Thank You for Smoking

by Christopher Buckley

"That's what the focus group told us, too. Very high negatives. But now, check out… this."

  Nick wasn't sure what it was, other than a smiling skull. And yet the longer he looked at it, the more gentle it seemed. Almost… friendly.

  "Who," Sven said, "is the nicest person in the world?"

  "I don't know any nice people," Nick said.

  "Then say hello to your new friend, 'Mr. Death's Neighborhood.' "

  Nick stared at the skull. It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day for a neighbor, will you be mine? "That's his skull?"

  "In the flesh. Actually, without the flesh. The computer gives you a perfect image of what his skull looks like underneath. It's basically just a reverse of a program they developed for forensic anthropologists who're trying to figure out who the bones that just turned up in someone's basement belonged to."

  "Wow."

  "The program's called KCIROY. Yorick, you know, the skull in Hamlet, spelled backward."

  "Oh, right."

  "All that's missing here is the cardigan sweater. We didn't have room for that. The focus groups loved it. The nonsmokers actually wanted to buy this pack. I took it home and tried it out on my kids. And they loved it."

  "Really," Nick said. "I must share it with my twelve-year-old."

  24

  Tobacco Spokesman Retains Criminal Lawyer As FBI Shifts Investigation Focus Onto Him

  Naylor Accuses Senator Finisterre of Initiating Federal Probe

  BY HEATHER HOLLOWAY MOON CORRESPONDENT

  "I think," Polly said in the hushed tones that were now standard at Mod Squad lunches, "that your Heather Holloway strategy has not been a total success."

  "I thought," Nick said, stirring his second vodka negroni with his finger, "that if I made her think I did kidnap myself, that she'd hold off rushing into print with a story about how the FBI was investigating me. And eventually trip herself up trying to prove that I kidnapped myself, which she can't, because I didn't. If you… see."

  "Young Washingtonians in love," Bobby Jay snorted. "What a wonderful thing it is."

  "For a Jesus freak," Polly said, "you're very cynical, Bobby Jay."

  "It should have worked," Nick said. "Because I did not kidnap myself."

  "Shh," Polly said, taking his arm.

  "Why," Nick said, "do I get the feeling that I'm preaching to the unconverted?"

  "We believe you," Polly said, though it sounded sort of forced.

  "Then that prick Carlinsky leaks it to her that he's representing me, and—this." Nick whacked the newspaper. "How can you be sure it was Carlinsky?"

  "Because he told me he didn't. Would you believe a lawyer who managed to get acquitted a man who sold radioactive waste as furniture-polish remover, the head of the Teamsters union, and that German they caught trying to resell that submarine to the Iraqis?"

  "See your point."

  "I did some checking on him. He doesn't drink, he doesn't smoke, he doesn't do the woolly deed with females or males. All he cares about is publicity. Do you know that he charged Mr. Dip 'n' Glow for every time he was quoted in the press?"

  "Really?"

  "When he went on Nightline, his client got a bill for half an hour, which in his case is $225. Plus for the limo to take him to the TV studio. And he wasn't even discussing the Dip 'n' Glow case. It was a show about whether there are too many lawyers."

  "Well," Polly said, "he'll do well for himself with your case. I have a feeling there are going to be a lot of mentions of you in the press."

  "At least he's good," Bobby Jay said. "He'll probably get you off."

  "I haven't been charged with anything, Bobby."

  "I mean, if."

  "We believe you," Polly said, giving him a squeeze.

  "Would you please not talk to me in that soothing tone of voice. I'm not a mental patient." Nick looked glumly at the Moon headline. Front page, but below the fold.

  "She did print my quote about how Finisterre put the FBI up to it," Nick said.

  Polly read: " 'Leslie Dach, an aide to Senator Finisterre, dismissed Mr. Naylor's allegation as being 'lower than the scum on an eel's underbelly,' adding that it was 'the kind of odious insinuation that has come to typify the tobacco lobby as it becomes more and more desperate to maintain its stranglehold on the American public's lungs and wallets.' I'd say she gave the Finisterre camp equal time to answer your charge."

  "Told you that woman was nothing but trouble," Bobby Jay said.

