‘Not to mention your life-long commitment to your wife.’
‘Not to mention my wife,’ Pearson agreed.
‘Plus assorted brothers, sisters-in-law, debt-collectors, ratepayers, and friends of the court.’
Pearson burst out laughing and nodded. ‘Yeah, you got it.’
‘Not as easy as it sounds, though, huh? When it’s four in the morning and you can’t sleep, all that nobility erodes fast.’
Pearson grimaced. ‘Or when you have to go upstairs and turn a few cartwheels for Grosbeck and Keefer and Fine and the rest of the boys in the boardroom. The first time I had to do that without grabbing a cigarette before I walked in . . . man, that was tough.’
‘But you did stop completely for at least awhile.’
Pearson looked at Duke, only a trifle surprised at this prescience, and nodded. ‘For about six months. But I never quit in my mind, do you know what I mean?’
‘Of course I know.’
‘Finally I started chipping again. That was 1992, right around the time the news stories started coming out about how some people who smoked while they were still wearing the patch had heart attacks. Do you remember those?’
‘Uh-huh,’ Duke said, and tapped his forehead. ‘I got a complete file of smoking stories up here, my man, alphabetically arranged. Smoking and Alzheimer’s, smoking and blood-pressure, smoking and cataracts . . . you know.’
‘So I had my choice,’ Pearson said. He was smiling a small, puzzled smile — the smile of a man who knows he has behaved like a horse’s ass, is still behaving like a horse’s ass, but doesn’t really know why. ‘I could quit chipping or quit wearing the patch. So I — ‘
‘Quit wearing the patch!’ they finished together, and then burst into a gust of laughter that caused a smooth-browed patron in the no-smoking area to glance over at them for a moment, frowning, before returning his attention to the newscast on the tube.
‘Life’s one fucked-up proposition, isn’t it?’ Duke asked, still laughing, and started to reach inside his cream-colored jacket. He stopped when he saw Pearson holding out his pack of Marlboros with one cigarette popped up. They exchanged another glance, Duke’s suiprised and Pearson’s knowing, and then burst into another mingled shout of laughter. The smooth-browed guy glanced over again, his frown a little deeper this time. Neither man noticed. Duke took the offered cigarette and lit it. The whole thing took less than ten seconds, but it was long enough for the two men to become friends.
‘I smoked like a chimney from the time I was fifteen right up until I got married back in ’91,’
Duke said. ‘My mother didn’t like it, but she appreciated the fact that I wasn’t smoking rock or selling it, like half the other kids on my street — I’m talking Roxbury, you know — and so she didn’t say too much.
‘Wendy and I went to Hawaii for a week on our honeymoon, and the day we got back, she gave me a present.’ Duke dragged deep and then feathered twin jets of blue-gray smoke from his nose. ‘She found it in the Sharper Image catalogue, I think, or maybe it was one of the other ones.
Had some fancy name, but I don’t remember what it was; I just called the goddamned thing Pavlov’s Thumbscrews. Still, I loved her like fire — still do, too, you better believe it — so I rared back and gave it my best shot. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, either. You know the gadget I’m talking about?’
‘You bet,’ Pearson said. ‘The beeper. It makes you wait a little longer for each cigarette.
Lisabeth — my wife — kept pointing them out to me while she was pregnant with Jenny. About as subtle as a wheelbarrow of cement falling off a scaffold, you know.’
Duke nodded, smiling, and when the bartender drifted by, he pointed at their glasses and told him to do it again. Then he turned back to Pearson. ‘Except for using Pavlov’s Thumbscrews instead of the patch, the rest of my story’s the same as yours. I got all the way to the place where the machine plays a shitty little version of the Freedom Chorus, or something, but the habit crept back. It’s harder to kill than a snake with two hearts.’ The bartender brought the fresh beers. Duke
paid this time, took a sip of his, and said, ‘I have to make a telephone call. Take about five minutes.’
