Smoke

by Donald E. Westlake

  Peter looked at him in surprise. “It isn’t?”

  “May I?”

  “Go ahead.”

  To Leethe, Bradley said, “David and Peter here created that invisible man while employees of your client. To the extent that a human being may be property, therefore, he is the property of your client, or the discoveries and techniques he embodies are your client’s property. However, legal practice, medical practice, scientific practice, all agree that while your client holds ultimate ownership, or whatever rights would take the place of ownership in this instance, David and Peter are the ultimate authorities as to when their creation is in a fit and proper condition to be turned over to your client. As of this point, since the experiment was altered by the experimental subject away from the original intentions of Peter and David, and since they have not as yet had the opportunity to examine the subject to see what other unforeseen effects may have been caused by this flawed experiment, they wish me to put NAABOR and the American Tobacco Research Institute on notice, through you, their agent, that the experiment must be considered at this point in time tentative and inconclusive and incomplete, and that David and Peter are thoroughly averse to turning over to your clients any experimental data, including but not limited to the invisible man himself, until they are satisfied with the results of their researches. It is only a completed discovery or invention they are required to deliver to your client and toward which your client would enjoy a proprietary relationship.” Opening the manila folder, he said, “I have a number of citations of court cases tending towards—”

  “That’s all right,” Leethe said, patting his right hand toward Bradley’s manila folder, as though to tell a dog he didn’t feel like playing fetch. “We can citation one another for a month, if we wish,” he said, “but I don’t think we need waste the time, do you?”

  “Fine,” Bradley said. But he left the folder open, and lifted from it a packet of white paper. “I have prepared,” he said, “a statement outlining the position I’ve just described, that David and Peter acknowledge that at the end of the day all research results adhere to the American Tobacco Research Institute, and the institute acknowledges David and Peter’s right to withhold material they consider flawed or incomplete. They will sign copies today, and we’d like a qualified officer of the institute to sign it as well. Here you are,” he said, and handed copies of the two-page statement to each of the other three.

  It was what Bradley’d said. David and Peter read their copies, and read their own names under signature lines mid-way down the second page, and both noticed that the subject of the discussion remained determinedly vague. Invisible men were never directly mentioned, which was a pity; what a thing it would be, to have on a legal document.

  Leethe took a lot longer to read it, then removed his own Mont Blanc pen from his inner pocket and said, “I think we need to add here, ‘Not to be frivolously withheld.’”

  “Where’s that?” Bradley asked. Leethe pointed to the spot, and Bradley considered it, then shrugged. “Of course. If you feel you need it.”

  “I would be happier.”

  “Then by all means. Peter, David, would you write that in on your copies?”

  He showed them where and what to write, and they did, and then he had them sign their copies and initial the addition, then exchange the copies and sign and initial, then take Bradley’s and Leethe’s copies and sign and initial them, and it was all very like buying a house.

  Bradley kept one signed copy, and gave the rest to Leethe, who put them away in his attaché case and said, “As a matter of fact, I also have something here for signature.”

  Bradley waited politely, and Leethe took out his own little stack of papers and put them on the table, saying, “The first point is, the American Tobacco Research Institute never approved experimentation on human beings.”

  “Oh, now!” Peter cried. “It was accepted from the very beginning that at some stage field trials would have to be done, and that means human volunteers, everybody knows that.”

  “I have searched the relevant files,” Leethe assured him, while his fingers demonstrated by running up a slope in midair. The hands then swept to the sides, palms down, clearing snow. “I found nothing.” The hands met in prayer. “If it isn’t on paper,” Leethe said, “it doesn’t exist.”

  Before either Peter or David could reply, Bradley interjected, “Granted.”

  Peter stared at him, betrayed. “Granted?”

  “It would have been better,” Bradley gently suggested, “if you’d gotten that understanding in writing at the outset, but we’re not going to worry about it now.” While Peter continued to look shocked, and almost mutinous, Bradley turned to Leethe and said, “We accept the point. We also accept the fact that the particular experimental subject under discussion was not a volunteer.”

