On Nick's first day back at work, BR gave him a welcome-back speech in front of the whole staff. He made it sound as though Nick had outwitted his captors and escaped. In fact, Nick still had no idea how he had ended up on the Mall, but he doubted that he had outwitted them as it's difficult to outwit while having a heart attack and projectile vomiting. The staff treated him like a returning war hero. All the attention was starting to make him a little squirmy, and now here was BR suddenly sounding like Henry V at the battle of Agincourt, exhorting his happy band of brothers. Then he quoted Churchill during Britain's darkest hour: "Never give in," he said. "Never. Never. Never!"
The staff stood up and applauded. Some had tears in their eyes. Well, he'd never seen anything like this at the Academy of Tobacco Studies. His kidnapping had had an amazing, morale-boosting effect. It was as if the long, uneasy truce between tobacco and the hostile world out there had finally broken down into open warfare, and by God, if this was war, then let it start here. They were ready. People who had never been inside a military base, much less on the business end of a gun, were walking around using phrases like lock and load and incoming. It was galvanizing, truly. Talk about esprit de corps. Nick was moved.
"Nick," said Gomez O'Neal, "a question." Gomez, tall, dark, pockmarked, with arms like bridge cable, was head of Issues Intelligence, the division in charge of coming up with personal information about the private lives of prominent gaspers and tobacco litigants. He'd been in some unspecified branch of the government, and did not invite questions about his past. For vacations, he went on one-man survival treks in places like Baffin Island and the Gobi Desert. BR seemed not to like Gomez, but then Gomez did not seem to care; he was not the sort of person one casually fired, any more than presidents had been able to get rid ofj. Edgar Hoover.
"Shoot," Nick said, a figure of speech one used carefully around Gomez.
"You gonna quit smoking?"
There was nervous laughter. The truth of it was that Nick had not had a cigarette in over a week; the thought of putting any more nicotine into his system held little appeal. It occurred to him that this might even qualify him for workmen's comp.
They were all looking at him expectantly. He couldn't let them down. He was more than their spokesman now; he was their hero.
"Anyone got a smoke?" he said. Twenty people produced packs. He accepted a Camel, lit up, took just a little down into his lungs, and exhaled. It felt quite good, so he took another puff and let it out. People smiled approvingly.
Then spots appeared. Soon the whole Milky Way galaxy was pulsing through his optic nerve and he was in a cold sweat and the room and — oh no, not again, not in front of the whole staff.
"Nick?" BR said.
"I'm fine," he said wobbily, putting the Camel down in an ashtray. The taste in his mouth. Uch. "Take it slow at first," BR said.
"Maybe you should start with filters," someone said helpfully.
There was this awkward silence as Nick stood there in front of them, blinking, quietly reeling.
"Hey Nick," Jeff Tobias said. "Did you see the figures on female eighteen to twenty-ones?"
"Uh-uh." My kingdom for a wintergreen Life Saver.
"Up twenty percent."
"Wonderful," Nick murmured.
BR added, "Wait until after Nick's anti-smoking campaign." Quite a few chuckles. "By the way, when do we get to see boards?"
"I'm videoconferencing with Sven this afternoon," Nick said, noticing that his fingers had gone cold again. Should he call Dr. Williams? You smoked a cigarette?
"I'm sure we're all eager to see what he's come up with. Okay," BR said, "now I'd like to turn the meeting over to Carlton, who is going to brief us on some new security procedures."
Carlton warmed up his audience with a joke about two guys who go camping and a grizzly bear attacks them in the middle of the night and one guy puts on his sneakers and starts lacing them up. The other guys says, "Why are you putting on sneakers, you can't outrun a grizzly bear." And his friend tells him, "I don't have to outrun the bear, I only have to outrun you." The point, Carlton said, was that in anti-terrorism, a phrase that put everyone into buttlock, you win by making the terrorists pick on the other guy. People glanced uneasily at each other. We few, we happy band of brothers.
Warming to his message — and was Carlton ever in his element— he emphasized the importance of not setting patterns. Everyone should leave for work at a different time every day, take a different route every day, be alert to strangers, especially ones wearing uniforms. He passed out photocopied sheets entitled what to do if you find yourself locked in a car trunk. People stared at it, hemorrhaging macho. Locked. in a trunk?
