Smoke

by Donald E. Westlake

   

  It was directed by the Court, and agreed to by the Authority, that all citizens of the state of New York who, according to the records of the Authority, engaged in gaming activities under the control of the Authority between the dates of February 9, 1982, and October 1, 1986, shall be given equal standing in a lottery drawing to be held on the fourth of July, 1994, and the fifteen hundred (1,500) citizens whose names would be drawn would share equally in the court-directed judgment against the Authority of three million, one hundred seventy-six thousand, seven hundred dollars ($3,176,700.).

   

  It is my happy duty, Mr. Noon, to inform you that yours was one of the names thus drawn by television star Ray Jones on July fourth of last year. Your share of the judgment comes to two hundred eleven thousand, seven hundred eighty dollars ($211,780.).

   

  CONGRATULATIONS, Mr. Noon! If you will call me at 555-1995 before the fourth of July of this year, I will be happy to give you further details in re this judgment. It will be necessary, of course, for you to provide identification, and the judgment is fully taxable, but otherwise, the money is yours.

   

  Unfortunately, Mr. Noon, if I do not hear from you before July fourth, I will have to assume that you have passed away or are not the correct Fredric U. Noon, and your two hundred eleven thousand, seven hundred eighty dollars ($211,780.) will be shared on a pro rata basis with the remaining lottery winners. Congratulations again, Mr. Noon. I hope to hear from you soon.

   

  With all best wishes,

   

   

  Banford L. Wickes

  Deputy Controller

  New York State Gaming Authority

  BLW:dw

   

  This letter, with several variants, had been used sparingly but effectively over the last decades by a number of different law enforcement agencies, including the NYPD, to find and apprehend criminals who had dropped out of sight. The letter was sent to the criminal’s last known address, in hopes it would be forwarded, or sent to some close relative.

  In this case, the only address for Fredric Noon that Barney’d been able to find in police records, since he was neither in jail nor on parole at the moment, was the perp’s parents’ home in Ozone Park. The phone number had been provided by Leethe, who would have somebody of his own answer that dedicated line the one and only time it would ring. From there on, it was Leethe’s task to reel the sucker in; Barney suspected he was up to it.

  “Very nice,” Leethe said at last. Closing the wine book, he returned it to Barney and said, “I’m looking forward to tasting some of those.”

  “I’m sure it won’t be long, Mr. Leethe,” Barney said, and carried the wine book back to the kitchen, where he removed the letter, folded it twice, put it in the official-looking envelope he’d had the guy at the copy place around the corner knock together, and tossed the envelope into the basket with the outgoing paid bills. Then he went back to his chums and his gnocchi.

  Leethe hadn’t told him what all this was about, of course, and Barney was too cool to show the slightest curiosity, nor was he so incautious as to stick his nose in anywhere until he found out what the story was. But a story was here, all right, he could tell that much. Profit in it for Barney Beuler? Hard to say.

  Fredric Urban Noon was a nobody, a penny-ante sticky-finger from Queens, not connected to anything except other people’s goods. Why would a major corporation like NAABOR want him? What had he been doing in a cancer research place? Did he steal a cancer cure? Barney ran that scenario in his mind, but it just wouldn’t play.

  So was it maybe something in the other direction? Did the little gonif make off with some proof of something bad about the tobacco company that they didn’t want known? Was he shaking them down right this minute? Did he need a partner?

  The only problem with that second scenario was, with everything that was already known about the tobacco companies that didn’t bother them, or bother their customers, or their stockholders, or the feds, what could they possibly have left to hide?

  It was seeming to Barney that he too might like one little word with this Fredric Urban Noon.

  17

  Freddie never got over how weird it felt to walk around naked in the public streets in the middle of the day, particularly in your own neighborhood, passing people you’d seen on these blocks for years. Not people you actually know, just people you recognized, but still.

  For instance, that fat young mother coming out of the supermarket pushing the stroller full of fat baby and Cheez Doodles and Dr Pepper. She seemed to be staring right at him, but of course she wasn’t, though still it seemed that way. On the other hand, he’d been seeing her around for a couple of years, but now for the first time he could pause and study her and marvel at how fat she’d managed to get herself while still in her twenties.

  But that wasn’t all. He could also look at the good-looking women, so far as this neighborhood had any, and he could watch the old guys in front of the social club and how they talked with their hands and their chins, and he could watch the different ways people wait for a bus, and he could thumb his nose at the patrol car when it drove slowly by, the cops inside there telling each other war-hero lies and laughing in their own private party; you could rob the Cheez Doodles right out of that fat kid’s stroller, those cops would never even notice.

  He could, in other words, do a thousand different things to help fight off boredom, without ever actually fighting off boredom.

  What he was doing out here, just before lunch on a warm sunny Saturday in June, was making Peg happy. Trying to make Peg happy, anyway. He and she had a long talk in the van the other night, Thursday night, after they left Jersey Josh Kuskiosko. It was somehow easier lately for Peg to talk to Freddie after dark, so while she drove and he wore his Bart Simpson head she explained how she felt about things, and how she didn’t want to break up with him or anything like that, but not being able to see him while he was all the time able to see her was really getting her down.

