Smoke

SMOKE

BY

DONALD E WESTLAKE

© 1995 by Donald Westlake.

This is for Knox Burger and Kitty Sprague, with affection, admiration, and gratitude

1

Freddie was a liar. Freddie was a thief.Freddie Noon his name was, the fourth child of nine in a small tract house in Ozone Park. That's in Queens in New York City, next door to John F. Kennedy International Airport, directly beneath the approach path of every big plane coming in from Europe, except when the wind is from the southeast, which it very rarely is. Throughout his childhood, the loud gray shadows of the wide-body jets swept across and across and across Freddie Noon and his brothers and his sisters and his house as though to wipe them clear of the table of life; but every shadow passed and they were still there.

Freddie's father worked, and still does, for the New York City Department of Sanitation, hanging off the back of a garbage truck. He's in a good union, and gets a decent salary and benefits, but not quite enough for a family with nine kids. And that may be why, at the age of seven, in the local five-and-dime's toy department, Freddie Noon became a thief.

His becoming a thief is why he became a liar. The two go hand in hand.

Freddie's junior high school was the big rock-candy mountain. In no time at all, Freddie became enthralled by, and in thrall to, any number of products that could set him up to soar above the flight paths of the inbound jets. The trouble was, the more potent the product and the higher it let him soar, the more it cost. By the age of fourteen, Freddie's reason for being a thief had changed; he did it now, as they say in the solemn magazine articles, to support his habit. His other habit, really, since his original long-term habit was already set: to be a thief. Habit number one supported habit number two.

Freddie took his first fall at sixteen, when he set off a silent alarm in an empty house he was burglarizing out in Massapequa Park on Long Island — they hadn't stopped their Newsday delivery when they went on vacation — an error he didn't know he'd committed until all those police cars showed up outside. He was sent to a juvenile detention center upstate, where he met youths his own age who were much worse than he was. A survivalist, Freddie quickly caught up. Fortunately, the joint was as awash in drugs as any high school, so the time passed more quickly than it otherwise might.

That was the end of Freddie's formal schooling, though not the end of his incarceration. He did one more term as a juvenile, then two clicks as an adult, before he found himself in a drug-free cell block, a situation that almost seemed against nature. What had happened, the white inmates who'd been born again as Christian fundamentalists and the black inmates who'd converted to Islam joined together for once, and policed that prison like a vacuum cleaner. They were more efficient, and they were a lot more mean, than the regular authorities, and they kept that building of that joint clean. You're found with so much as a Tylenol on you, you'd better have a damn good explanation.

Freddie was twenty-five when he went in for that stretch. He'd been flying above the flight paths for eleven years. The landing he made inside that clean house was a bumpy one, but he did walk away from it, and as the pilots say, any landing you walk away from is a good landing.

And here Freddie met a new self. He hadn't made his own acquaintance since he was fourteen years old, and he was surprised to find he liked the guy he'd become. He was quick-witted, once he had his wits about him. He was short and skinny, but also wiry and strong. He looked pretty good, in a feral-foxy sort of way. He liked what he saw himself doing, liked what he heard himself thinking, liked how he handled himself in the ebb and flow of life.

He never reformed, exactly, never became born again or changed his name to Freddie X, but once he was clear of drugs he saw no reason to go back. It would be like infecting yourself with the flu all over again; back to the stuffy nose, the dull headache, the dulled thought processes, the dry and itchy skin. Who needed it?

So that was why, when Freddie Noon hit the street once more, two years later, at twenty-seven years of age, he did not go back on drugs. He stayed clean, alert, quick-witted, wiry, good-looking in a feral-foxy way. He met a girl named Peg Briscoe, who worked sporadically as a dental technician, quitting every time she decided she couldn't stand to look into one more dirty mouth, and she also liked this new Freddie Noon, and so they set up housekeeping together. And Freddie went back to being a thief. Only now, he did it for a different reason, a third reason. Now he was a thief because he liked it.

And then one night — just last June, this was — when he was twenty-nine and had been two years out of prison, Freddie broke into a townhouse on East Forty-ninth Street, in Manhattan, way east over near the UN Building. He chose this particular townhouse because the front entry looked like a piece of cake, and because the bottom three floors of the four-story building were dark, and because a little brass plaque beside the main entrance read

LOOMIS-HEIMHOCKER

RESEARCH FACILITY

A research facility, in Freddie's extensive experience, was a place with many small valuable portable salable machines: word processors, faxes, microscopes, telephone switchboards, darkroom equipment; oh, all sorts of stuff. It made this particular townhouse seem a worthwhile place to visit.

So Freddie found a legal parking space for his van only a few doors away from the target, which was already a good omen, to find a parking place at all in Manhattan, and he sat there in the dark, eleven o'clock at night, and he watched the research facility across the street, and he bided his time. Faint candlelight flickered behind the top-floor windows, but that was okay. Whoever lived up there wouldn't get in Freddie's way. He'd be quick and quiet, and he wouldn't go above the second floor.

No cars coming. No pedestrians on the sidewalks. Freddie stepped out of the van, whose interior light he had long since removed, and stepped briskly across the street. He hardly paused at the front door for his busy fingers to do their stuff, and then he was in.

2

"Uh-oh," said David.

Peter peered across the candle flame, then turned his head to follow the trajectory of David's eyes. In the dimness beyond the kitchen alcove, in the hall, on the elaborate alarm panel mounted on the wall beside the maroon elevator door, a dull red light burned. "Ah-huh" Peter said.

"Do you suppose it's a malfunction?" David asked. It was clear he hoped it was.

But a sudden idea had come into Peter's mind, connected with what they'd just been discussing. "Someone has broken in," he said, sure of it and glad of it, and got to his feet, dropping his napkin beside his plate.

Dr. David Loomis and Dr. Peter Heimhocker were lovers. They were also medical researchers, both forty-three years of age, currently funded by the American Tobacco Research Institute to do blue-sky cancer research. Their work, reports of which looked good in tobacco-company annual reports, and references to which invariably formed a part of tobacco-industry spokespeople's testimony before congressional committees, was sincere, intelligent, and well funded. (Even the alarm system had been paid for with tobacco money.) David and Peter were encouraged by their funders to come up with anything and everything that might help in the human race's battle against the scourge of cancer, except, of course, further evidence that might recommend the giving up of the smoking of cigarettes.

David and Peter had met twenty years earlier, in medical school, and had soon realized how much they had in common, including a love of non-result-oriented research and an infinite capacity for guile and subterfuge in the suspicious sight of the outside world. Their coming together strengthened both. They'd been inseparable ever since.

The tobacco-money project was now in its fourth year. Early on, David and Peter had decided to focus their efforts in the direction of melanoma, the fatal form of skin cancer, for the avoidance of which one was advised to keep away from the sun, not cigarettes. It seemed both a safe and a worthwhile area of study, but it had also proved, so far, quite frustrating.

It seemed to David and Peter that the key lay in the pigment. Pigmentation is what gives our skin and hair and blood and eyes and all of us their color. David and Peter did not think pigment was the culprit, they thought it was the carrier. They thought that certain cancers could be reduced or even reversed if particular pigments could be temporarily eliminated. They had been working on various formulas for some time, and felt they were near a breakthrough, but they were stymied by an inability to perform a real-world practical test.

They had two formulas at this time, both more or less ready to go, neither of which seemed quite to do the job, though there was no way at this stage to be sure. One of these formulas was in the shape of a serum, to be injected into the buttock. The other was a kind of small black cake or cookie, looking much like an after-dinner mint, which was meant to be eaten. The serum was called LHRX1, and the mint was called LHRX2.

Both formulas had been tested on animals, as a result of which two translucent cats now roamed the townhouse on East Forty-ninth Street. Buffy had been given LHRX1 and Muffy LHRX2. These cats were quite startling, at first, for David and Peter's friends from the worlds of ballet, fashion, art, academe, and retail, when they would come over to the townhouse for parties. "No one else has cats you can see through!" everybody cried, giving in to both admiration and envy, watching these gray ghosts amble around, silent as the fog.

But what was needed, and what David and Peter had been discussing over late dinner when the alarm's red light went on, was human volunteers. The research had gone as far as it could without real test data, which meant actual human beings. Translucent cats can only tell so much. To finish refining the formulas, to be certain which of the two was the likelier candidate for further study, to achieve the breakthrough they could sense was out there, just beyond their grasp, they needed to try the stuff on people.

It was true, of course, that there were two formulas and two researchers, being David and Peter, so that in theory they could experiment on themselves, as so many heroic nineteenth-century medical discoverers were alleged to have done, but David and Peter were not mad scientists. Who knew what side effects there might be, what long-term consequences? Who would be around to record the data if something were to go wrong? And how could a translucent scientist hope to be taken seriously in the medical journals?

No, the volunteers must come from elsewhere, from outside David and Peter and their immediate circle. They had been discussing this problem over dinner. Could the governor of New York be approached, to offer inmates from the state prisons as guinea pigs? Would a tobacco company be prepared to open a clinic somewhere in the Third World? Could they advertise on the back page of the Village Voice?

Then that red light bounced on, and a sudden idea clicked on, a much brighter light, in Peter's mind. He stood, and dropped his napkin beside his plate. "Our problems may be solved," he said. "Just wait while I get my gun."

3

Freddie put a fax machine on top of a printer and carried both out to the van, juggling them there with one hand and one knee while unlocking the van's side cargo door. It was a pain having to unlock and relock the van every trip, but anybody who leaves a vehicle alone and unsealed for even a second in Manhattan is looking for trouble, and will soon be looking for a new radio.

It may be that the pervasive air of theft and chicanery forever floating like an aggressive cloud bank over New York City had played some part in Freddie's original decision to become a thief. In a different part of the world, where both property and human feelings are respected — oh, someplace like Ashland, Oregon, say — even the scurviest villain will have the occasional bout of conscience, but in New York's take-or-be-taken atmosphere moral suasion goes for naught.

Not that most New Yorkers are thieves. It is merely that most New Yorkers expect to be robbed, all the time, everywhere, in all circumstances, and in every way imaginable. The actual thieves in the city are statistically few, but very busy, and they set the tone. Therefore, whenever a New Yorker is robbed, there's no thought in anyone's mind, including the victim's, of a community outraged or a moral ethos damaged. There's nothing to be done about it, really, but shrug one's shoulders, buy better locks for next time, and rip off the insurance company.

Having relocked the van, Freddie went back to the neatly appointed front office on the first floor of the townhouse, and by the light of his muted pen-flash stacked a keyboard on a VDT, picked them up with both hands from underneath — van keys hooked in fingers of right hand — turned toward the front door, and a bright light hit him smack in the face.

Oh, shit. Freddie immediately slapped his eyelids shut; he knew that much. Don't lose your night vision. Eyes closed, he started to turn back to the desk to put down the VDT and keyboard, but a voice from the darkness said, "Don't move," so he stopped moving.

A second voice from the darkness said, "I think you're supposed to say "freeze.'"

"It means the same thing," said the first voice, sounding a little testy.

The second voice said, "Maybe not to them."

"Them," Freddie knew, was him. And "him," at this moment in the history of the world, was a guy in trouble. Third conviction as an adult. Good-bye Peg Briscoe, good-bye nice little apartment in Bay Ridge, good-bye best years of his life.

It was very depressing.

Well, let's get on with it, then. His eyes still squeezed shut, Freddie said, "I'll just put this stuff down here."

"No, no" said the first voice. "I like you with your hands occupied. Search him, David."

"I don't have any weapons, if that's what you mean," Freddie said. At least they wouldn't be getting him for armed robbery, which might count for something twenty-five or thirty years from now, when he first came up for parole. Jesus Christ.

A lot more light suddenly flooded onto his eyelids; they'd switched on the room fluorescents. Still, he kept his eyes closed, jealously guarding that old night vision, the one asset he still had that might prove useful, God knew how.

"Of course you have weapons," said the second voice, David, approaching. "You're a hardened criminal, aren't you?"

"I'm kind of semisoft," Freddie said, quoting a remark Peg had made one night, comparing him to some crime show they were then watching on television (hoping for a little human contact there, but not expecting much).

And not getting much. If the two voices found the remark as amusing in this context as Freddie had in the context of being in bed with Peg watching television while stroking her near thigh, they kept it to themselves. There was ongoing silence while hands patted him all over, and then David, now directly behind Freddie, said, "He's clean."

Everybody watches television. "Told you so," said Freddie.

"What a trusting person you must be," said voice number one.

David, who had now moved around to Freddie's front, said, "His eyes are closed, Peter, do you see that?"

"Maybe he's afraid of us," Peter said.

"Maybe it's deniability," said David, his voice receding toward Peter. "You know, so he'd be able to swear in court he couldn't identify us."

Sounding flabbergasted, Peter said, "For Christ's sake, David, him not identify us? Good God, why?"

"I don't know," David said. "I'm no lawyer."

I'd like to see these idiots, just once, Freddie admitted to himself, but he still thought there might be some value in retaining whatever night vision he might still have with all this fluorescent glare greenish-red on his eyelids, so he kept his eyes squeezed shut and his hands cupping the VDT — which was beginning to get heavy — and waited for whatever would follow from here.

Which was Peter saying, "David, where did we put those handcuffs?"

Freddie couldn't help it; his eyes popped open, night vision be damned. Scrunching up his cheeks against the sudden onslaught of fluorescents, he said, "Handcuffs! What do you people want with handcuffs?"

Meanwhile, David was saying, "What handcuffs? We don't have any handcuffs."

Peter, the tall skinny one with fuzzy black hair, answered Freddie first. "I want them for you, of course. You can't stand there holding our office equipment all night." Then, to David, he said, "From that Halloween thing. You remember."

David, the blond one with the baby fat, said, "Do we still have those?"

"Of course. You never throw anything away."

"You don't need handcuffs," Freddie said.

Peter said, "David, look in the storage closet with all the costumes, all right?"

"I'll look." David glanced at Freddie again, and back at Peter. "Will you be all right?"

"Of course. I have a gun."

"You don't need handcuffs," Freddie said.

"Be right back," David said, and left.

"You don't need handcuffs," Freddie said.

"Hush," Peter told him. "Turn to face that desk there, will you?"

So Freddie made a quarter turn, to face what was probably by day a receptionist's desk, and Peter sat at the desk, put the pistol down on top of it, and searched the drawers for forms. Freddie looked at Peter and the gun on the desk. He thought about throwing the VDT and the keyboard at Peter, or at the gun, and running for the front door. He thought Peter seemed pretty self-confident. He decided to wait and see what would happen next.

Which was, surprisingly enough, that Peter took his medical history. "Now," he said, having found the form he wanted and a pen to go with it, "I'll need your date of birth."

"Why?"

Peter looked at him. He sighed. He put down the pen and picked up the pistol and aimed it at Freddie's forehead. "Would you rather I knew your date of death?" he asked.

So Freddie told Peter his date of birth, and his record of childhood diseases, and about his parents' chronic illnesses, and what his grandparents had died of. And no, he was not allergic to penicillin or any other medicine that he knew of. He'd had no major operations.

"Drug history?" Peter asked.

Freddie clamped his mouth shut. Peter looked at him. He waited. Freddie said, "Reach for that gun all you want."

"I don't actually need to know your entire drug history," Peter acknowledged, as a clicking of handcuffs announced the return of David. "I just need to know your current status in re drugs."

"They were," David said, "in your underwear drawer."

"I've been clean over two years," Freddie said.

"Absolutely clean?"

"That's what I said, isn't it? What's going on here, anyway?"

David, jangling the handcuffs, said, "Put those things down and put your hands behind your back."

"I don't think so," Freddie said. He held tight to the VDT, ready to throw it in whatever direction seemed best. "Why don't you guys," he said, "just call the cops and quit all this fooling around?"

"There's a possibility," Peter said, seated over there at the desk, "that we won't have to call the cops at all."

Freddie squinted at him. He understood that these guys were the kind who in prison were known as faggots but who out here in the allegedly normal world preferred to be called gay, even though very few such people were even moderately cheerful. He didn't know what they wanted with him, but if it turned out that he did have some sort of honor on which they had nefarious designs, he was prepared to defend that honor with everything he had, which at the moment was a VDT and a keyboard.

David, apparently reading in Freddie's face something of his thoughts and his fears, abruptly said, with a kind of impatient sympathy, "Oh, for heaven's sake, there's nothing to worry about."

Freddie looked at him sidelong. "No?"

"No. We're not going to deflower you or anything."

Freddie wasn't sure what that word meant. "No?"

"Of course not," David said. "We're just going to experiment on you."

Freddie reared back. He very nearly tossed the VDT. "Like hell!" he said.

Rising from the desk, holding the pistol pointed alternately at David and Freddie, Peter said, "That's enough. David, you have the bedside manner of Jack the Ripper. Look, you — What's your name?"

"Freddie," Freddie said. He could give them that much.

"Freddie," agreed Peter. "Freddie," he said, "we are medical practitioners, David and me. Doctors. We are doing very valuable cancer research."

"Good."

"We are at a crossroads in our research," Peter went on, "and just this evening at dinner—"

"A dinner," David interpolated, giving Freddie a reproachful look, "which I prepared, which you interrupted, and which is now stone cold upstairs."

"Sorry about that," Freddie said.

"And not entirely relevant," Peter said, pointing the gun at David again.

"Point it at him!"

"Stop interrupting, all right, David?"

"Just point it at him."

"I'm trying to explain the situation to our friend here."

"Fine. Point the gun at him."

Peter pointed the gun at Freddie. He said, "Just this evening at dinner, we were discussing the next step in our research program, which is to test our formulae on human volunteers."

"Not me," Freddie said.

"We weren't thinking of you in particular," Peter told him, "because we didn't know you yet. We were thinking of calling our friend, the governor of the state of New York, and asking him for some prison volunteers. You know how that sort of thing works, don't you?"

As a matter of fact, Freddie did. Every once in a great while, in the pen, not often, the word would come around that some pharmacy company or the army or somebody wanted to test some shit on some people, and who would like to volunteer to drink the liquid or take the shot, in return for extra privileges or money or sometimes even early parole. There was always the guarantee that the shit was safe, but if the shit was safe why didn't they try it on people outside these prison walls?

