Smoke

by Donald E. Westlake

  “We’ll find out,” Peter said, and strode forward, David in his wake. When they reached car number three, Peter said, as though to the manner born, “Drs. Loomis and Heimhocker.”

  The chauffeur glanced down at the three-by-five cardboard card held discreetly in his left palm. “Yes, sir,” he said, and stooped to open the door.

  Well, well; not bad. Peter climbed in first, and then David, and in the low dim interior they found a lot of black leather upholstery on a bench-type seat across the rear, and facing that seat, more black leather on two separate seats just behind the driver’s-area partition, flanking a console veneered to look almost exactly like wood.

  Peter went for the broad bench seat at the rear, but David, as the chauffeur clicked shut the door behind him, slid into one of the rear-facing separate seats, the one nearest the sidewalk. Settled there, he said, “I wouldn’t sit back there, Peter. Someone more important than us is going to get into this car.”

  Peter looked mulish for just a second, but then shrugged and said, “You’re probably right,” and shifted his long skinny body around to the other single seat, across the console from David.

  The limo’s engine softly purred, and its air-conditioning was switched on to a very comfortable level: decent temperature, low humidity. Outside the gray-tinted windows they could see the humidity-laden people move heavily through the real world, and they couldn’t help but grin. Whatever chance it was that had led them into this vehicle, they were happy for it.

  “Not bad,” Peter said.

  David turned and winked. “Stick with me, baby,” he said.

  Peter looked past David at the sidewalk outside the window, and his expression changed, became more sour. “If this is the garden of Eden,” he said, “here comes the serpent.”

  David looked, and saw that it was true. Crossing directly toward their limo was the dark cloud of Mordon Leethe; was he going to be in their lives constantly from now on? They watched him speak to the chauffeur, who consulted his cuecard, and then opened the door. In came an ugly puff of hot wet city air and its moral equivalent, Mordon Leethe, who nodded at them, slid over to the far corner of the rear seat, and the chauffeur shut the door.

  What was there to say? They’d finished with Leethe on Friday. Still, David could not help but be polite. Therefore, “Hello,” he said.

  “Hello,” Leethe said.

  Duty done, David looked out the window again. Who else were they waiting for? If someone more important than themselves, certainly someone more important than Mordon Leethe. Who probably knew, come to think of it, but David wouldn’t dream of asking.

  “Did you enjoy the service?” Leethe asked.

  David turned his head, startled, but apparently Leethe had directed that question at Peter, who answered, “Enjoy? Do we enjoy funerals?”

  “Frequently,” Leethe said, and the limo door opened once more.

  David had been distracted by Leethe, and had not seen these people arrive, so they burst onto his awareness all of a heap. First, the woman: thirty-something, blond, expensive dark clothing, expensive tanned face, expensive expression and manner—all in all, a property with a high fence around it and a sentry at the gate.

  Entering, sleek knees together, this woman slid over next to Leethe without glancing at him or anyone else. She was then followed by the man: forty, at most. Trim, muscular, thick-necked but narrow-jawed, as though a greyhound had coupled with a malamute. Light brown hair in a furry low cap beyond a very high forehead. Ears tight to the skull, almost inset. Full mouth, slender nose, ice-cube eyes, eyebrows so pale as to be almost nonexistent. An aura of control, command, importance, that David found discomfiting in the extreme, a reaction that embarrassed him. Aren’t we all equal, dammit? Oh, if only they could be upstate right now, with Robert and Martin, where nobody ever frightened anybody.

  This time, once the chauffeur had shut the door, he went around to get in behind the wheel. Apparently the cortege was gearing up, almost ready to roll.

  Leethe said, “Merrill, may I introduce—”

  But the new man said, “No, Mordon, wait till we’re on the road.” To the woman, he said, “Wake me when we get to the Hutch.”

