Thank You for Smoking

that he was on a ground line, BR refused to reveal how, precisely, Gomez had come by this gruesome intelligence, but he did say that it was solid. Furthermore, he told Nick, Finisterre had gotten Representative Lamont C. King of Texas — one of the more conservative boll weevils in the Congress — to co-sponsor the bill in the House. An odd couple. King loathed Finisterre; but Finisterre sat on the Military Base Closings Commission.

'We did a quick and dirty whip count,' BR said, 'showing the bill will pass. Don Stookey is predicting a twenty-five percent drop in all tobacco stocks within a week.'

'Ouch,' Nick said.

'It's going to get pretty hairy,' BR said. 'You better get back on the next flight.'

Nick called Heather. He hoped she hadn't called about this. She hadn't.

'Two FBI agents were here to see me,' she said in a strange tone of voice. 'They were asking questions.'

'That's what FBI agents do,' Nick said. 'It's their job. They're trying to find the people who tried to kill me.'

'They wanted to know how well I knew you.'

'Oh?'

'They stopped just short of asking if we'd slept together. Exactly how well do you know Mr. Naylor? There were two of them. A good cop and a bad cop. The bad cop did most of the talking. Monmaney. Handsome, if your taste runs to wolves. He wanted to know quote what sort of person unquote you are.'

'Well,' Nick said, 'I suppose there's nothing too unusual in that.'

'He asked if you were especially ambitious.'

'Ambitious?'

'Uh-huh. They also wanted to know if I thought you were still quote psychologically grappling unquote with having told the world that the President was dead. Hello?'

'What did you tell them?'

'Obviously, I refused to tell them anything.'

'You refused? Why?'

'Because, I'm a reporter. Reporters don't divulge things to FBI agents.'

'Divulge? What's to divulge? They were just asking routine questions.'

'You call those routine?'

'But now they're going to think you're protecting me.'

'I'm not protecting you. I'm protecting a principle.'

'But why couldn't you just tell them the truth? That's a principle, isn't it?'

'Listen to Mr. There's No Link Between Smoking and Disease. Honestly. Hello?'

'I'm here,' Nick sighed, massaging the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger.

'Why are you getting so worked up? You sound…'

'What?'

'Guilty.'

'Guilty? Guilty of what? Covering myself with nicotine patches? I almost died!'

'Calm down. They're just fishing. They don't have anything.' Pause. 'Do they?'

'Heather,' Nick said, 'what are you talking about?'

'Hey, I don't know why the FBI is asking questions like these.'

'Well you might be a little more skeptical. Jesus, most reporters I know are so skeptical they don't believe in anything. Except Mother Teresa, and some I know think she's on the take.'

'Hold on. How did Mother Teresa enter into a conversation about the outraged principles of a tobacco lobbyist?'

'Thank you,' Nick said sullenly. 'You're really being tremendously supportive today.'

'I’m going to help. By writing about this.'

Nick said, 'You're what?'

'We'll put the FBI on the defensive. Let them explain why they're harassing kidnap victims. Politically Correct persecution. Escalation in the continuing vilification of tobacco. Tobacco as the new evil empire. I'm surprised you hadn't thought of that. It's a great story.'

'You want to write about this?'

'I have to write about this.'

'And tell everyone that I'm,… I'm,… I'm under suspicion by the FBI? Uh-uh. No thank you. I think not. Hello? Heather? Heather, this conversation is off the record. Heather?'

'Stop being so paranoid. This will be very positive for your side. Now, have they approached you directly yet? Hello?'

He called Polly. She sounded alarmed.

'Nick,' she said, 'thank God. I've been trying to reach you. Uh, you're not on cellular are you? Good, because the FBI came to see me yesterday. They… '

… had asked her the same questions as Heather. Now Nick was paranoid. He knew the FBI was good, but how did they know about Heather, and Polly? How did they know all this personal stuff?

'Don't worry,' Polly said. 'I didn't tell them anything.'

'What do you mean?'

'Is there anything I can do? Marty Berlin says the lawyer to have is Geoff Aronow. He's at Arnold and Porter. Expensive, but really good.'

'Polly…' But Nick was too morally exhausted to proclaim his innocence twice in an hour. Then it occurred to him that if the FBI was listening in on this conversation — and God knows they were able to listen in on ground lines, too — he'd better at least go through the motions of being outraged. Yet Polly, dear Polly, only made it worse by continuing to say that she didn't care, it didn't matter, she was behind him 110 percent. If there was a phrase to titillate the tappers, surely it was that, from a woman: I'm behind you 110 percent.

Jeannette hadn't been questioned by the FBI, thank God. She'd called because she'd wanted to 'do a quick mind-meld' with him on the Finisterre bombshell. She was wondering if it wouldn't make sense to leak it themselves ahead of Finisterre's announcement, so that they could give it their own spin: Pitiful, isn't it, that Senator Finisterre, in order to get people's minds off the fact that he's getting divorced yet again, is grandstanding with this hysterical nonsense, and in the process, insulting the intelligence of the American people by treating them like illiterate rats? Not bad, Nick thought. Smart, Jeannette. He complimented her. She purred, 'I have a good mentor.'

'By the way,' he said, sounding suavely casual — no sense in BR freaking out at a time like this over one of his employees being under suspicion—'the FBI is apparently poking around asking dumb personal questions.'

'What jerks,' she said.

'Yeah, but do me a favor. If they come to you, tell them everything.'

'Everything?' she laughed.

'Well,' Nick said, 'by way of the facts. I don't have anything to hide from them.'

'Get an early flight back,' she sizzled. 'I want you.'

Nick was zipping up his garment bag when Jack Bein called, aggrieved that nearly an hour had gone by without Nick's having returned his call. In a city where everything took forever, forty-five minutes was an eternity.

'Jeff thought the meeting went really well, and,' Jack said, with the air of announcing the winner of a lottery, 'he wants you to come to dinner tonight at his home. Normally, Jeff doesn't invite new clients to eat with him at home. He's a very private person. It's a sign of how much he respects you. It'll be just you, Fiona, and Mace. Plus Jerry Gornick and Voltan Zeig, the producers. He's serving something very special. I can never get the name of it straight, I'm not very good at Japanese — I better get better, right? — but it's transparent sushi. They bring it all the way up from the bottom of the Mariana Trench. From like thousands of feet down, where the really strange creatures are. Jurassic squid. You know, those things with eyeballs on the end