Author’s Note

Some real people appear here under their own names, but this is fiction.

1

There was a thick stack of while you were outs when he got back to the Academy's office in one of the more interesting buildings on K Street, hollowed out in the middle with a ten-story atrium with balconies dripping with ivy. The overall effect was that of an inside-out corporate Hanging Gardens of Babylon. A huge neo-deco-classical fountain on the ground floor provided a continuous and soothing flow of splashing white noise. The Academy of Tobacco Studies occupied the top three floors. As a senior vice president for communications at ATS, or "the Academy" as BR insisted it be called by staff, Nick was entitled to an outside comer office, but he chose an interior corner office because he liked the sound of running water. Also, he could leave his door open and the smoke would waft out into the atrium. Even smokers care about proper ventilation.

He flipped through the stack of pink slips waiting for him at the receptionist's stand. "CBS needs react to SG's call for ban on billboard ads." ABC, NBC, CNN, etc., etc., they all wanted the same, except for USA Today, which needed a react to tomorrow's story in The New England Journal of Medicine announcing medical science's conclusion that smoking also leads to something called Buerger's disease, a circulatory ailment that requires having all your extremities amputated. Just once, Nick thought, it would be nice to get back to the office to something other than blame for ghastly new health problems.

"Your mother called," said Maureen, the receptionist, handing him one last slip. "Good morning," she said chirpily into her headset, exhaling a stream of smoke. She began to cough. No dainty little throat-clearer, either, but a deep, pulmonary bulldozer. "Academy of" — hargg—"Tobacco" — kuhhh—"Studies."

Nick wondered if having a receptionist who couldn't get through "hello" without a broncospasm was a plus.

He liked Maureen. He wondered if he should tell her not to cough if BR walked by. Enough heads had rolled in the last six months. Murad IV was in charge now.

Back in his office, Nick took off his new Paul Stuart sports jacket and hung it on the back of the door. One advantage to the change in Academy leadership was the new dress code. One of the first things BR had done had been to call in all the smokesmen — that is, the Academy's PR people, the ones who went in front of the cameras— and told them he didn't want them looking like a bunch of K Street dorks. Part of tobacco's problem, he said, was that the sex had gone out of it. He wanted them, he said, to look like the people in the fashion ads, and not the ones for JC Penney's Presidents' Day sale. Then he gave them each a five-thousand-dollar clothing allowance. Everyone walked out of the meeting thinking, What a great boss! Half of them got back to their desks to find memos saying they'd been fired.

Nick looked at his desk and frowned. It was very annoying. He was not an anal person, he could cope with a certain amount of clutter, but he did not like being the depository for other people's clutter. He had explained this to Jeannette, and she had said, in that earnest way of hers, that she completely understood, and yet she continued to use his desk as a compost heap. The problem was that though Jeannette was technically under Nick in communications, BR had brought her with him from Allied Vending and they obviously had this rapport. The odd thing was how she acted as if Nick were her real boss, with rights of high, middle, and low justice over her.

She had dumped five piles of EPA reports on secondhand smoke on his desk, all of them marked urgent. Nick collected knives. She had carefully placed his leather-sheathed Masai pigsticker on top of one of the piles. Was this insolence masquerading as neatness?

Gazelle, his secretary, buzzed to say that BR had left word he wanted to see him as soon as he got back from Clean Lungs. Nick decided he would not report to BR immediately. He would make a few calls and then go and make his report to BR. There. He felt much better, indeed swollen with independence.

"BR said soon as you got back, Nick," Gazelle buzzed him a few moments later, as if reading his thoughts. Gazelle, a pretty black single mother in her early thirties, was very bossy with Nick, for Nick, having been largely raised in a household dominated by a black housekeeper of the old school, was powerless before the remonstrations of black women.

"Yes, Gazelle," he said tartly, even this stretching the limits of his ability to protest. Nick knew what was going on in Gazelle's intuitive head: she knew that Jeannette had her beady eyes on his job title, and that her own job depended on Nick's keeping his.

Still, he would not be ruled by his secretary. He had had a harrowing morning and he would take his time. The silver-framed picture of Joey, age twelve, looked up at him. It used to face the couch opposite his desk, until one day when a woman reporter from American Health magazine — now there was an interview likely to result in favorable publicity; yet you had to grant the bastards the interview or they'd just say that the tobacco lobby had refused to speak to them — spotted it and said pleasantly, "Oh, is that your son?" Nick beamed like any proud dad and said yes, whereupon she hit him with the follow-up, "And how does he feel about your efforts to promote smoking among underage children?" Ever since, Joey's picture had faced in, away from the couch.

