Smoke

by Donald E. Westlake

  3

  Freddie put a fax machine on top of a printer and carried both out to the van, juggling them there with one hand and one knee while unlocking the van’s side cargo door. It was a pain having to unlock and relock the van every trip, but anybody who leaves a vehicle alone and unsealed for even a second in Manhattan is looking for trouble, and will soon be looking for a new radio.

  It may be that the pervasive air of theft and chicanery forever floating like an aggressive cloud bank over New York City had played some part in Freddie’s original decision to become a thief. In a different part of the world, where both property and human feelings are respected—oh, someplace like Ashland, Oregon, say—even the scurviest villain will have the occasional bout of conscience, but in New York’s take-or-be-taken atmosphere moral suasion goes for naught.

  Not that most New Yorkers are thieves. It is merely that most New Yorkers expect to be robbed, all the time, everywhere, in all circumstances, and in every way imaginable. The actual thieves in the city are statistically few, but very busy, and they set the tone. Therefore, whenever a New Yorker is robbed, there’s no thought in anyone’s mind, including the victim’s, of a community outraged or a moral ethos damaged. There’s nothing to be done about it, really, but shrug one’s shoulders, buy better locks for next time, and rip off the insurance company.

  Having relocked the van, Freddie went back to the neatly appointed front office on the first floor of the townhouse, and by the light of his muted pen-flash stacked a keyboard on a VDT, picked them up with both hands from underneath—van keys hooked in fingers of right hand—turned toward the front door, and a bright light hit him smack in the face.

  Oh, shit. Freddie immediately slapped his eyelids shut; he knew that much. Don’t lose your night vision. Eyes closed, he started to turn back to the desk to put down the VDT and keyboard, but a voice from the darkness said, “Don’t move,” so he stopped moving.

  A second voice from the darkness said, “I think you’re supposed to say ‘freeze.’”

  “It means the same thing,” said the first voice, sounding a little testy.

  The second voice said, “Maybe not to them.”

  “Them,” Freddie knew, was him. And “him,” at this moment in the history of the world, was a guy in trouble. Third conviction as an adult. Good-bye Peg Briscoe, good-bye nice little apartment in Bay Ridge, good-bye best years of his life.

  It was very depressing.

  Well, let’s get on with it, then. His eyes still squeezed shut, Freddie said, “I’ll just put this stuff down here.”

  “No, no” said the first voice. “I like you with your hands occupied. Search him, David.”

  “I don’t have any weapons, if that’s what you mean,” Freddie said. At least they wouldn’t be getting him for armed robbery, which might count for something twenty-five or thirty years from now, when he first came up for parole. Jesus Christ.

  A lot more light suddenly flooded onto his eyelids; they’d switched on the room fluorescents. Still, he kept his eyes closed, jealously guarding that old night vision, the one asset he still had that might prove useful, God knew how.

  “Of course you have weapons,” said the second voice, David, approaching. “You’re a hardened criminal, aren’t you?”

  “I’m kind of semisoft,” Freddie said, quoting a remark Peg had made one night, comparing him to some crime show they were then watching on television (hoping for a little human contact there, but not expecting much).

  And not getting much. If the two voices found the remark as amusing in this context as Freddie had in the context of being in bed with Peg watching television while stroking her near thigh, they kept it to themselves. There was ongoing silence while hands patted him all over, and then David, now directly behind Freddie, said, “He’s clean.”

  Everybody watches television. “Told you so,” said Freddie.

  “What a trusting person you must be,” said voice number one.

  David, who had now moved around to Freddie’s front, said, “His eyes are closed, Peter, do you see that?”

  “Maybe he’s afraid of us,” Peter said.

  “Maybe it’s deniability,” said David, his voice receding toward Peter. “You know, so he’d be able to swear in court he couldn’t identify us.”

  Sounding flabbergasted, Peter said, “For Christ’s sake, David, him not identify us? Good God, why?”

