"Good."
"And then we can relax."
"I keep thinking," Freddie said, bracing himself with both hands on the AstroTurf, "about that chief back there, and how he damn near got me."
"Well, he didn't get you," Peg said, braking not very much at a yield sign. "So don't worry, Freddie, you'll never see that guy again." She laughed. "And Lord knows, he won't see you."
31
Monday afternoon, three-thirty. Mordon Leethe watched Jack Fullerton the Fourth set flame to a cigarette from a Greek Revival lighter the size of a football. There was then a delay in the conversation for the ritual coughing, hacking, wheezing, gasping, spitting, eyeball-rolling, weeping, snorting, snot-spraying, drooling, and braying, Jack the Fourth being held and succored and rubbed down and wiped off all through it by his two silent dark-suited assistants. Then, once the storm had subsided and Jack was again capable of speech, the cigarette smoldering like some outlying district of hell in that huge ashtray on his desk, the oxygen tube once again in position beneath his nostrils, he turned his wet pale red-rimmed eyes on Mordon and said, "Where is he? I want to see this fellow."
"Well, that's the thing," Mordon ventured, fingers pointing toward various nonexistent fireflies, "you can't see this fellow. No one can. That's what makes him so hard to find."
"And so useful, dammit." Jack the Fourth thumped a meaty fist against his clean desktop, making the ashtray and Mordon jump, but not the stoic assistants. "I want that fellow now! I need him! So why don't I have him?"
"Being a thief," Mordon hazarded, fingers searching for a lost contact lens in a shag rug, "makes him adept, I presume, at hiding out. But I'm sure we'll find him eventually."
"I don't have eventually. What I have is an idea."
Mordon's hands climbed the escape rope of his tie. "Yes?"
"These mad medicos," Jack the Fourth wheezed, "they know now, don't they, if they put their two potions together, they make an invisible man?"
Surprised, his hands turning like sunflowers, Mordon said, "Well, yes, I suppose they do."
"Then let them make us one," Jack the Fourth demanded. "Keep looking for the original, but make us a copy."
The sunflowers grew. "They could, couldn't they?" But then the sunflowers died, and Mordon said, "But who? Who would take such a risk, and wind up like, like that?"
"One thing I've learned about money," Jack the Fourth wheezed. "If you have enough of it, somebody's gonna volunteer. And I need an invisible man, dammit. I need him right away!"
"Congressional hearings?" Mordon suggested. "Competitors' pricing plans?"
"All that, too, of course," Jack the Fourth rumbled, with a massive shrug of shoulder. "But that isn't the most important. I need him for something else, closer to home."
Suspected infidelity? Jack the Fourth's fifth wife? Mordon looked alert. "Yes?"
"The doctors!" Jack the Fourth cried, with sudden passion. "The doctors are lying to me!"
"Which doctors?" Mordon asked.
"You're right," Jack the Fourth told him. "They're all witch doctors!"
"No, I meant, which doctors are lying to you?"
"My doctors! Who the hell other pill pusher do you think I'd talk to? Do you think I like to talk to doctors? Grubby little handwashers? Don't you know I quit two different country clubs in my life because they let the pill pushers in? Measly little body mechanics, they get two dimes to rub together, they think they're class! Effrontery!"
"Uh, Jack," Mordon said. "What have your doctors been lying to you about?"
"Me, of course! What the hell do I care what their opinions are on anything else? They're lying to me about me, and I damn well know it. You think I look any better today than the last time you saw me?"
If it were possible for Jack the Fourth to look worse, he would look worse. Since it was not, he looked the same. "Uh—" Mordon said.
"Neither do I!" yelled Jack the Fourth, and paused to cough a lot of red foam into a handkerchief held by one of the assistants. When that attack was over, he resumed, telling Mordon, "They tell me I'm improving, if you can believe it. Oh, they admit I'll never play tennis again, they don't go so far as to promise a cure, the rotten sycophants, but they claim I'm holding my own, that's how they phrase it, as though I could even find my own anymore. I need this goddam spook of yours, or one we make ourselves, to sneak in there and listen when I'm not around. I know they're lying, I know it!"
"Then why do you need the invisible man's confirmation?" Mordon asked, blessing the multitudes.
Jack the Fourth turned his melting iceberg eyes on Mordon. "I want to know," he rasped, "if they're laughing."
32
Sometimes it seemed to Peg she'd been born in the wrong century. Sometimes it seemed to her she should have been born back in the Middle Ages, when people liked their white women white, when alabaster was a word that showed up in the poetry a lot, referring to women, not mausoleums, and was considered a compliment. Sometimes she thought it had been a mistake on her part to be born at a time when white women were supposed to color themselves like french toast.
Even when she was a little kid, she felt the same way. The other little kids were at Coney Island or Jones Beach, spread-eagled on the sand like victims of a hostile tribe, and where was Peg? Under the beach umbrella; wrapped inside the beach towel; in the shade of the hot dog stand; home, reading a book. "It's such a beautiful day out, whyn't you go out and catch the sun?" well-meaning but mortally mistaken grownups would say, and five minutes later Peg would be sneaking in the back door.
Now, of course, with ozone, everybody knows that tinting yourself the shade of a tennis racket handle is a dangerous affectation at best. Now, with the sunblocks steadily thickening toward three figures, Peg no longer had to justify herself to the rest of the world. "I'm keeping out of the sun," she'd say, and people would nod and say, "Ozone," and Peg would smile and let it go at that, but it wasn't ozone. It was her skin. She liked it the color she was born with.
So she hadn't expected to be spending much time at, in, or near the swimming pool that had come as part of the rental house, though she knew Freddie liked to swim and would probably drift up there by himself without a bathing suit from time to time. But then she discovered how much fun it was to watch Freddie swim, and that changed everything.
Yes, watch. In the pool, he was still of course invisible, but nevertheless he was a palpable substance, a mass, and he did displace the water he moved through. The clear water could be seen to bunch and roil and stream all around him, reflecting the light in another way, making forms and shapes of its own as Freddie passed by. When he swam the length of the pool underwater, a thing he liked to do, it was eerie, almost frightening, to see that thick rippling disturbance move ghostly and fishlike down there, occasionally emitting streams of bubbles from . . . from nowhere. And when he burst through the surface, leaping up, blowing water like a whale, it was just astonishing: water exploding, all by itself.
The pool was behind the house, and up a slight slope, and off-center from the house just a bit to the right. An enclosing fence framed the pool and its stone-and-wood surround; it was made of vertical wood slats four feet high, with a two-foot latticework above that, to catch the breeze and permit the people inside to look out while retaining their own privacy. At the right end of the pool, where a round Lucite table and four white plastic chairs stood under a large blue-and-white-striped umbrella that stuck up like a Martian plant from the middle of the table, you could look through the lattice and down past the side of the house to the driveway in front, to see people arrive without their seeing you.