Smoke

by Donald E. Westlake

  Their drinks came. An extraspecial little treat from the chef came, being a kind of pâté on toast points that wasn’t half bad. Their wine came, and Freddie forgot to be self-conscious while he went through the tasting-and-approving ritual. They toasted one another, and Freddie said, “I’m glad you talked me into this, Peg.”

  “Me, too,” Peg said. “I love to be with you, Freddie, but not in the same place all the time.”

  “To getting out and about,” he said, gripping his wineglass with some little difficulty. They clinked glasses, and drank.

  Their appetizers came. They ate; they had a little more wine; they made funny remarks and laughed at them. The bus-boy in the bow tie cleared, and here came the main courses. Everything was just great.

  Peg looked up, at the wrong moment. Halfway through the meal, eating and drinking had by now removed almost all of Freddie’s lipstick, plus some of the makeup around his mouth. When Peg looked up, therefore, at precisely the wrong moment, with Freddie’s mouth open and a forkful of food on its way, what she saw was a guy with a hole in the middle of his face, and in the hole she could just make out, way back there, the inside of the wig.

  Peg closed her eyes. For good measure, she put one hand over her eyes. I’ll forget that sight, she promised herself. Sooner or later, I’ll forget what that looked like.

  In the meantime, there were other considerations to consider. “Freddie,” Peg said quietly, “when the waitress is around, keep your head down.”

  Instead of which, startled, he lifted his head. Amber candle-glow glanced dully off those dark sunglasses. Peg refused to look lower than the sunglasses, as Freddie said, “Peg? A problem?”

  “A little. We’ll take care of it. You go ahead and eat.”

  “What is it, Peg?”

  “You’re losing a little makeup, not bad. No point fixing it now, we’ll do it when we’re done eating.”

  “Now I’m nervous,” Freddie said.

  “We’re both nervous, Freddie.”

  “No no,” he said, “that’s not what I mean. I’m not used anymore to people seeing me, Peg, you know? I’m like a teenager again, self-conscious, afraid people are staring at me.”

  “Nobody’s staring at you,” Peg promised him. “Believe me, if anybody was staring at you, we’d know.”

  “I don’t want to know what you mean by that.”

  “Just eat,” she advised.

  Neither of them had much to say after that, though they both tried to recapture the spirit. But awkwardness had taken a seat at table with them, and wouldn’t get up.

  Peg did the talking with the waitress after that, saying the meal had been delicious, thank you, politely refusing dessert and coffee, asking for the check. All while Freddie posed like The Thinker with his gloved fist against his jaw on the waitress’s side.

  After Marie Antoinette went away to get the check, Peg slipped Freddie the little zipper bag containing his lipstick and makeup, and he went off to the gents’ to reconstruct himself. That’s what the girl does, Peg thought, not the guy, and decided not to pursue that thought, and then Marie brought the check.

  Peg was counting out cash into the little tray when Freddie returned. Standing beside the table, he said, “Okay now?”

  She considered him, squinting a bit. “It’ll do to get to the car,” she decided.

  Freddie gave her back the makeup bag. “A guy in there saw me putting on the lipstick,” he said.

  “Did he make a remark?”

  “I think he was going to, so I smiled at him, and he went away.”

  “I bet he did.”

  Freddie sighed. “Peg,” he said. “I’m turning into something you scare little kids with.”

  Not just little kids, Peg thought, but she wasn’t mean enough to say that out loud. “So we’ll keep you away from playgrounds,” she said instead. Getting to her feet, the bill paid, she said, “Lighten up, Freddie. Didn’t we have fun tonight?”

  “Yes,” he said, without enthusiasm.

  She took his long-sleeved arm, twined hers around it. At least he still felt like Freddie. “Pretty soon,” she murmured, as they headed toward the exit, “we’ll be back in our own bed, in the dark, without a care in the world.”

  “That sounds good.”

