Smoke Read online

  It was astonishing, David thought, how through this whole tirade the woman just sat there, beside Merrill Fullerton, and read her book.

  Merrill leaned forward, his eyes now hot ice. This was the gist, at last. “I want the code for lung cancer,” he told them. “I want the code for emphysema. I want the code for congestive heart failure. I want the codes that tobacco taps into. And then I want a reeducation program, aimed directly at our consumers, not just here, but around the world. Abort the lung cancer cases! Abort the emphysema cases! Never let the little bastards see the light of day!”

  David and Peter both blinked. Merrill sat back, as though after an orgasm, and smiled. “We’ve spent the last forty years,” he said, “trying to make cigarettes safe for the human race, and we failed. We can spend the next forty years making the human race safe for cigarettes!”

   

  * * *

   

  A flunky informed them, midway through the interminable mumbling graveside ceremony on its breezy knoll with its one old oak tree and its green views of Connecticut and the purple haze over New York far away, that they would not be traveling back to the city with Merrill Fullerton and the woman of mystery, but in a different car. “Why am I not surprised?” Peter said, sounding peevish.

  The flunky shrugged—what did he care?—and said, “You’ll be in car nineteen,” and went away.

  David felt relieved, and said so. “Peter, you don’t want to travel with that man again. God knows what he’ll say next.”

  “He’s already said too much,” Peter agreed. But then he looked past David and murmured in his ear, “People are leaving.”

  What? David looked toward the grave, and the mound of earth next to it covered by that horrible Easter-basket-green tinsel fake grass they always use, a sort of Hawaiian welcome mat to the next world, and the minister was still mumbling over there, people were still standing around in attitudes of grief or boredom or paralysis, the service was certainly still going on.

  But then he turned his head the other way, down the slope behind them, and he saw a car discreetly purr away along the gravel road toward the exit, leaving the line of waiting limos and cars, in which there were several gaps, suggesting that other cars had already departed. Between here and there, two women and a man, all in black, picked their way quietly down over the grass toward the cars. An exodus had begun.

  “We’ve done our part,” Peter murmured in David’s ear, like Satan suggesting a new and interesting sin. “This Fullerton doesn’t want to talk to us anymore, and we never even knew the other one.”

  “You’re right,” David whispered, and at once they faded back from the oval of mourners, turned in their pale gray suits, and headed for the cars.

  They never did find car nineteen, because standing next to car eleven was George Clapp, who grinned when he saw them and said, “My doctors. Best doctors in the world. You wanna go back to town?”

  David said, “We’re supposed to be in car nineteen.”

  “Oh, don’t worry bout that,” George told them. “These systems always break down, people work it out. Climb aboard here, I’m ready to call it a day myself.”

  Car eleven was not a limo, but was what was known as a town car, being an ordinary sedan, but with black leather seats. David and Peter slid into the back, George shut the door behind them, and as they grinned at one another and looked up the hill at the people still standing there, outlined beside the oak tree against the sky as though the passing of Jack Fullerton the Fourth were meaningful in some way, George trotted around to get behind the wheel and drive them out of there.

  As they headed southwest, a few minutes later, on the Connecticut Turnpike, Peter said, “George, I’m surprised. I thought they were paying you enough so you didn’t have to work anymore.”

  “Oh, they weaseled out of that,” George said, with no apparent ill feeling, “once it turned out we wasn’t gonna be invisible after all. I figured they would, you know. That lawyer—”

  “Mordon Leethe,” they both said.

  “That’s the one.” George laughed and said, “He’s the one let us know, yesterday morning in his office, in there on a Saturday to tell us they ain’t gonna pay anybody for being useless, and except for driving vehicles I’m useless, so that’s that. Am I gonna take them to court? What are they called, The Five Hundred Fortune companies? They got five hundred fortunes and I got no fortune. Am I gonna sue them?”

  “That’s terrible,” David said.

  “Aw, it ain’t so bad,” George said. “If I’d got all that money, all that time on my hands, I’d justa got myself in trouble anyway. Fact is, I like driving, like talking to the passengers.” He waved a hand in the air, grinning in the rearview mirror. “Now I got these new fingerips, this new face, nothing scares me, man, I can go on driving the rest of my life.”

  “So long as you’re happy,” Peter told him.

  “Count on it,” George said.

  David said, “But what about Michael? Michael Prendergast. Did they cheat her, too?”

  “Oh, sure, man,” George said. “They’re an equal opportunity fucker. They done her like they done me.”

  David said, “What is she going to do about it, do you know?”

  “Oh, yeah, she told me,” George said, “when we left the lawyer’s office yesterday. There’s this country, Iran, Iraq, one of those, been after her to head up their nuclear power program. She wouldn’t do it before, on account it’s against our law, her being there to do that, but now she says she’s had enough. She’s taking the job, probably already gone in the plane now.”

  Peter said, “To Iran?”

  “Or Iraq, or one of those others over there. She says, the great thing is, she gets to wear that black thing the women wear, covers them all up . . .”

  “The chador,” David suggested.

  “That’s it. She gets to wear the chador, so that’s good. And the other thing, running that program for them,” George explained, “she says she should be just about ready to blow up the whole world in about eight years. I think she’ll probably do it, too.”

