Smoke

its surface and plucked the other from Loomis's trembling hand. 'You met this fellow once,' he pointed out, 'as he was robbing your offices. You gave him one injection, one unethical and probably illegal injection. You can't—'

'The patient left our care without our approval,' Heimhocker interrupted. It seemed he could be as steely cold as Mordon himself. Mordon waited, alert, and Heimhocker went on, 'It was never our intention to leave him without proper medical care, without thorough medical observation. We brought the problem of his disappearance to you, which makes you our agent in this matter. You now say—'

'Hardly, Doctor, hardly your agent. I'm employed by—'

'You were talking, a minute ago, about ethics?'

A slippery slope here. Mordon asked himself, Do I want to make enemies of these people? What's the profit in it? On the other hand, what do they want? He said, 'Dr. Heimhocker, I don't believe we have a disparity of interest here. You want to see the result of your experiment, naturally, and NAABOR wants to see if the result of your experiment is useful in any other way.'

Heimhocker's reaction was to display even greater hostility and suspicion. 'What other way?'

Mordon's irritation broke the surface of his professional calm. 'Nothing to do with you,' he snapped. 'We're not talking vivisection here, for God's sake.'

'What are you talking?'

'I don't see in what way that matters to you. The fellow's a thief, he robbed you, he stole all your office equipment, what are you trying to protect him for?'

'All we're trying to protect,' Heimhocker said, while beside him Loomis's head bobbed in frantic agreement, 'is the integrity of our experiment. What we are thinking about, quite frankly, Mr. Leethe, David and I, what we are thinking about is the judgment of our peers, our peers, when we publish. We made a mistake, I grant you that, but the mistake wasn't using whatsisname, Fredric Noon, Fredric Urban Noon, using him for our experimental subject. The mistake was in letting him get away. You say you know where he is, and we say, we're not going to let—'

'No, I didn't say that.'

'— him get away again. What do you mean? Of course that's what you said.'

'I did not.'

'We heard you,' Loomis chimed in. 'We both heard you.'

'What I said,' Mordon carefully explained, 'was that we know who he is. He left fingerprints in your guest room, our expert lifted them—'

'And left a mess behind.'

'Irrelevant, David.'

'Still.'

Mordon said, 'May I go on?'

'I'm sorry,' Loomis said. 'Yes, please do. You know who he is, but you don't know where he is? That's silly.'

'Is it? The man is not on parole, not wanted for any crime—'

'Except the burglary here,' Heimhocker interrupted.

'Well, no,' Mordon said. 'In the first place, it was a robbery, not a burglary, and in—'

Loomis said, 'What's the difference? It's the same thing.'

'A burglary is a theft in unoccupied premises,' Mordon explained. 'If the premises are occupied, it's robbery, a more serious crime. Whether or not the occupants and the criminal interact.'

'Then he's wanted for robbery,' Heimhocker said.

'The robbery was reported, by you,' Mordon told him, 'but there's been no official report linking Fredric Noon to the crime.'

'For God's sake, why not?'

'Well, just from your point of view,' Mordon said, 'how much do you want Fredric Noon in jail from now on, for the rest of his life, absolutely unavailable to you for observation and experimentation?'

'We've done the experiment.'

'And the observation?'

Loomis said, 'Peter, he's right.' Turning to Mordon, he said, 'But the fingerprint man was from the police.'

'Moonlighting,' Mordon explained. 'A few members of the New York Police Department are unofficially helping NAABOR in this matter. I'm going to see one of them next, on the question of how we make contact with Mr. Noon.' Tucking the mug shots away again in their envelope, and returning the envelope to his jacket pocket, he said, 'Before seeing him, I needed a positive identification that we were on the track of the right man.' Rising, he said, 'Now I know we are, I can proceed.'

The two doctors got to their feet, Heimhocker fixing Mordon with a stern eye as he said, 'You'll keep us informed of progress, of course.'

'Of course,' Mordon said, and thought, I'm lying. He knows I'm lying. I know he knows I'm lying. But does he know I know he knows I'm lying? And does it make any difference? Well, time would tell. 'I can find my own way out, thank you,' he said, and departed.

16

A restaurant can be a very satisfying business. Barney Beuler found that so, certainly. It had so many advantages. For instance, it always gave you a place to go if you wanted a meal, but you it didn't cost an arm and a leg. It gave you, as well, a loyal — or at least fearful — kitchen staff of illegals, always available for some extra little chore like repainting the apartment or standing on line at the Motor Vehicle or breaking some fucking wisenheimer's leg. It also made a nice supplement to your NYPD sergeant's salary (acting lieutenant, Organized Crime Detail) in your piece of the legit profit, of course, but more importantly in the skim. And it helped to make your personal and financial affairs so complex and fuzzy that the shooflys could never quite get enough of a handle on you to drag you before the corruption board.

The downside was that, in the six years Barney Beuler had been a minor partner — one of five — in Comaldo Ristorante on West Fifty-sixth Street, he'd gained eighty-five pounds, all of it cholesterol. It was true he'd die happy; it was also true it would be soon.

Another advantage of Barney's relationship with Comaldo was that it made a perfect place to meet someone like the attorney Mordon Leethe. The NYPD frowned on its cops using department time and department equipment and department clout on nondepartment matters, but what did Barney Beuler have to sell to a big multinational corporation like NAABOR except his NYPD access? I mean, get real. A man with three ex-wives, a current wife, a current girlfriend, a very small drug habit (strictly strictly recreational), two bloodsuckers he's paying off to keep their mouths shut and himself out of jail, a condo on Saint Thomas, a house and a boat on the north shore of Long Island, and a six-room apartment on Riverside Drive overlooking the Hudson from eleven stories up needs these little extra sources of income to make ends meet, as any sensible person realizes.

Barney was having lunch at 'his' table near the front (it was his and the rest of the partners' table every midday till 12:45, when, if none of them had showed up, it would be given away as needed, Comaldo always doing a brisk lunchtime trade) when he saw Mordon Leethe come in with a tall skinny young guy who looked like Ichabod Crane. Ich would be one of the recent law school graduate employees of Leethe's firm and would not know he was the beard in this meeting between Leethe and Barney; the sap would think he was being earmarked for the big time. Well, maybe he was; stranger things have happened. Every day.

Barney, who was lunching with one copartner and two Long Island boating friends, gave Leethe the smiling nod of a restaurateur spying a good customer, and Leethe responded with the dignified nod of that good customer. He and Ich were shown to a table near the rear, one selected earlier by Barney because the acoustics at that back-corner location were particularly good if you didn't want your conversation overheard.

Barney kept his attention on his own table and food and companions, but nevertheless was also aware when Leethe and Ich ordered their lunches, and when they were given their bread, their water, and their olive oil. Only then, 'Be right back,' Barney told his pals, filled his mouth with gnocchi, and got to his feet.

Every year, it seemed, it was a little harder to squeeze between the tables. Seemed like the customers sat with their chairs farther back than they used to. Maybe everybody was getting fat.

Still, Barney eventually forced his way through the clientele to that rear table, where he did his complete