  He made very sympathetic noises while she explained all this, and said he understood, and in fact he did understand, at least partially. Since she couldn’t be with him completely while he was invisible like this, she had to have some time when she could be completely by herself. Of course, when you said it like that it didn’t make any sense, but Peg had ways of saying it where it did make sense, or anyway it was important to her, so finally in the van Freddie suggested something that might help, and Peg agreed to it at once.

  The idea was, since they weren’t eating their meals together anymore—Peg still didn’t know that food took a couple of hours to fully join his invisible body, and with luck she never would know—Freddie would leave the apartment at lunchtime any day it wasn’t raining, go for a walk or take in a matinee movie (he wouldn’t have to pay, after all) or whatever he wanted, while Peg ate her lunch and did whatever she had a mind to do in her own home without any thought that Freddie might be lurking somewhere, watching. (That was Peg’s word, lurking, which Freddie himself wouldn’t have used, but which he’d made no beef about, merely nodding his agreement, which of course she couldn’t see.) Then, after an hour or so, Freddie would come home and have his own lunch, which Peg would have left on the kitchen table. It wasn’t a solution to the problem, but it ought to at least help.

  There was only one movie house in the neighborhood, and it showed a matinee only on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, but all four days of one week the same movie. So Freddie yesterday went in and watched an action movie where guys get blown up and you see them arc through the air like off a trampoline and afterward their machine guns still work, never mind the guys.

  This is not a movie you can see two days in a row. One day in a row is a lot. Also, it turned out the matinee was senior discount time, and seniors in a movie theater in the middle of the day act exactly they way they did when they were eight years old in the same circumstan
ces, talking and yelling at each other, changing their seats, eating stuff and throwing the wrappers on the floor, asking each other what just happened up on the screen. The only difference is, they totter up the aisle instead of running, and it’s the toilet they’re headed for, not the candy counter.

  So Freddie wasn’t looking forward to a repetition of that experience anytime soon, except maybe to go in with an Angel of Death kite and swoop it around over their heads until the theater emptied.

  Anyway, today he was viewing the rich panorama of street life while time crawled by, and also incidentally looking for a telephone. Peg had suggested he phone her every day when he was ready to come home, and although she said it was because she wanted to be sure she got his lunch on the table at the right time, he knew it was because in her innermost heart she didn’t entirely trust him, and wanted him to prove he was actually out of the apartment by phoning her from someplace else.

  So yesterday he’d snuck into the manager’s office in the movie theater, while the manager was out separating two codgers who were beating on each other with canes in the process of their discussion of whether or not Walter O’Malley was totally culpable in the felonious robbery of the Dodgers from Brooklyn. He’d made his call, assured Peg he was enjoying the movie—Holy Shit III, or whatever it was called—then got out of the way as the manager returned to his office to tend to his nosebleed.

  Today, though, was a little different. He was not going back into the Megablok Star, no matter what, not even just to use the phone in the manager’s office. He couldn’t use a pay phone because he didn’t have a quarter on him; in fact, he didn’t have anything on him. And pay phones were the only kind of phones to be found out here on the street. But to go inside, into the storefront dentist, or the deli, or the copy shop, or the dry cleaner’s, would mean somehow using a telephone right under the eyes—and ears, let’s not forget ears—of employees, customers, dentists.

  Still, to go home without having made a call would leave Peg convinced he’d never gone out in the first place, which would be not good. The last thing Freddie wanted to do was feed her doubt and paranoia. He was, after all, well known to be a liar and a thief insofar as other people were concerned, so if Peg gave way to occasional suspicion or skepticism she couldn’t really be blamed.

  And here came a guy talking on the phone. A guy in a tan suit and pale green shirt and dark green tie and brown shoes. A guy in his thirties, with a narrow sandy mustache and sandy hair cropped close all around so his big ears stuck out. One big ear, anyway; the other one would probably stick out, too, but at the moment the cellular phone was pressed against it as the guy walked along, swinging a briefcase in his other hand, chatting away.

  It was only envy at first that made Freddie lope along beside this guy, ducking around oncoming pedestrians as he listened to the guy’s half of the conversation, learning that he was an insurance salesman calling his office, reporting on his appointments so far today, wondering if there’d been any messages. It should have been a short call, since there weren’t any messages for this guy, and not a lot had happened in his appointments till now, but he dragged it out, prolonging it, obviously getting a kick out of walking there on a semicrowded shopping street in Brooklyn in the sunshine talking on his brand-new toy.

  Still, the conversation eventually had to wind down, because the secretary or whoever it was at the other end of the call had work to do, couldn’t just sit there and play games all day. But the so-longs also stretched out, and then Freddie saw the stocky older woman coming slowly the other way, fresh from the supermarket, weighed down by full plastic bags dragging at each downward arm, slogging ahead flat-footed, oblivious to the world and even to the sight of a tall insurance man in a tan suit talking on the telephone as he walked along the sidewalk.