  “Which the institute,” Leethe added, the first finger of his right hand playing metronome, “would never have approved.”

  “Agreed.”

  “At this point,” Leethe went on, “the institute, not acknowledging any onus of responsibility in this matter, but certainly aware of an accrual of goodwill that has grown between the doctors and the institute over the last years, is prepared to assist the doctors in finding the missing experimental subject—”

  “You’re already looking for him!” Peter cried.

  Leethe ignored the interruption. “—for the purpose of assuring themselves the subject will come to no harm as a result of their actions. In return, the institute requires the doctors, in writing, to hold the institute harmless in all matters both prior to and proceeding from this date, in connection with this flawed experiment.”

  “You want carte blanche,” Bradley said.

  “The institute does not intend to carry the can,” Leethe said, and carried a pretty bad bag of garbage out.

  “David and Peter could only sign such an agreement,” Bradley said, “if the institute places them in charge of the search for the experimental subject—”

  “Oh, come, now.”

  “—and places them in charge of the subject himself, once he has been located.”

  “I’m not sure the institute could—”

  “The alternative is that Peter and David will go to the state medical association.”

  Leethe blinked. He gazed at David and Peter, who did their best to maintain poker faces. “Would you, indeed,” he said.

  “We need protection from somewhere,” Peter said.

  Leethe pondered, then shrugged and said, “We’ll find common ground.”

  Bradley nodded. “I have no doubt.”

  Leethe dealt out his documents, saying, “Look these over, and tell me what you feel should be altered.”

  They all took copies—it was another two-pager—but Bradley said, “Before we do that, Mr. Leethe, I’d appreciate it if you’d bring us up to date on the search for . . .” He turned to David and Peter. “What is his name?”

  “We’re not sure,” David said. “We think he lied on his medical form.”

  “Fredric Noon,” Leethe said.

  Bradley nodded at him. “Thank you. How goes the search for Fredric Noon?”

  “It goes well, I think,” Leethe said. His hands gathered a light blanket to his chest. “We have hired a New York City policeman, to conduct the—”

  “Police?” David cried.

  “Not officially,” Leethe assured him, as his left hand, two fingers up, waved back and forth in benediction. “The gentleman is moonlighting for us.”

  “Moonlighting,” Bradley echoed, and smiled. “What a lovely image.”

  “Oddly inapt, with this fellow, I think,” Leethe said, as his hands lifted, tossing a little stardust into the air. “In any event,” while both hands became play guns and shot David and Peter in their stomachs, “he’s found Noon’s girlfriend, the one he’s been living with recently.” While his left hand rested, palm down, on the table, his right, finger upraised, pointed out various constellations. “I hope to
hear good news very shortly.”

  “When you find him,” Peter said, “we want to be there.”

  “That’s what we’re here to iron out,” Leethe told him, smoothing a bedspread. “When we do get our hands on friend Noon at last, I assure you, we’ll be delighted to have you assist.”

  David and Peter might have nodded agreement with that, but Bradley said, “What you mean, I think, is that when you find Noon, you’ll be delighted to have assisted David and Peter, and you’ll want to go on assisting them.”

  “Semantics,” Leethe said, and shrugged.

  “Is my business,” Bradley said, and picked up Leethe’s document. “Shall we see what we have here?”

  27

  The thing about anger is, it tends to overcome one’s sense of self-preservation, even if that one is such a one as Barney Beuler, whose sense of self-preservation had been honed for years on the whetstone of the New York Police Department. Coming off the Amtrak train from Rhinecliff into Penn Station at eight that night—after dark!—Barney was so enraged by life in general, Amtrak in particular, and Fredric Urban Goddam Noon in special particular, that he couldn’t have cared less if shooflys had wired his wristwatch.

