Thank You for Smoking

chorus of horns and anti-locking brakes. Nick was slammed into the side of the car.

'We lose them!' Akmal shouted triumphantly.

Nick peered cautiously through the rear window and saw the FBI sedan trying to catch up by speeding around the rotary in front of the cemetery. But by now Akmal had a couple of hundred yards on them. After another stunningly illegal turn, south onto Rock Creek, onto Independence, he did another 180-degree boodeg. Then it was back onto Rock Creek, right on Virginia, left onto Route 66, off at the Iwo Jima Memorial, left onto Route 50, and onto the George Washington Parkway south. Nick tipped Akmal fifty bucks and agreed with him that God was indeed great, then caught the flight to Charlotte, where he connected into Winston-Salem, arriving at the Bowman-Gray Medical Center after the Cardiac Care Unit visiting hours, making it necessary to adopt a rather broad southern accent as he told the head nurse that he was Doak Boykin III, uhgently come to see his deah old grandpappy.

'You're his grandson?' she inquired, a little suspiciously.

'Yay-ess,' Nick said, sounding like Butterfly McQueen.

She peered at him. 'You look familiar.'

Doubtless, Nick's face had been prominently splashed across the front page of the Tar- Intelligencer.

'They say ah look jus like him. May I please see him? Ah been so wurried.'

'Well,' she said, 'all right. But only ten minutes. He's very tired.'

'Is he gone to be all rayht?'

'Oh, he just likes to make us all worried. He'll be all right. If he behaves'.

The Cardiac Care Unit was top of the line, paid for with tobacco money, just another example of how tobacco and progress go hand in hand. The Captain was hooked up to a number of machines. In the semidarkness, their screens cast a cool glow of light onto the Captain's face, which seemed to Nick very pale and drawn. He stood next to the bed. 'Captain?'

The old man's eyes opened, blinked a few times. 'I told you,' he said, 'that I will not have any more pig parts put in me. I want human parts, damnit.'

'Captain. It's me, Nick.'

The Captain looked up.

'Why son. Sit down, have some oxygen.'

'I came to explain to you. About the arrest.'

'Yes,' the Captain said, coughing. 'It could use some explaining. BR called me in the middle of the night to say you were in custody.'

'Thank you for the bail money.'

'I don't suppose it'll bankrupt us. That Jewish lawyer fellow we hired you probably will, though. Four hundred and fifty dollars an hour. '

'This is going to sound a little strange,' Nick said, 'but here's what I think has happened.'

Nick drew a breath and laid it out: BR wanted to fire Nick and replace him with his squeeze, Jeannette, but his appearance on the Oprah show had made him the Captain's gold-haired boy, and that had made BR jealous. The threatening caller on the Larry King show had probably given BR the brainstorm to kill two birds with one stone: remove Nick and drum up some sympathy for tobacco by creating a martyr. BR, who'd come up from the mafia- murky world of vending machines, would have had the connections to hire people to do it. But, to judge from the 'Executed for Crimes Against Humanity' sign, the kidnappers had screwed up by dropping him off on the Mall, still alive. So BR and Jeannette contrived to pin the kidnapping on Nick by having Jeannette seduce him and get his fingerprints all over the boxes of 'condoms' and plant them in the cabin on the Virginia lake, along with a few other compromising clues. Nick would go to jail, disgraced, and BR's suspicion would turn out to have been correct, so he'd look like a hero. Of course, the real loser in all this was tobacco.

Nick finished. The Captain looked at him with lowered eyebrows, took a long breath, and said, 'You sound like one of those people who thinks there were five gunmen on the Grassy Knoll in Dallas that day.'

'I know,' Nick said. 'It'll probably sound that way in court, too.'

'On the other hand,' the Captain said, pulling himself up in bed, 'preposterous though it sounds, elements of it have a certain,' he sighed, 'ring to them that make my liver twitchy.' He frowned. 'BR's been telling me since the week after the kidnapping that he thought you were involved.'

'Oh?' Nick said.

'And I have it from my own man in there that he and that blond gal Jurnelle—'

'Jeannette.'

'— have been making whoopee on company time. So that fits in with this conspiracy theory of yours. I know BR for a jugular fellow. You know, he wanted us to go public that your friend Lorne Lutch had taken the money from us.'

'Why?'

'So he'd look like a whore and there'd be no Rancho Canceroso foundation. He never wanted us to pay him off. One conversation we had, he said, 'There are better ways to deal with people like that.' I wondered what he meant. You know, when I hired him away from Allied Vending, we were up to our armpits in liability suits, and I told him I'd pay him a bonus for every one that didn't make it to trial. And three of the big ones didn't make it to trial, on account of, you remember, they died from smoking in bed. BR made me pay him the bonuses even though those were accidents. Said a deal's a deal. Cost me plenty, too, though a hell of a lot less than it would have if we'd lost in court.'

'Captain,' Nick said, 'I think there something's very wrong here.'

'You don't think that he… no. Now, I don't doubt he mighta been a little jealous of my affection for you. And while it's true people in the vending machine business rub elbows with some rough individuals, I shouldn't think. Good Lord, is this possible?' His head sank into his pillow. He put his hand over his eyes. 'I'll need to have my man make inquiries.'

'Your man? Who's that?'

'Best keep his identity private, for the time being.'

The Captain opened his eyes again and removed his hand. 'Now Nick, if these grotesqueries that you have revealed to me do turn out to be true, I don't suppose I need to elaborate for you what this is going to mean for our industry.'

'Well, no, but… '

'Of course, that's not the prime consideration here. Assuming that you've been grievously wronged, we'll have to make amends to you. But let me cook you up some hypothetical soup. Suppose — just suppose — assuming we establish that what you're saying is true, which I don't doubt it is, that I fire BR's sorry ass — and that chippy of his, Jumelle — quietly, but with such extreme prejudice that he'll be lucky to get a job selling lottery tickets in Guam. And you were to plead guilty to these charges.'

'Guilty?'

'Bear with me. Guilty with an explanation. That is, guilty to the sin of being young and impetuous, just like a lot of other people who've worked in Washington. Hell, you already got a reputation for impetuosity on account of telling everyone the President choked. For $450 an hour Carlinsky can damn well get you reduced time at some country club prison where they riot on account of the coq an vin was overcooked and the wine wasn't properly chilled.'

'Uh—'

'Now here's the really good part. We open up a quiet little bank account in the Cayman Islands for you, say… five million dollars. What the hell, ten. Now even counting inflation and taxes, ten million dollars is still a lot of money, son. You wouldn't have to work for the rest of your life. You like to fish, don't you? Well, you could buy yourself a nice island somewhere and fish and be fed mangos by dusky women who don't wear clothes. That sounds pretty good to me. Tell you what, if you want to go on working for us, I'll put you in charge of the Hong Kong office. You'll be head of all American tobacco business in the Far East. Hell, that's where the future is, anyway. So many Asians, so little time… '

Nick thought. 'I like the part about firing BR and Jeannette. I don't know about the rest of it.'

'Well, let's take it step by step. We'll start with BR, then see how you feel about taking early