Smoke

Grungle-grungle, the delivery door closed down there. Kerough-kerough, the elevator started up. Snarl snarl . . . Josh peered, trying to see the rising wooden platform. Something was on it, moving . . . the Dobermans!

Josh ran for his life.

After eighteen rings, Josh finally gave up and answered the telephone: 'Y.'

'Peg tells me she had to set the dogs on you,' Freddie Noon's voice said.

Four in the morning, and the Dobermans were still snarling and biting and hurling themselves at the other side of his secret mirrored door. God knows what they'd destroyed back there in the storage area. Tomorrow, the downstairs people would figure out how to get those murderous beasts back where they belonged, but for now, Josh's private space was ass-deep in Doberman pinschers. 'Y,' he repeated.

'Peg knew what you had in mind,' Freddie said, infuriatingly calm. 'She saw you get that key, she knew you were gonna try to attack her again.'

Saw him get the key? Impossible, she was two rooms away in the van. Did she follow him? Was that possible? But how did that fire start? Did she start it? Did he brush by it without seeing it, and that's how it got his shirt? It couldn't have happened that way. 'No,' Josh said, meaning no to just about everything in the world.

Freddie said, 'Josh, you and me, we've always had a good professional business relationship.'

'S.'

'And I want us to go on having that good professional business relationship, Josh.'

'S.'

'But, you know, I figure I'm gonna be laid up a while longer, so it's Peg you're gonna be dealing with, and she and me, we don't want her to have any more trouble with you.'

She's having trouble with me? Josh gritted his teeth, but kept silent.

'Josh? You hear me?'

'S.'

'When Peg comes over there, she's gonna have the same good professional business relationship with you that I do. Right? Right, Josh?'

Josh's fantasies lay in crumbled ruins around his feet. Nearby, a Doberman flung himself yet again at the secret door. 'S,' Josh said, and hung up.

15

So this is what tobacco money buys when it's blowing the stink off, Mordon Leethe thought, as he got out of the taxi at the Loomis-Heimhocker Research Facility on East Forty-ninth Street. The taxi, driven by a recent immigrant from Alpha Centauri, zipped away, rattling, and Mordon climbed the slate steps in late-morning sunshine toward the well-polished old wood front door with beveled lights, his hand stroking the smooth thick paint on the rail. Thursday, the fifteenth of June, beautiful weather, three days since Mordon's meeting with Jack Fullerton the Fourth, and at last it looked as though some progress was about to be made. But first, ID.

Mordon reached the landing at the front door, saw the bell button beside the door, saw the small sign above it — PLEASE RING BELL — and rang it.

In the oriel to his right, a young black woman sat typing on a very new word processor atop a very old mahogany desk. When Mordon pressed the bell button, she paused in her typing, turned her head just enough to give him a look as flat and impersonal as the gaze of a parakeet, and then, having apparently decided he looked like the sort of person who was permitted onto these premises, she reached under her desk. A faint buzzing sound came from the direction of the door; Mordon pushed on it, the door swung open, and he entered.

The immediate interior impression was of the entry to an Edith Wharton novel. Emotionally constipated people should now come down those carpeted stairs into this flocked-wallpaper entryway, not telling one another the important things. Instead, the slender black girl, having risen from her desk, appeared in the doorway to the right, hands clasped at her waist as she said, 'Yes?'

'I'm Mr. Leethe, I phoned earlier.'

'Oh, yes, the doctors are expecting you. I'll tell them you're here.'

She receded back into her room, and he followed into the doorway, where he gazed around at the neatly efficient office while she murmured briefly into the phone. When she hung up, he said, 'You had a robbery.'

'Yes, we did,' she agreed, with a wry little smile; someone she would not have approved of had gained entry.

'All the equipment is new,' he explained, displaying his powers of observation.

'I'm still not used to it all yet.' Her fleeting smile came and went. 'I thought technological obsolescence was fast. Robbery's faster.'

'I suppose it is.'

'The doctors are one flight up. You'll see them, just at the top of the stairs.'

'Thank you.'

Mordon climbed the stairs, thinking that in fact he would not be revealing any emotional privacies in this coming meeting, nor could he expect — or want — any from the doctors Loomis and Heimhocker, so the Wharton setting would be honored, after all.

Dr. David Loomis, the blond one with the baby fat, stood at the head of the stairs, smiling nervously and offering a hand, which trembled when Mordon shook it. 'It's good to see you, Mr. Leethe.'

'And you,' Mordon lied.

Loomis gestured with his spastic hand. 'We can talk in the conference room.'

'Of course.'

Loomis led him down the hall, and the conference room turned out to be Edith Wharton's parlor, without the ferns and plant stands. Two red Victorian sofas set at a welcoming angle flanked the fireplace with its polished brass andirons and tools. Tall windows overlooking Forty-ninth Street were discreetly curtained. Garden prints hung on the dark-papered walls.

Dr. Heimhocker, the skinny one with the Afro, rose from one of the sofas as Loomis and Mordon entered. 'You have news, I guess,' he suggested, coming forward to offer a firmer handshake.

'Possibly,' Mordon said. 'A start, anyway, or we think so.'

'Tea?' asked the skittish Loomis. 'Perrier?'

'No, thank you.' Mordon had no desire to elongate this meeting into a social call, Edith Wharton be damned.

Heimhocker, who seemed to have better antennae than his partner, said, 'Sit down, Mr. Leethe. What kind of start?'

Mordon took the sofa on the right. Heimhocker (relaxed) and Loomis (tense) sat across from him. An elaborate low Oriental table with inlaid teak filled much of the space between the sofas. Taking a small manila envelope from his inner jacket pocket, Mordon said, 'We think we've identified your burglar.' He shook out the mug shots onto the Oriental table, slid them across to the others. 'He told you his name was Freddie, and that much was true.'

There were two sets of the mug shots, front and side views, about five years old, courtesy of the Kings County (Brooklyn) District Attorney's office. Each doctor picked up a set. Loomis gasped, 'That's him! Peter, that's him!'

' 'Fredric Urban Noon,' ' read Heimhocker, and raised an eyebrow at Mordon. 'Urban?'

'I believe that was a pope. Perhaps more than one.'

'That explains it,' Heimhocker agreed, and looked at the pictures some more. 'He wasn't happy when these were taken, was he?'

'He was going to jail.'

'Of course.' Heimhocker placed the mug shots before him on the table. 'When do we go talk to Mr. Noon?'

Mordon looked blank. 'We?'

'David and I are his doctors,' Heimhocker said.

'Oh, come now.'

'We gave him the injection, that makes—'

'One moment, Doctor,' Mordon said. Reaching across the table, he picked up the one set of mug shots from