Smoke

nervousness was gone, the apprehension was gone, the — whatchacallit — stage fright was gone. Now that he'd done it, Freddie was really ready to do it. This was a long block, a street full of trade, a street full of commerce. A street full of diamonds.

'I'm gonna do it again, Peg,' Freddie said. You could hear the grin in his voice. 'This is fun!'

10

It was five days after his meeting with the two burglar-doping researchers — and a further confirming meeting here in the office later that day with their astonishingly translucent cats — that Mordon Leethe got to meet at last with his ultimate authority, the CEO of NAABOR, his lord and master. It had been clear to him from the outset — as clear as those cats — that this situation could not be resolved or made use of at any lower level.

The initial problem was, the situation could also not be described at any lower level — this was not news that Mordon wanted publicly aired. But unless he could explain to an entire ladder of underlings just why he wanted a private meeting with Jack Fullerton the Fourth, the boss of all bosses, they wouldn't approve it. Sarcasm, anger, cold aloofness, and vague threat were the tools Mordon had used in lieu of candor — the last arrow in his quiver anyway, under any circumstances — and at last, on Friday afternoon, a reluctant PPS (personal private secretary) had informed Mordon that Mr. Fullerton would see him for thirty minutes on Monday morning, promptly at eleven.

CEOs understand the word promptly differently from thee and me. Mordon arrived at five before the hour, and was ushered into Jack the Fourth's football-field office in the World Trade Center at ten past the hour, to find its owner not yet there. Mordon refused an underling's offers of coffee, tea, seltzer, or diet soft drink, and contented himself (if that's the right word) with standing near the windows, gazing out at the broken playground of New Jersey across the broad sweep of heaving gunk of New York Harbor until twenty past, when the click of a door opening far behind him caused him to turn about, an obsequious oil automatically filming his face.

Mordon watched as Jack Fullerton the Fourth wheezed himself into a room, carrying his oxygen machine in a Pebble Beach tote bag at his side, the slender plastic tube snaking up out of the bag and up along his back and over his shoulder, to cross his face just above the lip, extending a pair of tendrils into Jack the Fourth's nostrils on the way by to provide him the extra oxygen he now required, then back over his other shoulder and thus downward once more into the machine in the tote bag. Some users wear that tube as though it's a great unfair weight, pressing them down, down into the cold earth, long before their time; on others it becomes a ludicrous mustache, imitation Hitler, forcing the victim to poke fun at himself in addition to being sick as a dog; but on Jack the Fourth, with his heavy shoulders and glowering eyes and broad forehead and dissatisfied thick mouth and pugnacious stance, the translucent line of plastic bringing oxygen to his emphysemaclenched lungs was borne like a military decoration, perhaps awarded by the French: Prix de Nez, First Class.

Jack Fullerton the Fourth had been chief executive officer of NAABOR the last seven years, having assumed the title after the cardiac-disease death of his uncle, Jim Fullerton the Third, who had himself taken over the helm nineteen years earlier, upon the lung-cancer demise of his cousin Tom Fullerton, Jr. All in all, the Fullerton family had for almost the entire length of the twentieth century controlled what had originally been National Tobacco, then (after the merger with American Leaf) N&A Tobacco, then (after the absorption of the Canadian firm Allied Paper Products) N.A.A. Corporation, then (after the horizontal expansions of the fifties and sixties) N.A.A. Brands of Raleigh, then (after a Madison Avenue face-lift) NAABOR.

Jack the Fourth was accompanied everywhere these days by two 'assistants.' These assistants knew nothing about corporate work, but were well skilled both as nurses and as bodyguards. The dark suits and conservative neckties they wore did not disguise their true callings, but did at least serve to soften their professional silence and alertness, and distract from their bulging muscles and bulging coats.

This trio made its laborious way across the lush expanse of Virgin Mary-blue carpet toward the broad clean desk at the far end, Jack the Fourth not yet attempting to speak but contenting himself along the way with a nod and a small two-finger salute in Mordon's direction, to which Mordon responded by nodding his head, smiling his mouth, and wagging his tail.

At last seated at his desk, tote bag on the floor at his side, assistants in armchairs behind him and to his right, Jack the Fourth wheezed three or four times, then nodded at Mordon once more and gestured at the comfortable chair just across the desk. 'Thank you, Jack,' said Mordon, coming over to settle himself into the chair (Jack liked imitation informality). 'You're looking well,' he lied.

'Had a good enough night,' Jack the Fourth wheezed. 'Had a good enough shit this morning.' His voice was like the wind in the upper reaches of a deconsecrated cathedral, possibly one where the nuns had all been raped and murdered and raped.

'That's good,' Mordon said, expressing interest.

Jack the Fourth brooded at Mordon. 'Haven't seen you since the victory party,' he wheezed, 'when we whupped the widows and orphans.'

'Grand days,' Mordon agreed.

Jack the Fourth's interest in small talk had never been very strong. 'Cartwright tells me,' he wheezed, 'you want to talk about something, but you won't tell him what it is.'

'Jack,' Mordon said, with a significant look at the assistants, 'I won't tell anybody on this earth but you what it is.'

Jack the Fourth fixed Mordon with a watery but cold eye. 'You aren't about to suggest,' he wheezed, 'that my assistants leave us alone in here.'

Mordon at once shifted ground. 'Not at all, Jack,' he said. He had no idea if Jack the Fourth felt he might need his assistants to protect him from murderous attack from Mordon Leethe, or if he simply had in mind their nursing skills: CPR, all that. In any event, Mordon smoothly said, 'I just wanted you to hear it first. After that, of course I'll be guided by your decision.'

'Fire away,' Jack the Fourth wheezed, opening a desk drawer and removing a fresh pack of cigarettes.

While his CEO's shaky fingers worked on opening the package, Mordon said, 'We fund, under our American Tobacco Research Institute arm, two blue-sky medical researchers named Loomis and Heimhocker.'

'Do we.' Jack the Fourth's clean nails scrabbled at the cigarette pack, finally breaking through.

'They've been studying melanoma.'

Jack the Fourth tapped a cigarette loose, while that word circled down into his brain, searching for a definition with which to mate. Got it; Jack the Fourth frowned massively at Mordon. 'Melanoma! What the fuck for?'

'Research.'

Jack the Fourth held up the cigarette for Mordon to see. 'Let them make these fuckers less lethal,' he advised. 'Melanoma! Who gives a fuck about melanoma?'

'I think,' Mordon said carefully, not knowing how much Jack the Fourth wanted to know about his own business, 'I think it's mostly window dressing.'

Again, Jack the Fourth thought that over, while one of his assistants took his cigarette, lit it for him, and gave it back. Taking a drag, coughing his guts out, heaving in the chair, tapping ash that didn't yet exist into the hubcap- size clean ashtray on his desk, at last he wheezed, in utter disgust, 'Public relations,' much as another man might have said, 'There's vomit on this seat.'

'Yes, Jack,' Mordon said. 'A smoke screen, you might say.'

'That's not bad.' Jack wheezed a chuckle.

'But the point is, they've been working on two formulas to reduce skin pigmentation — it doesn't matter, it's just something to do with their research — and they both work pretty well, to the extent that they turn you translucent.'

'Trans' — hack hack hack herack hok hok hok HOK HOK hack hack hack hack — 'lucent? What do you mean?'

'Well, these researchers gave the formulas to their cats, one each, and now you can see through the cats.'

Jack the Fourth waved smoke away from his face with his free hand. 'You mean they're invisible?'

'No, you can see them, the shapes of them, sort of grayish, but you can see through them. They're like' — Mordon pointed at the air between himself and his master