Also, those times, they also always guaranteed they had this antidote available if anybody turned out to be allergic or something, but if they couldn't know for sure the shit itself would work how come they were always so positive the antidote would work? Anyway, Freddie had never volunteered for any of that stuff, but he knew people who had, usually long-termers, and there was always something weird happened. They gained a lot of weight, or their pee turned blue, or their hair fell out. One guy came back to the block talking Japanese, and nobody could figure out how they'd worked that on him. Sounded like Japanese, anyway.

Peter was still talking while Freddie'd been skipping down memory lane. When Freddie next tuned in, Peter was saying, "— takes so long. We'll get our volunteers, we'll run our experiments, everything will be fine, but it's just going to add six months of unnecessary delay to get the paperwork filed and the state legislature to approve and all that."

"The thing is," David said, sounding more eager than his partner, jingling the handcuffs as he talked, "the thing is, we've gone through all this bureaucratic red tape before and it's so costly in terms of time lost, and when we're talking cancer research, time lost is lives lost. You can see that, can't you?"

"Sure," said Freddie.

"Which is where you come in," Peter said.

"No," Freddie said.

"Listen to the proposition first," Peter advised him.

Freddie shrugged, which reminded him this VDT was getting heavy. "Can I put this down?" he asked.

"Not yet," Peter said. "Here's the proposition. If you agree, you'll sign a release here, and we'll give you the medicine, and you'll stay in this house for twenty-four hours. We'll have to lock you up, of course, but we'll feed you and give you a decent place to sleep."

"The rose room," David said to Peter.

"Exactly," Peter agreed. To Freddie he said. "The point is, we'll need to observe you, for reactions to the medicine. After the twenty-four hours, you'll be free to go. Without our equipment, of course."

"Heh-heh," Freddie said, acknowledging the joke.

"If you decide, on the other hand, not to cooperate—"

"You'll call the cops."

"I knew you were quick," Peter said.

Freddie considered. These guys were legitimate doctors, okay, and this thing was even called a research facility, the very phrase that had brought him in here. And it's on the East Side of Manhattan, so it's all gotta be on the up and up, right?

And what's the alternative? Good-bye to all that, that's the alternative. Police, prison, guards, fellow cons. That's the alternative.

So, if worse comes to worst, Peg can learn Japanese, that's all.

Freddie said, "And if something goes wrong, you got the antidote, right?"

"Nothing will go wrong," Peter said.

"Not a chance," David assured him.

"But you do got the antidote, right?"

The two doctors exchanged a glance. "If necessary," David said, jingling the handcuffs, "and it won't be necessary at all, but just in case it should be necessary, we would have an antidote, yes."

"And I get to put this thing down," Freddie said, meaning the VDT.

"Of course," David said.

Freddie looked from one to the other. "One thing," he said, "and one thing only. You don't need the handcuffs."

4

Both Peter and David would have felt more comfortable with the burglar in handcuffs, but that had turned out to be actually a sort of deal-breaker, so finally they'd agreed, and that meant the only restraint they had on this fellow Freddie was Peter's pistol. Fortunately, it was clear that Freddie believed Peter might be capable of using the pistol, a belief neither Peter nor David shared, but a belief they were willing to encourage.

Freddie having signed the release form with an unrecognizable scrawl, they moved him at last up one flight from reception to the rear lab room, where they seated him in a metal chair and did a cursory examination to be sure he was as physically fit as he claimed, and he was. There was no evidence of alcohol or drugs, no irregular heartbeat, no troublesome sounds in his lungs, and a perfectly average blood pressure. So that left nothing to do but give him the formula and see what happened.

No, actually there was still one thing more to be done. Before the experiment could get under way, they first had to decide which formula to try on him, since they could only hope to test one of the two formulas per experimental subject. LHRX1 and LHRX2 were both put out on the chrome table, side by side, the syringe and the after-dinner mint, and there they waited while David and Peter discreetly argued over which one was the likelier to succeed, therefore which one should be tried in this first human experiment. They argued for several minutes, at an impasse, and then the subject said, "I get it. That's always the way."

They turned to study him. Peter said, "What is?"

The subject pointed. "The shot is the stuff I got to take, and the cookie's the antidote, that I probably won't even need."

They looked at him. They looked at one another. Peter, who'd been arguing for LHRX1, the serum in the syringe, smiled and said, "An omen, clearly. David, we'd best do what it says."

"Oh, very well," said David, who hadn't really expected to win the argument anyway.

Peter smiled again as he crossed to pick up the syringe. Holding it point upward beside his shoulder, he turned to the subject. "In the buttock, I'm afraid," he said.

"And I saw that one comin', too," the subject said. But he made no trouble about it, merely stood and dropped his trousers and bent over the lab table and jumped a foot when Peter swabbed the spot with the cotton wad dipped in alcohol. "Jesus!" the subject cried. "That hurt!"

"I didn't do it yet," Peter told him, and did it, and the subject didn't move at all, because he was too confused. "There you are," Peter said, stepping back a pace. "You may adjust your clothing."

The subject did.

"You may sit down again," Peter said.

"Not yet," the subject said. "My ass cheek is real sore."

It was not, and Peter knew it, but he also knew how childish patients are, so he merely said, "Stand, then, if you like."

The subject stood. He said, "What happens next?"

"Nothing, not at first," Peter told him. "We all stand around here like idiots—"

"While our dinner dies upstairs," David said.

Peter turned to him. "We'll microwave it, David, it will be good as new."

"Hardly."

Peter turned back to the subject. "We'll stand here bickering about nothing at all," he explained, "for fifteen minutes, and then we'll take your pulse and look in your eyes and do a few more things like that, and then we'll close you away in the guest room upstairs—"

"It has its own john," David assured him.

"— and then," Peter said, "we'll examine you again at . . ." He consulted his watch. "It's nearly midnight now. Every two hours. We'll disturb your beauty sleep, I'm afraid, at two, and four, and six, and so on."

"Disturbing our own, as well," David added, as though the subject cared.

"During the day tomorrow," Peter went on, "the staff will be down here, in the research area, but only David and I ever go up to the living quarters, so no one else needs to know you're here. We'll feed you at appropriate times, and go on observing you at two-hour intervals, and at midnight tomorrow we will be happy to let you go."

"Me, too," said the subject. "Can I call my girl?"

"Sorry," said Peter.

"She'll worry," said the subject.

"I imagine she's used to that," Peter said, "given you for a boyfriend."

So that was the end of that. Conversation grew more desultory, time crept by, and at last the fifteen minutes were up. David and Peter gave the subject his first postserum examination, found no abnormalities, and wrote everything down on a long yellow legal pad. "Fine," Peter said. "Now we go upstairs. The elevator's too small for three, I'm afraid."

As they were leaving the lab, the subject pointed back to LHRX2, saying, "What about the antidote? Doesn't that come along with us?"

"Don't worry," Peter said. "You won't need it."

"Besides," David said, "that isn't—" But then he broke off, at a warning glare and headshake from Peter, behind the subject's back. Oh, of course. The point was to keep the subject soothed, not permit him to get more than necessarily tense. "We know where it is," David said, "if we need it. Which we won't."

"Okay."

With no more complaint, the subject went on ahead of them up the stairs two flights and then past their cold dinners and down the hall and into the rose room. "See you at two," Peter said, and locked the door, and he and David went back to their main living quarters, where David mourned their dinner a while before nuking it in the microwave, and Peter said, "We can't take turns, of course. This is still a criminal here, we'll both have to wake up every two hours."

"Assuming we sleep at all," David said. "Oh, Peter! Wouldn't it be wonderful if it works?"

"Not wonderful, exactly," Peter said. "We did struggle very hard on this, David, you and I, after all."

"You know what I mean, though."

Peter unbent. He smiled at his partner. "I do know what you mean. And you're right, wonderful is the word."

It was not, however, the word for their dinner, when at last they got back to it. They finished it just the same, their attention elsewhere, on the guest in the rose room and the serum even now coursing through his veins. Affecting his pigment? They discussed what they would do if the experiment proved a success. If the subject, Freddie, became even a little translucent, they would photograph him from every angle, they would document the fact as much as possible, they would even bring in one or two trusted staff members during the day tomorrow to see the subject for themselves. Then, armed with that documentation — but not with Freddie; they'd keep their side of the bargain and release him — they could go to the governor of New York or the president of a tobacco company or almost anybody and get permission and funding for much broader experimentation, with volunteers who could be thoroughly documented and checked and observed by all the impartial medical men you want. No problem.

This prospect keyed them up so much they didn't go to bed at all between midnight and 2 A.M., when it was time for the first check on the subject. They unlocked his door to find him in bed sound asleep, but he quickly and amiably awoke, yawning. How could he be so calm under such circumstances?

David and Peter examined him once more, found no changes at all, locked him in the room again, and this time went to bed, setting the radio alarm for 3:50. It went off at that awful hour, with the kind of ungodly modern music the classical stations like to put on when no one's listening, and they got up, brushed their teeth, dressed hurriedly, and went down the hall to find the door of the rose room gone.

Well, no, not gone. It was leaning against the wall inside the room. The subject had removed the pins from the hinges, moved the door, and left. "Oh, Christ!" said Peter.

But that wasn't the worst. The alarm system had been dismantled, not carefully: wires dangled from the box next to the elevator door. "Hell and damn," said Peter.

They went down to the first floor, where they found that Freddie NoName had taken all the rest of their office equipment with him on his way out. "Bastard," said Peter.

Then they went back up one flight and looked around the lab, and it was David who noticed that the LHRX2 was gone. "Oh, Peter, my God," he said, pointing at the empty space where that black after-dinner mint had lately stood.

Peter looked. "Oh, no," he said.

Half-whispering, David said, "He thinks it's the antidote."

"Oh, wow," Peter said.

5

Peg Briscoe dreamed of open mouths, huge open mouths with great red sluglike tongues and teeth that were huge and filthy and alive, writhing like Medusa's snakes. And she was being drawn into them, drawn into the horrible foul-smelling mouths.

This is very scary, she thought, in the dream. This is really very scary. I better quit working for Dr. Lopakne.

The mouths were getting closer, the writhing tongues reaching for her, the snakey teeth glaring at her with their shiny chrome-filling eyes. This is truly scary, Peg told herself in the dream. I think I better wake up now.

So she did, to find a hand on her breast. She opened her eyes in the blackness of the bedroom and whispered, "Freddie?"

"Who else?" Freddie whispered, his breath warm on her ear, his hand roaming over her body.

"You're late," she whispered.

"I had a hell of a thing happen," he whispered, moving her legs apart. "I'll tell you all about it."

"I had such an awful dream," she whispered, as he moved around under the covers, getting closer to her. "I'm going to have to quit at the dentist."

"That's okay," he said. He was on top of her now, supporting weight on his elbows. "I got a bunch of stuff in the van."

"Mmm, nice," she whispered, feeling that gentle pressure, feeling him find his way home. Her left hand reached out in the darkness, toward the bedside table. "Oh, let me see you," she whispered, and her fingers found the pull chain. She pulled, and the light came on, and she SCREAMED.

"Wha?"

Her eyes snapped shut. She thought, Take me back to the dream! Back into the mouths, anywhere, anywhere but here!

Thrashing on top of her. "Whasa matter?"

She opened her eyes; wide, and stared at the ceiling. "There's nobody here!" she screamed, "Oh, my God, I'm going crazy!"

"What? Whadayou — Holy shit!"

The thrashing redoubled. A weight lifted from her, and the covers flung themselves back from her body, down to a heap on her ankles. In the light of the bedside lamp, she stared down at her own naked body, the white sheet all around, the sudden indentation in the sheet beside her and then that indentation just as suddenly gone.

She was alone in the room. Alone! Is this a dream? she asked herself.

Drugs! All at once, she was sure of it. Years ago, she'd experimented, the way everybody experimented, she'd tried some pretty wild chemicals that nobody knew what the side effects were, or how long they could hang around inside the body. Was this a — was this a bad trip, five years late?

Over to the right was the dresser, with the mirror above it. From over there came the voice that sounded so much like Freddie's: "Holy Jesus!"

Peg whimpered; she couldn't help it. She wanted to reach down to the flung covers and pull them up over herself, but she was afraid to move. She whimpered again and said, in a new tiny voice, "Freddie?"

"What the fuck has happened?"

"Freddie, where are you?"

"I'm right here, for Christ's sake!"

"Freddie, what are you doing?"

"I'm looking at myself," said the voice, from over by the dresser and the mirror. "I'm looking for myself."

"Freddie, don't do this!"

"It's those goddamn doctors! That goddamn stuff they shot me with!"

"What? Freddie?"

"The fucking antidote didn't work!"

"Freddie?"

A big indentation came into the sheet beside her, as though someone had sat down on the other side of the bed. She screamed, but not as loudly as before. She kept staring at that indentation.

"Listen, Peg," said a voice from somewhere above the indentation. "What happened to me was — hey!" the voice suddenly interrupted itself, as though surprised and pleased by something.

Fearful, trembling all over, Peg said, "Hey? Hey what?"

"When I close my eyes," said Freddie's voice, "I can still see!"

"Oh, Freddie, I'm gonna have a heart attack, I'm gonna have an accident right here in the bed, Freddie, don't do this, whatever you're doing, don't do it!"

"Listen, Peg, listen," Freddie's voice said, and something horrible touched her arm.

This time she SHRIEKED — she let out a good one — and recoiled half off the bed.

"Jeeziz, Peg! The neighbors are gonna call the cops!"

"What was that? What was it? Something touched me!"

"I touched you, Peg."

"You? Who are you?"

"I'm Freddie, for Christ's sake."

"Where are you?"

"I'm right here, I — listen, let me explain."

"I can't stand this!"

"Peg," the voice said, "Peg, turn off the light."

"What? Are you crazy?"

"Believe me, Peg, it'll be better. Turn off the light."

Afraid to disobey — what if something horrible touched her again? — she reached out and pulled the chain and turned off the light, and in the blessed shield of darkness she sat up, reached forward, grabbed the covers, and pulled them up over herself as she lay back down. All the way over herself, head and everything.

"Peg?"

"Wha?"

She could feel him shifting around, changing position on the bed, sitting there beside her. "You feel a little better, Peg?"

She did. It was stupid, but she did. Just not seeing him — well, she wouldn't be able to see him anyway, but in the darkness there was no way to know you couldn't see him. "A little," she admitted, but kept the covers over her head just the same.

"Peg," said Freddie's voice in the darkness, outside the covers, "let me tell you what happened. I went to a place to get some stuff tonight, and these two doctors grabbed me and held a gun on me."

"Doctors?"

"Some kinda doctors. It was a lab kinda place, with equipment I could turn over pretty easy, so I went in, and they got me, and they made me this deal."

"Freddie, that is you there, isn't it?"

"Sure it's me, Peg," Freddie said, and patted her through the covers, and the funny thing was, the pat was comforting. As long as she couldn't see that she couldn't see him, things were okay. Almost normal.

She sighed. She relaxed one tiny notch. She said, "Okay, Freddie. What happened?"

"They made me this deal," Freddie said. "I'd help them with this experiment, or they'd call the cops. I mean, one option was, they don't call the cops. They were doing cancer research and they had this medicine and they needed to test it on a person. And there was this other stuff that was the antidote, in case something went wrong. So I went along with them—"

"Sure."

"— and as soon as I could I got out of there and took the stuff I came for and took the antidote and come right home. And you know I don't like to turn the light on when you're asleep . . ."

"I know."

"So that's what it is," Freddie said, and sighed.

Peg tentatively moved her head out from under the covers, like a turtle. She looked in the blackness toward the sound of his voice, pretending she'd be able to see him if the light was on. "What's what it is, Freddie?" she asked.

"The antidote didn't work," Freddie said. "I don't know what the hell all this has to do with cancer research, but I see what they did to me. Peg?"

"Yes, Freddie?"

"I'm invisible, Peg," Freddie said. "Isn't that a bitch?"

He sounded so forlorn, so lost, that she couldn't help it, her heart went out to him. "Oh, come here, Freddie," she said, reaching out, finding his arm, pulling him close.

"I'm sorry, Peg," Freddie said, sliding in under the covers.

"It's not your fault," she said, arms around him, caressing him.

"Aw, thanks, Peg," Freddie said, and kissed her, and pretty soon they were heading back toward where they'd been going in the first place.

"One thing," Peg said, as Freddie's comforting weight settled upon her.

"What's that, Peg?"

"Don't turn on the light."

"Don't worry," Freddie said.

6

It's hard to service a body you can't see. Freddie's bathroom experiences in the morning were more complex than usual. Shaving turned out to be the easiest part of it — if maybe the least necessary, all things considered — since he was used to shaving in the shower, where he couldn't look at his face anyway. The worst, particularly in the shower, was that he could see through his eyelids. Now, when a person closes his eyes it's because he wants them closed. He doesn't want to see water spraying straight down from the shower fixture onto his eyeballs, and he certainly doesn't want to watch the soapy outline of knuckles, in extreme close-up, squidging deep into his eyes.

Still, he eventually finished, his towel swooping and swirling in what seemed to be an empty room, and came out to dress — shoes and socks and pants okay, but the polo shirt had these round openings for arms and neck, and nothing there — and by that time Peg was back. She'd taken one look at him this morning — or, rather, she'd taken one look at where she'd thought he might be, judging by the sounds he was making — and she'd said, "I don't need this, Freddie. I'll be right back." And off she'd gone.

And now she was back, in the kitchen, and when Freddie walked in she stood up from her breakfast of dry toast and black coffee, looked at the round openings in the polo shirt, and said, "I thought it was gonna be like that. I can't do anything about the hands, but there's your head." And she gestured at the butcher-block counter between the sink and the refrigerator.