  She nodded, not looking at him. She had a black shoulder bag, now in her lap. While the man—Merrill, apparently—stretched out his legs so that David had to move his own out of the way, settled himself comfortably, and closed his eyes, seeming to go at once to sleep, the woman rooted around in the bag, came out with a slender appointment book and a tiny pen, and proceeded to read the entries, occasionally adding something or drawing a line through something.

  David and Peter looked at one another. David looked at Leethe, who was gazing out his window at the mess of Park Avenue traffic.

  Smoothly, the limo moved forward.

   

  * * *

   

  At the legal speed limit, once they reached the FDR Drive, the mortal remains of Jack Fullerton the Fourth and its train of twenty-seven cars sped northward up the eastern hem of Manhattan, across the Triborough Bridge without paying the toll—it looked as though they had motorcycle policemen with them—up the Bruckner Expressway and over to the Hutchinson River Parkway, the truck-free conduit to New England. Still technically in the Bronx, but with every outward indication of having left the city behind, the Hutch is the psychological watershed; beyond this point be suburbanites.

  “Merrill,” said calmly and quietly by the woman in a low but pleasing voice, was the first word spoken in car number three since it had pulled away from The Church of Lenox Hill. Instantly the man’s ice eyes opened, he sat up, retracted his legs from David’s space, stretched a series of muscle groupings without shifting very much in his place, and then pointed at the console while saying to David, “Get me a Perrier, would you?”

  “What?” David leaned forward to look at the front of the console, and it contained a door, which he opened, feeling suddenly and foolishly like Alice in Wonderland. And there, inside the console, was a small refrigerator, full of not only little green bottles of Perrier but also beer, soft drinks, and splits of champagne.

  “Of course,” David said, and took out a Perrier, and handed it to the man, who had opened another secret compartment, this one in the door, containing short thick glasses.

  “Take something for yourself,” the man said, in lieu of thanks.

  “Thank you,” David said, because he would. He turned his head. “Peter?”

  They both chose Perrier as well, and took glasses from the man’s cache. David said, “Mr. Leethe?”

  “Perrier.”

  David looked at the woman: “Anything for you?”

  She very nearly looked directly at him as she replied with the most minimal of headshakes.

  The four men sat with Perrier water fizzing and sputtering in glasses in their hands. Leethe said, “Merrill, may I now present—”

  “Delighted.”

  “May I present Dr. Peter Heimhocker and Dr. David Loomis of the American Tobacco Research Institute. Doctors, may I present Merrill Fullerton, nephew of the late lamented Jack, and heir apparent to the chairmanship.”

  “Well, not quite apparent,” Merrill Fullerton said, with a faint smile. “Not quite yet, though soon, we hope.” He turned his smile and his ice eyes on David and Peter. “With the doctors’ help, in fact. Or their friend’s help.”

  David said, “Our friend?”

  “The invisible man,” Merrill said.

  Peter said, “We won’t discuss that except in the presence of our attorney.”

  Merrill Fullerton gazed almost fondly at Peter. “The reason we are having this conversation in this setting,” he said, “far from your little attorney, and far from my feverish family, and far from the spies and wiretaps and bugs of our friends and enemies, is so that I can make it plain to you just what the situation is now that Uncle Jack has gone to the great ashtray in the sky. You needn’t discuss anything for a while. I’ll do the talking for all of u
s.”

  David and Peter watched Merrill Fullerton like birds watching a cat. Mordon Leethe watched the traffic out on the Hutch. The woman read a paperback novel by Danielle Steel.

  Merrill Fullerton said, “Uncle Jack was all right in his way, in his day, but he had slowed down, you know, he wasn’t the man he used to be, he was letting things slide, and one of the things he was letting slide was your invisible man.”

  “We haven’t been able to find him,” David said. “That’s—”

  The ice eyes looked at David. “I believe I said it was my turn to talk.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I understand from Mordon,” Merrill said, “that the invisible man is not at this point replicable. So I want the original. I want him now, I want him doing our bidding, and I want him under your control.”

  “So do we,” said Peter.

