Smoke

concerned. 'Mr. Kuskiosko? Jersey Josh? Speak to me!'

'. . . Wha . . .'

'I'm sorry I had to do that.'

'. . . Wha . . .'

'You understand, if I'd had to go home and tell Freddie you misbehaved, he'd come here and do something terrible, and I wouldn't want that.'

Josh raised a shaky hand and touched the wetness at the back of his head, then looked at the fingers and it wasn't red. Shouldn't his blood be red, like anybody else's? He sniffed his fingers, and it was wine. Blue Nun. Looking past his fingers at Peg, finding it hard to focus, he said, 'Wha . . .'

'We can be friends, Mr. Kuskiosko, but not if you're going to be silly. Are you all right now? Can you sit up?'

'Wha . . .'

'Here you go. Try to sit up.'

She didn't touch him, but she did make a lot of hand movements to encourage him, and, following them, leaning into them, he did manage to sit up. He looked around. Pieces of broken wine bottle littered the wet carpet. The Amish chair was overturned. But the mountain of diamonds still sat on the coffee table, the tube sock still lay on the sofa. 'Wha . . .'

'Mr. Kuskiosko,' she said, 'I think we should just conclude our business and I'll go on my way, and neither of us will ever mention this misunderstanding again, and from now on we can get along with one another and be friends. Okay?'

She extended her slim long-fingered hand toward him, her nasty schoolteacher smile fixed on her nasty pretty face. Josh looked at that hand, those long fingers, and he knew in his heart they would never be used in any of the ways he had imagined them being used. Hating everything about this situation, but seeing nothing else to be done, he took that nasty hand and shook it briefly, feeling the delicate bones in there, quickly letting go.

She had been kneeling beside him, her coat again fastened, looking none the worse for wear, dammit. Now she got to her feet, brushed off her knees, and briskly but smilingly said, 'There. We're friends now.'

'S,' he muttered.

'Can you get up?'

'S.'

He could, and he did, and stood tottering there, while she nodded at him in satisfaction and said, 'You're fine now, I know you are.'

'S.'

'So shall we talk about the diamonds?'

'S.'

'How much are you going to give me for them, Mr. Kuskiosko?'

He beetled his brows, and glowered at her. '2.'

She pretended she didn't understand. 'Two? Two what?'

'K.'

'Two thousand dollars?' She laughed, as though perfectly naturally, and said, 'I didn't know you told jokes, Mr. Kuskiosko, Freddie never told me that. But he did tell me I shouldn't take less than ten, so unless that was a joke I guess I'd better take all this back to Freddie.' And she crossed the room to pick up the sock from the sofa.

Damn woman. 'Wait.'

She turned, sock in hand, one eyebrow lifted, and waited.

Now she does what I tell her to do. Josh brooded. Dicker? Haggle? Negotiate? Or just get the damn woman out of here, so he could remove his wine-soaked clothes and take aspirin and watch Centerspread Girls all by himself? 'OK,' he said.

'Oh, thank you, Mr. Kuskiosko,' she said, as sunny as a field of daisies. 'Freddie will be so pleased.'

'Wait,' he commanded again. Then, not looking directly at the woman, he lurched away, holding the bruise on the back of his head, moving through the bedroom and past the mirror/door and on into his office, where many items were just subtly disarranged, which he was too distressed to notice.

In the office, he opened one of the safes, removed from it two white envelopes that each contained five thousand dollars in wrinkled bills, shut the safe, and staggered back to the living room, which was empty.

Oh, God, what now? Josh stared around, his headache redoubling, and in she came from the kitchen, smiling, saying, 'I put the cheese and crackers away. It was the least I could do, Mr. Kuskiosko.'

It damn well was. 'Here,' he said, and thrust the envelopes at her.

'I know I don't have to count these,' she said, chirpy chirpy chirpy, as she put the envelopes in her coat pockets. 'Besides, we both know Freddie will count them. Well, bye-bye.'

Josh stood there, in his violated living room, while she crossed to the door, opened it, and then held it open an unnecessarily long time while she turned back and waved at him like Audrey Hepburn or somebody, and then at last she left. Chack of metal door sardonically into metal frame.

Josh sank onto the sofa, drained and miserable. He gazed at his new diamonds without joy. Hit him on the head, she did, just because he wanted to be friendly.

How in hell did she do that? Get the wine bottle from all the way over here and hit him with it all the way over there, while he was holding her down in the chair?

It just goes to prove it yet again, Jersey Josh thought. You simply can't trust women.

12

Getting chilly. Freddie jogged in place to keep warm, watching out for the sudden appearance of employees around the hall's far turn. One skinny black kid who kept zipping into sight behind a wheeled garment rack full of fur was the worst menace, having actually knocked Freddie over during one of his abrupt flybys. Fortunately, Freddie had managed to roll out of the way before those flashing feet stumbled over him, so the kid remained unaware — as did everybody else in this building — that Affiliated Fur Storage contained at the moment an extremely unauthorized visitor.

Eight days, and no change. Not a hint of Freddie had come back into view, not a shadow, not the faintest smudge of smoke. He was as invisible as on the night those mad doctors had done their experiment on him. Was this condition going to be permanent?

Freddie was torn on the subject. On the one side, invisibility was certainly a decided asset in his occupation. On the other side, there was Peg.

Peg was being very good and supportive about this situation, mostly, and was a great help on the professional side, driving the car and dealing with Jersey Josh Kuskiosko and all of that, but on the personal side, there was a definite sense of strain here, which was not getting better. You could even say it was getting worse. Freddie had noticed a new pattern in Peg the last few days, a habit she had developed of facing half away from wherever she thought he was, as though she had to pretend to herself that he wasn't really invisible, it was just that she didn't happen to be looking in his specific direction at this specific moment.

Denial, in other words. Not being able to see Freddie was a problem for Peg that she had clearly not figured out how to deal with, and it seemed to him that one result was a growing distance between them, a certain coolness, that worried him a lot.

All right. The thing to do, he'd decided, was pile up a lot of scores very quick, accumulate a lot of money, and then make contact with those crazed doctors, open negotiations, and work out some way to get his hands on an actual working antidote without getting himself arrested the second somebody could see his wrists to put the cuffs on.

But money first, the scores first, and that was why Freddie, naked as an empty water glass, was bouncing around in this hall here in Affiliated Fur Storage, with clerical offices on one side and chilled rooms full of fur coats on the other, trying not to get killed by a supersonic black kid with huge sneakers and an evident fantasy in which he won the Indianapolis 500 driving a wheeled garment rack.

It isn't true that all small business has been driven out of New York City by high rents and high taxes and high