Donald Westlake - Smoke

Freddie looked up, and the old man was definitely talking to him. Looking at him, and talking to him. There was nobody else nearby. What kind of magic old guy was this?

"You don't say hello to a person?"

There was no way out; the old guy was sooner or later going to draw the wrong kind of attention. "Hello," Freddie said.

The old guy's smile widened. "There you go," he said. "That wasn't so hard, was it?"

"I was distracted," Freddie said. "I was thinking about what I'm supposed to buy here today."

"Gotta check that shopping list, huh?"

"Yeah, that's right," Freddie said, and suddenly understood: the old guy was blind! Must have been blind for a long time, years and years. His other senses were sharper, to help compensate. Everybody else in the store, since they couldn't see Freddie, would assume he wasn't there, but this old guy couldn't see anybody anyway, and had to dope out presence or absence by some other method — smell, heat, air currents, the tiny noises of human movement — and had not only known there was another person sharing this intersection with him, but had figured it out that the person was male and probably young. And naturally had to show off what a whiz-bang he was. Hello, sonny.

Freddie said, "I guess you don't have a shopping list, huh?"

"My daughter's got it." The old guy cocked his head, listening. "I think this is her coming now."

Freddie looked, and down the aisle from the right marched a thickset woman in her fifties, sour-faced, pushing a really full shopping cart. "Yeah, here she comes," Freddie said.

The old guy said, "Probably too old for you, but you want me to do the introduction?"

"No, that's okay," Freddie said, "I gotta get going. Nice talking to you." And he veered away to the left.

"So long, sonny," the old guy called after him, and Freddie then heard the woman say, "Pop, who you talking to?"

"That young fella over there," the old guy told her. "In a hurry, like everybody."

Freddie turned a corner and heard no more. He slowed down, then, and thought about the old guy, and realized it had been nice, that, to have a normal conversation with another person. He wasn't getting much of that these days. Maybe he should hang out with blind people a lot, go to their conventions and all.

Musing like this, Freddie found himself at the end of an aisle, and there was the front of the store, with a broad line of cash-register pods, like the world's longest highway tollbooth plaza, or like the Maginot Line that was once upon a time supposed to keep Germany out of France. Beyond the cash registers, most of them closed today, the main exit from the building was off to the right. The rest of the space at the front was occupied by a building within the building, a two-story vinyl-sided structure that didn't quite reach the ceiling of the warehouse and had some sort of flat roof of its own. In this building's ground floor were a restaurant, a video store, a foreign exchange window, and a drugstore, while upstairs were what looked to be offices, behind plate-glass windows covered by venetian blinds.

There had to be a way to get up there. Freddie went over and sat on the counter of an unoccupied register — the metal was also cold, against his rump, thank you very much, but at least it got his feet off that cold floor — and waited, and watched, and observed, and pretty soon he saw the way it went.

There was no cash moving through these cash registers. People were buying in bulk, and they were paying by check — no credit cards. From time to time, an employee would come down the line and take all the checks and put them into a black cloth bag with a zipper, then carry the bag over to a door at the far left corner of the building-within-a-building, just beyond the drugstore. The person would press a button there, and a few seconds later would push the door open and go in, the door remaining open just long enough for Freddie to see the flight of stairs leading up, before it closed itself.

That was where Freddie wanted to go. The question was, How? The stunt with the doors that he'd pulled at the diamond-exchange place wouldn't work here, not with one person and a spring-closing door. There didn't seem to be any other way upstairs, like an emergency fire exit, which was a pity, because an exterior fire escape, for instance, would be just perfect access for an invisible man. But no.

The person who collected the checks from the registers was not the only one who went through that door and up and down those stairs. There were other people as well, all in the blue-and-white caps and smocks and ID buttons of employees — HI! MY NAME IS LANA HOW CAN I BE OF SERVICE TODAY? — who went in and out of there, mostly carrying sheafs of papers, invoices, order forms, various kinds of documents. The letters of transit. Those people were more interesting to Freddie than the check-carriers; he wanted to know exactly what they did and how they did it.

Well, maybe the thing to do was track them in the other direction first. Freddie waited until he saw a gruff-looking older guy — HI! MY NAME IS GUS HOW CAN I BE OF SERVICE TODAY? — go up to the office and then come out again, carrying a different sheaf of papers when he came out. Freddie then jumped off his register counter and followed Gus on a straight line all the way back to the very rear of the store.

Interesting. Since the whole setup was a warehouse, they didn't actually have a back room for stock. What they had instead was a series of tall garage doors across the back of the building, some open and some shut. Back up against the open doors were the trailers from tractor-trailer rigs, and they were being used as stockrooms, with goods on pallets and guys using forklift trucks to bring mounds of goods out of the trailers and across the floor to where they'd be put on display.

But it was more complicated than that. Inventory control must be a real bitch with an operation like this, so sometimes they just shifted pallets of stuff from one trailer to another — particularly if the garage door was going to be lowered so an emptied trailer could presumably be taken away — and he even saw a couple of instances of pallets of stuff coming back from the display area, most likely either to make room for sale items or because they were unsold sale items themselves, after the sale was over.

Gus had brought with him orders that moved some pallets out and some pallets over, and he spent a lot of time now yelling at his crew of forklift operators and waving the hand holding the sheaf of invoices. Watching him, Freddie saw that Gus kept doing something weird with his mouth, something ripply and faintly disgusting, and at last he realized what it was. Gus, a true Gus in a world that has lost much of its Gusness, was chewing an invisible cigar.

Freddie grinned, feeling a sense of camaraderie. There the cigar was invisible, here the whole man was invisible; it was a link. (Freddie, in his increasing isolation from humankind, would take his links where he found them.)

Having learned much from Gus, Freddie made his way back to the front of the store:

"Hi, Pop."

"Hello, sonny."

"Who are you talking to?"

This time, he decided to heck with it, just do it. So he went past the registers, over to the door beyond the drugstore, found the button, and pushed it, and a few seconds later was rewarded by a buzzing sound. He leaned the door open just barely wide enough to slide quickly through, then let it shut behind him, and waited, looking up.

There was no one visible at the head of the stairs, just a glimpse of ceiling up there, with an egg carton-style fluorescent light fixture. A hum of voices, a chitter of office machinery. The person up there who operated the buzzer was undoubtedly, like most such people, on automatic pilot; they hear the call, they respond.