hurry up and finish digesting—it hadn’t improved his mood, and it kept putting those guys on his trail—and then he came across the swimming pool, out behind the house. He and the champagne could both hide in there, couldn’t they, while he waited? They could. Freddie eased himself down into the pool, and morosely began to do laps.

   

  * * *

   

  It was Curtis the set designer who saw it. They’d all come back inside, barricaded themselves in here to some degree, and were gathered around the living room trying to decide what to do next.

  Was the invisible man still somewhere on the property? If so, did he plan some sort of awful vengeance for what Peter and David had done to him? And if he did have such plans, would he be willing to restrict his vengeance to Peter and David, who after all did deserve the fellow’s wrath—“Thank you I don’t think”—or would he make the Draconian decision that the friend of his enemy is also his enemy, and thus wreak his awful vengeance indiscriminately on the whole crowd?

  “And with thirty-four people more invited for this evening,” Robert said. “This is some little contretemps you two brought us, I must say.”

  “You wanted him to come here,” Peter said, and David said, “You all just thought it was going to be fun.”

  Curtis didn’t like squabbling; he got enough of that in the theater. So he roved the living room while the others bickered, and after a while he picked up the bird-watching binoculars and casually looked through them, adjusting the focus, wondering what sort of bird one might watch in this neighborhood, and all at once he stiffened. “Robert,” he said, half-afraid to breathe. “Robert, there’s something . . . in the pool.”

   

  * * *

   

  Freddie loved to swim. His body moved through the buoyant water, resisting him and helping him at the same time, urging him along. Below the surface, he swept along, pushing through the clear slightly warmed water, surfacing only when he needed to breathe, then rolling like a dolphin down again beneath the air.

  Time disappeared. The
hot thoughts in his brain cooled. He knew he was an adaptable sort of guy, inventive, basically positive. He was giving those qualities their most severe test at the moment, and he was pleased to see his better side coming through. If this is who he had to be from now on, he realized, somehow he’d figure out a way to handle it. The only real insoluble problem he could see was Peg.

  What did please him, in this whole mess, was that he hadn’t the slightest urge to go back to dope. Not that finding a vein would be at all easy, even if he wanted to; though on the other hand he wouldn’t have that much trouble finding his nose. But he didn’t want to, not even in this extreme situation, and he was glad to see that in himself. I may be disappearing, he thought to himself, but at least I seem to have grown up.

  Out of air. He rolled to the surface, took in a lungful of air, heard the motor sound, and had already slip-slid back down into the moving water when the echo of what he’d just seen and heard came back to him.

  The thirteen guys. They were all around the pool, looking at him. And some kind of motor was running.

  Staying underwater, Freddie fishtailed on, remembering what Peg had said about being able to see him, or at least find him, in the pool. Time to get out of here. Then, as he thought that, the world around him darkened; not black, but suddenly much dimmer than before. He rolled over onto his back, and couldn’t for a second figure out that darkness up there, spreading inexorably from one end of the pool to the other, And then he understood.

  The pool cover! The bastards were closing their electrically run pool cover over him!

  He swam ahead of the advancing darkness to the far end of the pool, but the second his wet hand touched the top of the coping around the pool’s edge half a dozen of the bastards yelled, “There he is! There he is!” And came running, to surround that wet handprint.

  Can’t get out, not here. Freddie pushed away from the edge as people risked falling in fully dressed to reach for him. He flowed away, faceup, kicking, and here came the pool cover, right over him.

  Hell! Hell and blast and damn son of a bitch!

  Narrr, said the pool-cover motor, as Freddie quartered beneath it like a goldfish in a too-small aquarium. Click, said the pool-cover motor, and Freddie was completely roofed in, floating in a big room of water with no exits.

  “Turn off the heater!” one of the bastards yelled.

  Oh, you bastard, Freddie thought, I’ll get you for this, I’ll get you all for this. The rage that had consumed him, back in the house, when he’d first learned the truth, came back into him now in full force, as though it had never gone away. Go ahead and turn off the heater, he thought, my brain could heat this pool.

  “Freddie? Freddie!”

  It was one of the doctors, he recognized the voice, the blond baby-fat one, Dr. David Loomis. Freddie was damned if he’d talk to the bastard. To conserve his strength, he moved down to the shallow end of the pool, sat there on the lowest step, his head just below the thick tarp of the cover, and considered his situation.

  Not so good. The cover was loose down both long sides of the pool, only fastened tight across the ends, but the bastards were watching the sides, they’d see the cover lump up if he tried to get out, and they’d see his wet prints on the pool surround.

  Trapped. And, face it, his brain would not heat the pool. With the cover on, the sun’s warmth no longer reached the water. There was no place under here that he could go without being in water. After a while, this was not going to be a pleasant place.

  Crap. Freddie rested a wet elbow on a wet knee, cupped a wet chin in his wet palm, and waited.

   

  * * *

   

  Martin knelt beside the pool, holding up the edge of the cover so he could look in at the shadowed grotto within. It had been nearly two hours now, and the invisible man had so far refused absolutely to respond. He won’t speak, he won’t move, he won’t do a thing. He just sits there, on the steps at the shallow end.

