Smoke

by Donald E. Westlake

  Geoff took a deep breath, held the handgun in his left hand—a Smith & Wesson Police Positive .32 revolver, tested semiannually on the firing range but never fired otherwise, up till now—squeezed the doorknob with his right hand, stopped to be sure he was calm enough for all this, then turned the knob, shoved the door open, stepped in, pointed the revolver toward the desk, and cried, “Hold it right—”

  There was nobody in the room. Geoff stared around, this way and that, and there was nobody in the room, the place was as empty as when he’d gone out.

  There’d been no scratch marks or damage on the door, either, come to think of it. Was he crazy? Was it a mouse after all?

  The bottom desk drawer over there was open. From this angle, he could just barely see it. And his office chair was tilted backward at an unusual angle. Geoff squinted, pointing the handgun at that chair. He waited.

  The chair squeaked. A tiny, reluctant, embarrassed squeak, but a definite squeak.

  “Okay,” Geoff said. Now he was sure of himself. Back to the doorway, handgun pointed firmly at the seat back, he said, “I don’t know how you’re doing that, mirrors or whatever it might be you’ve got there, some kind of city trick I’ve never heard of, but that’s okay. I don’t have to see you to know you’re there. And I don’t have to see you to shoot you, either, so you’d best be very careful.”

  The chair squeaked again, even more reluctantly than before, this time sullenly, mulishly as well.

  “I said be careful,” Geoff told it. One small part of him was amazed to listen how he was talking so calmly and self-assuredly in an empty room, but the rest of him was just doing his job. All of his jobs, all the jobs he’d been trained for, taking state-police classes and fire-department classes and CPR training and ambulance-rescue instruction and all the rest of it. Emergencies were what he did. If the emergency is you talk out loud in an empty room and point your handgun at a perpetrator you can’t see, that’s okay. You cope.

  Geoff said, “That chair’s giving you away, you know. I’ll know if you try to stand up out of it, so you shouldn’t try that, because then I will have to shoot you, because otherwise I might not know where you are. So just stay in the chair.”

  Nothing. Silence.

  “You’re not fooling me, you know,” Geoff said.

  Nothing. Silence.

  “Well, this is just silly,” Geoff said. “All I have to do is call a couple of friends of mine, and they’ll come here and throw ropes around you and the chair while I hold this gun on you, and then we’ll turn you over to the state police and let them send you back to the city or whatever they want to do with you. Is that woman in the van with you?”

  A sigh sounded, floating in the air.

  Geoff nodded. “Yeah, I thought she was.”

  The chair squeaked again, this time loudly and unashamedly. Papers on the desk ruffled and crumpled. It was Geoff’s guess that the perp had put his elbows on the table and his head in his hands. He almost felt sorry for the fellow, and might have, if the fellow weren’t in the process of burglarizing Geoff’s own house, own office, and own desk. Sympathy in his voice, he said, “You want to tell me about it?”

  “Out of all the police departments in all the small towns in all the world,” said a faint forlorn voice from the general direction of the desk, “why did I have to pick this one?”

  “Maybe you underestimated us hicks,” Geoff suggested.

  “Oh, don’t do that city-country shit on me,” the nothing in the chair said, sounding aggrieved. “We’re all just people, goddam it.”

  “Well, that’s true,” Geoff said, feeling suddenly abashed. He tried to be a decent person, and didn’t like all at once to find evidences of prejudice in himself. “I apologize if I was being anti-city,” he said, “but you have to admit, what you’re doing there, whatever it is you’re doing, it isn’t something anybody around Dudley could do.”

  “That’s right. So nobody’s gonna believe you,” the whatsit in the chair said hopefully, “so you’d just make trouble for yourself, so probably the best thing would be, you just let me go.”

  “They don’t have to believe me,” Geoff told him. “They can believe you.”

  The next sigh from the chair was counterpointed by a sudden loud knocking at the front door. An instant later, a woman’s voice out there called, “Hello? Anybody home?”

  “There’s your friend,” Geoff said.

  “Never saw her before in my life.”

