Smoke

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Well, that’s the thing,” Mordon ventured, fingers pointing toward various nonexistent fireflies, “you can’t see this fellow. No one can. That’s what makes him so hard to find.”

  “And so useful, dammit.” Jack the Fourth thumped a meaty fist against his clean desktop, making the ashtray and Mordon jump, but not the stoic assistants. “I want that fellow now! I need him! So why don’t I have him?”

  “Being a thief,” Mordon hazarded, fingers searching for a lost contact lens in a shag rug, “makes him adept, I presume, at hiding out. But I’m sure we’ll find him eventually.”

  “I don’t have eventually. What I have is an idea.”

  Mordon’s hands climbed the escape rope of his tie. “Yes?”

  “These mad medicos,” Jack the Fourth wheezed, “they know now, don’t they, if they put their two potions together, they make an invisible man?”

  Surprised, his hands turning like sunflowers, Mordon said, “Well, yes, I suppose they do.”

  “Then let them make us one,” Jack the Fourth demanded. “Keep looking for the original, but make us a copy.”

  The sunflowers grew. “They could, couldn’t they?” But then the sunflowers died, and Mordon said, “But who? Who would take such a risk, and wind up like, like that?”

  “One thing I’ve learned about money,” Jack the Fourth wheezed. “If you have enough of it, somebody’s gonna volunteer. And I need an invisible man, dammit. I need him right away!”

  “Congressional hearings?” Mordon suggested. “Competitors’ pricing plans?”

  “All that, too, of course,” Jack the Fourth rumbled, with a massive shrug of shoulder. “But that isn’t the most important. I need him for something else, closer to home.”

  Suspected infidelity? Jack the Fourth’s fifth wife? Mordon looked alert. “Yes?”

  “The doctors!” Jack the Fourth cried, with sudden passion. “The doctors are lying to me!”

  “Which doctors?” Mordon asked.

  “You’re right,” Jack the Fourth told him. “They’re all witch doctors!”

  “No, I meant, which doctors are lying to you?”

  “My doctors! Who the hell other pill pusher do you think I’d talk to? Do you think I like to talk to doctors? Grubby little handwashers? Don’t you know I quit two different country clubs in my life because they let the pill pushers in? Measly little body mechanics, they get two dimes to rub together, they think they’re class! Effrontery!”

  “Uh, Jack,” Mordon said. “What have your doctors been lying to you about?”

  “Me, of course! What the hell do I care what their opinions are on anything else? They’re lying to me about me, and I damn well know it. You think I look any better today than the last time you saw me?”

  If it were possible for Jack the Fourth to look worse, he would look worse. Since it was not, he looked the same. “Uh—” Mordon said.

  “Neither do I!” yelled Jack the Fourth, and paused to cough a lot of red foam into a handkerchief held by one of the assistants. When that attack was over, he resumed, telling Mordon, “They tell me I’m improving, if you can believe it. Oh, they admit I’ll never play tennis again, they don’t go so far as to promise a cure, the rotten sycophants, but they claim I’m holding my own, that’s how they phrase it, as though I could even find my own anymore. I need this goddam spook of yours, or one we make ourselves, to sneak in there and listen when I’m not around. I know they’re lying, I know it!”

  “Then why do you need the invisible man’s confirmation?” Mordon asked, blessing the multitudes.

  Jack the Fourth turned his melting iceberg eyes on Mordon. “I want to know,” he rasped, “if they’re laughing.”

  32

  Sometimes it seemed to Peg she’d been born in the wrong century. Sometimes it seemed to her she should have been born back in the Middle Ages, when people liked their white women white, when alabaster was a word that showed up in the poetry a lot, referring to women, not mausoleums, and was considered a compliment. Sometimes she thought it had been a mistake on her part to be born at a time when white women were supposed to color themselves like french toast.