  Martin called, “Freddie? Wouldn’t you like to come out now? Isn’t it getting a little cold in there? We could give you towels, a robe, we have lovely terry-cloth robes, one size fits all. No? Would you like a cup of coffee? Tea? A drink? We have a nice Spanish red that might warm you if you’re feeling a bit chilly. Freddie? Forgive my informality, but I don’t know your last name. You’re going to make yourself sick if you stay in there much longer, you really are. Trust Nurse Martin, please do. Freddie? Darn it, you know, I can see you there, the parts of you that are under water, I can see you sitting there on that step, the least you could do, I mean, it is our pool, the least you could do is give us the courtesy of an answer. Freddie? No? Oh, Freddie, this isn’t going to get you anywhere but a good case of the flu.”

  Reluctant, saddened, Martin dropped the pool-cover edge and got to his feet. He shook his head at Peter, nearby. “He’s just stubborn, Peter, he’s just very very stubborn.”

  Peter had decided to be coldhearted; it was the only way to handle the situation that he could see. He said, “Let him stay in there as long as he wants. Let him get really exhausted down in there, and when he finally does come out he’ll be that much easier to deal with.”

  “I suppose so,” Martin said, sorry to treat a fellow human being in such a way, and a gray van came tearing around the end of the house, over the lawn, through the hedges, with a sudden blaring squawk and ruckus of horn.

  “Good God!” Martin cried. “What now?”

  The van drove straight for the pool, horn screaming, regardless of whatever else was in the way. “My delphiniums!” screamed Robert.

  People ran toward the van, but then they turned and ran away from it, because it was not veering out of the way. And the horn of the thing just kept blaring and blaring and blaring.

  “There he is!” screamed Peter, pointing at the sudden bulge that had risen up at the side of the pool cover, and then the spray of moving water drops in the air, the sudden wet footprints on the deck.

  “Stop him!” a lot of people cried, and a few tried. Gerald the talent agent happened to be nearest the expanding line of wet footprints; he ran over there, arms widespread to capture the invisible man, and suddenly he went, “Whoooffff!” and doubled up, clutching his midsection.

  William the screenwriter stuck out a foot in front of the advancing prints, to trip the fellow, instead of which his ankle was grabbed by a hard hand, his leg was yanked up over his head, and he was dumped ass-over-teakettle over a folding chaise longue that then folded around him like a Venus fly-trap.

  Peter came running at an angle to intercept the footprints, yelling, “Freddie, listen! Freddie, listen!” until he abruptly flipped over and fell on his back. When he sat up, his nose was bleeding. “He hit me,” Peter said, in utter astonishment.

  Meanwhile, the van was circling around and around, as near the pool as it could get, running roughshod over all sorts of plantings, while the grim-faced young woman at the wheel kept everybody from getting too close. Then all at once she braked to a stop, which did the lawn no good, and the passenger door snapped open and shut, and the van shot away, which did the lawn even less good.

  It was gone. The van was gone. Without question, the invisible man was gone. The pool was covered, the lawn and the gardens were a wreck, the guests were staggering around in filthy disarray, the hosts were furious, nobody remembered the van’s license number, and Peter’s nose was bleeding.

  And the weekend had just begun.

  46

  “How are you?”

  Peg waited to ask that question until after they’d bounced over a lot of shrubbery and plantings and railroad ties and pebbly Japanese gardens and a lot of other stuff all the way around to the front of the house, and then out the weaving blacktop driveway, and then the sharp squealing rattly right turn onto the dirt of Quarantine Road, with all this time Freddie somewhere in the vehicle, no telling where, probably just holding on for dear life. “How are you?” she asked, as they settled down to the more or less straight an
d more or less even dirt surface of Quarantine Road.

  “Iiiiii’ mm freezing!”

  “Oh, you poor baby!”

  The voice had come from the passenger seat, and sounded much frailer and weaker than Freddie’s normal voice. She reached out and touched a leg, and that was cold flesh she was feeling there. Cold and clammy. “What did they do to you?”

  “In the pool,” he said. “Forever, Peg.”

  “I saw them there,” she told him. Here was the end of Quarantine Road; she made the left onto County Route 14. “I got back to the house,” she said, “and saw your note, and the little map you drew up, and I came up here as quick as I could.”

  “Th-th-thank you.”

  “There were all those cars parked there, and I went first to the front door, but then I saw everybody was around back, so I snuck over and saw them around the pool, and listened, and finally figured it out they had you trapped in there.”

  “Boy, did they.”

  “When we get home, you’ll take a nice hot tub, and I’ll grill hamburgers, how does that sound?”

  “Better than anything else I heard today.”

  Peg drove another half mile or so before that penny dropped. When it did, she said, “Oh? You got to talk to the doctors?”

  “I got to listen to them. They didn’t know I was there.”

  “And what did they say?”

  “Well, the first thing I learned,” he said, and she didn’t have to see a face or body language or anything like that to know he was stalling, so that bad news must be on the way here, sooner or later, “the first thing I learned, if they do talk to me, they’re gonna lie to me. They said they were, they told those other guys that.”

  “Who were all those people?”

  “I dunno, some kind of house party. I got the feeling it was like Dracula’s house, you wouldn’t want to go there after dark.”