Smoke

What persistence. "Sorry, wrong number," Freddie told it, and closed the two halves of the phone together, which made it hang up. He waited a couple seconds, then opened it again, put it to his ear, and the plaintive hellos were gone at last, replaced by the welcome dial tone. Quickly he punched out his own number, and Peg answered on the second ring: "Hello?"

"It's me, Peg, I'm gonna come home now."

"Okay. Your brother Jimmy called."

"Oh, yeah?"

"He said don't call him back, he'll ring again later."

"What's it about?"

"He didn't say."

Freddie looked up, and there was a kid of maybe eight years of age standing in the doorway, looking with deep interest at the floating cellular phone, which was just now saying, "I'll make you a turkey sandwich, okay?"

"Ssshhhhh," Freddie said.

The kid said, "I didn't say anything."

Peg said, "Freddie? Something wrong?"

"I got to hang up now," Freddie said, and folded the phone on itself.

The kid gazed, neither frightened nor excited, just intensely interested. He said, "Are you a magic phone?"

"Yes," Freddie said.

"Do you belong to that man back there?"

"I didn't like him anymore," Freddie said, "so I went away from him."

"He's really mad."

"That's it," Freddie told the kid. "He's just got too excitable a personality, I get yelled into all the time, that's why I left."

"What are you going to do now?" the kid asked.

"I'm going to fly away," Freddie said. Standing up, he held the phone in both hands, then opened and closed it, opened and closed it, which made it look like something with wings.

Freddie left the dentist's doorway and headed toward home, holding the phone in front of him at about wrist level, opening and closing, opening and closing; every time he looked back, the kid was still there, watching.

Other people were watching, too, their attention caught by the vision of something weird flying by. Nobody tried to grab the phone, though, and Freddie made sure to steer himself so he never got too close to anybody.

Moving like that, he made it to the corner, and turned away from the shopping street onto a residential side street, where maybe he could get a little peace and quiet. His idea was, he'd stash the phone under a bush or a rock or something, so he could come back and use it every day at lunchtime and solve his telephone problem for good and all.

But when he looked back, an army of the curious was coming around the corner behind him, led by that damn kid, who was loudly explaining to anybody who'd listen that that was a magic flying telephone up ahead there, and that it didn't want to be yelled into anymore.

Freddie sped up, waggling the phone wings like mad. Behind him, the crowd also sped up, and some of them were considerably speedier than Freddie, mostly because they were wearing shoes and he was not.

Too damn many people, that was the problem. You can distract a thousand of them, there's still another hundred to give chase. The downside of city life.

Freddie could see his plan was not going to work. If he didn't abandon this telephone, before the end of this block somebody would catch up, reach for it, touch him, yell like mad, touch him some more, and then grab. And then a lot of people would grab.

Come to think of it, since they wouldn't be able to see him, they wouldn't know what they were grabbing, or where they were grabbing it. They could knock him down onto the sidewalk and trample him and never even know it.

Would they be able to see his blood, once it was outside him, all over the sidewalk?

These were not comforting thoughts. At the moment, Freddie was running past narrow yellow-brick two-story houses, all alike, two feet apart from one another, built up a tiny slope and back from the sidewalk, with gray-brick steps and walks, and scrubby little plantings in front of their enclosed porches. As he ran on by them, the shouts behind him closer and closer, and as he came to understand at last how the fox feels when all those loudmouth hounds are in his near background, Freddie finally tossed the telephone up and away, toward the shrubbery in front of house number 261-23.

Good-bye, telephone. Tomorrow we'll work out something else.

Freddie kept running, but the shouts behind him receded, and when he at last dared to look back the crowd had all run up the steps to 261-23 and were diving into the bushes there. More and more of them came, ripping greenery out by the roots in their frenzied search for the magic flying telephone.

Freddie was winded. He stood where he was, panting, holding his side where the pain was, and watched people toss the phone into the air and leap to catch it and fight over it and toss it some more, trying to make it fly. A throng of people had gathered in front of 261-23 now, ballooning out onto the sidewalk and even to the street, and nobody even paid any attention when the lady of the house, outraged at this attack on her brushwork, came roaring out of her enclosed porch to stand on her top step with an Uzi in her hands, at port arms. She yelled a lot, but everybody else was also yelling, so what else was new?

Would she shoot the damn gun? She looked mad enough. Meanwhile, the insurance salesman in his now-rumpled tan suit was way out at the periphery of the mob, jumping up and down and screaming that he wanted his phone back. And above it all, the sound of approaching police sirens.

Enough. Figure out telephones some other time. Turning his back on the follies of the human race, Freddie trudged on home.

"I'm home!"

"Did you go to the movies?"

Peg wouldn't come out of the bedroom, as Freddie well knew, but would shout to him from in there until he'd lunched and dressed.

"No, I saw it yesterday," he called back, and made his way toward the kitchen

"What'd you do?" she shouted.

"Went for a run," he shouted, and entered the kitchen.

His sandwich and coffee were on the table there. On one of the two chairs lay his clothing and all four masks, so he could make his own choice. He sat on the other chair, ate, considered his recent experiences in the outside world, and at the end of the sandwich he had no difficulty at all selecting the mask to put on.

It was Frankenstein's monster in a long-sleeved shirt and pink rubber gloves who at length sloped on into the living room, where Peg sat reading a paperback novel about a rich beautiful woman who owned her own successful perfume business but had trouble keeping a guy. She looked up from the deck of a yacht in the Med, anchored off Cannes at film festival time, to say, "Frankenstein? You haven't wanted to be him before."

"Frankenstein's monster," Freddie corrected. "Frankenstein was the doctor. I don't think the monster ever had a name."

Peg marked her place in the book with a twenty-dollar bill. "What's the matter, Freddie? You seem depressed. Or is it just the head?"

"No, I don't think so," he said. "I think I'm probably kind of depressed all over. I was just chased by a mob. A Brooklyn mob. It made me kind of identify with this guy," he explained, pointing at his head.

"Chased by a mob? How could they even see you?"

He began to relate his adventures, assuring her he didn't blame her for his complex need to find a telephone (while making it clear in the subtext that he did blame her, for not trusting him to really leave the apartment), and he'd just reached the dentist's doorway when the phone beside Peg rang. "If it's the insurance guy," Freddie said, "tell him I don't need any."

"Oh, yes, you do," she said, but picked up the phone and spoke and then said, "Yeah, he's here now, hold on." She extended the phone toward Frankenstein, or his monster. "It's your brother."

"Oh, yeah."

Freddie crossed to take the phone, which felt strange with the rubber gloves on. Holding the phone to the side of the mask, he said, "Hey, Jimmy, what's happening?"

"Where are you, man, in a tunnel?"

Jimmy was one of Freddie's younger siblings, so Freddie didn't have to take any shit. "No, I'm not in a tunnel," he said. "Is that why you called?"

"You sound like you're on one of those speakerphones or something."

"Well, I'm not. This is how I sound these days, is all." Through the eyeholes, he could see Peg wincing in sympathy, which made him feel a little better. He said, "I'll tell you all about it sometime, Jimmy. What's going on?"

"Well, I'm calling from a pay phone," Jimmy said.

Ah-hah. The message in that was that Jimmy wanted to tell him something that the law might want to know about, and Jimmy's own phone might be tapped, since Jimmy had also in the course of his life at times drawn himself to their attention. But, since Freddie's phone likewise might have additional listeners, Jimmy's comment was also a warning: Be careful what we both say here.

"Okay," Freddie said. "How's the weather out there, by your pay phone?"

"Not bad. You got one of those sting letters, sent to the folks' place."

Whoops. Again Freddie knew exactly what his brother was talking about. Whenever the cops wanted to round up a whole bunch of really stupid people who had warrants outstanding, they'd send out these letters, which had come to be known on the street as the Superbowl letters, because usually they told the recipient he'd won tickets to the Superbowl and all he had to do was come to such-and-such an address and pick them up. Instead of which, he was what would be picked up, by a lot of unfriendly cops. This was a real cull, sweeping the streets of the most boneheaded of the crooks, leaving a clearer field to everybody else.

On the other hand, it was kind of an insult to be sent one of those letters. Voice dripping scorn, hoping his phone was tapped, Freddie said, "I got tickets to the Superbowl."

"It wasn't exactly that," his brother said, "but you got the idea. I don't know what you been up to recently—"

"Nothing! There's no sheet out on me at all!"

But even while he was saying that, and just for that moment believing it, Freddie was also thinking, Those damn doctors! Frankenstein and Frankenstein. They must have turned him in, and he must not have cleared away every last fingerprint from all the places he'd been in their damn house.

Meantime, Jimmy was saying, "Well, the folks got the letter, and it gave them a start, you know what I mean?"

"Tell them everything's fine, Jimmy, okay?"

"But is it? I mean, really? You know, just a yes or a no."

"Yes, Jimmy," Freddie said, and hung up, and said to Peg, "Let's get outta town for the summer."

18

At the end of 1993, Congress passed an obscure amendment to the tax law declaring that employer-provided free parking garage space worth more than $155 a month was to be treated as taxable income. The purpose of this obscure amendment was to skim just a little more off a few rich businessmen in New York and Los Angeles and Chicago, it never occurring to the good burghers of Congress that they receive from their employer — us — free parking garage space worth considerably more than $155 a month; have you ever tried to park near the Capitol? This fact, however, did not escape the notice of the IRS, no respecter of persons, so we can assume it's an amendment that won't be on the books for long.

In the meantime, however, the partners of Mordon Leethe's law firm were faced with an agonizing choice. Either pay the tax on their convenient parking spaces in the basement of their office building, or remove the glass from the barred high windows of the basement garage area, thus making the parking area one "exposed to the elements," thus presumably outdoors, thus worth less than $155 a month; whew, close one.

In June, the breeze wafting through the basement garage where Mordon parked his Mercedes was sweet and soft, redolent of the islands, or at least of the Cajun restaurant half a block away. Mordon locked his car — he also locked it inside his own garage, attached to his own house, in Oyster Bay — and as he turned toward the elevator a nearby car door slammed and there was Barney Beuler, the corrupt cop, striding fatly toward him, smiling that smug smile of his. (The man, did he but know it, was far more credible as a maоtre d' than a police officer.) "Good morning, Mr. Leethe," Barney crowed, pleased with himself. "Long time no see."

This was why Mordon locked his car. "How did you get in here?" he snapped.

Some men might have been insulted by such a greeting, but not Barney. "Are you kidding?" he said, and beamed more and more broadly in self-satisfaction. "I can get in anywhere I want."

"I thought you liked to be careful where you went," Mordon said, sour because he hadn't been looking forward to an encounter like this at the very beginning of the business day. "I thought you were worried about surveillance from — What do you call them? The police that police the police."

"Shooflys," Barney said, and grinned again, and pointed a thumb upward. "At this very moment," he said, "I am at my dentist's, in this building."

"When did he become your dentist?"

"Very recently."

The difference between Barney and me, Mordon told himself, and the reason I am automatically repelled by the man, is that when we meet, I am doing my job, but he is betraying his job. It makes all the difference. "What's this about, Barney?" he asked, and made a point of looking at his watch. "If you have news about that fellow Noon, why not get to me the normal way?"

"Because it isn't normal news," Barney said. Gesturing at Mordon's Rolex, he said, "You got nothing that won't keep. Come on and siddown a minute, lemme tell you a story."

Reluctant, but curious despite himself, Mordon followed Barney to a long black Lincoln, where Barney opened a rear door and gestured for Mordon to enter.

Mordon reared back to study the car. Connecticut plates. Chauffeur's cap on front passenger seat, on top of today's New York Post. Extraspacious rear seat, with TV. "This isn't your car."

"I never said it was. Get in, will ya?"

Mordon couldn't believe it. "It was unlocked?"

"Not when I got here. Come on, we don't wanna stand out here in the wind. You people oughta glass in those windows or something."

Mordon was not going to get into a discussion of tax law with Barney Beuler. Instead, he bowed forward and climbed into the Lincoln, sliding over on the black leather to make room. Barney settled in next to him, pulled the door shut, and leaned back with a sigh and a smile. "Not bad."

"Are you here to sell me this car?"

"That's one of the things I like about you, Mr. Leethe," Barney told him. "You're always a pistol, you never let up."

Mordon closed his mouth, observed Barney from a great distance, and waited.

Barney got it; he was always quick. "Right," he said, and looked out at the parking garage, then back to Mordon. "This fella Noon," he said. "He's an interesting guy."

"Just a little crook, you told me the other day."

"That's his record," Barney agreed. "Not even a blip on the old crime meter. But here you are taking an interest in him."

"My client is taking an interest in him."

"Even better. So this fella Noon, there's more to him than meets the eye."

Mordon permitted himself a wintry smile. "That's truer than you know."

"There's been no answer to our letter," Barney said.

"Surely he's gotten it by now." Today was Tuesday, and the letter had been sent last Thursday.

"Either he's not gonna get it," Barney said, "because his people don't know where he is, or he's too smart to fall for the stunt."

"This isn't what you're here to tell me."

"Last Wednesday," Barney said, "there was a break-in at a fur storage place out in Astoria. Looks like an inside job, nothing busted to get in, alarms switched off, a bunch of valuable mink coats just up and walk off the property. But the Burglary Squad takes prints, just to see if there's any strangers that the inside man let in, and there's our friend Fredric Urban Noon."

"He stole the coats?"

"You can't prove it, not in a court of law," Barney said. "Fingerprints will tell you where a guy was, but they can't tell you when he was there. Anyway, the week before that, either Wednesday or Thursday, they can't be sure, a bunch of diamonds went missing on West Forty-seventh Street. Again, looks like an inside job, no alarms touched, nobody suspicious around, just the diamonds are gone."

"And they found Noon's fingerprints," Mordon finished.

Barney grinned at him. "You know they did."

"Of course," Mordon said, realizing. "He can't wear gloves."

Barney raised an eyebrow. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing. Go on."

Barney thought about that, then shrugged and decided to let it go, to get back to his own flow of events. His smile when he looked at Mordon now was proprietary, the way he might smile at his restaurant. "Fredric Noon's an interesting guy, isn't he?"

"You said that before."

"I'm saying it again. He's an interesting guy. And you're gonna tell me why."

"I don't think so," Mordon said, "but I'll be happy to tell my client what you just said." And he reached for the door handle.

"Don't be stupid, Mr. Leethe," Barney said.

Mordon looked at him in surprise, and Barney wasn't smiling anymore. "Am I being stupid?"

"Not yet. It's true some of the shooflys would like to nail my nuts to a courthouse bench, but I also got friends here and there in the department, what with one thing and another."

"I'm sure you do."

"Now, if I was to go to those friends," Barney said, "and tell them you tried to suborn me and bribe me to pass along classified NYPD information—"

"They'd laugh at you," Mordon said. "I'd laugh at you."

"You think so?" Barney's eyes were now cold as ice. "You think I haven't been wired with you, Mr. Leethe? You think I'm so stupid I don't have selected tapes from our conversations that make you the heavy and me the virgin? Do you have tapes, Mr. Leethe?"

It had never occurred to Mordon that he might need such items. He stared at Barney, unable to think of a thing to say.

Barney could think of what to say. Patting Mordon's knee, the gesture sympathetic, he said, "You got a partner now, Mr. Leethe. So tell me the story."

Mordon told him the story.

19

"The house is haunted, you know," Mrs. Krutchfield said.

The young woman signing the register looked less than overwhelmed. "Oh, yeah?"

"Many of our guests have seen . . . strange things."

"I do too sometimes," the young woman said, and extended her credit card.

Dealing with the card, looking at the information the young woman had written on the register — Peg Briscoe, and an address in Brooklyn and the license number of that van outside — Mrs. Krutchfield was not at all surprised that this guest was a New Yorker.

City people, they think they know it all. Mrs. Krutchfield, a buxom motherly woman rather beyond a certain age, was sorry, but she just couldn't help it, New Yorkers rubbed her the wrong way, they always had. They were never impressed by anything. You can take your tourist families from faraway places like Osaka, Japan, and Ionia, Iowa, and Urbino, Italy, and Uyuni, Bolivia — and Mrs. Krutchfield could show you all of them in her visitors' book with their very excellent comments — and you could show them your wonders of the Hudson River valley, and you could just happen to mention that this lovely old pre-Revolution farmhouse, now The Sewing Kit bed-and-breakfast outside Rhinebeck, was known to be haunted by a British cavalry officer slain under this very roof in 1778, and those people are, in two words, impressed.

But not New Yorkers. It was such a pity, then, since The Sewing Kit was a mere 100 miles straight north of Manhattan, into the most scenic countryside, that New Yorkers were so much more important to her operation than all the Osakians and Ionians and Urbinos and Uyunis put together. Mrs. Krutchfield just bit her lip and kept her own counsel and tried not to look at the "wives'" ring fingers, and did her level best to treat the New Yorkers just like everybody else.

Including this Briscoe snip. Handing over the large iron key dangling from an even larger wooden representation of the sort of drum that goes with a fife, Mrs. Krutchfield smiled maternally and said, "You'll be in General Burgoyne."

The snip frowned, hefting the heavy key and drum. "Is that usual?"

That was the other thing about New Yorkers: they kept saying things that made no sense. Ignoring that remark, Mrs. Krutchfield said, "We've named all our rooms after Revolutionary War figures, so much nicer than numbers, I think. General Burgoyne, and Betsy Ross, and Thomas Jefferson—"

"The usual suspects."

Mrs. Krutchfield got that one. "Yes," she said, miffed. But she couldn't help going on with her patter. "All except the colonel, of course, we wouldn't name a room after him."

So it is possible to attract the attention of a New York snip. The girl said, "The colonel?"

"Colonel Hesketh Pardigrass," Mrs. Krutchfield explained, and looked over her shoulder before lowering her voice to add, "the one who was slain in this very house in 1778. It was because of a woman. He's the ghost."

"Ah," the young woman said. "Haunted house equals ghost equals your colonel."

"Well, yes." It was so hard to be civil to New Yorkers, but Mrs. Krutchfield would not give up. "You can read all about him in your room," she confided. "I wrote up his history and made copies, so there's one in every room. You're welcome to take it with you if you like." She didn't add, but might have, most of the decent people do. Particularly the Japanese.

"Thank you," the girl said, noncommittal; she wouldn't take the colonel's history with her, you could tell. And now she hefted the drum-and-key once more, and said, "Are they alphabetical?"

Mrs. Krutchfield went blank. "Are what alphabetical?"

"The rooms. I was wondering how to find General Burgoyne."

"Oh, well, I'll give you directions," Mrs. Krutchfield offered. Alphabetical? she wondered. What did the girl mean, alphabetical? "You just drive your vehicle around to the back," she said, "and park anywhere. You'll see the outside staircase, just go up and in the door there, and it's the first door on the right. You'll have lovely views of the Catskills."

"Oh, good."

"And you'll be staying just the one night?" This customer was a bit unusual, at that; a lone young woman on a Wednesday in June, arriving at almost six in the evening, for one night only.

Which the girl confirmed. "Yes. We're up looking for a house to rent for the summer, but we didn't find anything today."

Mrs. Krutchfield frowned past the girl toward her van parked on the circular drive. "We? I thought you were alone."

"Oh, I am. My, uh, my friends had to drive back to the city tonight, because of their cats."

Oh, yes, New Yorkers also have cats. Some had even been known to ask if they could keep their smelly cats in the actual rooms at The Sewing Kit, to which the invariable response was a gentle but firm no.

The girl said, "You wouldn't know any houses for rent, would you?"

"I'm afraid not, no."

"Well, we'll look some more tomorrow. Thank you."

Mrs. Krutchfield was at heart a good woman, which is why she said, "There's a television set in the parlor, some guests like to watch in the evening," even though New Yorkers never want to watch the same programs as everybody else.

