Thank You for Smoking (28 page)

"Thank you," Nick said sullenly. "You're really being tremendously supportive today."

"I’
m
going
to help. By writing about this."

Nick said, "You're what?"

"We'll put the FBI on the defensive. Let them explain why they're harassing kidnap victims. Politically Correct persecution. Escalation in the continuing vilification of tobacco. Tobacco as the new evil empire. I'm surprised you hadn't thought of that. It's a great story."

"You want to
write
about this?" "I
have
to write about this."

"And tell everyone that I'm,
…
I'm,
…
I'm under suspicion by the FBI? Uh-uh. No thank you. I think not. Hello? Heather? Heather, this conversation is off the record. Heather?"

"Stop being so paranoid. This will be very positive for your side. Now, have they approached you directly yet? Hello?"

He called Polly. She sounded alarmed.

"Nick,"
she said, "thank God. I've been trying to reach you. Uh, you're not on cellular are you? Good, because the FBI came to see me yesterday. They . . ."

. . . had asked her the same questions as Heather. Now Nick
was
paranoid. He knew the FBI was good, but how did they know about Heather, and Polly? How did they know all this
personal
stuff?

"Don't worry," Polly said. "I didn't tell them anything."

"What do you mean?"

"Is there anything I can do? Marty Berlin says the lawyer to have is Geoff Aronow. He's at Arnold and Porter. Expensive, but really good."

"Polly
..."
But Nick was too morally exhausted to proclaim his innocence twice in an hour. Then it occurred to him that if the FBI was listening in on this conversation—and God knows they were able to listen in on ground lines, too—he'd better at least go through the motions of being outraged. Yet Polly, dear Polly, only made it worse by continuing to say that she didn't
care,
it didn't
matter,
she was behind him 110 percent. If there was a phrase to titillate the tappers, surely it was that, from a woman:
I
'm
behind
you
110
percent.

Jeannette hadn't been questioned by the FBI, thank God. She'd called because she'd wanted to "do a quick mind-meld" with him on the Finisterre bombshell. She was wondering if it wouldn't make sense to leak it themselves ahead of Finisterre's announcement, so that they could give it their own spin:
Pitiful,
isn't
it,
that
Senator
Finisterre,
in order
to
get
people's
minds
off
the
fact
that
he's
getting
divorced
yet
again,
is grandstanding
with
this
hysterical
nonsense,
and
in
the
process,
insulting
the intelligence
of
the
American
people
by
treating
them
like
illiterate
rats?
Not
bad, Nick thought. Smart, Jeannette. He complimented her. She purred, "I have a good mentor."

"By the way," he said, sounding suavely casual—no sense in BR freaking out at a time like this over one of his employees being under suspicion—"the FBI is appare
ntly
poking around asking dumb personal questions."

"What jerks," she said.

"Yeah, but do me a favor. If they come to you, tell them everything."

"Everything?"
she laughed.

"Well," Nick said, "by way of the facts. I don't have anything to hide from them."

"Get an early flight back," she sizzled. "I
want
you."

Nick was zipping up his garment bag when Jack Bein called, aggrieved that nearly an hour had gone by without Nick's having returned his call. In a city where everything took forever, forty-five minutes was an eternity.

"Jeff thought the meeting went
really
well, and," Jack said, with the air of announcing the winner of a lottery, "he wants you to come to dinner tonight at his home. Normally, Jeff doesn't invite new clients to eat with him at home. He's a very private person. It's a sign of how much he respects you. It'll be just you, Fiona, and Mace. Plus Jerry Gornick and Voltan Zeig, the producers. He's serving something very special. I can never get the name of it straight, I'm not very good at Japanese—I better get better, right?—but it's transparent sushi. They bring it all the way up from the bottom of the Mariana Trench. From like thousands of feet down, where the really strange creatures are. Jurassic squid. You know, those things with eyeballs on the end of their antennae? Frankly I'm not so crazy for it. Personally, I like fish you can't see through, but it's incredibly rare, and you cannot get this stuff in even the best restaurants. Jeff has a connection through Sumitashi International, which you didn't hear from me about. Usually, Jeff only serves it if like Ovitz or Eisner are coming, so it's a terrific tribute to his feelings for you."

Nick explained that, honored as he
was, he'd just been called back
to Washington on urgent business. There was a long pause. Jack sounded mortally wounded. "Nick, I don't know how to put this, but what could be more important than
this?"

The bellman was knocking on the door. His flight left in—Jesus— fifty-five minutes. "Trust me, Jack, it's big. I'll call you later, from my coast."

20

The
conversation over the table by the fake fireplace at Bert's was strictly sotto voce today. Nick, Polly, and Bobby Jay hunched inward, like revolutionaries discussing bombs in a Paris cafe.

Bobby Jay was livid over this news about Finisterre. When he was governor of Vermont, Finisterre had pushed through a very tough anti-handgun bill—as far as SAFETY was concerned—requiring a forty-eight-hour waiting period
and
limiting purchases to one per week. Now that he'd bought himself a Senate seat with family money, he could inflict his Neo-Puritanism on the national scene.

"There's nothing wrong," Bobby Jay said, crunching into a large Italian pepper, squirting a bit of fiery green juice onto Polly's dress, "with that
little
buck-toothed son of a bitch that a hundred grains of soft lead couldn't set right."

Much as it did Nick's heart good to get such sympathy, Bobby Jay's reaction seemed a tad extreme, especially for a born-again Christian.

