Smoke

by Donald E. Westlake

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

Due to a foiled burglary in a high-tech lab doing research for cigarette manufacturers, Freddie Noon, the thief, is now invisible. This condition has clear-cut advantages for a man in Freddie's profession, but now everybody wants a glimpse of Freddie. But Freddie doesn't dare show his face, his shadow, anything. Because Freddie Noon has gotten a taste of invisibility--and he can't quit now.

Release date: April 11, 2001

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 464

Sample

♦

“Explaining what happens in a Donald Westlake novel is like reading a recipe for meringue instead of eating the results.… I strongly suggest you buy a copy now and squirrel it away for emergency use the next time you find yourself stuck in an airport lounge with a departure time of maybe. The bartender may resent the fact that you’re too busy laughing to order another drink, but you’ll definitely feel better in the morning.”

—New York Times Book Review

♦

“Westlake is a consummate pro.… SMOKE is one of his best books in years.”

—Washington Post Book World

♦

“This is one of the funniest books I’ve read in a long time. The dialogue is outrageous, the situations implausible, the humor nonstop. Freddie is the most likable fictional scamp you’re likely to ever encounter.”

—San Francisco Examiner

♦

“More effective than a nicotine patch, and much funnier.”

—San Jose Mercury News

♦

“Glorious Westlake comedy.… Full of hilarious characters, crackpot conversations and narrative sleight of hand.”

—Publishers Weekly

♦

“A funny mystery writer.… Only Westlake could have come up with this one.”

—Larry King, USA Today

♦

“No one’s touch is as quixotically cockeyed as Westlake’s, no one can keep you chuckling as continuously.”

—Los Angeles Times Book Review

♦

“Rousing… full of fun.… The anti-tobacco satire hits square on the mark.”

—Kirkus Reviews

♦

“Westlake’s delightful and absurd new novel… delivers the laughs. No one can turn a phrase or pen a comedy caper like Westlake.”

—Detroit News and Free Press

♦

“Full of chuckles… SMOKE is deft entertainment.”

—Booklist

♦

“Donald Westlake is very funny and weirdly enlightening.”

—Newsweek

♦

“Westlake [is] establishing himself as one of the hippest, coolest, funniest mystery writers out there.”

—New York magazine

♦

“Mystery connoisseurs will feel driven to rush to their nearest bookstore for a copy of SMOKE.”

—Mostly Murder

♦

“Donald E. Westlake [is] the Noel Coward of crime.… He displays an excellent ear for bitter-salty urban humor, composed of equal parts of raunch and cynicism.”

—Chicago Sun-Times

♦

“Donald Westlake keeps showing me people I’d like to meet.”

—Rex Stout

♦

“Westlake tosses the sand of petty frustrations and human fallibility into the well-oiled machine of the thriller.”

—TIME

♦

“Westlake is among the smoothest, most engaging writers on the planet.”

—San Diego Tribune

♦

“A glorious Westlake comedy.”

—Hackensack Record

♦

“There is never a dull moment in this tale… a merry romp that is clever and memorable.”

—Rainbo Electronic Reviews

♦

“If you like humor in your mysteries, you’ll love this one.”

—Abilene Reporter-News

♦

“Suspend disbelief, get a few hankies for those tears of mirth, and spend an evening with this book. It’s fun.”

—Baton Rouge Advocate

Freddie was a liar. Freddie was a thief.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LOOMIS-HEIMHOCKER

RESEARCH FACILITY

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

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

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

“Uh-oh,” said David.

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

“Do you suppose it’s a malfunction?” David asked. It was clear he hoped it was.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A second voice from the darkness said, “I think you’re supposed to say ‘freeze.’ ”

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

The second voice said, “Maybe not to them.”

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

It was very depressing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everybody watches television. “Told you so,” said Freddie.

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

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

“Maybe he’s afraid of us,” Peter said.

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

Sounding flabbergasted, Peter said, “For Christ’s sake, David, him not identify us? Good God, why?”

“I don’t know,” David said. “I’m no lawyer.”

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

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

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

Meanwhile, David was saying, “What handcuffs? We don’t have any handcuffs.”

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

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

“Of course. You never throw anything away.”

“You don’t need handcuffs,” Freddie said.

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

“I’ll look.” David glanced at Freddie again, and back at Peter. “Will you be all right?”

“Of course. I have a gun.”

“You don’t need handcuffs,” Freddie said.

“Be right back,” David said, and left.

“You don’t need handcuffs,” Freddie said.

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

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

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

“Why?”

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

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

“Drug history?” Peter asked.

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

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

“They were,” David said, “in your underwear drawer.”

“I’ve been clean over two years,” Freddie said.

“Absolutely clean?”

“That’s what I said, isn’t it? What’s going on here, anyway?”

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

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

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

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

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

Freddie looked at him sidelong. “No?”

“No. We’re not going to deflower you or anything.”

Freddie wasn’t sure what that word meant. “No?”

“Of course not,” David said. “We’re just going to experiment on you.”

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

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

“Freddie,” Freddie said. He could give them that much.

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

“Good.”

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

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

“Sorry about that,” Freddie said.

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

“Point it at him!”

“Stop interrupting, all right, David?”

“Just point it at him.”

“I’m trying to explain the situation to our friend here.”

“Fine. Point the gun at him.”

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

“Not me,” Freddie said.

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

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

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

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

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

“Sure,” said Freddie.

“Which is where you come in,” Peter said.

“No,” Freddie said.

“Listen to the proposition first,” Peter advised him.

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

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

“The rose room,” David said to Peter.

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

“Heh-heh,” Freddie said, acknowledging the joke.

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

“You’ll call the cops.”

“I knew you were quick,” Peter said.

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

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

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

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

“Nothing will go wrong,” Peter said.

“Not a chance,” David assured him.

“But you do got the antidote, right?”

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

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

“Of course,” David said.

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

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

Freddie having signed the release form with an unrecognizable scrawl, they moved him at last up one fligh