Smoke

by Donald E. Westlake

  Peg frowned at him, discontented. After a minute, she said, “Freddie, could you possibly put on a long-sleeve shirt?”

  “This is becoming a pain,” Freddie announced, but he obediently got up and went into the bedroom, coming back two minutes later in a long-sleeved blue work shirt with the cuffs turned back just once and the bottom of the Dick Tracy head tucked into the collar. “Okay?”

  “Fine,” Peg said. “I’m sorry to be a pest, Freddie, but I’m just not used to it yet. I’ll get used to it, I really will, but it’s gonna take time.”

  “Maybe we won’t need a whole buncha time,” Freddie suggested, sitting again in his favorite chair, constantly aware of the nothing just beyond his turned-back shirt cuffs. “Maybe it’ll go away soon.”

  “Maybe.”

  “The sooner the better,” Freddie said. “I wonder if I oughta go back to those doctors, make up some kinda deal, see have they got an antidote that works.”

  “That could be trouble, Freddie,” Peg said. “If they had you arrested or something.”

  “Still. To get my, you know, my self back.”

  “Well, I’ve been thinking about that,” Peg said, “and maybe this thing isn’t such a tragedy after all.”

  “It’s not a tragedy,” Freddie agreed. “It’s just a pain in the ass.”

  “Or maybe,” Peg suggested, “an opportunity.”

  The Dick Tracy face gave her a skeptical look. “What kinda opportunity?”

  “Well, what is it you do for a living?”

  “Steal things.”

  “And if nobody can see you?”

  Freddie thought about that. He rested Dick Tracy’s chin on the heel of his invisible right hand, which looked worse than he knew, and he said, “Hmmmmm.”

  “You see what I mean,” Peg said.

  Freddie shifted position, nodded Dick Tracy’s head, and said, “You mean, get naked and sneak into places.”

  “Yeah, that’s right, you’d have to be naked, wouldn’t you?”

  “Warm places,” Freddie decided. “Sneak into warm places. But then what?”

  “Steal,” Peg said.

  “Steal what? I grab a handful of cash, I head for the door, people see this wad of cash floating through the air, they make a jump for it, what they grab is me.”

  “Too bad you don’t have a, like a bag that’s invisible, too.”

  “I got trouble enough with just me invisible.”

  “Well, it won’t be all trouble, Freddie, will it?”

  He sighed; Dick Tracy’s mumps recurred. “What else is it, Peg? Look how I am.”

  “Well, I can’t look how you are, can I?”

  “That’s part of the problem right there. And I have to sit around with my head inside this microwave oven here—”

  “We’ll punch airholes around the top.”

  “After I take it off.”

  “Okay,” she said. “But, you know, Freddie, maybe we don’t have to be so completely negative about this situation.”

  “Oh, no?” He waved his round empty sleeves at her. “You call this positive?”

  “Possibly,” she said, musing, thinking. “Possibly it’s positive.”

  Freddie loved it when Peg thought. In the first place, she was so good at it, and in the second place, she looked so lovable while doing it. So he didn’t interrupt, merely sat there, invisible inside his clothes and Dick Tracy head, and watched her think, and after a while he saw the slow smile of success spread across her face. “Yeah?” he said.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Now it’s all hunky-dory?”

  “Not exactly” she said. “It’s true there’s still stuff we’re gonna have to adapt to here, we both know that—”

  “Like don’t make love with the lights on.”

  “Don’t remind me. But that isn’t all there is to what’s happened here, just problems and adaptations.”

  “No?”

  “Freddie,” she said, with a broad smile at Dick Tracy’s latex-chiseled features, “it just might be, when we get used to it, invisibility, just maybe, it could be fun.”

  7

  To be a tobacco-company lawyer is to know something of the darkness of the human heart. Little surprised Mordon Leethe, nothing shocked him, not much interested him, and there was nothing in life he loved, including himself.

  A stocky heavy-shouldered man of fifty-six, Mordon Leethe had been a skinny six foot two when he’d played basketball all those years ago at Uxtover Prep, but caution and skepticism had worked on him like a heavy planet’s gravity, compressing him to his current five foot ten, none of it muscle but all of it hard anyway, with tension and rage and disdain.