  The maître d’ wished to bid them farewell, and wanted to know how they’d enjoyed the experience. “Let me do the talking,” Peg muttered out of the side of her mouth, and then she praised the maître d’ and the ambiance and the food and the service and the thoughtfulness of everybody concerned, until the maître d’ squirmed all over with pleasure, like a heat shimmer. Then they left the place and crunched across the gravel parking lot in the dark, and at last got into the van.

  “Oh, boy,” Freddie said, sighing, sagging back against the passenger seat.

  “It was worth the try,” Peg said.

  “I guess it was. Yeah, you’re right, it was.”

  “Needs fine-tuning,” she suggested.

  “Back to the drawing board,” he agreed.

  “But we proved it’s possible.”

  He thought about that. “Okay,” he decided at last. “Not probable yet, but possible. But I tell you, Peg,” and before she could react he’d reached up and whipped the wig right off his head and into his lap, “this wig here is hot.”

  There wasn’t much light in the Auberge’s parking lot, but there didn’t have to be. Peg looked at him, at the makeup and the lipstick and the eyebrow pencil and the sunglasses, and then above that at nothing, and all at once, astonishing herself, she started to laugh. Then she couldn’t stop laughing.

  Freddie looked at her. “Yeah?” he asked. “What?”

  “Oh, Freddie!” she cried, through her laughter. “I do love you, Freddie, I do love to be with you, but oh, my God, Freddie, right now, you look like a Toby jug!”

  37

  The funeral was on Sunday. Wouldn’t you know it? Spoiled the entire Fourth of July weekend, putting the funeral on Sunday the second. Can’t do anything before it, can’t do anything after it, have to stay in town. You might as well be poor, or something.

  It was three-thirty on Friday afternoon when Shanana buzzed upstairs, to where Peter and David were just beginning to pack. Mordon Leethe had at last departed, taking the volunteers with him, George Clapp practically singing “Happy Days Are Here Again” and Michael Prendergast weeping bitter buckets, and now Peter and David could prepare to leave, having been invited to Robert and Martin’s place way up in the Hudson Valley for the holiday weekend. Then the distinctive buzz of the in-house phone line sounded, and they both looked over at it, and for some reason, some inexplicable reason, something told David to say, “Don’t answer it.”

  Peter gave him a scoffing look. “Don’t answer it? Why not?”

  “I don’t know, something just told me to say that. A premonition or something.”

  Peter shook his head. “And you call yourself a scientist,” he said, and picked up the phone, and said, “Yes, Shanana, what is it? Put him on.” Cupping the mouthpiece, he told David, “Amory,” then said into the phone, “Archer, how are you?”

  David moved closer to Peter and the phone, forgetting his premonition. Dr. Archer Amory, head of NAABOR’s research and development program, was their only real link to the tobacco industry that funded them, if you didn’t count the attorney, Mordon Leethe, and David certainly did not count that fellow. This was the first they’d heard from Dr. Amory since they’d turned to him with their invisible man problem a month ago and he’d passed them on to Mordon Leethe, who had told them, in an unnecessarily harsh manner, that NAABOR (and Dr. Amory, by implication) had “cut them loose.”

  And now here was Archer Amory on the phone, and Peter was listening, looking somber, saying, “Oh, too bad,” saying, “Let me write that down.” He jotted something on the pad beside the phone, said, “Thank you, Archer,” said, “Yes, we’ll see you there,” and hung up. Then he just stood there and brooded for a while.

  “
Peter? Peter, may one know?”

  Peter started, as though from a trance. “Oh,” he said. “Sorry. Jack Fullerton is dead.”

  “Who?”

  “The Fourth.”

  “Who?”

  “The head of NAABOR, the man who ran it.”

  “Oh.” David shrugged. “So what?”

  “The funeral is Sunday.”

  “Yes?”

  “We’re expected to go.”

  David stared. “Sunday? This Sunday? The day after tomorrow?”

  “Yes, of course. He died this morning. On the toilet, apparently.”

  “Peter, we can’t go to a funeral on Sunday, we’re spending the weekend with Robert and Martin!”

  “Amory said the new head man specifically asked that we be there,” Peter said, and the in-house line buzzed again. Peter raised an eyebrow at David. “Any more premonitions?”

