Smoke Read online

  The sudden adrenaline rush made her veer too close to the cab on her left, which yawped in angry response. Pulling back into her own lane, emerging from the tunnel into sunlight—even Manhattan gets sunlight, some days—Peg said, “Neaten up those clothes, Freddie, you’re gonna have to put that stuff back on.”

  “You’re right,” said the voice, and the forearm left her seatback, and she heard but did not turn around to watch Freddie’s clothing arrange itself more neatly in a rear corner.

  “Where do I go from here?” Peg asked, since big green signs dead ahead were giving her a number of choices, and not much time to make one.

  “West Side,” Freddie’s voice said. From the sound of it, he was now leaning on the back of the passenger seat, and when Peg glanced over there, yes, that was the indentation of his arm. This, she thought, not for the first time, is going to take some getting used to.

  Peg took the West Side Highway, Freddie’s disembodied voice telling her to bear to the right at Twenty-third Street and then make the right turn onto Forty-second Street, which she did, only then saying, “Where we going, Freddie?”

  “West Forty-seventh. The diamond district.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Peg was pleased. “I’ve never been there.”

  “Neither have I,” Freddie said. “At least, not in the daytime.”

  9

  There are a couple of centers of the wholesale diamond trade in New York City, one down by the Manhattan Bridge and the other on West Forty-seventh Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Diamonds are the principal business of this block, but they also deal in other precious stones, and gold and silver, and platinum, and whatever else is small and shiny and very very valuable. Here entire buildings are given over to the buyers and sellers of costly stone and metal, all seated at the small wood-and-glass tables under the extremely bright lights, protected by layer after layer of security, negotiating in Yiddish or Dutch or Japanese or Boer or Portuguese or Bantu or even, if all else fails, English. Millions of dollars in value change hands on this block, not every month, not every day, but every minute, most of the transactions handled by somewhat shabby-looking people who seem to take no pleasure from riches or even the idea of riches but only from the process itself. They don’t live to make money, they live to make deals, and they’ve gotten pretty good at it.

  When Peg made the turn from Seventh Avenue, Freddie could sense it already, the buzz and stir of furious life all up and down the block. There’s something here for me, Freddie thought, as he often did, adrenaline surging, and as usual it was a happy thought. “Park anywhere, Peg,” he said.

  Peg gave the air around him a caustic look, then turned her attention back to the street, lined solidly on both sides with parked trucks, vans, station wagons, and sedans armed with company names on their doors. (A civilian vehicle would be eaten alive on this block.) “Oh, sure,” she said. “How about on top of that cable-company van?”

  “Whatever works for you, Peg,” Freddie said. He was too excited by the street to worry about details. The bowl of succotash and soy sauce (without the bowl) was gone now, happily digested, and he was ready to roll.

  Midway down the block, on the right, stood a fire hydrant. A roofing company truck was parked next to it, of course, but whatever had recently blocked the rest of the legal clearance must have just this minute left, so Peg slid in there, backed and filled into the tiny space, and at last said, “There.”

  “Leave the motor on and switch on the blinker lights,” Freddie advised. “That way you’re not parked, you’re stopped. And I tell you what, Peg. After a few minutes, move over to the passenger seat here. When I knock on the window, you open it, okay?”

  “How will I know it’s you?”

  “Because you won’t see me, Peg,” Freddie said. “If you see somebody, don’t open it. If you don’t see somebody, it’s me.”

  “Of course,” Peg said. “I’m sorry, Freddie, the traffic got me rattled.”

  “S’okay. Close the door after me, okay?”

  The side door of the van opened on the curb side. Freddie slid it slowly back, sorry for once there wasn’t a window in it so he could see exactly what was just outside there, and when it was ajar barely enough he wriggled through and stood silent a moment, back against the van, checking it all out, while Peg reached over to slide the door shut.

