Smoke

by Donald E. Westlake

  Well, that was one reason, of course. Josh smirked as he poured into the two glasses, and extended the cleaner one toward her. “Both drunk,” he said.

  “Well, that’s fair,” she admitted, and took the glass, and even held it up while he clinked his against it.

  He drank down half a glass of the cold stuff, while she held the glass to her lips. Then he put down the wine and gestured at the cheese and crackers. “Eat,” he suggested.

  “Oh, I’m on a diet,” she told him, putting her glass on the floor beside the Amish chair. “I have to watch my figure, you know.”

  There was some sort of clever response to that, he knew there was, having to do with him watching her figure, something like that, but his mind tripped over the phraseology, and the moment was lost. “OK,” he said, and put down his own glass on the coffee table with a little thunk that made tiny avalanches on the diamond slopes. Then he lumbered across the room to kiss her on the point of the chin, painful for his teeth.

  He hadn’t been aiming for the point of her chin, of course, he’d been aiming for her mouth, but she’d moved, the damn woman, she’d thrown off his aim. She was still moving, as he pressed forward, fumbling at her, holding her in the chair.

  “I DON’T THINK SO!” she yelled, very loudly, unnecessarily loudly.

  He’d known she’d be loud, dammit. “Coats,” he muttered, pawing at her, meaning he had other coats in the back he’d give her after he’d finished ripping this one to shreds to get it off her.

  “DAMMIT, FREDDIE!”

  “Not here,” he panted, shoving coat out of the way, blouse out of the way, one knee now in her lap, holding her down. Faintly he registered the squeak of the hinge of his mirror/door, far away, but his own loud breathing and his own tense concentration kept him from heeding that impossibility, or remembering it later. His hand found a breast, an actual real-life throbbing warm human breast! This so electrified him that he froze, glary-eyed, not even breathing, and was like that when he felt the sharp hard pain at the back of his head, and darkness fell, like a tree.

  So did Josh.

  * * *

  “Are you all right?”

  Josh swam into painful consciousness. There was a sticky smell in the air, a pain in his head, a nasty wetness around his collar and the back of his shirt. He groaned, and moved, and found he was stretched out on his back on the very thin carpet on his living room floor. The woman . . . Peg . . . leaned over him, expression concerned. “Mr. Kuskiosko? Jersey Josh? Speak to me!”

  “. . . Wha . . .”

  “I’m sorry I had to do that.”

  “. . . Wha . . .”

  “You understand, if I’d had to go home and tell Freddie you misbehaved, he’d come here and do something terrible, and I wouldn’t want that.”

  Josh raised a shaky hand and touched the wetness at the back of his head, then looked at the fingers and it wasn’t red. Shouldn’t his blood be red, like anybody else’s? He sniffed his fingers, and it was wine. Blue Nun. Looking past his fingers at Peg, finding it hard to focus, he said, “Wha . . .”

  “We can be friends, Mr. Kuskiosko, but not if you’re going to be silly. Are you all right now? Can you sit up?”

  “Wha . . .”

  “Here you go. Try to sit up.”

  She didn’t touch him, but she did make a lot of hand movements to encourage him, and, following them, leaning into them, he did manage to sit up. He looked around. Pieces of broken wine bottle littered the wet carpet. The Amish chair was overturned. But the mountain of diamonds still sat on the coffee table, the tube sock still lay on the sofa. “Wha . . .”

  “Mr. Kuskiosko,” she said, “I think we should just conclude our business and I’ll go on my way, and neither of us will ever mention this misunderstanding again, and from now on we can get along with one another and be friends. Okay?”

  She extended her slim long-fingered hand toward him, her nasty schoolteacher smile fixed on her nasty pretty face. Josh looked at that hand, those long fingers, and he knew in his heart they would never be used in any of the ways he had imagined them being used. Hating everything about this situation, but seeing nothing else to be done, he took that nasty hand and shook it briefly, feeling the delicate bones in there, quickly letting go.

