Smoke

roaring out of her enclosed porch to stand on her top step with an Uzi in her hands, at port arms. She yelled a lot, but everybody else was also yelling, so what else was new?

Would she shoot the damn gun? She looked mad enough. Meanwhile, the insurance salesman in his now- rumpled tan suit was way out at the periphery of the mob, jumping up and down and screaming that he wanted his phone back. And above it all, the sound of approaching police sirens.

Enough. Figure out telephones some other time. Turning his back on the follies of the human race, Freddie trudged on home.

'I'm home!'

'Did you go to the movies?'

Peg wouldn't come out of the bedroom, as Freddie well knew, but would shout to him from in there until he'd lunched and dressed.

'No, I saw it yesterday,' he called back, and made his way toward the kitchen

'What'd you do?' she shouted.

'Went for a run,' he shouted, and entered the kitchen.

His sandwich and coffee were on the table there. On one of the two chairs lay his clothing and all four masks, so he could make his own choice. He sat on the other chair, ate, considered his recent experiences in the outside world, and at the end of the sandwich he had no difficulty at all selecting the mask to put on.

It was Frankenstein's monster in a long-sleeved shirt and pink rubber gloves who at length sloped on into the living room, where Peg sat reading a paperback novel about a rich beautiful woman who owned her own successful perfume business but had trouble keeping a guy. She looked up from the deck of a yacht in the Med, anchored off Cannes at film festival time, to say, 'Frankenstein? You haven't wanted to be him before.'

'Frankenstein's monster,' Freddie corrected. 'Frankenstein was the doctor. I don't think the monster ever had a name.'

Peg marked her place in the book with a twenty-dollar bill. 'What's the matter, Freddie? You seem depressed. Or is it just the head?'

'No, I don't think so,' he said. 'I think I'm probably kind of depressed all over. I was just chased by a mob. A Brooklyn mob. It made me kind of identify with this guy,' he explained, pointing at his head.

'Chased by a mob? How could they even see you?'

He began to relate his adventures, assuring her he didn't blame her for his complex need to find a telephone (while making it clear in the subtext that he did blame her, for not trusting him to really leave the apartment), and he'd just reached the dentist's doorway when the phone beside Peg rang. 'If it's the insurance guy,' Freddie said, 'tell him I don't need any.'

'Oh, yes, you do,' she said, but picked up the phone and spoke and then said, 'Yeah, he's here now, hold on.' She extended the phone toward Frankenstein, or his monster. 'It's your brother.'

'Oh, yeah.'

Freddie crossed to take the phone, which felt strange with the rubber gloves on. Holding the phone to the side of the mask, he said, 'Hey, Jimmy, what's happening?'

'Where are you, man, in a tunnel?'

Jimmy was one of Freddie's younger siblings, so Freddie didn't have to take any shit. 'No, I'm not in a tunnel,' he said. 'Is that why you called?'

'You sound like you're on one of those speakerphones or something.'

'Well, I'm not. This is how I sound these days, is all.' Through the eyeholes, he could see Peg wincing in sympathy, which made him feel a little better. He said, 'I'll tell you all about it sometime, Jimmy. What's going on?'

'Well, I'm calling from a pay phone,' Jimmy said.

Ah-hah. The message in that was that Jimmy wanted to tell him something that the law might want to know about, and Jimmy's own phone might be tapped, since Jimmy had also in the course of his life at times drawn himself to their attention. But, since Freddie's phone likewise might have additional listeners, Jimmy's comment was also a warning: Be careful what we both say here.

'Okay,' Freddie said. 'How's the weather out there, by your pay phone?'

'Not bad. You got one of those sting letters, sent to the folks' place.'

Whoops. Again Freddie knew exactly what his brother was talking about. Whenever the cops wanted to round up a whole bunch of really stupid people who had warrants outstanding, they'd send out these letters, which had come to be known on the street as the Superbowl letters, because usually they told the recipient he'd won tickets to the Superbowl and all he had to do was come to such-and-such an address and pick them up. Instead of which, he was what would be picked up, by a lot of unfriendly cops. This was a real cull, sweeping the streets of the most boneheaded of the crooks, leaving a clearer field to everybody else.

On the other hand, it was kind of an insult to be sent one of those letters. Voice dripping scorn, hoping his phone was tapped, Freddie said, 'I got tickets to the Superbowl.'

'It wasn't exactly that,' his brother said, 'but you got the idea. I don't know what you been up to recently —'

'Nothing! There's no sheet out on me at all!'

But even while he was saying that, and just for that moment believing it, Freddie was also thinking, Those damn doctors! Frankenstein and Frankenstein. They must have turned him in, and he must not have cleared away every last fingerprint from all the places he'd been in their damn house.

Meantime, Jimmy was saying, 'Well, the folks got the letter, and it gave them a start, you know what I mean?'

'Tell them everything's fine, Jimmy, okay?'

'But is it? I mean, really? You know, just a yes or a no.'

'Yes, Jimmy,' Freddie said, and hung up, and said to Peg, 'Let's get outta town for the summer.'

18

At the end of 1993, Congress passed an obscure amendment to the tax law declaring that employer-provided free parking garage space worth more than $155 a month was to be treated as taxable income. The purpose of this obscure amendment was to skim just a little more off a few rich businessmen in New York and Los Angeles and Chicago, it never occurring to the good burghers of Congress that they receive from their employer — us — free parking garage space worth considerably more than $155 a month; have you ever tried to park near the Capitol? This fact, however, did not escape the notice of the IRS, no respecter of persons, so we can assume it's an amendment that won't be on the books for long.

In the meantime, however, the partners of Mordon Leethe's law firm were faced with an agonizing choice. Either pay the tax on their convenient parking spaces in the basement of their office building, or remove the glass from the barred high windows of the basement garage area, thus making the parking area one 'exposed to the elements,' thus presumably outdoors, thus worth less than $155 a month; whew, close one.

In June, the breeze wafting through the basement garage where Mordon parked his Mercedes was sweet and soft, redolent of the islands, or at least of the Cajun restaurant half a block away. Mordon locked his car — he also locked it inside his own garage, attached to his own house, in Oyster Bay — and as he turned toward the elevator a nearby car door slammed and there was Barney Beuler, the corrupt cop, striding fatly toward him, smiling that smug smile of his. (The man, did he but know it, was far more credible as a maоtre d' than a police officer.) 'Good morning, Mr. Leethe,' Barney crowed, pleased with himself. 'Long time no see.'

This was why Mordon locked his car. 'How did you get in here?' he snapped.

Some men might have been insulted by such a greeting, but not Barney. 'Are you kidding?' he said, and beamed more and more broadly in self-satisfaction. 'I can get in anywhere I want.'

'I thought you liked to be careful where you went,' Mordon said, sour because he hadn't been looking forward to an encounter like this at the very beginning of the business day. 'I thought you were worried about surveillance from — What do you call them? The police that police the police.'

'Shooflys,' Barney said, and grinned again, and pointed a thumb upward. 'At this very moment,' he said, 'I am at my dentist's, in this building.'

'When did he become your dentist?'