  The first thing Freddie didn’t like was the sidewalk. It wasn’t what you would call clean. It was also crowded with people, rushing, scurrying, sidestepping, side-slipping people. Tall skinny black messengers with many-shaped packages strapped to their backs; black-coated and black-hatted Hasidim, some pushing wheeled black valises; short round Puerto Rican file clerks in Day-Glo clothing; tourists from Germany and Japan, gawping at what might have been theirs; MBAs in their last suit, looking for work; lawyers and process servers and bill collectors, sniffing the air as they prowled; white-collar workers taking fifteen minutes to do an hour of errands; Central American delivery boys with white aprons, bearing cardboard trays of paper cups; cops and rental cops and undercover cops, all eyeing one another with deep suspicion; mail-persons and United Parcel persons and FedEx persons hurrying past one another, pretending the other persons didn’t exist; druggies visiting Terra in search of supplies; and the homeless with their empty cups, trying against all the odds to get at least a little attention, if not sympathy, from this heedless throng.

  All those bodies in motion formed a constantly changing woven fabric, a six-foot-high blanket of rolling humanity, and it was now Freddie’s job to weave himself horizontally through this fabric, slipping through the weft and warp without any of the textile becoming aware of his existence; to be, in short, the ultimate flea. To do all of that, and to do it successfully, would require every bit of his concentration, leaving nothing for the careful self-protective study of this dubious sidewalk that the surface really deserved. Freddie knew his bare feet were just going to have to get along as best they could.

  Freddie took one tentative step away from the van, and here came hurtling two hooky-playing kids in big sneakers, waving cigarettes and laughing at each other’s dumb jokes. Freddie dodged them, but then almost ran into a guy carrying a roll of tarpaper on his shoulder, coming out of the roofing-company truck. A rollout in the other direction put Freddie in the path of three middle-aged Japanese women, marching arm in arm, cameras dangling down their fronts, forming a phalanx as impenetrable as the Miami Dolphins’ defensive line.

  Freddie recoiled, back against the cool side of the van, heart beating, doubt rising to the surface of his brain. This mob was dangerous. It was true they rarely crashed violently into one another, hardly did anything worse than the occasional shoulder bump, but that was because they could see one another and take whatever minimal evasive action might be necessary to avoid a head-on collision. But they couldn’t see Freddie, and would have no notion of getting out of his way or even accounting for his presence on the sidewalk. They would tromp his toes, knee him in the groin, elbow him in the breadbasket, and pound their foreheads into his nose, all without ever having the slightest clue that his toes, groin, bread-basket, or nose were anywhere in the vicinity.

  Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. Maybe what he needed was someplace quiet, uncrowded. But then, when he tried to move the loot, he would be noticeable. Still, the question was, how to deal with this never-ending crowd?

  As Freddie stood there, pressed against the side of the van, staring at the surge of people and trying to figure out his next move, if any, a United Parcel guy bumped into him on his way past and kept going without even a backward glance to see what he’d hit. Coming the other way, a pale overweight tourist skipped out of the United Parcel guy’s path and would have run head-on into Freddie if Freddie hadn’t automatically fended him off with an elbow. The tourist threw some words in some language over his shoulder, perhaps an apology, and kept going.

  Wait a minute. It was true the people couldn’t see Freddie, but in fact they weren’t re
ally seeing anybody, except as necessary to avoid full-scale collisions. If Freddie were to bob and weave just enough to keep the jostling to a minimum, no one would even notice there was an invisible man in their midst.

  Well, it was a theory worth testing. Freddie’s goal was a narrow building, six stories high, just a few doors back up the block, with the words DIAMOND EXCHANGE among other words in gold on its bullet-proof glass display window. A truly homicidal-looking black security guard in a brown uniform sat on a stool behind the showcases in this window, looking out at the world like a fish-store cat, daring anybody to try to come in and take any of these goodies away. Beside this window, a locked black iron gate led to a small square vestibule and a solid door, and then who knew?

