Donald Westlake - Smoke

Eight days, and no change. Not a hint of Freddie had come back into view, not a shadow, not the faintest smudge of smoke. He was as invisible as on the night those mad doctors had done their experiment on him. Was this condition going to be permanent?

Freddie was torn on the subject. On the one side, invisibility was certainly a decided asset in his occupation. On the other side, there was Peg.

Peg was being very good and supportive about this situation, mostly, and was a great help on the professional side, driving the car and dealing with Jersey Josh Kuskiosko and all of that, but on the personal side, there was a definite sense of strain here, which was not getting better. You could even say it was getting worse. Freddie had noticed a new pattern in Peg the last few days, a habit she had developed of facing half away from wherever she thought he was, as though she had to pretend to herself that he wasn't really invisible, it was just that she didn't happen to be looking in his specific direction at this specific moment.

Denial, in other words. Not being able to see Freddie was a problem for Peg that she had clearly not figured out how to deal with, and it seemed to him that one result was a growing distance between them, a certain coolness, that worried him a lot.

All right. The thing to do, he'd decided, was pile up a lot of scores very quick, accumulate a lot of money, and then make contact with those crazed doctors, open negotiations, and work out some way to get his hands on an actual working antidote without getting himself arrested the second somebody could see his wrists to put the cuffs on.

But money first, the scores first, and that was why Freddie, naked as an empty water glass, was bouncing around in this hall here in Affiliated Fur Storage, with clerical offices on one side and chilled rooms full of fur coats on the other, trying not to get killed by a supersonic black kid with huge sneakers and an evident fantasy in which he won the Indianapolis 500 driving a wheeled garment rack.

It isn't true that all small business has been driven out of New York City by high rents and high taxes and high crime and a workforce whose only skill is pilferage. All small business has been driven out of Manhattan by the above, but many thousands of these little companies still exist in Queens and Brooklyn, where they can draw from the labor pool on Long Island, people at the competency level of the smiling Burger King kid who gets your order right the second time.

Among these surviving small companies is Affiliated Fur Storage — and who knows how many failed furriers are entombed in that cemetery of a word, Affiliated? — here in Astoria, Queens, in a long low cinder-block building flanked by a seltzer bottler and a uniform laundry. Behind it, facing the next street, is a smaller similar structure housing a manufacturer of bowling pins. The fur storage building sits inside an eight-foot chain-link fence topped by razor wire, with two gates, both at the front, both hedged from street to building past the weedy dirt moat by more tall chain-link fence. The narrow gate at the right is for pedestrians, the wider gate at the left for delivery trucks.

The interior of this building, except for the administrative offices, is a maze of windowless rooms, air-conditioned to a fur-loving forty degrees. Here is where many of the more fortunate women of New York store their minks in summer, to protect them from deadly heat and humidity. Here, if you've a mind to steal fur coats, is the place to go.

And here is where Freddie came, this afternoon at four-thirty, slipping in with a delivery truck, filled with another load of arriving mink. Once inside, he'd tucked out of the way, taking it easy, expecting the place to close at five. But it did not.

Problem. By June, the fur coat owners really should already have called Affiliated to make their arrangements for the pickup of their coats, but you know how people procrastinate, how they forget to do something unless it's staring them right in the face, how they don't even think about the fur coat until one day they open that closet looking for something else entirely — sunglasses in a coat pocket, usually — and there it is! And then they make that call, and that's why June is the busiest month of the year at Affiliated, and that was why, at ten past six on Wednesday, June 14, this year, Peg was still in the van parked up in the next block, waiting for the signal — something waving by itself in the air, in front of the just-opened delivery gate — while Freddie, inside, still bobbed and weaved around that damn kid.

He'd come in here in the first place figuring half an hour was all he'd need to watch the security systems, see how they were armed and how they could be disarmed, and he'd been right; once everybody finally did get the hell out of here, he'd open the building like a banana, no sweat. But when would they call it a day, goddam it, and go home ?

And now it was six-twenty, and a person came around the corner of the hall. Not the speed demon, this was a middle-aged woman shrugging into a light cloth spring coat. Freddie pressed himself against the wall as she went by, and here came three more, chatting together, taking up the entire width of the hall. And more behind them.

Whoops. Freddie fled in front of the staff, and found that the receptionist had been among the first to leave, which meant her desk was empty, which meant Freddie could skip around behind it, and even sit in the receptionist's chair, still warm from her bottom, and from that vantage point watch everybody leave.

This place had rent-a-cops, three of them in brown uniforms and shoulder patches, with holsters containing walkie-talkies, and the seriously humorless faces of drunks who aren't drinking yet today. These were the last to leave, having checked every room to be sure there were no stragglers, having set every alarm, and having called their security office from the receptionist's desk — Freddie leaped nimbly out of that guy's way — to report all secure and solid and shut down. Then they left, arming the final alarm system behind them. Freddie stood by the windowed front door — shatterproof window with what looked like chicken wire in it — and watched the security guys close and alarm the outer gate, then get into their little white security car with all the words and numbers on it, and putt-putt away.

Ain't no security against the invisible man; no, sir .

The first thing Freddie did, when he knew he was alone in the building, was skip down the hall, waving his invisible arms and kicking his invisible feet, knowing nobody would be coming around that corner to knock him down, not even his old friend Superfly. And the second thing he did was go into the nearest storage room and find a fur coat that fit and put it on.

June, shmoon; Freddie was cold .

13

By five-thirty, Peg had to go to the bathroom bad. Freddie should have signaled to her by now, but he hadn't, because of course the employees should have left by now, and they hadn't, which meant she couldn't avail herself of the fur-storage building's ladies' room.

Before they'd come out here, she'd talked this situation over with Freddie, or at least with the volume of air she'd assumed contained Freddie, and she'd asked him how come they had to deal with Jersey Josh Kuskiosko all the time? Aside from Jersey Josh's personality, which was the pits, why not just steal cash, and cut out the middleman? Take 100 percent instead of 10 percent? And Freddie had said, "What cash? There aren't any big piles of cash around. Payrolls are by check. Big stores take credit cards."

"Banks have cash," she'd pointed out. "You could sneak in, wait till they close—