  “I don’t know,” David said. “I’m no lawyer.”

  I’d like to see these idiots, just once, Freddie admitted to himself, but he still thought there might be some value in retaining whatever night vision he might still have with all this fluorescent glare greenish-red on his eyelids, so he kept his eyes squeezed shut and his hands cupping the VDT—which was beginning to get heavy—and waited for whatever would follow from here.

  Which was Peter saying, “David, where did we put those handcuffs?”

  Freddie couldn’t help it; his eyes popped open, night vision be damned. Scrunching up his cheeks against the sudden onslaught of fluorescents, he said, “Handcuffs! What do you people want with handcuffs?”

  Meanwhile, David was saying, “What handcuffs? We don’t have any handcuffs.”

  Peter, the tall skinny one with fuzzy black hair, answered Freddie first. “I want them for you, of course. You can’t stand there holding our office equipment all night.” Then, to David, he said, “From that Halloween thing. You remember.”

  David, the blond one with the baby fat, said, “Do we still have those?”

  “Of course. You never throw anything away.”

  “You don’t need handcuffs,” Freddie said.

  Peter said, “David, look in the storage closet with all the costumes, all right?”

  “I’ll look.” David glanced at Freddie again, and back at Peter. “Will you be all right?”

  “Of course. I have a gun.”

  “You don’t need handcuffs,” Freddie said.

  “Be right back,” David said, and left.

  “You don’t need handcuffs,” Freddie said.

  “Hush,” Peter told him. “Turn to face that desk there, will you?”

  So Freddie made a quarter turn, to face what was probably by day a receptionist’s desk, and Peter sat at the desk, put the pistol down on top of it, and searched the drawers for forms. Freddie looked at Peter and the gun on the desk. He thought about throwing the VDT and the keyboard at Peter, or at the gun, and running for the front door. He thought Peter seemed pretty self-confident. He decided to wait and see what would happen next.

  Which was, surprisingly enough, that Peter took his medical history. “Now,” he said, having found the form he wanted and a pen to go with it, “I’ll need your date of birth.”

  “Why?”

  Peter looked at him. He sighed. He put down the pen and picked up the pistol and aimed it at Freddie’s forehead. “Would you rather I knew your date of death?” he asked.

  So Freddie told Peter his date of birth, and his record of childhood diseases, and about his parents’ chronic illnesses, and what his grandparents had died of. And no, he was not allergic to penicillin or any other medicine that he knew of. He’d had no major operations.

  “Drug history?” Peter asked.

  Freddie clamped his mouth shut. Peter looked at him. He waited. Freddie said, “Reach for that gun all you want.”

  “I don’t actually need to know your entire drug history,” Peter acknowledged, as a clicking of handcuffs announced the return of David. “I just need to know your current status in re drugs.”

  “They were,” David said, “in your underwear drawer.”

  “I’ve been clean over two years,” Freddie said.

  “Absolutely clean?”

  “That’s what I said, isn’t it? What’s going on here, anyway?”

  David, jangling the handcuffs, said, “Put those things down and put your hands behind your back.”

  “I don’t think so,” Freddie said. He held tight to the VDT, ready to t
hrow it in whatever direction seemed best. “Why don’t you guys,” he said, “just call the cops and quit all this fooling around?”

  “There’s a possibility,” Peter said, seated over there at the desk, “that we won’t have to call the cops at all.”

  Freddie squinted at him. He understood that these guys were the kind who in prison were known as faggots but who out here in the allegedly normal world preferred to be called gay, even though very few such people were even moderately cheerful. He didn’t know what they wanted with him, but if it turned out that he did have some sort of honor on which they had nefarious designs, he was prepared to defend that honor with everything he had, which at the moment was a VDT and a keyboard.

  David, apparently reading in Freddie’s face something of his thoughts and his fears, abruptly said, with a kind of impatient sympathy, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, there’s nothing to worry about.”

