Thank You for Smoking

'Yes,' Nick said. 'My job would have been a lot easier back then.'

'My dad smoked Luckies.'

'Is that a fact?' Nick said.

'Uh-huh,' Allman said, in a tone that made Nick suspect that his father had died a ghastly, protracted death from lung cancer. Swell, just what he needed on his side, an anti-smoking zealot.

'Is he,' Nick groped, 'was he… in law enforcement?'

'No, he owned a garage. He's retired, in Florida.'

Nick felt great relief that Papa Allman was still among the living. Allman said, 'The sun'll probably get him before the cigarettes.'

'Hah,' Nick said.

'Does anyone else use your office phone?' Agent Monmaney said. 'My phone? Uh, sure, possibly.'

' 'Sure, possibly'?'

'Maybe. Why?'

'No reason.'

Nick and Monmaney stared at each other. Allman said, 'Have you ever used nicotine patches before, yourself?'

'Me?' Nick said. He was getting a very uncomfortable feeling from this line of questioning. 'I used to enjoy smoking. I wish I still could.'

'You certainly picked an extreme way to give up,' Allman said, holding up Nick's World War I trench-knife paperweight. 'This is mean.'

'Excuse me?' Nick said. 'You said, 'Picked'?'

'I said that?'

'Yes,' Nick said firmly, 'you did.'

'Did I?' Allman said to Monmaney. 'I didn't hear,' Monmaney said.

Nick sucked in his chest. 'Why,' he said, 'do I get the feeling this is an interrogation?'

'I just saw an article in one of the scientific journals on skin cancer,' Agent Allman said. 'Pretty scary. You've really got to watch it these days.'

'Yes,' Nick said with asperity, 'you certainly do.'

'Mr. Naylor,' said Agent Monmaney, 'you're getting a lot of favorable publicity as a result of this incident.'

'Well, it's not every day a lobbyist is abducted, tortured, and nearly killed,' Nick said, 'though a lot of people probably think it should happen more often.'

'That wasn't my point.'

'What was your point, exactly?'

'You're portraying yourself as a martyr. A hero.'

'Agent Monmaney,' Nick said, 'do you have a problem with cigarettes?'

The faintest trace of a smile played on Monmaney's lupine features, not a nourishing smile. 'Not since I quit.'

'I'd say this,' Nick said. 'For the first time since I took this job, I'm getting fair publicity. Now at least they wait until the fourth paragraph in the story to compare me to Goebbels.'

'Funny,' Agent Allman said. Agent Monmaney did not share in the amusement.

The three held a staring bee. Nick was determined not to break the silence.

'You received a raise recently,' Agent Monmaney said. 'Uh-huh,' Nick said.

'A very considerable one. They doubled your salary.'

'More or less,' Nick said.

'I'd say,' said Agent Allman, rising up off the sofa beneath the Luckies doctor, 'that you deserve it. You seem to be doing a very competent job promoting cigarettes.'

'Thank you,' Nick said tardy.

'We'll be in touch,' Agent Allman said.

15

Stress — which Nick was now distinctly feeling — tended to make him horny. He went out onto the balcony off his office and looked down at the fountain. It was a warm spring day outside and the office women were in their summer dresses. He found himself watching one, below, walking along as she ate her frozen yoghurt, a lovely, tall, busty blonde in a sheer sleeveless dress, stockings, and heels, taking long, slow licks of her cone. Even at this altitude he could make out her bra straps. Heather did the bra strap thing to very good effect. It was a trick among certain professional Washington women of bounteous endowment. They wouldn't go so far as to wear too-small sweaters or appear too decollete — sex had to be flaunted in a more subversive way here — so instead they'd make sure a bit of strap showed for the photographer and pretend to be embarrassed when they saw it.

Looking down on the atrium, he began to dream. He dimmed the lights, got rid of all the people eating yoghurt and calzone. Around the fountain he assembled a full orchestra consisting of stunningly toothsome women wearing nothing but their instruments. He put the cellists out front. Yes. There's just something about nude women cellists. He had them play the cigarette song from act I in Carmen, where the young Sevillian men are serenaded by their sweethearts, the girls who work in the cigarette factory. The Academy had underwritten the opera at the Kennedy Center two years ago. Ever since, Nick had been humming it in the shower.

C'est fumee, c'est fumee!

In the air, we follow with our eyes,

The smoke, the smoke,

that rises toward the sky, sweet-smelling smoke.

How pleasantly it goes, to your head, to your head,

so sweetly

and fills your soul with joy!

The sweet talk of lovers— that is smoke.

Their transports and their vows— all that is smoke.

The scene was set. There remained only the piece de resistance: Heather, buxom, pink, and entirely au naturel, looking like one of Renoir's bathing beauties, sitting in the uppermost bowl of the fountain, with him, drinking champagne (Veuve Clicquot, demi-sec) from iced flutes.

He went back inside and called Heather.

'Hi,' Heather said, sounding very throaty, 'I can't come to the phone right now. Leave a message and I'll call you back as soon as I can. If you want to speak to an operator, press zero.'

He left a message asking her if she wanted to have dinner that night at Il Peccatore, then went back outside to see if his tableau was still vivant. It wasn't. The orchestra had been replaced by worker bees eating calzones and frozen yoghurts.

He sat at his desk and turned to the work at hand with the enthusiasm of a man changing a flat tire on a sweltering day on the interstate. It was to ghostwrite an op-ed piece for congressman Jud Jawkins (D-Ky), challenging an NIH study showing that children of smoking mothers have 80 percent more asthma attacks than children of nonsmoking mothers. Nick sighed.

He wrote: 'No one is more respectful of the work carried on at the National Institutes of Health than I, yet it is unfortunate that at a time when so many ghastly severe health problems face our nation — AIDS, skyrocketing cholesterol levels, and the recent outbreak of measles in my own home state, to name but a few examples — that the NIH has become so riven with political correctness that it is spending precious resources to bombard the American people with information that they already have.'

It was one of his more conventional devices — the old Deja Voodoo — but it would have to do. He was just cranking up some moral counter-outrage and pleas for common decency and fairness when there was a rap on his door and Jeannette said, 'Am I interrupting?'