"Thanks." The girl turned away, paused, seemed to think about something, and turned back with her brow all furrowed. "Your ghost," she said. "You say there's a write-up about him in the room?"

"Yes, every room. You're welcome to take it with you, if you like."

"Yes, you said that." The girl seemed obscurely troubled, and even sighed a little. "Well, we can only hope for the best," she commented, as though to herself, and left Mrs. Krutchfield steaming in a stew of irritation and bewilderment.

New Yorkers!

There was only one empty room at The Sewing Kit tonight, Nathan Hale, the one Mrs. Krutchfield always rented last because it was downstairs in back, too near the kitchen and the TV, and with no view at all to speak of, unless you like extreme close-ups of pine trees. But it was a nice group tonight, a nice mix, with some Germans in Betsy Ross, making marks on maps, and a family of Canadians in Ben Franklin washing their clothing in the sink — they'd particularly asked for a room with a sink, since The Sewing Kit did not offer private baths, but only communal bathrooms shared by two or three guest rooms — and in other rooms were several groups of mid-westerners, whom Mrs. Krutchfield had always found to be the very nicest of Americans, if somehow not all that stimulating. And of course the retired couple from Detroit — "Motor City!" they kept calling it, with the exclamation point solidly present in a silvery saliva spray — were still here, and still had more of their postcard collection from all over the "Lower Forty-eight" — as they called America — to show to their innkeeper or the other guests or anyone else who didn't move fast enough.

And of course there was the New Yorker in General Burgoyne.

Somehow, not entirely sure why, Mrs. Krutchfield found herself hoping the Motor City! couple and the girl from Brooklyn never crossed paths.

The Sewing Kit did not serve lunch or dinner, offering instead a typed-up list of suggestions of fine restaurant experiences to be had in the general Rhinebeck-Red Hook area. Mrs. Krutchfield did serve a breakfast of which she was proud, enough baked and fried food to pin any traveler to the seat of his or her car for hours after departure from The Sewing Kit, but the other meals she prepared only for herself, in her private quarters off in the left front wing of the sprawling structure, from which she could watch the main entrance and the circular drive for late arrivals or unexpected departures.

Usually, after dinner, Mrs. Krutchfield would join in the side parlor any of her guests who might like to watch TV. She herself was always in bed by ten, but she didn't mind if the guests continued to enjoy television by themselves, so long as they kept the volume down and turned the box off no later than the end of Jay Leno at 12:30. (New Yorkers always wanted to watch David Letterman.)

This evening the parlor was comfortably full, mostly with midwesterners, plus the Canadians (who smelled of Ivory Liquid), all spread out on both sofas, the three padded armchairs, and even the two wooden chairs. The girl from Brooklyn came in a little later than everyone else, looked around, smiled, said, "That's okay," waved the midwestern gentlemen back into their seats, and settled cross-legged on the floor in front of the sofas more gracefully and athletically than a city girl should be able to do.

Mrs. Krutchfield was justifiably proud of the big black gridwork dish out behind The Sewing Kit, bringing in television signals from all over outer space, but the truth was, she didn't make much use of its potential, limiting herself almost exclusively to the three networks, except when it so happened that one of the guests knew of a particular old movie afloat on some obscure brooklet crossing the heavens, and asked if they might tune in: a Martin and Lewis comedy, perhaps, or Johnny Belinda, or Fail-Safe.

There was nobody like that tonight, though, so they contented themselves with sitcoms. Mrs. Krutchfield sat in her usual place, the comfortable armchair directly opposite the TV. On the maple end table beside her lay the remote control, atop the satellite weekly listings open to tonight's schedule. (It was better not to let any of the male guests near the remote control.) And so another evening began at The Sewing Kit.

At first, everything was normal and serene. Then, at just about four minutes past nine, as everybody was contentedly settling in to watch a program broadcast from some parallel universe in which, apparently, there was a small town where the mayor and the fire chief and the high school football coach spent all their time joshing with one another at a diner run by a woman suffering from, judging by her voice, throat cancer, all at once the TV set sucked that picture into itself, went click, and spread across itself an image of three people moving on a bed, with no covers on. With no clothing on! Good gracious, what are those people doing?

Some horrible corner of the satellite village, some swamp beside the information highway, had suddenly thrust itself — oh, what an awful choice of words! — onto their TV screen. Gasping and shaking and little cries of horror ran through the room as Mrs. Krutchfield grabbed frantically for the remote control, only to find it had somehow fallen to the floor under her chair.

The people on-screen were also gasping and shaking and emitting little cries, though not of horror. "Mrs. Krutchfield!" cried a midwesterner, a stout lady from Loose Falls, whose chubby hands were now a bas relief on the front of her face. "Mrs. Krutchfield, help!"

"I'm, I'm—"

Scrabble, scramble — there! A different channel. On this channel, in a bare room, garishly lit, several men in ski masks and gray robes waved machine guns over their heads and yelled at the camera in some foreign tongue, urging who knew what depredations to be directed against the decent people of the planet, but at least they were clothed, and none of them were women, so they afforded Mrs. Krutchfield that calm moment of leisure she needed to figure out how to get back to Kitty's Diner, where the coach was saying: "— and that's when you throw the long bomb."

The sound track laughed, God knows why, and most of the people in the parlor dutifully laughed along with it, and life got back to normal.

For eight minutes. Im-plode, click, and now it was two people on what looked like a hockey rink in a large empty arena. These two weren't entirely naked, since they were both wearing ice skates, but what they were doing together was certainly not an Olympic routine.

Cries and shrieks from the sofas. Great wafts of Ivory Liquid essence from the Canadians. Mrs. Krutchfield lunged for the remote, and it was gone again!

Under her chair again — how could she keep knocking the blame thing off the end table like that, without noticing? — but this time she was more sure-fingered in fighting her way back to Kitty's Diner, where Kitty was rasping: "— and that's why you can't get today's special today."

The sound track laughed, the people in Mrs. Krutchfield's parlor laughed, and the world returned to its accustomed orbit.

For four minutes this time, before the implodeclickpicture, during which half the guests either squeezed their eyes shut or protectively slapped their palms to their faces. But this time it was something entirely different. The picture on the screen was in black-and-white, to begin with, instead of those all-too-real flesh tones. Also, the woman walking along the cliff-edge above the stormy sea was fully clothed. Not only that, she was . . .

"Gene Tierney!" cried a midwestern gentleman who had not shut his eyes.

"She wouldn't do things like that!" cried a midwestern lady, whose eyes were still firmly sealed.

"It's a movie!" cried another midwestern gentleman.

Eyes opened. On-screen, the action had moved indoors, into an extremely cute cottage not unlike The Sewing Kit itself, though perhaps a bit more cramped. In this setting, a recognizable Rex Harrison marched and harrumphed, dressed like a pirate captain or something, and behaving in a rough-and-ready way that didn't at all suit him. Also, you could see through him, which was odd.

A midwestern gentleman said, "It's The Ghost and Mrs. Muir."

A midwestern lady said, "I remember that series. But it wasn't Rex Harrison."

"No, no, no," said the gentleman. "This is the original movie."

"There was a movie?"

A Canadian, somewhat younger, said, "There was a television series?"

A midwestern lady gave out a sudden shriek. "It's the ghost!" she cried.

"And Mrs. Muir," said her companion on the sofa.

"No! The ghost! Colonel Pardigrass!"

That shut them up. For a minute or two everyone in the room just sat and gazed at Rex Harrison and Gene Tierney, finding love — or something — across the centuries. So much pleasanter to contemplate than those other people.

Timidly, a midwestern lady said, "Mrs. Krutchfield, does this happen often?"

"My goodness, no," Mrs. Krutchfield said. "I couldn't bear it."

"What does the ghost usually do?" asked a gentleman.

"Well, uh," Mrs. Krutchfield stammered, all undone by events. "Just, oh, rapping and, and creaking, and that sort of thing. The usual sort of thing."

"This is a completely different manifestation from anything that ever happened before?"

"Lord, yes!"

The snip from Brooklyn, seated on the floor in their midst, turned toward them an excessively innocent face as she said, "Looks like, after all these years, the colonel's getting a little randy."

"The ghost wasn't like that with Mrs. Muir," a lady objected.

"Frankly," a gentleman said, "I don't see how it's possible to suffer the pangs of the flesh if you don't have any flesh."

"It doesn't bear thinking about," a lady announced, in an effort to forestall speculation.

Another lady said, "Mrs. Krutchfield, what should we do?"

Mrs. Krutchfield had been pondering this problem herself. The ghost of Colonel Hesketh Pardigrass had never been any trouble before, had been, in fact, merely another charming part of the decor, like the Laura Ashley curtains and the Shaker reproduction furniture and the print in the entranceway of George Washington crossing the Delaware. An insubstantial insubstantiality, in other words, which was exactly the way Mrs. Krutchfield preferred it.

It wasn't that Mrs. Krutchfield had made up the ghost, or not exactly. The real estate agent, years ago when she'd bought this wreck of a place to fix up for its present use, had told her about the old tales of ghostly goings-on here, though without any specific history or even anecdotes attached. (Privately, Mrs. Krutchfield had always believed that much of what the real estate agent had told her was malarkey, meant to intrigue her, but that was all right. She'd been spending her school-administration retirement funds plus her dead husband's insurance money, and had been in a mood for a bit of malarkey, anyway.)

Then, shortly after buying the place, when Mrs. Krutchfield had been ripping out some horrible old linoleum in the kitchen, with newspapers lining the floor beneath, one ancient newspaper had contained a feature story about ghosts in the Hudson River valley, in which Mrs. Krutchfield had read about this Colonel Hesketh Pardigrass, who had been having some sort of liaison with the wife of a farmer in the area and had been murdered in the farmhouse, presumably by the farmer, though possibly by the wife. In any event, it had been claimed for a while that Colonel Pardigrass roamed the site of his demise on windy nights, still vainly trying to get back to his old regiment, though no one, even at the time this old newspaper had been printed, claimed to have had personal experience of the wayward colonel. As to the farmhouse, the description of the place and its whereabouts had been vague, but this house here could just as well have been the one where it all happened, so why not say so? What was the harm?

And how much cosier for a nice B-and-B like Mrs. Krutchfield's to come equipped with a ghost. A nice gentlemanly ghost, like Rex Harrison over there, though less intrusive. And that was how it had been.

Until tonight, that is.

After a few minutes of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, when nothing further of an untoward nature happened — and now, more than ever before, Mrs. Krutchfield understood the concept of happenings of an untoward nature — one of the Canadians timidly asked if it might be possible to return to Kitty's Diner, but one of the midwestern gentlemen said, "Seems to me, this is what the colonel wants to watch. I don't know that we oughta cross him."

Which ended that discussion, and everybody settled down to make some sense out of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, if possible. However, without color to soothe their eyes and a laugh track to let them know when things were supposed to be funny, they soon became restless and uneasy. There were murmurings among the guests, who were clearly suggesting to one another it was time to give up television for this evening and go to sleep instead — what else was there? — until Mrs. Krutchfield, who was not a timid woman, suddenly said, "Well, I'm sorry, but I'm just not in the mood for this particular movie this evening. I want to go back to Kitty's Diner."

"So do I," said several other people.

"Good," Mrs. Krutchfield said, and reached to the end table, and found nothing. She looked — the remote wasn't there. On the floor again? Grunting, she leaned forward to look under her chair, and it wasn't there either. "Now where's that remote doodad?" she asked, and implodeclickpicture it was those people on the bed again!

Indefatigable, inexhaustible, and now there were four of them! A second naked woman had joined the other depraved souls, and this one had something strapped around her mid-section. What is that?

"Aaaaa!" said many people in the room.

A mad scramble took place to find the remote, while onscreen the four naked people displayed various mathematical formulae. Two into one does go, as it turns out.

The remote was in a midwestern lady's purse, which caused her to turn as red as Rudolph the Reindeer's nose. "I'm sure I — I'm sure I — I'm sure I—" was all she could manage to say.

"No one blames you, Edith," her husband assured her, patting her arm.

Mrs. Krutchfield had, the instant the remote was in her hands, used it to off the TV, with extreme prejudice. "I think," she said, "that's enough television for this evening."

No one disagreed. One of the ladies, on quitting the parlor, said rather waspishly in Mrs. Krutchfield's ear, "I don't think much of that colonel of yours."

"I don't know what to think of him," Mrs. Krutchfield replied, which was only the truth. A dubious character from two dubious sources, dubiously yoked together into one fanciful whole, and now was it to come to life? Would Mrs. Krutchfield never be able to watch television peaceably in her own parlor ever again? Would she have to remove those handsome write-ups about the colonel from her guest rooms, the ones the guests were free to take along with them on departure, if they so chose? (No one from this group would so choose, you could be sure of that.)

How did one find an exorcist? Were they in the Yellow Pages?

Mrs. Krutchfield went to bed with a severe headache, and tossed and turned all night; alone, at least, thank heaven.

Most people, including the grinning snip from Brooklyn, left the parlor when Mrs. Krutchfield did, but a few of the midwestern gentlemen stayed behind to try to find those naked people on the bed in the airwaves just one more time. They never did succeed.

20

"That wasn't very nice."

"Then how come you're still laughing?" came the unrepentant voice from the rear of the van.

"I didn't say it wasn't funny," Peg pointed out, "I said it wasn't nice."

In both exterior mirrors, The Sewing Kit and its collar of pine trees receded in bright morning sunlight, appearing to shiver slightly, as though not yet over last night's trauma. Everyone had seemed subdued at breakfast this morning in the overly cutesy sunroom, and Mrs. Krutchfield most subdued of all. As she brought out platter after platter of scrambled eggs and sausage and English muffins and fried potatoes and heavily buttered toast, her professional smile had been less than perfect and her doting attention to her guests hampered by an unremitting distraction. Jugs of orange juice and coffee and milk sloshed as she brought them from the kitchen, and she constantly darted glances over her shoulder. From time to time, she trembled all over, like a hard-ridden horse.

Peg had offered to sneak some food back for Freddie, but he'd said that was okay, he could wait until they left and get something at a deli somewhere, so Peg ate by herself while Freddie packed, and now they were on their way north in their continuing search for a nice place to spend the summer.

The problem was, most nice places were already gone. To be looking for a summer rental in the mountains north of New York City in the last week in June was an exercise in frustration. Most real estate agents had nothing left to show, and those few rentals that were still on the market were there for a very good reason: nobody could possibly want them.

Still, they were here, so, once they'd gotten Freddie a sandwich and a Coke to eat in the back of the van, on they went in their quest.

Most of the real estate agents Peg talked to wanted to use their own cars, naturally, to show this potential client around, but she always refused, saying she just wasn't comfortable as an automobile passenger anymore, not since that horrible accident that had led to so much reconstructive surgery; you can't see the scars, can you? Tell the truth, now.

So the real estate agents invariably agreed to travel with Peg in the van, unaware of the naked Freddie, lolling in the back. And wherever they went to look at a house, Peg would always leave her van door open. That way, Freddie could look the places over, too, and once Peg had returned the agent to his or her office, they could discuss what they'd seen.

Not that there was much to discuss. Kennels and chicken coops, chicken coops and kennels, and that was how the morning sailed by. For lunch, they picnicked on opposite sides of the van in a field full of flowers, with cows on the other side of a barbed-wire fence, and in calling back and forth to one another, their mouths full of take-out sandwiches, they admitted a certain discouragement. And not just with the house-hunt, either.

"I'll tell you the truth, Freddie," Peg called from her side of the van, waggling a pickle for emphasis, "this eating business is getting to be a drag."

"For me, too, Peg," Freddie's voice came back, floating around the van. "I'd like to go to a restaurant again, the two of us. I'd like to eat with you even at home sometimes, order out Chinese like we used to."

"That's the way I feel, too, Freddie."

Freddie could be heard chewing thoughtfully for a while, and then he said, "Peg, the fact is, there's a lot of advantages to this invisibility thing, I don't deny it, but there's a whole bunch of disadvantages, too."

"That's the truth."

"If I could turn it on or off, you know, whenever I wanted, it would be a different thing."

"Exactly."

"On the other hand, Peg," Freddie said, "I think maybe all these doghouses we've been looking at the last couple days have depressed us."

"Even more, you mean."

"Yeah. Even more. Maybe we should pack it in. Quit now, and go back to the city."

"We've only got one more guy on the list around here," Peg said. "Let's go see him, take a look at what he's got, and then we'll give it up, we'll go home and forget it."

"We can take a plane somewhere," Freddie said. "First Class is never full, we'll take one First Class seat, and I'll sit beside you."

"And spook the pilots, just for fun?"

"Did you like that? The ghost and Mrs. Muir?"

Peg laughed, and then Freddie laughed, and things were all right again for a while.

"I have something you're going to love," said Call Me Tom. He was a hefty amiable guy in a small office in what had once been a gasoline station back before OPEC, and he'd jotted down Peg's particulars on a form, asked her about price range, and then he'd smiled and said he had something she was going to love.

Fine. On the other hand, every other real estate agent had also had something to show Peg that she was going to love, and every one of them had been wrong. So Peg was restrained in her joy. "I'll look at it," she allowed.

"It just came on the market," Call Me Tom explained, "or it would have been snapped up already. The owners didn't leave till Tuesday, we needed the cleaning lady to go through, so it's only today I can start to show it."

Peg said, "How come the owners left in such a hurry?" Because if it didn't mean the owner was on the run from the Mob so the house was likely to get itself firebombed, it must mean the house was full of asbestos that the owner just found out about.

But Call Me Tom said, "He's a scientist with a big pharmaceutical company, they had some kind of problem in their plant out on the West Coast, all of a sudden he had to transfer out there for the next four months. He doesn't like to leave the place empty, so that's why it's for rent. Fully furnished. Within your price range."

"Let's take a look," Peg said.

Okay. Here's the house: It's a small old farmhouse, built in the early nineteenth century, a center-hall Colonial with entrance and second-floor staircase in the middle. Downstairs is a big living room, medium-size dining room, small kitchen, and tiny bath. Upstairs, two bedrooms and two more baths.

Modern windows and screens and central air. A wooden deck behind the house. The swimming pool, small but very nice, was in a wooden-fenced enclosure just beyond the patio. The circular asphalt drive in from the secondary country road included a spur to a two-car garage, built to match the style of the house; it contained a 1979 white Cadillac convertible up on blocks and space for another vehicle, such as Freddie's van. The house, tastefully furnished with American antiques and every known modern appliance, came with a cleaning woman and a guy to mow the lawn and take care of the pool, each showing up once a week.

All the way through the place, while Call Me Tom was pointing out features and Peg was trying to see and listen and comprehend, she kept getting insistent little jabs in the side and taps on the elbow from her invisible playmate. In the master bathroom, just as Call Me Tom was leaving and Peg was about to leave, steam appeared on the medicine cabinet mirror, which would be Freddie's breath, and a moving but not observable finger wrote TAKE IT.

Peg, who already knew that, rolled her eyes and would have left the room, but Call Me Tom had turned back to remark on something or other, and when Peg looked at him he was frowning past her toward that mirror.

Immediately, she turned back. Keeping her own head visible in the mirror, blocking Call Me Tom's view of the message, she stepped forward, saying, "I forgot to look in the medicine cabinet."

"That's funny," Call Me Tom said, musing, following her.

As Peg neared the medicine cabinet, an invisible palm swiped over the steam, removing it. Peg opened the door fast, hoping to whack her playful companion a painful one, but missed. The interior of the cabinet was empty. All the personal goods the owner had not taken with him had been stored away in the attic.

"Very nice," Peg said, and shut the cabinet door, to see in its mirror Call Me Tom's face looming over her right shoulder, frowning deeply at his own reflection. She lifted an eyebrow.