  Freddie looked at him sidelong. “No?”

  “No. We’re not going to deflower you or anything.”

  Freddie wasn’t sure what that word meant. “No?”

  “Of course not,” David said. “We’re just going to experiment on you.”

  Freddie reared back. He very nearly tossed the VDT. “Like hell!” he said.

  Rising from the desk, holding the pistol pointed alternately at David and Freddie, Peter said, “That’s enough. David, you have the bedside manner of Jack the Ripper. Look, you—What’s your name?”

  “Freddie,” Freddie said. He could give them that much.

  “Freddie,” agreed Peter. “Freddie,” he said, “we are medical practitioners, David and me. Doctors. We are doing very valuable cancer research.”

  “Good.”

  “We are at a crossroads in our research,” Peter went on, “and just this evening at dinner—”

  “A dinner,” David interpolated, giving Freddie a reproachful look, “which I prepared, which you interrupted, and which is now stone cold upstairs.”

  “Sorry about that,” Freddie said.

  “And not entirely relevant,” Peter said, pointing the gun at David again.

  “Point it at him!”

  “Stop interrupting, all right, David?”

  “Just point it at him.”

  “I’m trying to explain the situation to our friend here.”

  “Fine. Point the gun at him.”

  Peter pointed the gun at Freddie. He said, “Just this evening at dinner, we were discussing the next step in our research program, which is to test our formulae on human volunteers.”

  “Not me,” Freddie said.

  “We weren’t thinking of you in particular,” Peter told him, “because we didn’t know you yet. We were thinking of calling our friend, the governor of the state of New York, and asking him for some prison volunteers. You know how that sort of thing works, don’t you?”

  As a matter of fact, Freddie did. Every once in a great while, in the pen, not often, the word would come around that some pharmacy company or the army or somebody wanted to test some shit on some people, and who would like to volunteer to drink the liquid or take the shot, in return for extra privileges or money or sometimes even early parole. There was always the guarantee that the shit was safe, but if the shit was safe why didn’t they try it on people outside these prison walls?

  Also, those times, they also always guaranteed they had this antidote available if anybody turned out to be allergic or something, but if they couldn’t know for sure the shit itself would work how come they were always so positive the antidote would work? Anyway, Freddie had never volunteered for any of that stuff, but he knew people who had, usually long-termers, and there was always something weird happened. They gained a lot of weight, or their pee turned blue, or their hair fell out. One guy came back to the block talking Japanese, and nobody could figure out how they’d worked that on him. Sounded like Japanese, anyway.

  Peter was still talking while Freddie’d been skipping down memory lane. When Freddie next tuned in, Peter was saying, “—takes so long. We’ll get our volunteers, we’ll run our experiments, everything will be fine, but it’s just going to add six months of unnecessary delay to get the paperwork filed and the state legislature to approve and all that.”

  “The thing is,” David said, sounding more eager than his partner, jingling the handcuffs as he talked, “the thing is, we’ve gone through all this bureaucratic red tape before and it’s so costly in terms of time lost, and when we’re talking cancer research, time lost is lives lost. You can see that, can’t you?”

  “Sure,” said Freddie.

  “Which is where you come in,” Peter said.

  “No,” Freddie said.

  “Listen to the proposition first,” Peter advised him.

  Freddie shrugged, which reminded him this VDT was getting heavy. “Can I put this down?” he asked.

  “Not yet,” Peter said. “Here’s the proposition. If you agree, you’ll sign a release here, and we’ll give you the medicine, and you’ll stay in this house for twenty-four hours. We’ll have to lock you up, of course, but we’ll feed you and give you a decent place to sleep.”

  “The rose room,” David said to Peter.

  “Exactly,” Peter agreed. To Freddie he said. “The point is, we’ll need to observe you, for reactions to the medicine. After the twenty-four hours, you’ll be free to go. Without our equipment, of course.”

  “Heh-heh,” Freddie said, acknowledging the joke.