  Even when she was a little kid, she felt the same way. The other little kids were at Coney Island or Jones Beach, spread-eagled on the sand like victims of a hostile tribe, and where was Peg? Under the beach umbrella; wrapped inside the beach towel; in the shade of the hot dog stand; home, reading a book. “It’s such a beautiful day out, whyn’t you go out and catch the sun?” well-meaning but mortally mistaken grownups would say, and five minutes later Peg would be sneaking in the back door.

  Now, of course, with ozone, everybody knows that tinting yourself the shade of a tennis racket handle is a dangerous affectation at best. Now, with the sunblocks steadily thickening toward three figures, Peg no longer had to justify herself to the rest of the world. “I’m keeping out of the sun,” she’d say, and people would nod and say, “Ozone,” and Peg would smile and let it go at that, but it wasn’t ozone. It was her skin. She liked it the color she was born with.

  So she hadn’t expected to be spending much time at, in, or near the swimming pool that had come as part of the rental house, though she knew Freddie liked to swim and would probably drift up there by himself without a bathing suit from time to time. But then she discovered how much fun it was to watch Freddie swim, and that changed everything.

  Yes, watch. In the pool, he was still of course invisible, but nevertheless he was a palpable substance, a mass, and he did displace the water he moved through. The clear water could be seen to bunch and roil and stream all around him, reflecting the light in another way, making forms and shapes of its own as Freddie passed by. When he swam the length of the pool underwater, a thing he liked to do, it was eerie, almost frightening, to see that thick rippling disturbance move ghostly and fishlike down there, occasionally emitting streams of bubbles from . . . from nowhere. And when he burst through the surface, leaping up, blowing water like a whale, it was just astonishing: water exploding, all by itself.

  The pool was behind the house, and up a slight slope, and off-center from the house just a bit to the right. An enclosing fence framed the pool and its stone-and-wood surround; it was made of vertical wood slats four feet high, with a two-foot latticework above that, to catch the breeze and permit the people inside to look out while retaining their own privacy. At the right end of the pool, where a round Lucite table and four white plastic chairs stood under a large blue-and-white-striped umbrella that stuck up like a Martian plant from the middle of the table, you could look through the lattice and down past the side of the house to the driveway in front, to see people arrive without their seeing you.

  Here they were spending most of their time, when not in Dudley. The sun was warm, the air not too hot, the pool heated. Freddie frolicked like a walrus, a dolphin, but one you couldn’t see, while Peg sat under the umbrella, wore a straw hat with a big brim, and white slacks and sleeveless blouses (she wasn’t a maniac on the subject), and read Bleak House. (Having been a dental technician had led Peg to the Good Books; she liked to give book reports aloud while working on her patients. They couldn’t say anything anyway, their mouths being full of slender chrome instruments, so if Peg was going to be reduced to monologues, they might as well be on something worthwhile).

  The morning after their encounter with the police chief in Dudley they spent up by the pool. Freddie swam sometimes, and other times lay out on a beach towel spread in the sun on the duckboard surround; he said he wasn’t worried about getting a burn. Peg alternatively hung out with the lawyers in Bleak House or, whenever Freddie enthusiastically and invisibly cannonballed back into the pool, she watched that spectral surge as it lashed and plunged through the heaving water.

  The sun was high, and she was just beginning to think about lunch, when she heard a car door slam. The chief! At once, she slapped down the book onto the table and jumped to her feet. The chief! He found us!

  Of course, there was no way.
Even if the chief knew their license number, which was unlikely, all it would lead him to was the address in Bay Ridge. Still, it was the chief she fully expected to face when she hurried to the fence and stared through the lattice, and so it was with great relief that she saw, moving away from his red car in the driveway toward the front of the house, the real estate agent, Call Me Tom. “Up here!” she cried, and waved her hand above the fence.

  He looked back and up. “Oh, hi.” Waving, he reversed his route.

  Peg turned back to the pool, hissing, “Freddie! Freddie!”

  He was already coming out of the pool, which she could tell by the splashing, and then the wet footprints, and all those water drops suspended in the air, vaguely in the shape of a man.

  “No, no!” She hurried toward him, with frantic shooing gestures. “Back in the pool!”

