Donald Westlake - Smoke

"Yes?"

"We're expected to go."

David stared. "Sunday? This Sunday? The day after tomorrow?"

"Yes, of course. He died this morning. On the toilet, apparently."

"Peter, we can't go to a funeral on Sunday, we're spending the weekend with Robert and Martin!"

"Amory said the new head man specifically asked that we be there," Peter said, and the in-house line buzzed again. Peter raised an eyebrow at David. "Any more premonitions?"

"That last one was right, wasn't it? Go ahead and answer, apparently the weekend's ruined anyway."

"Apparently. Yes, Shanana? Yes, put him on." Cupping the mouthpiece, "Bradley," he told David, meaning of course their own wonderful attorney, Bradley Cummingford, and then into the phone Peter said, "Hello, Bradley. Yes, we just heard. Yes, Archer Amory said so. No, I have no idea. Yes, I suppose we must. Will you be — ? No, I see, of course not. Well, say hello to Robert and Martin for us. And the whole gang. Yes, do that. We'll think of you, too, dear." Hanging up, Peter said to David, "Bradley says we should go to the funeral."

"We never even knew the man."

"Nevertheless."

David stamped his foot, a thing he did rarely. "I will not wear black," he said.

They were both in light gray, like the sky. Hazy, hot, and humid had been the forecast, and for once the Weather Service had gotten it right. The whole funeral party looked dead.

The initial proceedings took place in a Park Avenue church of so high and refined a tone their fax number was unlisted. Though of course Gentile, it was too genteel to admit to a specific denomination, and would certainly not have permitted itself to be named after any grubby sheet-wearing saint: The Church of Lenox Hill was good enough, thank you. A brownstone pile taking up half a really good Park Avenue block, surmounted by a few spires, it steered a delicate course between Roman Catholic-cathedral ostentation and Methodist-chapel humility, managing to make itself and everyone connected with it seem utterly insincere from any angle.

The sidewalk out front, when David and Peter emerged from their taxi, was dense with smokers, all puffing away in the heat-haze, a miasma rising from them into the dank air like the fog over a city dump, their low conversations polka-dotted with coughs. Hoping the interior of the church would be cooler, knowing its air would at least be cleaner, David and Peter made their way through the undulous crowd and up the steps to the main arched entrance, where a burly tough-looking man with a clipboard asked their names, checked them off on his list, and said, "You'll be in car three."

"Oh, we're not going to the cemetery," David said.

The man with the clipboard gave him an unadorned look. "Yes, you are."

"But—" David said, and felt Peter's hand squeeze his arm. He permitted Peter, by that hand, to steer him past the tough fellow with the clipboard, and heard Peter, behind his back, say to the man, "Car three. Got it."

On into the church, high-ceilinged, dim, and relatively cool. Peter released David's arm, and David hissed, "What was that all about?"

"Something's going on," Peter told him, quietly. "They insisted we come here, and now they're putting us in car three. They don't count those cars from the back, David, think about it. We're being treated like VIPs."

"I don't want to be a VIP. I want to be in North Dudley with Robert and Martin."

"Some other time. For now, let's keep our eyes open and our mouths shut."

And here came a slender young blond woman in a snug black above-the-knee dress. She too carried a clipboard and wanted to know their names, and when Peter responded, she led them to a pew very near the front on the right side. There was no one else yet in that pew — all out front, no doubt — so David and Peter sat down and looked around and watched the church gradually fill.

When Harry Cohn, the tyrannical well-loathed head of Columbia Pictures in the thirties and forties, finally passed away, there was a huge turnout at his funeral, which led Red Skelton to comment, "It just goes to prove the old saying. Give the people what they want, they'll come out for it." On that basis, the demise of Jack Fullerton the Fourth had to be considered a resounding success. Slowly the church filled, with more and more coughers, but fill it did, with men and women and even children in expensive dark garb, all maintaining a low decorous hum in deference to the surroundings, and not a wet eye in the house.

Peter and David's pew gradually filled, with complete strangers. Not to one another, judging by the low-pitched chatter all about, but certainly to Peter and David, who had deferentially slid over to the farthest end of the pew, where the low oak partition separated it from the servants' pews fed by the side aisle. Then, at the very end, a truly familiar face took up the aisle position: Mordon Leethe himself, his expression finally finding its appropriate venue. Peter and David raised their eyebrows at one another, but kept their opinions to themselves.

The service could not have been more nondenominational if Carly Simon had got up and sung; she did not, but a chorus group from Nana: The Musical, the current Cameron Mackintosh Broadway smash, did, and sang "Smoke Dreams," the thing that passed for a love ballad in that show.

Then the minister, or pastor, or parson, or deacon, or whatever he called himself, stood up and delivered the eulogy. Peter and David didn't listen to the sense of it, because they were trying to figure out the accent. Where was the man from? Nowhere in America, certainly. Nowhere in Great Britain they'd ever heard of, though sometimes there was a trace of something very BBC audible down in there. Not Australian, not South African, obviously not Canadian.

But still it wasn't a foreign accent, either. It was as though, through all his formative years, this person in this cassock had never had the opportunity actually to listen to any human beings in conversation, but had merely watched an indiscriminate mйlange of movies from all over the English-speaking world, so that he emerged from the experience at the end with a pudding of accents, in which every word was recognizably from the mouth of a native English-language speaker, but no string of words had any geographic coherence.

It was a pity, though, that the delivery system so distracted David and Peter, because the eulogy was in fact well worth listening to:

"You all know Jack Fullerton. You all, that is to say, knew Jack Fullerton, one way and another, most of you, I suppose, which is why you're all here today. To remember, to recall, Jack Fullerton, the man. Whom, in our own fashion, we all knew. Some in business, some . . . not in business.

"Jack was a family man. That needs to be said, one thinks, particularly in this day and age, particularly at a time when the family, the concept of the family, perhaps the family itself, is not what it was, once upon a time. But that was not true of Jack, no, never true of Jack. Jack Fullerton was a family man. He himself came from a family, and he went on and produced a family of his own, a proud and full family of his own, of which he was proud, mightily proud. Often expressed, proud.

"If Jack could be here today, as of course he cannot, but if he were somehow here as well as not being here, he would, I think, still be proud, yes, proud of that family I see, here and there among you, proud of his friends, his associates, his position in the world that he has now left, and we the poorer for it.

"Jack was a philanthropist. Ah, yes, that large word which merely means good. Good-hearted, good-intentioned, good in one's dealings with one's world. Jack's contributions are many and legion and many. Perhaps more than many of you are aware, because Jack was also a modest man, in his way, his own idiosyncratic very personal way of being a modest man, as many of you are aware. His support, for instance, for example, his support of the television episodes of great moments in the histories of the southern American states on public television is perhaps not as well known as it should be, and I would correct that if I could, and possibly do, here.