"Now let's talk about explosives." This part of his presentation went on for a full quarter-hour, during which he enumerated some three dozen types of bombs, including one that was attached to your windshield wiper blades. "Turn on the wipers and boom, eye-level, in the kisser." Betty O'Malley went pale.
BR interjected, "Now give us the good news." Carlton opened a case and passed out little black things that looked like beepers. They were electronic locator devices, like the ones in life rafts that send out emergency signals. If anyone was snatched, they should push the two little buttons together and the whole U.S. government would be alerted. Then he opened another case and gave everyone little canisters of pepper gas. These were to be spritzed into the faces of any suspicious individuals. But only after they'd made the first move. And only if it looked like they were about to kill you. Otherwise, do exactly what they said, even if they wanted you to get into that lockedtrunk.
Any questions? By now you could have heard a pin drop, and the floor was carpeted.
"I'm not sure I understand," said Charley Noble, from Legislative Affairs, "are we all targets?"
"I don't know the answer to that," BR said, "but I'm not prepared to take any chances. Carlton has arranged for everyone here, and I mean everyone, no exceptions — except of course for you, Nick — to spend next weekend at a facility in West Virginia where they train government people in anti-terrorist driving tactics."
There was intense murmuring. "You'll all receive instruction in— what is the drill, Carlton?"
"Examining a vehicle for bombs, evasive maneuvers, J-turns and bootleg turns, proper ramming technique, and surveillance detection."
"Bombs?" said Syd Berkowitz of the Coalition for Health. "Are there bomb threats?"
"Just a precaution. I assure you that the FBI is going to have these people in custody very, very soon. In the meantime, we've made arrangements with 1800 K Street to use their basement parking. For the time being, there'll be no parking in our own underground garage."
By now the murmuring was quite loud. BR had to raise his own voice to be heard. "People, people. This is just precautionary. There have been no bomb threats. Anyway, we're on a high floor here. And I'm certain everyone here could handle a little smoke inhalation."
Jeannette laughed. No one else did.
After the meeting, BR took Nick aside. He handed him a box of NicoStop patches. Nick held it as if BR had just handed him a fresh, steaming turd.
"Guess what?" BR said. "Sales of your 'deadly Band-Aids' are off forty-five percent since your gig on the Today show."
Nick handed him back the box with a shudder. No more nicotine for him.
"I feel awkward scoring points off this rotten business, but, God, talk about stepping in shit and coming out smelling like roses. Look at this press." He handed Nick a thick folder, a veritable media hero sandwich, clippings sticking out like bits of lettuce and ham. Nick had already seen most of them. He'd been on all the morning network shows, all the cable shows. The Europeans and Asians, who were still puffing away happily, couldn't get enough of him. Nick had experienced the thrill of being simultaneously translated. The French interviewer, a very fetching and soulful-looking woman, had done a little medical research on vasoconstricting and had put it to him: had it affected his "romantic capabilities"? Nick blushed, said no, pas du tout, and broke out in cold sweat. He'd been on Slovakian TV, a very important appearance as Agglomerated Tobacco, the Captain's own company, was moving into the former Eastern Bloc in a big way, introducing a brand whose name translated as "Throat-Scraper." The Eastern Euros, who'd been brought up on cigarettes that tasted like burning nuclear waste, were old-fashioned about their smokes: they demanded more, not less tar. To them, lung cancer was proof of quality.
"Jeannette tells me that Young Modem Man wants to do a week-in-the-life story on you," BR said.
"Yeah," Nick said, again annoyed at the Jeannette-BR pipeline, "I'm inclined to pass on that one."
"Japan's very important to us, and they do reach two out of three Japanese men between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one." This was the age group known within the Academy as "entry-level."
"I just don't know if I want Japanese reporters hanging out in my office for a week. Or any reporters. I think maybe I'm getting a little overexposed."
"Two out of three, Nick. Millions and millions of young, modern Japanese. You're a hero to these people. That brings a certain responsibility."
"I'll get back to you." The nice thing was that Nick was now a certifiable, eight-hundred-pound gorilla, with I'll-get-back-to-you privileges.