"I could have sworn," he said.

She lifted both eyebrows. "What?"

"Oh, nothing."

The tour continued, and so did the jabs and jostles, until finally, back downstairs in the kitchen, while Call Me Tom was pointing out the food disposal in the sink, Peg yanked away from one poke too many, and cried out, in exasperation, "I know! I know!"

Call Me Tom gazed at her, hurt. "You don't have one of these in New York," he said, justifying himself. "They're not legal in the city."

"I'm sorry," Peg told him, "I just, uh, I didn't mean that, I was thinking about something else. Anyway, we'll take it."

"Good," Call Me Tom said, well pleased, but then looked confused. "We?"

"My boyfriend," Peg explained. "He couldn't come up today, he's working, but he'll visit me on weekends. We'll share the cost."

"Are you sure he won't want to see it first, before you take it?"

"Oh, no. I know Freddie's taste," Peg assured the agent. "I'm as positive of how he'll feel about this place as if he were standing right here next to me."

"That's beautiful," Call Me Tom said. "When a couple have that much understanding of one another and confidence in one another."

"We understand each other pretty good," Peg said, and on the way out she did at last manage, with a sudden unexpected shove of the front door, to give Mr. Smartaleck a satisfying whump. She distinctly felt and heard it hit, and definitely heard that sharp intake of breath.

Peg smiled, all the way back to the van.

21

At just about the same moment that Peg was looking into the empty medicine cabinet up north in Columbia County, "A very frustrating guy, your Freddie Noon," Barney Beuler was telling Mordon Leethe in the backseat of a maroon Jaguar sedan in the underground garage where they'd met before. Barney liked this way of meeting, except for the dental bills; he really did have to keep those appointments. On the other hand, his teeth had needed work for some time, as both his wife and his lady friend had more than once pointed out. And the main point was, he liked the idea of these secret meetings in the underground garage here, these shadowy figures together. Like he was Deep Throat, in the backseat of this car here. The other Deep Throat.

Anyway, "A very frustrating guy," he repeated, and settled more comfortably into the luxurious cordovan-tone leather of the Jaguar upholstery.

"Is that right," said Leethe. Sour as ever, which was his problem, wasn't it?

The other nice thing about meeting here instead of at the restaurant was, down here Barney didn't have to do his restaurant grovel with this asshole. They could meet as . . . what? Partners.

"Lemme tell you about Freddie Noon," Barney told his partner. "He's got no phone listed in his name, he isn't registered to vote—"

"That's a surprise," Leethe said, with deep sarcasm.

"No, there's a lotta guys registered you wouldn't think so," Barney told him. "Your serial killers, for instance, they tend to be very scrupulous voters. I dunno, maybe it's a way to meet people."

"You were talking about Fredric Noon."

"His pals call him Freddie," Barney said. "And he's got a true scoundrel's take on life. No vehicle registered in his name, no account with Con Edison, no way to get a handle on him. A guy that's ready to cut and run at any second."

"Are you saying it's impossible to find this fellow?"

"Well, we know he's in town," Barney said, "with those fingerprints of his showing up in all the wrong places. Pretty good, huh? The invisible burglar." Barney'd been getting a kick out of that idea ever since he'd browbeaten Leethe into telling him the secret.

"We would prefer him," Leethe said, "to be an invisible burglar for us."

"Well, naturally. Okay, the other thing is, besides he's in town, we can figure he's got himself a lady friend. Somebody's got to get those electric bills, put their name on the apartment lease. The question is, how do you find the lady friend?"

"I take it," Leethe said, "you wanted to speak to me because you've succeeded."

"Wait for it," Barney told his partner. He refused to let Leethe's sourness spoil the occasion. "It happens," he said, "I have a friend in the department has a friend in probation has a client that's an old pal of Freddie Noon. So my friend asks his friend to ask Freddie's friend how Freddie's doing these days, and Freddie's friend says he thinks Freddie went straight—"

"Hah."

"Well, yeah, but what would you expect the guy to say? Except, he says he thinks Freddie went straight when he took up with a dental technician named Peg."

"There must be a lot of such people," Leethe said.

"Yeah, but they're all licensed," Barney said. "Dental technicians are licensed. So we're talking about somebody that lives in New York, that's named Peg, that's on the list of licensed dental technicians, that's the right age and race and sex and marital status."

"She could be black," objected Leethe. "Or Asian. Or married. Or the wrong age group."

"You go with the probabilities," Barney said. "And when you go with the probabilities, you find she's a single white broad in her twenties named Peg Briscoe and she lives in Bay Ridge."

"Very good," Leethe allowed, which was about on a par with a normal person having an orgasm.

"On the basis," Barney said, "of those fingerprints found at the furrier and the diamond center, and on the basis of Peg Briscoe being a known associate of Fredric Urban Noon, and on the basis of I'm the one that found the connection, I got an okay to go question Peg Briscoe on her knowledge of the whereabouts of one F. U. Noon."

"F.U.?"

"Think of him as F.U.N."

"Slightly better," Leethe acknowledged. "But why go through all that hugger-mugger?"

Barney pointed at the top of his head. "See this scalp? There's shooflys want to wear this on their belt. Everything I do, every goddam thing, I gotta take it for granted they're watching me. So I always cover my ass."

"If only my corporate clients," Leethe said, "could absorb that concept into their thinking."

"Civilians think like civilians," Barney said, and shrugged. "There's no point trying to change them."

"You're probably right. What happens now?"

"When I'm done at the dentist," Barney said, "I'll go see this Peg Briscoe. You wanna come along?"

"What about those shooflys of yours?"

"I've already signed out that I'm going to interview Peg Briscoe. That's where I'll go, and when they see that's where I'm going they'll forget me for today. They don't have the manpower to watch every red-flag cop twenty-four hours a day."

"I should think not."

"So you'll go there, too, you'll drive, and you'll park near the place—"

"Where is it?"

"Bay Ridge, I'll give you the address. When I get there, I'll go around the block a couple times, make sure I'm alone. Then I'll park and go in, and when you see me go in you go in. Then we go talk to Briscoe together. And with any luck our pal Freddie."

"This is very good news." Leethe said. He damn near smiled, the bastard.

22

Driving south toward New York City on the Taconic Parkway, the keys to their new summer house in her pocket, Peg said, "I thought he looked a little funny when I gave him cash."

Beside her, Freddie was being Dick Tracy again, always a sign he was in a cheerful mood, sometimes a sign he was in too cheerful a mood, might decide to get playful or something. But at the moment he was just sitting there, being a good boy, wearing his head and his pink Playtex gloves. Using a gloved finger to scratch Dick's nose, he said, "Whaddaya mean, money? Why wouldn't he want money? You're telling me they still use wampum up here?"

"Checks," Peg said. Having lived a more or less normal life until she'd met Freddie, it was frequently her job to explain the straight world to him. "Nobody uses cash anymore," she explained.

"Whadda they use?"

"When you go the supermarket, you use your credit card."

"Don't have one."

"I know. When you rent a house, you pay by check."

"Don't have a checking account."

"I know. Freddie, we might have to get us one."

Freddie really and truly didn't get it. "Why? Peg, cash is money. You know? The green stuff, that's the actual money."

"But nobody uses it."

"Big companies don't use it."

"Nobody uses it," Peg insisted. "So when you use it, you stand out, people look at you."

"They don't look at me, Peg."

"You know what I mean, Freddie, don't be a smartaleck. You know, I used to have a checking account."

"What, and you miss it?"

"The problem is," Peg said, "when you move a lot of money around in a bank, they have to report it to the feds. I forget, it's either five or ten thousand. You move more than that, whichever it is, the bank tells the IRS, and they look at you to see what's what."

Dick Tracy's mask managed to look astonished, even skeptical. He said, "Regular citizens they do this to?"

"Anybody. Sure."

"And the citizens put up with it?"

"Well, yeah."

The Dick Tracy head shook, in mournful wonder. "Peg," Freddie said, from down inside there, "that's a world I never wanna be a part of."

"I don't think you'll be asked," Peg told him. "But what I think I'll do, I'll reactivate my old checking account, or start a new one, and put three or four grand a week in it, so we can pay our bills like regular people."

"Peg, I don't know about this," Freddie said.

"And I'll get a credit card," Peg said. "Dr. Lopakne'll give me a reference, if I ask." Dr. Lopakne was the dentist she'd most recently worked for.

"Peg!" Freddie cried. He sounded really alarmed now. "I don't like this, Peg. In our life, we don't need all this stuff."

"I tell you what I'll do," Peg said. "I'll use the address in the country. That way, when we move back to town, I can just cancel everything."

"Okay," he said, but he still sounded dubious.

"We don't want people wondering about us, Freddie," Peg said.

"Yeah, you're right, I know you're right," Freddie said. "It's just such a weird way to live, though. Afraid of the feds. Don't believe in cash money. Putting stuff down on paper all the time. How do the squares stand it?"

"They get used to it," Peg said.

The deal was, they were taking the house for four months, July through October, two thousand a month, and the owners were throwing in the last week in June, but they wanted a one-month deposit, so, four thousand in front. It was when Peg had opened her shoulder bag and taken out the envelope with five grand in it and counted it out on the desk until she got to four thousand, and then put the rest away again, that Call Me Tom began to look a little glassy.

Peg had seen that reaction, and understood it, and explained that her boyfriend was avoiding checks and normal paper trails at the moment because he was in a legal battle with his ex-wife, which was why Peg was signing the lease by herself and her boyfriend had given her cash to seal the bargain. Call Me Tom understood, of course, about legal battles with ex-wives, so that was okay, but still, at the end, after the signature and the handshake, as he escorted Peg out of his office, and over to her van, parked where the gas pumps used to be, he said, "I hope your friend's legal problems get worked out."

"Me, too," Peg said, and smiled, but she knew what he meant. Normal people really and truly don't trust cash.

The place was theirs right now, to move in whenever they wanted. Driving back, they discussed their plans. It would be nice to make the move, do it and be done with it, but on the other hand did they want to drive another hundred and some miles today? Probably not. So they go home to Bay Ridge, pack, make grocery lists and stuff, sleep in the apartment, and tomorrow morning head north.

It might have worked out that way, too, if they hadn't been interrupted. Freddie was in the bedroom, his two beat-up suitcases on the bed, drawers open as he transferred stuff, and Peg was in the kitchen, deciding what to take from the refrigerator and the shelves and what to toss out, when a banging sounded at the front door. Freddie and Peg both moved, meeting in the living room, giving each other wary looks. Peg called at the door, "Who is it?"

"Police!"

Already Freddie's head was coming off, as he dashed back into the bedroom. Peg called, "Just a second till I get dressed!" Then she returned to the kitchen, closed the cabinet doors, and ran some water from the sink over her head, dabbing it quickly with a dish towel.

Meanwhile, the pounding started up again at the front door. Crossing the living room, Peg called, "Here I come! Here I come!" Opening the door, she said, "I just got out of the shower."

It was plainclothes cops, which was worse than usual cops, because that meant already they were taking it seriously, whatever it was. One of them was your typical beefy cop, tough guy, looking for a chance to throw his weight around. He came in first, flashing his shield in its leather case, saying, "We're looking for Freddie Noon."

"Not here," Peg said. "You came to the wrong place."

"No, we didn't, girlie," the tough cop said. He put away his shield, then pulled out a folded document on thick paper. "This is the warrant," he said, waving it around like an incense holder, sanctifying the apartment for his search. "It says we can go through this place, look for your boyfriend."

"He isn't my boyfriend."

"Oh, yeah?" The cop opened his warrant and studied it, as though for the first time. "Are you," he said, frowning over the document, "Margaret Elizabeth Briscoe?"

Hard to believe; oh, well. "Sure," Peg said.

"Then we're in the right place," the cop said, and some ghostly stew came floating across the room; it looked something like chicken а la king.

Uck — she hadn't known about that. "Let me see that paper," she demanded, to distract both the cops and herself.

The cop held it up, so she could see but not touch, then frowned and said, "What are you standin there with the door open?"

"This all of you?" Peg made a production out of leaning out to look up and down the hall. A voice whispered in her ear, "Train, tomorrow, Rhinebeck." Ghostly lips touched her cheek. She grinned at the air, winked, and turned back, saying, "The way you came in, I thought you had like an army with you."

The tough cop ignored all that. "Where is he?"

"I don't know. I haven't seen him in weeks," Peg said, which was, of course, the literal truth. "I threw him out, I didn't like the way he carried on."

The tough cop said to his partner, "Keep an eye on her, I'll toss the place."

"Right," said the other one.

The tough cop left, to thud through the other rooms of the apartment, and Peg now took a closer look at his partner, and was surprised by what she saw. An older guy, sour-looking, deeply lined face, sloping shoulders. Not in good physical shape at all, but not in bad shape in that beer-and-weightlifting way that cops get. There's something weird about this guy, Peg thought. She said, "What did Freddie do this time?"

The guy shook his head. He seemed faintly embarrassed. "We don't have to have a conversation," he said.

What? Cops always want to have a conversation, particularly when they've got the upper hand. Now Peg was really leery of these guys. "I want to see that warrant," she said.

"Oh, it's real," the guy told her.

Meaning you're not, Peg thought, and the tough cop came back into the living room. "The bedroom's full of some guy's stuff," he said. "Freddie Noon's stuff, right?"

Peg said, "Don't you see the suitcases on the bed? I'm packing that crap up, taking it to the Good Will."

"He left without his things?"

"I threw him out, I told you. Let me see that warrant."

The tough cop laughed, fished it out, handed it to her. "Always happy to help a citizen," he said. "Especially if the citizen's gonna help us."

Peg looked at the warrant. It seemed real, but what did she know? "I think," she said, looking at the tough cop, "I think this is legitimate, and I think you're a cop, but who's this other guy?"

"Detective Leethe," said the tough cop.

The other one, "Detective Leethe" bullshit, said, "Let me handle this, Barney."

So this is the power, he's letting the cop march around and be tough out in front. Peg said to him, "You're no cop."

"I want to talk to Freddie Noon," the guy said, and took a little leather case from his inner pocket. From it, he withdrew a business card, extended it toward her. "I mean him no harm. It's to his advantage to talk to me."

Peg took the card. Leethe, that part was right. Mordon Leethe. The guy was a lawyer! Wishing she had a crucifix to hold up, Peg said, "You still came to the wrong place." She held the card out, wanting him to take it back. "You'll have to get the message to him some other way."

The tough cop wasn't finished. "Don't waste our time with all this shit, okay, Peg?" he said.

The lawyer wouldn't take his card back. Still holding it, Peg said to the cop, "I won't be seeing Freddie, all right? I guarantee it."

The lawyer said, "Is that some sort of joke, Miss Briscoe?"

Peg was so startled that she let him see she was startled, which was of course stupid. He knows! she thought, as she saw the look of satisfaction touch his sour face. Trying to save the situation, even though they both knew it was too late, she said, "Whaddaya mean, a joke? Freddie Noon's the joke, that's why I threw him out."

"If you have the opportunity to speak with him," the lawyer said, "would you tell him I represent the doctors?"

Peg shut down. This lawyer already knew too much. "I'm not going to see him," she said.

The lawyer offered a wrinkled kind of little smile, as though he didn't use those muscles often. He nodded at Peg, nodded at the card she still held, then looked at the cop. "Come on, Barney," he said. Once more, he nodded at Peg. "Sorry to disturb you," he said.

After they left, Peg went back to the kitchen to try to concentrate on what she'd been doing before those two had come crashing in here. But it was hard not to be distracted. And she couldn't bring herself to throw away the lawyer's card.

23

"Frankly," the attorney said, "I believe you've been avoiding me."

Well, of course Mordon had been avoiding the fellow. It was sufficient reason merely that this attorney, one Bradley Cummingford, had left a series of messages over the past week describing himself as representing the doctors Loomis and Heimhocker, and leaving a number at Sachs, Fried, one of the most prestigious old-time law firms in New York. However, had Mordon known that Cummingford was also someone who said "frankly," he would have gone on avoiding him forever.

Anyway, so far as Mordon was concerned, Loomis and Heimhocker were cut out of this matter, no longer involved. Besides which he was their attorney, through the beneficent goodwill of NAABOR; the idea that the doctors might feel the need for outside counsel — independent counsel, if you will — was aggravating, but no more.

At least, not until today's phone memo, which had been waiting on Mordon's desk when he'd arrived this morning. He hadn't returned to the office after yesterday's unsettling session with Miss Peg Briscoe, a self-possessed tart with rather a quicker brain than Mordon had expected. After they'd left Miss Briscoe's residence yesterday afternoon, with a pretty good idea that Fredric Noon had been somewhere in the vicinity, but was no more, Barney had said, "Leave it to me from here," and Mordon had been happy to agree. He knew his own uses for an invisible Fredric Noon were essentially benign — NAABOR would pay the fellow well, for what amounted to no more than industrial espionage — and he suspected that Barney's ideas were cruder and probably more dangerous and less legal, but they could work out their differences later, once they actually had their hands on the man.

In the meantime, Loomis and Heimhocker were no more than irrelevancies, if irritating ones. But now, this morning, the latest message from their "attorney," Bradley Cummingford, was: The doctors intend to go public.

Go public? With what? To whom? How? Nevertheless the threat was enough to force Mordon at last to return Cummingford's call, only to hear him say "frankly."

Twice. "Frankly," Bradley Cummingford said, "I had expected more courtesy from a firm of your standing."

Had you. "What surprises me," Mordon said, "is that you represent yourself as attorney for my clients."

"I believe," Cummingford said, "your client is NAABOR."

"I represent Drs. Loomis and Heimhocker," Mordon said, "in matters concerning their employment by the American Tobacco Research Institute. Any invention, discovery, product, commodity, or theorem they produce as employees of the institute naturally belongs to the institute. It is my job to protect the interests of both the institute and the doctors in any matter concerning or relating to that employment."

"And if the interests conflict?"

"How can they?"

"Frankly," Cummingford said, doing it again, "I was thinking of the invisible man."

Mordon blinked rapidly, several times. "I'm not sure I—"

"Frankly, Mr. Leethe, my clients are afraid you have it in mind to make off with their invisible man."

"Their invisi—"

"Leaving them to fret over questions of medical ethics, not to mention laws that might be, perhaps have already been, broken. My clients have no intention of being made the goats in this matter, which is why, against my advice, they have expressed the desire to go public with the facts of the case."

Against Cummingford's judgment; well, at least there was that. "What do they hope to gain by going public, as you put it?"

"Frankly, they hope to distance themselves from any legal fallout that might ensue."

"Have you told them, Mr. Cummingford, that they'll simply make fools of themselves? That either they won't be believed, which will ruin them as researchers forever, like those cold-fusion idiots from Utah, or they will be believed, in which case they are already at legal risk?"

"Frankly," the damn fellow said, over and over again, "my clients have, I would say, minds of their own. Which is why, Mr. Leethe, I strongly suggest a meeting among the four of us, before my clients do anything irrevocable."

No way out of it, Mordon saw. But Cummingford, apart from his infernal "frankly"s, seemed rational enough. "Where?" Mordon demanded. "When?"

"The sooner the better. Four this afternoon?"

"Fine. Where?"

"The conference room here is very—"

"Bugged."

A tiny silence, and then a laugh. "Well, yours over there will be, too, won't it?"

Mordon didn't dignify that with a response.

Cummingford said, "How about the doctors' facility? You've been there before, I understand."

Facility — oh, yes, that place. "The townhouse, you mean."

"At four?"

Damn you all. Is Barney Beuler accomplishing something or not? Is there any point in delay? Or is there too much danger? "At four," Mordon agreed.