  Good-bye good-bye good-bye. Timing is everything. The woman approached, the guy said yet another good-bye, then thought of one more irrelevant question to ask, started to ask it. The woman passed, headed the opposite way. Freddie plucked the phone out of the guy’s hand and dropped it into the woman’s right-side shopping bag.

  The guy talked another two syllables before he realized the phone wasn’t there anymore. Then he stopped dead, said, “Wha?” and moved his now-empty hand, still cupped for the phone, around in front of his eyes, where he could stare at it.

  Meanwhile, Freddie backed away out of the flow of foot traffic, stood with his back against the cool glass of the nearest storefront window—ladies’ garments, latest styles, large sizes a specialty—and watched to see what would happen next, which was that the woman kept trudging homeward with her groceries, unaware of anything at all occurring anywhere in the world, while the guy in the tan suit started spinning in circles, looking down, out, up, around, everywhere. A couple of little kids, bopping along, deep in their own conversation, stopped to look at this weird grown-up, and the grown-up stopped his whirling to glare at them and shout, “Where is it?”

  “Where’s what?” one of the kids asked, while the other kid, wiser in the ways of adults, said, “We don’t have it.”

  “I want my phone!”

  “There’s a phone on the corner,” the wiser kid suggested, pointing.

  “I want my phone!”

  An older guy with half a dozen magazines under his arm stopped to say, “What’s the problem?”

  “My phone, I—” The guy would have torn his hair if it weren’t too short to get hold of. “I was talking on it, and it disappeared!”

  “Your telephone disappeared?”

  “Yes!”

  “Right out of your hand?”

  “Yes!”

  “That’s like the missing Ambroses,” the older guy said.

  Freddie and both kids now gave this new arrival a lot closer attention, realizing he was going to be more interesting than they’d thought. The insurance man, glaring pop-eyed, cried, “Ambroses? Ambroses?”

  “Sure,” the other guy said. “Somebody was collecting Ambroses, Charles Fort wrote about it.”

  The insurance man had expected skepticism, scorn, disbelief; he hadn’t expected Ambroses. “What the hell has that got to do,” he cried passionately, “with my phone?”

  The other guy took his magazines out from under his arm and started to leaf through them, as though one might contain an article explaining where the insurance man’s telephone had gone. “Then there’s Judge Crater,” he said. “Now, in parapsychology—”

  “I don’t want any of your crap!” the insurance man screamed, waving his arms around. “I want my phone!”

  It seemed to Freddie the insurance man was doing a very nice job of drawing attention to himself and away from anything else that might happen on this block, so, while all eyes turned toward this unexpected entertainment on the sidewalk, Freddie skipped through the gathering throng and went off in pursuit of the woman with the shopping bags. She was still plodding forward, step after step, doggedly homeward bound.

  Unfortunately, just as Freddie arrived, the woman stopped. She frowned. She gazed down at the shopping bag into which Freddie had dropped the phone. Her eyes widened. “Hello?” she said.

  Now what? Freddie had just caught up, and had been about to reach into that bag to retrieve the phone, but he couldn’t very well do that with the woman staring at the bag that way.

  Then things got worse. One-armed, the woman raised that plastic bag toward her head, a listening expression on her face. And then Freddie could hear it, too. In a tiny tinny voice, the plastic bag was saying, “Hello? Hello?”

  The woman screamed, sensibly enough. Then she dropped the plastic bag onto the sidewalk—something glass broke in there, Freddie heard it—and legged it down the street at a milk-horse trot, listing to the side where she still toted groceries, but making good headway nonetheless.

  So now while most of the people on the street were watching the insurance man do his mad lost-telephone dance, the rest of the people on the street turned to watch the fershlugginer woman with the one plas
tic bag, trotting and shrieking. A great moment for Freddie to retrieve the phone, which he did, and scoot with it into the tapered recess of the storefront dentist’s entryway. Hunkering down there, so he could keep the phone below the level of the storefront window—he didn’t want the receptionist in there to have to wonder why a cellular phone was flying solo in her doorway—he raised it and heard the thing still going, “Hello? Hello?”

  What persistence. “Sorry, wrong number,” Freddie told it, and closed the two halves of the phone together, which made it hang up. He waited a couple seconds, then opened it again, put it to his ear, and the plaintive hellos were gone at last, replaced by the welcome dial tone. Quickly he punched out his own number, and Peg answered on the second ring: “Hello?”

  “It’s me, Peg, I’m gonna come home now.”

  “Okay. Your brother Jimmy called.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “He said don’t call him back, he’ll ring again later.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  Freddie looked up, and there was a kid of maybe eight years of age standing in the doorway, looking with deep interest at the floating cellular phone, which was just now saying, “I’ll make you a turkey sandwich, okay?”

  “Ssshhhhh,” Freddie said.

  The kid said, “I didn’t say anything.”

  Peg said, “Freddie? Something wrong?”

  “I got to hang up now,” Freddie said, and folded the phone on itself.

  The kid gazed, neither frightened nor excited, just intensely interested. He said, “Are you a magic phone?”

  “Yes,” Freddie said.

  “Do you belong to that man back there?”