Donald Westlake - Smoke

Up the stairs Freddie went, very well pleased, because these stairs were carpeted. Scratchy industrial carpeting, but nevertheless carpet, and warm.

At the top, he found the second floor was mostly one large room, with a vaguely underwater feel. The industrial carpet was light green, the walls and ceiling cream, the fluorescent lighting vaguely greenish, the office furniture gray. They could be on the Nautilus, and out beyond those venetian blinds could be the deep ocean itself, with giant octopi swimming through the submarine's powerful searchlights.

Instead of which, of course, this was the command center of the Big S, a long low-ceilinged air-conditioned humming space full of clerks, mostly women, with an enclosed office at the far end for the manager. Freddie looked around and saw, positioned atop the desk nearest the stairs, a small TV monitor showing the space in front of the door below. The woman seated at that desk was entering an endless series of numbers into her computer terminal, reading from a two-inch-thick stack of pink vouchers. While Freddie watched, an employee appeared in the monitor and pushed the button; a buzzer sounded here, just like the one downstairs; the woman at the desk never looked away from the vouchers but just reached out, pressed a button in front of the monitor, and went on with her typing.

Routine is the death of security.

Freddie now spent a lot of time wandering around this office, watching over people's shoulders as they worked, reading the forms, studying the charts on the walls, getting to know a lot about the operation of this place. He learned that on weekdays the store closed at eight, but that clerks remained in the office until ten, and the cleaning crew came in at eleven, and there were four guards on duty all night, but no dogs, which had been a worry. (Invisibility wouldn't faze dogs; they trust their noses more than their eyes anyway.)

He also learned that the clerks arrived up here at eight in the morning, so there were two overlapping shifts of clerks, so nobody could ever be absolutely certain that such-and-such a decision had not been made by the other clerk on this desk. He learned that the store opened for business each morning at ten. And he learned a lot about the flow of goods in and through and out of the store. He saw what he could maybe do, and it looked nice.

And then he saw the clock on the wall, and he'd been up here an hour and a half! And who knew how long downstairs before that. He'd told Peg he'd see her in one hour. It had to be at least two hours by now, maybe more.

No no no; things were tough enough for Peg these days as it was, having to live with somebody she couldn't see. There was no point making her also sit forever in the hot sun in an exposed parking lot. Time to get out of here.

Freddie was in such a hurry to got going that he started down the stairs without looking, and then he looked, and here came Gus, tromping upward. Frowning at the invoices in his fist, chewing his invisible cigar, boot-shod feet clomping one step after another upward toward the second floor.

Too late to go back. To late to do anything but make a run for it.

Holding his breath, grimacing in terror, Freddie scraped past, downward, between Gus and the wall.

"Sorry," muttered Gus, not looking up.

"Sorry," Freddie told him.

Both kept going.

The reason Peg didn't notice the time going by was because she was making plans. She had come to a decision, and now she had to make her plans, work out her timing, figure out exactly what to do and what to say and when to do and say it.

She did love Freddie, dammit, and she did like being with him, but only when she was with him. Being with his voice and some clothing and latex masks and Playtex gloves wasn't the same. Knowing you did not dare turn on any lamps once you were in bed at night took some of the fun out of having fun. Being tense all the time was bad for a girl's complexion, digestion, and posture.

The disastrous experience last week, that doomed effort just to go out and have a normal date and eat dinner at a restaurant, was the last straw, really. That had been last Friday, the restaurant fiasco, the beginning of the July Fourth weekend, and she'd spent the whole time since brooding about what to do, sitting up by the pool, under the umbrella, with Silas Marner, while that invisible whale surged back and forth in the pool.

Of course she already knew what to do, she'd known for some time what the only possible option was, but she stalled, she held off, and she was still stalling. And she knew all this was bad for their relationship, if you can call hanging out with the little man who wasn't there a relationship.

It wasn't Freddie's fault he had this condition, and she knew it, and yet she found herself blaming him, feeling as though he could be visible if he just wanted to, that he was being invisible just to be a smart-ass. In some ways, of course, Freddie was a smart-ass, which gave the accusation a little credibility; more credibility than Freddie himself had, these days.

I'll stick through this caper, Peg told herself. I won't distract him by talking about it now, but once this caper is done and he's got a bunch of money and he's set up here for a while, I'll explain it to him. "Freddie," I'll say, "this isn't working out. It's straining my love for you, Freddie, being stuck here in the backwoods with you when I'm not even with you. What we have to have, and I'm sorry about this, Freddie, but what we have to have is a trial separation. I'll go back to Bay Ridge, and you stay here, and we'll talk on the phone, and maybe from time to time I'll come up and visit, and if you ever get your visibility back I'll be here for you, you know that. But this way, honey, it's just too much of a strain. I'm sorry, but."

Peg sighed. She was sorry. But.

The passenger door opened. Indentations appeared in the passenger seat and backrest. The passenger door slammed. A passing mother on her way to the Big S didn't even look around, but her three tiny dirty-faced children all stared and stared, hanging back until their mama whacked all three of them on the top of the head. Then the entire group progressed on to the store, yelling and wailing.

Freddie's voice, out of breath, said, "Gee, I'm sorry, Peg, I lost all sense of time in there."

She smiled at where she figured his head would be. She might as well treat him nice, until she pulled the ripcord. Give him nice memories. After all, she really did love him, or what was left of him. "That's okay, honey," she said. "I was just sitting here thinking, that's all."

"I didn't mean to be away so long."

"Don't worry about it. Is it gonna be okay?"

"It's gonna be wonderful!" The enthusiasm in his voice gave her yet one more reason to be sorry she couldn't see his face. "All I gotta do," he told her, "is spend one night in there, and in the morning I walk off with half the store."

"That's terrific, Freddie."

"What we'll do, when we get home, I'll call Jersey Josh, ask him what he would most like a truck of — and the truck, too, he might as well take that along with — and then we do it."

"That's great."

"And then we can come back here," he said, bubbling over, "and take it easy for the summer. We got it made, Peg."

Something touched her right leg. She knew it was Freddie's hand, and didn't even flinch. "That's wonderful, honey," she said. "Why don't you go in the back and get dressed now?"

"Let me kiss you first."

She closed her eyes.

39

On the Wednesday after the July Fourth weekend, while Freddie Noon was casing the Big S upstate, Mordon Leethe was continuing, in New York City, to concern himself with Freddie's affairs. It began first thing in the morning, right after Mordon had parked his car in the untaxed parking space in the basement of his office building. Hearing another nearby car door slam, he knew even before he turned around that he was about to have another encounter with Barney Beuler.