Freddie went over to look. Peg had gone to one of those party-supply places, or tourist-junk places — whatever. And here on the butcher block were four full-head latex masks: Dick Tracy, Bart Simpson, Frankenstein's monster, and the Ayatollah Khomeini. Freddie said, "Khomeini?"

"It was marked down. The way I look at it," Peg said, "you've got kind of a mood thing there. You go through the day, you can decide who you feel like."

"If I ever feel like Frankenstein," Freddie said, "you better worry."

"I figure you'll mostly be Bart Simpson," Peg told him.

"Have a cow," Freddie agreed morosely, beginning to feel sorry for himself. He sighed, and said, "Peg, how do I eat through one of those?"

"I don't wanna know about it." Picking up her toast and coffee, she said, "I think we don't eat together anymore. I'll be in the living room. When you come in, be one of those fellas, okay?"

"Okay, Peg." Freddie sighed again. "Being an invisible guy," he said, "is kind of a lonely job, isn't it?"

Taking pity on him, Peg said, "Maybe it'll go away pretty soon."

"Maybe."

"Or we'll adapt, we'll get used to it."

"You think so?"

"Eat your breakfast, if you can find your mouth," Peg told him. "Then come in and we'll talk."

She left the kitchen, and Freddie poured orange juice and coffee, then popped a couple fake waffles into the toaster. Sitting alone at the small kitchen table, feeling more and more sorry for himself, he ate his breakfast, lifted his shirt to find out if he could still see the food he'd just eaten, and looked in at a bowl of succotash and soy sauce, without the bowl. Lowering the shirt and averting his gaze, he decided he wouldn't mention this part of the experience to Peg. Nor let her discover it for herself, if at all possible.

The visual replay of breakfast so discouraged him he almost went into the living room without his new head. In the doorway, in the nick of time, he remembered, and made a U- turn.

His choosing of Dick Tracy was a kind of self-therapy, an attempt to lighten his mood through the therapeutic use of comedy. He was a crook, see, and Dick Tracy was a cop. Get it? Well, it was a try.

Peg didn't help much. Looking up from Newsday, "Ah, the Dick head," she said.

"Thanks, Peg."

"That isn't what I meant. Sit down, Freddie, let's talk."

"It's hot inside here," Freddie complained, sitting in his favorite chair, across from the TV.

"If you want to talk to me," Peg told him, "you'll keep it on."

"I'm just saying." Whenever Freddie sighed, inside the latex mask, it ballooned slightly, as though Dick Tracy had recurring mumps.

Peg frowned at him, discontented. After a minute, she said, "Freddie, could you possibly put on a long-sleeve shirt?"

"This is becoming a pain," Freddie announced, but he obediently got up and went into the bedroom, coming back two minutes later in a long-sleeved blue work shirt with the cuffs turned back just once and the bottom of the Dick Tracy head tucked into the collar. "Okay?"

"Fine," Peg said. "I'm sorry to be a pest, Freddie, but I'm just not used to it yet. I'll get used to it, I really will, but it's gonna take time."

"Maybe we won't need a whole buncha time," Freddie suggested, sitting again in his favorite chair, constantly aware of the nothing just beyond his turned-back shirt cuffs. "Maybe it'll go away soon."

"Maybe."

"The sooner the better," Freddie said. "I wonder if I oughta go back to those doctors, make up some kinda deal, see have they got an antidote that works."

"That could be trouble, Freddie," Peg said. "If they had you arrested or something."

"Still. To get my, you know, my self back."

"Well, I've been thinking about that," Peg said, "and maybe this thing isn't such a tragedy after all."

"It's not a tragedy," Freddie agreed. "It's just a pain in the ass."

"Or maybe," Peg suggested, "an opportunity."

The Dick Tracy face gave her a skeptical look. "What kinda opportunity?"

"Well, what is it you do for a living?"

"Steal things."

"And if nobody can see you?"

Freddie thought about that. He rested Dick Tracy's chin on the heel of his invisible right hand, which looked worse than he knew, and he said, "Hmmmmm."

"You see what I mean," Peg said.

Freddie shifted position, nodded Dick Tracy's head, and said, "You mean, get naked and sneak into places."

"Yeah, that's right, you'd have to be naked, wouldn't you?"

"Warm places," Freddie decided. "Sneak into warm places. But then what?"

"Steal," Peg said.

"Steal what? I grab a handful of cash, I head for the door, people see this wad of cash floating through the air, they make a jump for it, what they grab is me."

"Too bad you don't have a, like a bag that's invisible, too."

"I got trouble enough with just me invisible."

"Well, it won't be all trouble, Freddie, will it?"

He sighed; Dick Tracy's mumps recurred. "What else is it, Peg? Look how I am."

"Well, I can't look how you are, can I?"

"That's part of the problem right there. And I have to sit around with my head inside this microwave oven here—"

"We'll punch airholes around the top."

"After I take it off."

"Okay," she said. "But, you know, Freddie, maybe we don't have to be so completely negative about this situation."

"Oh, no?" He waved his round empty sleeves at her. "You call this positive?"

"Possibly," she said, musing, thinking. "Possibly it's positive."

Freddie loved it when Peg thought. In the first place, she was so good at it, and in the second place, she looked so lovable while doing it. So he didn't interrupt, merely sat there, invisible inside his clothes and Dick Tracy head, and watched her think, and after a while he saw the slow smile of success spread across her face. "Yeah?" he said.

"Yeah," she said.

"Now it's all hunky-dory?"

"Not exactly" she said. "It's true there's still stuff we're gonna have to adapt to here, we both know that—"

"Like don't make love with the lights on."

"Don't remind me. But that isn't all there is to what's happened here, just problems and adaptations."

"No?"

"Freddie," she said, with a broad smile at Dick Tracy's latex-chiseled features, "it just might be, when we get used to it, invisibility, just maybe, it could be fun."

7

To be a tobacco-company lawyer is to know something of the darkness of the human heart. Little surprised Mordon Leethe, nothing shocked him, not much interested him, and there was nothing in life he loved, including himself.

A stocky heavy-shouldered man of fifty-six, Mordon Leethe had been a skinny six foot two when he'd played basketball all those years ago at Uxtover Prep, but caution and skepticism had worked on him like a heavy planet's gravity, compressing him to his current five foot ten, none of it muscle but all of it hard anyway, with tension and rage and disdain.

Mordon was going over the latest PAC regulations regarding corporate donations to political campaigns — he loved Congress; hookers defining how they'll agree to be fucked — when the phone rang. He picked it up, made a low sound like a warthog, and the voice of his secretary, Helen, a nice maternal woman lost in these offices, said in his ear, "Dr. Amory on two. R&D."

Helen was a good secretary. She knew her boss could not possibly keep in his mind the name and title of every person listed in his Rolodex, so whenever someone he wasn't used to was on the line, Helen would identify the caller when announcing the call. By just now saying, "R&D," she'd jogged Mordon Leethe's memory, reminding him that Dr. Archer Amory was head of NAABOR's research and development program, a three-pronged project that attempted to (1) prove that all proof concerning the health dangers of cigarette consumption is unproved; (2) find some other use for tobacco — insulation? optical fibers? — should worse come to worst; and (3) prepare for a potential retooling to marijuana, should that market ever open up.

Which of these R&D tines had led Dr. Archer to call an attorney? All Mordon Leethe knew was the equation: Doctor = bad news. Shrinking, condensing yet another tiny millimeter, he punched "2" without acknowledging Helen's words, and said, "'Morning, Doctor. How are things in the lab?"

"Well, the mice are still dying," said a hearty brandy-and-golf voice.

"I know that joke," Mordon said sourly. "The elephants are still alive, but they're coughing like hell."

"Really? That's a new one. Very funny."

It was really a very old one. Mordon said, "What is it today, Doctor?"

"You're going to be getting a visit from two of our independent-contractor researchers."

"Am I."

"Their names are—"

"Wait."

Mordon drew toward himself today's yellow pad, flipped to a new page, picked up his Mont Blanc Agatha Christie pen with the ruby-eyed snake on its clip, and said, "Now."

"Their names are Dr. David Loomis and Dr. Peter Heimhocker, and they—"

"Spell."

Amory spelled, then said, "I want to emphasize, these two are not employees of my division, nor in fact employees of NAABOR at all. They're independent contractors."

This is something very bad, Mordon thought. He said, "And what's their problem?"

"I'd rather they told you that themselves. When today would be a good time to see them?"

Very very bad. Mordon looked at his calendar. "Three o'clock," he said.

"Do keep me informed," Archer Amory said.

Fat chance. "Of course," Mordon said, and dropped the phone like a dead rat into its cradle.

Since it was dangerous for Mordon to drink at lunch — his real self kept trying to come out — he refrained, taking only Pellegrino water, which meant his mood in the afternoons was much worse than his mood in the mornings. Into this foul presence came the two doctors, at five minutes before the hour of three, tension in their every aspect. Mordon remarked their sexual proclivity without regard; he didn't dislike any human being more than any other human being. "Doctor Amory," he said, with slight savage emphasis on the title, "tells me you two have some sort of problem."

"We think we do," said Dr. Peter Heimhocker. This was the one Mordon had the most trouble looking at. White men in Afros are hard enough for normal people to take; for Mordon, after lunch, that fuzzy halo of black hair above that skinny pale face was practically incitement to amputation. Of the head.

The other one, Dr. David Loomis, looked at his partner with frightened outrage. "You think we do! Pee-ter!" He was the somewhat heavier one, a soft-bodied, earnestly petulant man with thinning hair on top, unnaturally blond.

Meanwhile, Heimhocker was saying, "David, do you mind?"

It was going to be necessary to look at Heimhocker. Looking at him, Mordon said, "Why not tell me what happened?"

While Heimhocker opened his skinny mouth and took a long deep breath, visibly gathering his thoughts, Loomis, in a sudden spasm of words, cried out, "We kidnapped a man and gave him an experimental formula and he got away!"

Mordon moved backward in his chair. "Did you say "kidnapped'?"

Heimhocker said, "David, let me. David, please." Then he turned to Mordon, saying, "I don't know how much Archer told you—"

"Pretend Dr. Amory told me nothing."

"All right. David and I run a small research facility here in New York. Last night, a burglar broke in, and we captured him. We're just at a point here — well — you don't want to know about our research."

Mordon drew a noose on the yellow pad.

Heimhocker at last went on. "Suffice it to say, we're just at the stage in our work where we need practical field results."

"Guinea pigs," Mordon translated, being well familiar with the creation of smoke-screen phrases.

"Well, yes," Heimhocker said, and coughed delicately. "Human guinea pigs, in point of fact."

"Volunteers," the fidgety Loomis volunteered. "Or prisoners in a state penitentiary. Also volunteers, of course."

Mordon drew fuzzy hair above the noose. "What is the subject of this research?"

"Melanoma."

Mordon stared. "What the fuck has that got to do with cigarettes?"

"Nothing!" cried Loomis, appalled, waving his hands in front of his face like a man afraid of bats.

Simultaneously, Heimhocker practically leaped to his feet as he shouted, "There has never been the slightest link! Never!"

Then Mordon understood, and came close to smiling, but refrained. "I see," he said, and did see. "So you tried your whatsit on this burglar, but he then escaped, and you want to know what your legal exposure might be."

"Well," Heimhocker said, "us, of course, but also the American Tobacco Research Institute."

Now Mordon did smile, not pleasantly. "Is that what NAABOR calls itself with you two? Dr. Amory assures me they've already cut you loose."

"What?"

Mordon said, "Let me explain the situation. If your problem turns out to be a simple matter, I will handle it for you, and charge my normal corporate client, NAABOR. But if it turns out to be a police matter, a matter of felonies, I will direct you to a colleague of mine who handles criminal cases, and you'll work out your arrangements directly with him."

Loomis breathed the words, "Criminal case?"

"The first question, I suppose," Mordon said, writing the number 1 on his pad and circling it, "is, What is the likelihood your stuff killed the fellow?"

"Killed him!" They stared at one another, and then Heimhocker said, "No, there should be nothing. I mean, nothing lethal."

"In one," Loomis said, "or the other, Peter. The combination, how do we know what that cocktail could do?"

"Not kill anybody," Heimhocker insisted, irritably. "We've been over this and over this, David."

Mordon said, "Cocktail? Would you explain?"

"The fact is," Heimhocker said, "we have two formulae. We gave the burglar one, but he got the idea—"

"We gave him the idea, Peter."

"All right, David, we gave him the idea." To Mordon he explained, a bit shamefacedly, "He thought the other one was some sort of antidote."

"And took it, is that what you're saying, on the way out?"

"Yes."

"And now he's somewhere in the world," Mordon summed up, "a felon, a burglar, not likely to consult a doctor or an emergency room, with two experimental medicines floating around inside him that you aren't absolutely totally sure what either of them would do, much less both."

"Not precisely, no," Heimhocker agreed, sounding defensive, "not before much more testing and—"

"Yes, yes, I'm not impugning your methodology," Mordon assured him. "At least, not before last night. What were these products of yours supposed to do?"

"Affect the pigment of the skin," Loomis said, eagerly, pinching his own pink forearm to demonstrate the concept skin.

"You mean it could give him a bad burn, something like that?"

"Oh, no, not at all," Loomis said, briskly shaking his head, and Heimhocker said, "Quite the reverse. The object is the elimination or alteration of pigment."

Mordon waited, but nothing more was forthcoming. At last he said, "Meaning?"

"Well, we've discussed this, David and I," Heimhocker said, "ever since it happened—"

"We had no sleep."

"No. And we talked it over and we think it's possible," Heimhocker went on, and cleared his throat, and said, "that the fellow is, at this point he might very well be, uh, well . . . invisible."

Mordon looked at them, at their serious frightened faces. He did not write anything on his pad. In fact, he put down the pen. "Tell me," he said, "more."

8

There are vans with many large windows all the way around, so the kids can look out on their way to Little League. And there are vans with a minimum of windows — windshield, and rectangles to both sides of the front seat — so the cops can't look in on its way to or from the felony. Freddie's van was of the latter type, with two seats in front, a floor gearshift between them, and a dark cavernous emptiness in back where an electrician would mount shelves but which Freddie kept bare because he was never exactly sure what size object he might want to put back there. The van had two rear doors (windowless) that opened outward like the library doors in a serious play, plus a wide sliding door on the right side in case he ever desired to steal a stove. The floor in back was carpeted with stubbly gray AstroTurf, and the bulb was gone from the interior light.

Bay Ridge is one of the more crime-free neighborhoods of Brooklyn, mostly because it is populated by so many hot-headed ethnics who take crime personally and who in any case like to beat up on people. Therefore, most residents leave their vehicles parked at the curb, no problem. But Freddie felt about his van much the way he felt about Peg, and he wouldn't leave Peg at the curb, so he'd worked out an inexpensive rental arrangement for space in the parking lot next to the neighborhood firehouse, where the firepersons kept their own private vehicles and where nobody messed around.

This morning, after their separate breakfasts, Peg took the keys and walked the two blocks to this firehouse, waved to a couple of the persons sitting around on folding chairs out front enjoying the spring sunshine and the spring clothing on the persons passing by — they waved back, knowing Peg and Freddie and the van all went together as a package — then got the van and drove it back to their apartment building. Usually Freddie did the driving, but Peg had taken a shot at the wheel several times before this, and was used to the stick shift on the floor.

What she wasn't used to was Freddie, not like this. She pulled up in front of the building, and out came a tall Bart Simpson, in normal shirt and pants and shoes, but with weird peach-colored hands that were actually Playtex kitchen gloves. Not being a kitchen sort of person, and so not used to Playtex kitchen gloves, Freddie had a little trouble at first opening the passenger door of the van, but then he got it, and got in, and said, "Peg, these gloves are hotter than the mask."

"Keep them on," Peg advised, and drove away before anybody in the neighborhood could get a good look at her traveling companion.

"We'll go to Manhattan," Freddie said. "Nobody looks weird there because everybody looks weird there."

"Well, you're sure gonna test that theory," Peg said. "You know, Freddie, I didn't notice it in the apartment, but in this little space here, when you talk, you sound kind of muffled."

"Well, no wonder," Freddie said. "I'm inside this condom here."

"Poor Freddie," Peg said, and concentrated on her driving.

There were some looks from surprised other drivers while they were stopped at red lights along the way, but not enough to be real trouble. Freddie sat well back in the passenger seat, usually with his face turned toward Peg — or Bart's face, actually — and anyway it was pretty dim inside the van, so probably the worst the nosy parkers in the other cars could say, to themselves or their fellow travelers, was, "That's a weird-looking guy," or, "That weird-looking guy looks familiar," or, "Doesn't that weird-looking guy look like Bart Simpson?" And even if somebody said, aloud, in the privacy of his or her own vehicle, "There's a guy in that car in a Bart Simpson mask," so what? They sell them, don't they? For people to wear, don't they? So what's the problem?

They took the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel — well, what else would you do? — and once they were in the tunnel Freddie said, "Time for me to get ready." He clambered through the space between the seats, into the empty rear of the van, sat down on the floor back there, and began to unwrap himself.

Since the van was without back windows, it had only exterior rearview mirrors, for which Peg was now grateful. It meant she couldn't see her guy gradually disappear. Nevertheless, it was startling, just before they left the tunnel at the Manhattan end, when what was clearly a forearm rested on the back of the driver's seat and Freddie's voice just behind her right ear said, "All set," but when she turned her head for a quick look, there was nobody in the van except her, and nothing back there but a crumpled pile of clothes on the floor.

The sudden adrenaline rush made her veer too close to the cab on her left, which yawped in angry response. Pulling back into her own lane, emerging from the tunnel into sunlight — even Manhattan gets sunlight, some days — Peg said, "Neaten up those clothes, Freddie, you're gonna have to put that stuff back on."

"You're right," said the voice, and the forearm left her seatback, and she heard but did not turn around to watch Freddie's clothing arrange itself more neatly in a rear corner.

"Where do I go from here?" Peg asked, since big green signs dead ahead were giving her a number of choices, and not much time to make one.

"West Side," Freddie's voice said. From the sound of it, he was now leaning on the back of the passenger seat, and when Peg glanced over there, yes, that was the indentation of his arm. This, she thought, not for the first time, is going to take some getting used to.