  David and Peter stared at George’s merry eyes in the rearview mirror. Neither could think of a thing to say. George winked at them. “What I figure,” he said, “we might as well enjoy life while we got it.”

  38

  Wednesday, July 5, the day after the long hot exhausting holiday weekend, was a quiet one at the Big S Superstore on U.S. Route 9, the main commercial roadway on the east side of the Hudson River. A few retirees with nothing else to do wandered the cavernous interior of this warehouse-type store, the no-frills successor to the department store, where mountains of items were piled directly on the concrete floor or stuffed to overflowing on unpainted rough wooden shelves. Once you became a “member” of their “club” (not a hard thing to do), you could buy everything in here from a television set (and the unpainted piece of furniture to hide it in) to a goldfish bowl (and the goldfish) to put on top of the set for those times when there’s absolutely nothing to watch on TV. You could buy canned and frozen food, truck tires, toys, books, washing machines, flowers, tents (in case your house fills up), small tractors, bicycles, benches, lumber to make your own benches, double-hung windows, storm windows, snow tires, dresses with flowers on them, blue jeans, and baseball caps honoring the team of your choice.

  Here in the Big S (“the Big Store for Big Savings!”), in other words, you could get everything you used to be able to get in the Sears Roebuck catalog, except now you have to go to the warehouse and pick it up instead of phoning in and having them send it to you. People enjoy a new wrinkle, and the warehouse you go to instead of phoning it is a very successful new wrinkle indeed. Even the day after the big Fourth of July weekend, there were people in the place; not many of them, but some. And in among the retirees with nothing better to do was an attractive young woman talking to herself.

  This is what she was saying: “Freddie, be careful. That old lady just looked around at us.”


  “What did she see?” apparently asked the mountain of toasters the young woman was just then walking past.

  “You know what I mean,” she hissed.

  This young woman, whom we already know as Peg, was pushing a shopping cart here and there around the warehouse, but she wasn’t putting anything into it, because she wasn’t in truth a member of the club. She and her invisible partner, whom we already know as Freddie, were merely casing the joint. Just looking it over.

  An army of Barbies watched goggle-eyed as Peg pushed the shopping cart by, and then they all said, in Freddie’s voice, “My feet are cold.”

  “It’s hot outside,” she reminded him.

  “That’s there, this is here. Concrete, inside, is cold. Hard, too, but Peg, you’d be surprised how cold it is. I wish I could put on a pair of those slippers there.”

  “Who knows how many heart attacks you could give people.”

  “I won’t do it, I’m just saying.”

  “Well, do you want to get out of here, have you seen enough?”

  “No, I gotta look at the rest of it, the offices and all. Tell you what, give me an hour here, okay?”

  “Sure. I can go to the supermarket, do my shopping.”

  “Good idea.”

  “Should I come back in?”

  “No, I’ll find you in the parking lot.”

  “Okay. So you’re going now, right? Right? And I might as well leave the store. Cause I’m alone here now, right?”

  She listened, but answer came there none. At some point, he’d gone away, right? He wasn’t here now, was he? Watching her, just goofing around. He wouldn’t do that, would he? He’d say something if he was here, wouldn’t he?

  “Oh, I give up,” Peg said, this time really and truly talking to herself, and left the shopping cart in the middle of that aisle, and left the store.

   

  * * *

   

  Freddie padded along the concrete floor, pausing at the intersections of aisles to look this way and that, wondering where the offices were, where the loading docks were, where there was a nice floor around here with a soft warm carpet on it. And also wondering, Is there a caper in here? Is there something for me in this place?

  It was true that this was the most merchandise Freddie had ever in his life seen all together in one place, and that a truckload of almost anything out of here would make Jersey Josh Kuskiosko as happy as it was possible for Jersey Josh Kuskiosko to be, but the question was, how to make the transfer. An invisible man can’t be seen, that’s true. An invisible man carrying a television set still can’t be seen, but the television set can, and any customer or clerk or guard seeing a television set float down a Big S aisle would be bound to have questions, and would be very likely to investigate the matter.

  Then there was another consideration. Freddie Noon hadn’t gotten into this line of work in order to engage in heavy lifting. To shlep several tons of merchandise out of this building all by himself was not an idea with strong appeal. Was there some other way?

  “Hello, sonny.”

  Freddie looked around, startled out of his contemplations, and over there was an old man, sharing this particular intersection of aisles with him. A grizzled old guy leaning on a walker, he was smiling, and he was looking straight at Freddie.

  Whoops, was he visible all of a sudden? Was he standing naked and visible in the middle of the Big S? Freddie looked down at himself and, reassuringly, he was not there.

  “Cat got your tongue?”

  Freddie looked up, and the old man was definitely talking to him. Looking at him, and talking to him. There was nobody else nearby. What kind of magic old guy was this?

  “You don’t say hello to a person?”

  There was no way out; the old guy was sooner or later going to draw the wrong kind of attention. “Hello,” Freddie said.

  The old guy’s smile widened. “There you go,” he said. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

  “I was distracted,” Freddie said. “I was thinking about what I’m supposed to buy here today.”