  Fortunately for him, they hadn’t. In fact, fortunately for Barney, all of his many enemies over there on the side of truth, justice, and the American way were otherwise engaged when he stomped up the filthy steps of Penn Station from the filthy platform, bulldozed his way through the filthy homeless living their half-speed half-lives in the terminal, found an exposed pay phone on a stick—not even an enclosed phone booth, for a modicum of privacy—and dialed Mordon Leethe at home. At this point, he didn’t give much of a shit what happened, so long as revenge was a part of it.

  “Hello?”

  “Barney.”

  A second or two of baffled silence, and then, “Barney? Barney who?”

  “Oh, fuck you, Leethe!”

  “Oh, Barney! I’m sorry, I didn’t recognize your voice, you sounded different.”

  Barney hardly recognized himself; fury had annealed him. “We have to meet,” he snarled, while wide-eyed families from Iowa clutched one another close and moved in little clumps farther away across the terminal. “Now,” Barney added, and his teeth clacked together.

  “I’m engaged this evening.”

  “With me.”

  Leethe sighed, a dry and rasping sound. Barney almost expected dead leaves to drift out of the telephone. “I could see you at eleven,” Leethe agreed at last, reluctance dragging out the words. “There’s a bar near me.”

  Leethe lived, as Barney had made it his business to know, on the Upper East Side, Park Avenue in the nineties. It wasn’t a neighborhood he thought of as being rich in bars. “Oh, yeah?”

  “It’s called Cheval. It’s a bit of a bistro, really.”

  Sure it is, Barney thought. “I’ll see you there at eleven,” he snarled. “You and the rest of the Foreign Legion.”

   

  * * *

   

  Derrière du Cheval, if you asked Barney. As with most small side-street Manhattan restaurants, this one was built into the ground floor of a former private dwelling, which meant it was long and narrow, with a not very high ceiling. This particular example of the type was warmed with creamy paint and goldish fixtures and woodlike dark trim. The bar was a C-clamp near the front, against the right wall; beyond it, one would go to the dining area with its snowy tablecloths, most of them not in use at this hour.

  In fact, aside from the Israeli owners and Hispanic employees, most of the people still here at 11 P.M. on a Friday night were the adulterers at the bar, hunched in murmuring guilty pairs on the padded high square stools with the low upholstered backs. Among these semilost souls, Mordon Leethe looked like Cotton Mather in a bad mood, nursing a Perrier and brooding at his own reflection in the gold-dappled mirror above the back bar, as though hoping to find somewhere on the map of his own glowering face the path that would lead him out of all this.

  But no, not tonight. Sliding onto the stool to Leethe’s right, Barney bobbed two fingers at the Perrier and said, “Letting it all hang out, eh, Counselor?”

  Leethe glowered at Barney’s reflection in the mirror, then turned his head just enough to give him the full treatment from those bleak eyes. “You wouldn’t want me to let it all hang out, Barney,” he said.

  By God, and that was true, wasn’t it? “Keep it buttoned, then,” Barney advised, and turned his attention to the fourteen-year-old barman with the black pencil mustache. “Beer,” he said.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Imported. In a bottle.”

  “Any particular brand, sir?”

  “What’ve you got that’s from the farthest away?”

  The barman had to think about that. He wrinkled his mustache briefly, then said, “That would be the one from China.”

  “Mainland China? Where they have the slave labor?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ll have that,” Barney decided, and as the barman turned away he gave Leethe his own bleak look and explained, “I like the idea that a lot of people worked long and hard, just for me. Fifteen thousand miles to give me a beer.”

  “This isn’t why you phoned me,” Leethe said. “At home.”

  “No, it isn’t.” Barney looked at the hunched backs all around them. “Isn’t this kind of public?”

  “These people,” Leethe said, “don’t care about our problems. I take it something went wrong when you tried to follow the Briscoe woman.”

  “Oh, everything went ducky,” Barney said. He’d had three hours to cool down from his rage, and it was true his rage had cooled, in the sense that it had hardened, but it hadn’t abated one dyne, and would not abate until honor—or something—was satisfied. “Just ducky,” Barney repeated, and showed his teeth. At moments such as this, he didn’t actually look like a fat man at all.