"Do you have any ideas for me," Nick said, "short of assassinating him?" Nick pulled the carnation out of the vase and examined it closely.

"What are you doing?" Polly said.

"Checking for bugs. As long as we're discussing shooting U.S. senators."

Bobby Jay took the flower and spoke into it. "I have the h
ighest regard for Senator Orto
lan K. Finisterre."

"He's just in a bad mood," Polly said, "because another mail carrier went berserk this week and turned a post office into a slaughterhouse.

By the way, I meant to ask you—how was he able to legally purchase a
grenade
launcher?"

"Do I get on your case every time some drunk teenager runs over a Nobel laureate?" Bobby Jay said. "And by the way, pepper juice doesn't come out."

Nick said, "I believe we were talking about my problem."

"I assume you're backing Finisterre's opponent," Polly said.

"Oh yeah. He's going to be
rolling
in soft money. And hard money. But that doesn't do us a whole lot of good. The election is in November, and this is now."

"Well," Polly said, "do you have anything on him?"

"He's a fornicator," Bobby Jay said. "Married and divorced three times, and Lord only knows how many pop tarts in between."

"Shocking as that may be to the American people, I was thinking something more, I don't know, lurid. Kink, whips 'n' things? God," she said, exhaling a long, philosophical stream of smoke, "listen to us. I was going to be secretary of state."

"What's the matter?" Bobby Jay said. "Can't stand the heat? Life is a dirty, rotten job and someone's got to do it."

"Go shoot a whale." She said to Nick, "Isn't your guy—Garcia?— on the case?"

"Gomez. Yeah. They're probably going over his credit card slips right about now."

"Don't forget his video rental records. Remember what those swine did to poor Judge Thomas."

"I'm confident," Nick said, "that Gomez O'Neal isn't one to overlook those."

"Won't do any good. They all use cutouts now. Probably has someone on his staff renting his dirty movies. Pharisee."

"He was a bit of a playboy when he was younger. And thinner. He did used to get drunk a lot. Got stopped for DUI once."

"Oh,
please,"
Polly said, "stay off that if you can. Anyway, it's ancient history. He was the one who lowered Vermont's legal BAC to .08, hypocritical bastard. Typical. Just because he used to get loaded and drive, now anyone who takes two sips of chardonnay loses their license for six months. And what are you supposed to do, in Vermont? Call a cab?"

"You realize you're next, don't you?"
Nick said. "If he gets away
with putting skulls and bones on cigarettes, how long do you think it's going to be before he's going to want to slap them on scotch, beer, and wine?"

"There's no
room
for any more warning labels," Polly said bitterly. "I'm surprised we don't have to say that yo
u shouldn't swallow the bottl
e."

"We're all finished," Nick said morosely. "Despair is a mortal sin," Bobby Jay said.

"My entire product line is about to be moved from the cash register over to the "Household Poisons" shelf and the FBI thinks I covered myself with nicotine patches
. I think frankly that I'm entitl
ed to a little despair."

Polly put her hand on top of his. "Let's take it step by step."

"She's right," Bobby Jay said. "There's only one way to eat an elephant. One spoonful at a time."

"What is that supposed to be, redneck haiku? Can we please get
real?"

Bobby Jay leaned in close. "We have friends inside the J. Edgar Hoover building. Lemme see what I can find out."

"About an ongoing investigation? Good luck."

"You might be surprised. A whole lotta bonding goes on at a firing range. Never know what you might pick up with the empties."

"Well," Nick sighed, "tell them to go arrest some more Islamic Fundamentalists."

"All right, we're making progress," Polly said. "Bobby Jay's taking care of your FBI problem. So now you only have to figure out what to do with Finisterre. He's got to have a weak spot. Everyone does."

"What am I going to do? Attack him on
MacNeil-Lehrer
for renting
Wet Coeds?"

"Heyy," Polly said, taking him by the shoulder, "where's the old Neo-Puritan dragon slayer? Where's the guy I used to know who could stand up in a crowded theater and shout, 'There's no link between smoking and disease'?"

Nick looked at her, and was seized with the old swelling for Polly. But this was no time to think about that, as he was semi-involved with Heather and certainly involved with Jeannette. Pity. He and Polly would be . . . well, anyway, she was right. You want an easy job? Go flack for the Red Cross.

The waitress arrived to tell them about the dessert specials. She was new; Bert hadn't briefed her that table six was never, ever, to be told about the day's specials.

"We have apple
pie,"
she said, "and it's served a la mode, with ice cream, or with Vermont cheddar cheese, which is
real
good."

"So," Polly said, once the waitress had been shooed away, "so what's the deal with Fiona Fontaine's hair? Nick? Nick?"

It felt like he was in an isolation chamber, being observed by scientists on closed-circuit TV. He didn't even get to watch his interrogator and the other guest on a monitor. All he'd get was audio—and that lens, staring at him unwinkingly like a great, glassy, fish-eyed, man-eating cyclops.

Koppel preferred it this way—himself alone in the studio, his interviewees off in others. TV news's equivalent of the one-way mirror in police stations. It gave him the advantage of not having to cope with his subjects' corporeality. This way he would not be distracted by their nervous body language and take pity on them. Only special guests got to sit next to him, such as the disgraced former presidential candidate who, months later, selected
Nightline
to try to explain why—on earth—he had blown his kingdom for a blow job.