Peg took the West Side Highway, Freddie's disembodied voice telling her to bear to the right at Twenty-third Street and then make the right turn onto Forty-second Street, which she did, only then saying, "Where we going, Freddie?"

"West Forty-seventh. The diamond district."

"Oh, yeah?" Peg was pleased. "I've never been there."

"Neither have I," Freddie said. "At least, not in the daytime."

9

There are a couple of centers of the wholesale diamond trade in New York City, one down by the Manhattan Bridge and the other on West Forty-seventh Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Diamonds are the principal business of this block, but they also deal in other precious stones, and gold and silver, and platinum, and whatever else is small and shiny and very very valuable. Here entire buildings are given over to the buyers and sellers of costly stone and metal, all seated at the small wood-and-glass tables under the extremely bright lights, protected by layer after layer of security, negotiating in Yiddish or Dutch or Japanese or Boer or Portuguese or Bantu or even, if all else fails, English. Millions of dollars in value change hands on this block, not every month, not every day, but every minute, most of the transactions handled by somewhat shabby-looking people who seem to take no pleasure from riches or even the idea of riches but only from the process itself. They don't live to make money, they live to make deals, and they've gotten pretty good at it.

When Peg made the turn from Seventh Avenue, Freddie could sense it already, the buzz and stir of furious life all up and down the block. There's something here for me, Freddie thought, as he often did, adrenaline surging, and as usual it was a happy thought. "Park anywhere, Peg," he said.

Peg gave the air around him a caustic look, then turned her attention back to the street, lined solidly on both sides with parked trucks, vans, station wagons, and sedans armed with company names on their doors. (A civilian vehicle would be eaten alive on this block.) "Oh, sure," she said. "How about on top of that cable-company van?"

"Whatever works for you, Peg," Freddie said. He was too excited by the street to worry about details. The bowl of succotash and soy sauce (without the bowl) was gone now, happily digested, and he was ready to roll.

Midway down the block, on the right, stood a fire hydrant. A roofing company truck was parked next to it, of course, but whatever had recently blocked the rest of the legal clearance must have just this minute left, so Peg slid in there, backed and filled into the tiny space, and at last said, "There."

"Leave the motor on and switch on the blinker lights," Freddie advised. "That way you're not parked, you're stopped. And I tell you what, Peg. After a few minutes, move over to the passenger seat here. When I knock on the window, you open it, okay?"

"How will I know it's you?"

"Because you won't see me, Peg," Freddie said. "If you see somebody, don't open it. If you don't see somebody, it's me."

"Of course," Peg said. "I'm sorry, Freddie, the traffic got me rattled."

"S'okay. Close the door after me, okay?"

The side door of the van opened on the curb side. Freddie slid it slowly back, sorry for once there wasn't a window in it so he could see exactly what was just outside there, and when it was ajar barely enough he wriggled through and stood silent a moment, back against the van, checking it all out, while Peg reached over to slide the door shut.

The first thing Freddie didn't like was the sidewalk. It wasn't what you would call clean. It was also crowded with people, rushing, scurrying, sidestepping, side-slipping people. Tall skinny black messengers with many-shaped packages strapped to their backs; black-coated and black-hatted Hasidim, some pushing wheeled black valises; short round Puerto Rican file clerks in Day-Glo clothing; tourists from Germany and Japan, gawping at what might have been theirs; MBAs in their last suit, looking for work; lawyers and process servers and bill collectors, sniffing the air as they prowled; white-collar workers taking fifteen minutes to do an hour of errands; Central American delivery boys with white aprons, bearing cardboard trays of paper cups; cops and rental cops and undercover cops, all eyeing one another with deep suspicion; mail-persons and United Parcel persons and FedEx persons hurrying past one another, pretending the other persons didn't exist; druggies visiting Terra in search of supplies; and the homeless with their empty cups, trying against all the odds to get at least a little attention, if not sympathy, from this heedless throng.

All those bodies in motion formed a constantly changing woven fabric, a six-foot-high blanket of rolling humanity, and it was now Freddie's job to weave himself horizontally through this fabric, slipping through the weft and warp without any of the textile becoming aware of his existence; to be, in short, the ultimate flea. To do all of that, and to do it successfully, would require every bit of his concentration, leaving nothing for the careful self-protective study of this dubious sidewalk that the surface really deserved. Freddie knew his bare feet were just going to have to get along as best they could.

Freddie took one tentative step away from the van, and here came hurtling two hooky-playing kids in big sneakers, waving cigarettes and laughing at each other's dumb jokes. Freddie dodged them, but then almost ran into a guy carrying a roll of tarpaper on his shoulder, coming out of the roofing-company truck. A rollout in the other direction put Freddie in the path of three middle-aged Japanese women, marching arm in arm, cameras dangling down their fronts, forming a phalanx as impenetrable as the Miami Dolphins' defensive line.

Freddie recoiled, back against the cool side of the van, heart beating, doubt rising to the surface of his brain. This mob was dangerous. It was true they rarely crashed violently into one another, hardly did anything worse than the occasional shoulder bump, but that was because they could see one another and take whatever minimal evasive action might be necessary to avoid a head-on collision. But they couldn't see Freddie, and would have no notion of getting out of his way or even accounting for his presence on the sidewalk. They would tromp his toes, knee him in the groin, elbow him in the breadbasket, and pound their foreheads into his nose, all without ever having the slightest clue that his toes, groin, bread-basket, or nose were anywhere in the vicinity.

Maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all. Maybe what he needed was someplace quiet, uncrowded. But then, when he tried to move the loot, he would be noticeable. Still, the question was, how to deal with this never-ending crowd?

As Freddie stood there, pressed against the side of the van, staring at the surge of people and trying to figure out his next move, if any, a United Parcel guy bumped into him on his way past and kept going without even a backward glance to see what he'd hit. Coming the other way, a pale overweight tourist skipped out of the United Parcel guy's path and would have run head-on into Freddie if Freddie hadn't automatically fended him off with an elbow. The tourist threw some words in some language over his shoulder, perhaps an apology, and kept going.

Wait a minute. It was true the people couldn't see Freddie, but in fact they weren't really seeing anybody, except as necessary to avoid full-scale collisions. If Freddie were to bob and weave just enough to keep the jostling to a minimum, no one would even notice there was an invisible man in their midst.

Well, it was a theory worth testing. Freddie's goal was a narrow building, six stories high, just a few doors back up the block, with the words DIAMOND EXCHANGE among other words in gold on its bullet-proof glass display window. A truly homicidal-looking black security guard in a brown uniform sat on a stool behind the showcases in this window, looking out at the world like a fish-store cat, daring anybody to try to come in and take any of these goodies away. Beside this window, a locked black iron gate led to a small square vestibule and a solid door, and then who knew?

From time to time a person would approach this building, pause at the gate, and ring the bell beside it. He would then speak into the microphone grill set between gate and window. The security man in the window would engage him in suspicious conversation, would eye him with carnivorous hostility, and at last grudgingly the new arrival would be admitted. Sometimes two people showed up together, and while Freddie watched there was even a trio allowed in all at once, which meant there was certainly going to be room in that vestibule and those doorways for one entrant accompanied all unknowing by an unseen stranger.

The unseen stranger, at last emboldened to make his move, waited till he saw a black-coated, black-hatted, black-bearded, spit-curled skinny fellow who looked to be about seventeen approach DIAMOND EXCHANGE and ring the bell; then he pushed away confidently from the van, tiptoed rapidly across the iffy sidewalk, caromed off two or three pedestrians who merely kept on truckin', and reached the iron gate just as the nasty little buzzer began to sound. The skinny fellow in black pulled at the gate, it opened, he stepped through and the unseen stranger zipped through behind him, close enough to smell the combination of Palmolive soap and old wool coat that was his new associate's personal scent.

The iron gate very nearly nipped Freddie's heels and right elbow, but he scrinched himself just in time. The gate snicked. The inner door buzzed. Freddie and his dancing partner did it again.

He was inside. Here, Freddie and his new friend parted company, the skinny fellow in black moving purposefully across the floor toward a narrow door to what appeared to be a very narrow elevator, where he pushed another button, and waited, while Freddie didn't move forward at all, but pressed his naked back against the cool side wall, and took a moment to case the joint.

He was in a long narrow room, about twenty-five feet wide by sixty feet long, illuminated by a ceiling composed almost entirely of fluorescent tubes. Down both sides and down the middle of this space were three long rows of booths, waist-high cubicles separating each dealer and his desk and safe and display case from the dealers on either side. Armless wooden chairs for the customers stood outside each cubicle, facing in. Customers and security people moved up and down the two aisles, everybody constantly looking at everything. In their compartments, the dealers haggled, or read in little books, or talked on their telephones, or added up strings of numbers, or looked at tiny stones through their loupes.

Across the way, the elevator arrived, and was very small indeed. In that elevator, two was a crowd. A crowd of two emerged from it, shrugging their shoulders and adjusting their clothing after the unwelcome proximity of the ride, and Freddie's former friend boarded in lonely splendor to ride up — or possibly down — to some other selling floor.

There was a kind of loose unofficial flow to the movement in the long room; it mostly went counterclockwise, from the door here at the front right, then on back to the rear, then across to the left aisle, and thus back to the front again. Occasional customers swam briefly upstream, moving from one dealer to the next, but most of the traffic was one-way.

Fine by Freddie. He joined the throng, moving along at the general pace, tucking in close to one person or another, so as not to be bumped into from behind. And as he walked, he looked.

Jewels. Blue sapphires, green emeralds, red rubies. Blue turquoise, green jade, red garnet. Purple amethyst, black onyx, violet alexandrite. Opalescent girasol, creamy chalcedony, pearls of a thousand shades of white.

But what Freddie cared about, and only what he cared about, were the diamonds. Winking and blinking under the glass counters, nestling in clusters or in solitary grandeur on trays of felt, tumbled like sprays of magic moondust from palm to palm; little hard concentrations of light, colorless yet filled with color, prismatic, faceted, tiny, fabulous.

Freddie made one circuit of the place, getting used to it, getting used to himself in this new format, and by the time he got back to the front he was so comfortable, so at ease, so sure of himself, that he even tapped the homicidal sentry on the arm on the way by. The guard's head swung around, he looked, saw no one, and brushed away the nonexistent fly.

Freddie had his target picked out. On the left side, near the front, two dealers were dealing with one another as well as with a customer seated in front of one of them. The dealers would stand to speak across the cubicle wall at one another, then sit, then stand to hand across a tray of stones or take them back. The customer looked, discussed, moved back and forth between the two dealers. It had been going on for some time, it looked as though a lot of money was going to be involved once the deal was finally set, and the three thus engaged in the transaction were deeply engrossed in what they were doing.

Also, there were these factors: The site was not far from the front door. It was on the left side, where the movement of the customers was toward the front. And near the right elbow of the dealer nearest the front were several trays of small exquisite diamonds.

Freddie made a second circuit, partly to go with the flow and partly to keep an eye open for other opportunities, either to be accepted now or at some later time. But nothing better attracted his eye, not for this excursion, so when he came around to those two dealers once more, he tucked in next to the empty chair in front of the dealer on the right, leaned against the front of the cubicle, listened to the foreign languages going off all around him like popcorn, and waited for just the right customer to come along. He'd already spotted her, and now merely had to wait.

Most of the people in this room, but not all, were men, from sallow sharp-nosed teenagers to wrinkled heavy-jowled ancients. Most, but not all, were professionals, the customers as much as the dealers, the customers being also dealers in their own right, with shops or private clients. The few civilians in here were rich people being courted by a particular jeweler, who had emphasized their special status by bringing them here to this wholesale trading floor. The civilians could be told at once from the dealers: they were eager, their attention was not sharply focused, and they were well dressed. (The few female dealers tended to scowl a lot, and to wear very expensive tasteful jewelry with brown or black silk dresses.)

There was one civilian Freddie had particularly in mind to help him make his move out of this place, and here she comes now. Accompanied by a tall suave pale man in black whose languages seemed to include Dutch, Yiddish, German, French, and a heavily Dutch-accented English, she was a compact woman in her fifties, as round and solid as a beer keg, with madly curled hair the color of Pepto-Bismol and clothing so bright and sparkly you could read by her. This woman had either at one time been the toast of Broadway or with the help of a therapist had raised a submerged false memory of having been the toast of Broadway. Her whiskey voice was large, the gestures of her jeweled hands larger, her enthusiasms strong enough to knock over a horse. As she made the circuit of the sales floor, she would point, cry out, bend to study, rear back to gain perspective, and all the while her companion would speak to the dealers in his languages, consult briefly with the woman in his broken-spring English, and make notes in a small pad, sometimes handing a memo to a dealer on the way by.

Here was Freddie's escort. Of course, if this woman and her companion decided to take the elevator to some other floor, it could make an awkward moment for Freddie, but sometimes you just have to take a chance, and this was one of those times. (It seemed to Freddie, in any case, that for the Toast of Broadway, after this appearance, the only possible exit was grandly out the front door to the public street, not meekly into a tiny elevator box.)

Here she was, with her tall man. Nothing at the counters of Freddie's two dealers interested her. She barely slowed, turned her cotton-candy head to look at the dealer on the other side of the aisle, and kept going. Freddie watched her feet. If she'll take the elevator, that foot will angle to the right . . . now.

It didn't. Relieved and excited, with the woman past him, about four feet away toward the front door, Freddie reached with both hands to the trays of diamonds, made a double dip, and scampered. The dealer who'd just been robbed, deep though he was in tense negotiation, nevertheless caught movement from the corner of his eye, looked quickly around, frowned, stared this way and that, then had his attention snagged by something the other dealer said, and turned back.

Freddie meanwhile had tucked in close behind the Toast of Broadway, holding his double-fist of diamonds close to the back of her glittery sparkly dress. Gazing at these rocks from above, and up close, Freddie could clearly see that he'd done well. He smiled as he looked down at the diamonds floating there, inside his invisible hands. For anybody else in the room, involved as they all were in their own concerns, the diamonds would be barely visible, if at all, against the shiny statement of that dress. So long as they kept moving . . .

The woman halted, barely ten feet from the door. Freddie damn near ran right into her, but stopped himself just in time, teetering off balance. "That aquamarine," the woman said, with the plaintive loudness of someone bemoaning the loss of a loved one.

The tall pale man bent over her. "No, no, Marlene," he said, soothingly, "I don't tink so. Dot flaw—"

"Couldn't it be set so we could hide . . ."

This was going to go on. Now that the woman was not moving, and with that security guard so damn close, these diamonds would soon become noticeable. Freddie looked all around, becoming desperate, and near the front door he spied a fairly large trash can with an open top and black plastic liner. It was just a few feet away. Freddie leaped over there, stuck his hands down in among all the papers and plastic cups, and waited while the woman and her guide continued to discuss whether or not the flawed aquamarine was worth a return visit.

This was a bad situation. Of course, Freddie could merely open his hands and permit the diamonds to fall away into the trash, then saunter off unseen to try again, but he was so close. If only this woman would forget the aquamarine, just forget it.

In the meantime, people were coming in and going out, many of them brushing very close to Freddie. He didn't dare tuck in behind any of those exiting black coats, not with these handfuls of electric light, to stand out against the black like moons in the night sky.

At last, the tall pale man's views prevailed. He and the gaudy woman moved forward, and as they passed Freddie he yanked his hands out of the trash, causing a minor volcano in there, and put them back close to the woman's dress, where they belonged. (The Security guard glared briefly at the trash can, knowing something had happened but not sure what.)

But now there was a real problem. Three in the vestibule was a rather tight squeeze, and the security arrangements here included that the street-side gate, which opened outward, would not work until the inner door, which opened inward, was closed. Also, the tall pale man, being a gentleman, held the inner door open for the lady, then followed her through the doorway, much too close for Freddie to sandwich in between. Freddie had to duck under the gentleman's door-holding arm, scoot through the narrow space between the gentleman's left leg and the closing door, hold the glittery little sausages of diamond right down at floor level, and remain hunkered in the same position in the corner until the door closed and the gate opened.

The woman had some sort of problem getting through the gate. She stuttered and skipped, the tall pale man backed up, Freddie bounced off him, and the man turned to frown directly into Freddie's face from one foot away. Then the woman called something and the man turned back, expression bewildered and dissatisfied as he moved forward through the gate to the sidewalk, where he promptly and firmly slammed the gate shut before Freddie could get through.

Well, shit. That was vindictive. Freddie stood there, looking out at the sidewalk, but there was nothing to be done, no way to got out there until someone else came along, to persuade the guard to hit that button. In the meantime, waiting, Freddie stood with his hands in the corner next to the hinged side of the gate, hiding the diamonds from passersby, while nothing at all happened for minute after minute.

Come on, will ya? Somebody's got to pass through here, in or out, either way. In the meantime, since this was merely an iron-barred gate that the breeze (if not Freddie) could go through, he was beginning to get a little chilly (June is June, but naked is naked), while the bottoms of his feet were chafed and sore (who knew what they might have picked up?) and his hands were tired of making fists. Looking catty-corner through the gate, he could see the van down there, just beyond the fire hydrant and the roofing-company truck, and from time to time he could even see Peg move her head inside there, looking back, wondering how he was doing, looking for him even though she knew she wouldn't be able to see him.

A customer. An Arab, in a white head towel and a long gleaming gray robe. He had appeared just outside the gate and stopped to press the button there.

Freddie looked at him, and his heart sank. This was a large Arab, a hugely fat man who, in the pearly gray robe, looked mostly like a diving bell. He would fill this damn vestibule all by himself. How was Freddie to get by him and out of here?

The hell with it, that was how. The nasty buzzer sounded, but before the Arab could pull on the gate Freddie pushed against it, shoving it out forcefully, holding it wide open as he sidled through between the iron bars and the very large customer.

Who looked at the door in surprise, and then in pleasure. An innovation, since last he was here! A self-opening door, as in the supermarket! Very good!