  Mordon was going over the latest PAC regulations regarding corporate donations to political campaigns—he loved Congress; hookers defining how they’ll agree to be fucked—when the phone rang. He picked it up, made a low sound like a warthog, and the voice of his secretary, Helen, a nice maternal woman lost in these offices, said in his ear, “Dr. Amory on two. R&D.”

  Helen was a good secretary. She knew her boss could not possibly keep in his mind the name and title of every person listed in his Rolodex, so whenever someone he wasn’t used to was on the line, Helen would identify the caller when announcing the call. By just now saying, “R&D,” she’d jogged Mordon Leethe’s memory, reminding him that Dr. Archer Amory was head of NAABOR’s research and development program, a three-pronged project that attempted to (1) prove that all proof concerning the health dangers of cigarette consumption is unproved; (2) find some other use for tobacco—insulation? optical fibers?—should worse come to worst; and (3) prepare for a potential retooling to marijuana, should that market ever open up.

  Which of these R&D tines had led Dr. Archer to call an attorney? All Mordon Leethe knew was the equation: Doctor = bad news. Shrinking, condensing yet another tiny millimeter, he punched “2” without acknowledging Helen’s words, and said, “’Morning, Doctor. How are things in the lab?”

  “Well, the mice are still dying,” said a hearty brandy-and-golf voice.

  “I know that joke,” Mordon said sourly. “The elephants are still alive, but they’re coughing like hell.”

  “Really? That’s a new one. Very funny.”

  It was really a very old one. Mordon said, “What is it today, Doctor?”

  “You’re going to be getting a visit from two of our independent-contractor researchers.”

  “Am I.”

  “Their names are—”

  “Wait.”

  Mordon drew toward himself today’s yellow pad, flipped to a new page, picked up his Mont Blanc Agatha Christie pen with the ruby-eyed snake on its clip, and said, “Now.”

  “Their names are Dr. David Loomis and Dr. Peter Heimhocker, and they—”

  “Spell.”

  Amory spelled, then said, “I want to emphasize, these two are not employees of my division, nor in fact employees of NAABOR at all. They’re independent contractors.”

  This is something very bad, Mordon thought. He said, “And what’s their problem?”

  “I’d rather they told you that themselves. When today would be a good time to see them?”

  Very very bad. Mordon looked at his calendar. “Three o’clock,” he said.

  “Do keep me informed,” Archer Amory said.

  Fat chance. “Of course,” Mordon said, and dropped the phone like a dead rat into its cradle.

  * * *

  Since it was dangerous for Mordon to drink at lunch—his real self kept trying to come out—he refrained, taking only Pellegrino water, which meant his mood in the afternoons was much worse than his mood in the mornings. Into this foul presence came the two doctors, at five minutes before the hour of three, tension in their every aspect. Mordon remarked their sexual proclivity without regard; he didn’t dislike any human being more than any other human being. “Doctor Amory,” he said, with slight savage emphasis on the title, “tells me you two have some sort of problem.”

&nbs
p; “We think we do,” said Dr. Peter Heimhocker. This was the one Mordon had the most trouble looking at. White men in Afros are hard enough for normal people to take; for Mordon, after lunch, that fuzzy halo of black hair above that skinny pale face was practically incitement to amputation. Of the head.

  The other one, Dr. David Loomis, looked at his partner with frightened outrage. “You think we do! Pee-ter!” He was the somewhat heavier one, a soft-bodied, earnestly petulant man with thinning hair on top, unnaturally blond.

  Meanwhile, Heimhocker was saying, “David, do you mind?”

  It was going to be necessary to look at Heimhocker. Looking at him, Mordon said, “Why not tell me what happened?”

  While Heimhocker opened his skinny mouth and took a long deep breath, visibly gathering his thoughts, Loomis, in a sudden spasm of words, cried out, “We kidnapped a man and gave him an experimental formula and he got away!”

  Mordon moved backward in his chair. “Did you say ‘kidnapped’?”