  From time to time a person would approach this building, pause at the gate, and ring the bell beside it. He would then speak into the microphone grill set between gate and window. The security man in the window would engage him in suspicious conversation, would eye him with carnivorous hostility, and at last grudgingly the new arrival would be admitted. Sometimes two people showed up together, and while Freddie watched there was even a trio allowed in all at once, which meant there was certainly going to be room in that vestibule and those doorways for one entrant accompanied all unknowing by an unseen stranger.

  The unseen stranger, at last emboldened to make his move, waited till he saw a black-coated, black-hatted, black-bearded, spit-curled skinny fellow who looked to be about seventeen approach DIAMOND EXCHANGE and ring the bell; then he pushed away confidently from the van, tiptoed rapidly across the iffy sidewalk, caromed off two or three pedestrians who merely kept on truckin’, and reached the iron gate just as the nasty little buzzer began to sound. The skinny fellow in black pulled at the gate, it opened, he stepped through and the unseen stranger zipped through behind him, close enough to smell the combination of Palmolive soap and old wool coat that was his new associate’s personal scent.

  The iron gate very nearly nipped Freddie’s heels and right elbow, but he scrinched himself just in time. The gate snicked. The inner door buzzed. Freddie and his dancing partner did it again.

  He was inside. Here, Freddie and his new friend parted company, the skinny fellow in black moving purposefully across the floor toward a narrow door to what appeared to be a very narrow elevator, where he pushed another button, and waited, while Freddie didn’t move forward at all, but pressed his naked back against the cool side wall, and took a moment to case the joint.

  He was in a long narrow room, about twenty-five feet wide by sixty feet long, illuminated by a ceiling composed almost entirely of fluorescent tubes. Down both sides and down the middle of this space were three long rows of booths, waist-high cubicles separating each dealer and his desk and safe and display case from the dealers on either side. Armless wooden chairs for the customers stood outside each cubicle, facing in. Customers and security people moved up and down the two aisles, everybody constantly looking at everything. In their compartments, the dealers haggled, or read in little books, or talked on their telephones, or added up strings of numbers, or looked at tiny stones through their loupes.

  Across the way, the elevator arrived, and was very small indeed. In that elevator, two was a crowd. A crowd of two emerged from it, shrugging their shoulders and adjusting their clothing after the unwelcome proximity of the ride, and Freddie’s former friend boarded in lonely splendor to ride up—or possibly down—to some other selling floor.

  There was a kind of loose unofficial flow to the movement in the long room; it mostly went counterclockwise, from the door here at the front right, then on back to the rear, then across to the left aisle, and thus back to the front again. Occasional customers swam briefly upstream, moving from one dealer to the next, but most of the traffic was one-way.

  Fine by Freddie. He joined the throng, moving along at the general pace, tucking in close to one person or another, so as not to be bumped into from behind. And as he walked, he looked.

  Jewels. Blue sapphires, green emeralds, red rubies. Blue turquoise, green jade, red garnet. Purple amethyst, black onyx, violet alexandrite. Opalescent girasol, creamy chalcedony, pearls of a thousand shades of white.

  But what Freddie cared about, and only what he cared about, were the diamonds. Winking and blinking under the glass counters, nestling in clusters or in solitary grandeur on trays of felt, tumbled like sprays of magic moondust from palm to palm; little hard concentrations of light, colorless yet filled with color, prismatic, faceted, tiny, fabulous.

  Freddie made one circuit of the place, getting used to it, getting used to himself in this new format, and by the time he got back to the front he was so comfortable, so at ease, so sure of himself, that he even tapped the homicidal sentry on the arm on the way by. The guard’s head swung around, he looked, saw no one, and brushed away the nonexistent fly.

  Freddie had his target picked out. On the left side, near the front, two dealers were dealing with one another as well as with a customer seated in front of one of them. The dealers would stand to speak across the cubicle wall at one another, then sit, then stand to hand across a tray of stones or take them back. The customer looked, discussed, moved back and forth between the two dealers. It had been going on for some time, it looked as though a lot of money was going to be involved once the deal was finally set, and the three thus engaged in the transaction were deeply engrossed in what they were doing.