  “You’re not seeing her now.”

  “If I could see her, I’ve never seen her before.”

  Knock knock. “Hello? Hello?”

  Geoff said, “Is my front door locked or unlocked?”

  “Unlocked.”

  “Why don’t you call her in, then?”

  “It’s your house.”

  “You unlocked the door.”

  Knock knock. “Hello? Anybody? Freddie?”

  Sigh from the chair, long and heartfelt. “Come on in,” the burglar called.

  “Freddie?”

  “It’s unlocked!”

  “You be good now, Freddie,” Geoff warned, and stepped back into the doorway, so he could look simultaneously at his office chair and the front door, which opened.

  The woman from the van, now that he got a better look at her in his open front doorway, was an attractive girl, like one of those movie actresses that play girls from Brooklyn but aren’t really. Except this one probably was. She stared at Geoff, much more astonished and frightened by his appearance than he had been by her boyfriend’s nonappearance. “Who—who are you?”

  “Well, the householder,” Geoff said. “Also the chief of police. Come on in. Might as well close the door behind you.”

  “No, I, I was just, he’s not here, sorry, I was just, uh, looking for my friend.”

  “Freddie. Come on in,” Geoff invited again, being very calm and easygoing, trying not to spook this girl more than she was already spooked. “Freddie’s sitting at my desk,” he said.

  She came in, she shut the door, and she looked at Geoff with deep mistrust. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

  Now that she was inside, Geoff let her see the gun. Gesturing with it, he said, “I’d like you to come into the office, please,” and he put more of his official tone into his voice.

  She stared at the gun. “That’s a gun!”

  “Yes, ma’am. Which I don’t intend to use unless you try to run away or Freddie makes an unauthorized move out of that chair.” Looking toward the chair in question, Geoff said, “Freddie, would you ask your friend to come on in?”

  Sounding resigned, Freddie’s voice said, “Come on in, Peg.”

  “Freddie?” Clearly, she couldn’t believe any of this. “What’s happening?”

  “Well, I’m caught, Peg. That’s the hell of it.”

  Geoff stepped back from the doorway into the office, and Peg came forward. Entering the office, she looked around and made one last hopeless try. “I don’t see anybody.”

  “Forget it, Peg,” Freddie said. “He’s got me pinned in this chair here.” And he made the chair squeak, just to prove it. Then, sounding aggrieved again, he said, “You’re such a goddam handyman, I can see it all over you, how come you don’t oil this chair?”

  “Never got around to it. Peg, maybe you could stand beside the desk over there, while Freddie tells me what’s going on.”

  As she moved over, they both started talking at once, then both stopped, then Peg said, “Freddie, let me tell him.”

  “Okay. You’re better at it, I guess.”

  “That’s right.” Peg turned to Geoff, her expression as open and honest and clean as the day outside those windows. “Besides,” she explained, “you can see me, you can see my face and know I’m telling the truth.”

  “Sure,” Geoff said, and looked at that dewy face, and thought, Now here we have a first-class grade-A liar. “Go ahead,” he said.

  “Freddie’s a scientist.”

  Well, tha
t’s good, Geoff thought. Start with a whopper. “Uh-huh,” he said.

  “He’s working on a cure for cancer.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Skin cancer,” Freddie added.

  “Uh-huh.”

  Peg said, “He’s got this special medicine that takes the color out of your skin and your whole body, and that’s why you can’t see him.”

  “That would explain it,” Geoff agreed.

  Peg now looked more sincere than ever. “But,” she said, “there are some very bad guys trying to steal the formula.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Simultaneously, Freddie said, “A chemical company,” and Peg said, “Foreign agents.”

  “Uh-huh,” Geoff said.

  “A foreign chemical company,” Freddie explained.

  “Their agents,” Peg footnoted. “They’re Swiss, I think.” Turning desperately to the chair behind the desk, she said, “Is that right, Freddie?”

  “Yeah, I think so. Swiss, I think.”

  “So Freddie had to get away and hide,” Peg explained, turning back to Geoff.