‘Okay,’ Pearson said. He glanced around, saw the bartender had once more retreated to the relative safety of the no-smoking section (The unions’ll have two bartenders in here by 2005, he thought, one for the smokers and one for the non-smokers), and turned back to Duke again.
When he spoke this time, he pitched his voice lower. ‘I thought we were going to talk about the batmen.’
Duke appraised him with his dark-brown eyes for a moment and then said, ‘We have been, my man. We have been.’
And before Pearson could say anything else, Duke had disappeared into the dim (but almost entirely smokeless) depths of Gallagher’s, bound for wherever the pay phones were hidden away.
He was gone closer to ten minutes than to five, and Pearson was wondering if maybe he should go back and check on him when his eye was drawn to the television, where the news anchor was talking about a furor that had been touched off by the Vice President of the United States. The Veep had suggested in a speech to the National Education Association that government-subsidized daycare centers should be re-evaluated and closed wherever possible.
The picture switched to videotape shot earlier that day at some Washington, D.C., convention center, and as the newsclip went from the wide establishing shot and lead-in narration to the close-up of the VP at his podium, Pearson gripped the edge of the bar with both hands, squeezing tightly enough to sink his fingers a little way into the padding. One of the things Duke had said that morning on the plaza came back to him: They’ve got friends in high places. Hell, high places is what they’re all about.
‘We have no grudge against America’s working mothers,’ the misshapen bat-faced monster standing in front of the podium with the blue Vice Presidential seal on it was saying, ‘and no grudge against the deserving poor. We do feel, however — ‘
A hand dropped on Pearson’s shoulder, and he had to bite his lips together to keep the scream inside them. He looked around and saw Duke. A change had come over the young man — his eyes were sparkling brightly, and there were fine beads of sweat on his brow. Pearson thought he looked as if he’d just won the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes.
‘Don’t ever do that again,’ Pearson said, and Duke froze in the act of climbing back onto his stool. ‘I think I just ate my heart.’
Duke looked surprised, then glanced up at the TV. Understanding dawned on his face. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Jesus, I’m sorry, Brandon. Really. I keep forgetting that you came in on this movie in the middle.’
‘What about the President?’ Pearson asked. He strained to keep his voice level and almost made it. ‘I guess I can live with this asshole, but what about the President? Is he — ‘
‘No,’ Duke said. He hesitated, then added: ‘At least, not yet.’
Pearson leaned toward him, aware that the strange numbness was stealing back into his lips again. ‘What do you mean, not yet? What’s happening, Duke? What are they? Where do they come from? What do they do and what do they want?’
‘I’ll tell you what I know,’ Duke said, ‘but first I want to ask you if you can come to a little meeting with me this evening. Around six? You up for that?’
‘Is it about this?’
‘Of course it is.’
Pearson ruminated. ‘All right. I’ll have to call Lisabeth, though.’
Duke looked alarmed. ‘Don’t say anything about — ‘
‘Of course not. I’ll tell her La Belle Dame sans Merci wants to go over her precious spread-sheets again before she shows them to the Japanese. She’ll buy that; she knows Holding’s all but fudging her frillies about the impending arrival of our friends from the Pacific Rim. Sound okay to you?’
‘Yes.’
‘It sounds okay to me, too, but it feels a little sleazy.’
‘There’s nothing sleazy about wanting to keep as much space as possible between your wife and the bats. I mean, it’s not a massage-parlor I want to take you to, bro.’
‘I suppose not. So talk.’
‘All right. I guess I better start by telling you about your smoking habits.’
The juke, which had been silent for the last few minutes, now began to emit a tired-sounding version of Billy Ray Cyrus’s golden clunker, ‘Achy Breaky Heart.’ Pearson stared at Duke Rhinemann with confused eyes and opened his mouth to ask what his smoking habits had to do with the price of coffee in San Diego. Only nothing came out. Nothing at all.