Smoke

by Donald E. Westlake

  “The cops from yesterday?”

  “Just one of them’s a cop. He’s up there in an old Chevy the color of a lima bean.”

  “And he put a bug on the car?”

  “He must’ve.”

  “Go take a walk somewhere for maybe five minutes,” the voice behind her said. “Get him to follow you. I’ll take care of it.”

  So she did, and the cop followed her, and Freddie took care of it, and now, as she waited for the Rhinebeck traffic light to turn green, Bart Simpson came up and sat next to her, saying, “Only one of them was a cop?”

  The light changed; traffic moved. As she drove on through town and out to the countryside, Peg told him her story, and then said, “How’ve things been with you, since yesterday?”

  “Weird,” he said. “I took the subway to Manhattan—it’s really dirty down there, Peg, after a while you could see my feet, I think a couple little kids did see my feet—”

  “That must have been kinda scary.”

  “Good thing it wasn’t rush hour. I got off at Times Square and went to a movie and washed my feet in the men’s room—”

  Slyly, she said, “Not the ladies’ room?”

  “I don’t know why I didn’t thinka that,” he said. The Bart Simpson face was deadpan. “Anyway, then I sat there and watched a Disney movie five times. You can’t believe, Peg, you just can’t believe, how not funny after a while it is to see a wet Labrador retriever in a station wagon with six little kids and an actress on coke. And every time you see a can of housepaint you say, ‘Oh, boy, here comes that one again.’”

  “Sounds like no fun.”

  “They oughta change the rating system,” Bart said. “They oughta have a 2D rating, for movies that are Too Dumb to put up with.”

  “It might bring more people in,” Peg suggested. “Especially out-of-towners.”

  “Good for them,” Freddie said. “Finally, after the fifth time, the movie stopped and everybody went home, and I got a good night’s sleep.”

  “On a movie chair?”

  “No no, the manager had a nice sofa in his office. Smelled like Dr Pepper, that’s all. They have these dust cloths they put over the popcorn stand at night, so I used a couple of them for sheets and blankets, and it was pretty good.”

  “Be glad nobody walked in.”

  “The first movie’s at noon,” he said. “I was up long before then, had breakfast at the food stand, and took off when they unlocked the doors, before Disney could get at me again.”

  “And went to the railroad station?”

  “I was on my way,” he assured her, “but those city streets are crowded, you know, and this time of year most of them seem like they’re Europeans, talking all these other languages, and they got no radar at all, they bang into each other all the time and they can see one another. So I had like fifteen blocks to go to get to Penn Station, and I just wasn’t gonna make it, so I ducked into Macy’s and went up to furniture and fell asleep again on a sofa in there and woke up when a fat lady sat on me.”

  “No!”

  “Yes. She let out a holler and so did I, but with her holler nobody heard mine, so I got outta there, and she was saying that was the lumpiest sofa she ever felt in her life.”

  “I bet. Then what’d you do?”

  “I made it over to Penn Station—another dirty place, believe me—and saw when the next train was, which was like over an hour—”

  “They don’t go very often,” Peg agreed. “I think we’ll travel mostly by car.”

  “Me especially,” Freddie said. “Anyway, I tried to keep out of the way, but what you got in railroad stations is people running, and wherever I went that’s where somebody wanted to run, so finally I hid behind a homeless guy against a side wall, and when he accidentally leaned back and found me there I told him just to mind his own business.”

  “You talked to him?”

  “I was tired of gettin out of people’s way, Peg. So I said, ‘You just do what you’re doin, don’t mind me back here, I’m not gonna bother you, just do what you’re doin,’ which was nothin much except to hold up a message on a piece of cardboard and stick out a used plastic coffee cup for people to put quarters in, which mostly they don’t.”

  “But what did he do?” Peg wanted to know. “When you talked to him, and he couldn’t see you?”

  “Well, first he jumped—”

  “Naturally.”

  “But then he just got sad and shook his head and said, ‘It’s my old trouble comin back. And I was doin so good. And now it’s my old trouble comin back.’”