  “That last one was right, wasn’t it? Go ahead and answer, apparently the weekend’s ruined anyway.”

  “Apparently. Yes, Shanana? Yes, put him on.” Cupping the mouthpiece, “Bradley,” he told David, meaning of course their own wonderful attorney, Bradley Cummingford, and then into the phone Peter said, “Hello, Bradley. Yes, we just heard. Yes, Archer Amory said so. No, I have no idea. Yes, I suppose we must. Will you be—? No, I see, of course not. Well, say hello to Robert and Martin for us. And the whole gang. Yes, do that. We’ll think of you, too, dear.” Hanging up, Peter said to David, “Bradley says we should go to the funeral.”

  “We never even knew the man.”

  “Nevertheless.”

  David stamped his foot, a thing he did rarely. “I will not wear black,” he said.

   

  * * *

   

  They were both in light gray, like the sky. Hazy, hot, and humid had been the forecast, and for once the Weather Service had gotten it right. The whole funeral party looked dead.

  The initial proceedings took place in a Park Avenue church of so high and refined a tone their fax number was unlisted. Though of course Gentile, it was too genteel to admit to a specific denomination, and would certainly not have permitted itself to be named after any grubby sheet-wearing saint: The Church of Lenox Hill was good enough, thank you. A brownstone pile taking up half a really good Park Avenue block, surmounted by a few spires, it steered a delicate course between Roman Catholic–cathedral ostentation and Methodist-chapel humility, managing to make itself and everyone connected with it seem utterly insincere from any angle.

  The sidewalk out front, when David and Peter emerged from their taxi, was dense with smokers, all puffing away in the heat-haze, a miasma rising from them into the dank air like the fog over a city dump, their low conversations polka-dotted with coughs. Hoping the interior of the church would be cooler, knowing its air would at least be cleaner, David and Peter made their way through the undulous crowd and up the steps to the main arched entrance, where a burly tough-looking man with a clipboard asked their names, checked them off on his list, and said, “You’ll be in car three.”

  “Oh, we’re not going to the cemetery,” David said.

  The man with the clipboard gave him an unadorned look. “Yes, you are.”

  “But—” David said, and felt Peter’s hand squeeze his arm. He permitted Peter, by that hand, to steer him past the tough fellow with the clipboard, and heard Peter, behind his back, say to the man, “Car three. Got it.”

  On into the church, high-ceilinged, dim, and relatively cool. Peter released David’s arm, and David hissed, “What was that all about?”

  “Something’s going on,” Peter told him, quietly. “They insisted we come here, and now they’re putting us in car three. They don’t count those cars from the back, David, think about it. We’re being treated like VIPs.”

  “I don’t want to be a VIP. I want to be in North Dudley with Robert and Martin.”

  “Some other time. For now, let’s keep our eyes open and our mouths shut.”

  And here came a slender young blond woman in a snug black above-the-knee dress. She too carried a clipboard and wanted to know their names, and when Peter responded, she led them to a pew very near the front on the right side. There was no one else yet in that pew—all out front, no doubt—so David and Peter sat down and looked around and watched the church gradually fill.

  When Harry Cohn, the tyrannical well-loathed head of Columbia Pictures in the thirties and forties, finally passed away, there was a huge turnout at his funeral, which led Red Skelton to comment, “It just goes to prove the old saying. Give the people what they want, they’ll come out for it.” On that basis, the demise of Jack Fullerton the Fourth had to be considered a resounding success. Slowly the church filled, with more and more coughers, but fill it did, with men and women and even children in expensive dark garb, all maintaining a low decorous hum in deference to the surroundings, and not a wet eye in the house.

  Peter and David’s pew gradually filled, with complete strangers. Not to one another, judging by the low-pitched chatter all about, but certainly to Peter and David, who had deferentially slid over to the farthest end of the pew, where the low oak partition separated it from the servants’ pews fed by the side aisle. Then, at the very end, a truly familiar face took up the aisle position: Mordon Leethe himself, his expression finally finding its appropriate venue. Peter and David raised their eyebrows at one another, but kept their opinions to themselves.