"I spoke to the Captain earlier. He hopes you'll be able to do it." Agglomerated was moving into Japan, too, now that the U.S. trade rep had threatened to slap imported soy sauce with a 50 percent tariff unless they opened their ports and lungs to U.S. tobacco products.
"I'll get back to him, too." Nick was pushing the envelope a little here, but all BR could do was make a face that said, All right, but I hope you know what you're doing.
All this attention. And Sammy Najeeb had called this morning to
ask — to insist — that he go back on the Larry King show. She and Larry were sure, knew in their bones, that the threatening caller would call in again, and could Nick imagine what kind of TV that would make?
"By the way," BR said, full of drama, "Penelope Bent is coming in next week and guess who she wants to meet?" Penelope, now Lady Bent, had recently signed a seven-figure-a-year deal with Bonsacker International, formerly Bonsacker Tobacco, Inc., to lend a little clahss to their board and annual shareholders' meetings. This was increasingly common among the Big Six tobacco companies, which were retaining a lot of substantive celebrities — Vietnam-era POWs, former presidents of prestigious universities; they'd even asked Mother Teresa — to shill for them under the guise of celebrating freedom of speech, or the Constitution. The former British PM was their latest acquisition.
"Oh?" Nick said.
"The Captain called me this morning. They're all still in awe of her and haven't been able to get in a word edgewise. She's quite a talker, apparently. Anyway, he thought you might take the opportunity to give her a little gospel so if she gets any hostile questions about the relationship, everyone will be singing off the same sheet of music. Stress diversity. Agglomerated isn't just tobacco, it's infant formula, frozen foods, industrial lubricants, air filters, bowling balls. You know the drill."
"Yes, I do," Nick said, miffed at being given advice on spin control. "I doubt that the Titanium Lady needs lessons on handling the press from me."
"She wants to meet you, Nick," BR said brightly. "You should be flattered."
"Okay, I'm flattered."
"Maybe you'll pick up some tips on how to deal with terrorists. Remember what she did to the IRA after they blew up her bulldogs?"
"Aren't I supposed to be going out to Hollywood?" "We're working on setting up a meeting with Jeff Megall's people. It's like getting an appointment with God." "The Jeff Megall?" Nick said.
"Himself. But the Captain says he wants you right here where the press can find you until they get tired of you. Frankly, if I'd known that a kidnapping would result in this kind of coverage, I'd have kidnapped you myself. Speaking of L.A., as long as you're going to be out there. "
"Uh-huh," Nick said suspiciously.
"Your friend Lorne Lutch."
"He's not my friend, BR. All I did was talk you people out of suing him. I ducked into a closet at the Larry King show to avoid running into him."
"He's been hitting us very hard lately," BR said. "Did you see the things he said about us last week? No, of course not, you were still in Intensive Care. Your pal Oprah had him on with the Silver-O's girl. You should have seen them, both talking through their voice boxes. A duet for two kazoos."
It was one Oprah appearance Nick was glad not to have been invited to share.
"It was pathetic. Her being a woman, I can forgive her. But him. The man has no sense of personal responsibility."
"He's dying, BR. We should probably cut the man some slack. If it was me, I'd slip him some money, help out with the expenses."
BR said, "I'm not sure that's the approach I'd take, but you and the Captain think alike on this one."
"Okay," Nick said to Sven, who was staring back at him on the video-phone, "does it gobble?"
Sven said, "I want to point out at the beginning that thrilled as we are to be on this account, and we're extremely thrilled, everyone here, what you asked us to produce was an ineffective message that will have no impact on the people it is targeted at."
Nick had the feeling he was being taped. It was like having a conversation in the Oval Office with Nixon at the height of Watergate.
"I just want it clear what our role is," Sven said.
Nick said, "Okay, you've established that your role is the tormented artiste. Can we proceed?" Honestly, these creative hothouse orchids. And in Minneapolis, no less. Nick still had frostbite from his visit there six months ago.
"What we did was to take the 'Some People Want You to Smoke. We Don't' concept, which avoided the whole health issue, and instead tapped into the adolescent's innate fear of being manipulated by adults. You didn't like it."