  “Oh,” Peg said, brought down. “I feel sorry for the guy.”

  “Me, too,” Freddie said. “So I told him, ‘You shoulda took your medicine, like they told you.’ And he said, ‘Oh, I know, I know.’ And it was gonna be my train then, so I said, ‘Take your medicine and I’ll never bother you again. Is it a deal?’ And he said, ‘Oh, I will, I will.’ And I gave him a little pat on the back, and his eyes got all wide, and when I went away he was thinking it over, and I think maybe I did some good there today, Peg.”

  “That’s nice,” Peg said. “That was good of you, Freddie.”

  “So then I got on the train,” Freddie said, “and it was only like half full, so I had no trouble about a seat by myself, and here I am, except I’m hungry. All I had was breakfast at the movie.”

  “Which brings up an issue,” Peg said. “You didn’t tell me food doesn’t disappear right away.”

  “Uh-oh. Yesterday, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought maybe you wouldn’t want to know.”

  “You were right. But now I do. How long does it take, anyway, to uh, you know, disappear?”

  “Couple hours,” Bart said, looking hangdog. “I’ll make sure, Peg, I don’t remind you again. You know, if those cops hadn’t showed up—”

  “I know, Freddie,” she told him. “You’re doing your best, I know you are.”

  “Thanks, Peg.”

  “And we’ll be home pretty soon.” They were driving through bright green June scenery, rounded hills, tiny white villages, red barns, wildflowers on the roadsides, horses in fields, cows in fields, even sheep in one field, afternoon sun smiling down on the countryside, corn and tomatoes growing in tight rows, the gray van with Peg Briscoe and Bart Simpson running deeper and deeper into the landscape. “From here on,” Peg said, “we’ve got it made.”

  26

  Peter and David dressed for the meeting. Fumbling with his necktie, getting it wrong again, David said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with this tie.”

  “You’re nervous, David,” Peter explained. His tie was perfect, he was even now shrugging into his blazer, shooting his cuffs. “Calm down, why don’t you?”

  “Of course I’m nervous. Peter, for God’s sake, you’re nervous, too, you’re just covering it, keeping it inside, you know that’s—”

  “Tie your tie, David,” Peter said, not unkindly. “We’ll be all right.”

  That trace of sympathy in Peter’s voice was enough; David calmed down at least enough to tie his tie so the end neither dangled at his crotch nor covered a mere two buttons of his shirt. Slipping into his rough jacket with the brown suede elbow patches—his defensive garb was professorial, while Peter’s was aristocratic—David said, “All right. I’m ready. For whatever comes.”

  What came first, by prearrangement, was Bradley Cummingford, a large sandy-haired man with a big round open face and eyebrows of such a pale pinky-orange as to almost disappear. He wore a blue pinstripe suit, white shirt, muted blue tie, and black tassel loafers, and he carried an attaché case of extremely expensive leather, and he greeted them with a firm handshake and a clear eye and no nonsense. This was a Bradley Cummingford seen in a whole new light. Prior to this, they had only known Bradley in playful mode, when he was a very different person, in a very different place.

  Many of David and Peter’s friends summered up in the central Hudson Valley, around the river town of
Hudson and eastward from there toward—but not into—New England. This influx into the rural dairy world of upstate by all these sophisticated New Yorkers of a certain type had done wonders for the region, particularly in culinary ways: an unusual range of restaurants; arugula and goat cheese in the supermarkets, for God’s sake; excellent variety in the local wine shops. David and Peter, wedded to their research and happy as Darby and Joan—Darby and Darby, anyway—in their city townhouse, had never bought or rented a summer place in the country, but they’d frequently accepted weekend invitations to this or that hideaway in the woods, where the goings-on tended to be . . . unbuttoned.