  She had been kneeling beside him, her coat again fastened, looking none the worse for wear, dammit. Now she got to her feet, brushed off her knees, and briskly but smilingly said, “There. We’re friends now.”

  “S,” he muttered.

  “Can you get up?”

  “S.”

  He could, and he did, and stood tottering there, while she nodded at him in satisfaction and said, “You’re fine now, I know you are.”

  “S.”

  “So shall we talk about the diamonds?”

  “S.”

  “How much are you going to give me for them, Mr. Kuskiosko?”

  He beetled his brows, and glowered at her. “2.”

  She pretended she didn’t understand. “Two? Two what?”

  “K.”

  “Two thousand dollars?” She laughed, as though perfectly naturally, and said, “I didn’t know you told jokes, Mr. Kuskiosko, Freddie never told me that. But he did tell me I shouldn’t take less than ten, so unless that was a joke I guess I’d better take all this back to Freddie.” And she crossed the room to pick up the sock from the sofa.

  Damn woman. “Wait.”

  She turned, sock in hand, one eyebrow lifted, and waited.

  Now she does what I tell her to do. Josh brooded. Dicker? Haggle? Negotiate? Or just get the damn woman out of here, so he could remove his wine-soaked clothes and take aspirin and watch Centerspread Girls all by himself? “OK,” he said.

  “Oh, thank you, Mr. Kuskiosko,” she said, as sunny as a field of daisies. “Freddie will be so pleased.”

  “Wait,” he commanded again. Then, not looking directly at the woman, he lurched away, holding the bruise on the back of his head, moving through the bedroom and past the mirror/door and on into his office, where many items were just subtly disarranged, which he was too distressed to notice.

  In the office, he opened one of the safes, removed from it two white envelopes that each contained five thousand dollars in wrinkled bills, shut the safe, and staggered back to the living room, which was empty.

  Oh, God, what now? Josh stared around, his headache redoubling, and in she came from the kitchen, smiling, saying, “I put the cheese and crackers away. It was the least I could do, Mr. Kuskiosko.”

  It damn well was. “Here,” he said, and thrust the envelopes at her.

  “I know I don’t have to count these,” she said, chirpy chirpy chirpy, as she put the envelopes in her coat pockets. “Besides, we both know Freddie will count them. Well, bye-bye.”

  Josh stood there, in his violated living room, while she crossed to the door, opened it, and then held it open an unnecessarily long time while she turned back and waved at him like Audrey Hepburn or somebody, and then at last she left. Chack of metal door sardonically into metal frame.

  Josh sank onto the sofa, drained and miserable. He gazed at his new diamonds without joy. Hit him on the head, she did, just because he wanted to be friendly.

  How in hell did she do that? Get the wine bottle from all the way over here and hit him with it all the way over there, while he was holding her down in the chair?

  It just goes to prove it yet again, Jersey Josh thought. You simply can’t trust women.

  12

  Getting chilly. Freddie jogged in place to keep warm, watching out for the sudden appearance of employees around the hall’s far turn. One skinny black kid who kept zipping into sight behind a wheeled garment rack full of fur was the worst menace, having actually knocked Freddie over during one of his abrupt flybys. Fortunately, Freddie had managed to roll out of the way before those flashing feet stumbled over him, so the kid remained unaware—as did everybody else in this building—that Affiliated Fur Storage contained at the moment an extremel
y unauthorized visitor.

  Eight days, and no change. Not a hint of Freddie had come back into view, not a shadow, not the faintest smudge of smoke. He was as invisible as on the night those mad doctors had done their experiment on him. Was this condition going to be permanent?

  Freddie was torn on the subject. On the one side, invisibility was certainly a decided asset in his occupation. On the other side, there was Peg.

  Peg was being very good and supportive about this situation, mostly, and was a great help on the professional side, driving the car and dealing with Jersey Josh Kuskiosko and all of that, but on the personal side, there was a definite sense of strain here, which was not getting better. You could even say it was getting worse. Freddie had noticed a new pattern in Peg the last few days, a habit she had developed of facing half away from wherever she thought he was, as though she had to pretend to herself that he wasn’t really invisible, it was just that she didn’t happen to be looking in his specific direction at this specific moment.

