Smoke

Station from the filthy platform, bulldozed his way through the filthy homeless living their half-speed half-lives in the terminal, found an exposed pay phone on a stick — not even an enclosed phone booth, for a modicum of privacy — and dialed Mordon Leethe at home. At this point, he didn't give much of a shit what happened, so long as revenge was a part of it.

'Hello?'

'Barney.'

A second or two of baffled silence, and then, 'Barney? Barney who?'

'Oh, fuck you, Leethe!'

'Oh, Barney! I'm sorry, I didn't recognize your voice, you sounded different.'

Barney hardly recognized himself; fury had annealed him. 'We have to meet,' he snarled, while wide-eyed families from Iowa clutched one another close and moved in little clumps farther away across the terminal. 'Now,' Barney added, and his teeth clacked together.

'I'm engaged this evening.'

'With me.'

Leethe sighed, a dry and rasping sound. Barney almost expected dead leaves to drift out of the telephone. 'I could see you at eleven,' Leethe agreed at last, reluctance dragging out the words. 'There's a bar near me.'

Leethe lived, as Barney had made it his business to know, on the Upper East Side, Park Avenue in the nineties. It wasn't a neighborhood he thought of as being rich in bars. 'Oh, yeah?'

'It's called Cheval. It's a bit of a bistro, really.'

Sure it is, Barney thought. 'I'll see you there at eleven,' he snarled. 'You and the rest of the Foreign Legion.'

Derriйre du Cheval, if you asked Barney. As with most small side-street Manhattan restaurants, this one was built into the ground floor of a former private dwelling, which meant it was long and narrow, with a not very high ceiling. This particular example of the type was warmed with creamy paint and goldish fixtures and woodlike dark trim. The bar was a C-clamp near the front, against the right wall; beyond it, one would go to the dining area with its snowy tablecloths, most of them not in use at this hour.

In fact, aside from the Israeli owners and Hispanic employees, most of the people still here at 11 P.M. on a Friday night were the adulterers at the bar, hunched in murmuring guilty pairs on the padded high square stools with the low upholstered backs. Among these semilost souls, Mordon Leethe looked like Cotton Mather in a bad mood, nursing a Perrier and brooding at his own reflection in the gold-dappled mirror above the back bar, as though hoping to find somewhere on the map of his own glowering face the path that would lead him out of all this.

But no, not tonight. Sliding onto the stool to Leethe's right, Barney bobbed two fingers at the Perrier and said, 'Letting it all hang out, eh, Counselor?'

Leethe glowered at Barney's reflection in the mirror, then turned his head just enough to give him the full treatment from those bleak eyes. 'You wouldn't want me to let it all hang out, Barney,' he said.

By God, and that was true, wasn't it? 'Keep it buttoned, then,' Barney advised, and turned his attention to the fourteen-year-old barman with the black pencil mustache. 'Beer,' he said.

'Yes, sir?'

'Imported. In a bottle.'

'Any particular brand, sir?'

'What've you got that's from the farthest away?'

The barman had to think about that. He wrinkled his mustache briefly, then said, 'That would be the one from China.'

'Mainland China? Where they have the slave labor?'

'Yes, sir.'

'I'll have that,' Barney decided, and as the barman turned away he gave Leethe his own bleak look and explained, 'I like the idea that a lot of people worked long and hard, just for me. Fifteen thousand miles to give me a beer.'

'This isn't why you phoned me,' Leethe said. 'At home.'

'No, it isn't.' Barney looked at the hunched backs all around them. 'Isn't this kind of public?'

'These people,' Leethe said, 'don't care about our problems. I take it something went wrong when you tried to follow the Briscoe woman.'

'Oh, everything went ducky,' Barney said. He'd had three hours to cool down from his rage, and it was true his rage had cooled, in the sense that it had hardened, but it hadn't abated one dyne, and would not abate until honor — or something — was satisfied. 'Just ducky,' Barney repeated, and showed his teeth. At moments such as this, he didn't actually look like a fat man at all.

The barman brought the Chinese beer the last few feet of its journey, poured some from the bottle into a glass, and went off to provide more Kleenex for the hefty blond woman at the end of the bar. Barney drank, nodded, put the glass down, and said, 'That invisible son of a bitch is pretty cute, I'll give him that. When I do get my hands on him, I just may strangle him to death.'

'He wouldn't be much use to us then.'

'Almost to death.'

'What did Mr. Urban Noon do to you, Barney?'

One thing Barney had learned in his years with the NYPD; how to give a succinct report. Succinctly, he described his day, finishing with the dead Impala sprawled on its broken ankles in Rhinecliff and he himself coming back to the city alone, by train.

At the finish, there was a little silence. In it, Barney sipped more Chinese beer and Leethe sipped more French water — Barney's liquid might have traveled farther, but Leethe's had arguably made a sillier trip — and then Leethe said, 'It may be we've been misjudging Mr. Noon.'

Barney looked at the grim profile, studying itself again in the mirror. 'How do you figure?' he asked. 'I've been judging him to be a cheap crook, and he's a cheap crook.'

'We've been judging him,' Leethe said, 'to be stupid because he's small-time. But he didn't bite on that excellent letter of yours, and he understood how you were managing to follow his friend Briscoe, and he threw you off his trail with, you must admit, dismaying ease.'

'I'm not off his trail,' Barney snapped. 'I'm on that son of a bitch's trail, don't you worry.'

'All I'm suggesting is, we shouldn't underestimate the man.'

'Fine.' Barney shrugged, making his jacket jump. 'I'll brush up my Shakespeare for when we meet,' he said, and made a small sword-type gesture. 'Have at you, Fauntleroy!'

Leethe gave him a skeptical, even disgusted, look. 'And where is that,' he asked, 'in Shakespeare?'

'How the fuck do I know? The question is,' Barney said, lowering his voice as he became aware of the adulterous herd around him disturbed at their grazing, 'where is Noon in New York State? I had my maps on the train—'

'Why?' Leethe asked, surprised. 'You were on a train.'

Barney lowered an eyebrow. 'I may practice my strangling on you,' he said.

'Never mind,' Leethe said, unintimidated. 'I understand what you meant. You've determined the area Noon must be in'

'On the basis of the railroad station he picked,' Barney said, 'I worked out an area where he's got to be. No,' he corrected himself, 'I'm forgetting, he's a genius. So maybe he took the train north to Rhinebeck because he's actually staying on the Jersey shore.'

'I don't think so,' Leethe said.

'I don't think so, either,' Barney admitted. 'I think I'll go with the probabilities here, and the probabilities here are limited to four rural counties in New York state plus maybe a little bit of Connecticut.'

What might have been a smile ruffled Leethe's features. 'So Mr. Urban has gone rural.'

'Yeah, and we'll find Mr. Noon at midnight. What are you drinking there? What'd they put in that stuff?'

'Barney,' Leethe said, sounding impatient all at once. 'Why are you telling me all this? Why are we in this place? If your target area is four counties in New York State and a little piece of Connecticut, why aren't you there, nose to the ground, tirelessly searching?'

'Because I figure we want to find Freddie Noon within this lifetime,' Barney told him. 'It's all little villages up