  Until now, that was the only way they’d ever known Bradley Cummingford, merely as a fellow guest at summer outings, but they’d always been aware that he somehow or other had a serious side as well, in which he wore grown-up male clothing and was treated with respect by lawyers and judges and businessmen. When they found themselves at the mercy—to put too strong a word on it—of the tobacco lawyer, Mordon Leethe, and when it became evident there was no one around who was both knowledgeable in the arcane and frightening world of the law and reliably on their side, one of them—it doesn’t matter which one, it really doesn’t—remembered Bradley, and they made the phone call, and met with him in his offices in a downtown skyscraper—high floor, tall windows, lovely view of La Liberty lifting her skirts above that awful sludge in the harbor—and once they got him to believe that yes, they had strong reason to believe they had created an invisible man, on whom a large tobacco company had some sort of nefarious designs, he looked somber, almost severe, and said, “Well, you two have been silly, haven’t you?”

  Peter, not used to this more responsible Bradley, said. “Is that a legal term, Bradley?”

  “You don’t want to know the legal term, Peter,” Bradley said, and gazed levelly at him until Peter coughed and looked away and muttered, “I’m sorry. I’ll be good.”

  “Better late than never,” Bradley said. “Now tell me the rest.”

  So they told him everything, and he made many tiny notes on a long yellow legal pad, and said he’d see what he could do. Then, for a week, he couldn’t do a thing; every time they called, Bradley had the same news: “He’s ducking me. But he can’t do it forever.” Until, late yesterday, when they called him—he never called them, you notice—he said, “Tomorrow morning, you will threaten to go public.”

  “Oh, please,” they cried. (They were on the speakerphone in their office at the time.) “Bradley, are you out of your mind? A premature disclosure of this experiment would make us laughingstocks, Bradley, it would ruin us in the field forever, we’d be lucky to get published in Omni!”

  “I didn’t say you were going public,” he corrected them, infuriatingly calm.

  “Well, it certainly sounded like it.”

  “I said you will, tomorrow morning, threaten to go public, to protect yourselves from unknown consequences of Mr. Leethe and his friends’ activities. You will make this threat against my counsel and advice, I might add.”

  In their office, Peter and David smiled in relief at one another. They hadn’t been wrong about Bradley, after all. Peter said, “Bradley, you are a slyboots.”

  “Well, we’ll see,” Bradley said, and now they had seen, and Bradley was a slyboots. Mordon Leethe had been flushed from his lair, was on his way here, would meet with them and with Bradley.

  But first Bradley by himself. In he came with his expensive attaché case, briskly shook hands, and surveyed their parlor with a critical eye. “Haven’t you anything less comfortable?”

  David stared. “Less comfortable?”

  Peter said, “This is where we talked with him last time.”

  “It’s obviously too small for four,” Bradley said, gazing around a room that could have—and often had—accommodated eight with no problem. “What else do you have?”

  “Well,” David said, dubiously, “there’s the conference room downstairs.”

  “Oh? What’s that like?”

  “Very plain,” David told him. “Comfortable chairs but, you know, officelike. TV and VCR and all that at one end, a long rectangular table.”

  “Fluorescents in the ceiling,” Peter added. “Nothing on the walls. When we eventually do make a public announcement about our work here, that’s where we’ll hold the press conference.”

  “Sounds ideal,” Bradley said. “Lead me to it.”

  So, having brought him upstairs, they now brought him downstairs again, where Shanana the receptionist read her correspondence-school lessons and watched the street outside and answered the occasional phone call. Peter said to her, “Shanana, when Mr. Leethe gets here, show him to the conference room, will you?”

  She looked at him, alert and willing but uncertain. “The conference room? Where’s that?”

  “The coffee room,” he explained, because the coffeemaker was kept in there.

  “Oh.” She looked just as alert and just as willing, but even more uncertain. “You’re going to be in there?”

  “Yes,” he said firmly, and went after David and Bradley, who’d already gone on into the . . . conference . . . coffee . . . press-announcement room.

  In there, Bradley was looking about in happy satisfaction. “This is perfect,” he said, and plopped his attaché case onto the table down at the far end, opposite the entrance, with the TV and VCR and the pull-down slide-show screen all behind him. “You two both sit on my right here,” he directed, “along this side. When Leethe arrives, he’ll sit down there, with his back to the door. People always feel slightly uneasy with their backs to the door in an unknown room. Whether they’re aware of the feeling or not, the unease is there.”