"Right. Because it was effective."
"It's gone. So now we're going to be blunt, we want to speak to them with the voice of despised authority, nag them, tell them to go to their rooms, turn them completely off."
"I like it already," Nick said.
"Okay." Sven said. "Here we go. He pulled the board into video camera range. All it had on it was type. It said, "Everything Your Parents Told You About Smoking Is Right."
"Hmm," Nick said.
"You know what I love about it?" Sven said. "Its dullness." "It is dull," Nick admitted.
"It's deadly. Kids are going to look at this and go, 'Puuke.' " That would probably be Joey's reaction, Nick mused. "And yet," Sven said, "its brilliance, if I may say so, is in its deconstructability." "How's that?"
"Say the last three words out loud." " 'Smoking Is Right.' "
"Gobbles on the outside, grabs you on the inside. A Trojan turkey."
"I think," Nick said, "that I can sell this to my people."
Nick was looking forward to lunch, an hour or two of normalcy with Polly and Bobby Jay. As a Ph.D. in Spin Control, he could certainly understand why the Captain and BR were eager to suction every golden egg from the goose before it died, but fame has its price. As Fred Allen used to say, a celebrity is someone who works hard in order to become well-known and then has to wear dark glasses in order to avoid being recognized. On his way from the Academy to Bert's, he became aware of people staring at him as he passed, saw people nudge each other, whisper, "Isn't that him?" At the corner of K and Connecticut, while waiting for the light, he heard a woman murmur, "You deserved it."
He whirled but the woman kept going and he didn't feel like running after her to ask her if he'd heard correctly. It sent a chill up his spine. Nick was no wimp, he'd been called "mass murderer" and worse by entire crowds of people, often simultaneously; but that was heckling, and usually by card-carrying gaspers or "health professionals." But when pedestrians, total strangers, started coming up to you — at Washington's busiest intersection, in the middle of the day— and expressing solidarity with people who had kidnapped and tortured you, it could be taken as a sign that somewhere along your career path you had taken a wrong turn.
He ducked into the Trover Shop and bought some cheap sunglasses. He made it the rest of the way up Connecticut and down Rhode Island without anyone else wishing him dead.
Once inside Bert's he felt secure again. Bert came over and hugged him and made a big fuss; the regular waiters came over to shake his hand and congratulate him and tell him how well he looked. He was hearing that a lot these days: "You look good, Nick," despite the fact that he had lost ten pounds and his skin was fish gray.
Bert told him that lunch today was on the house and led him personally to his regular table by the fake fireplace, which was flickering away, casting its comforting acetate flames onto the chimney brick.
Bobby Jay and Polly were already there. They both got up to greet him, unsettling Nick. Here of all places he valued the comfort of routine, and no member of the Mod Squad ever got up to greet the other. Among merchants of death, equality rules. Polly actually kissed him and hugged him. It was unsettling. He was tired of being fussed over.
"I'm fine," Nick said. "It's no big thing." "You look great," Bobby Jay said. "Yeah, you really do," Polly said. "You look great." Nick stared at them. "What are you two, from Hallmark Cards? I look like shit."
Bobby Jay and Polly exchanged glances. Polly touched his forearm. "We're just glad to have you back." "Don't patronize me."
"Sorry," Polly said, withdrawing her arm, "I didn't realize you were having a bad hair day."
"BR just told me the Captain wants me to go bribe the Tumbleweed Man, who's dying of throat cancer, so he'll stop badmouthing us. I have to accept every goddamn interview request — I'm on Larry King tomorrow night, he and the FBI want to use me as bait to
draw out this Peter Lorre maniac — and some woman on the street just hissed at me that I deserved to get kidnapped. Yes, I'm having a bad hair day."
"It's a tough town," Bobby Jay said.
"Tell me about it. Check out my new bodyguards."
"Where?"
"Fooled you, didn't they? The one in the jeans and the woman with the handbag the size of a duffel? Former Secret Service. Do you know what she's got in there? Sawed-off shotgun. I hope they'll try it again. Do you have any idea what a ragged hole a fistful of double-ought buckshot makes?"