  “If you decide, on the other hand, not to cooperate—”

  “You’ll call the cops.”

  “I knew you were quick,” Peter said.

  Freddie considered. These guys were legitimate doctors, okay, and this thing was even called a research facility, the very phrase that had brought him in here. And it’s on the East Side of Manhattan, so it’s all gotta be on the up and up, right?

  And what’s the alternative? Good-bye to all that, that’s the alternative. Police, prison, guards, fellow cons. That’s the alternative.

  So, if worse comes to worst, Peg can learn Japanese, that’s all.

  Freddie said, “And if something goes wrong, you got the antidote, right?”

  “Nothing will go wrong,” Peter said.

  “Not a chance,” David assured him.

  “But you do got the antidote, right?”

  The two doctors exchanged a glance. “If necessary,” David said, jingling the handcuffs, “and it won’t be necessary at all, but just in case it should be necessary, we would have an antidote, yes.”

  “And I get to put this thing down,” Freddie said, meaning the VDT.

  “Of course,” David said.

  Freddie looked from one to the other. “One thing,” he said, “and one thing only. You don’t need the handcuffs.”

  4

  Both Peter and David would have felt more comfortable with the burglar in handcuffs, but that had turned out to be actually a sort of deal-breaker, so finally they’d agreed, and that meant the only restraint they had on this fellow Freddie was Peter’s pistol. Fortunately, it was clear that Freddie believed Peter might be capable of using the pistol, a belief neither Peter nor David shared, but a belief they were willing to encourage.

  Freddie having signed the release form with an unrecognizable scrawl, they moved him at last up one flight from reception to the rear lab room, where they seated him in a metal chair and did a cursory examination to be sure he was as physically fit as he claimed, and he was. There was no evidence of alcohol or drugs, no irregular heartbeat, no troublesome sounds in his lungs, and a perfectly average blood pressure. So that left nothing to do but give him the formula and see what happened.

  No, actually there was still one thing more to be done. Before the experiment could get under way, they first had to decide which formula to try on him, since they could only hope to test one of the two formulas per experimental subject. LHRX1 and LHRX2 were both put out on the chrome table, side by side, the syringe and the after-dinner mint, and there they
waited while David and Peter discreetly argued over which one was the likelier to succeed, therefore which one should be tried in this first human experiment. They argued for several minutes, at an impasse, and then the subject said, “I get it. That’s always the way.”

  They turned to study him. Peter said, “What is?”

  The subject pointed. “The shot is the stuff I got to take, and the cookie’s the antidote, that I probably won’t even need.”

  They looked at him. They looked at one another. Peter, who’d been arguing for LHRX1, the serum in the syringe, smiled and said, “An omen, clearly. David, we’d best do what it says.”

  “Oh, very well,” said David, who hadn’t really expected to win the argument anyway.

  Peter smiled again as he crossed to pick up the syringe. Holding it point upward beside his shoulder, he turned to the subject. “In the buttock, I’m afraid,” he said.

  “And I saw that one comin’, too,” the subject said. But he made no trouble about it, merely stood and dropped his trousers and bent over the lab table and jumped a foot when Peter swabbed the spot with the cotton wad dipped in alcohol. “Jesus!” the subject cried. “That hurt!”

  “I didn’t do it yet,” Peter told him, and did it, and the subject didn’t move at all, because he was too confused. “There you are,” Peter said, stepping back a pace. “You may adjust your clothing.”

  The subject did.

  “You may sit down again,” Peter said.

  “Not yet,” the subject said. “My ass cheek is real sore.”

  It was not, and Peter knew it, but he also knew how childish patients are, so he merely said, “Stand, then, if you like.”

  The subject stood. He said, “What happens next?”

  “Nothing, not at first,” Peter told him. “We all stand around here like idiots—”

  “While our dinner dies upstairs,” David said.

  Peter turned to him. “We’ll microwave it, David, it will be good as new.”