  “Bradley,” David said, sitting nearest him, “you’re brilliant.”

  It was clear that Bradley agreed with this assessment, but, “We’ll see,” he said, and opened his attaché case and brought out both his yellow legal pad and a manila folder. “Sit down, Peter,” he said, since Peter was still standing, then Bradley sat down himself and said, “Before Leethe gets here, let’s define exactly what it is you two want.”

  “We want our invisible man back,” Peter said.

  “Unharmed,” David added.

  “Without publicity,” Peter said.

  “You also, I take it,” Bradley said, twiddling his Mont Blanc pen, “want to retain your relationship with NAABOR.”

  “I never thought we had a relationship with NAABOR,” David said.

  Peter said, “We’re funded by the American Tobacco Research Institute.”

  “A golem belonging to NAABOR,” Bradley pointed out, “as their own annual stockholder statements are proud to claim.”

  “We’re not stockholders,” David said.

  “You aren’t totally unworldly either,” Bradley told him. “You know who’s financing you, and why. And the point is, you don’t want to put that relationship at risk by whatever happens in connection with this current matter.”

  “God, no,” David said. “We don’t want to lose our funding.”

  “What we want, in fact,” Peter said, “is everything. We want our invisible man, and we want our funding, and we want our privacy maintained until we are ready to go public.”

  “The question is,” Bradley said, “what in all that is negotiable, and to what extent—”

  “None,” Peter said, and Shanana entered, saying, “Mr. Leethe is here.”

  Bradley offered her a big moonlike smile, and probably raised those invisible eyebrows of his. Getting to his feet, motioning for Peter and David to rise as well, he said, “Thank you, dear. Show him in, please.”

  She stepped back, and Leethe entered, carrying his own more battered but equally expensive attaché case. Peter and David stood where they were, like minor servers at some arcane Mass, while Bradley strode around the table, hand out, high-wattage smile agleam as he said, “Ah, Mr. Leethe, at last we meet. Bradley Cummingford.”

  Leethe took Bradley’s hand as though it were part of
the membership ritual for a club he wasn’t sure he wanted to join. Then he lifted an eyebrow at the room, gazed at David and Peter, and said, “Farewell to elegance, I see.”

  “This seems more businesslike,” Peter said.

  “It certainly does.”

  Bradley gestured at the chair he wanted Leethe in. “Do sit down, Mr. Leethe,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  As Bradley returned to his own place at the head of the table, Leethe followed him partway and took a chair midway along the side, facing David and Peter, with the allegedly uneasy-making door down to his left. David and Peter both looked at Bradley, to see how he’d take this development, but Bradley didn’t appear to have noticed it at all. Sitting down, picking up his pen, smiling again at Leethe, he said, “It does seem to me we do have some goals in common here.”

  “That’s because we have the same clients,” Leethe said.

  “Ah, if only that were so,” Bradley told him. “In fact, our firm has done some work for NAABOR over the years, but on this matter, I’m sorry to say, we have not been retained.”

  Gesturing at David and Peter, Leethe said, “I meant the doctors here.”

  “Oh, Mr. Leethe,” Bradley said. “We aren’t going over that stale ground, are we?”

  “I suppose not,” Leethe agreed, and shrugged. “I want my position clear, that’s all.” Raising that eyebrow at David and Peter, lifting his hands from the table to gesture with upheld palms, like a slow-motion demonstration of pizza-tossing, he said, “You want something. Something you couldn’t discuss with me without the presence of your friend here.”

  “We want our invisible man,” Peter said.

  Leethe’s smile could give you frostbite. “We all want the invisible man,” he said.

  “You’re looking for him,” Peter pointed out. “You have . . . people, looking for him.”

  “Granted.”

  “We want to be a part of it, when he’s found.”

  Bradley said, “Well, no, Peter, that isn’t exactly what you want.”