Thank You for Smoking (21 page)

"Mr. Naylor," said Agent Monmaney,
"you're getting a lot of fa
vorable publicity as a result of this incident."

"Well, it's not every day a lobbyist is abducted, tortured, and nearly killed," Nick said, "though a lot of people probably think it should happen more often."

"That wasn't my point."

"What was your point, exactly?"

"You're portraying yourself as a martyr. A hero."

"Agent Monmaney," Nick said, "do you have a problem with cigarettes?"

The faintest trace of a smile played on Monmaney's lupine features, not a nourishing smile. "Not since I quit."

"I'd say this," Nick said. "For the first time since I took this job, I'm getting
fair
publicity. Now at least they wait until the fourth paragraph in the story to compare me to Goebbels."

"Funny," Agent Allman said. Agent Monmaney did not share in
the amusement.

The three held a staring bee. Nick was determined not to break the silence.

"You received a raise recently," Agent Monmaney said. "Uh-huh," Nick said.

"A very considerable one. They doubled your salary." "More or less," Nick said.

"I'd say," said Agent Allman, rising up off the sofa beneath the Luckies doctor, "that you deserve it. You seem to be doing a very competent job promoting cigarettes."

"Thank you," Nick said tardy.

"We'll be in touch," Agent Allman said.

15

S
tress—which Nick was now distinctly feeling—tended to make him horny. He went out onto the balcony off his office and looked down at the fountain. It was a warm spring day outside and the office women were in their summer dresses. He found himself watching one, below, walking along as she ate her frozen yoghurt, a lovely, tall, busty blonde in a sheer sleeveless dress, stockings, and heels, taking long, slow licks of her cone. Even at this altitude he could make out her bra straps. Heather did the bra strap thing to very good effect. It was a trick among certain professional Washington women of bounteous endowment. They wouldn't go so far as to wear too-small sweaters or appear too decollete—sex had to be flaunted in a more subversive way here—so instead they'd make sure a bit of strap showed for the photographer and pretend to be embarrassed when they saw it.

Looking down on the atrium, he began to dream. He dimmed the lights, got rid of all the people eating yoghurt and calzone. Around the fountain he assembled a full orchestra consisting of stunningly toothsome women wearing nothing but their instruments. He put the cellists out front. Yes. There's just something about nude women cellists. He had them play the cigarette song from act I in
Carmen,
where the young Sevillian men are serenaded by their sweethearts, the girls who work in the cigarette factory. The Academy had underwritten the opera at the Kennedy Center two years ago. Ever since, Nick had been humming it in the shower.

C'est fumee, c'est fumee!

In the air, we follow with our eyes,

The smoke, the smoke,

that rises toward the sky, sweet-smelling smoke.

How pleasantly it goes, to your head, to your head,

so sweetly

and fills your soul with joy!

The sweet talk of lovers— that is smoke.

Their transports and their vows— all that is smoke.

The scene was set. There remained only the piece de resistance: Heather, buxom, pink, and entirely au naturel, looking like one of Renoir's bathing beauties, sitting in the uppermost bowl of the fountain, with him, drinking champagne (Veuve Clicquot, demi-sec) from iced flutes.

He went back inside and called Heather.

"Hi," Heather said, sounding very throaty, "I can't come to the phone right now. Leave a message and I'll call you back as soon as I can. If you want to speak to an operator, press zero."

He left a message asking her if she wanted
to have dinner that night at Il
Peccatore, then went back outside to see if his
tableau
was still
vivant.
It wasn't. The orchestra had been replaced by worker bees eating calzones and frozen yoghurts.

He sat at his desk and turned to the work at hand with the enthusiasm of a man changing a flat tire on a sweltering day on the interstate. It was to ghostwrite an op-ed piece for congressman Jud Jawkins (D-Ky), challenging an NIH study showing that children of smoking mothers have 80 percent more asthma attacks than children of nonsmoking mothers. Nick sighed.

He wrote: "No one is more respectful of the work carried on at the National Institutes of Health than I, yet it is unfortunate that at a time when so many ghastly severe health problems face our nation—AIDS, skyrocketing cholesterol levels, and the recent outbreak of measles in my own home state, to name but a few examples—that the NIH has become so riven with political correctness that it is spending precious resources to bombard the American people with information that they already have."

It was one of his more conventional devices—the old Deja Voodoo—but it would have to do. He was just cranking up some moral counter
-
outrage and pleas for common decency and fairness when there was a rap on his door and Jeannette said, "Am I interrupting?"

He looked up from his dissimulations to see Jeannette's head sticking out from behind the door. She looked much more relaxed than she usually did. She'd furloughed her ice-blond hair from its normal prison of a bun at the back and had i
t loosely ponytailed with a bar
rette. She was in her standard Don't Mess With Me dark blue suit, worn tightly so as to show off every minute of every sweaty hour at the health club; but she'd added an explosively colorful silk scarf from Hermes or Chanel that gave her the look of a rich woman on the prowl for fun. Nick had to admit that Jeannette was looking mighty fine this afternoon. Maybe one of her focus groups had told her to lighten up and lose the dominatrix look. After all, the whole idea of having a spokesbabe was to take the viewer's mind off cancer and heart disease and emphysema, not to beat back their own libidos with a chair and whip.

"Hi," she said in a friendly way. "Am I interrupting?"

"No," Nick said. "I was just making some op-ed mush."

She closed the door behind her. "God," she said, "I'd
kill
to have your touch with op-eds."

"Ah," Nick said, "easy as breathing."