  He went, dropping backwards, making a great splash, the idiot. Peg, shaking her head, ran over to open the wood-and-lattice door, just as Call Me Tom got there, smiling. He wore a short-sleeved white shirt with a pale green necktie, but he must have left his briefcase or sample book in the car. “Hi, Peg,” he said. He was all the salesmen in the history of the world rolled into one and placed in bright sunlight, to see what would happen.

  “Hi, Tom. Come on in.”

  “Thanks. Just checking, see how you’re coming along,” he said, as he entered the pool area.

  “Fine, thanks.”

  He stopped and looked around. “Where’s your friend?”

  The footprints on the duckboards were fading fast in the dry sunny air. “He’s in New York,” Peg said. “He still has to work, poor guy.”

  “Oh. I thought . . .” Call Me Tom looked at the still-wet duckboards, the empty pool, the book on the table under the umbrella, and decided to give it up. “Catching up on your reading, eh?”

  “Sure, why not? Good weather, nothing to do, no interruptions—”

  “Except me,” he said, and stopped smiling long enough to look sheepish.

  “No, no, I didn’t mean that,” she assured him, though she had meant that, and they both knew it.

  “Well, I won’t take you away from your—oh, Bleak House! God, I read that years ago.”

  “First time for me.”

  “Jarndyce and Jarndyce,” Call Me Tom said, and chuckled, and shook his head. “I could tell you some lawsuit stories,” he threatened. “Real estate, it honestly brings out the worst in people, I believe that’s true.”

  Beyond him, in Peg’s line of sight, a wet forearm print appeared on the duckboard beside the pool. “You may be right,” she said. “But not here, we’re really happy with the place.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.” Call Me Tom cast a look around, to be sure they were alone, and failed to notice the knee print that now appeared next to the forearm print. Nonetheless, he lowered his voice as he said, “You told me about the legal troubles your friend is having. The divorce and all.”

  It was hard for Peg to concentrate on what Call Me Tom was saying, when over his right shoulder she could see those wet footprints appearing one after the other along the duckboards on the other side of the pool. “The reason we’re paying in cash and all that, you mean,” she said.

  “Exactly.” Call Me Tom moved closer, being more confidential, as behind him a beach towel picked itself off a chair and whipped around madly and soundlessly in the air. Peg knew Freddie was doing this only because he was sore at the interruption, but it was so dangerous. “I just thought you ought to know,” Call Me Tom murmured, managing to remain ebullient while expressing sympathy and concern and solidarity, “that I got a phone call this morning, first thing, some finance outfit in Syracuse, looking for you.”

  This made no sense. “Syracuse?” Peg repeated, astonished. “For me? I’ve never been in Syracuse in my life.” Meantime, that damn towel was still doing its dance, as though Call Me Tom might not turn around at any second.

  And yet he didn’t. Maintaining eye contact with Peg, “My hunch is,” he said, “it has something to do with your friend’s divorce. I think they know the two of you rented a place somewhere around here, and they’re calling all the brokers, trying to track you down.”

  The towel opened itself, sailed briefly, then made a magic-carpet landing on the duckboards. At the same time, Peg suddenly realized what that phone call must mean. “Oh, my God,” she said. If she’d permitted her face to pick up any color before this, it would have drained away now.

  “You’re my client,” Call Me Tom assured her. Parts of the beach towel flattened more than other parts. “I have no complaint with you, and I trust you have no complaint with me.”

  “Complaint? What complaint?” I must not get hysterical, Peg thought hysterically, and used up some of the tension by waving her arms around as she said, “Look at this great place you found us!”

  “Well, thanks. It is nice, isn’t it?” Call Me Tom said, and now he did turn in a half-circle, taking it all in: the day, the pool, the beach towel. Smiling at Peg some more, he said, “Mention me to your friends.”

  “I will.”

  “I got”—he took several folded pieces of paper from his pants pocket, went through them, selected one, put the rest away, and handed that one to Peg—“the fellow’s name and phone number, in case you want to call him and tell him to leave you out of it all. Sometimes that works, when they’re bothering somebody other than the person involved in the case.”

