Donald Westlake - Smoke

"Of course," David said, and took out a Perrier, and handed it to the man, who had opened another secret compartment, this one in the door, containing short thick glasses.

"Take something for yourself," the man said, in lieu of thanks.

"Thank you," David said, because he would. He turned his head. "Peter?"

They both chose Perrier as well, and took glasses from the man's cache. David said, "Mr. Leethe?"

"Perrier."

David looked at the woman: "Anything for you?"

She very nearly looked directly at him as she replied with the most minimal of headshakes.

The four men sat with Perrier water fizzing and sputtering in glasses in their hands. Leethe said, "Merrill, may I now present—"

"Delighted."

"May I present Dr. Peter Heimhocker and Dr. David Loomis of the American Tobacco Research Institute. Doctors, may I present Merrill Fullerton, nephew of the late lamented Jack, and heir apparent to the chairmanship."

"Well, not quite apparent," Merrill Fullerton said, with a faint smile. "Not quite yet, though soon, we hope." He turned his smile and his ice eyes on David and Peter. "With the doctors' help, in fact. Or their friend's help."

David said, "Our friend?"

"The invisible man," Merrill said.

Peter said, "We won't discuss that except in the presence of our attorney."

Merrill Fullerton gazed almost fondly at Peter. "The reason we are having this conversation in this setting," he said, "far from your little attorney, and far from my feverish family, and far from the spies and wiretaps and bugs of our friends and enemies, is so that I can make it plain to you just what the situation is now that Uncle Jack has gone to the great ashtray in the sky. You needn't discuss anything for a while. I'll do the talking for all of us."

David and Peter watched Merrill Fullerton like birds watching a cat. Mordon Leethe watched the traffic out on the Hutch. The woman read a paperback novel by Danielle Steel.

Merrill Fullerton said, "Uncle Jack was all right in his way, in his day, but he had slowed down, you know, he wasn't the man he used to be, he was letting things slide, and one of the things he was letting slide was your invisible man."

"We haven't been able to find him," David said. "That's—"

The ice eyes looked at David. "I believe I said it was my turn to talk."

"Sorry."

"I understand from Mordon," Merrill said, "that the invisible man is not at this point replicable. So I want the original. I want him now, I want him doing our bidding, and I want him under your control."

"So do we," said Peter.

Ignoring that, Merrill said, "I want him, of course, for all the same reasons Uncle Jack wanted him, but Uncle Jack's vision, I must say, though not wishing to speak ill of the dead, his vision was rather limited. I will need the invisible man initially to consolidate my position as the new head of NAABOR, which shouldn't take long, once I have my own absolutely indetectable spy in the very bosom of the councils of my family, but after that, gentlemen, after that I have much bigger plans for both your invisible man and your own good selves."

"What," David said.

"In the first place," Merrill told him, "this melanoma nonsense is finished. Forget all that, throw out your research, no one now or tomorrow or ever in the history of the world will give a good goddam."

Stiffly, Peter said, "I can't believe that—"

"Believe what you want to believe," Merrill interrupted. "I'm telling you that your research, as you very well know, was never anything more than a public relations dodge, and I no longer need it or want it or will fund it or have anything to do with it."

David's mouth and throat were terribly dry. He drank Perrier, aware of Peter drinking Perrier over there to his right, but it didn't help. Liquid didn't help. He was just terribly dry.

"What you are going to do instead," Merrill told them, "with my financial backing, extremely generous financial backing, and with the assistance of your invisible man, is nothing more or less than save the entire cigarette industry from annihilation and collapse."

David blinked. He couldn't help it, he had to ask. "How?"

Merrill, a born orator, raised one finger. "Let me," he said, "give you just a bit of the background. It was more than forty years ago that the industry first had to confront the fact that the only product it had to sell was, in fact, a deadly poison."

Peter abruptly said, "Do you smoke?"

Merrill gave him a look of astonished contempt. "Of course not! Do you take me for an idiot?"

"The rest of your family smokes."

"Yes, and look at them."

"You're going to go on selling cigarettes."

Merrill smiled. "That's all I have to sell, isn't it? In fact, that's been the quandary ever since nineteen fifty-two, when Dr. Doll, in England — charming name — first laid out the evidence linking benzoapyrene to lung cancer. Since then, bad news has followed bad news, and by now the scientific world knows — we in the industry don't know, of course, but everyone else does — the existence of forty-three separate carcinogens in cigarette smoke. Quite an army in that field, don't you think?"

Faintly, David said, "I hadn't known it was that many."

"Could be more before they're done rooting around," Merrill said, and shrugged. "Dead is dead, as Uncle Jack could tell you, so it hardly matters if you're killed once or forty-three times. The point is, the industry has known about the problem for forty years or more, and has struggled with it, and has failed to solve it, and the situation has got blacker and blacker and blacker. As black as a smoker's lung, you might say. In the sixties and seventies, the industry tried everything it could think of to make its product less lethal; face it, no businessman in his right mind wants to kill off his customers. But nothing worked. All kinds of filters were tried, and failed. Different tobaccos, different additives, even substitutes for tobacco. If they were at all safe, smokers wouldn't go near them. Finally, within the last ten to fifteen years, when it became clear that there was no solution, there was no way to make cigarette smoking anything other than suicidal, the industry fell back on its last weapon: denial. That's where we are now, but the denials are getting weaker and weaker, the evidence is getting harder and harder to refute, and the lawsuits are getting more and more dangerous, and unless something is done, I stand to inherit a mighty ship just as it sinks to the bottom of the sea. Doctors, I don't intend to be the first president of NAABOR to lose a war."

"I'd heard," Peter said delicately, "the industry might shift over to marijuana. Might encourage legalization and—"

"For several reasons, no," Merrill said. "The zeitgeist is against that, to begin with. In the years since nineteen thirty-six, when marijuana was first made illegal in the United States, to give employment to those government enforcement officials put out of work by the repeal of Prohibition, marijuana has unfortunately become wedded in the popular mind with actual narcotic drugs, like heroin and cocaine. Also, marijuana contains even more tar than tobacco and may have just as many, though different, negative implications for the human respiratory system. There's nothing to be gained by switching from a legal health hazard to an illegal health hazard."

David said, "You still want to sell tobacco."

"It's what I have in the shop."

"And the invisible man comes into this? How?"

Merrill seemed to consider that question, as though for the first time. Then he answered it with a question of his own: "What do you know of the Human Genome Project?"

"Nothing," David said promptly.

"It sounds," Peter said, "as though it's outside our area of expertise."