Smiling, the Arab entered the vestibule, as Freddie released the door and ran for the van, juking and jinking through the broken field of pedestrians, his hands with their packs of diamonds held down at his sides at thigh level, where people were not likely to be looking when he went by. And when that Arab left DIAMOND EXCHANGE, he'd probably whomp his big belly a good one against that gate when it didn't open, wouldn't he? Ah, well.

Freddie reached the van. He bunked the window with his elbow bone, not wanting to raise a visible cluster of diamonds to window height, and inside he saw Peg leap, startled, then stare at him — through him, around him — and push the button to lower the window.

Freddie turned to the van and raised his hands. He knew there was no point in shielding the movement with his body, it was just habit; nevertheless, he shielded the movement with his invisible body as he lifted both hands, stuck them through the open window, and dropped a lot of diamonds onto Peg's lap. "Yike!" Peg said.

Passersby would have seen, if anything, a flash, come and gone. "Hide them," Freddie advised.

Peg brushed at her lap with both hands, while saying, "Should I open the side door?"

"Not yet." She couldn't see him grin, but he grinned anyway. Maybe she'd be able to hear the grin in his voice. "I'm not done," he said.

She stared toward his voice, which meant that actually she looked at his mouth. "Freddie? Why not?"

Now that all the disasters had been avoided, now that he'd been freed from the vestibule, now that no one had seen the floating diamonds and grabbed him by the wrist, Freddie was feeling a sudden elation. The 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 — "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, alarms, razor wire, and two Doberman pinschers who were never fed quite enough.

Upstairs — you got up there through a door at the right front of the building, next to the two big wide green accordion-metal overhead garage doors — were Jersey Josh's apartment, office, and storage area. Some of the restaurant-supply company's security measures also protected his space, but in addition to that he had his own double layer of doors at the foot of the stairs, both metal, both wired for a variety of things, including a disagreeable but probably not fatal electric shock should you insert anything at all into any of those inviting-looking keyholes.

The stairs themselves were steep and narrow, so that only one person could ascend at a time. The door at the head of the stairs was also metal, and contained a peephole for looking through, a slit for shooting through, and a small hinged openable panel for accepting pizzas through.

Behind this door was a large living room with two natural brick walls and two plaster walls painted a kind of dirty white. These weren't dirty walls, these were walls painted a specific white only found in New York City, variously known as landlord white or cockroach white; it goes on gray and drab, and therefore will always look the way it does the first day it's spread, and so it doesn't have to be repainted as often as walls painted more esthetically pleasing colors.

The furnishings here are, you might say, eclectic, since everything was bought from thieves, including the saggy green sofa, all the lamps (he paid a premium, three dollars, for the table lamp that represents a Moor in a turban and scimitar and wide lavender pants), and the rug on the floor, on which can clearly be seen the traffic patterns of its previous owners.

Almost no one penetrates deeper into Jersey Josh's domain than the living room, but then, almost no one except police with warrants would want to. His bathroom is large and contains a big old clawfoot tub (stolen), but is otherwise unspeakable, as is his kitchen. His bedroom is as large as his living room, and furnished out of the same back doors. The floor-length mirror on its farthest wall is actually a door, leading to Jersey Josh's business space: a room with a desk and two safes, plus several rooms of watches, fur coats, TV sets, and SaladShooters. At the farthest end is the wall-less ancient elevator for which only he has the key, used to bring larger goods up or send shipments down for resale to dealers from Pennsylvania and Maine.

When Jersey Josh uses this elevator, it descends into a cage on the first floor, which separates his realm from the territory of the restaurant-supply company; always, when he and the elevator lower into that cage, the Doberman pinschers are there, slavering, in such a frenzy to tear his flesh they bite the bars of the cage. Good-humoredly, Jersey Josh spits at them and makes obscene gestures in their direction, before turning to open the overhead garage door which only he can operate without electrocution, and which leads to a side alley, where the customers await, with their trucks.

Usually, Jersey Josh was content in this comfy little nest he'd carved for himself from the cold heart of the city, but tonight he was to have a lady visitor, and tonight he wasn't sure the place was absolutely up to snuff. He fussed around, dusting the Moor, running water in the bathtub to redistribute the grease in there, spraying the rooms with an aerosol product that was supposed to make them smell like a mountain glade but which in fact gave them an odor strongly reminiscent of an Eastern European chemical plant. But it was the best he could do.

Also, there was his personal self. Short, heavyset, out of condition, with long lank gray hair and a deeply lined face the exact color of Egyptian mummies, Jersey Josh was not at the best of times easy to look at, and his best of times had been some decades ago. Nevertheless, when he was ready — seven-thirty, half an hour early, agog with anticipation — and looked at himself in his mirror/secret door, he saw an image that did not displease him totally. Wasn't there something of Henry Kissinger in his stance, a soupзon of Ari Onassis in the debonair tilt of his brow? If he were a little taller, couldn't he give Tip O'Neill a run for the money? Wasn't there more than a trace of Ed Meese in his whole self-confident air?

7:32. Jersey Josh put Blue Nun on ice, Centerspread Girls in the VCR ready to roll, and sat down to wait.

8:04. Doorbell. Josh jolted awake from a warm dream. Doorbell. The lady. Right.

He struggled out of the saggy sofa, wiping drool from his chin, and lumbered across the room to push the intercom button: "R?"

"It's Peg, uh . . . Peg."

Female. Young. Nervous. Check, check, and check. "S," Josh said, and pushed admittance button number one. Then he peered through the peephole in the upstairs door, and didn't push button number two until he heard her thud into the interior door down there, expecting it to open. Push. Open.

In she came, holding the door open a long time down there, as though thinking she might turn around and go back after all. She even muttered to herself, showing more of the nervousness he liked, then looked up toward his door, and at last released the door down there and started up the stairs.

Nice. Good-looking, but not a real beauty, not enough to scare a person. Good strong legs, coming up those steep stairs. Good long fingers holding the rail. Nice round head, slowly rising toward him.

He didn't make her ring the bell at the top, the way he did with most people, including the pizza kid. Instead, just as she reached the last step he opened his final door, smiled at her in a way he hoped wouldn't show his teeth too much, and said, "I."

"Hello," she said, blinking at him, taken aback. She almost seemed to lose her balance for a second in the doorway, maybe from the long climb, causing her to lean against the door, opening it more widely than normal, while Josh automatically resisted, gripping the knob. Then she got her footing again and smiled a little shakily and went past him into the living room.

Josh closed the door, metal door chacking into metal frame with a satisfying finality. He turned to see his guest surveying his room, so he took the opportunity to survey her, the black shoes, black slacks, black spring coat, the blond hair, the little winks of gold at her earlobes. "S'just my place," he said, shrugging, sorry to hear himself apologize for it.

She turned and smiled at him; nice teeth, better than his. "It's very individual," she said. Inside the black coat was a bit of white blouse, moving with her breath.

"S." He smiled back, forgetting about his teeth till he saw her look at them, then quickly stopped smiling, but was still pleased, no longer unhappy about his living room. "Take your coat," he said. She frowned at that, and he hurriedly added, "No, no, I'll give it back!"

That made her smile again. "I know you would," she said. "But I'm a little . . . chilly, I guess. I'll keep it on."

Disappointed, he said, "OK," then gestured at the sofa: "Siddown?"

"I'll sit here," she said, and took the wooden chair off to the side, on which somebody long ago had painted, pretty poorly, some Amish hex signs.

"But," Josh said, as she sat on the hex signs, "you can't see the TV!"

She looked at him. "So what?"

"Well." His imaginings scrambled in his brain. He motioned at the VCR atop the TV. "You could watch a movie."

"No, I'll just sell you these things," she said, taking a white tube sock from her coat pocket. The sock was clean, and had red bands around the top. Softening the rejection, she said, "Freddie's waiting for me at home. He's pretty sick, you know."

"He said leg."

"That's right, it went to his leg! He told you that, did he? I guess you and Freddie are pretty good friends."

"Pretty good," Josh agreed. How could he ask this woman to go to bed with him? What were the exact words, to go from here to there? Did he have anything he could put in a drink, knockout drops? Maybe roach poison, he had plenty of that around here. Or maybe he could just hit her on the head when her back was turned, do what he wanted, and then when she woke up he'd say she tripped or something, knocked herself out, and she'd never know anything at all had happened.

Meanwhile, she was holding the damn tube sock, saying, "Where should I put all this?"

"What's in?" he asked her, reluctant to engage in the wrong conversation.

"Diamonds. Some other jewels, too, but mostly diamonds. All unset."

"Sit there," he said, pointing again to the sofa. Then he pointed to the coffee table — kidney-shape avocado-colored Formica — and said, "Put 'em there. I'll get wine."

"I don't need any wine," the damn woman said, and extended the sock toward him, dangling it in the air like some damn scrotum, as though to make fun of him, smiling at him but not getting to her feet, not coming forward, not letting him get his hands on her at all. "Here, you do it," she said.

Grumpy, stymied, Josh snatched the sock from her hand, sat himself down on the sofa, and emptied the sock onto the coffee table.

Well, well. Unquenchable lust for the moment forgotten, Josh stared at the little mountain of diamonds, like the world's richest pile of cocaine, with here and there a dozen other kinds of gems visible on its slopes. Small stones, mostly, but choice.

Jersey Josh knew his business, you could say that much for him. He would check and double-check, but he already knew what he was looking at here. Somewhat over a hundred thousand dollars in gems, unset, untraceable. Probably not so much as a hundred and a half, but certainly more than a hundred.

Since Jersey Josh and Freddie Noon had done business together for quite a while, Freddie normally would get the favored rate, which was ten cents on the dollar, which would be ten thousand in cash for this pile of crystallized carbon here. But that wasn't Freddie Noon over there, was it? That was a lady Jersey Josh didn't know, who wouldn't sit with him on the sofa, who wouldn't look at a movie with him, who wouldn't drink any of his Blue Nun, who almost certainly would not have sex with him without a struggle, and bad feeling from everybody afterward. Ten thousand dollars would this lady not get.

"Minute," Josh said, palmed a couple diamonds, and got to his feet to go into the bedroom and get his jeweler's loupe, pausing to drop the diamonds into a dresser drawer and to pat his hair a couple times in front of the mirror.

A sound like a giggle came from the other room; was she loosening up, this woman? Josh lumbered back to the living room, and she was seated as before, knees together, arms folded, with her head bent forward now and shaking back and forth as she muttered something or other, then stopped when she saw he'd returned.

Woman talks to herself. Prays? Giggles. Maybe Josh'd be better off, have nothing to do with this woman, could be crazy. Nothing worse than a crazy woman. So loud.

Sitting up straighter, hands now in her lap, the woman said, "Did you bring those diamonds back?"

He stared at her. She could not have seen him palm them, could not. "What diamonds?" he asked.

"The ones you carried into the other room," she said, cool, calm, and collected.

He was rattled, but he shook his head anyway, and clamped his jaws tight shut.

She smiled easily at him, and as though to give him an out, she said, "I figured, maybe you wanted to weigh them or something."

"Did not," Josh said.

She considered him, then looked around, and pointed at the phone. "Should I call Freddie?"

A confrontation with Freddie Noon? Bad idea. Josh snapped his fingers, as though suddenly realizing what she was talking about; it wasn't much of a snap. "Weigh them," he agreed.

"I thought so," she said.

Feeling put-upon, Josh sat on the sofa again, in front of the little stack of diamonds. He screwed the loupe into his right eye, put a few of the stones in his right palm, studied them one by one.

Nice, very nice. Good quality. Excellent resale value. "Not so good," he said.

"Oh, sure they're good," the woman said, unruffled.

She was very annoying. Josh dropped the diamonds back onto the table, lifted his eyebrow to drop the loupe into his now-empty palm, and looked at her. "I know diamonds," he said.

"So does Freddie."

Hmm, yes. Whatever he gave this woman, she would take back to her friend Freddie, whose leg illness, whatever it might be, wouldn't last forever. Freddie Noon had for some time been a good source for Josh, and from the look of these diamonds Freddie was just now hitting his stride as a source.

Then there was the woman herself, named Peg; why make her angry or irritable? If she goes to bed with cheap burglars, why wouldn't she go to bed with Jersey Josh Kuskiosko?

All right. Time to lighten up. Taking a deep breath, Josh aimed an utterly false smile at . . . Peg . . . and said, "Peg."

She looked perky and alert. "Yes?"

"Wait," he announced, and heaved himself to his feet. At her look of surprise, he patted the air as though in reassurance, repeated, "Wait," and waddled off to his unspeakable kitchen, where he not only took the Blue Nun out of the refrigerator, but also the cheese spread he'd put in there last Christmas after nobody showed up. He gave it the sniff test — still fine. Crackers, crackers, crackers, here they are.

Speaking of crackers, the woman was muttering to herself in the other room again. Josh could hear her. That's okay, that's okay. Maybe crazy women aren't so bad, maybe they're better in bed, more . . . uninhibited. Josh tried to imagine what an uninhibited woman in his bed would be like, and had to lean briefly against the drainboard until the image faded. Then he opened the Blue Nun — the tock of the cork coming out silenced the muttering in the other room — chose his two least unspeakable glasses, put everything on an unspeakable tray, and carried it all to the living room, where he smiled at . . . Peg . . . as she looked at him in some surprise, gazing in particular at the wine bottle as he bore the tray across the room and put it down on the coffee table next to the little alp of diamonds.

"Oh, you shouldn't," Peg said.

"Peg," Josh repeated. His instinct told him, if you say her name, she'll think you care about her. About her.

She shook a finger at him, with a smile to show she was only teasing. "If you think," she said, "you can get me drunk so I'll take less money, you're wrong."

Well, that was one reason, of course. Josh smirked as he poured into the two glasses, and extended the cleaner one toward her. "Both drunk," he said.

"Well, that's fair," she admitted, and took the glass, and even held it up while he clinked his against it.

He drank down half a glass of the cold stuff, while she held the glass to her lips. Then he put down the wine and gestured at the cheese and crackers. "Eat," he suggested.

"Oh, I'm on a diet," she told him, putting her glass on the floor beside the Amish chair. "I have to watch my figure, you know."

There was some sort of clever response to that, he knew there was, having to do with him watching her figure, something like that, but his mind tripped over the phraseology, and the moment was lost. "OK," he said, and put down his own glass on the coffee table with a little thunk that made tiny avalanches on the diamond slopes. Then he lumbered across the room to kiss her on the point of the chin, painful for his teeth.

He hadn't been aiming for the point of her chin, of course, he'd been aiming for her mouth, but she'd moved, the damn woman, she'd thrown off his aim. She was still moving, as he pressed forward, fumbling at her, holding her in the chair.

"I DON'T THINK SO!" she yelled, very loudly, unnecessarily loudly.

He'd known she'd be loud, dammit. "Coats," he muttered, pawing at her, meaning he had other coats in the back he'd give her after he'd finished ripping this one to shreds to get it off her.

"DAMMIT, FREDDIE!"

"Not here," he panted, shoving coat out of the way, blouse out of the way, one knee now in her lap, holding her down. Faintly he registered the squeak of the hinge of his mirror/door, far away, but his own loud breathing and his own tense concentration kept him from heeding that impossibility, or remembering it later. His hand found a breast, an actual real-life throbbing warm human breast! This so electrified him that he froze, glary-eyed, not even breathing, and was like that when he felt the sharp hard pain at the back of his head, and darkness fell, like a tree.

So did Josh.

"Are you all right?"

Josh swam into painful consciousness. There was a sticky smell in the air, a pain in his head, a nasty wetness around his collar and the back of his shirt. He groaned, and moved, and found he was stretched out on his back on the very thin carpet on his living room floor. The woman . . . Peg . . . leaned over him, expression concerned. "Mr. Kuskiosko? Jersey Josh? Speak to me!"

". . . Wha . . ."

"I'm sorry I had to do that."

". . . Wha . . ."

"You understand, if I'd had to go home and tell Freddie you misbehaved, he'd come here and do something terrible, and I wouldn't want that."

Josh raised a shaky hand and touched the wetness at the back of his head, then looked at the fingers and it wasn't red. Shouldn't his blood be red, like anybody else's? He sniffed his fingers, and it was wine. Blue Nun. Looking past his fingers at Peg, finding it hard to focus, he said, "Wha . . ."

"We can be friends, Mr. Kuskiosko, but not if you're going to be silly. Are you all right now? Can you sit up?"

"Wha . . ."

"Here you go. Try to sit up."

She didn't touch him, but she did make a lot of hand movements to encourage him, and, following them, leaning into them, he did manage to sit up. He looked around. Pieces of broken wine bottle littered the wet carpet. The Amish chair was overturned. But the mountain of diamonds still sat on the coffee table, the tube sock still lay on the sofa. "Wha . . ."

"Mr. Kuskiosko," she said, "I think we should just conclude our business and I'll go on my way, and neither of us will ever mention this misunderstanding again, and from now on we can get along with one another and be friends. Okay?"

She extended her slim long-fingered hand toward him, her nasty schoolteacher smile fixed on her nasty pretty face. Josh looked at that hand, those long fingers, and he knew in his heart they would never be used in any of the ways he had imagined them being used. Hating everything about this situation, but seeing nothing else to be done, he took that nasty hand and shook it briefly, feeling the delicate bones in there, quickly letting go.

She had been kneeling beside him, her coat again fastened, looking none the worse for wear, dammit. Now she got to her feet, brushed off her knees, and briskly but smilingly said, "There. We're friends now."

"S," he muttered.

"Can you get up?"

"S."

He could, and he did, and stood tottering there, while she nodded at him in satisfaction and said, "You're fine now, I know you are."

"S."

"So shall we talk about the diamonds?"

"S."

"How much are you going to give me for them, Mr. Kuskiosko?"

He beetled his brows, and glowered at her. "2."

She pretended she didn't understand. "Two? Two what?"

"K."

"Two thousand dollars?" She laughed, as though perfectly naturally, and said, "I didn't know you told jokes, Mr. Kuskiosko, Freddie never told me that. But he did tell me I shouldn't take less than ten, so unless that was a joke I guess I'd better take all this back to Freddie." And she crossed the room to pick up the sock from the sofa.