  “Should be easy for him to do, considering,” Geoff agreed.

  Sounding bitter, Peg said, “You’d think so.”

  “I experimented on myself,” Freddie said. “To test my formula, because I didn’t want to put anybody else at risk.”

  “I’ve seen that in the movies,” Geoff said.

  “Sure. Happens all the time. But now I got to hide out until my experiment’s done, and these guys are after me. They’re very powerful guys, with these like tentacles into the very highest level of government, and all that stuff.”

  Peg explained, “It’s like a Robert Ludlum novel.”

  “I was going to suggest that myself,” Geoff told her.

  “So we ran away,” Peg went on, “but Freddie wanted to know if maybe they had some of their powerful friends get the police to look for us—”

  “Corrupt city police,” Freddie said, in a blatant appeal to Geoff’s prejudices—dang!

  “So we stopped here,” Peg said.

  “Of all places,” Freddie said.

  “And Freddie came in here to see if his name was on any wanted lists.”

  Geoff lifted an interested eyebrow toward the chair. “Was it?”

  “I don’t know yet. I mean, not so far.”

  Geoff pointed the gun at the clipboard on the right side of the desk. “Did you look on that clipboard?”

  “No. What’s that?”

  “If they were looking for you, how long would it be?”

  “Just a few days.”

  “Then it’ll be on that clipboard,” Geoff told him. “Any wanted flyers they fax me, I put them on that clipboard. Anything in the last two, three weeks’ll be there.”

  “Okay if I look?”

  Geoff couldn’t help a sardonic chuckle. “You break-and-enter my house, and then ask my permission to look at that clipboard?”

  “I apologize for breaking and entering.”

  “Go ahead and look,” Geoff said.

  That was a strange moment, when the clipboard lifted up into the air all by itself, and then started riffling its own pages. While the clipboard animated itself like that, Geoff took time to consider the baloney sandwich they’d just fed him. He suspected that, here and there in the mix, like flecks of gold in a sandy streambed, there were particles of truth stirred into the baloney. Not a lot of particles, but some.

  A sigh of relief from the desk. Peg turned, hopeful, ready to be happy. “Is it okay?”

  “We’re not there!” Freddie sounded relieved, elated, even astonished. “Peg, by golly, I’m not a wanted man!”

  “Well, that isn’t exactly true,” Geoff said. “Here in Dudley you’re wanted, in fact you’re being arrested, for breaking and entering.”

  “Aw, come on, Chief,” Freddie said. “I didn’t take anything, I wasn’t gonna take anything, you know that’s true. And I didn’t hurt any of your locks or anything else, no damage at all. I’ll even oil this damn chair before I go, if you want.”

  “Go? You aren’t going anywhere.”

  “Chief?” Freddie asked. “Won’t you give us a break?”

  “No.”

  “Peg?”

  All at once, Peg was slinking seductively toward him, smiling, blocking his view of the desk, saying, “Chief? Am I arrested, too? I didn’t break into anywhere.”

  “Move over!” Geoff cried, but it was too late. Squeak! When Geoff jumped to his right, to see his chair, it was turning in a lazy circle, bobbing slightly, definitely empty.

  “Damn it!” Geoff yelled, and pointed the gun at Peg. “Don’t you move!”

  “I just don’t believe you’ll shoot me,” Peg said, and backed toward the open doorway.

  “I’ll shoot your leg!”

  “This leg?” She leered at him. “Chief, what kind of man are you?”

  “Now, stop! Right there!” Geoff shouted, and his fire-chief helmet came flying out of the air and bounced off his wrist, so that he almost dropped the gun, but held on to it. Peg was now through the doorway, fleet of foot, and before he could get to the hall the front door slammed shut. Geoff spun around, trying to fill the doorway, to at least keep Freddie bottled up in here, and his police-chief hat took him square on the nose.

  The son of a gun was throwing his hats at him! Geoff dodged his fedora, waving the useless gun this way and that, and here came his choir-singing cap, tassel streaming out behind it like a kite’s tail. Geoff was actually ducking away from that cap when he realized it was moving in too straight a line, and not turning; it wasn’t being thrown, it was being carried!