"Yeah," Bobby Jay said, "I do."
"They're supposed to blend. Unlike my former bodyguards with the suits and earphones. 'Attention everyone! We're bodyguards! Come attack our client.' Lot of good they were."
"I thought you kept trying to lose them," Polly said.
"Polly," said Nick condescendingly, in tones suggesting that security matters were beyond women, "good bodyguards don't get lost by the people they're supposed to be protecting." He sighed. "Jesus. Look at me. Bodyguards."
"We're all going to need bodyguards soon," Polly said, "the way things are going. Did you see the coverage the fetal-alcohol people got themselves over the weekend?"
"Pathetic," Bobby Jay said.
"Don't you think the Sun sort of debased itself giving that kind of space to those people? I spoke to Dean Jardel over at S and B. They distribute two-thirds of the liquor in the D.C. area, and he says the Washington Sun is going to find itself without any liquor advertising for the next month."
"I wish we had that kind of leverage," Bobby Jay said, "but they don't take gun ads. Not that you can buy a gun in D.C."
"They made it sound like we encourage pregnant mothers to drink. It was so… pc I wanted to. "
"Frow up."
"I'm surprised I didn't get kidnapped on the way to work this morning."
Nick, taking all this in, brooding over the woman on the street, felt suddenly that his nicotine patch of courage was being co-opted.
"Polly," he broke in, "I don't think people who work for the alcoholic beverage industry have to worry about being kidnapped, just
yet."
Awkward silence. He'd made alcoholic beverage sound like laxative or pet supplies. Polly did a slow burn, blew a deep lungful of smoke out the side of her mouth in a cool, focused way, her eyes never leaving his, tapped her toe against the floor a few times. "Aren't we unholier than thou, today."
"Look," Nick said, "nothing personal, but tobacco generates a little more heat than alcohol."
"Oh?" Polly said. "This is news."
"Whoa," Nick said. "I'll put my numbers up against your numbers any day. My product puts away 475,000 people a year. That's 1,300 a day—"
"Waait a minute," Polly said. "You're the one who's always saying that 475,000 number is bull—"
"Okay, 435,000. Twelve hundred a day. So how many alcohol-related deaths a year? A hundred thousand, tops. Two hundred and seventy something a day. Well wow-wee. Two hundred and seventy. That's probably how many people die every day from slipping on bars of soap in the bathtub. So I don't see terrorists getting excited enough to kidnap anyone from the alcohol industry."
Bobby Jay said, "You two sound like McNamara, all this talk about body counts. Let's just chill out here."
Nick turned to him. "How many gun deaths a year in the U.S.?"
"Thirty thousand," Bobby Jay said, "but that's gross."
"Eighty a day," Nick snorted. "Less than passenger car mortalities."
"It nets out to even less," Bobby Jay said mildly. "Fifty-five percent of those are suicides, and another eight percent are justifiable homicides, so we're really only talking eleven thousand one hundred."
"Thirty a day," Nick said. "Hardly worth counting. No terrorist would bother with either of you."
"Would you like to see some of my hate mail," Polly said, flushing. Nick hadn't seen her look this up since she went on Geraldo with the parents of an entire school bus that had been wiped out by a drunk driver.
"Hate mail? Hate mail?" Nick laughed sarcastically. "All of my mail is hate mail. I don't even open my mail anymore. I just assume it's a letter bomb. My mail goes directly to the FBI lab. Technicians in lead suits steam-open it. Please, don't even try to one-up me on the subject of mail."
"Why don't we put away the gloves and order," Bobby Jay said, "I'm starved."
"Fine," Nick said, grinding his teeth. Expect a little sympathy. wait, she was being sympathetic until you told her she sounded like a get-well card. There was that awful taste in his mouth again, like there was a cigarette butt under his tongue. The doctors had told him that his system was going to be flushing nicotine for the next three months. Food wasn't tasting very good these days, and spices made it taste like Drano.
Nick forced himself to say, "I wasn't trying to be unholier than thou."
"No big deal," Polly said tersely. The two of them concentrated on their menus so that they wouldn't have to look at each other.