Damn woman. "Wait."

She turned, sock in hand, one eyebrow lifted, and waited.

Now she does what I tell her to do. Josh brooded. Dicker? Haggle? Negotiate? Or just get the damn woman out of here, so he could remove his wine-soaked clothes and take aspirin and watch Centerspread Girls all by himself? "OK," he said.

"Oh, thank you, Mr. Kuskiosko," she said, as sunny as a field of daisies. "Freddie will be so pleased."

"Wait," he commanded again. Then, not looking directly at the woman, he lurched away, holding the bruise on the back of his head, moving through the bedroom and past the mirror/door and on into his office, where many items were just subtly disarranged, which he was too distressed to notice.

In the office, he opened one of the safes, removed from it two white envelopes that each contained five thousand dollars in wrinkled bills, shut the safe, and staggered back to the living room, which was empty.

Oh, God, what now? Josh stared around, his headache redoubling, and in she came from the kitchen, smiling, saying, "I put the cheese and crackers away. It was the least I could do, Mr. Kuskiosko."

It damn well was. "Here," he said, and thrust the envelopes at her.

"I know I don't have to count these," she said, chirpy chirpy chirpy, as she put the envelopes in her coat pockets. "Besides, we both know Freddie will count them. Well, bye-bye."

Josh stood there, in his violated living room, while she crossed to the door, opened it, and then held it open an unnecessarily long time while she turned back and waved at him like Audrey Hepburn or somebody, and then at last she left. Chack of metal door sardonically into metal frame.

Josh sank onto the sofa, drained and miserable. He gazed at his new diamonds without joy. Hit him on the head, she did, just because he wanted to be friendly.

How in hell did she do that? Get the wine bottle from all the way over here and hit him with it all the way over there, while he was holding her down in the chair?

It just goes to prove it yet again, Jersey Josh thought. You simply can't trust women.

12

Getting chilly. Freddie jogged in place to keep warm, watching out for the sudden appearance of employees around the hall's far turn. One skinny black kid who kept zipping into sight behind a wheeled garment rack full of fur was the worst menace, having actually knocked Freddie over during one of his abrupt flybys. Fortunately, Freddie had managed to roll out of the way before those flashing feet stumbled over him, so the kid remained unaware — as did everybody else in this building — that Affiliated Fur Storage contained at the moment an extremely unauthorized visitor.

Eight days, and no change. Not a hint of Freddie had come back into view, not a shadow, not the faintest smudge of smoke. He was as invisible as on the night those mad doctors had done their experiment on him. Was this condition going to be permanent?

Freddie was torn on the subject. On the one side, invisibility was certainly a decided asset in his occupation. On the other side, there was Peg.

Peg was being very good and supportive about this situation, mostly, and was a great help on the professional side, driving the car and dealing with Jersey Josh Kuskiosko and all of that, but on the personal side, there was a definite sense of strain here, which was not getting better. You could even say it was getting worse. Freddie had noticed a new pattern in Peg the last few days, a habit she had developed of facing half away from wherever she thought he was, as though she had to pretend to herself that he wasn't really invisible, it was just that she didn't happen to be looking in his specific direction at this specific moment.

Denial, in other words. Not being able to see Freddie was a problem for Peg that she had clearly not figured out how to deal with, and it seemed to him that one result was a growing distance between them, a certain coolness, that worried him a lot.

All right. The thing to do, he'd decided, was pile up a lot of scores very quick, accumulate a lot of money, and then make contact with those crazed doctors, open negotiations, and work out some way to get his hands on an actual working antidote without getting himself arrested the second somebody could see his wrists to put the cuffs on.

But money first, the scores first, and that was why Freddie, naked as an empty water glass, was bouncing around in this hall here in Affiliated Fur Storage, with clerical offices on one side and chilled rooms full of fur coats on the other, trying not to get killed by a supersonic black kid with huge sneakers and an evident fantasy in which he won the Indianapolis 500 driving a wheeled garment rack.

It isn't true that all small business has been driven out of New York City by high rents and high taxes and high crime and a workforce whose only skill is pilferage. All small business has been driven out of Manhattan by the above, but many thousands of these little companies still exist in Queens and Brooklyn, where they can draw from the labor pool on Long Island, people at the competency level of the smiling Burger King kid who gets your order right the second time.

Among these surviving small companies is Affiliated Fur Storage — and who knows how many failed furriers are entombed in that cemetery of a word, Affiliated? — here in Astoria, Queens, in a long low cinder-block building flanked by a seltzer bottler and a uniform laundry. Behind it, facing the next street, is a smaller similar structure housing a manufacturer of bowling pins. The fur storage building sits inside an eight-foot chain-link fence topped by razor wire, with two gates, both at the front, both hedged from street to building past the weedy dirt moat by more tall chain-link fence. The narrow gate at the right is for pedestrians, the wider gate at the left for delivery trucks.

The interior of this building, except for the administrative offices, is a maze of windowless rooms, air-conditioned to a fur-loving forty degrees. Here is where many of the more fortunate women of New York store their minks in summer, to protect them from deadly heat and humidity. Here, if you've a mind to steal fur coats, is the place to go.

And here is where Freddie came, this afternoon at four-thirty, slipping in with a delivery truck, filled with another load of arriving mink. Once inside, he'd tucked out of the way, taking it easy, expecting the place to close at five. But it did not.

Problem. By June, the fur coat owners really should already have called Affiliated to make their arrangements for the pickup of their coats, but you know how people procrastinate, how they forget to do something unless it's staring them right in the face, how they don't even think about the fur coat until one day they open that closet looking for something else entirely — sunglasses in a coat pocket, usually — and there it is! And then they make that call, and that's why June is the busiest month of the year at Affiliated, and that was why, at ten past six on Wednesday, June 14, this year, Peg was still in the van parked up in the next block, waiting for the signal — something waving by itself in the air, in front of the just-opened delivery gate — while Freddie, inside, still bobbed and weaved around that damn kid.

He'd come in here in the first place figuring half an hour was all he'd need to watch the security systems, see how they were armed and how they could be disarmed, and he'd been right; once everybody finally did get the hell out of here, he'd open the building like a banana, no sweat. But when would they call it a day, goddam it, and go home?

And now it was six-twenty, and a person came around the corner of the hall. Not the speed demon, this was a middle-aged woman shrugging into a light cloth spring coat. Freddie pressed himself against the wall as she went by, and here came three more, chatting together, taking up the entire width of the hall. And more behind them.

Whoops. Freddie fled in front of the staff, and found that the receptionist had been among the first to leave, which meant her desk was empty, which meant Freddie could skip around behind it, and even sit in the receptionist's chair, still warm from her bottom, and from that vantage point watch everybody leave.

This place had rent-a-cops, three of them in brown uniforms and shoulder patches, with holsters containing walkie-talkies, and the seriously humorless faces of drunks who aren't drinking yet today. These were the last to leave, having checked every room to be sure there were no stragglers, having set every alarm, and having called their security office from the receptionist's desk — Freddie leaped nimbly out of that guy's way — to report all secure and solid and shut down. Then they left, arming the final alarm system behind them. Freddie stood by the windowed front door — shatterproof window with what looked like chicken wire in it — and watched the security guys close and alarm the outer gate, then get into their little white security car with all the words and numbers on it, and putt-putt away.

Ain't no security against the invisible man; no, sir.

The first thing Freddie did, when he knew he was alone in the building, was skip down the hall, waving his invisible arms and kicking his invisible feet, knowing nobody would be coming around that corner to knock him down, not even his old friend Superfly. And the second thing he did was go into the nearest storage room and find a fur coat that fit and put it on.

June, shmoon; Freddie was cold.

13

By five-thirty, Peg had to go to the bathroom bad. Freddie should have signaled to her by now, but he hadn't, because of course the employees should have left by now, and they hadn't, which meant she couldn't avail herself of the fur-storage building's ladies' room.

Before they'd come out here, she'd talked this situation over with Freddie, or at least with the volume of air she'd assumed contained Freddie, and she'd asked him how come they had to deal with Jersey Josh Kuskiosko all the time? Aside from Jersey Josh's personality, which was the pits, why not just steal cash, and cut out the middleman? Take 100 percent instead of 10 percent? And Freddie had said, "What cash? There aren't any big piles of cash around. Payrolls are by check. Big stores take credit cards."

"Banks have cash," she'd pointed out. "You could sneak in, wait till they close—

"Bank security is not simple, Peg," the air had told her. "Bankers are serious about money, that's one thing I'm sure of. You never know what you're gonna find in a bank. Heat sensors, motion sensors; they don't have to see me to know I'm there. The real money is locked away so no one naked guy without tools is ever gonna get at it. I know Jersey Josh is kind of an irritation—"

"I can put up with him, if I have to," Peg had said, being brave. "As long as you're there with me."

"I'm sorry, Peg, but that's just the way it is. All I can take is merchandise, and convert it to cash. I could start, maybe, a new relationship with a new fence . . ."

"Would he be any better?"

"Probably worse. You know, guys who go into that business, being a fence, they're not your Albert Schweitzer mostly."

So here they were, in pursuit of more merchandise. Over there, more delivery trucks backed in to the loading zone, maneuvering backward up a driveway so hemmed in by tall chain-link fence that most drivers didn't even try to get out of their vehicle. Peg watched them, and thought about the diner she and Freddie had passed on Astoria Avenue on their way over here, and thought about Freddie finally coming out of that building to make the signal and nobody around to receive the signal, and at last she decided enough was enough. Bladder-wise, enough was too much.

Leaving the area, Peg drove past the fur building and noticed that across the street from it was a parking lot with a sign that read AFFILIATED FUR STORAGE PARKING ONLY. The lot was better than half full. Employee cars, they must be. If they're gone when I get back, Peg told herself, then Freddie will be ready for me. So there is a signal after all, whether I'm here or not.

At the diner, Peg relieved herself and ordered a coffee and a doughnut to go, because she didn't feel right about just using the ladies' and then walking out. When she drove back to take up her vigil, the cars were all still in that lot, so nothing had changed. Peg settled down again, a bit more comfortably, to wait.

An hour went by. The second hour since Freddie'd left the van. An hour in which Peg drank the coffee but didn't eat the doughnut. An hour that gave her a lot of time for thought, for private rumination. And the longer she had to think, and the more she pondered this situation in which she found herself, the gloomier she became. Gloomier, and then gloomier.

What it came down to was, an invisible boyfriend was no fun. You just didn't get used to being around such a person, having their voice suddenly come at you from over there when you thought they were over here, having the TV channel-changer float in the air while Freddie was surfing for something to watch, seeing those sudden indentations and abrupt puffings-up, and other signs of Freddie's movements, his presences and absences.

What made it even worse, you could never be sure when he was looking at you. We all like privacy sometimes, to be alone with our thoughts, or our bodies, but these two hours in the van were the longest stretch Peg had had to herself — to be herself — in the last eight days. There was no privacy when you lived with an invisible man. He got all the privacy, and you got none. Never knowing when you're under observation, whether he's behind you or in front of you, never knowing how you look. At this particular moment, do you look sexy and pretty and thin, or do you look foolish or ugly or stupid? Or just merely cranky, probably, most of the time.

And of course Freddie, being a man, hadn't the slightest idea anything was wrong. He just went blithely on, being invisible, half the time in the apartment forgetting his Bart Simpson head, never wearing the gloves, never giving a second thought to the effect he was having on the person with whom he shared the apartment.

Which might be unfair, actually, though Peg wasn't in much of a mood to give Freddie the benefit of the doubt. But the other problem with living with an invisible man was the fact you can't see him. It wasn't merely that you can't see him, you can't see him. You can't see the expression on his face, can't tell if he's pleased or miserable, can't tell if he's bored or excited, can't tell what's going on. We all of us to some extent chart our voyages through life based on the weather occurring in our loved ones, but with an invisible man you can never tell what the weather is. The voice gives some clues, the words give some clues, but where are the facial expressions? Where's the body language? Where's the goddamn body?

I don't know how much more of this I can put up with, Peg thought. There, the thought was out.

So were the people. All at once, people were coming out of the fur-storage building a block and a half away, streaming across the street to the parking lot, calling out words to one another, waving, getting into their cars. A little pocket rush-hour now took place on the street in front of Affiliated Fur Storage, and then they were all dispersed, leaving only a little white security-company car parked at the gate. Five minutes later, as Peg watched, no longer impatient, no longer bored, happy and interested now that something was happening, three bulky men in brown uniforms came out of the building, paused to lock the front gate, then clambered into the little car and drove away.

Peg didn't wait for a signal from Freddie. She knew that place down there was empty, she knew he was in there dismantling the alarm system, she knew it would be only a very few minutes before he came out with a white towel or a roll of fax paper or something to wave at her, so she started the van and eased it slowly forward, through and beyond the intervening intersection.

The seltzer bottler and the uniform laundry, not being seasonal businesses with a high-volume June, had both shut for the day more than an hour ago. This was strictly a commercial area around here, with no pedestrians ever and no traffic after business hours. Peg had the world to herself as she drove on down the street, and was pulling up in front of the loading entrance to Affiliated when the garage door back in there lifted and out walked a fur coat, holding a white plastic in-tray in its nonexistent hand. "Oh, Freddie," Peg muttered, and just for a moment closed her eyes.

The fur coat, seeing she was already there, retired into the building to put down the in-tray, then came out again and unlocked the gate, while Peg backed and filled, getting the van into position. The fur coat opened wide both sides of the gate, then waved an arm at Peg, and she backed into the driveway, looking left and right, this mirror, that mirror, not quite scraping the sides of the van, moving slowly as the fur coat retreated, and finally kabunking against the black rubber edge of the loading dock. She switched off the engine as the van's rear doors opened and the fur coat said, "Peg, I thought they'd never go home."

"Freddie," Peg said, trying to sound calm and dispassionate, "why are you wearing that coat?"

"I'm cold, Peg. Believe me, it gets cold in there. I need my shoes and socks."

The van jounced as the fur coat clambered in, then sat on the floor. Socks moved through the air. Peg said, "You're going to get dressed, aren't you? I mean, regular dressed, your own stuff."

"Let's do the job first," he said. "Here, put my things on the seat, okay?" Freddie's clothing floated toward her, as he said, "I'll put the rest on when I'm done loading up the van."

Peg took the mound of clothing, mostly to stop it from floating like that. "You want help?"

"No, you stay with the van, in case there's some kind of trouble. If you gotta take off, I'll make my way home later."

"Take off?" Peg looked out at the street. Police patrols, that was what Freddie was thinking of. But if the police came along, and if they didn't like the look of the situation here, all they'd have to do was park across the front of this driveway, blocking her in.

Get arrested? Do eight years of prison laundry upstate? This, Peg thought, is not what I signed on for.

She might have said something, she wasn't sure what, but the fur coat, now sporting loafers and white socks, was skidding back out of the van. She watched him go, and there was just something so stupidly comical about a shin-length mink coat wearing white socks and brown shoes and no head that she forgot the awful possibility of getting Jean Harris's old room, and simply watched as the mink coat made a dozen trips in and out of the building, bringing great armloads of fur, dumping them into the back of the van, shoving them in, pushing them in, piling them in, until the leading edge of the pile, like a furry iceberg spreading, began to intrude into the driver compartment. "Enough, Freddie!" Peg yelled through the muffling mountain of mink, not sure he'd even be able to hear her back there.

But he did. "Right!" his voice shouted, dulled but intelligible. Thunk thunk, the rear doors closed. "Drive it out!"

She did. Stopping in the street, looking in the right-hand outside mirror, she watched the mink coat with the white socks and brown shoes, and what a busy mink coat it was! First it ran inside the building one last time, then ran back out as the garage door lowered, then came forward to close and lock the gates, with itself on the outside. Finally, it came up to the van and opened the passenger door. As Peg watched through the open door, the mink coat paused, then suddenly went mad and then limp, as Freddie took it off. The coat then appeared to stuff itself in among the other coats crowding the back of the passenger seat, and Peg looked away, watching the street for police patrols, until Freddie said, "Okay, Peg, you can look now."

He was back, or Bart Simpson was back, standing out there beside the van. She smiled, relieved, actually liking Freddie when all was said and done. Putting the van in gear, she said, "Now what?"

"On to Jersey Josh," Bart said, sounding like a cartoon character with a head cold, and climbed into the van.

14

"9," Jersey Josh repeated, with more emphasis.

"The thing is, Josh," Freddie Noon's voice said in his ear from this old telephone, "I'm making these deliveries, see, I mean I'm already loaded up here."

Obviously, as Josh well knew, there was only so much one could say under such circumstances, because who knows how many telephones are tapped? All of them, probably; after all, this is the information age. But what Josh understood, from what little Freddie could say, and from the traffic noises in the background, was that Freddie was calling from a pay phone somewhere out on some street, and that his van was already loaded up with whatever it was he wanted to sell Josh, and he didn't like the idea of driving around the city for hours with his van full of felony convictions.

However, that was Freddie's problem, and had nothing to do with Josh. Josh's problem was, he would not, repeat not, repeat never, never ever lower the elevator and open the delivery entrance at the side of the building in daylight. Period. June is the worst of months for a fellow like Josh, with daylight practically all around the clock, which meant he was not going to think about opening that door down there until 9 P.M. Two A.M. would be better, but 9 P.M. he could live with.

But not a second earlier. "9," he said, for the third time.

Freddie sighed. "Okay, Josh, I understand. I just don't like Peg out by herself at night, that's all."

The woman again? Josh flinched, his head suddenly aching at the memory, as he said, "Not U?"

"Naw, you know, I pushed myself, I shouldn't have got out of bed so soon; I just can't make it. You know Peg now, so that's okay."

"S." He knew Peg, all right.

"So she'll be there at nine o'clock."

And this time, Josh thought, she doesn't get off so easy. This time, no more Mr. Nice Guy. This time, no subtlety, no wine and cheese, no Centerspread Girls. This time, direct action. Hit her on the head, start from there. "9," Josh said, and hung up, and went to look for something heavy.