  "Thank you, Bobby Jay," Nick said. "That's very helpful just now. Something to tide me over until you give me your wonderful intel from the FBI firing range."

  "I don't think bibulating yourself into stupefaction is going to help."

  "Boys, boys," Polly said.

  "If I can't smoke, I'm going to drink," Nick said. "It's the only way I know to avoid karoshi."

  "What's that?"

  "Japanese for 'sudden death.' It happens to their executives a lot. They work twenty-three-hour days, then one day they're walking along the Ginza, going back to their offices at ten o'clock after a business dinner, they just fall down on the sidewalk and die. One minute they're middle managers, the next, they're on their backs on the pavement like June bugs."

  Nick's cellular rang. It was Gazelle and she was whispering. "Nick, it's those FBI people. They're headed your way."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Nick, I had to tell them where you were."

  "Why? Did they beat you with rubber truncheons? Oh hell. All right, call Carlinsky. No, never mind, I'll call him."

  "What about your panel this afternoon?"

  "What panel?"

  "The Healthy Heart 2000 panel."

  "Call Jeannette. No, call Tyler. And tell him to expect a lot of questions about last week's JAMA story about clots. Clots. Erhardt's got some stuff on it. It's on my desk somewhere."

  Nick hung up, drank the last of his vodka negroni in a swallow. "So, would you like to meet some FBI agents?"

  Agents Monmaney and Allman arrived a few minutes later, suggesting that they had hurried, which was not particularly reassuring. Nick saw that they were followed by a uniformed D.C. policeman, which was even less so. Nick's three bodyguards, immediately assessing the situation, made no move to interfere with these more legitimate carriers of guns.

  "Mr. Naylor," Monmaney said with his usual charm, "would you please stand up and move toward the fireplace."

  "Why," Nick said, "would I want to do that?"

  "Yeah. Hold on a minute," Polly said.

  "Ma'am!" the D.C. cop said warningly. What a macho guy, talking tough like that to a size six.

  But — what was this? Monmaney unmistakably placing his hand on his gun? "All right, Mr. Naylor, please stand up, keep your hands where I can see them, turn around and move toward the fireplace."

  And so Nick found himself spread-eagled over the fireplace, staring down into the fake flames, as Agent Monmaney frisked him. And then handcuffed him. Dimly, he heard the words 'arrest' and the familiar lines about how he had the right to remain silent, et cetera.

  "I'd like to see some ID," Bobby Jay said in a steely tone.

  "Sir!" the D.C. cop shouted.

  "Well you got that right, bub."

  "Stand up, sir." Then Bobby Jay was being spread-eagled, or in his case, spread-hooked, and frisked by the cop.

  "What's this?" The cop found something interesting in the vicinity of Bobby Jay's ankle. A bulge. Now there was a commotion and the D.C. cop had his gun out and was pointing it at Bobby Jay in what Nick thought was a slightly melodramatic way.

  "Hunh," Bobby Jay said. "That's — you know, I didn't realize that I was wearing that. See, I live in Virginia and I wasn't actually planning to come in to the District today, and—"

  "You're under arrest for possession of a concealed loaded firearm."

  "Aw now, come on, there's no need for that. I'm a senior vice president of SAFETY."

  "You have the right to remain silent. "

  The D.C
. cop was stymied as to how to handcuff Bobby Jay's hook.

  As Nick and Bobby Jay were being led away, Polly, who looked like she was going into shock, said to them, "I'll… get the… check."

  FBI Arrests Tobacco Smokesman; Charges Him in Kidnapping Scheme

  Nicotine Patch Boxes With Naylor's Fingerprints Are Found at Va. Cabin

  Gun Lobbyist is Arrested With Him For Carrying an Illegal Handgun

  BY HEATHER HOLLOWAY MOON CORRESPONDENT

  "What I don't understand," Steve Carlinsky was saying, "is why you didn't tell me about these boxes before."

