Donald Westlake - Smoke

"Do we." Jack the Fourth's clean nails scrabbled at the cigarette pack, finally breaking through.

"They've been studying melanoma."

Jack the Fourth tapped a cigarette loose, while that word circled down into his brain, searching for a definition with which to mate. Got it; Jack the Fourth frowned massively at Mordon. "Melanoma! What the fuck for?"

"Research."

Jack the Fourth held up the cigarette for Mordon to see. "Let them make these fuckers less lethal," he advised. "Melanoma! Who gives a fuck about melanoma?"

"I think," Mordon said carefully, not knowing how much Jack the Fourth wanted to know about his own business, "I think it's mostly window dressing."

Again, Jack the Fourth thought that over, while one of his assistants took his cigarette, lit it for him, and gave it back. Taking a drag, coughing his guts out, heaving in the chair, tapping ash that didn't yet exist into the hubcap-size clean ashtray on his desk, at last he wheezed, in utter disgust, "Public relations," much as another man might have said, "There's vomit on this seat."

"Yes, Jack," Mordon said. "A smoke screen, you might say."

"That's not bad." Jack wheezed a chuckle.

"But the point is, they've been working on two formulas to reduce skin pigmentation — it doesn't matter, it's just something to do with their research — and they both work pretty well, to the extent that they turn you translucent."

"Trans" — hack hack hack herack hok hok hok HOK HOK hack hack hack hack — "lucent? What do you mean?"

"Well, these researchers gave the formulas to their cats, one each, and now you can see through the cats."

Jack the Fourth waved smoke away from his face with his free hand. "You mean they're invisible?"

"No, you can see them, the shapes of them, sort of grayish, but you can see through them. They're like" — Mordon pointed at the air between himself and his master — "they're like smoke."

Jack the Fourth shook his big head. "I'm not following this. They want to make cigarettes out of cats? "

"No, no, I—"

"Not that I'd be against it," Jack wheezed, "if they were lower in tar and nicotine. But you've got to factor in those damn animal-rights people, you know, they're much nastier than the human-rights people, human beings mean nothing to them."

"The cats," Mordon said firmly, "were merely an early part of the experiment."

Jack the Fourth considered that. "Do cats get skin cancer?"

"Not as far as I know. Jack, could I just tell you about this?"

"I think you'd better."

"They have these two formulas," Mordon said, and held his hands up as though they gripped test tubes. "They have to experiment with them," and he poured the test tube contents onto the carpet. "They experimented on their cats," and he spread his hands, palms up, forgiving the researchers on behalf of animal-rights activists everywhere. "But now," and he brought his hands together as though hiding a baseball greased with illegal spit, "they need to experiment on human beings."

"I won't be a part of that," Jack the Fourth wheezed. "They'll have to go offshore for that. Set them up a dummy corporation."

"Well, they already did it," Mordon said, dropping his hands into his lap, and jutting his jaw forward like Il Duce. "They caught a burglar, tested one of the formulas on him, locked him up — very ineptly, I might say — and the burglar took the other formula, thinking it was the antidote, and escaped."

"Probably dead in a ditch somewhere," Jack the Fourth commented, and paused to cough before adding, "No legal problem I can see. Not for us."

"No, Jack," Mordon said, and his hands reappeared, to conduct the slow movement of a sextet. "The researchers say it's almost impossible the burglar's dead. I wouldn't come here, Jack, to talk to you about a dead burglar."

"I would hope not." Jack the Fourth took a puff, strangled, retched, coughed his guts out, lost his oxygen tube out of his nose, replaced it with the help of both calm assistants, blew his nose on a Kleenex out of a desk drawer, wiped his eyes on another Kleenex, gasped and panted a while, clutched the arms of his chair as though it were mounted on the rear of a sports-fishing boat in a heavy sea, and at last wheezed, "Well, Mordon, if they don't think this burglar's dead, what do they think he is?"

"Invisible."

For a long moment, there was silence in the room. Jack the Fourth didn't wheeze. The assistants even looked at one another, briefly. Then, with a long shuddering inhalation, very like a death rattle, Jack the Fourth wheezed, "Invisible?"

"They can't be sure, of course, but it seems very likely."

"Invisible. Not smoke, not . . . ghostly. Somebody you can't see at all. "

"Yes."

"Hmmm," wheezed Jack the Fourth.

Briskly, Mordon said, "We're pretty sure he left fingerprints at the researchers' place. He's a burglar, he'll have a record. We don't want to make an official complaint in this case, Jack, but surely we know someone somewhere in law enforcement—"

"We know half the fucking Senate," Jack the Fourth wheezed.

"Half the Senate, Jack," Mordon said, "is on the wrong side of the law. We need a lawman, someone with access to the FBI's fingerprint files—"

"You want this invisible man."

" You want him, Jack," Mordon said. "He'll work for us, if we give him the right inducement. The fly on the wall, Jack. In jury deliberations, in advertising-campaign strategy sessions, in closed congressional hearings, in private pricing discussions . . ."

"Jesus Christ on a plate," Jack the Fourth wheezed, and almost sat up straight. Reaching for his phone, stubbing out his cigarette in the big ashtray — almost out; it smoldered, reeking like an old city dump — Jack the Fourth even rose briefly above his wheeze. "Don't you move, Mordon," he stated. "We're about to get this boy."

11

As fences go, Jersey Josh Kuskiosko was no more scuzzy than the average. As human beings go, of course, Jersey Josh was just about at the bottom of the barrel, down there in the muck and the filth and the fetid stink where thoughts just naturally arise of retroactive abortion. But as far as fences are concerned, he wasn't bad.

Still, it wasn't often that Jersey Josh's phone rang, so when it did on that Monday evening a little after six, while he was watching several children being burned alive in their tenement apartment on the local news (their mother had only left the place for a minute, to get milk, Cheerios, and crack), Josh turned a very suspicious head to glower at the telephone, daring it to repeat that noise.

It did; damn. Hadn't been a glitch in the wires after all. It could still be a wrong number, though, or bad news. Aiming the remote at the TV to hit "mute" — now he could watch the children burn without listening to the newscaster's play-by-play — he mistrustfully picked up the phone, an old black rotary-dial model some scumbag had sold him long long ago, and warily said into it, "R?"

"Josh?"

"S?"

"This is Freddie Noon, Josh."

"O."

"You gonna be around?"

Where else would he be, but around? Nevertheless, this answer was going to require more of the alphabet. Hunching over the phone, as though he didn't want the burning children to watch, he said, "Maybe."

"I got some stuff to show you," Freddie Noon said.

Meaning, of course, stuff to sell him. So why didn't he just come over and announce himself around midnight, like a normal person? "S?"

"I'll send Peg. She's my friend."

"Y not U?"

"I'm kind of laid up," Freddie said.

"U sound OK."

"It's my leg."

"O."

"When should she come over?"

Shower. Shave. Change underwear. "8."