  Ignoring that, Merrill said, “I want him, of course, for all the same reasons Uncle Jack wanted him, but Uncle Jack’s vision, I must say, though not wishing to speak ill of the dead, his vision was rather limited. I will need the invisible man initially to consolidate my position as the new head of NAABOR, which shouldn’t take long, once I have my own absolutely indetectable spy in the very bosom of the councils of my family, but after that, gentlemen, after that I have much bigger plans for both your invisible man and your own good selves.”

  “What,” David said.

  “In the first place,” Merrill told him, “this melanoma nonsense is finished. Forget all that, throw out your research, no one now or tomorrow or ever in the history of the world will give a good goddam.”

  Stiffly, Peter said, “I can’t believe that—”

  “Believe what you want to believe,” Merrill interrupted. “I’m telling you that your research, as you very well know, was never anything more than a public relations dodge, and I no longer need it or want it or will fund it or have anything to do with it.”

  David’s mouth and throat were terribly dry. He drank Perrier, aware of Peter drinking Perrier over there to his right, but it didn’t help. Liquid didn’t help. He was just terribly dry.

  “What you are going to do instead,” Merrill told them, “with my financial backing, extremely generous financial backing, and with the assistance of your invisible man, is nothing more or less than save the entire cigarette industry from annihilation and collapse.”

  David blinked. He couldn’t help it, he had to ask. “How?”

  Merrill, a born orator, raised one finger. “Let me,” he said, “give you just a bit of the background. It was more than forty years ago that the industry first had to confront the fact that the only product it had to sell was, in fact, a deadly poison.”

  Peter abruptly said, “Do you smoke?”

  Merrill gave him a look of astonished contempt. “Of course not! Do you take me for an idiot?”

  “The rest of your family smokes.”

  “Yes, and look at them.”

  “You’re going to go on selling cigarettes.”

  Merrill smiled. “That’s all I have to sell, isn’t it? In fact, that’s been the quandary ever since nineteen fifty-two, when Dr. Doll, in England—charming name—first laid out the evidence linking benzoapyrene to lung cancer. Since then, bad news has followed bad news, and by now the scientific world knows—we in the industry don’t know, of course, but everyone else does—the existence of forty-three separate carcinogens in cigarette smoke. Quite an army in that field, don’t you think?”

  Faintly, David said, “I hadn’t known it was that many.”

  “Could be more before they’re done rooting around,” Merrill said, and shrugged. “Dead is dead, as Uncle Jack could tell you, so it hardly matters if you’re killed once or forty-three times. The point is, the industry has known about the problem for forty years or more, and has struggled with it, and has failed to solve it, and the situation has got blacker and blacker and blacker. As black as a smoker’s lung, you might say. In the sixties and seventies, the industry tried everything it could think of to make its product less lethal; face it, no businessman in his right mind wants to kill off his customers. But nothing worked. All kinds of filters were tried, and failed. Different tobaccos, different additives, even substitutes for tobacco. If they were at all safe, smokers wouldn’t go near them. Finally, within the last ten to fifteen years, when it became clear that there was no solution, there was no way to make cigarette smoking anything other than suicidal, the industry fell back on its last weapon: denial. That’s where we are now, but the denials are getting weaker and weaker, the evidence is getting harder and harder to refute, and the lawsuits are getting more and more dangerous, and unless something is done, I stand to inherit a mighty ship just as it sinks to the bottom of the sea. Doctors, I don’t intend to be the first president of NAABOR to lose a war.”

  “I’d heard,” Peter said delicately, “the industry might shift over to marijuana. Might encourage legalization and—”

  “For several reasons, no,” Merrill said. “The zeitgeist is against that, to begin with. In the years since nineteen thirty-six, when marijuana was first made illegal in the United States, to give employment to those government enforcement officials put out of work by the repeal of Prohibition, marijuana has unfortunately become wedded in the popular mind with actual narcotic drugs, like heroin and cocaine. Also, marijuana contains even more tar than tobacco and may have just as many, though different, negative implications for the human respiratory system. There’s nothing to be gained by switching from a legal health hazard to an illegal health hazard.”