24

Rhinebeck. What was the damn woman doing in Rhinebeck? Meeting three trains so far, and so what?

Yesterday, after tossing Peg Briscoe's apartment and reassuring himself that Freddie Noon actually did live there, Barney had sent lawyer Leethe on his way and had then driven slowly and purposefully around the neighborhood. He had earlier collected, from Motor Vehicle, the make, model, color, and tag number of a van registered to Margaret Briscoe at that Bay Ridge address, so all he had to do now was find it.

But that took a lot longer than he'd expected. It was over an hour before he saw the damn thing, so smug and demure and unnoticeable and safe, tucked away in the parking lot next to the local firehouse. "Goddam, Freddie," Barney said out loud, driving by, grinning at that van behind the chain-link fence. "You're a pretty clever fella, Freddie. But so am I."

Barney parked half a block away, and from the glove box he took the tailing transmitter he'd lifted years ago from Stores at Organized Crime Detail, for just such a situation as this. The tailing transmitter came in two parts, one being a tiny dome-shaped black bug with one sticky side when you peeled off the tape, and the other being a small flat metal box, about the size and shape of a TV remote control, but with a round compass dial where the remote would have had all its buttons. Leaving the compass in the glove box, Barney pocketed the bug and took a walk.

At the firehouse, Barney ID'd himself as a member of a collateral uniformed force. He explained that a blue Toyota had been involved earlier today in a fender-bender with a car driven by a well-known mafioso, and that the Organized Crime Squad was trying to find that Toyota to tell its driver he might be facing more retribution than he expected. No, Barney didn't have the Toyota's tag number, but there was a blue Toyota of the right model parked next to that van in that parking lot there that matched the description. Okay if he looked it over?

The owner of the Toyota, a young red-haired Irish fireman with last night's hangover lying on him like the results of a poison gas attack, assured Barney his vehicle had been in no fender-benders at all, but go ahead and look. So Barney went ahead and looked, studying the Toyota's exterior from every angle, and along the way sticking the transmitter bug onto the frame of Peg Briscoe's van. Then he thanked the fire guys for their help, and left the firehouse.

All afternoon and evening, Barney sat in his car, parked where he could see Peg Briscoe's building, and all afternoon and evening nothing happened. Which gave him time to think, and what he thought was that he was involved in something a little different here. If you're on the lookout for an invisible man, it isn't business as usual. For instance, forget descriptions. Forget tailing the guy through the streets. All you can hope to do is find out for sure where he is, close down that spot, and when you know you've got him inside a perimeter he can't get out of, you make your proposition.

Barney knew exactly what his proposition would be when the time came, and he thought he knew how to make Noon go along with it. His proposition was a straightforward one: assassination. Forget industrial espionage, tiptoeing around cigarette-company meetings, all this penny-ante stuff. There were those two guys, for instance, that he was endlessly paying off to keep their evidence about Barney to themselves. They were still alive only because Barney Beuler would be the prime suspect if either of them went down. The prosecutors were right now trying to get something on those guys, to force them to give up Barney, and he knew it. Take them out, and nobody would ever be able to put together an indictment against Barney Beuler; nobody, ever.

But how to do it? How to terminate those dear old friends? Barney had brooded on this problem for months. He couldn't do it personally; they'd have him in a second. And who could he hire that wouldn't turn on him, set him up, sell him for their own rotten reasons?

But if you had yourself an invisible man, and if that invisible man had a big family he liked, and a girlfriend he wanted to protect, you could be in Europe if you wanted, safe and clean and absolutely untouchable, while those two dangerous guys went down. And then after that, Noon could still be useful. Through his job, naturally, Barney knew a few guys in the world of organized crime, and those people were always looking for the clean hit. Farm Freddie Noon out. Why not? Retire on the little son of a bitch.

The only snag that Barney could see, other than finding Noon in the first place, was that violence had never been part of the guy's MO. But that was okay; everybody's capable of violence. Noon had just never been motivated before, that's all.

In the meantime, there was still the first step to accomplish. Find Noon, box him in. So Barney sat in his car as the long June twilight descended on Bay Ridge, and he watched Peg Briscoe's apartment, and nothing at all happened. It would be nice, wouldn't it, if she came out? It would be even nicer if the door opened and nobody came out. Barney was looking forward to that one, hope against hope.

But no, it didn't happen. Around eight, he drove away to find a fast-food joint, then swung around the firehouse on the way back and the van was still there, so he took up his position again, parked where he could see Peg Briscoe's front door.

A little after nine, he called home, told his wife he was on stakeout and she could call him on the car phone if she needed anything. Around ten, he called his girlfriend on West Seventy-fourth Street in Manhattan and told her he'd probably come over around midnight, why not have a nice little supper ready? And at eleven-thirty, he quit for the night.

One of the things Barney had that he hoped nobody knew about was a second car. He kept it in an apartment building's garage on the block behind his girlfriend's place, and he had bribed the supers involved so he now had the keys he needed to take the elevator from his girlfriend's place down to the basement, go through several locked doors and one narrow open areaway, and eventually wind up in the garage. If the shooflys were watching his girlfriend's place they'd just have to assume he was spending entire days in the sack, while they were sitting in cars surrounded by empty cardboard cups. Good, ya fucks.

Barney and his second car, a nondescript older Chevy Impala, reached Bay Ridge a little before eight-thirty in the morning, and the van was still there. He drove over to park near Briscoe's building, and was barely in position when out she came, by herself — well, maybe by herself — and walked away toward the firehouse.

At last. Barney placed the transmitter compass on the dashboard and waited; the thing would make a low buzzing sound once the van was in motion, and he'd be able to follow it without ever having to be within sight of it.

It's funny, he thought, waiting for the buzz, how quickly you get used to an impossibility. A week ago, he would have said there was no such thing as an invisible man, that was old movie shit. But all he had to hear was that some serious people said there was an invisible man, and that they were willing to spend serious bread to find him, and doubt vanished like . . . well, like an invisible man. What it comes down to is, you don't question the real world, right? Because if you do, they put you away where the walls are soft, right? Right.

Buzz. Barney started his engine. But then, instead of the buzz getting fainter, as it would if the van moved away from him, it got louder, so Barney switched off his engine, and here came the van, Briscoe at the wheel. She stopped in front of her building, opened the van's side door, and then proceeded to go between van and building several times, lugging heavy suitcases and liquor-store cartons.

O-kay! Pay dirt! Barney sat and watched, grinning from ear to ear, and pretty soon Briscoe slid the side door shut, got behind the wheel, and took off. Barney waited till she was out of sight, then followed.

And now Rhinebeck, ninety miles north of the city beside the Hudson River, long ago a port town, when river traffic meant something. Peg Briscoe had driven straight here, like a homing pigeon, north out of the city, up the Taconic Parkway, then west to the river. The whole way, Barney hung back out of sight, listening to the transmitter buzz and watching the compass, and it wasn't until they were in Rhinebeck itself that he saw the van again, five vehicles ahead at the town's only traffic light. He considered dawdling here to get himself caught by the next red, but the hell with it. In town there was enough traffic to hide among, even if she was looking for a tail, and it was clear she wasn't.

They went on through Rhinebeck to its even smaller suburb, a steep village called Rhinecliff, where the Amtrak trains from New York, on their way to Albany and Buffalo and Montreal, pulled in a dozen times a day. The station building was midway down a steep slope, with a small full parking area above and a downhill entrance drive clogged with parked cars. The van drove down in there, found itself a niche in among the others, and Barney parked at the curb up top, where he could look down through the parked cars and just barely see the van.

Nothing happened for about twenty minutes, and then a train must have come in, because people suddenly began emerging from the station building down there, maybe a couple dozen, lugging their luggage. Barney watched Briscoe get out of her van and open its side door and lean against the front passenger door like she was waiting for a Little League team. This was interesting; what was the woman up to?

The last of the passengers came out of the station, to be greeted by friends or to climb into their cars or to take off in the two taxis that had showed up at the last minute. Briscoe waited a little longer, then shut the van's sliding door, got behind the wheel, and drove off, back the way she'd come. Barney waited till she was out of sight, then U-turned and followed, to see where she was going.

To have lunch. There was a cafeteria on the main street in Rhinebeck, and that was where she went, in no hurry at all, worried about nothing. Damn.

Barney couldn't find another lunch place nearby, and since she knew his face he couldn't go in where she was, so he stopped at the local supermarket to get himself a sandwich and coffee from their deli department, which he ate in the car. Do something, Peg, he thought. Do something.

She did something. After lunch, she got in the van and drove back to the damn railroad station. This time, the wait was half an hour, then what looked like the same couple dozen ex-passengers appeared, did the same things as before, and left. And again Briscoe opened the van's side door and waited. And again, once all the passengers were gone, she shut that door and got back into the van.

But this time she didn't drive away. Instead, she backed into a parking space that had just been vacated, and when Barney got out of the Impala to walk back to where he could see her, she was in there behind the wheel reading a magazine. Waiting for the next train, right? Had to be.

There was another side street that went downhill behind the station, and when Barney walked down that way, out of sight of the parking area where Briscoe sat, he found, as he'd hoped, another entrance to the station. Going in there, he got a copy of the schedule and carried it back to the Impala, to study it and figure out what was going on.

Okay. Judging from the times on this schedule, the first two trains she'd met had been northbound out of New York. And then Barney got it, all of it. The son of a bitch had been there yesterday! When he and Leethe had showed up. Noon had skipped out, invisible, and arranged with Briscoe to meet him here today. The Amtrak out of New York City was carrying an invisible man. Freeloading.

I hope somebody sits on the son of a bitch.

All right. All Barney had to do now was wait until Briscoe left here, and he'd know she had Freddie Noon inside that van. Then he'd follow, out of sight, to wherever they were hiding out, up here in the north country. High Sierra time, right? Too bad there wasn't snow on the ground. That'd slow down your goddam invisible man.

Barney looked at the schedule, and the next train out of New York wasn't for another two hours and a half. Hell. Okay, he'd been on long stakeouts before. If Briscoe could do it, Barney could do it.

But he didn't have to stay here the whole damn time, did he? No, he didn't. So he U-turned again, and went back to Rhinebeck, and had a second lunch there, at the place where Briscoe had eaten, and then used the pay phone and a charge card the shooflys didn't know about to make some calls, square himself in his world. He called the Organized Crime Detail and said he was in Brooklyn following up some possibilities about the Paviola family. He called his wife and said he was calling from the office but was about to go on stakeout again, this time in a department car, so no phone, and he'd get in touch with her when he got in touch with her. He also made a couple more calls, concerning other matters he had cooking, and heard nothing too troublesome. Then he walked down to the drugstore on the corner, where he bought four magazines and two newspapers and two maps of the general area.

Back at the railroad station, having double-checked that Briscoe and the van were still there, he U-turned and parked up the block, out of her sight, and spread out the maps on the steering wheel to see where he was and where they might all be headed.

And the first thing he saw was a big bridge just a couple miles north, and no passenger service on the other side of the river. So Briscoe could be planning to cart Noon somewhere over there. But not too far, or this wouldn't be the right train stop.

Finished with the maps, he went through the two newspapers, and was about to turn to Playboy for the haberdashery tips when a disgorgement of cars up from the railroad station told him the next New York train had arrived. Dropping the magazine, he waited and watched, but after the last of the cars and taxis had come up and run off, the van had still not appeared.

Barney got out of the Impala and walked back to where he could see down the driveway, and there it was, still there, Briscoe still at the wheel. Shit. He went back to the car to look at the schedule, and it would be another three hours before the next train. Dammit, the local people ought to complain, they really ought to, get themselves better service.

Barney almost missed it. He was just picking up Playboy when a tiny movement in his rearview mirror caught his eye, and when he looked there was Briscoe, walking up out of the driveway, stopping at the top to look left and right, then turning right to walk along past the upper-level parking area.

Now what? Barney watched in the mirror, and Briscoe took the same route he'd taken earlier, down to the next cross street, then right toward the rear entrance to the station.

He had to know what was happening, but he also had to be very damn careful. Getting out of the Impala, he walked back toward the station, following her. He could see the top of her head far away on the cross street, past the cars parked in the upper area. He hung back until she'd disappeared past the corner of the building, then followed, and when he got to the corner she was well down the street, still going straight. Past the railroad station the street became some kind of overpass, leading to a low wall and a sharp left turn angling down. More cars were parked along there, on the right side; Briscoe walked down the middle of the street to the end, then made the left.

Barney trotted forward once she was out of sight. He saw that this overpass went above the railroad tracks, and that the left turn carried the roadway, now a kind of bridge or ramp, down a long slope to a launching site at the river. A few vans and pickups were parked down there, with empty boat trailers hitched at their backs, and Briscoe was walking straight down to join them.

Had Barney been wrong? Was she waiting for Noon to arrive by boat? Or, worse thought, had he arrived, and they were leaving by boat? That would be a true pain in the ass.

But, no. After a minute, Barney saw what was happening. Briscoe was just killing time, that's all, sightseeing while she waited for the next train. Barney couldn't blame her.

Just in case, though, he kept watching. Briscoe walked on down to the launching area, strolled around there a few minutes, looked out at the river and the green cliffs and white mansions over there on the other side, and Barney leaned against the wall at the top of the overpass, feeling warm in the sunshine in his dark jacket, watching her.

She hung around down there maybe five minutes, and then turned and started the long trudge back up the slope, and Barney retreated all the way to the far corner, past the parking area, waiting there until she made the turn, then moving back again, holding at the head of the station driveway until her head would appear again, over there beyond the parked cars, and it didn't.

He waited. He frowned. He looked down into the blacktop area in front of the station, where the van was parked, and here she came, out of the building. She just hadn't known ahead of time about that back entrance, that's all.

Okay. Time out for everybody. Barney walked back to his car, got behind the wheel, reached for Playboy, and the van drove by.

What? The damn buzzer wasn't working! What a hell of a time to break down! Knowing he'd have to do a visual tail, hating the idea of it, Barney quickly started the engine, shifted into drive, and the car went klomp forward klomp forward klomp forward. A mile an hour. Less. And shaking all over the place.

Barney hit the brakes. The bastards. He already knew, but he got out of the Impala anyway, as the van disappeared around a curve far ahead.

All four tires. Flat. Slashed. And a little later, when he lifted his maps and newspapers and magazines from the front seat, there under them lay the bug, almost as good as new.

25

"I don't like that guy on our necks like that," Freddie said.

He was still dressing in the back of the van, so Peg kept her eyes firmly on Rhinebeck's only traffic light, now red, two cars in front of her.

She said, "He isn't on our necks anymore, Freddie. You took care of that."

"Damn good thing those guys told you about him."

"Yes, it was."

Those guys were the guys in the firehouse, who had told her, when she went to pick up the van this morning, about the cop who'd come in with a cockamamie story that nobody believed for a second, so everybody watched the cop when he was supposedly looking over a blue Toyota, and he was obviously taking too much of an interest in Freddie and Peg's van, and maybe she ought to know about it. The guy, from their description, was the tough cop who'd come to the place yesterday with the lawyer, Leethe.

Because the fire guys had given her that warning, she'd been extremely alert, looking in every direction at once on her way back to the apartment to pick up the stuff they were taking upstate, so that was why she spotted him, lurking in that big old Chevy, a faded green like an old shower curtain or something, parked half a block from her place. I'll have to lose him somehow, she thought, and went on to load up the van.

But then she didn't see him again. Had he been that easy to lose? She drove all the way upstate on the Taconic, and over the local road to Rhinebeck, and never saw him at all. Until all at once, as she was stopped at this very light, there he was, just a few cars behind her.

That was when she realized what he must have done at the firehouse yesterday: put some kind of bug on this car. Every new piece of police technology is immediately described to the citizenry via cop shows on TV, so Peg knew all about long-distance tailing of other cars with these radio bugs. What she didn't know, now that she found the cop in his washed-out green Chevy behind her, was what to do about it. I'll let Freddie decide, she decided, and ignored the cop and his car from that point on.

It was a long wait, all in all — three trains — before at last she heard that whisper in her ear: "Hi, Peg." Then the van sagged beside her, so he was aboard.

Relieved, glad to be reunited, grinning like an idiot, Peg shut the van door, got around to the other side, slid in behind the wheel, got serious, and said, "Freddie, he followed me, he put something on the van."

"The cops from yesterday?"

"Just one of them's a cop. He's up there in an old Chevy the color of a lima bean."

"And he put a bug on the car?"

"He must've."

"Go take a walk somewhere for maybe five minutes," the voice behind her said. "Get him to follow you. I'll take care of it."

So she did, and the cop followed her, and Freddie took care of it, and now, as she waited for the Rhinebeck traffic light to turn green, Bart Simpson came up and sat next to her, saying, "Only one of them was a cop?"

The light changed; traffic moved. As she drove on through town and out to the countryside, Peg told him her story, and then said, "How've things been with you, since yesterday?"

"Weird," he said. "I took the subway to Manhattan — it's really dirty down there, Peg, after a while you could see my feet, I think a couple little kids did see my feet—"

"That must have been kinda scary."

"Good thing it wasn't rush hour. I got off at Times Square and went to a movie and washed my feet in the men's room—"

Slyly, she said, "Not the ladies' room?"

"I don't know why I didn't thinka that," he said. The Bart Simpson face was deadpan. "Anyway, then I sat there and watched a Disney movie five times. You can't believe, Peg, you just can't believe, how not funny after a while it is to see a wet Labrador retriever in a station wagon with six little kids and an actress on coke. And every time you see a can of housepaint you say, "Oh, boy, here comes that one again.'"

"Sounds like no fun."

"They oughta change the rating system," Bart said. "They oughta have a 2D rating, for movies that are Too Dumb to put up with."

"It might bring more people in," Peg suggested. "Especially out-of-towners."

"Good for them," Freddie said. "Finally, after the fifth time, the movie stopped and everybody went home, and I got a good night's sleep."

"On a movie chair?"

"No no, the manager had a nice sofa in his office. Smelled like Dr Pepper, that's all. They have these dust cloths they put over the popcorn stand at night, so I used a couple of them for sheets and blankets, and it was pretty good."

"Be glad nobody walked in."

"The first movie's at noon," he said. "I was up long before then, had breakfast at the food stand, and took off when they unlocked the doors, before Disney could get at me again."

"And went to the railroad station?"

"I was on my way," he assured her, "but those city streets are crowded, you know, and this time of year most of them seem like they're Europeans, talking all these other languages, and they got no radar at all, they bang into each other all the time and they can see one another. So I had like fifteen blocks to go to get to Penn Station, and I just wasn't gonna make it, so I ducked into Macy's and went up to furniture and fell asleep again on a sofa in there and woke up when a fat lady sat on me."

"No!"

"Yes. She let out a holler and so did I, but with her holler nobody heard mine, so I got outta there, and she was saying that was the lumpiest sofa she ever felt in her life."

"I bet. Then what'd you do?"

"I made it over to Penn Station — another dirty place, believe me — and saw when the next train was, which was like over an hour—"

"They don't go very often," Peg agreed. "I think we'll travel mostly by car."

"Me especially," Freddie said. "Anyway, I tried to keep out of the way, but what you got in railroad stations is people running, and wherever I went that's where somebody wanted to run, so finally I hid behind a homeless guy against a side wall, and when he accidentally leaned back and found me there I told him just to mind his own business."

"You talked to him?"

"I was tired of gettin out of people's way, Peg. So I said, "You just do what you're doin, don't mind me back here, I'm not gonna bother you, just do what you're doin,' which was nothin much except to hold up a message on a piece of cardboard and stick out a used plastic coffee cup for people to put quarters in, which mostly they don't."

"But what did he do?" Peg wanted to know. "When you talked to him, and he couldn't see you?"

"Well, first he jumped—"

"Naturally."