  Heimhocker said, “David, let me. David, please.” Then he turned to Mordon, saying, “I don’t know how much Archer told you—”

  “Pretend Dr. Amory told me nothing.”

  “All right. David and I run a small research facility here in New York. Last night, a burglar broke in, and we captured him. We’re just at a point here—well—you don’t want to know about our research.”

  Mordon drew a noose on the yellow pad.

  Heimhocker at last went on. “Suffice it to say, we’re just at the stage in our work where we need practical field results.”

  “Guinea pigs,” Mordon translated, being well familiar with the creation of smoke-screen phrases.

  “Well, yes,” Heimhocker said, and coughed delicately. “Human guinea pigs, in point of fact.”

  “Volunteers,” the fidgety Loomis volunteered. “Or prisoners in a state penitentiary. Also volunteers, of course.”

  Mordon drew fuzzy hair above the noose. “What is the subject of this research?”

  “Melanoma.”

  Mordon stared. “What the fuck has that got to do with cigarettes?”

  “Nothing!” cried Loomis, appalled, waving his hands in front of his face like a man afraid of bats.

  Simultaneously, Heimhocker practically leaped to his feet as he shouted, “There has never been the slightest link! Never!”

  Then Mordon understood, and came close to smiling, but refrained. “I see,” he said, and did see. “So you tried your whatsit on this burglar, but he then escaped, and you want to know what your legal exposure might be.”

  “Well,” Heimhocker said, “us, of course, but also the American Tobacco Research Institute.”

  Now Mordon did smile, not pleasantly. “Is that what NAABOR calls itself with you two? Dr. Amory assures me they’ve already cut you loose.”

  “What?”

  Mordon said, “Let me explain the situation. If your problem turns out to be a simple matter, I will handle it for you, and charge my normal corporate client, NAABOR. But if it turns out to be a police matter, a matter of felonies, I will direct you to a colleague of mine who handles criminal cases, and you’ll work out your arrangements directly with him.”

  Loomis breathed the words, “Criminal case?”

  “The first question, I suppose,” Mordon said, writing the number 1 on his pad and circling it, “is, What is the likelihood your stuff killed the fellow?”

  “Killed him!” They stared at one another, and then Heimhocker said, “No, there should be nothing. I mean, nothing lethal.”

  “In one,” Loomis said, “or the other, Peter. The combination, how do we know what that cocktail could do?”

  “Not kill anybody,” Heimhocker insisted, irritably. “We’ve been over this and over this, David.”

  Mordon said, “Cocktail? Would you explain?”

  “The fact is,” Heimhocker said, “we have two formulae. We gave the burglar one, but he got the idea—”

  “We gave him the idea, Peter.”

  “All right, David, we gave him the idea.” To Mordon he explained, a bit shamefacedly, “He thought the other one was some sort of antidote.”

  “And took it, is that what you’re saying, on the way out?”

  “Yes.”

  “And now he’s somewhere in the world,” Mordon summed up, “a felon, a burglar, not likely to consult a doctor or an emergency room, with two experimental medicines floating around inside him that you aren’t absolutely totally sure what either of them would do, much less both.”

  “Not precisely, no,” Heimhocker agreed, sounding defensive, “not before much more testing and—”

  “Yes, yes, I’m not impugning your methodology,” Mordon assured him. “At least, not before last night. What were these products of yours supposed to do?”

  “Affect the pigment of the skin,” Loomis said, eagerly, pinching his own pink forearm to demonstrate the concept skin.

  “You mean it could give him a bad burn, something like that?”

  “Oh, no, not at all,” Loomis said, briskly shaking his head, and Heimhocker said, “Quite the reverse. The object is the elimination or alteration of pigment.”

  Mordon waited, but nothing more was forthcoming. At last he said, “Meaning?”

  “Well, we’ve discussed this, David and I,” Heimhocker said, “ever since it happened—”

  “We had no sleep.”

  “No. And we talked it over and we think it’s possible,” Heimhocker went on, and cleared his throat, and said, “that the fellow is, at this point he might very well be, uh, well . . . invisible.”