  Denial, in other words. Not being able to see Freddie was a problem for Peg that she had clearly not figured out how to deal with, and it seemed to him that one result was a growing distance between them, a certain coolness, that worried him a lot.

  All right. The thing to do, he’d decided, was pile up a lot of scores very quick, accumulate a lot of money, and then make contact with those crazed doctors, open negotiations, and work out some way to get his hands on an actual working antidote without getting himself arrested the second somebody could see his wrists to put the cuffs on.

  But money first, the scores first, and that was why Freddie, naked as an empty water glass, was bouncing around in this hall here in Affiliated Fur Storage, with clerical offices on one side and chilled rooms full of fur coats on the other, trying not to get killed by a supersonic black kid with huge sneakers and an evident fantasy in which he won the Indianapolis 500 driving a wheeled garment rack.

  It isn’t true that all small business has been driven out of New York City by high rents and high taxes and high crime and a workforce whose only skill is pilferage. All small business has been driven out of Manhattan by the above, but many thousands of these little companies still exist in Queens and Brooklyn, where they can draw from the labor pool on Long Island, people at the competency level of the smiling Burger King kid who gets your order right the second time.

  Among these surviving small companies is Affiliated Fur Storage—and who knows how many failed furriers are entombed in that cemetery of a word, Affiliated?—here in Astoria, Queens, in a long low cinder-block building flanked by a seltzer bottler and a uniform laundry. Behind it, facing the next street, is a smaller similar structure housing a manufacturer of bowling pins. The fur storage building sits inside an eight-foot chain-link fence topped by razor wire, with two gates, both at the front, both hedged from street to building past the weedy dirt moat by more tall chain-link fence. The narrow gate at the right is for pedestrians, the wider gate at the left for delivery trucks.

  The interior of this building, except for the administrative offices, is a maze of windowless rooms, air-conditioned to a fur-loving forty degrees. Here is where many of the more fortunate women of New York store their minks in summer, to protect them from deadly heat and humidity. Here, if you’ve a mind to steal fur coats, is the place to go.

  And here is where Freddie came, this afternoon at four-thirty, slipping in with a delivery truck, filled with another load of arriving mink. Once inside, he’d tucked out of the way, taking it easy, expecting the place to close at five. But it did not.

  Problem. By June, the fur coat owners really should already have called Affiliated to make their arrangements for the pickup of their coats, but you know how people procrastinate, how they forget to do something unless it’s staring them right in the face, how they don’t even think about the fur coat until one day they open that closet looking for something else entirely—sunglasses in a coat pocket, usually—and there it is! And then they make that call, and that’s why June is the busiest month of the year at Affiliated, and that was why, at ten past six on Wednesday, June 14, this year, Peg was still in the van parked up in the next block, waiting for the signal—something waving by itself in the air, in front of the just-opened delivery gate—while Freddie, inside, still bobbed and weaved around that damn kid.

  He’d come in here in the first place figuring half an hour was all he’d need to watch the security systems, see how they were armed and how they could be disarmed, and he’d been right; once everybody finally did get the hell out of here, he’d open the building like a banana, no sweat. But when would they call it a day, goddam it, and go home?

  And now it was six-twenty, and a person came around the corner of the hall. Not the speed demon, this was a middle-aged woman shrugging into a light cloth spring coat. Freddie pressed himself against the wall as she went by, and here came three more, chatting together, taking up the entire width of the hall. And more behind them.

  Whoops. Freddie fled in front of the staff, and found that the receptionist had been among the first to leave, which meant her desk was empty, which meant Freddie could skip around behind it, and even sit in the receptionist’s chair, still warm from her bottom, and from that vantage point watch everybody leave.