  The barman brought the Chinese beer the last few feet of its journey, poured some from the bottle into a glass, and went off to provide more Kleenex for the hefty blond woman at the end of the bar. Barney drank, nodded, put the glass down, and said, “That invisible son of a bitch is pretty cute, I’ll give him that. When I do get my hands on him, I just may strangle him to death.”

  “He wouldn’t be much use to us then.”

  “Almost to death.”

  “What did Mr. Urban Noon do to you, Barney?”

  One thing Barney had learned in his years with the NYPD; how to give a succinct report. Succinctly, he described his day, finishing with the dead Impala sprawled on its broken ankles in Rhinecliff and he himself coming back to the city alone, by train.

  At the finish, there was a little silence. In it, Barney sipped more Chinese beer and Leethe sipped more French water—Barney’s liquid might have traveled farther, but Leethe’s had arguably made a sillier trip—and then Leethe said, “It may be we’ve been misjudging Mr. Noon.”

  Barney looked at the grim profile, studying itself again in the mirror. “How do you figure?” he asked. “I’ve been judging him to be a cheap crook, and he’s a cheap crook.”

  “We’ve been judging him,” Leethe said, “to be stupid because he’s small-time. But he didn’t bite on that excellent letter of yours, and he understood how you were managing to follow his friend Briscoe, and he threw you off his trail with, you must admit, dismaying ease.”

  “I’m not off his trail,” Barney snapped. “I’m on that son of a bitch’s trail, don’t you worry.”

  “All I’m suggesting is, we shouldn’t underestimate the man.”

  “Fine.” Barney shrugged, making his jacket jump. “I’ll brush up my Shakespeare for when we meet,” he said, and made a small sword-type gesture. “Have at you, Fauntleroy!”

  Leethe gave him a skeptical, even disgusted, look. “And where is that,” he asked, “in Shakespeare?”

  “How the fuck do I know? The question is,” Barney said, lowering his voice as he became aware of the adulterous herd
around him disturbed at their grazing, “where is Noon in New York State? I had my maps on the train—”

  “Why?” Leethe asked, surprised. “You were on a train.”

  Barney lowered an eyebrow. “I may practice my strangling on you,” he said.

  “Never mind,” Leethe said, unintimidated. “I understand what you meant. You’ve determined the area Noon must be in”

  “On the basis of the railroad station he picked,” Barney said, “I worked out an area where he’s got to be. No,” he corrected himself, “I’m forgetting, he’s a genius. So maybe he took the train north to Rhinebeck because he’s actually staying on the Jersey shore.”

  “I don’t think so,” Leethe said.

  “I don’t think so, either,” Barney admitted. “I think I’ll go with the probabilities here, and the probabilities here are limited to four rural counties in New York state plus maybe a little bit of Connecticut.”

  What might have been a smile ruffled Leethe’s features. “So Mr. Urban has gone rural.”

  “Yeah, and we’ll find Mr. Noon at midnight. What are you drinking there? What’d they put in that stuff?”

  “Barney,” Leethe said, sounding impatient all at once. “Why are you telling me all this? Why are we in this place? If your target area is four counties in New York State and a little piece of Connecticut, why aren’t you there, nose to the ground, tirelessly searching?”

  “Because I figure we want to find Freddie Noon within this lifetime,” Barney told him. “It’s all little villages up there, dairy farms, shit like that, spread out. A lot of people rent summer places up there, a lot of New Yorkers have weekend places there. It’s not the kind of territory I know, and it’s not a place where I got any clout, and it’s not a job for one guy anyway, no matter.”

  Leethe considered this as he turned the little Perrier bottle around and around on its circle of water on the bar. “You’re saying,” he decided at last, “that you want to hire somebody, or some several somebodies, to canvass the area, and you couldn’t wait till tomorrow to talk to me because I have to approve the expense.”