Donald Westlake - Smoke

As they headed southwest, a few minutes later, on the Connecticut Turnpike, Peter said, "George, I'm surprised. I thought they were paying you enough so you didn't have to work anymore."

"Oh, they weaseled out of that," George said, with no apparent ill feeling, "once it turned out we wasn't gonna be invisible after all. I figured they would, you know. That lawyer—"

"Mordon Leethe," they both said.

"That's the one." George laughed and said, "He's the one let us know, yesterday morning in his office, in there on a Saturday to tell us they ain't gonna pay anybody for being useless, and except for driving vehicles I'm useless, so that's that. Am I gonna take them to court? What are they called, The Five Hundred Fortune companies? They got five hundred fortunes and I got no fortune. Am I gonna sue them?"

"That's terrible," David said.

"Aw, it ain't so bad," George said. "If I'd got all that money, all that time on my hands, I'd justa got myself in trouble anyway. Fact is, I like driving, like talking to the passengers." He waved a hand in the air, grinning in the rearview mirror. "Now I got these new fingerips, this new face, nothing scares me, man, I can go on driving the rest of my life."

"So long as you're happy," Peter told him.

"Count on it," George said.

David said, "But what about Michael? Michael Prendergast. Did they cheat her, too?"

"Oh, sure, man," George said. "They're an equal opportunity fucker. They done her like they done me."

David said, "What is she going to do about it, do you know?"

"Oh, yeah, she told me," George said, "when we left the lawyer's office yesterday. There's this country, Iran, Iraq, one of those, been after her to head up their nuclear power program. She wouldn't do it before, on account it's against our law, her being there to do that, but now she says she's had enough. She's taking the job, probably already gone in the plane now."

Peter said, "To Iran?"

"Or Iraq, or one of those others over there. She says, the great thing is, she gets to wear that black thing the women wear, covers them all up . . ."

"The chador," David suggested.

"That's it. She gets to wear the chador, so that's good. And the other thing, running that program for them," George explained, "she says she should be just about ready to blow up the whole world in about eight years. I think she'll probably do it, too."

David and Peter stared at George's merry eyes in the rearview mirror. Neither could think of a thing to say. George winked at them. "What I figure," he said, "we might as well enjoy life while we got it."

38

Wednesday, July 5, the day after the long hot exhausting holiday weekend, was a quiet one at the Big S Superstore on U.S. Route 9, the main commercial roadway on the east side of the Hudson River. A few retirees with nothing else to do wandered the cavernous interior of this warehouse-type store, the no-frills successor to the department store, where mountains of items were piled directly on the concrete floor or stuffed to overflowing on unpainted rough wooden shelves. Once you became a "member" of their "club" (not a hard thing to do), you could buy everything in here from a television set (and the unpainted piece of furniture to hide it in) to a goldfish bowl (and the goldfish) to put on top of the set for those times when there's absolutely nothing to watch on TV. You could buy canned and frozen food, truck tires, toys, books, washing machines, flowers, tents (in case your house fills up), small tractors, bicycles, benches, lumber to make your own benches, double-hung windows, storm windows, snow tires, dresses with flowers on them, blue jeans, and baseball caps honoring the team of your choice.

Here in the Big S ("the Big Store for Big Savings!"), in other words, you could get everything you used to be able to get in the Sears Roebuck catalog, except now you have to go to the warehouse and pick it up instead of phoning in and having them send it to you. People enjoy a new wrinkle, and the warehouse you go to instead of phoning it is a very successful new wrinkle indeed. Even the day after the big Fourth of July weekend, there were people in the place; not many of them, but some. And in among the retirees with nothing better to do was an attractive young woman talking to herself.

This is what she was saying: "Freddie, be careful. That old lady just looked around at us."

"What did she see?" apparently asked the mountain of toasters the young woman was just then walking past.

"You know what I mean," she hissed.

This young woman, whom we already know as Peg, was pushing a shopping cart here and there around the warehouse, but she wasn't putting anything into it, because she wasn't in truth a member of the club. She and her invisible partner, whom we already know as Freddie, were merely casing the joint. Just looking it over.

An army of Barbies watched goggle-eyed as Peg pushed the shopping cart by, and then they all said, in Freddie's voice, "My feet are cold."

"It's hot outside," she reminded him.

"That's there, this is here. Concrete, inside, is cold. Hard, too, but Peg, you'd be surprised how cold it is. I wish I could put on a pair of those slippers there."

"Who knows how many heart attacks you could give people."

"I won't do it, I'm just saying."

"Well, do you want to get out of here, have you seen enough?"

"No, I gotta look at the rest of it, the offices and all. Tell you what, give me an hour here, okay?"

"Sure. I can go to the supermarket, do my shopping."

"Good idea."

"Should I come back in?"

"No, I'll find you in the parking lot."

"Okay. So you're going now, right? Right? And I might as well leave the store. Cause I'm alone here now, right?"

She listened, but answer came there none. At some point, he'd gone away, right? He wasn't here now, was he? Watching her, just goofing around. He wouldn't do that, would he? He'd say something if he was here, wouldn't he?

"Oh, I give up," Peg said, this time really and truly talking to herself, and left the shopping cart in the middle of that aisle, and left the store.

Freddie padded along the concrete floor, pausing at the intersections of aisles to look this way and that, wondering where the offices were, where the loading docks were, where there was a nice floor around here with a soft warm carpet on it. And also wondering, Is there a caper in here? Is there something for me in this place?

It was true that this was the most merchandise Freddie had ever in his life seen all together in one place, and that a truckload of almost anything out of here would make Jersey Josh Kuskiosko as happy as it was possible for Jersey Josh Kuskiosko to be, but the question was, how to make the transfer. An invisible man can't be seen, that's true. An invisible man carrying a television set still can't be seen, but the television set can, and any customer or clerk or guard seeing a television set float down a Big S aisle would be bound to have questions, and would be very likely to investigate the matter.

Then there was another consideration. Freddie Noon hadn't gotten into this line of work in order to engage in heavy lifting. To shlep several tons of merchandise out of this building all by himself was not an idea with strong appeal. Was there some other way?

"Hello, sonny."

Freddie looked around, startled out of his contemplations, and over there was an old man, sharing this particular intersection of aisles with him. A grizzled old guy leaning on a walker, he was smiling, and he was looking straight at Freddie.

Whoops, was he visible all of a sudden? Was he standing naked and visible in the middle of the Big S? Freddie looked down at himself and, reassuringly, he was not there.

"Cat got your tongue?"