  This place had rent-a-cops, three of them in brown uniforms and shoulder patches, with holsters containing walkie-talkies, and the seriously humorless faces of drunks who aren’t drinking yet today. These were the last to leave, having checked every room to be sure there were no stragglers, having set every alarm, and having called their security office from the receptionist’s desk—Freddie leaped nimbly out of that guy’s way—to report all secure and solid and shut down. Then they left, arming the final alarm system behind them. Freddie stood by the windowed front door—shatterproof window with what looked like chicken wire in it—and watched the security guys close and alarm the outer gate, then get into their little white security car with all the words and numbers on it, and putt-putt away.

  Ain’t no security against the invisible man; no, sir.

  The first thing Freddie did, when he knew he was alone in the building, was skip down the hall, waving his invisible arms and kicking his invisible feet, knowing nobody would be coming around that corner to knock him down, not even his old friend Superfly. And the second thing he did was go into the nearest storage room and find a fur coat that fit and put it on.

  June, shmoon; Freddie was cold.

  13

  By five-thirty, Peg had to go to the bathroom bad. Freddie should have signaled to her by now, but he hadn’t, because of course the employees should have left by now, and they hadn’t, which meant she couldn’t avail herself of the fur-storage building’s ladies’ room.

  Before they’d come out here, she’d talked this situation over with Freddie, or at least with the volume of air she’d assumed contained Freddie, and she’d asked him how come they had to deal with Jersey Josh Kuskiosko all the time? Aside from Jersey Josh’s personality, which was the pits, why not just steal cash, and cut out the middleman? Take 100 percent instead of 10 percent? And Freddie had said, “What cash? There aren’t any big piles of cash around. Payrolls are by check. Big stores take credit cards.”

  “Banks have cash,” she’d pointed out. “You could sneak in, wait till they close—”

  “Bank security is not simple, Peg,” the air had told her. “Bankers are serious about money, that’s one thing I’m sure of. You never know what you’re gonna find in a bank. Heat sensors, motion sensors; they don’t have to see me to know I’m there. The real money is locked away so no one naked guy without tools is ever gonna get at it. I know Jersey Josh is kind of an irritation—”

  “I can put up with him, if I have to,” Peg had said, being brave. “As long as you’re there with me.”

  “I’m sorry, Peg, but that’s just the way it is. All I can take is merchandise, and convert it to cash. I could start, maybe, a new relationship with a new fence . . .”


  “Would he be any better?”

  “Probably worse. You know, guys who go into that business, being a fence, they’re not your Albert Schweitzer mostly.”

  So here they were, in pursuit of more merchandise. Over there, more delivery trucks backed in to the loading zone, maneuvering backward up a driveway so hemmed in by tall chain-link fence that most drivers didn’t even try to get out of their vehicle. Peg watched them, and thought about the diner she and Freddie had passed on Astoria Avenue on their way over here, and thought about Freddie finally coming out of that building to make the signal and nobody around to receive the signal, and at last she decided enough was enough. Bladder-wise, enough was too much.

  Leaving the area, Peg drove past the fur building and noticed that across the street from it was a parking lot with a sign that read AFFILIATED FUR STORAGE PARKING ONLY. The lot was better than half full. Employee cars, they must be. If they’re gone when I get back, Peg told herself, then Freddie will be ready for me. So there is a signal after all, whether I’m here or not.

  At the diner, Peg relieved herself and ordered a coffee and a doughnut to go, because she didn’t feel right about just using the ladies’ and then walking out. When she drove back to take up her vigil, the cars were all still in that lot, so nothing had changed. Peg settled down again, a bit more comfortably, to wait.

  An hour went by. The second hour since Freddie’d left the van. An hour in which Peg drank the coffee but didn’t eat the doughnut. An hour that gave her a lot of time for thought, for private rumination. And the longer she had to think, and the more she pondered this situation in which she found herself, the gloomier she became. Gloomier, and then gloomier.

  What it came down to was, an invisible boyfriend was no fun. You just didn’t get used to being around such a person, having their voice suddenly come at you from over there when you thought they were over here, having the TV channel-changer float in the air while Freddie was surfing for something to watch, seeing those sudden indentations and abrupt puffings-up, and other signs of Freddie’s movements, his presences and absences.