Donald Westlake - Smoke

What persistence. "Sorry, wrong number," Freddie told it, and closed the two halves of the phone together, which made it hang up. He waited a couple seconds, then opened it again, put it to his ear, and the plaintive hellos were gone at last, replaced by the welcome dial tone. Quickly he punched out his own number, and Peg answered on the second ring: "Hello?"

"It's me, Peg, I'm gonna come home now."

"Okay. Your brother Jimmy called."

"Oh, yeah?"

"He said don't call him back, he'll ring again later."

"What's it about?"

"He didn't say."

Freddie looked up, and there was a kid of maybe eight years of age standing in the doorway, looking with deep interest at the floating cellular phone, which was just now saying, "I'll make you a turkey sandwich, okay?"

"Ssshhhhh," Freddie said.

The kid said, "I didn't say anything."

Peg said, "Freddie? Something wrong?"

"I got to hang up now," Freddie said, and folded the phone on itself.

The kid gazed, neither frightened nor excited, just intensely interested. He said, "Are you a magic phone?"

"Yes," Freddie said.

"Do you belong to that man back there?"

"I didn't like him anymore," Freddie said, "so I went away from him."

"He's really mad."

"That's it," Freddie told the kid. "He's just got too excitable a personality, I get yelled into all the time, that's why I left."

"What are you going to do now?" the kid asked.

"I'm going to fly away," Freddie said. Standing up, he held the phone in both hands, then opened and closed it, opened and closed it, which made it look like something with wings.

Freddie left the dentist's doorway and headed toward home, holding the phone in front of him at about wrist level, opening and closing, opening and closing; every time he looked back, the kid was still there, watching.

Other people were watching, too, their attention caught by the vision of something weird flying by. Nobody tried to grab the phone, though, and Freddie made sure to steer himself so he never got too close to anybody.

Moving like that, he made it to the corner, and turned away from the shopping street onto a residential side street, where maybe he could get a little peace and quiet. His idea was, he'd stash the phone under a bush or a rock or something, so he could come back and use it every day at lunchtime and solve his telephone problem for good and all.

But when he looked back, an army of the curious was coming around the corner behind him, led by that damn kid, who was loudly explaining to anybody who'd listen that that was a magic flying telephone up ahead there, and that it didn't want to be yelled into anymore.

Freddie sped up, waggling the phone wings like mad. Behind him, the crowd also sped up, and some of them were considerably speedier than Freddie, mostly because they were wearing shoes and he was not.

Too damn many people, that was the problem. You can distract a thousand of them, there's still another hundred to give chase. The downside of city life.

Freddie could see his plan was not going to work. If he didn't abandon this telephone, before the end of this block somebody would catch up, reach for it, touch him, yell like mad, touch him some more, and then grab. And then a lot of people would grab.

Come to think of it, since they wouldn't be able to see him, they wouldn't know what they were grabbing, or where they were grabbing it. They could knock him down onto the sidewalk and trample him and never even know it.

Would they be able to see his blood, once it was outside him, all over the sidewalk?

These were not comforting thoughts. At the moment, Freddie was running past narrow yellow-brick two-story houses, all alike, two feet apart from one another, built up a tiny slope and back from the sidewalk, with gray-brick steps and walks, and scrubby little plantings in front of their enclosed porches. As he ran on by them, the shouts behind him closer and closer, and as he came to understand at last how the fox feels when all those loudmouth hounds are in his near background, Freddie finally tossed the telephone up and away, toward the shrubbery in front of house number 261-23.

Good-bye, telephone. Tomorrow we'll work out something else.

Freddie kept running, but the shouts behind him receded, and when he at last dared to look back the crowd had all run up the steps to 261-23 and were diving into the bushes there. More and more of them came, ripping greenery out by the roots in their frenzied search for the magic flying telephone.

Freddie was winded. He stood where he was, panting, holding his side where the pain was, and watched people toss the phone into the air and leap to catch it and fight over it and toss it some more, trying to make it fly. A throng of people had gathered in front of 261-23 now, ballooning out onto the sidewalk and even to the street, and nobody even paid any attention when the lady of the house, outraged at this attack on her brushwork, came roaring out of her enclosed porch to stand on her top step with an Uzi in her hands, at port arms. She yelled a lot, but everybody else was also yelling, so what else was new?

Would she shoot the damn gun? She looked mad enough. Meanwhile, the insurance salesman in his now-rumpled tan suit was way out at the periphery of the mob, jumping up and down and screaming that he wanted his phone back. And above it all, the sound of approaching police sirens.

Enough. Figure out telephones some other time. Turning his back on the follies of the human race, Freddie trudged on home.

"I'm home!"

"Did you go to the movies?"

Peg wouldn't come out of the bedroom, as Freddie well knew, but would shout to him from in there until he'd lunched and dressed.

"No, I saw it yesterday," he called back, and made his way toward the kitchen

"What'd you do?" she shouted.

"Went for a run," he shouted, and entered the kitchen.

His sandwich and coffee were on the table there. On one of the two chairs lay his clothing and all four masks, so he could make his own choice. He sat on the other chair, ate, considered his recent experiences in the outside world, and at the end of the sandwich he had no difficulty at all selecting the mask to put on.

It was Frankenstein's monster in a long-sleeved shirt and pink rubber gloves who at length sloped on into the living room, where Peg sat reading a paperback novel about a rich beautiful woman who owned her own successful perfume business but had trouble keeping a guy. She looked up from the deck of a yacht in the Med, anchored off Cannes at film festival time, to say, "Frankenstein? You haven't wanted to be him before."

"Frankenstein's monster, " Freddie corrected. "Frankenstein was the doctor. I don't think the monster ever had a name."

Peg marked her place in the book with a twenty-dollar bill. "What's the matter, Freddie? You seem depressed. Or is it just the head?"

"No, I don't think so," he said. "I think I'm probably kind of depressed all over. I was just chased by a mob. A Brooklyn mob. It made me kind of identify with this guy," he explained, pointing at his head.

"Chased by a mob? How could they even see you?"

He began to relate his adventures, assuring her he didn't blame her for his complex need to find a telephone (while making it clear in the subtext that he did blame her, for not trusting him to really leave the apartment), and he'd just reached the dentist's doorway when the phone beside Peg rang. "If it's the insurance guy," Freddie said, "tell him I don't need any."

"Oh, yes, you do," she said, but picked up the phone and spoke and then said, "Yeah, he's here now, hold on." She extended the phone toward Frankenstein, or his monster. "It's your brother."

"Oh, yeah."

Freddie crossed to take the phone, which felt strange with the rubber gloves on. Holding the phone to the side of the mask, he said, "Hey, Jimmy, what's happening?"