Smoke

— 'they're like smoke.'

Jack the Fourth shook his big head. 'I'm not following this. They want to make cigarettes out of cats?'

'No, no, I—'

'Not that I'd be against it,' Jack wheezed, 'if they were lower in tar and nicotine. But you've got to factor in those damn animal-rights people, you know, they're much nastier than the human-rights people, human beings mean nothing to them.'

'The cats,' Mordon said firmly, 'were merely an early part of the experiment.'

Jack the Fourth considered that. 'Do cats get skin cancer?'

'Not as far as I know. Jack, could I just tell you about this?'

'I think you'd better.'

'They have these two formulas,' Mordon said, and held his hands up as though they gripped test tubes. 'They have to experiment with them,' and he poured the test tube contents onto the carpet. 'They experimented on their cats,' and he spread his hands, palms up, forgiving the researchers on behalf of animal-rights activists everywhere. 'But now,' and he brought his hands together as though hiding a baseball greased with illegal spit, 'they need to experiment on human beings.'

'I won't be a part of that,' Jack the Fourth wheezed. 'They'll have to go offshore for that. Set them up a dummy corporation.'

'Well, they already did it,' Mordon said, dropping his hands into his lap, and jutting his jaw forward like Il Duce. 'They caught a burglar, tested one of the formulas on him, locked him up — very ineptly, I might say — and the burglar took the other formula, thinking it was the antidote, and escaped.'

'Probably dead in a ditch somewhere,' Jack the Fourth commented, and paused to cough before adding, 'No legal problem I can see. Not for us.'

'No, Jack,' Mordon said, and his hands reappeared, to conduct the slow movement of a sextet. 'The researchers say it's almost impossible the burglar's dead. I wouldn't come here, Jack, to talk to you about a dead burglar.'

'I would hope not.' Jack the Fourth took a puff, strangled, retched, coughed his guts out, lost his oxygen tube out of his nose, replaced it with the help of both calm assistants, blew his nose on a Kleenex out of a desk drawer, wiped his eyes on another Kleenex, gasped and panted a while, clutched the arms of his chair as though it were mounted on the rear of a sports-fishing boat in a heavy sea, and at last wheezed, 'Well, Mordon, if they don't think this burglar's dead, what do they think he is?'

'Invisible.'

For a long moment, there was silence in the room. Jack the Fourth didn't wheeze. The assistants even looked at one another, briefly. Then, with a long shuddering inhalation, very like a death rattle, Jack the Fourth wheezed, 'Invisible?'

'They can't be sure, of course, but it seems very likely.'

'Invisible. Not smoke, not . . . ghostly. Somebody you can't see at all.'

'Yes.'

'Hmmm,' wheezed Jack the Fourth.

Briskly, Mordon said, 'We're pretty sure he left fingerprints at the researchers' place. He's a burglar, he'll have a record. We don't want to make an official complaint in this case, Jack, but surely we know someone somewhere in law enforcement—'

'We know half the fucking Senate,' Jack the Fourth wheezed.

'Half the Senate, Jack,' Mordon said, 'is on the wrong side of the law. We need a lawman, someone with access to the FBI's fingerprint files—'

'You want this invisible man.'

'You want him, Jack,' Mordon said. 'He'll work for us, if we give him the right inducement. The fly on the wall, Jack. In jury deliberations, in advertising-campaign strategy sessions, in closed congressional hearings, in private pricing discussions . . .'

'Jesus Christ on a plate,' Jack the Fourth wheezed, and almost sat up straight. Reaching for his phone, stubbing out his cigarette in the big ashtray — almost out; it smoldered, reeking like an old city dump — Jack the Fourth even rose briefly above his wheeze. 'Don't you move, Mordon,' he stated. 'We're about to get this boy.'

11

As fences go, Jersey Josh Kuskiosko was no more scuzzy than the average. As human beings go, of course, Jersey Josh was just about at the bottom of the barrel, down there in the muck and the filth and the fetid stink where thoughts just naturally arise of retroactive abortion. But as far as fences are concerned, he wasn't bad.

Still, it wasn't often that Jersey Josh's phone rang, so when it did on that Monday evening a little after six, while he was watching several children being burned alive in their tenement apartment on the local news (their mother had only left the place for a minute, to get milk, Cheerios, and crack), Josh turned a very suspicious head to glower at the telephone, daring it to repeat that noise.

It did; damn. Hadn't been a glitch in the wires after all. It could still be a wrong number, though, or bad news. Aiming the remote at the TV to hit 'mute' — now he could watch the children burn without listening to the newscaster's play-by-play — he mistrustfully picked up the phone, an old black rotary-dial model some scumbag had sold him long long ago, and warily said into it, 'R?'

'Josh?'

'S?'

'This is Freddie Noon, Josh.'

'O.'

'You gonna be around?'

Where else would he be, but around? Nevertheless, this answer was going to require more of the alphabet. Hunching over the phone, as though he didn't want the burning children to watch, he said, 'Maybe.'

'I got some stuff to show you,' Freddie Noon said.

Meaning, of course, stuff to sell him. So why didn't he just come over and announce himself around midnight, like a normal person? 'S?'

'I'll send Peg. She's my friend.'

'Y not U?'

'I'm kind of laid up,' Freddie said.

'U sound OK.'

'It's my leg.'

'O.'

'When should she come over?'

Shower. Shave. Change underwear. '8.'

'Okay. Her name's Peg.'

'S.'

Jersey Josh Kuskiosko lived over a onetime truck-repair place near the Lincoln Tunnel. The building was squat and brick, with a tall ground floor and a normal-size second floor, its grubby windows overlooking a tunnel approach; open one of those windows, you're dead in ten minutes. Nobody had ever opened them.

In the old days, the upstairs had been used only for storage of parts and files, since the downstairs had at that time been full of the noise and stench of big trucks, many of them not stolen, undergoing repair. But some years ago the owners of the business moved to the other end of the tunnel, over in Jersey, where the rents are lower and law enforcement even more slack. This left the owners of the structure, the British royal family, with yet another lemon on their hands. Fortunately, the British royal family is used to thinking in the long term, so they simply held on to the parcel, as they've continued to hold on to so many Manhattan parcels, waiting for the idea of gentrification of the world's most important city to come around and be popular again.

These days, the downstairs was rented as storage space by a restaurant-supply company, so on that thick oily concrete floor down there stood big restaurant stoves, walk-in freezers, industrial dishwashers, wooden boxes full of dishes and cutlery, all kinds of stuff, much of it not stolen, and all of it protected by locks, bolts, chains,