"I can recite the one you did for Jordan when Deukmejian banned smoking on flights in California. 'I have a lot of respect for Governor Deukmejian. It's his respect for the Constitution that concerns me.' October eighty-seven, right?"

Nick blushed. "Lot of good it did."

She sat down, crossed her stockinged legs, which, Nick noticed, looked very sleek today. He looked up and saw that she'd seen him purloining a glance at her gams. He looked down at his op-ed and frowned as though he were trying to think of the right word.

"What's up?" he said in a businesslike way, though it was by now obvious to both of them what, precisely, was up.

"I've got this idea that I'm really excited about."

"Oh?" Nick said, still looking down at his op-ed piece.

"A magazine for smokers."

"Hm," Nick said, sitting back and looking at her, careful to keep his eyes above the waist. "Couple of the companies tried it. Controlled circulation, no newsstand."

"Precisely," Jeannette said, "where I think they went wrong. I want this on the newsstands. In their faces. Look at newsstands these days. Magazines for everyone, except smokers."

"What would you call it?"

"Inhale!"
Jeannette said, "with the exclamation mark in the form of a cigarette, you know, with the ash. Dynamic, unapologetic, and
hot."

"Hot?"

"Sexy," Jeannette said.
"Dripping."

" 'Inhale!' "
said Nick. "Tell me more."

"We've got fifty-five million customers out there, huddling outside in doorways, feeling persecuted. Why wouldn't they want a magazine all their own? We're talking more readers than
TV Guide. A
magazine for the smoking lifestyle. Overweight women, minorities, blue-collar workers, depressives, alcoholics—"

"Rugged individualists," Nick said. "Independent spirits. Risk takers. Which is quintessentially American. I sometimes think that our customers are the most American people left."

"And dying out fast."

"Feature stories on the American West, fast, sexy muscle cars—" "Bungee jumping."

"Yes."

"Listings of smoker-friendly restaurants. A real service magazine." "But sexy."

"Hot.
Sports Illustrated-type
babes in swimsuits, only holding cigarettes. So much of the
sex
has gone out of smoking." "But with substance."

"Absolutely. Interviews with prominent smokers."

"Are there any?"

"Castro."

"He gave up. Anyway, I'm not sure Caribbean Commies are sexy anymore. Nixon. Nixon smokes. Not many people know that." "Is Nixon
sexy?"
"Clinton. Cigars."

"He doesn't light them."

"We'll find someone."

Gazelle came over the intercom. She sounded amused. "Nick, the two gentlemen from
Modem Man
magazine—"

"Young Modern Man,"
corrected a Japanese voice in the background.

"Sorry. To see you."

Nick rolled his eyes. "BR's idea."

"Later," Jeannette said.

"Later when?" Nick said.

"Later-later? I'm crashing on sick building syndrome, but I'd really want to get with you on this."

"You want to grab a drink later-later? Or a bite later-later-later?"

"Perfect. BR wants me to do a drop-by at the Healthy Heart 2000 thing at-the Omni-Shoreham. You know, show the flag."

"Uch. Bring your flak jacket."

"Believe me, I'm not sticking around. Eight?"

"Great. You like soft-shell crabs?"

"I
love
soft-shell crabs."

Heather called in the middle of his session with the reporter and photographer from
Young Modern Man,
who, to judge from the questions—"Who do you consider are the true smoking heroes in America today?"—were on the side of the angels. But then the Japanese were amazingly tolerant where it came to smoking: they allowed cigarette advertising in
children's
TV programming. Maybe he should ask for a transfer to Tokyo. . . .

"I can't do dinner tonight," said Heather, sounding busy, sounds of the newsroom about her. Thank God. Nick realized that he had asked two women to dinner.

"No sweat. By the way, we're going to roll out the new anti-underage smoking campaign next week, and I wondered if the
Moon
wanted an exclusive preview."

"Nick, I told you I don't do propaganda."

"Look, we're committing economic suicide. Tell me that's not news?"

"Maybe to Oprah."

"What's the matter, are you worried that jerk at the
Sun
will think you're soft on tobacco?"

"Hardly."

"All right," Nick said, "but don't blame me if something interesting happens at the press conference."

"Like what? An announcement that smoking cures cancer?"

"You laugh," Nick said, "but we've just seen a study showing that smoking retards the onset of Parkinson's."

"In what?
Tobacco Farmer's Almanac?"

"Half my job," Nick said to
Young Modern Man
after hanging up, "is maintaining good communications with the media. Information doesn't do any good if you don't get it out there. Right?"

The maitre d' at Il
Peccatore led Nick to the same corner booth where he'd had the first lunch with Heather. It made him hope Heather didn't show up; though what the hell, to her it would just look like he was having dinner with a co-worker.

His bodyguards sat at a nearby table with the
ir Velcro bags, ready to turn Il
Peccatore into an abattoir if Peter Lorre and his gang of dispatchers made another move. They were two taciturn women, steely-eyed and
very
butch, admittedly, but
women
bodyguards? He said something about it to Carlton, who just laughed and said, "Listen to me, Nicky, Godzilla wouldn't want to fuck with these babes, believe me. Anyone so much as brushes up against you is to become a major organ donor. If there's anything left whole enough to donate."

Jeannette arrived ten minutes after eight, full of apologies, and carrying tchotchkes that she presented to Nick: a Healthy Heart 2000 tote bag.

"Double Dewar's, up," she told the waiter. She lit a Tumbleweed Light and exhaled. "Christ, I didn't think I'd make it out of there alive. Wall-to-wall cardiologists." She shuddered.