  Mordon looked at them, at their serious frightened faces. He did not write anything on his pad. In fact, he put down the pen. “Tell me,” he said, “more.”

  8

  There are vans with many large windows all the way around, so the kids can look out on their way to Little League. And there are vans with a minimum of windows—windshield, and rectangles to both sides of the front seat—so the cops can’t look in on its way to or from the felony. Freddie’s van was of the latter type, with two seats in front, a floor gearshift between them, and a dark cavernous emptiness in back where an electrician would mount shelves but which Freddie kept bare because he was never exactly sure what size object he might want to put back there. The van had two rear doors (windowless) that opened outward like the library doors in a serious play, plus a wide sliding door on the right side in case he ever desired to steal a stove. The floor in back was carpeted with stubbly gray AstroTurf, and the bulb was gone from the interior light.

  Bay Ridge is one of the more crime-free neighborhoods of Brooklyn, mostly because it is populated by so many hot-headed ethnics who take crime personally and who in any case like to beat up on people. Therefore, most residents leave their vehicles parked at the curb, no problem. But Freddie felt about his van much the way he felt about Peg, and he wouldn’t leave Peg at the curb, so he’d worked out an inexpensive rental arrangement for space in the parking lot next to the neighborhood firehouse, where the firepersons kept their own private vehicles and where nobody messed around.

  This morning, after their separate breakfasts, Peg took the keys and walked the two blocks to this firehouse, waved to a couple of the persons sitting around on folding chairs out front enjoying the spring sunshine and the spring clothing on the persons passing by—they waved back, knowing Peg and Freddie and the van all went together as a package—then got the van and drove it back to their apartment building. Usually Freddie did the driving, but Peg had taken a shot at the wheel several times before this, and was used to the stick shift on the floor.

  What she wasn’t used to was Freddie, not like this. She pulled up in front of the building, and out came a tall Bart Simpson, in normal shirt and pants and shoes, but with weird peach-colored hands that were actually Playtex kitchen gloves. Not being a kitchen sort of person, and so not used to Playtex kitchen gloves, Freddie had a little trouble at first opening the passenger door of the van, but then he got i
t, and got in, and said, “Peg, these gloves are hotter than the mask.”

  “Keep them on,” Peg advised, and drove away before anybody in the neighborhood could get a good look at her traveling companion.

  “We’ll go to Manhattan,” Freddie said. “Nobody looks weird there because everybody looks weird there.”

  “Well, you’re sure gonna test that theory,” Peg said. “You know, Freddie, I didn’t notice it in the apartment, but in this little space here, when you talk, you sound kind of muffled.”

  “Well, no wonder,” Freddie said. “I’m inside this condom here.”

  “Poor Freddie,” Peg said, and concentrated on her driving.

  There were some looks from surprised other drivers while they were stopped at red lights along the way, but not enough to be real trouble. Freddie sat well back in the passenger seat, usually with his face turned toward Peg—or Bart’s face, actually—and anyway it was pretty dim inside the van, so probably the worst the nosy parkers in the other cars could say, to themselves or their fellow travelers, was, “That’s a weird-looking guy,” or, “That weird-looking guy looks familiar,” or, “Doesn’t that weird-looking guy look like Bart Simpson?” And even if somebody said, aloud, in the privacy of his or her own vehicle, “There’s a guy in that car in a Bart Simpson mask,” so what? They sell them, don’t they? For people to wear, don’t they? So what’s the problem?

  They took the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel—well, what else would you do?—and once they were in the tunnel Freddie said, “Time for me to get ready.” He clambered through the space between the seats, into the empty rear of the van, sat down on the floor back there, and began to unwrap himself.

  Since the van was without back windows, it had only exterior rearview mirrors, for which Peg was now grateful. It meant she couldn’t see her guy gradually disappear. Nevertheless, it was startling, just before they left the tunnel at the Manhattan end, when what was clearly a forearm rested on the back of the driver’s seat and Freddie’s voice just behind her right ear said, “All set,” but when she turned her head for a quick look, there was nobody in the van except her, and nothing back there but a crumpled pile of clothes on the floor.