  David said, “You still want to sell tobacco.”

  “It’s what I have in the shop.”

  “And the invisible man comes into this? How?”

  Merrill seemed to consider that question, as though for the first time. Then he answered it with a question of his own: “What do you know of the Human Genome Project?”

  “Nothing,” David said promptly.

  “It sounds,” Peter said, “as though it’s outside our area of expertise.”

  “So far,” Merrill agreed. “But it is about to become your area of expertise. Every cell of your body contains a complete strand of your DNA, the chain of information—the instruction manual, if you will—that went into constructing you in the first place. Genetic scientists—which is what you two are about to become—have begun to pick apart that chain of information, the human genome, and have learned how to isolate sections of it for study. The Human Genome Project is financed by the United States government, through the National Institutes of Health. They tried to patent a few genes a couple of years ago, but the patent office turned them down, on the basis that they couldn’t describe what the things they’d discovered were good for. Read Cook-Deegan on the subject. So far, they’ve—”

  He broke off, and frowned at them. “Shouldn’t one of you,” he asked, “be taking notes?”

  Instantly, David and Peter both lunged into their inner jacket pockets, but then Peter said, “David, I’ll do it,” and David subsided, smoothing his jacket again, watching Merrill Fullerton, wondering where the man was headed, convinced that somehow or other, wherever this would lead, he and Peter would hate it. And what then?

  “The genetic scientists,” Merrill was saying, “can study your genes and tell you the percentage of likelihood that a child of yours will get Huntington’s disease. Or one form of Alzheimer’s. Or cystic fibrosis. They’re working to identify the piece of chain that indicates breast cancer. Or homosexuality. Or alcoholism. Eventually, if it all turns out the way they expect, the Genome Project will be able to describe the probable health history and time and cause of death for every human being in the world, in embryo, in the womb. In the first trimester. If Junior is going to be the runt of the litter, you’ll know in plenty of time to off him.” Merrill Fullerton’s smile was as thin as his eyes were cold. “What a healthy race we’re going to be,” he said. “The Aryan dream come true at last.”

  “It sounds horrible,” David
said.

  “And marvelous,” Merrill told him. “Horrible and marvelous. Knowledge. How much we want it, and how we’re afraid of it. You, for instance, might want to know all about my future health history, and I might want to know all about yours, particularly if I were thinking of hiring you or marrying you or going into business with you, but neither of us would be comfortable seeing our own genetic report card.”

  Peter said, “Is this science, or science fiction?”

  “Fact,” Merrill answered. “You’ll read the literature, of which there isn’t as yet much. And you’ll see that, like your friend here, the scientific part of the project is already well hemmed in by emotional and moral and ethical doubts. Will the project break the DNA code entirely, and then will the government do its best to keep us from that knowledge, for our own good? In a survey not long ago, eleven percent of the respondents said they would abort a fetus if they learned the child carried the gene for obesity. You can see that this is not going to be a simple ride.”

  “Not at all,” Peter said. He was on, David noticed, the second page of his notebook.

  “Whatever the government may do,” Merrill told them, “to hem in this new knowledge, to confine it the way they confined the information about the atom bomb for so long, I want it. Already they’re shrouding the project in secrecy, and I need to penetrate that shroud. I want the information, and I want to be able to lead the research, or at the very least influence the research into areas of interest to me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Peter said, tapping his pen against the notebook. “I don’t see what all this has to do with you at all.”

  “You don’t?” Merrill smiled. “I want you both to prepare yourselves on this subject,” he said. “I want you to know as much about it as the scientists in the project themselves. I want your invisible man in their laboratories, in their discussions, in their diaries and workbooks, bringing back to you every bit of information they have. I want to guide their research away from breast cancer and chronic liver disease, matters that I don’t give one shit about.”