"But then he just got sad and shook his head and said, "It's my old trouble comin back. And I was doin so good. And now it's my old trouble comin back.'"

"Oh," Peg said, brought down. "I feel sorry for the guy."

"Me, too," Freddie said. "So I told him, "You shoulda took your medicine, like they told you.' And he said, "Oh, I know, I know.' And it was gonna be my train then, so I said, "Take your medicine and I'll never bother you again. Is it a deal?' And he said, "Oh, I will, I will.' And I gave him a little pat on the back, and his eyes got all wide, and when I went away he was thinking it over, and I think maybe I did some good there today, Peg."

"That's nice," Peg said. "That was good of you, Freddie."

"So then I got on the train," Freddie said, "and it was only like half full, so I had no trouble about a seat by myself, and here I am, except I'm hungry. All I had was breakfast at the movie."

"Which brings up an issue," Peg said. "You didn't tell me food doesn't disappear right away."

"Uh-oh. Yesterday, huh?"

"Yes."

"I thought maybe you wouldn't want to know."

"You were right. But now I do. How long does it take, anyway, to uh, you know, disappear?"

"Couple hours," Bart said, looking hangdog. "I'll make sure, Peg, I don't remind you again. You know, if those cops hadn't showed up—"

"I know, Freddie," she told him. "You're doing your best, I know you are."

"Thanks, Peg."

"And we'll be home pretty soon." They were driving through bright green June scenery, rounded hills, tiny white villages, red barns, wildflowers on the roadsides, horses in fields, cows in fields, even sheep in one field, afternoon sun smiling down on the countryside, corn and tomatoes growing in tight rows, the gray van with Peg Briscoe and Bart Simpson running deeper and deeper into the landscape. "From here on," Peg said, "we've got it made."

26

Peter and David dressed for the meeting. Fumbling with his necktie, getting it wrong again, David said, "I don't know what's wrong with this tie."

"You're nervous, David," Peter explained. His tie was perfect, he was even now shrugging into his blazer, shooting his cuffs. "Calm down, why don't you?"

"Of course I'm nervous. Peter, for God's sake, you're nervous, too, you're just covering it, keeping it inside, you know that's—"

"Tie your tie, David," Peter said, not unkindly. "We'll be all right."

That trace of sympathy in Peter's voice was enough; David calmed down at least enough to tie his tie so the end neither dangled at his crotch nor covered a mere two buttons of his shirt. Slipping into his rough jacket with the brown suede elbow patches — his defensive garb was professorial, while Peter's was aristocratic — David said, "All right. I'm ready. For whatever comes."

What came first, by prearrangement, was Bradley Cummingford, a large sandy-haired man with a big round open face and eyebrows of such a pale pinky-orange as to almost disappear. He wore a blue pinstripe suit, white shirt, muted blue tie, and black tassel loafers, and he carried an attachй case of extremely expensive leather, and he greeted them with a firm handshake and a clear eye and no nonsense. This was a Bradley Cummingford seen in a whole new light. Prior to this, they had only known Bradley in playful mode, when he was a very different person, in a very different place.

Many of David and Peter's friends summered up in the central Hudson Valley, around the river town of Hudson and eastward from there toward — but not into — New England. This influx into the rural dairy world of upstate by all these sophisticated New Yorkers of a certain type had done wonders for the region, particularly in culinary ways: an unusual range of restaurants; arugula and goat cheese in the supermarkets, for God's sake; excellent variety in the local wine shops. David and Peter, wedded to their research and happy as Darby and Joan — Darby and Darby, anyway — in their city townhouse, had never bought or rented a summer place in the country, but they'd frequently accepted weekend invitations to this or that hideaway in the woods, where the goings-on tended to be . . . unbuttoned.

Until now, that was the only way they'd ever known Bradley Cummingford, merely as a fellow guest at summer outings, but they'd always been aware that he somehow or other had a serious side as well, in which he wore grown-up male clothing and was treated with respect by lawyers and judges and businessmen. When they found themselves at the mercy — to put too strong a word on it — of the tobacco lawyer, Mordon Leethe, and when it became evident there was no one around who was both knowledgeable in the arcane and frightening world of the law and reliably on their side, one of them — it doesn't matter which one, it really doesn't — remembered Bradley, and they made the phone call, and met with him in his offices in a downtown skyscraper — high floor, tall windows, lovely view of La Liberty lifting her skirts above that awful sludge in the harbor — and once they got him to believe that yes, they had strong reason to believe they had created an invisible man, on whom a large tobacco company had some sort of nefarious designs, he looked somber, almost severe, and said, "Well, you two have been silly, haven't you?"

Peter, not used to this more responsible Bradley, said. "Is that a legal term, Bradley?"

"You don't want to know the legal term, Peter," Bradley said, and gazed levelly at him until Peter coughed and looked away and muttered, "I'm sorry. I'll be good."

"Better late than never," Bradley said. "Now tell me the rest."

So they told him everything, and he made many tiny notes on a long yellow legal pad, and said he'd see what he could do. Then, for a week, he couldn't do a thing; every time they called, Bradley had the same news: "He's ducking me. But he can't do it forever." Until, late yesterday, when they called him — he never called them, you notice — he said, "Tomorrow morning, you will threaten to go public."

"Oh, please," they cried. (They were on the speakerphone in their office at the time.) "Bradley, are you out of your mind? A premature disclosure of this experiment would make us laughingstocks, Bradley, it would ruin us in the field forever, we'd be lucky to get published in Omni!"

"I didn't say you were going public," he corrected them, infuriatingly calm.

"Well, it certainly sounded like it."

"I said you will, tomorrow morning, threaten to go public, to protect yourselves from unknown consequences of Mr. Leethe and his friends' activities. You will make this threat against my counsel and advice, I might add."

In their office, Peter and David smiled in relief at one another. They hadn't been wrong about Bradley, after all. Peter said, "Bradley, you are a slyboots."

"Well, we'll see," Bradley said, and now they had seen, and Bradley was a slyboots. Mordon Leethe had been flushed from his lair, was on his way here, would meet with them and with Bradley.

But first Bradley by himself. In he came with his expensive attachй case, briskly shook hands, and surveyed their parlor with a critical eye. "Haven't you anything less comfortable?"

David stared. "Less comfortable?"

Peter said, "This is where we talked with him last time."

"It's obviously too small for four," Bradley said, gazing around a room that could have — and often had — accommodated eight with no problem. "What else do you have?"

"Well," David said, dubiously, "there's the conference room downstairs."

"Oh? What's that like?"

"Very plain," David told him. "Comfortable chairs but, you know, officelike. TV and VCR and all that at one end, a long rectangular table."

"Fluorescents in the ceiling," Peter added. "Nothing on the walls. When we eventually do make a public announcement about our work here, that's where we'll hold the press conference."

"Sounds ideal," Bradley said. "Lead me to it."

So, having brought him upstairs, they now brought him downstairs again, where Shanana the receptionist read her correspondence-school lessons and watched the street outside and answered the occasional phone call. Peter said to her, "Shanana, when Mr. Leethe gets here, show him to the conference room, will you?"

She looked at him, alert and willing but uncertain. "The conference room? Where's that?"

"The coffee room," he explained, because the coffeemaker was kept in there.

"Oh." She looked just as alert and just as willing, but even more uncertain. "You're going to be in there?"

"Yes," he said firmly, and went after David and Bradley, who'd already gone on into the . . . conference . . . coffee . . . press-announcement room.

In there, Bradley was looking about in happy satisfaction. "This is perfect," he said, and plopped his attachй case onto the table down at the far end, opposite the entrance, with the TV and VCR and the pull-down slide-show screen all behind him. "You two both sit on my right here," he directed, "along this side. When Leethe arrives, he'll sit down there, with his back to the door. People always feel slightly uneasy with their backs to the door in an unknown room. Whether they're aware of the feeling or not, the unease is there."

"Bradley," David said, sitting nearest him, "you're brilliant."

It was clear that Bradley agreed with this assessment, but, "We'll see," he said, and opened his attachй case and brought out both his yellow legal pad and a manila folder. "Sit down, Peter," he said, since Peter was still standing, then Bradley sat down himself and said, "Before Leethe gets here, let's define exactly what it is you two want."

"We want our invisible man back," Peter said.

"Unharmed," David added.

"Without publicity," Peter said.

"You also, I take it," Bradley said, twiddling his Mont Blanc pen, "want to retain your relationship with NAABOR."

"I never thought we had a relationship with NAABOR," David said.

Peter said, "We're funded by the American Tobacco Research Institute."

"A golem belonging to NAABOR," Bradley pointed out, "as their own annual stockholder statements are proud to claim."

"We're not stockholders," David said.

"You aren't totally unworldly either," Bradley told him. "You know who's financing you, and why. And the point is, you don't want to put that relationship at risk by whatever happens in connection with this current matter."

"God, no," David said. "We don't want to lose our funding."

"What we want, in fact," Peter said, "is everything. We want our invisible man, and we want our funding, and we want our privacy maintained until we are ready to go public."

"The question is," Bradley said, "what in all that is negotiable, and to what extent—"

"None," Peter said, and Shanana entered, saying, "Mr. Leethe is here."

Bradley offered her a big moonlike smile, and probably raised those invisible eyebrows of his. Getting to his feet, motioning for Peter and David to rise as well, he said, "Thank you, dear. Show him in, please."

She stepped back, and Leethe entered, carrying his own more battered but equally expensive attachй case. Peter and David stood where they were, like minor servers at some arcane Mass, while Bradley strode around the table, hand out, high-wattage smile agleam as he said, "Ah, Mr. Leethe, at last we meet. Bradley Cummingford."

Leethe took Bradley's hand as though it were part of the membership ritual for a club he wasn't sure he wanted to join. Then he lifted an eyebrow at the room, gazed at David and Peter, and said, "Farewell to elegance, I see."

"This seems more businesslike," Peter said.

"It certainly does."

Bradley gestured at the chair he wanted Leethe in. "Do sit down, Mr. Leethe," he said.

"Thank you."

As Bradley returned to his own place at the head of the table, Leethe followed him partway and took a chair midway along the side, facing David and Peter, with the allegedly uneasy-making door down to his left. David and Peter both looked at Bradley, to see how he'd take this development, but Bradley didn't appear to have noticed it at all. Sitting down, picking up his pen, smiling again at Leethe, he said, "It does seem to me we do have some goals in common here."

"That's because we have the same clients," Leethe said.

"Ah, if only that were so," Bradley told him. "In fact, our firm has done some work for NAABOR over the years, but on this matter, I'm sorry to say, we have not been retained."

Gesturing at David and Peter, Leethe said, "I meant the doctors here."

"Oh, Mr. Leethe," Bradley said. "We aren't going over that stale ground, are we?"

"I suppose not," Leethe agreed, and shrugged. "I want my position clear, that's all." Raising that eyebrow at David and Peter, lifting his hands from the table to gesture with upheld palms, like a slow-motion demonstration of pizza-tossing, he said, "You want something. Something you couldn't discuss with me without the presence of your friend here."

"We want our invisible man," Peter said.

Leethe's smile could give you frostbite. "We all want the invisible man," he said.

"You're looking for him," Peter pointed out. "You have . . . people, looking for him."

"Granted."

"We want to be a part of it, when he's found."

Bradley said, "Well, no, Peter, that isn't exactly what you want."

Peter looked at him in surprise. "It isn't?"

"May I?"

"Go ahead."

To Leethe, Bradley said, "David and Peter here created that invisible man while employees of your client. To the extent that a human being may be property, therefore, he is the property of your client, or the discoveries and techniques he embodies are your client's property. However, legal practice, medical practice, scientific practice, all agree that while your client holds ultimate ownership, or whatever rights would take the place of ownership in this instance, David and Peter are the ultimate authorities as to when their creation is in a fit and proper condition to be turned over to your client. As of this point, since the experiment was altered by the experimental subject away from the original intentions of Peter and David, and since they have not as yet had the opportunity to examine the subject to see what other unforeseen effects may have been caused by this flawed experiment, they wish me to put NAABOR and the American Tobacco Research Institute on notice, through you, their agent, that the experiment must be considered at this point in time tentative and inconclusive and incomplete, and that David and Peter are thoroughly averse to turning over to your clients any experimental data, including but not limited to the invisible man himself, until they are satisfied with the results of their researches. It is only a completed discovery or invention they are required to deliver to your client and toward which your client would enjoy a proprietary relationship." Opening the manila folder, he said, "I have a number of citations of court cases tending towards—"

"That's all right," Leethe said, patting his right hand toward Bradley's manila folder, as though to tell a dog he didn't feel like playing fetch. "We can citation one another for a month, if we wish," he said, "but I don't think we need waste the time, do you?"

"Fine," Bradley said. But he left the folder open, and lifted from it a packet of white paper. "I have prepared," he said, "a statement outlining the position I've just described, that David and Peter acknowledge that at the end of the day all research results adhere to the American Tobacco Research Institute, and the institute acknowledges David and Peter's right to withhold material they consider flawed or incomplete. They will sign copies today, and we'd like a qualified officer of the institute to sign it as well. Here you are," he said, and handed copies of the two-page statement to each of the other three.

It was what Bradley'd said. David and Peter read their copies, and read their own names under signature lines mid-way down the second page, and both noticed that the subject of the discussion remained determinedly vague. Invisible men were never directly mentioned, which was a pity; what a thing it would be, to have on a legal document.

Leethe took a lot longer to read it, then removed his own Mont Blanc pen from his inner pocket and said, "I think we need to add here, "Not to be frivolously withheld.'"

"Where's that?" Bradley asked. Leethe pointed to the spot, and Bradley considered it, then shrugged. "Of course. If you feel you need it."

"I would be happier."

"Then by all means. Peter, David, would you write that in on your copies?"

He showed them where and what to write, and they did, and then he had them sign their copies and initial the addition, then exchange the copies and sign and initial, then take Bradley's and Leethe's copies and sign and initial them, and it was all very like buying a house.

Bradley kept one signed copy, and gave the rest to Leethe, who put them away in his attachй© case and said, "As a matter of fact, I also have something here for signature."

Bradley waited politely, and Leethe took out his own little stack of papers and put them on the table, saying, "The first point is, the American Tobacco Research Institute never approved experimentation on human beings."

"Oh, now!" Peter cried. "It was accepted from the very beginning that at some stage field trials would have to be done, and that means human volunteers, everybody knows that."

"I have searched the relevant files," Leethe assured him, while his fingers demonstrated by running up a slope in midair. The hands then swept to the sides, palms down, clearing snow. "I found nothing." The hands met in prayer. "If it isn't on paper," Leethe said, "it doesn't exist."

Before either Peter or David could reply, Bradley interjected, "Granted."

Peter stared at him, betrayed. "Granted?"

"It would have been better," Bradley gently suggested, "if you'd gotten that understanding in writing at the outset, but we're not going to worry about it now." While Peter continued to look shocked, and almost mutinous, Bradley turned to Leethe and said, "We accept the point. We also accept the fact that the particular experimental subject under discussion was not a volunteer."

"Which the institute," Leethe added, the first finger of his right hand playing metronome, "would never have approved."

"Agreed."

"At this point," Leethe went on, "the institute, not acknowledging any onus of responsibility in this matter, but certainly aware of an accrual of goodwill that has grown between the doctors and the institute over the last years, is prepared to assist the doctors in finding the missing experimental subject—"

"You're already looking for him!" Peter cried.

Leethe ignored the interruption. "— for the purpose of assuring themselves the subject will come to no harm as a result of their actions. In return, the institute requires the doctors, in writing, to hold the institute harmless in all matters both prior to and proceeding from this date, in connection with this flawed experiment."

"You want carte blanche," Bradley said.

"The institute does not intend to carry the can," Leethe said, and carried a pretty bad bag of garbage out.

"David and Peter could only sign such an agreement," Bradley said, "if the institute places them in charge of the search for the experimental subject—"

"Oh, come, now."

"— and places them in charge of the subject himself, once he has been located."

"I'm not sure the institute could—"

"The alternative is that Peter and David will go to the state medical association."

Leethe blinked. He gazed at David and Peter, who did their best to maintain poker faces. "Would you, indeed," he said.

"We need protection from somewhere," Peter said.

Leethe pondered, then shrugged and said, "We'll find common ground."

Bradley nodded. "I have no doubt."

Leethe dealt out his documents, saying, "Look these over, and tell me what you feel should be altered."

They all took copies — it was another two-pager — but Bradley said, "Before we do that, Mr. Leethe, I'd appreciate it if you'd bring us up to date on the search for . . ." He turned to David and Peter. "What is his name?"

"We're not sure," David said. "We think he lied on his medical form."

"Fredric Noon," Leethe said.

Bradley nodded at him. "Thank you. How goes the search for Fredric Noon?"

"It goes well, I think," Leethe said. His hands gathered a light blanket to his chest. "We have hired a New York City policeman, to conduct the—"

"Police?" David cried.

"Not officially," Leethe assured him, as his left hand, two fingers up, waved back and forth in benediction. "The gentleman is moonlighting for us."

"Moonlighting," Bradley echoed, and smiled. "What a lovely image."

"Oddly inapt, with this fellow, I think," Leethe said, as his hands lifted, tossing a little stardust into the air. "In any event," while both hands became play guns and shot David and Peter in their stomachs, "he's found Noon's girlfriend, the one he's been living with recently." While his left hand rested, palm down, on the table, his right, finger upraised, pointed out various constellations. "I hope to hear good news very shortly."

"When you find him," Peter said, "we want to be there."

"That's what we're here to iron out," Leethe told him, smoothing a bedspread. "When we do get our hands on friend Noon at last, I assure you, we'll be delighted to have you assist."

David and Peter might have nodded agreement with that, but Bradley said, "What you mean, I think, is that when you find Noon, you'll be delighted to have assisted David and Peter, and you'll want to go on assisting them."

"Semantics," Leethe said, and shrugged.

"Is my business," Bradley said, and picked up Leethe's document. "Shall we see what we have here?"

27

The thing about anger is, it tends to overcome one's sense of self-preservation, even if that one is such a one as Barney Beuler, whose sense of self-preservation had been honed for years on the whetstone of the New York Police Department. Coming off the Amtrak train from Rhinecliff into Penn Station at eight that night — after dark! — Barney was so enraged by life in general, Amtrak in particular, and Fredric Urban Goddam Noon in special particular, that he couldn't have cared less if shooflys had wired his wristwatch.

Fortunately for him, they hadn't. In fact, fortunately for Barney, all of his many enemies over there on the side of truth, justice, and the American way were otherwise engaged when he stomped up the filthy steps of Penn Station from the filthy platform, bulldozed his way through the filthy homeless living their half-speed half-lives in the terminal, found an exposed pay phone on a stick — not even an enclosed phone booth, for a modicum of privacy — and dialed Mordon Leethe at home. At this point, he didn't give much of a shit what happened, so long as revenge was a part of it.

"Hello?"

"Barney."

A second or two of baffled silence, and then, "Barney? Barney who?"

"Oh, fuck you, Leethe!"

"Oh, Barney! I'm sorry, I didn't recognize your voice, you sounded different."

Barney hardly recognized himself; fury had annealed him. "We have to meet," he snarled, while wide-eyed families from Iowa clutched one another close and moved in little clumps farther away across the terminal. "Now," Barney added, and his teeth clacked together.

"I'm engaged this evening."

"With me."

Leethe sighed, a dry and rasping sound. Barney almost expected dead leaves to drift out of the telephone. "I could see you at eleven," Leethe agreed at last, reluctance dragging out the words. "There's a bar near me."

Leethe lived, as Barney had made it his business to know, on the Upper East Side, Park Avenue in the nineties. It wasn't a neighborhood he thought of as being rich in bars. "Oh, yeah?"