  The service could not have been more nondenominational if Carly Simon had got up and sung; she did not, but a chorus group from Nana: The Musical, the current Cameron Mackintosh Broadway smash, did, and sang “Smoke Dreams,” the thing that passed for a love ballad in that show.

  Then the minister, or pastor, or parson, or deacon, or whatever he called himself, stood up and delivered the eulogy. Peter and David didn’t listen to the sense of it, because they were trying to figure out the accent. Where was the man from? Nowhere in America, certainly. Nowhere in Great Britain they’d ever heard of, though sometimes there was a trace of something very BBC audible down in there. Not Australian, not South African, obviously not Canadian.

  But still it wasn’t a foreign accent, either. It was as though, through all his formative years, this person in this cassock had never had the opportunity actually to listen to any human beings in conversation, but had merely watched an indiscriminate mélange of movies from all over the English-speaking world, so that he emerged from the experience at the end with a pudding of accents, in which every word was recognizably from the mouth of a native English-language speaker, but no string of words had any geographic coherence.

  It was a pity, though, that the delivery system so distracted David and Peter, because the eulogy was in fact well worth listening to:

  “You all know Jack Fullerton. You all, that is to say, knew Jack Fullerton, one way and another, most of you, I suppose, which is why you’re all here today. To remember, to recall, Jack Fullerton, the man. Whom, in our own fashion, we all knew. Some in business, some . . . not in business.

  “Jack was a family man. That needs to be said, one thinks, particularly in this day and age, particularly at a time when the family, the concept of the family, perhaps the family itself, is not what it was, once upon a time. But that was not true of Jack, no, never true of Jack. Jack Fullerton was a family man. He himself came from a family, and he went on and produced a family of his own, a proud and full family of his own, of which he was proud, mightily proud. Often expressed, proud.

  “If Jack could be here today, as of course he cannot, but if he were somehow here as well as not being here, he would, I think, still be proud, yes, proud of that family I see, here and there among you, proud of his friends, his associates, his position in the world that he has now left, and we the poorer for it.

  “Jack was a philanthropist. Ah, yes, that large word which merely means good. Good-hearted, good-intentioned, good in one’s dealings with one’s world. Jack’s contributions are many and legion and many. Perhaps m
ore than many of you are aware, because Jack was also a modest man, in his way, his own idiosyncratic very personal way of being a modest man, as many of you are aware. His support, for instance, for example, his support of the television episodes of great moments in the histories of the southern American states on public television is perhaps not as well known as it should be, and I would correct that if I could, and possibly do, here.

  “Speaking personally, and with great and undimmed gratitude, I well remember the generosity with which Jack responded to our own fund drive, here at the kirk, when we had all that trouble with the roof, which some of you may remember. The more communicants among you. Those days with buckets in the pews, all that, well behind us now, gone and forgotten, and we have Jack Fullerton as much as anyone, except of course DeMartino Roofing, who did the actual work, to thank and thank we will. Did at the time. Do now. Remember Jack in our, er, thoughts.

  “Jack Fullerton was a man of vision, who came to us from a family rich in men of vision, and who leaves in his wake, in his path, in his, behind him, more of the same. The Fullerton vision. Wealth carefully husbanded, largesse generously distributed, honor maintained, the law obeyed, and the family upheld.

  “And so we say, from the deepest bottom part of ourselves, good-bye, Jack. We are all better men—and of course better women, and better children, too—for having known you. You enriched our lives, in so many ways: Jack. Farewell. Please bow your heads.”

   

  * * *

   

  The sidewalk was covered by a lumpy layer of cigarette butts. The mourners, if that’s the word, crunched over all those filters on their way to the cars, many of them lighting up the instant they emerged from the sanctuary within.

  Car number three was a stretch limo, gleaming black, with darkened side windows. The blue-suited, uniform-capped chauffeur stood beside the closed rear passenger door, hands crossed at his crotch, face unreadable behind sunglasses. “Peter,” David muttered as they crossed the sea of cigarette butts, “there must be some mistake.”