Nine. Josh stepped onto the thick wooden-plank floor of the freight elevator, turned the key in the lock, and the oil-smeared motor in its housing up on the roof growled into action, sounding like an old lion with emphysema. Slowly the open-sided platform lowered, shaking under its cables, and as Josh descended, the growl of the motor became blended with the snarls and threats and bitings of the Dobermans, flinging themselves at the heavy metal cage. Josh amused himself with the dogs in his usual fashion as the platform settled down into its lower position, then turned his back on them, ostentatiously farted, and used his key to open the ground-level garage door.

The van was there. In the darkness, Josh couldn't see exactly who was at the wheel, but assumed it was the woman. "N!" he cried, and waved for the driver to back the van in onto the elevator platform.

The van's windows had been shut. Now the driver's window slid down and the woman's head appeared, looking back at him. "Just unload it," she called.

Oh, no, not that easy. "Up," Josh insisted, pointing toward his lair upstairs.

As usual, the woman was nothing but trouble. "Why not unload it right here?" she asked.

"2 much work," he said, which happened to be true, though not the reason. Jabbing his thumb skyward, he repeated, "N. Up."

"Oh, all right."

She closed her window before backing the van into the elevator. Did she think she was going to stay in there? No way.

With the van inside, Josh used his keys to close the door and raise the elevator, leaving the key in the elevator lock for later. He opened the rear doors of the van, and looked in at enough fur to clothe an entire Norse horde. "M," he said, his word of satisfaction, rarely heard. Going around to the driver's window, he looked in through the glass at the woman and said, "Help."

She lowered her window less than an inch. "What?"

"Help."

"You mean, unload?" She shook her head as he was nodding his. "I don't do heavy lifting," she said, and closed the window.

Heavy lifting. All women can lift fur coats, they've got special muscles for the job. Grousing, muttering letters of the alphabet to himself, Josh sloped on back to the rear of the van and started pulling out furs, hanging them on garment racks he kept around for just this purpose, every coat still equipped with the hanger it had worn at the fur-storage place.

A lot of furs. Good furs, too, Freddie always had a good eye. Four garment racks crammed with minks in shades of brown and black, giving off that cold warmth peculiar to natural fur.

Valuable. More than the diamonds, last time. There had to be two hundred thousand dollars' worth of fur bending the metal bars of these garment racks. In the normal course of business with Freddie Noon, that would be a twenty-G payment, and of course Freddie would know it, so his woman would know it, so there was no point arguing, was there? No.

Josh went around to the driver's window, rapped on it, and the damn woman lowered it that same inch. "Twenty," he said.

She smiled at him, sweetly, the lying little bitch. Her smile lied. "Freddie said," she said, also sweetly, "twenty-five."

Josh frowned. Had he estimated wrong? Or had Freddie? "Wait," he decided, and went back to look at the furs again, paying more attention to labels this time, and lengths, and finally deciding he'd been right the first time around.

But then he decided it didn't matter. He'd give her the twenty-five, and a little later he'd take it away from her again, and let her explain herself at home. He'd tell Freddie she'd left with the money, that's all, and Freddie would have to know what a sneaking liar this woman was, so he'd have to believe his old friend Josh, wouldn't he? And if he didn't, if he took the damn woman's part against his old friend, well, fine. If Josh never saw Freddie Noon again, that would be okay, too.

So he went back to the driver's window, and of course it was shut. He rapped more sharply on the glass this time, and when she opened it the usual inch he said, "S."

"Oh, good. Freddie will be very happy. This'll make him get healthy even faster."

"Out," Josh suggested, and turned the door handle, and it was locked. Damn woman!

"I don't need to get out," she told him. "You can just give me the money right here, and I'll be on my way. I don't like to leave Freddie alone when he isn't feeling well."

Stupid woman. The van's back doors were open; he could just crawl in that way and get his hands on her. So he turned away from her nasty smiling face and walked toward the rear of the van, and she started the engine. He looked back, betrayed, and she'd lowered the window more now and was looking back at him. "Don't go right behind there," she advised. "It might back up and hurt you."

He stood glowering, unable to think of a single thing to say. She waited, smiling, then said, "Just get the money, all right, Josh? And I'll be off. I don't want to smell up your place with the exhaust."

Money. All right, get her the money. We'll get her the money. And more. We'll see who's so smart around here.

Josh went through his storage rooms to his office, opened a safe, and took out five of the five-thousand-dollar envelopes. This time, he'd make her count the money, so she'd be looking away when . . .

Here was the rack of auto keys, the master keys for every kind of car, for this kind of car, that kind of car, and . . . Freddie Noon's van. Josh slipped the key off its hook on the rack.

This evening, a part of Josh's fashion statement was grimy shirttails hanging out. He pulled up the tail on the right side so he could put the key in the pocket of his baggy rotten trousers, then wiped his sweaty hands on the shirttail, picked up the five envelopes, and plodded back to the van.

It still sat there with its engine running, but the rear doors were now shut. The exhaust smell was getting pretty strong. Don't want her to knock me out again, Josh thought, and grinned to himself, because this time he'd be the one doing the knocking out.

Window open one damn inch. Giving her the envelopes one at a time was like mailing letters. "Count," Josh ordered.

"Oh, that's okay, I'll just—"

"Count!"

"Okay, okay, I'll count," she said, shrugging, and as she looked down at the envelopes in her lap, reaching for one, he reached for the key in his trouser pocket and found his shirttail on fire.

Ipe! Josh jumped around like a Watusi, whacking at his right hip like a move in a Bob Fosse dance, while the damn woman in the van looked at him with the first honest smile he'd ever seen her wear.

How could he catch fire? Holy Batman, his whole shirt was on fire! What had he touched, what had he brushed against, how —

Yanking the shirt off to reveal the tattered and filthy sleeveless undershirt beneath, staring around in wild surmise, Josh saw, against the far wall, forty million dollars in counterfeit twenties in brown paper bags burning like a Magritte tuba.

Fire! Disaster! Shrieking, leaving the shirt to burn itself out on the elevator floor, Josh scampered to the bags of money, grabbing fur coats along the way, throwing the coats onto the flames, throwing himself on top of the coats, smothering the fire.

Creak/groan/creak/groan. Supine atop the smoldering minks, Josh looked up to see the van descending out of sight. Somehow, the damn woman had gotten out of the van and started the elevator. Josh couldn't run after her, not with everything on fire here. He slapped at flames, rolled around on flames, scrambled to his feet, threw more coats on the smoking mess, jumped up and down on it all, and at last felt it was safe to turn his attention to the elevator.

It was already at the bottom, down in the darkness there. The woman had the garage door open and was driving out. Josh stood panting at the lip of the big square opening, his nose full of burning fur and car exhaust and his own self, and her vicious voice came up to him from the blackness below. "I'll send the elevator back up."

Huh.

"And I'll send along a little something to remember me by."

What did she mean by that?

"And next time, Josh, you be nice."

Grungle-grungle, the delivery door closed down there. Kerough-kerough, the elevator started up. Snarl snarl . . . Josh peered, trying to see the rising wooden platform. Something was on it, moving . . . the Dobermans!

Josh ran for his life.

After eighteen rings, Josh finally gave up and answered the telephone: "Y."

"Peg tells me she had to set the dogs on you," Freddie Noon's voice said.

Four in the morning, and the Dobermans were still snarling and biting and hurling themselves at the other side of his secret mirrored door. God knows what they'd destroyed back there in the storage area. Tomorrow, the downstairs people would figure out how to get those murderous beasts back where they belonged, but for now, Josh's private space was ass-deep in Doberman pinschers. "Y," he repeated.

"Peg knew what you had in mind," Freddie said, infuriatingly calm. "She saw you get that key, she knew you were gonna try to attack her again."

Saw him get the key? Impossible, she was two rooms away in the van. Did she follow him? Was that possible? But how did that fire start? Did she start it? Did he brush by it without seeing it, and that's how it got his shirt? It couldn't have happened that way. "No," Josh said, meaning no to just about everything in the world.

Freddie said, "Josh, you and me, we've always had a good professional business relationship."

"S."

"And I want us to go on having that good professional business relationship, Josh."

"S."

"But, you know, I figure I'm gonna be laid up a while longer, so it's Peg you're gonna be dealing with, and she and me, we don't want her to have any more trouble with you."

She's having trouble with me? Josh gritted his teeth, but kept silent.

"Josh? You hear me?"

"S."

"When Peg comes over there, she's gonna have the same good professional business relationship with you that I do. Right? Right, Josh?"

Josh's fantasies lay in crumbled ruins around his feet. Nearby, a Doberman flung himself yet again at the secret door. "S," Josh said, and hung up.

15

So this is what tobacco money buys when it's blowing the stink off, Mordon Leethe thought, as he got out of the taxi at the Loomis-Heimhocker Research Facility on East Forty-ninth Street. The taxi, driven by a recent immigrant from Alpha Centauri, zipped away, rattling, and Mordon climbed the slate steps in late-morning sunshine toward the well-polished old wood front door with beveled lights, his hand stroking the smooth thick paint on the rail. Thursday, the fifteenth of June, beautiful weather, three days since Mordon's meeting with Jack Fullerton the Fourth, and at last it looked as though some progress was about to be made. But first, ID.

Mordon reached the landing at the front door, saw the bell button beside the door, saw the small sign above it — PLEASE RING BELL — and rang it.

In the oriel to his right, a young black woman sat typing on a very new word processor atop a very old mahogany desk. When Mordon pressed the bell button, she paused in her typing, turned her head just enough to give him a look as flat and impersonal as the gaze of a parakeet, and then, having apparently decided he looked like the sort of person who was permitted onto these premises, she reached under her desk. A faint buzzing sound came from the direction of the door; Mordon pushed on it, the door swung open, and he entered.

The immediate interior impression was of the entry to an Edith Wharton novel. Emotionally constipated people should now come down those carpeted stairs into this flocked-wallpaper entryway, not telling one another the important things. Instead, the slender black girl, having risen from her desk, appeared in the doorway to the right, hands clasped at her waist as she said, "Yes?"

"I'm Mr. Leethe, I phoned earlier."

"Oh, yes, the doctors are expecting you. I'll tell them you're here."

She receded back into her room, and he followed into the doorway, where he gazed around at the neatly efficient office while she murmured briefly into the phone. When she hung up, he said, "You had a robbery."

"Yes, we did," she agreed, with a wry little smile; someone she would not have approved of had gained entry.

"All the equipment is new," he explained, displaying his powers of observation.

"I'm still not used to it all yet." Her fleeting smile came and went. "I thought technological obsolescence was fast. Robbery's faster."

"I suppose it is."

"The doctors are one flight up. You'll see them, just at the top of the stairs."

"Thank you."

Mordon climbed the stairs, thinking that in fact he would not be revealing any emotional privacies in this coming meeting, nor could he expect — or want — any from the doctors Loomis and Heimhocker, so the Wharton setting would be honored, after all.

Dr. David Loomis, the blond one with the baby fat, stood at the head of the stairs, smiling nervously and offering a hand, which trembled when Mordon shook it. "It's good to see you, Mr. Leethe."

"And you," Mordon lied.

Loomis gestured with his spastic hand. "We can talk in the conference room."

"Of course."

Loomis led him down the hall, and the conference room turned out to be Edith Wharton's parlor, without the ferns and plant stands. Two red Victorian sofas set at a welcoming angle flanked the fireplace with its polished brass andirons and tools. Tall windows overlooking Forty-ninth Street were discreetly curtained. Garden prints hung on the dark-papered walls.

Dr. Heimhocker, the skinny one with the Afro, rose from one of the sofas as Loomis and Mordon entered. "You have news, I guess," he suggested, coming forward to offer a firmer handshake.

"Possibly," Mordon said. "A start, anyway, or we think so."

"Tea?" asked the skittish Loomis. "Perrier?"

"No, thank you." Mordon had no desire to elongate this meeting into a social call, Edith Wharton be damned.

Heimhocker, who seemed to have better antennae than his partner, said, "Sit down, Mr. Leethe. What kind of start?"

Mordon took the sofa on the right. Heimhocker (relaxed) and Loomis (tense) sat across from him. An elaborate low Oriental table with inlaid teak filled much of the space between the sofas. Taking a small manila envelope from his inner jacket pocket, Mordon said, "We think we've identified your burglar." He shook out the mug shots onto the Oriental table, slid them across to the others. "He told you his name was Freddie, and that much was true."

There were two sets of the mug shots, front and side views, about five years old, courtesy of the Kings County (Brooklyn) District Attorney's office. Each doctor picked up a set. Loomis gasped, "That's him! Peter, that's him!"

" "Fredric Urban Noon,' " read Heimhocker, and raised an eyebrow at Mordon. "Urban?"

"I believe that was a pope. Perhaps more than one."

"That explains it," Heimhocker agreed, and looked at the pictures some more. "He wasn't happy when these were taken, was he?"

"He was going to jail."

"Of course." Heimhocker placed the mug shots before him on the table. "When do we go talk to Mr. Noon?"

Mordon looked blank. "We?"

"David and I are his doctors," Heimhocker said.

"Oh, come now."

"We gave him the injection, that makes—"

"One moment, Doctor," Mordon said. Reaching across the table, he picked up the one set of mug shots from its surface and plucked the other from Loomis's trembling hand. "You met this fellow once," he pointed out, "as he was robbing your offices. You gave him one injection, one unethical and probably illegal injection. You can't—"

"The patient left our care without our approval," Heimhocker interrupted. It seemed he could be as steely cold as Mordon himself. Mordon waited, alert, and Heimhocker went on, "It was never our intention to leave him without proper medical care, without thorough medical observation. We brought the problem of his disappearance to you, which makes you our agent in this matter. You now say—"

"Hardly, Doctor, hardly your agent. I'm employed by—"

"You were talking, a minute ago, about ethics?"

A slippery slope here. Mordon asked himself, Do I want to make enemies of these people? What's the profit in it? On the other hand, what do they want? He said, "Dr. Heimhocker, I don't believe we have a disparity of interest here. You want to see the result of your experiment, naturally, and NAABOR wants to see if the result of your experiment is useful in any other way."

Heimhocker's reaction was to display even greater hostility and suspicion. "What other way?"

Mordon's irritation broke the surface of his professional calm. "Nothing to do with you," he snapped. "We're not talking vivisection here, for God's sake."

"What are you talking?"

"I don't see in what way that matters to you. The fellow's a thief, he robbed you, he stole all your office equipment, what are you trying to protect him for?"

"All we're trying to protect," Heimhocker said, while beside him Loomis's head bobbed in frantic agreement, "is the integrity of our experiment. What we are thinking about, quite frankly, Mr. Leethe, David and I, what we are thinking about is the judgment of our peers, our peers, when we publish. We made a mistake, I grant you that, but the mistake wasn't using whatsisname, Fredric Noon, Fredric Urban Noon, using him for our experimental subject. The mistake was in letting him get away. You say you know where he is, and we say, we're not going to let—"

"No, I didn't say that."

"— him get away again. What do you mean? Of course that's what you said."

"I did not."

"We heard you," Loomis chimed in. "We both heard you."

"What I said," Mordon carefully explained, "was that we know who he is. He left fingerprints in your guest room, our expert lifted them—"

"And left a mess behind."

"Irrelevant, David."

"Still."

Mordon said, "May I go on?"

"I'm sorry," Loomis said. "Yes, please do. You know who he is, but you don't know where he is? That's silly."

"Is it? The man is not on parole, not wanted for any crime—"

"Except the burglary here," Heimhocker interrupted.

"Well, no," Mordon said. "In the first place, it was a robbery, not a burglary, and in—"

Loomis said, "What's the difference? It's the same thing."

"A burglary is a theft in unoccupied premises," Mordon explained. "If the premises are occupied, it's robbery, a more serious crime. Whether or not the occupants and the criminal interact."

"Then he's wanted for robbery," Heimhocker said.

"The robbery was reported, by you," Mordon told him, "but there's been no official report linking Fredric Noon to the crime."

"For God's sake, why not?"

"Well, just from your point of view," Mordon said, "how much do you want Fredric Noon in jail from now on, for the rest of his life, absolutely unavailable to you for observation and experimentation?"

"We've done the experiment."

"And the observation?"

Loomis said, "Peter, he's right." Turning to Mordon, he said, "But the fingerprint man was from the police."

"Moonlighting," Mordon explained. "A few members of the New York Police Department are unofficially helping NAABOR in this matter. I'm going to see one of them next, on the question of how we make contact with Mr. Noon." Tucking the mug shots away again in their envelope, and returning the envelope to his jacket pocket, he said, "Before seeing him, I needed a positive identification that we were on the track of the right man." Rising, he said, "Now I know we are, I can proceed."

The two doctors got to their feet, Heimhocker fixing Mordon with a stern eye as he said, "You'll keep us informed of progress, of course."

"Of course," Mordon said, and thought, I'm lying. He knows I'm lying. I know he knows I'm lying. But does he know I know he knows I'm lying? And does it make any difference? Well, time would tell. "I can find my own way out, thank you," he said, and departed.

16

A restaurant can be a very satisfying business. Barney Beuler found that so, certainly. It had so many advantages. For instance, it always gave you a place to go if you wanted a meal, but you it didn't cost an arm and a leg. It gave you, as well, a loyal — or at least fearful — kitchen staff of illegals, always available for some extra little chore like repainting the apartment or standing on line at the Motor Vehicle or breaking some fucking wisenheimer's leg. It also made a nice supplement to your NYPD sergeant's salary (acting lieutenant, Organized Crime Detail) in your piece of the legit profit, of course, but more importantly in the skim. And it helped to make your personal and financial affairs so complex and fuzzy that the shooflys could never quite get enough of a handle on you to drag you before the corruption board.

The downside was that, in the six years Barney Beuler had been a minor partner — one of five — in Comaldo Ristorante on West Fifty-sixth Street, he'd gained eighty-five pounds, all of it cholesterol. It was true he'd die happy; it was also true it would be soon.