It fell to Bobby Jay to make conversation in the form of a monologue. He bemoaned the upcoming anniversary of the assassination of President Finisterre, as these occasions always occasioned an orgy, as he put it, of calls for gun control on the op-ed pages of newspapers, never mind the fact that Finisterre had been blown away with a scope-mounted hunting rifle. "What are they going to do, take away our deer rifles?"
"Not until they pry them from our cold, dead fingers," Nick murmured, settling on pasta in the hopes that it wouldn't taste like stump dissolver. Bobby Jay said SAFETY was planning some proactive publicity in anticipation of the anniversary. They were also trying to get their friendlies in the Congress to get the White House to sign off on a Firearms Safety Awareness Week that would bracket the anniversary day. The White House was so far stonewalling them, but by their doing so, SAFETY was maneuvering them into a box: We asked the White House, begged the White House, to get behind a national, week-long consciousness-raising initiative, and what happened? Nothing. Additionally, Stockton Drum, having been recently accused on Face the Nation of perpetrating "genocide" among black inner-city youth, had given orders that all senior SAFETY staff were to perform one hour a week of public service with black inner-city youth. This way, the next time some prissy-ass liberal accused him of enabling mass murder, he'd be able to cut him off at the balls. Drum's executive order was being met with mixed enthusiasm by most of the staff though with genuine civic-mindedness by some. One staffer had proposed giving free handgun instruction in the inner city. If these kids were going to turn the city streets into free-fire zones, he reasoned, they might as well be taught how to be accurate so that they'd kill fewer innocent bystanders. Bobby Jay had nixed the proposal. "The sad thing," he said, fixing his special knife into his hook as the food arrived, "is that it's probably not such a bad idea."
The iced coffee had arrived. Polly hadn't said much over the food. Nick was feeling worse about how he'd acted and was working up to a rapprochement when Bobby Jay brought up a story in that day's Washington Moon.
"So," Polly said in a studiously casual way, "how's Feather?"
"Feather?"
"Heather."
"Fine," Nick said. "I guess. I don't know. She's trying to get a job on the Sun. She's interviewing with Atherton Blair."
"That asshole. He's probably the one who decided to put the fetal-alcohol convention above the fold. You know he doesn't drink."
"A newspaperman who doesn't drink," Bobby Jay said. "Things have changed."
"Not only that, he's in AA."
"He is?" Nick said.
"Our information is that he's in AA. He goes all the way out to Reston, so no one will know."
"No kidding," Nick said. "I should mention that to Heather." Polly frowned. "What do you mean?"
"I don't know. Could come in handy. Maybe she should pitch him a story on how great AA is or something."
"And score points off alcohol-bashing? That's privileged information. Like everything that gets said around this table."
"Well, don't get your panty hose in a knot. I was just—"
"About to pass confidential information to your squeeze."Bobby Jay put in, "I don't think any of us supposes, for a second, that anything that's said at this table goes any further than the sugar shaker."
"Right," Nick said.
"Right," Polly said.
Nick added companionably, "Nothing's, you know, happened, anyway. I've had other things on my mind these last few weeks, like wondering if I'm ever going to get the feeling back in my fingers. Or am I going to need a liver transplant."
"You better get to work if you're developing her as a mouthpiece," Polly said. She looked at her watch and said she had to go. Her wine people were in town from California to work the Ag Committee on phylloxera. Also to brainstorm with their ad agency on how to counter the disastrous misimpression that only French red wine kept you from getting a heart attack.
Nick and Bobby Jay watched her walk out, her bag slung over her shoulder, cellular antennae sticking out of it, heels going clickety-click on the floor. She was wearing a shorter skirt than usual, Nick noticed; sexy, with pleats.
Nick said to Bobby Jay, "Something going on with Polly? She seemed kind of bent out of shape."
Bobby Jay said, "She got a letter from Hector. He wants to try again. But he wants her to come live with him in Lagos."
"Oh, well, hell," Nick said, "no wonder."
Back in his office, Nick was squirreled away with a stack of paperwork when Gomez O'Neal came in and shut the door behind him. "What's up?"
"I don't know," Gomez said gravely.
At a loss, Nick said, "Is this some Zen thing?"
"Watch your back, kid," Gomez said, and left.