"It's called Cheval. It's a bit of a bistro, really."

Sure it is, Barney thought. "I'll see you there at eleven," he snarled. "You and the rest of the Foreign Legion."

Derriйre du Cheval, if you asked Barney. As with most small side-street Manhattan restaurants, this one was built into the ground floor of a former private dwelling, which meant it was long and narrow, with a not very high ceiling. This particular example of the type was warmed with creamy paint and goldish fixtures and woodlike dark trim. The bar was a C-clamp near the front, against the right wall; beyond it, one would go to the dining area with its snowy tablecloths, most of them not in use at this hour.

In fact, aside from the Israeli owners and Hispanic employees, most of the people still here at 11 P.M. on a Friday night were the adulterers at the bar, hunched in murmuring guilty pairs on the padded high square stools with the low upholstered backs. Among these semilost souls, Mordon Leethe looked like Cotton Mather in a bad mood, nursing a Perrier and brooding at his own reflection in the gold-dappled mirror above the back bar, as though hoping to find somewhere on the map of his own glowering face the path that would lead him out of all this.

But no, not tonight. Sliding onto the stool to Leethe's right, Barney bobbed two fingers at the Perrier and said, "Letting it all hang out, eh, Counselor?"

Leethe glowered at Barney's reflection in the mirror, then turned his head just enough to give him the full treatment from those bleak eyes. "You wouldn't want me to let it all hang out, Barney," he said.

By God, and that was true, wasn't it? "Keep it buttoned, then," Barney advised, and turned his attention to the fourteen-year-old barman with the black pencil mustache. "Beer," he said.

"Yes, sir?"

"Imported. In a bottle."

"Any particular brand, sir?"

"What've you got that's from the farthest away?"

The barman had to think about that. He wrinkled his mustache briefly, then said, "That would be the one from China."

"Mainland China? Where they have the slave labor?"

"Yes, sir."

"I'll have that," Barney decided, and as the barman turned away he gave Leethe his own bleak look and explained, "I like the idea that a lot of people worked long and hard, just for me. Fifteen thousand miles to give me a beer."

"This isn't why you phoned me," Leethe said. "At home."

"No, it isn't." Barney looked at the hunched backs all around them. "Isn't this kind of public?"

"These people," Leethe said, "don't care about our problems. I take it something went wrong when you tried to follow the Briscoe woman."

"Oh, everything went ducky," Barney said. He'd had three hours to cool down from his rage, and it was true his rage had cooled, in the sense that it had hardened, but it hadn't abated one dyne, and would not abate until honor — or something — was satisfied. "Just ducky," Barney repeated, and showed his teeth. At moments such as this, he didn't actually look like a fat man at all.

The barman brought the Chinese beer the last few feet of its journey, poured some from the bottle into a glass, and went off to provide more Kleenex for the hefty blond woman at the end of the bar. Barney drank, nodded, put the glass down, and said, "That invisible son of a bitch is pretty cute, I'll give him that. When I do get my hands on him, I just may strangle him to death."

"He wouldn't be much use to us then."

"Almost to death."

"What did Mr. Urban Noon do to you, Barney?"

One thing Barney had learned in his years with the NYPD; how to give a succinct report. Succinctly, he described his day, finishing with the dead Impala sprawled on its broken ankles in Rhinecliff and he himself coming back to the city alone, by train.

At the finish, there was a little silence. In it, Barney sipped more Chinese beer and Leethe sipped more French water — Barney's liquid might have traveled farther, but Leethe's had arguably made a sillier trip — and then Leethe said, "It may be we've been misjudging Mr. Noon."

Barney looked at the grim profile, studying itself again in the mirror. "How do you figure?" he asked. "I've been judging him to be a cheap crook, and he's a cheap crook."

"We've been judging him," Leethe said, "to be stupid because he's small-time. But he didn't bite on that excellent letter of yours, and he understood how you were managing to follow his friend Briscoe, and he threw you off his trail with, you must admit, dismaying ease."

"I'm not off his trail," Barney snapped. "I'm on that son of a bitch's trail, don't you worry."

"All I'm suggesting is, we shouldn't underestimate the man."

"Fine." Barney shrugged, making his jacket jump. "I'll brush up my Shakespeare for when we meet," he said, and made a small sword-type gesture. "Have at you, Fauntleroy!"

Leethe gave him a skeptical, even disgusted, look. "And where is that," he asked, "in Shakespeare?"

"How the fuck do I know? The question is," Barney said, lowering his voice as he became aware of the adulterous herd around him disturbed at their grazing, "where is Noon in New York State? I had my maps on the train—"

"Why?" Leethe asked, surprised. "You were on a train."

Barney lowered an eyebrow. "I may practice my strangling on you," he said.

"Never mind," Leethe said, unintimidated. "I understand what you meant. You've determined the area Noon must be in"

"On the basis of the railroad station he picked," Barney said, "I worked out an area where he's got to be. No," he corrected himself, "I'm forgetting, he's a genius. So maybe he took the train north to Rhinebeck because he's actually staying on the Jersey shore."

"I don't think so," Leethe said.

"I don't think so, either," Barney admitted. "I think I'll go with the probabilities here, and the probabilities here are limited to four rural counties in New York state plus maybe a little bit of Connecticut."

What might have been a smile ruffled Leethe's features. "So Mr. Urban has gone rural."

"Yeah, and we'll find Mr. Noon at midnight. What are you drinking there? What'd they put in that stuff?"

"Barney," Leethe said, sounding impatient all at once. "Why are you telling me all this? Why are we in this place? If your target area is four counties in New York State and a little piece of Connecticut, why aren't you there, nose to the ground, tirelessly searching?"

"Because I figure we want to find Freddie Noon within this lifetime," Barney told him. "It's all little villages up there, dairy farms, shit like that, spread out. A lot of people rent summer places up there, a lot of New Yorkers have weekend places there. It's not the kind of territory I know, and it's not a place where I got any clout, and it's not a job for one guy anyway, no matter."

Leethe considered this as he turned the little Perrier bottle around and around on its circle of water on the bar. "You're saying," he decided at last, "that you want to hire somebody, or some several somebodies, to canvass the area, and you couldn't wait till tomorrow to talk to me because I have to approve the expense."

"You got it in one."

"I hired you," Leethe pointed out, "and all at once you're my partner. Now you're suggesting we should hire somebody else."

"I see your problem," Barney agreed, "but let me reassure you."

"I find it very unlikely, Barney," Leethe said, "that you could ever reassure me, on any subject, at any time."

"Let me try, anyway. There's a bunch of private detective agencies—"

"My God. You're going to bring in Mike Hammer?"

"Not like in the movies," Barney told him. Now he was getting impatient. "In real life," he explained, "licensed private detectives do guard duty at small museums or private estates, they do industrial espionage to find out who's stealing the lawn mowers or the secrets or whatever, they repossess cars and boats and stuff that people don't make their payments on, but what they mostly do is find deadbeats. Skip-tracing is their real art, and they do it all on the phone, and they never ask why the customer wants to find so-and-so, they just do it. Mostly, they're little shops with three or four or five people, and that many phones, and the boss has the license, and he's a retired cop. They're all over the country, and they all have WATS lines so they don't care if they have to call Alaska or Florida or whatever, and in a situation like this I wouldn't even use a New York outfit. New York City, I mean. I'd use one from Boston, or maybe Albany or Syracuse, and all they know is they're looking for Margaret Briscoe, formerly of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and we believe for the summer she's somewhere in this area. So they'll charge me for the time — overcharge me, that's how they are — and a bonus when they find her, and in the meantime we sit back and wait."

"How long?"

"Maybe a week, maybe less, maybe more."

"Precision," Leethe said, with another brief faux smile. "How much will all this cost?"

"Under a grand."

Leethe considered. He finished his Perrier. He said, "And how much of that will be paid by my partner?"

Barney stared at him. He couldn't believe this guy. "Are you feelin all right?" he demanded. "Maybe it's past your bedtime. Lemme make it easy on you. Just nod your head if I got the okay to spend the grand."

28

Sunday evening, they had a fire. They didn't need a fire, the Sunday of the last week in June, but if you're going to rent a house in the country, and if that house has a fireplace, and if it has a stack of firewood outside under a black plastic sheet against the back wall, it doesn't much matter if it's August, you've got to have a fire.

Also, as Freddie pointed out, "You need more warmth in a room when you're naked."

"You could put some clothes on, Freddie."

"If I put on a shirt and pants," he answered, accurately, "you'll get upset unless I put on one of the heads and a pair of rubber gloves and then some socks and shoes and—"

"Okay, okay. We'll have a fire. Let me do it!" she cried, as a log started to fly all by itself across the room toward the fireplace.

This was long enough after dinner for Freddie to be completely invisible again, and there was still bluish-pink light to be seen through the windows in the sky outside, above the black soft masses of the trees. In the country, their patterns were changing, they were going to sleep earlier, waking up earlier, living an entirely different life. Call Me Tom had given them a list of nearby — if fifteen miles could be considered nearby — shops and stores, and they'd done their exploring, taking life easy, Freddie not even shoplifting, though in these country shops you hardly had to be invisible to walk out with half their stock. There were places in the little towns to rent videotapes, and the house had a big television set and a working VCR — even the clock in it worked, to show the advantage of renting from a scientist — so in the evenings they could watch movies, except tonight they were having a fire.

A nice one, too, if Peg did say so herself, having done the whole thing and then come back across the room to admire her handiwork. Sitting there on the deep sofa, lights out, rich sky colors in black-framed rectangles at the windows, snuggled against Freddie (it was okay if she didn't look), she gazed into the twisting flames and said, "Freddie, this is pretty okay."

"I kind of like it," Freddie agreed.

"The only question—"

"I know."

"What do you—"

"The cop."

"That's it."

"Here's the way I see it," Freddie told her, adjusting his arm more comfortably around her (she didn't look). "This cop, that you say his name is Barney something—

"That's what the lawyer called him."

"It could still be true, though. Okay, Barney's a real cop, with all that power, and that was probably a real warrant he showed you, but what I think is, I think he isn't working as a cop. I think he's rented himself out to that lawyer—"

"The lawyer was the guy in charge," Peg agreed, "when they were at our place."

"Right. And the lawyer's working for the doctors."

"Do doctors have that kind of clout?" Peg asked. "That they can get a lawyer that bosses cops around?"

"These aren't regular doctors," Freddie pointed out. "These are research doctors. Who knows who they got behind them? The CIA, maybe, or the Republican National Committee, or some oil sheik."

"Scary people."

"Which is why we want to stay away from them. Keep out of their sight."

"Easy for you to say."

"The question is," Freddie said, ignoring that, "what's gonna happen next with this cop and this lawyer?"

"They know we're up here someplace," Peg reminded him. "Someplace around the Rhinebeck railroad station."

"Which I'm not worried about," Freddie said, "if the cop's working on his own. If he can send out a flyer on us, that's different. Then we might actually have to leave here."

"Oh, Freddie! Don't even say it!"

"We still have to think it, Peg. We don't wanna be sitting here like this, cozy and romantic in front of the fire, and outside a SWAT team's surrounding the house."

Peg stared at the darkening shapes of the windows, her eyes wide in the firelight. "Oh, my God, Freddie, do you think it's possible?"

"Not this quick. Maybe not at all."

"But — what are we gonna do?"

"I tell you what," Freddie said. "Tomorrow's Monday. If this Barney the cop is on official business, if he's after me because there's a warrant out on me or something, those doctors swore out something against me, though I doubt it, but if that's the case—"

"Yes? Yes?"

"By tomorrow," Freddie said, "they'll have the bulletin with my name on it at all the police stations around here, and the state trooper barracks, and all the rest of it. So I'll go to one of those places and have a look."

"Freddie!" Peg said, and forgot, and looked at him — at the sofa, that is — then quickly looked at the fire again. "Could you do that?"

"Peg, I can do anything. That's the upside of this business. I know there's problems and all that with this invisibility thing, but Peg, you know, when it comes right down to it, I can do anything I want."

"I guess that's true."

"So if my name isn't there, on the be-on-the-lookout-for list, then everything's fine. Barney'll never find us here on his own."

"So we're safe."

"Yes." Freddie squeezed her more tightly. "Peg," he said.

"Yes?"

"Close your eyes now, Peg."

"What? Oh, sure."

29

When folks around Dudley said that Geoff Wheedabyx wore a whole lot of different hats, they meant it literally. Geoff lived in the old Wheedabyx place that had been built by his great-great-grandfather along the Albany-Boston road back in the 1850s, when there was still iron under this land (great-great-grandpa was the mine owner) and when all this countryside around here was farms and woods. Some members of the Wheedabyx clan — particularly the ones who had moved away to California — were still sore that the town that had grown up around great-great-grandpa's place was called Dudley and not Wheedabyx, but the fact was the Dudley farm had comprised over seven hundred acres, while Great-great-grandpa never had more than eleven acres around his house, a parcel which in any case he'd bought from the Dudleys.

The Albany-Boston road was now Market Street, the only east-west thoroughfare in the village of Dudley. The iron under the ground was long gone, turned into hard round balls and fired southward in the 1860s, and the farms were recently gone, turned into suburban developments and weekend homes and back into woods, but the Dudley descendants were still here, in and around their namesake town, and the Wheedabyx descendants were represented mainly these days by Geoff, who wore all those hats.

They were hung usually on pegs in his office, that being the big room at the left when you came in the front door. Originally that room had been the best parlor, unused except for holidays and family reunions and visits from the pastor, and at later times it had been a sickroom, whenever there was a Wheedabyx in residence too far gone to make it up the stairs, or sometimes a formal dining room, though too far from the kitchen, but now it was Geoff's office, where, on pegs high on the side wall opposite the entrance doorway, hung his many hats.

Here are the hats, from the left: volunteer fireman's helmet, with CHIEF emblazoned on the front, and goggles and mask and straps dangling from it; yellow construction hard hat, with WHEEDABYX BUILDERS in blue letters on the right side, being the small construction company Geoff ran and spent most of his time at, hammer in hand; white helmet with built-in walkie-talkie and AMBULANCE in red letters across the front, which he wore when driving for the Roe-Jan Volunteer Ambulance Service; dark blue graduation-type cap with tassel, worn when singing with the Unitarian choir (he wasn't a Unitarian, but it was a good place to meet girls); serious black fedora for use at weddings and funerals and outdoor speech-making (by others); and dark blue military officer-style police chief's hat, with silver badge and black hard brim, which is why we're here.

Monday morning, June 26 of this year, Geoff Wheedabyx awoke alone and happy, leaped out of bed, and went off to shower. He didn't always awake alone, but he didn't mind it. At forty-seven, he'd been married twice and divorced twice and, while still friends with both ex-wives, he saw no reason to marry a third time. He essentially agreed with the philosophy of W. C. Fields, who once said, "Women to me are like elephants. I like to look at them, but I wouldn't want to own one."

Geoff liked to look at women, and more, hence the choirsinging cap and the black fedora, but to an even greater extent he liked to go on being an overgrown boy, hence the fireman hat and the policeman hat and the hard-hat hat. For a cheerful grown-up boy, who can actually legitimately wear all those hats, life is a pretty sweet proposition, all in all.

Geoff had a bachelor's kitchen skills: he threw food at the stove, then ate it, then cleaned up. By 7:40 A.M., he was done with all that, and carrying his second cup of coffee into the office, ready to go to work.

Geoff's office, a large room, was nevertheless crowded. His police-department file cabinet stood next to his fire-department file cabinet stood next to his construction-company file cabinet. His firematic books and police manuals and building codes bulletins and lumber brochures were all tumbled together into rough bookcases he'd made himself, evenings. On the walls, wherever there was space among the calendars, safety posters, work schedules, and area maps, Geoff had pinned up FBI wanted posters, not because he ever expected to see any of those hard-looking fellows here in Dudley, but because their pitiless faces helped to remind him that, small as all his operations might be, he was still engaged in serious business here.

As a police department, his operation was about as small as you could get: himself and two part-timers, who were mostly employed for traffic control when things like the circus or the horse show or the bluegrass festival were in the neighborhood. The rest of the time, the Dudley, New York, police department was just him, as backup to the state police, who handled all the real criminal work: burglary, DWI, possession of a controlled substance. (Once, there'd been a small Ziploc bag of some sort of white powdery controlled substance actually here in this office, locked in the bottom drawer of his grandfather's old oak desk over there between the two front windows, locked in there for two days, waiting for State CID up in Albany to send somebody down and pick it up. Oh, how Geoff had wanted to open that bag, just take a sniff, maybe a tiny taste; but he'd been good, and left that evidence alone, and regretted it ever since.)

This morning, as usual, he phoned the state-police barracks down toward Pawling to find out if anything he should know about had happened during the night — like more escapees from the boys' reformatory over by the Connecticut state line — but this morning, happily, there was nothing. Next he called the firehouse out at Futterman — Dudley was just backup to their fire department — and they'd also had a quiet night. So then he made some lumberyard and hardware-store calls, put on his hard hat, and went out, locking both the office door and the front door behind him, because there were just too many things in the office, like guns and flares and radios, that kids might take too intense an interest in, and he didn't want to be responsible for some dumb kid blowing his fingers off or something.

The Dudley PD owned a fine black-and-gray police car, two years old, equipped with stuff you wouldn't believe possible, but Geoff rarely used it. In fact, he mostly kept it parked just this side of the town-limit sign at the west end of Market Street, to remind eastbound drivers they weren't on the Taconic Parkway anymore and should slow the hell down. What Geoff drove instead was his 4 X— 4 pickup equipped with flashing red light, police radio, CB radio, walkie-talkie, handgun mounted under the dash, fire extinguisher, and, oh, Lord, just tons of stuff. Including at the moment, three sheets of C-D exterior plywood and some boxes of nails and a can of joint compound and some other construction-company stuff in the back.

The pickup was parked in the drive outside to the left. Geoff boarded it and took it the two blocks to the house where he was enclosing the back porch downstairs and creating a new screened porch on the second floor above it. He arrived at three minutes to eight, to find two of his three construction-company employees already there, yawning and scratching and drinking diner coffee out of plastic cups. The third guy pulled in about ten seconds later, and then they went to work.

The deal is, as everybody knows, construction crews cannot work, can simply not work, unless country-and-western music is playing on a crappy little portable radio under everybody's feet. On the other hand, Geoff had to be aware of his radios in the pickup, just in case there was a fire or an ambulance emergency or some call for the police department, so an electrician friend — who should have been here this week, by the way, but of course he wasn't — had rigged a white light on the pickup's dashboard that would flash through the windshield if anybody tried to call. And Geoff always left one transmitter on in the office, that could be received by the police radio in the pickup, if anybody tried to make contact with him back there. A voice, a phone ringing, anything like that in the offices would transmit to the pickup and switch on that white light.

It came on this morning a little after ten. It would come on like that once or twice a week, and was never any big deal. Today, one of the guys on the crew noticed it first, and said, "Your light's on, Geoff," and Geoff put down his hammer and left the porch and went around to get behind the wheel of the pickup.

He listened. No voice, no telephone, no walkie-talkie. Nothing. So why would the light go on? Did somebody just ring once, at the office, and then hang up? Geoff was about to switch off the light and go back to work when his police-department radio began to make scratching sounds.

Well, hell, so that's what it was. When he'd put in this system, the electrician — where the hell was he, by the way? — had said it was so sensitive it could pick up a mouse eating an apple in the office, which was okay with Geoff since he had no varmints in his house at all. Except maybe now he did. Listen to that scratching — sounded like the damn thing was eating a baseball bat.

The door opened.

What? Geoff leaned closer to the radio. Had he heard what he'd thought he'd heard?

The door closed. Footsteps. A file drawer opened.