  “Gotta check that shopping list, huh?”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Freddie said, and suddenly understood: the old guy was blind! Must have been blind for a long time, years and years. His other senses were sharper, to help compensate. Everybody else in the store, since they couldn’t see Freddie, would assume he wasn’t there, but this old guy couldn’t see anybody anyway, and had to dope out presence or absence by some other method—smell, heat, air currents, the tiny noises of human movement—and had not only known there was another person sharing this intersection with him, but had figured it out that the person was male and probably young. And naturally had to show off what a whiz-bang he was. Hello, sonny.

  Freddie said, “I guess you don’t have a shopping list, huh?”

  “My daughter’s got it.” The old guy cocked his head, listening. “I think this is her coming now.”

  Freddie looked, and down the aisle from the right marched a thickset woman in her fifties, sour-faced, pushing a really full shopping cart. “Yeah, here she comes,” Freddie said.

  The old guy said, “Probably too old for you, but you want me to do the introduction?”

  “No, that’s okay,” Freddie said, “I gotta get going. Nice talking to you.” And he veered away to the left.

  “So long, sonny,” the old guy called after him, and Freddie then heard the woman say, “Pop, who you talking to?”

  “That young fella over there,” the old guy told her. “In a hurry, like everybody.”

  Freddie turned a corner and heard no more. He slowed down, then, and thought about the old guy, and realized it had been nice, that, to have a normal conversation with another person. He wasn’t getting much of that these days. Maybe he should hang out with blind people a lot, go to their conventions and all.

  Musing like this, Freddie found himself at the end of an aisle, and there was the front of the store, with a broad line of cash-register pods, like the world’s longest highway tollbooth plaza, or like the Maginot Line that was once upon a time supposed to keep Germany out of France. Beyond the cash registers, most of them closed today, the main exit from the building was off to the right. The rest of the space at the front was occupied by a building within the building, a two-story vinyl-sided structure that didn’t quite reach the ceiling of the warehouse and had some sort of flat roof of its own. In this building’s ground floor were a restaurant, a video store, a foreign exchange window, and a drugstore, while upstairs were what looked to be offices, behind plate-glass windows covered by venetian blinds.

  There had to be a way to get up there. Freddie went over and sat on the counter of an unoccupied register—the metal was also cold, against his rump, thank you very much, but at least it got his feet off that cold floor—and waited, and watched, and observed, and pretty soon he saw the way it went.

  There was no cash moving through these cash registers. People were buying in bulk, and they were paying by check—no credit cards. From time to time, an employee would come down the line and take all the checks and put them into a black cloth bag with a zipper, then carry the bag over to a door at the far left corner of the building-within-a-building, just beyond the drugstore. The person would press a button there, and a few seconds later would push the door open and go in, the door remaining open just long enough for Freddie to see the flight of stairs leading up, before it closed itself.

  That was where Freddie wanted to go. The question was, How? The stunt with the doors that he’d pulled at the diamond-exchange place wouldn’t work here, not with one person and a spring-closing door. There didn’t seem to be any other way upstairs, like an emergency fire exit, which was a pity, because an exterior fire escape, for instance, would be just perfect access for an invisible man. But no.

  The person who collected the checks from the registers was not the only one who went through that door and up and down those stairs. There were other people as well, al
l in the blue-and-white caps and smocks and ID buttons of employees—HI! MY NAME IS LANA HOW CAN I BE OF SERVICE TODAY?—who went in and out of there, mostly carrying sheafs of papers, invoices, order forms, various kinds of documents. The letters of transit. Those people were more interesting to Freddie than the check-carriers; he wanted to know exactly what they did and how they did it.

  Well, maybe the thing to do was track them in the other direction first. Freddie waited until he saw a gruff-looking older guy—HI! MY NAME IS GUS HOW CAN I BE OF SERVICE TODAY?—go up to the office and then come out again, carrying a different sheaf of papers when he came out. Freddie then jumped off his register counter and followed Gus on a straight line all the way back to the very rear of the store.

  Interesting. Since the whole setup was a warehouse, they didn’t actually have a back room for stock. What they had instead was a series of tall garage doors across the back of the building, some open and some shut. Back up against the open doors were the trailers from tractor-trailer rigs, and they were being used as stockrooms, with goods on pallets and guys using forklift trucks to bring mounds of goods out of the trailers and across the floor to where they’d be put on display.

  But it was more complicated than that. Inventory control must be a real bitch with an operation like this, so sometimes they just shifted pallets of stuff from one trailer to another—particularly if the garage door was going to be lowered so an emptied trailer could presumably be taken away—and he even saw a couple of instances of pallets of stuff coming back from the display area, most likely either to make room for sale items or because they were unsold sale items themselves, after the sale was over.

  Gus had brought with him orders that moved some pallets out and some pallets over, and he spent a lot of time now yelling at his crew of forklift operators and waving the hand holding the sheaf of invoices. Watching him, Freddie saw that Gus kept doing something weird with his mouth, something ripply and faintly disgusting, and at last he realized what it was. Gus, a true Gus in a world that has lost much of its Gusness, was chewing an invisible cigar.