Another advantage of Barney's relationship with Comaldo was that it made a perfect place to meet someone like the attorney Mordon Leethe. The NYPD frowned on its cops using department time and department equipment and department clout on nondepartment matters, but what did Barney Beuler have to sell to a big multinational corporation like NAABOR except his NYPD access? I mean, get real. A man with three ex-wives, a current wife, a current girlfriend, a very small drug habit (strictly strictly recreational), two bloodsuckers he's paying off to keep their mouths shut and himself out of jail, a condo on Saint Thomas, a house and a boat on the north shore of Long Island, and a six-room apartment on Riverside Drive overlooking the Hudson from eleven stories up needs these little extra sources of income to make ends meet, as any sensible person realizes.

Barney was having lunch at "his" table near the front (it was his and the rest of the partners' table every midday till 12:45, when, if none of them had showed up, it would be given away as needed, Comaldo always doing a brisk lunchtime trade) when he saw Mordon Leethe come in with a tall skinny young guy who looked like Ichabod Crane. Ich would be one of the recent law school graduate employees of Leethe's firm and would not know he was the beard in this meeting between Leethe and Barney; the sap would think he was being earmarked for the big time. Well, maybe he was; stranger things have happened. Every day.

Barney, who was lunching with one copartner and two Long Island boating friends, gave Leethe the smiling nod of a restaurateur spying a good customer, and Leethe responded with the dignified nod of that good customer. He and Ich were shown to a table near the rear, one selected earlier by Barney because the acoustics at that back-corner location were particularly good if you didn't want your conversation overheard.

Barney kept his attention on his own table and food and companions, but nevertheless was also aware when Leethe and Ich ordered their lunches, and when they were given their bread, their water, and their olive oil. Only then, "Be right back," Barney told his pals, filled his mouth with gnocchi, and got to his feet.

Every year, it seemed, it was a little harder to squeeze between the tables. Seemed like the customers sat with their chairs farther back than they used to. Maybe everybody was getting fat.

Still, Barney eventually forced his way through the clientele to that rear table, where he did his complete boniface number, smiling broadly, extending his hand out across the table, bowing from the general vicinity of his waist as he said, "How are ya, Mr. Leethe? Been a while."

"I've missed the place, Barney," Leethe said, showing one of his own false smiles as he laid a dead bird into Barney's hand.

Barney shook the dead bird, returned it, and said, "How you been keepin, Mr. Leethe?"

"Just fine, Barney. That tip you gave me on the brandy was perfect, thank you for it."

The "brandy," of course, was the minor punk and thief called Fredric Urban Noon, who had turned out to be the perp Leethe was looking for. Barney grinned and said, "My pleasure, Mr. Leethe, I'm glad it worked out. Speaking of brandy and suchlike, you and your companion having some wine this lunchtime?"

"No, Barney, not today, we've got a lot of work ahead of us back at the shop." The false smile took in Ich Crane: "Right, Jeff?"

"Right," Ich said, and sat at attention. He was mostly Adam's apple, over a yellow tie. Who'd told him yellow ties were still in?

"Nevertheless, Mr. Leethe," Barney said, "I'd like you to just cast an eye over our new wine list. I'm not trying to tempt you—"

"You couldn't, Barney," Leethe said, chuckling at his underling, who chuckled back.

"I'm sure I couldn't. But for your future reference, I'd just like you to see some of the Italians we got in. Okay?"

"Be happy to look at it, Barney," Leethe agreed.

"Be right back."

Barney went into the kitchen, took the sheet of paper he'd earlier worked up on the restaurant's computer — the same computer that did the menus, the billing, and the inventory — slipped it into the middle of one of the restaurant's large wine books, and went back to Leethe's table, where he presented the book with a flourish and said, "Just take a look at that."

Leethe found the insert right away, of course, and Barney watched him study it with just as much pleasure as if it had actually been a list of fine Italian wines. What the insert was, though, was a letter. Printed in three colors and four different typefaces, it looked like an expensive print job, and what it said was:

NEW YORK STATE GAMING AUTHORITY

WORLD TRADE CENTER TOWER #2

NEW YORK, NY 10001

212-555-1995

June 16, 1995

Mr. Fredric U. Noon

124-87 130th Crescent

Ozone Park, NY 11333

Dear Mr. Noon:

CONGRATULATIONS!

As you may know, the New York State Gaming Authority, in response to a consent order from the New York State Supreme Court, dated September 25, 1989, has been required to make a reimbursement of a certain percentage of the "tote" in the various gaming operations under the Authority's control, due to a computer malfunction between February 9, 1982, and October 1, 1986. The class-action suit brought against the Gaming Authority was completely satisfied by that court action.

It was directed by the Court, and agreed to by the Authority, that all citizens of the state of New York who, according to the records of the Authority, engaged in gaming activities under the control of the Authority between the dates of February 9, 1982, and October 1, 1986, shall be given equal standing in a lottery drawing to be held on the fourth of July, 1994, and the fifteen hundred (1,500) citizens whose names would be drawn would share equally in the court-directed judgment against the Authority of three million, one hundred seventy-six thousand, seven hundred dollars ($3,176,700.).

It is my happy duty, Mr. Noon, to inform you that yours was one of the names thus drawn by television star Ray Jones on July fourth of last year. Your share of the judgment comes to two hundred eleven thousand, seven hundred eighty dollars ($211,780.).

CONGRATULATIONS, Mr. Noon! If you will call me at 555-1995 before the fourth of July of this year, I will be happy to give you further details in re this judgment. It will be necessary, of course, for you to provide identification, and the judgment is fully taxable, but otherwise, the money is yours.

Unfortunately, Mr. Noon, if I do not hear from you before July fourth, I will have to assume that you have passed away or are not the correct Fredric U. Noon, and your two hundred eleven thousand, seven hundred eighty dollars ($211,780.) will be shared on a pro rata basis with the remaining lottery winners. Congratulations again, Mr. Noon. I hope to hear from you soon.

With all best wishes,

Banford L. Wickes

Deputy Controller

New York State Gaming Authority

BLW:dw

This letter, with several variants, had been used sparingly but effectively over the last decades by a number of different law enforcement agencies, including the NYPD, to find and apprehend criminals who had dropped out of sight. The letter was sent to the criminal's last known address, in hopes it would be forwarded, or sent to some close relative.

In this case, the only address for Fredric Noon that Barney'd been able to find in police records, since he was neither in jail nor on parole at the moment, was the perp's parents' home in Ozone Park. The phone number had been provided by Leethe, who would have somebody of his own answer that dedicated line the one and only time it would ring. From there on, it was Leethe's task to reel the sucker in; Barney suspected he was up to it.

"Very nice," Leethe said at last. Closing the wine book, he returned it to Barney and said, "I'm looking forward to tasting some of those."

"I'm sure it won't be long, Mr. Leethe," Barney said, and carried the wine book back to the kitchen, where he removed the letter, folded it twice, put it in the official-looking envelope he'd had the guy at the copy place around the corner knock together, and tossed the envelope into the basket with the outgoing paid bills. Then he went back to his chums and his gnocchi.

Leethe hadn't told him what all this was about, of course, and Barney was too cool to show the slightest curiosity, nor was he so incautious as to stick his nose in anywhere until he found out what the story was. But a story was here, all right, he could tell that much. Profit in it for Barney Beuler? Hard to say.

Fredric Urban Noon was a nobody, a penny-ante sticky-finger from Queens, not connected to anything except other people's goods. Why would a major corporation like NAABOR want him? What had he been doing in a cancer research place? Did he steal a cancer cure? Barney ran that scenario in his mind, but it just wouldn't play.

So was it maybe something in the other direction? Did the little gonif make off with some proof of something bad about the tobacco company that they didn't want known? Was he shaking them down right this minute? Did he need a partner?

The only problem with that second scenario was, with everything that was already known about the tobacco companies that didn't bother them, or bother their customers, or their stockholders, or the feds, what could they possibly have left to hide?

It was seeming to Barney that he too might like one little word with this Fredric Urban Noon.

17

Freddie never got over how weird it felt to walk around naked in the public streets in the middle of the day, particularly in your own neighborhood, passing people you'd seen on these blocks for years. Not people you actually know, just people you recognized, but still.

For instance, that fat young mother coming out of the supermarket pushing the stroller full of fat baby and Cheez Doodles and Dr Pepper. She seemed to be staring right at him, but of course she wasn't, though still it seemed that way. On the other hand, he'd been seeing her around for a couple of years, but now for the first time he could pause and study her and marvel at how fat she'd managed to get herself while still in her twenties.

But that wasn't all. He could also look at the good-looking women, so far as this neighborhood had any, and he could watch the old guys in front of the social club and how they talked with their hands and their chins, and he could watch the different ways people wait for a bus, and he could thumb his nose at the patrol car when it drove slowly by, the cops inside there telling each other war-hero lies and laughing in their own private party; you could rob the Cheez Doodles right out of that fat kid's stroller, those cops would never even notice.

He could, in other words, do a thousand different things to help fight off boredom, without ever actually fighting off boredom.

What he was doing out here, just before lunch on a warm sunny Saturday in June, was making Peg happy. Trying to make Peg happy, anyway. He and she had a long talk in the van the other night, Thursday night, after they left Jersey Josh Kuskiosko. It was somehow easier lately for Peg to talk to Freddie after dark, so while she drove and he wore his Bart Simpson head she explained how she felt about things, and how she didn't want to break up with him or anything like that, but not being able to see him while he was all the time able to see her was really getting her down.

He made very sympathetic noises while she explained all this, and said he understood, and in fact he did understand, at least partially. Since she couldn't be with him completely while he was invisible like this, she had to have some time when she could be completely by herself. Of course, when you said it like that it didn't make any sense, but Peg had ways of saying it where it did make sense, or anyway it was important to her, so finally in the van Freddie suggested something that might help, and Peg agreed to it at once.

The idea was, since they weren't eating their meals together anymore — Peg still didn't know that food took a couple of hours to fully join his invisible body, and with luck she never would know — Freddie would leave the apartment at lunchtime any day it wasn't raining, go for a walk or take in a matinee movie (he wouldn't have to pay, after all) or whatever he wanted, while Peg ate her lunch and did whatever she had a mind to do in her own home without any thought that Freddie might be lurking somewhere, watching. (That was Peg's word, lurking, which Freddie himself wouldn't have used, but which he'd made no beef about, merely nodding his agreement, which of course she couldn't see.) Then, after an hour or so, Freddie would come home and have his own lunch, which Peg would have left on the kitchen table. It wasn't a solution to the problem, but it ought to at least help.

There was only one movie house in the neighborhood, and it showed a matinee only on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, but all four days of one week the same movie. So Freddie yesterday went in and watched an action movie where guys get blown up and you see them arc through the air like off a trampoline and afterward their machine guns still work, never mind the guys.

This is not a movie you can see two days in a row. One day in a row is a lot. Also, it turned out the matinee was senior discount time, and seniors in a movie theater in the middle of the day act exactly they way they did when they were eight years old in the same circumstances, talking and yelling at each other, changing their seats, eating stuff and throwing the wrappers on the floor, asking each other what just happened up on the screen. The only difference is, they totter up the aisle instead of running, and it's the toilet they're headed for, not the candy counter.

So Freddie wasn't looking forward to a repetition of that experience anytime soon, except maybe to go in with an Angel of Death kite and swoop it around over their heads until the theater emptied.

Anyway, today he was viewing the rich panorama of street life while time crawled by, and also incidentally looking for a telephone. Peg had suggested he phone her every day when he was ready to come home, and although she said it was because she wanted to be sure she got his lunch on the table at the right time, he knew it was because in her innermost heart she didn't entirely trust him, and wanted him to prove he was actually out of the apartment by phoning her from someplace else.

So yesterday he'd snuck into the manager's office in the movie theater, while the manager was out separating two codgers who were beating on each other with canes in the process of their discussion of whether or not Walter O'Malley was totally culpable in the felonious robbery of the Dodgers from Brooklyn. He'd made his call, assured Peg he was enjoying the movie — Holy Shit III, or whatever it was called — then got out of the way as the manager returned to his office to tend to his nosebleed.

Today, though, was a little different. He was not going back into the Megablok Star, no matter what, not even just to use the phone in the manager's office. He couldn't use a pay phone because he didn't have a quarter on him; in fact, he didn't have anything on him. And pay phones were the only kind of phones to be found out here on the street. But to go inside, into the storefront dentist, or the deli, or the copy shop, or the dry cleaner's, would mean somehow using a telephone right under the eyes — and ears, let's not forget ears — of employees, customers, dentists.

Still, to go home without having made a call would leave Peg convinced he'd never gone out in the first place, which would be not good. The last thing Freddie wanted to do was feed her doubt and paranoia. He was, after all, well known to be a liar and a thief insofar as other people were concerned, so if Peg gave way to occasional suspicion or skepticism she couldn't really be blamed.

And here came a guy talking on the phone. A guy in a tan suit and pale green shirt and dark green tie and brown shoes. A guy in his thirties, with a narrow sandy mustache and sandy hair cropped close all around so his big ears stuck out. One big ear, anyway; the other one would probably stick out, too, but at the moment the cellular phone was pressed against it as the guy walked along, swinging a briefcase in his other hand, chatting away.

It was only envy at first that made Freddie lope along beside this guy, ducking around oncoming pedestrians as he listened to the guy's half of the conversation, learning that he was an insurance salesman calling his office, reporting on his appointments so far today, wondering if there'd been any messages. It should have been a short call, since there weren't any messages for this guy, and not a lot had happened in his appointments till now, but he dragged it out, prolonging it, obviously getting a kick out of walking there on a semicrowded shopping street in Brooklyn in the sunshine talking on his brand-new toy.

Still, the conversation eventually had to wind down, because the secretary or whoever it was at the other end of the call had work to do, couldn't just sit there and play games all day. But the so-longs also stretched out, and then Freddie saw the stocky older woman coming slowly the other way, fresh from the supermarket, weighed down by full plastic bags dragging at each downward arm, slogging ahead flat-footed, oblivious to the world and even to the sight of a tall insurance man in a tan suit talking on the telephone as he walked along the sidewalk.

Good-bye good-bye good-bye. Timing is everything. The woman approached, the guy said yet another good-bye, then thought of one more irrelevant question to ask, started to ask it. The woman passed, headed the opposite way. Freddie plucked the phone out of the guy's hand and dropped it into the woman's right-side shopping bag.

The guy talked another two syllables before he realized the phone wasn't there anymore. Then he stopped dead, said, "Wha?" and moved his now-empty hand, still cupped for the phone, around in front of his eyes, where he could stare at it.

Meanwhile, Freddie backed away out of the flow of foot traffic, stood with his back against the cool glass of the nearest storefront window — ladies' garments, latest styles, large sizes a specialty — and watched to see what would happen next, which was that the woman kept trudging homeward with her groceries, unaware of anything at all occurring anywhere in the world, while the guy in the tan suit started spinning in circles, looking down, out, up, around, everywhere. A couple of little kids, bopping along, deep in their own conversation, stopped to look at this weird grown-up, and the grown-up stopped his whirling to glare at them and shout, "Where is it?"

"Where's what?" one of the kids asked, while the other kid, wiser in the ways of adults, said, "We don't have it."

"I want my phone!"

"There's a phone on the corner," the wiser kid suggested, pointing.

"I want my phone!"

An older guy with half a dozen magazines under his arm stopped to say, "What's the problem?"

"My phone, I—" The guy would have torn his hair if it weren't too short to get hold of. "I was talking on it, and it disappeared!"

"Your telephone disappeared?"

"Yes!"

"Right out of your hand?"

"Yes!"

"That's like the missing Ambroses," the older guy said.

Freddie and both kids now gave this new arrival a lot closer attention, realizing he was going to be more interesting than they'd thought. The insurance man, glaring pop-eyed, cried, "Ambroses? Ambroses?"

"Sure," the other guy said. "Somebody was collecting Ambroses, Charles Fort wrote about it."

The insurance man had expected skepticism, scorn, disbelief; he hadn't expected Ambroses. "What the hell has that got to do," he cried passionately, "with my phone?"

The other guy took his magazines out from under his arm and started to leaf through them, as though one might contain an article explaining where the insurance man's telephone had gone. "Then there's Judge Crater," he said. "Now, in parapsychology—"

"I don't want any of your crap!" the insurance man screamed, waving his arms around. "I want my phone!"

It seemed to Freddie the insurance man was doing a very nice job of drawing attention to himself and away from anything else that might happen on this block, so, while all eyes turned toward this unexpected entertainment on the sidewalk, Freddie skipped through the gathering throng and went off in pursuit of the woman with the shopping bags. She was still plodding forward, step after step, doggedly homeward bound.

Unfortunately, just as Freddie arrived, the woman stopped. She frowned. She gazed down at the shopping bag into which Freddie had dropped the phone. Her eyes widened. "Hello?" she said.

Now what? Freddie had just caught up, and had been about to reach into that bag to retrieve the phone, but he couldn't very well do that with the woman staring at the bag that way.

Then things got worse. One-armed, the woman raised that plastic bag toward her head, a listening expression on her face. And then Freddie could hear it, too. In a tiny tinny voice, the plastic bag was saying, "Hello? Hello?"

The woman screamed, sensibly enough. Then she dropped the plastic bag onto the sidewalk — something glass broke in there, Freddie heard it — and legged it down the street at a milk-horse trot, listing to the side where she still toted groceries, but making good headway nonetheless.

So now while most of the people on the street were watching the insurance man do his mad lost-telephone dance, the rest of the people on the street turned to watch the fershlugginer woman with the one plastic bag, trotting and shrieking. A great moment for Freddie to retrieve the phone, which he did, and scoot with it into the tapered recess of the storefront dentist's entryway. Hunkering down there, so he could keep the phone below the level of the storefront window — he didn't want the receptionist in there to have to wonder why a cellular phone was flying solo in her doorway — he raised it and heard the thing still going, "Hello? Hello?"