"Well, hell," Geoff said, and reached for the handgun under the dash. Tucking it into his jeans, removing his nail apron, flipping the tail of his T-shirt over the gun butt, he got out of the pickup, called to his guys, "I'll be right back," and walked the two blocks back to his house, passing along the way a gray minivan with city plates and a strange woman at the wheel, who didn't look at him as he went by. Something to do with it, whatever it was.

Already he knew this wasn't kids. It was a burglar, picking locks, deliberately breaking into that specific room in that specific house and going right away to the filing cabinets.

Half a block this side of his house, Geoff turned off and walked down a driveway, then across some backyards. He'd grown up in this town, and until the age of thirteen the backyards and fields and lower tree branches and barn interiors had been his primary routes, leaving the ordinary streets and roads for the use of unimaginative grown-ups. You didn't forget those childhood patterns: Geoff could now come at his house from eleven different unexpected directions.

Letting himself quietly into the house through the back door, he paused to remove his work boots, then in his tube socks eased through the house to the closed office door. Leaning close to it, holding his breath, he listened at first to silence, and then to a squeak — his office chair, the son of a gun was sitting in his office chair — and then the undeniable scrape of his bottom drawer opening, the one that was always kept locked, but which this alien burglar son of a gun had picked or pried open. Goddam it!

Geoff took a deep breath, held the handgun in his left hand — a Smith & Wesson Police Positive .32 revolver, tested semiannually on the firing range but never fired otherwise, up till now — squeezed the doorknob with his right hand, stopped to be sure he was calm enough for all this, then turned the knob, shoved the door open, stepped in, pointed the revolver toward the desk, and cried, "Hold it right—"

There was nobody in the room. Geoff stared around, this way and that, and there was nobody in the room, the place was as empty as when he'd gone out.

There'd been no scratch marks or damage on the door, either, come to think of it. Was he crazy? Was it a mouse after all?

The bottom desk drawer over there was open. From this angle, he could just barely see it. And his office chair was tilted backward at an unusual angle. Geoff squinted, pointing the handgun at that chair. He waited.

The chair squeaked. A tiny, reluctant, embarrassed squeak, but a definite squeak.

"Okay," Geoff said. Now he was sure of himself. Back to the doorway, handgun pointed firmly at the seat back, he said, "I don't know how you're doing that, mirrors or whatever it might be you've got there, some kind of city trick I've never heard of, but that's okay. I don't have to see you to know you're there. And I don't have to see you to shoot you, either, so you'd best be very careful."

The chair squeaked again, even more reluctantly than before, this time sullenly, mulishly as well.

"I said be careful," Geoff told it. One small part of him was amazed to listen how he was talking so calmly and self-assuredly in an empty room, but the rest of him was just doing his job. All of his jobs, all the jobs he'd been trained for, taking state-police classes and fire-department classes and CPR training and ambulance-rescue instruction and all the rest of it. Emergencies were what he did. If the emergency is you talk out loud in an empty room and point your handgun at a perpetrator you can't see, that's okay. You cope.

Geoff said, "That chair's giving you away, you know. I'll know if you try to stand up out of it, so you shouldn't try that, because then I will have to shoot you, because otherwise I might not know where you are. So just stay in the chair."

Nothing. Silence.

"You're not fooling me, you know," Geoff said.

Nothing. Silence.

"Well, this is just silly," Geoff said. "All I have to do is call a couple of friends of mine, and they'll come here and throw ropes around you and the chair while I hold this gun on you, and then we'll turn you over to the state police and let them send you back to the city or whatever they want to do with you. Is that woman in the van with you?"

A sigh sounded, floating in the air.

Geoff nodded. "Yeah, I thought she was."

The chair squeaked again, this time loudly and unashamedly. Papers on the desk ruffled and crumpled. It was Geoff's guess that the perp had put his elbows on the table and his head in his hands. He almost felt sorry for the fellow, and might have, if the fellow weren't in the process of burglarizing Geoff's own house, own office, and own desk. Sympathy in his voice, he said, "You want to tell me about it?"

"Out of all the police departments in all the small towns in all the world," said a faint forlorn voice from the general direction of the desk, "why did I have to pick this one?"

"Maybe you underestimated us hicks," Geoff suggested.

"Oh, don't do that city-country shit on me," the nothing in the chair said, sounding aggrieved. "We're all just people, goddam it."

"Well, that's true," Geoff said, feeling suddenly abashed. He tried to be a decent person, and didn't like all at once to find evidences of prejudice in himself. "I apologize if I was being anti-city," he said, "but you have to admit, what you're doing there, whatever it is you're doing, it isn't something anybody around Dudley could do."

"That's right. So nobody's gonna believe you," the whatsit in the chair said hopefully, "so you'd just make trouble for yourself, so probably the best thing would be, you just let me go."

"They don't have to believe me," Geoff told him. "They can believe you."

The next sigh from the chair was counterpointed by a sudden loud knocking at the front door. An instant later, a woman's voice out there called, "Hello? Anybody home?"

"There's your friend," Geoff said.

"Never saw her before in my life."

"You're not seeing her now."

"If I could see her, I've never seen her before."

Knock knock. "Hello? Hello?"

Geoff said, "Is my front door locked or unlocked?"

"Unlocked."

"Why don't you call her in, then?"

"It's your house."

"You unlocked the door."

Knock knock. "Hello? Anybody? Freddie?"

Sigh from the chair, long and heartfelt. "Come on in," the burglar called.

"Freddie?"

"It's unlocked!"

"You be good now, Freddie," Geoff warned, and stepped back into the doorway, so he could look simultaneously at his office chair and the front door, which opened.

The woman from the van, now that he got a better look at her in his open front doorway, was an attractive girl, like one of those movie actresses that play girls from Brooklyn but aren't really. Except this one probably was. She stared at Geoff, much more astonished and frightened by his appearance than he had been by her boyfriend's nonappearance. "Who — who are you?"

"Well, the householder," Geoff said. "Also the chief of police. Come on in. Might as well close the door behind you."

"No, I, I was just, he's not here, sorry, I was just, uh, looking for my friend."

"Freddie. Come on in," Geoff invited again, being very calm and easygoing, trying not to spook this girl more than she was already spooked. "Freddie's sitting at my desk," he said.

She came in, she shut the door, and she looked at Geoff with deep mistrust. "I don't know what you mean," she said.

Now that she was inside, Geoff let her see the gun. Gesturing with it, he said, "I'd like you to come into the office, please," and he put more of his official tone into his voice.

She stared at the gun. "That's a gun!"

"Yes, ma'am. Which I don't intend to use unless you try to run away or Freddie makes an unauthorized move out of that chair." Looking toward the chair in question, Geoff said, "Freddie, would you ask your friend to come on in?"

Sounding resigned, Freddie's voice said, "Come on in, Peg."

"Freddie?" Clearly, she couldn't believe any of this. "What's happening?"

"Well, I'm caught, Peg. That's the hell of it."

Geoff stepped back from the doorway into the office, and Peg came forward. Entering the office, she looked around and made one last hopeless try. "I don't see anybody."

"Forget it, Peg," Freddie said. "He's got me pinned in this chair here." And he made the chair squeak, just to prove it. Then, sounding aggrieved again, he said, "You're such a goddam handyman, I can see it all over you, how come you don't oil this chair?"

"Never got around to it. Peg, maybe you could stand beside the desk over there, while Freddie tells me what's going on."

As she moved over, they both started talking at once, then both stopped, then Peg said, "Freddie, let me tell him."

"Okay. You're better at it, I guess."

"That's right." Peg turned to Geoff, her expression as open and honest and clean as the day outside those windows. "Besides," she explained, "you can see me, you can see my face and know I'm telling the truth."

"Sure," Geoff said, and looked at that dewy face, and thought, Now here we have a first-class grade-A liar. "Go ahead," he said.

"Freddie's a scientist."

Well, that's good, Geoff thought. Start with a whopper. "Uh-huh," he said.

"He's working on a cure for cancer."

"Uh-huh."

"Skin cancer," Freddie added.

"Uh-huh."

Peg said, "He's got this special medicine that takes the color out of your skin and your whole body, and that's why you can't see him."

"That would explain it," Geoff agreed.

Peg now looked more sincere than ever. "But," she said, "there are some very bad guys trying to steal the formula."

"Uh-huh."

Simultaneously, Freddie said, "A chemical company," and Peg said, "Foreign agents."

"Uh-huh," Geoff said.

"A foreign chemical company," Freddie explained.

"Their agents," Peg footnoted. "They're Swiss, I think." Turning desperately to the chair behind the desk, she said, "Is that right, Freddie?"

"Yeah, I think so. Swiss, I think."

"So Freddie had to get away and hide," Peg explained, turning back to Geoff.

"Should be easy for him to do, considering," Geoff agreed.

Sounding bitter, Peg said, "You'd think so."

"I experimented on myself," Freddie said. "To test my formula, because I didn't want to put anybody else at risk."

"I've seen that in the movies," Geoff said.

"Sure. Happens all the time. But now I got to hide out until my experiment's done, and these guys are after me. They're very powerful guys, with these like tentacles into the very highest level of government, and all that stuff."

Peg explained, "It's like a Robert Ludlum novel."

"I was going to suggest that myself," Geoff told her.

"So we ran away," Peg went on, "but Freddie wanted to know if maybe they had some of their powerful friends get the police to look for us—"

"Corrupt city police," Freddie said, in a blatant appeal to Geoff's prejudices — dang!

"So we stopped here," Peg said.

"Of all places," Freddie said.

"And Freddie came in here to see if his name was on any wanted lists."

Geoff lifted an interested eyebrow toward the chair. "Was it?"

"I don't know yet. I mean, not so far."

Geoff pointed the gun at the clipboard on the right side of the desk. "Did you look on that clipboard?"

"No. What's that?"

"If they were looking for you, how long would it be?"

"Just a few days."

"Then it'll be on that clipboard," Geoff told him. "Any wanted flyers they fax me, I put them on that clipboard. Anything in the last two, three weeks'll be there."

"Okay if I look?"

Geoff couldn't help a sardonic chuckle. "You break-and-enter my house, and then ask my permission to look at that clipboard?"

"I apologize for breaking and entering."

"Go ahead and look," Geoff said.

That was a strange moment, when the clipboard lifted up into the air all by itself, and then started riffling its own pages. While the clipboard animated itself like that, Geoff took time to consider the baloney sandwich they'd just fed him. He suspected that, here and there in the mix, like flecks of gold in a sandy streambed, there were particles of truth stirred into the baloney. Not a lot of particles, but some.

A sigh of relief from the desk. Peg turned, hopeful, ready to be happy. "Is it okay?"

"We're not there!" Freddie sounded relieved, elated, even astonished. "Peg, by golly, I'm not a wanted man!"

"Well, that isn't exactly true," Geoff said. "Here in Dudley you're wanted, in fact you're being arrested, for breaking and entering."

"Aw, come on, Chief," Freddie said. "I didn't take anything, I wasn't gonna take anything, you know that's true. And I didn't hurt any of your locks or anything else, no damage at all. I'll even oil this damn chair before I go, if you want."

"Go? You aren't going anywhere."

"Chief?" Freddie asked. "Won't you give us a break?"

"No."

"Peg?"

All at once, Peg was slinking seductively toward him, smiling, blocking his view of the desk, saying, "Chief? Am I arrested, too? I didn't break into anywhere."

"Move over!" Geoff cried, but it was too late. Squeak! When Geoff jumped to his right, to see his chair, it was turning in a lazy circle, bobbing slightly, definitely empty.

"Damn it!" Geoff yelled, and pointed the gun at Peg. "Don't you move!"

"I just don't believe you'll shoot me," Peg said, and backed toward the open doorway.

"I'll shoot your leg!"

"This leg?" She leered at him. "Chief, what kind of man are you?"

"Now, stop! Right there!" Geoff shouted, and his fire-chief helmet came flying out of the air and bounced off his wrist, so that he almost dropped the gun, but held on to it. Peg was now through the doorway, fleet of foot, and before he could get to the hall the front door slammed shut. Geoff spun around, trying to fill the doorway, to at least keep Freddie bottled up in here, and his police-chief hat took him square on the nose.

The son of a gun was throwing his hats at him! Geoff dodged his fedora, waving the useless gun this way and that, and here came his choir-singing cap, tassel streaming out behind it like a kite's tail. Geoff was actually ducking away from that cap when he realized it was moving in too straight a line, and not turning; it wasn't being thrown, it was being carried!

But the trick had worked, doggone it, that cap had made him duck out of the doorway just at the wrong second. Geoff flailed with his free hand, and found a wrist, and clenched on tight to that invisible wrist until he felt invisible teeth crunch hard onto his fingers. "Yow!" he cried, and let go, and so did the teeth, and a few seconds later slam went the front door again.

By the time Geoff got out to the porch, the van was picking up speed westward down Market Street; not a chance in the world he could get to either his pickup, two blocks to the left, or his police car, two blocks to the right, before those people were long gone.

Geoff hurried back into his office, sat down at his communications center, and was on the very brink of calling the state police when his second thoughts caught up with him. Report this? Report what? No evidence of a burglary, nothing taken. He knew Freddie was invisible, because he'd spent time in this room talking to the guy, but what would the fellas at the state-police barracks think if he called and asked them to pick up an invisible man in a gray minivan?

He had no idea who those two people really were, except not scientists. He had no idea where they were headed or what their true story was or why Freddie had thought he might be on some wanted list. All he knew for sure about Freddie, in fact, was that he was not on any wanted list, which seemed improper, somehow.

Well, he did know a couple things more about those two, when he thought it over. He knew Freddie had enough burglar skills to be a first-rate burglar, so probably was. He knew their first names, Freddie and Peg. And he knew their minivan's license number.

It took about two minutes to radio in and get the registration information, and learn that the owner of the van was one Margaret Briscoe — Peg, check — with an address in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, New York.

So he'd been right about one thing today, anyway.

30

"That was too close a call," Freddie said. He was staying in the back of the van, clothes off, just in case they got stopped by some law sicced on them by the chief. It hadn't happened so far, which meant it was increasingly unlikely to happen, but nevertheless. Freddie's wrist still burned where the chief had grabbed it, and his mouth still remembered the bad taste of the chief's work-roughened fingers.

Up front, Peg concentrated on her driving. "What got me about that guy," she said, "was how easy he took it. Like he talked to invisible people all the time."

"I don't like a cop that doesn't get rattled," Freddie agreed. He was sitting on his rolled-up clothing, trousers on the outside of the roll, but the country road still jounced him pretty solidly against the hard floor of the van. And AstroTurf, as any professional ballplayer can tell you, is no fun to bounce on.

"Well, at least," Peg said, slowing but not stopping for a stop sign, then making the right onto another small twisty bumpy county road, "now we know for sure there isn't any paper out on you."

"I told you Barney was working off the books," Freddie said. "So now we're safe and clear. All we have to do is stay away from Dudley."

"There's not much there," Peg said. "We can do our shopping in the other direction."

"Fi-hine!" Freddie said as hey went over one particularly brutal bump. "How much longer till we get home, Peg?"

"Ten minutes, maybe less."

"Good."

"And then we can relax."

"I keep thinking," Freddie said, bracing himself with both hands on the AstroTurf, "about that chief back there, and how he damn near got me."

"Well, he didn't get you," Peg said, braking not very much at a yield sign. "So don't worry, Freddie, you'll never see that guy again." She laughed. "And Lord knows, he won't see you."

31

Monday afternoon, three-thirty. Mordon Leethe watched Jack Fullerton the Fourth set flame to a cigarette from a Greek Revival lighter the size of a football. There was then a delay in the conversation for the ritual coughing, hacking, wheezing, gasping, spitting, eyeball-rolling, weeping, snorting, snot-spraying, drooling, and braying, Jack the Fourth being held and succored and rubbed down and wiped off all through it by his two silent dark-suited assistants. Then, once the storm had subsided and Jack was again capable of speech, the cigarette smoldering like some outlying district of hell in that huge ashtray on his desk, the oxygen tube once again in position beneath his nostrils, he turned his wet pale red-rimmed eyes on Mordon and said, "Where is he? I want to see this fellow."

"Well, that's the thing," Mordon ventured, fingers pointing toward various nonexistent fireflies, "you can't see this fellow. No one can. That's what makes him so hard to find."

"And so useful, dammit." Jack the Fourth thumped a meaty fist against his clean desktop, making the ashtray and Mordon jump, but not the stoic assistants. "I want that fellow now! I need him! So why don't I have him?"

"Being a thief," Mordon hazarded, fingers searching for a lost contact lens in a shag rug, "makes him adept, I presume, at hiding out. But I'm sure we'll find him eventually."

"I don't have eventually. What I have is an idea."

Mordon's hands climbed the escape rope of his tie. "Yes?"

"These mad medicos," Jack the Fourth wheezed, "they know now, don't they, if they put their two potions together, they make an invisible man?"

Surprised, his hands turning like sunflowers, Mordon said, "Well, yes, I suppose they do."

"Then let them make us one," Jack the Fourth demanded. "Keep looking for the original, but make us a copy."

The sunflowers grew. "They could, couldn't they?" But then the sunflowers died, and Mordon said, "But who? Who would take such a risk, and wind up like, like that?"

"One thing I've learned about money," Jack the Fourth wheezed. "If you have enough of it, somebody's gonna volunteer. And I need an invisible man, dammit. I need him right away!"

"Congressional hearings?" Mordon suggested. "Competitors' pricing plans?"

"All that, too, of course," Jack the Fourth rumbled, with a massive shrug of shoulder. "But that isn't the most important. I need him for something else, closer to home."

Suspected infidelity? Jack the Fourth's fifth wife? Mordon looked alert. "Yes?"

"The doctors!" Jack the Fourth cried, with sudden passion. "The doctors are lying to me!"

"Which doctors?" Mordon asked.

"You're right," Jack the Fourth told him. "They're all witch doctors!"

"No, I meant, which doctors are lying to you?"

"My doctors! Who the hell other pill pusher do you think I'd talk to? Do you think I like to talk to doctors? Grubby little handwashers? Don't you know I quit two different country clubs in my life because they let the pill pushers in? Measly little body mechanics, they get two dimes to rub together, they think they're class! Effrontery!"

"Uh, Jack," Mordon said. "What have your doctors been lying to you about?"

"Me, of course! What the hell do I care what their opinions are on anything else? They're lying to me about me, and I damn well know it. You think I look any better today than the last time you saw me?"

If it were possible for Jack the Fourth to look worse, he would look worse. Since it was not, he looked the same. "Uh—" Mordon said.

"Neither do I!" yelled Jack the Fourth, and paused to cough a lot of red foam into a handkerchief held by one of the assistants. When that attack was over, he resumed, telling Mordon, "They tell me I'm improving, if you can believe it. Oh, they admit I'll never play tennis again, they don't go so far as to promise a cure, the rotten sycophants, but they claim I'm holding my own, that's how they phrase it, as though I could even find my own anymore. I need this goddam spook of yours, or one we make ourselves, to sneak in there and listen when I'm not around. I know they're lying, I know it!"

"Then why do you need the invisible man's confirmation?" Mordon asked, blessing the multitudes.

Jack the Fourth turned his melting iceberg eyes on Mordon. "I want to know," he rasped, "if they're laughing."

32

Sometimes it seemed to Peg she'd been born in the wrong century. Sometimes it seemed to her she should have been born back in the Middle Ages, when people liked their white women white, when alabaster was a word that showed up in the poetry a lot, referring to women, not mausoleums, and was considered a compliment. Sometimes she thought it had been a mistake on her part to be born at a time when white women were supposed to color themselves like french toast.