  Things were looking a little calmer through Nick's eyes, owing to the 10 mgs of Valium Polly had given him. He would have preferred a couple of stiff vodka negronis, or for that matter a hash brownie, but he refrained from asking for either since it was ten o'clock in the morning. It had not been a pleasant eighteen hours. His fingers still smelled of the stuff they'd given him to wipe off the fingerprint ink, and the rest of him felt stale and clammy, despite the clean shirt, underwear, and socks that Polly — dear Polly — had provided. All night she had shuttled back and forth between the FBI building, where Nick had spent the night being gone over by agents Monmaney and Allman, and the D.C. city jail, where Bobby Jay had spent his night, making all sorts of new friends, many of whom shared his views on gun control. Nick's one consolation was that the quality of person you meet in a federal lockup was, perhaps, slightly superior to the ones you met in the municipal jail. At his arraignment, Polly told him that Bobby Jay had inserted his hook deeply into a delicate part of a fellow prisoner who had expressed the desire to share intimacies with him in the toilets. There was now the possibility that a charge of assault with a deadly weapon would be added to the firearms charge, though his lawyer was optimistic on that count. As for Nick, Carlinsky had persuaded the judge that, grievous though the charge was — conspiracy to commit criminal fraud; criminal fraud; giving false evidence to federal officers; along with a few lesser charges that Carlinsky said were just plain "piling on" — Nick was unlikely to flee to the Canadian border in his BMW, and so he'd gotten him released on bail of $100,000, which the Captain, from his hospital bed, had ordered BR to post. So here he was in the offices of the man upon whom he was now dependent to keep him from being sent away for ten to fifteen years, doing his best to cope. "Tell you what about the boxes?"

  Carlinsky's already close-set eyes narrowed so much that Nick thought they were going to combine into one big eye, like the ones on the prison guards on the planet Alar.

  "Nick, how can I help you if you won't help me?"

  "Steve, I don't know how my fingerprints got on the boxes."

  Carlinsky pensively made a steeple with his hands. "Let's review."

  "Again?"

  "They have ten boxes of NicArrest nicotine patches with your fingerprints all over them at a rental cabin in Virginia that was rented sight unseen over the phone. They have a record of calls made to that cabin from your office phone, the second call on the morning of the abduction, and a piece of paper found in your apartment with the phone number of the cabin. Okay, now any paralegal in my office could get that last piece of evidence thrown out on illegal search, and anyone could have placed the call to the cabin from your office— provided we can establish that you weren't in the office at the time it was placed. But the boxes. The boxes are a problem. As evidence goes, fingerprints are very, very tough. I'd rather go up against a DNA match than fingerprints. Do you know why?" Carlinsky was the kind who waited until you said, Why?

  "Why?" Nick said.

  "Because your average District of Columbia jury does not understand DNA. And being lectured about it makes them feel like they're back in high school, flunking biology. You have to present it to them so sloowly and caarefully that it makes them feel like idiots. They resent you for it, and little good comes of making a jury feel inadequate. But fingerprints — fingerprints are easy to grasp. Much easier than DNA, or such precious bodily fluids as blood or urine or sperm."

  "Are you saying your job would be easier if they found boxes of nicotine patches with my blood or sp…?"

  "Nick, are you all right? Wait, we have work to do. Where are you going?"

  "To kill someone," Nick said, heading out the door.

  Nick stormed out of the Hill Building overlooking Farragut Square and made his way down I Street toward the Academy offices in what passers-by could not have mistaken for anything other than what is usually called a towering rage. The only question he was still trying to resolve in his mind was — what instrument to use on Jeannette. His first impulse was to drag her, by that tight little bun of hair, to his balcony and toss her ten stories down into the fountain. He mused on other, less spectacular but equally efficient ways to devise her demise. But it is a scientific fact — and not one of Erhardt's — that in moments of stress we lose twenty-five percent of our powers of reason, and so as the first flush of rage subsided, fantasies of listening to Jeannette's death gurgle as his hands throttled her lovely neck were displaced by images of him being carted out of the Academy by the men in white and being taken across the river to Saint Elizabeth's, where his new padded-cellmate John Hinckley could critique for him, over and over and over, Jodie Foster's performance in The Silence of the Lambs.

  25

  There were no hurrahs this time for the returning conqueror as Nick made his way through the Academy. It was downright awkward. People kept saying, "Oh — Nick… " and kept right on going. Only Gomez O'Neal, whom he met by the coffee machine, greeted him with sympathy. "You okay, Nick?"