  “Good idea,” Peg agreed, taking the piece of paper but not yet looking at it. She couldn’t help herself; even with this bad news, her concentration was still broken by that goddam towel, lying there so innocently. I’m going to hit him with a stick, she promised herself, as she said, “I really appreciate this, Tom. Thanks a lot.”

  “Anytime. Well, I’ll let you get back to your book.”

  They walked together over to the door in the pool-area wall, Call Me Tom smiling at the scene, then frowning slightly. Had some corner of his brain noticed that there hadn’t been a beach towel lying there in that position the last time he’d looked?

  “I’ll call Freddie tonight,” Peg said, talking fast to distract him. “Tell him about this. He’ll know what to do.”

  “Or his lawyer. Well, enjoy your summer,” Call Me Tom said, and waved, and went away.

  Peg stood inside the wall, door closed, and watched through the lattice as Call Me Tom returned to his car and backed it down the driveway. When, in the middle of that, a wet hand touched her arm, she didn’t look around—what was the point in looking around?—but merely said, “I’m not speaking to you.”

  “He wasn’t going to look away from those big eyes of yours, Peg. I get cold in the water after a while.”

  “It’s a heated pool.”

  “Still. I seem colder, now I’m invisible. Anyway, it turned out our friend Barney set some skip-trace outfit loose on us, huh?”

  Peg looked at the folded piece of paper in her hand, opened it, and read the names aloud: “‘Stephen Garmainster, Equity Research and Retrieval Corporation.’ We aren’t going to phone this guy.”

  “Barney’s got some money behind him, to do this,” Freddie said.

  Call Me Tom was gone; pocketing the piece of paper, Peg walked back over to her chair and her table and her book. Freddie, from the sound of his voice, followed, saying, “This checking-account business you’re gonna do. Better use the apartment in the city for the address.”

  “I’m glad Call Me Tom told us about it, anyway,” Peg said, settling into her chair, resting a hand on her book, wishing she were back in nineteenth-century London.

  “Yeah, well.” The chair across the way recoiled from the table, then sagged.

  Peg gave it a jaundiced look. “What do you think, he’s after my body, that’s the only reason he told me?”

  “That’s one possibility,” Freddie agreed, from somewhere in the air. This was exactly the sort of thing Peg hated, she reminded herself, as he went on, “Another possibility is, he had a guilty conscience.
”

  She frowned. “What kind of guilty conscience?”

  “What if he did tell the guy something? Then afterward he thought it over, he thought, maybe you should at least get a warning.”

  “Oh, gee, Freddie, do you think so? Is that what it was all about?”

  “I don’t know. He’s tough to read.”

  “You’re one to talk.”

  “Yeah, but Call Me Tom’s such a friendly guy, you can see him and you still can’t see him.”

  “I don’t think he’d lie about it,” Peg said.

  “I hope not.” Freddie’s voice floated in the air. “But, maybe, just to be on the safe side,” he said, “we ought to each pack one little bag, leave it in the van. Just in case.”

  Peg sat there, alone but not alone. There were no more words from Freddie. Her hand rested on the book, but she didn’t pick it up. The sun didn’t seem as bright anymore.

  33

  “Not possible,” Peter said, and David said, “What do you think we are?”

  “Scientists,” the lawyer Leethe said, which of course couldn’t properly be refuted.

  Still. “You come here unannounced,” Peter began.

  “Of course,” Leethe said, shrugging his shoulders, playing the piano. “Had I called, you would have refused to see me.”

  “Absolutely,” said David.

  “Or insisted on your friend Cummingford being present.”

  “Our attorney Cummingford,” Peter said.

  They were standing together, all three, in the front hall, under the amused gaze of Shanana. When she’d buzzed up to them in the lab to say that Mordon Leethe had made an unexpected entry—rather like bubonic plague making an unexpected entry, that—they’d decided at once to come down here, meet the man as close to the front door as possible, and repel this invader before the pestilence could spread.