Even when she was a little kid, she felt the same way. The other little kids were at Coney Island or Jones Beach, spread-eagled on the sand like victims of a hostile tribe, and where was Peg? Under the beach umbrella; wrapped inside the beach towel; in the shade of the hot dog stand; home, reading a book. "It's such a beautiful day out, whyn't you go out and catch the sun?" well-meaning but mortally mistaken grownups would say, and five minutes later Peg would be sneaking in the back door.

Now, of course, with ozone, everybody knows that tinting yourself the shade of a tennis racket handle is a dangerous affectation at best. Now, with the sunblocks steadily thickening toward three figures, Peg no longer had to justify herself to the rest of the world. "I'm keeping out of the sun," she'd say, and people would nod and say, "Ozone," and Peg would smile and let it go at that, but it wasn't ozone. It was her skin. She liked it the color she was born with.

So she hadn't expected to be spending much time at, in, or near the swimming pool that had come as part of the rental house, though she knew Freddie liked to swim and would probably drift up there by himself without a bathing suit from time to time. But then she discovered how much fun it was to watch Freddie swim, and that changed everything.

Yes, watch. In the pool, he was still of course invisible, but nevertheless he was a palpable substance, a mass, and he did displace the water he moved through. The clear water could be seen to bunch and roil and stream all around him, reflecting the light in another way, making forms and shapes of its own as Freddie passed by. When he swam the length of the pool underwater, a thing he liked to do, it was eerie, almost frightening, to see that thick rippling disturbance move ghostly and fishlike down there, occasionally emitting streams of bubbles from . . . from nowhere. And when he burst through the surface, leaping up, blowing water like a whale, it was just astonishing: water exploding, all by itself.

The pool was behind the house, and up a slight slope, and off-center from the house just a bit to the right. An enclosing fence framed the pool and its stone-and-wood surround; it was made of vertical wood slats four feet high, with a two-foot latticework above that, to catch the breeze and permit the people inside to look out while retaining their own privacy. At the right end of the pool, where a round Lucite table and four white plastic chairs stood under a large blue-and-white-striped umbrella that stuck up like a Martian plant from the middle of the table, you could look through the lattice and down past the side of the house to the driveway in front, to see people arrive without their seeing you.

Here they were spending most of their time, when not in Dudley. The sun was warm, the air not too hot, the pool heated. Freddie frolicked like a walrus, a dolphin, but one you couldn't see, while Peg sat under the umbrella, wore a straw hat with a big brim, and white slacks and sleeveless blouses (she wasn't a maniac on the subject), and read Bleak House. (Having been a dental technician had led Peg to the Good Books; she liked to give book reports aloud while working on her patients. They couldn't say anything anyway, their mouths being full of slender chrome instruments, so if Peg was going to be reduced to monologues, they might as well be on something worthwhile).

The morning after their encounter with the police chief in Dudley they spent up by the pool. Freddie swam sometimes, and other times lay out on a beach towel spread in the sun on the duckboard surround; he said he wasn't worried about getting a burn. Peg alternatively hung out with the lawyers in Bleak House or, whenever Freddie enthusiastically and invisibly cannonballed back into the pool, she watched that spectral surge as it lashed and plunged through the heaving water.

The sun was high, and she was just beginning to think about lunch, when she heard a car door slam. The chief! At once, she slapped down the book onto the table and jumped to her feet. The chief! He found us!

Of course, there was no way. Even if the chief knew their license number, which was unlikely, all it would lead him to was the address in Bay Ridge. Still, it was the chief she fully expected to face when she hurried to the fence and stared through the lattice, and so it was with great relief that she saw, moving away from his red car in the driveway toward the front of the house, the real estate agent, Call Me Tom. "Up here!" she cried, and waved her hand above the fence.

He looked back and up. "Oh, hi." Waving, he reversed his route.

Peg turned back to the pool, hissing, "Freddie! Freddie!"

He was already coming out of the pool, which she could tell by the splashing, and then the wet footprints, and all those water drops suspended in the air, vaguely in the shape of a man.

"No, no!" She hurried toward him, with frantic shooing gestures. "Back in the pool!"

He went, dropping backwards, making a great splash, the idiot. Peg, shaking her head, ran over to open the wood-and-lattice door, just as Call Me Tom got there, smiling. He wore a short-sleeved white shirt with a pale green necktie, but he must have left his briefcase or sample book in the car. "Hi, Peg," he said. He was all the salesmen in the history of the world rolled into one and placed in bright sunlight, to see what would happen.

"Hi, Tom. Come on in."

"Thanks. Just checking, see how you're coming along," he said, as he entered the pool area.

"Fine, thanks."

He stopped and looked around. "Where's your friend?"

The footprints on the duckboards were fading fast in the dry sunny air. "He's in New York," Peg said. "He still has to work, poor guy."

"Oh. I thought . . ." Call Me Tom looked at the still-wet duckboards, the empty pool, the book on the table under the umbrella, and decided to give it up. "Catching up on your reading, eh?"

"Sure, why not? Good weather, nothing to do, no interruptions—"

"Except me," he said, and stopped smiling long enough to look sheepish.

"No, no, I didn't mean that," she assured him, though she had meant that, and they both knew it.

"Well, I won't take you away from your — oh, Bleak House! God, I read that years ago."

"First time for me."

"Jarndyce and Jarndyce," Call Me Tom said, and chuckled, and shook his head. "I could tell you some lawsuit stories," he threatened. "Real estate, it honestly brings out the worst in people, I believe that's true."

Beyond him, in Peg's line of sight, a wet forearm print appeared on the duckboard beside the pool. "You may be right," she said. "But not here, we're really happy with the place."

"I'm glad to hear it." Call Me Tom cast a look around, to be sure they were alone, and failed to notice the knee print that now appeared next to the forearm print. Nonetheless, he lowered his voice as he said, "You told me about the legal troubles your friend is having. The divorce and all."

It was hard for Peg to concentrate on what Call Me Tom was saying, when over his right shoulder she could see those wet footprints appearing one after the other along the duckboards on the other side of the pool. "The reason we're paying in cash and all that, you mean," she said.

"Exactly." Call Me Tom moved closer, being more confidential, as behind him a beach towel picked itself off a chair and whipped around madly and soundlessly in the air. Peg knew Freddie was doing this only because he was sore at the interruption, but it was so dangerous. "I just thought you ought to know," Call Me Tom murmured, managing to remain ebullient while expressing sympathy and concern and solidarity, "that I got a phone call this morning, first thing, some finance outfit in Syracuse, looking for you."

This made no sense. "Syracuse?" Peg repeated, astonished. "For me? I've never been in Syracuse in my life." Meantime, that damn towel was still doing its dance, as though Call Me Tom might not turn around at any second.

And yet he didn't. Maintaining eye contact with Peg, "My hunch is," he said, "it has something to do with your friend's divorce. I think they know the two of you rented a place somewhere around here, and they're calling all the brokers, trying to track you down."

The towel opened itself, sailed briefly, then made a magic-carpet landing on the duckboards. At the same time, Peg suddenly realized what that phone call must mean. "Oh, my God," she said. If she'd permitted her face to pick up any color before this, it would have drained away now.

"You're my client," Call Me Tom assured her. Parts of the beach towel flattened more than other parts. "I have no complaint with you, and I trust you have no complaint with me."

"Complaint? What complaint?" I must not get hysterical, Peg thought hysterically, and used up some of the tension by waving her arms around as she said, "Look at this great place you found us!"

"Well, thanks. It is nice, isn't it?" Call Me Tom said, and now he did turn in a half-circle, taking it all in: the day, the pool, the beach towel. Smiling at Peg some more, he said, "Mention me to your friends."

"I will."

"I got" — he took several folded pieces of paper from his pants pocket, went through them, selected one, put the rest away, and handed that one to Peg — "the fellow's name and phone number, in case you want to call him and tell him to leave you out of it all. Sometimes that works, when they're bothering somebody other than the person involved in the case."

"Good idea," Peg agreed, taking the piece of paper but not yet looking at it. She couldn't help herself; even with this bad news, her concentration was still broken by that goddam towel, lying there so innocently. I'm going to hit him with a stick, she promised herself, as she said, "I really appreciate this, Tom. Thanks a lot."

"Anytime. Well, I'll let you get back to your book."

They walked together over to the door in the pool-area wall, Call Me Tom smiling at the scene, then frowning slightly. Had some corner of his brain noticed that there hadn't been a beach towel lying there in that position the last time he'd looked?

"I'll call Freddie tonight," Peg said, talking fast to distract him. "Tell him about this. He'll know what to do."

"Or his lawyer. Well, enjoy your summer," Call Me Tom said, and waved, and went away.

Peg stood inside the wall, door closed, and watched through the lattice as Call Me Tom returned to his car and backed it down the driveway. When, in the middle of that, a wet hand touched her arm, she didn't look around — what was the point in looking around? — but merely said, "I'm not speaking to you."

"He wasn't going to look away from those big eyes of yours, Peg. I get cold in the water after a while."

"It's a heated pool."

"Still. I seem colder, now I'm invisible. Anyway, it turned out our friend Barney set some skip-trace outfit loose on us, huh?"

Peg looked at the folded piece of paper in her hand, opened it, and read the names aloud: ""Stephen Garmainster, Equity Research and Retrieval Corporation.' We aren't going to phone this guy."

"Barney's got some money behind him, to do this," Freddie said.

Call Me Tom was gone; pocketing the piece of paper, Peg walked back over to her chair and her table and her book. Freddie, from the sound of his voice, followed, saying, "This checking-account business you're gonna do. Better use the apartment in the city for the address."

"I'm glad Call Me Tom told us about it, anyway," Peg said, settling into her chair, resting a hand on her book, wishing she were back in nineteenth-century London.

"Yeah, well." The chair across the way recoiled from the table, then sagged.

Peg gave it a jaundiced look. "What do you think, he's after my body, that's the only reason he told me?"

"That's one possibility," Freddie agreed, from somewhere in the air. This was exactly the sort of thing Peg hated, she reminded herself, as he went on, "Another possibility is, he had a guilty conscience."

She frowned. "What kind of guilty conscience?"

"What if he did tell the guy something? Then afterward he thought it over, he thought, maybe you should at least get a warning."

"Oh, gee, Freddie, do you think so? Is that what it was all about?"

"I don't know. He's tough to read."

"You're one to talk."

"Yeah, but Call Me Tom's such a friendly guy, you can see him and you still can't see him."

"I don't think he'd lie about it," Peg said.

"I hope not." Freddie's voice floated in the air. "But, maybe, just to be on the safe side," he said, "we ought to each pack one little bag, leave it in the van. Just in case."

Peg sat there, alone but not alone. There were no more words from Freddie. Her hand rested on the book, but she didn't pick it up. The sun didn't seem as bright anymore.

33

"Not possible," Peter said, and David said, "What do you think we are?"

"Scientists," the lawyer Leethe said, which of course couldn't properly be refuted.

Still. "You come here unannounced," Peter began.

"Of course," Leethe said, shrugging his shoulders, playing the piano. "Had I called, you would have refused to see me."

"Absolutely," said David.

"Or insisted on your friend Cummingford being present."

"Our attorney Cummingford," Peter said.

They were standing together, all three, in the front hall, under the amused gaze of Shanana. When she'd buzzed up to them in the lab to say that Mordon Leethe had made an unexpected entry — rather like bubonic plague making an unexpected entry, that — they'd decided at once to come down here, meet the man as close to the front door as possible, and repel this invader before the pestilence could spread.

And now, when he'd told them the reason for his presence! He and his masters wanted Peter and David to make them another invisible man! Out of the question!

Peter said, "Don't you think enough trouble has been—"

"Excuse me," Leethe interrupted, stopping traffic with one raised palm. "I don't believe you're thinking this through as clearly as you might. We are talking here about volunteers, about the very experiment you were already undertaking, about—" He broke off and looked around. Almost plaintively, he said, "Couldn't we sit comfortably somewhere? In that nice lounge room upstairs?"

"We don't want you here at all," David said, but Peter had been listening more closely to Leethe's words, and so he asked, "What do you mean, volunteers?"

"I mean," Leethe said, "you needn't hold anyone at gunpoint."

Oh, dear, Shanana hadn't known about that. Her eyes were widening, weren't they? Yes, and her ears, too, no doubt. Peter said, "We can spare you five minutes. Come to the conference room."

"Oh, well," Leethe said, looking sad. "Mayn't I be permitted to sit in the nice lounge? Mr. Cummingford isn't present."

They both blinked at him. Peter said, "Did you say "mayn't I'?"

Apparently surprised, touching his chin with a fingertip as though to identify himself for the onlookers, Leethe said, "So I did. Doesn't that mean I deserve the nice lounge?"

"Oh, very well," Peter said, rolling his eyes in David's direction. "Come along."

They went upstairs, and sat on the sofas the same way they had two weeks ago when Leethe had shown them Freddie Noon's police pictures. This time, no one offered the man refreshments; instead, Peter said, "Maybe you'd better explain this proposal."

"Certainly. You have two experimental medicines—"

"Formulae," Peter interrupted. "Not medicines, because untried."

"Very well, formulae. You had hoped that one or the other would help in the struggle against melanoma, but now you know that the two in combination create invisibility. You have in your possession an invisibility formula."

David said, "Peter, that's right! I never even thought about that." His mind had been too full of the other ramifications of the problem.

Peter was less thrilled. He said, "Go on, Mr. Leethe."

"NAABOR, for its own purposes, would like to employ the services of an invisible person," Leethe went on. "You, for your purposes, would like volunteers upon which to test your med — formulae. NAABOR is prepared to present you with two volunteers at this time, to be made invisible. As an inducement, NAABOR will undertake, in the near future, to provide you as many volunteers as you require for more normal study."

David, all agog, said, "Peter, do you think — ?" But Peter was saying to Leethe, "What's the catch?"

"Catch?" Leethe smacked his right fist into a catcher's mitt, then tossed the ball into the dugout. "What catch can there possibly be? NAABOR will supply the volunteers, both now and for later, with all releases signed. You can observe your new guinea pigs, if you can be said to observe an invisible—"

"For how long?" Peter asked.

Leethe showed how long the fish was he'd almost caught. "How long do you want?"

"A week."

"Oh, come," Leethe said, reducing the fish to a minnow. "You were only hoping for twenty-four hours with the first one."

"The circumstances were different."

"We have a time consideration, on our side," Leethe admitted. "We could agree to forty-eight hours."

Peter considered that, then nodded. "Acceptable," he said, then added, "We'll want a contract," and David looked stern and said, "That's right!"

"Of course," Leethe said.

"Prepared by Bradley Cummingford."

"Less work for me," Leethe said. "Why not phone him right now? The sooner we get the paperwork out of the way, the sooner we can get started, and the sooner we'll see some results." He smiled at himself. "Or not," he appended. "As the case may be."

34

It was Tuesday morning when Mordon Leethe put in his request for more invisibles; the rest of Tuesday, how those phones and faxes flew. Documents were drawn up, sent, revised, sent, argued over, sent, signed, and sent. Meanwhile, the vast machinery of NAABOR was grinding through who knew what contortions to select, approve, and induce the two volunteers. At last, at ten minutes past six that evening, in the lab, long after Shanana had left for the day and Bradley's last contractual nit had been picked, David put down a retort and answered the telephone himself, to hear someone say, "This is Ms. Clarkson from Personnel, wishing to speak to either—"

"I beg your pardon?"

"— Dr. Loo — I say, this is Ms. Clarkson from Personnel, and I wish to speak—"

"What personnel? I don't know what you mean."

"Is this the Loomis—"

"Heimhocker, yes."

"I'd like to speak to—"

"This is Dr. Loomis."

"— either Doctor Loo — oh. You're Dr. Loomis."

"I know who I am," David said. "Who are you?"

"Ms. Clarkson of Personnel, as I believe I said before."

From across the lab, Peter said, "Who is it, David?"

"I'm trying to find out," David told him, and into the phone he said, "I'm sorry, I have no idea what you're talking about. What is personnel?"

"The department I'm in!"

"Department? Macy's?" Away from the phone: "Peter? Did we order anything from Macy's?"

"The department of NAABOR!" screamed the woman.

"I don't think so," Peter said.

"Oh, for heaven's sake," David told the phone. "Why didn't you say so?"

"I thought I had." The woman seemed to be panting now.

"Well, you didn't," David said.

There was a little silence down the phone line then, which David didn't intrude on, having nothing to say — she was the one who'd made the call, after all — and then, in a much more controlled manner, she said, "May I speak to Dr. Heimhocker, please."

"Of course," David said, and held the phone out toward Peter, saying, "It's for you."

Peter approached, hand out. "Who is it?"

"Somebody from NAABOR. It's you she wants to talk to."

"Huh." Peter took the phone, spoke briefly into it, wrote a couple of things on the pad near the phone, then said, "Fine. Thank you very much. Good-bye," and hung up.

David said, "What was that all about?"

"Our volunteers. They'll be here at nine tomorrow morning."

"Oh, the volunteers!" David clapped his hands. "Peter, it's actually going to happen!"

"It would seem so."

David gave him a look. "Peter," he said, "I know we're both being calm and collected about all this, but in fact, it is very exciting."

"I suppose it is," Peter said. "And especially for" — he added, looking at the names he'd written on the pad — "Michael Prendergast and George Clapp."

George Clapp was black, but that wasn't the surprise. The surprise was that Michael Prendergast was a woman. And a beautiful woman at that, astonishingly beautiful in her flowered summer dress, a tanned and healthy blonde of about twenty-five, the Playmate of the decade, with bright blue eyes and delicious cheekbones and a body as strokable as a kitten's.

George Clapp on the other hand was probably forty years of age and barely five feet tall. A skinny gnarly sort of guy, he wore a shiny black suit, thin black tie, white shirt, and big black river-barge shoes. His skin was a dull brown. Two thick ropes of old scar tissue angled across his face, from just under his right eye down his right cheek, across his chin and on down to the side of his neck under his left ear.

Beforehand, Peter and David had decided to speed the process by each doing the preliminary interview with one subject. Peter had drawn Michael, so he took her up to the sitting room that Mordon Leethe craved so much. As they sat facing one another on the sofas there, Peter took her through her medical history, and he simply couldn't find anything wrong. Not a junkie, no history of mental problems, no serious or chronic illnesses. Married twice, divorced twice, never pregnant. Healthy siblings, healthy parents, healthy grandparents. Finishing, Peter said, "This is not a question on the form, but I feel I have to ask it, anyway."

"Why, you mean," she said.

"Yes. You do understand what the idea is here, don't you?"

"Perfectly," she said. "I am a willing volunteer in a medical experiment, at the end of which I either will or will not be invisible." She smiled briefly, a dazzling sight. "My guess is that I will not be," she said, "but I don't want to spoil anybody's fun."

"Thank you."

"The corporation I work for is paying me a great deal of money over my remaining lifetime, no matter what happens with the experiment. If it turns out I am invisible, they'll have other well-paying uses for me."

"So you're doing it for money," Peter said. He felt vaguely disappointed.

"Not entirely," she said. "Dr. Heimhocker, would you say I'm attractive?"

"Anybody would say you're attractive," Peter told her. "You're probably the most beautiful woman I've ever been in the same room with. You understand you aren't my type—"

She smiled, and nodded.

"— but I certainly recognize beauty when I see it. Which is really why I'm asking the question. Why risk what — why risk anything?"

"Doctor," she said, "I am a nuclear physicist and a theoretical mathematician. I was third in my class at MIT, but when I left school I simply could not find a job to match my capabilities. My record was enough to get me many interviews, but that was always the end of it. Women hate me. Men find it impossible to think when I'm around. Today I am a drudge in the statistical section of the American Tobacco Research Institute, bending the cancer numbers. It's the equivalent of you being a janitor in a hospital."