  But the trick had worked, doggone it, that cap had made him duck out of the doorway just at the wrong second. Geoff flailed with his free hand, and found a wrist, and clenched on tight to that invisible wrist until he felt invisible teeth crunch hard onto his fingers. “Yow!” he cried, and let go, and so did the teeth, and a few seconds later slam went the front door again.

  By the time Geoff got out to the porch, the van was picking up speed westward down Market Street; not a chance in the world he could get to either his pickup, two blocks to the left, or his police car, two blocks to the right, before those people were long gone.

  Geoff hurried back into his office, sat down at his communications center, and was on the very brink of calling the state police when his second thoughts caught up with him. Report this? Report what? No evidence of a burglary, nothing taken. He knew Freddie was invisible, because he’d spent time in this room talking to the guy, but what would the fellas at the state-police barracks think if he called and asked them to pick up an invisible man in a gray minivan?

  He had no idea who those two people really were, except not scientists. He had no idea where they were headed or what their true story was or why Freddie had thought he might be on some wanted list. All he knew for sure about Freddie, in fact, was that he was not on any wanted list, which seemed improper, somehow.

  Well, he did know a couple things more about those two, when he thought it over. He knew Freddie had enough burglar skills to be a first-rate burglar, so probably was. He knew their first names, Freddie and Peg. And he knew their minivan’s license number.

  It took about two minutes to radio in and get the registration information, and learn that the owner of the van was one Margaret Briscoe—Peg, check—with an address in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, New York.

  So he’d been right about one thing today, anyway.

  30

  “That was too close a call,” Freddie said. He was staying in the back of the van, clothes off, just in case they got stopped by some law sicced on them by the chief. It hadn’t happened so far, which meant it was increasingly unlikely to happen, but nevertheless. Freddie’s wrist still burned where the chief had grabbed it, and his mouth still remembered the bad taste of the chief’s work-roughened fingers.

  Up front, Peg concentrated on her driving. “What got me about that guy,” she said, “was how easy he
took it. Like he talked to invisible people all the time.”

  “I don’t like a cop that doesn’t get rattled,” Freddie agreed. He was sitting on his rolled-up clothing, trousers on the outside of the roll, but the country road still jounced him pretty solidly against the hard floor of the van. And AstroTurf, as any professional ballplayer can tell you, is no fun to bounce on.

  “Well, at least,” Peg said, slowing but not stopping for a stop sign, then making the right onto another small twisty bumpy county road, “now we know for sure there isn’t any paper out on you.”

  “I told you Barney was working off the books,” Freddie said. “So now we’re safe and clear. All we have to do is stay away from Dudley.”

  “There’s not much there,” Peg said. “We can do our shopping in the other direction.”

  “Fi-hine!” Freddie said as hey went over one particularly brutal bump. “How much longer till we get home, Peg?”

  “Ten minutes, maybe less.”

  “Good.”

  “And then we can relax.”

  “I keep thinking,” Freddie said, bracing himself with both hands on the AstroTurf, “about that chief back there, and how he damn near got me.”

  “Well, he didn’t get you,” Peg said, braking not very much at a yield sign. “So don’t worry, Freddie, you’ll never see that guy again.” She laughed. “And Lord knows, he won’t see you.”

  31

  Monday afternoon, three-thirty. Mordon Leethe watched Jack Fullerton the Fourth set flame to a cigarette from a Greek Revival lighter the size of a football. There was then a delay in the conversation for the ritual coughing, hacking, wheezing, gasping, spitting, eyeball-rolling, weeping, snorting, snot-spraying, drooling, and braying, Jack the Fourth being held and succored and rubbed down and wiped off all through it by his two silent dark-suited assistants. Then, once the storm had subsided and Jack was again capable of speech, the cigarette smoldering like some outlying district of hell in that huge ashtray on his desk, the oxygen tube once again in position beneath his nostrils, he turned his wet pale red-rimmed eyes on Mordon and said, “Where is he? I want to see this fellow.”