  "Fine, fine," grinding away on his back molars.

  Gomez put his hand on his shoulder. "You hang in there."

  Coffee in hand, Nick made his way past a gauntlet of averted glances toward BR's office.

  "Oh — Nick…" BR's secretary said. "He's busy. He's in with Jeannette."

  Nick thought there might be one superfluous word in that sentence. He barged right in, rather hoping he'd catch them in flagrante, whacking each other with riding crops, but they were only going over papers.

  "Morning," Nick said.

  BR and Jeannette stared in surprise. "Are you all right?" BR asked.

  "Fine, fine. There's something about staying up all night protesting your innocence to FBI agents that I find invigorating."

  "Would you excuse us?" BR said to Jeannette.

  "No, please," Nick said. "I certainly don't have anything to hide from Jeannette."

  BR leaned back in his big black leather chair. "How do you think we ought to proceed?"

  "In terms of what?"

  "In terms of your situation."

  "Oh that. Well, as you say, Steve Carlinsky's the best there is. I'm sure he'll figure out something. That's why you're paying him $450 an hour."

  "I meant more in terms of the immediate situation. I don't need to tell you what kind of press we're getting. I have a responsibility to think of the organization. Jeannette thought a leave of absence might make sense."

  "I have no objections if Jeannette wants to take a leave of absence."

  "Uh, I think we're talking about you taking a leave of absence."

  "Much too much to do. Finisterre, Mr. Jolly Roger's Neighborhood, Project Hollywood. Gotta keep up the Big Mo." Nick smiled. "Neo-Puritans never sleep."

  "I'm not sure that's advisable, at this point. You've sort of become… "

  "A liability?"

  "An issue, certainly." BR held up the morning papers. "Your Ms. Holloway seems to be in hot pursuit of her first Pulitzer. She does have good sources."

  "Not as good as the FBI's. Now they have sources."

  "We're getting a hell of a lot of calls about this. Very, very angry calls."

  "Yes, I can imagine what they must think."

  "Jeannette's office has fielded one hundred seventy-eight calls this morning."

  "Jeannette's office?"

  "We obviously can't refer calls about you to your office."

  "No, no. Naturally. We
ll, Jeannette can certainly handle it. In fact, I appreciate Jeannette's abilities more and more each day. But I'm not sure that a leave of absence is a good idea."

  "And why is that?"

  "Because," Nick grinned, "it would send the signal that you all think I'm guilty. Which of course is not the case. Right?" BR and Jeannette stared.

  "I mean, the notion that I would cover myself with nicotine patches to the point of giving myself several heart attacks, and throw up a hundred times, and then leave the empty boxes all over the cabin for the FBI to find, once they were tipped off. And call the cabin from my office phone on the morning I abduct myself. And leave the number of the cabin right out in the open in my apartment. I mean, who would believe that a smart guy like me would be so FUCKING STUPID?!" Jeannette started.

  "Sorry," Nick said. "Don't know what got into me. Anyway, I know my colleagues, my trench mates, my brothers- and sisters-in-arms, could never believe that I'd be capable of such ineptitude. So," he said brightly, "let's fight this all the way to the Supreme Court."

  BR said, "Do we have a defense strategy'?"

  "You bet. We're going to find the people who made me into the asshole."

  "Do you have any idea who those might be?"

  "Well," Nick said pensively, "they would have to be people who really despise me. But in my case that comes to about four-fifths of the U.S. population. Two hundred million. Sort of a big suspect pool, isn't it? You know, they'll probably be thrilled to see me get sent off to play love slave to the Aryan Brotherhood for ten to fifteen."

  "I'm not sure it's going to come to that," BR said. "We ought to be able to get you into some minimum-security place."

  "Oh," Nick said, "I wouldn't count on it. Carlinsky says he's never seen prosecutors so pissed off. Evil yuppie scum devises cheap stunt to promote himself and cancer. He says they're out for blood." Nick grinned. "Mine."

  "Well," BR said, leaning forward in a way suggesting that he was tired of badinage about Nick having to spend his next decade behind bars being gang-banged by people with swastika tattoos. "Carlinsky is the best, and we are behind you. But I think under the circumstances a leave of absence does make sense."