  Also, there were these factors: The site was not far from the front door. It was on the left side, where the movement of the customers was toward the front. And near the right elbow of the dealer nearest the front were several trays of small exquisite diamonds.

  Freddie made a second circuit, partly to go with the flow and partly to keep an eye open for other opportunities, either to be accepted now or at some later time. But nothing better attracted his eye, not for this excursion, so when he came around to those two dealers once more, he tucked in next to the empty chair in front of the dealer on the right, leaned against the front of the cubicle, listened to the foreign languages going off all around him like popcorn, and waited for just the right customer to come along. He’d already spotted her, and now merely had to wait.

  Most of the people in this room, but not all, were men, from sallow sharp-nosed teenagers to wrinkled heavy-jowled ancients. Most, but not all, were professionals, the customers as much as the dealers, the customers being also dealers in their own right, with shops or private clients. The few civilians in here were rich people being courted by a particular jeweler, who had emphasized their special status by bringing them here to this wholesale trading floor. The civilians could be told at once from the dealers: they were eager, their attention was not sharply focused, and they were well dressed. (The few female dealers tended to scowl a lot, and to wear very expensive tasteful jewelry with brown or black silk dresses.)

  There was one civilian Freddie had particularly in mind to help him make his move out of this place, and here she comes now. Accompanied by a tall suave pale man in black whose languages seemed to include Dutch, Yiddish, German, French, and a heavily Dutch-accented English, she was a compact woman in her fifties, as round and solid as a beer keg, with madly curled hair the color of Pepto-Bismol and clothing so bright and sparkly you could read by her. This woman had either at one time been the toast of Broadway or with the help of a therapist had raised a submerged false memory of having been the toast of Broadway. Her whiskey voice was large, the gestures of her jeweled hands larger, her enthusiasms strong enough to knock over a horse. As she made the circuit of the sales floor, she would point, cry out, bend to study, rear back to gain perspective, and all the while her companion would speak to the dealers in his languages, consult briefly with the woman in his broken-spring English, and make notes in a small pad, sometimes handing a memo to a dealer on the way by.

  Here was Freddie’s escort. Of course, if this woman and her companion decided to take the elevator to some other floor, it could make an awkward moment for Fredd
ie, but sometimes you just have to take a chance, and this was one of those times. (It seemed to Freddie, in any case, that for the Toast of Broadway, after this appearance, the only possible exit was grandly out the front door to the public street, not meekly into a tiny elevator box.)

  Here she was, with her tall man. Nothing at the counters of Freddie’s two dealers interested her. She barely slowed, turned her cotton-candy head to look at the dealer on the other side of the aisle, and kept going. Freddie watched her feet. If she’ll take the elevator, that foot will angle to the right . . . now.

  It didn’t. Relieved and excited, with the woman past him, about four feet away toward the front door, Freddie reached with both hands to the trays of diamonds, made a double dip, and scampered. The dealer who’d just been robbed, deep though he was in tense negotiation, nevertheless caught movement from the corner of his eye, looked quickly around, frowned, stared this way and that, then had his attention snagged by something the other dealer said, and turned back.

  Freddie meanwhile had tucked in close behind the Toast of Broadway, holding his double-fist of diamonds close to the back of her glittery sparkly dress. Gazing at these rocks from above, and up close, Freddie could clearly see that he’d done well. He smiled as he looked down at the diamonds floating there, inside his invisible hands. For anybody else in the room, involved as they all were in their own concerns, the diamonds would be barely visible, if at all, against the shiny statement of that dress. So long as they kept moving . . .

  The woman halted, barely ten feet from the door. Freddie damn near ran right into her, but stopped himself just in time, teetering off balance. “That aquamarine,” the woman said, with the plaintive loudness of someone bemoaning the loss of a loved one.

  The tall pale man bent over her. “No, no, Marlene,” he said, soothingly, “I don’t tink so. Dot flaw—”