Nick had given some thought to the psy-decor of his office. Above his desk was a quote in large type that said, "Smoking is the nation's leading cause of statistics." He'd heard it from one of the lawyers at Smoot, Hawking, the Omaha law firm that handled most of the tobacco liability cases brought by people who had chain-smoked all their lives and now that they were dying of lung cancer felt that they were entitled to compensation.

Above the couch were the originals of two old cigarette magazine ads from the forties and fifties. The first showed an old-fashioned doctor, the kind who used to make house calls and even drive through snowdrifts to deliver babies. He was smilingly offering up a pack of Luckies like it was a pack of lifesaving erythromycin. "20,679* Physicians say 'Luckies are less irritating' " The asterisk indicated that an actual accounting firm had actually counted them. How much easier it had been when medical science was on their side.

The second ad demonstrated how Camels helped you to digest your Thanksgiving dinner, course by course. "Off to a good start— with hot spiced tomato soup. And then — for digestion's sake — smoke a Camel right after the soup." You were then supposed to smoke another before your second helping of turkey. Why? Because "Camels ease tension. Speed up the flow of digestive fluids. Increase alkalinity." Then it was another before the Waldorf salad. Another after the Waldorf salad. "This double pause clears the palate — and sets the stage for dessert." Then one with the plum pudding—"for the final touch of comfort and good cheer." It amounted to five, and that was just during dinner. Once coffee was served, you were urged to take out that pack and really go to town. "For digestion's sake."

BR, on his one slumming expedition to Nick's office so far, had stared at it as if trying to make up his mind whether it was the sort of thing his senior VP for communications should have in his office. His predecessor, J.J. Hollister, who had hired Nick after the unpleasantness — now there was a tobacco man of the old school, a man who in his day would have put away ten Camels with the Thanksgiving turkey, a man born with tar in his blood. A lovely man, kind, thoughtful, loved to sit around in his office after work over highballs and tell stories about the early days of slugging it out with Luther Terry, who had issued the catastrophic Surgeon General's Report back in 1964. Nick's favorite JJ story was—

"Nick, he said right away."

Really, it was intolerable. And he would not put up with it. "I know, Gazelle." To hell with it, he thought, flipping through his pink message slips like an unruly hand of poker; let Gazelle and BR wait. He would do his job.

He called the networks and issued his standard challenge to appear "anytime, anywhere" to debate with the surgeon general on the subject of cigarette billboard advertising or indeed on any topic. The surgeon general, for her part, had been refusing all Nick's invitations on the grounds that she would not debase her office by sharing a public platform with a spokesman for "the death industry." Nick went on issuing his invitations nonetheless. They made for better sound bites than explaining why the tobacco companies had the constitutional right to aim their billboard messages at little ghetto kids.

Now for Buerger's disease. This was trickier. Nick thought for a few minutes before calling Bill Albright at USA Today. He didn't like getting into disease specifics and he didn't particularly want his name attached to quotes containing the word "amputation."

"Well," he began, more in sadness than in anger, "why not blame us for Buerger's disease? We're taking the rap for everything these days. I read somewhere a week ago that cigarettes are widening the ozone hole, so why not Buerger's? What's next? Dolphins? The way things are going, we'll be reading next week that dolphins, arguably the most majestic of the smaller pelagic mammals, are choking on filters that people on cruise ships toss overboard."

Actually, Nick had not read that cigarettes were widening the ozone hole, but since Bill was a friend, he felt that he could in good conscience lie to him. He heard the soft clacking of the keyboard at the other end. Bill was taking it down. They were each playing their assigned roles.

"Nick," Bill said, "this report was in The New England Journal of Medicine."

"For which I have the highest respect. But can I just ask one question?"

"Yeah."

"Where are the data?"

"What do you mean, where are the data? It's The New England Journal of Medicine. It's all data, for Chrissake."

"This was a double-blind study?"

"…Sure."

Fatal hesitation. Attack! "And how big was the control group?"

"Come on, Nick."

"Was this a prospective study?"

"You want to be in the story, or not?"

"Of course."

"You want me to go with 'Where's the data?' "

" 'Where are the data.' Please, I don't mind your making me out to be a soulless, corporate lickspittle, but at least don't make me sound like an ignorant, soulless, corporate lickspittle."

"So your comment is The New England Journal of Medicine doesn't know what it's talking about?"

"My comment is… " What was the comment? Nick looked up at the Luckies doctor for inspiration. "Buerger's disease has only recently been diagnosed. It has a complex, indeed, extremely complex pathology. One of the more complex pathologies in the field of circulatory medicine." He hoped. "With all respect, I think further study is warranted before science goes looking, noose in hand, to lynch the usual subjects."

From the other end came the soft clack of Bill's keyboard. "Can I ask you something?" Bill was frisky today. Usually he just wrote it down and put it in and moved on to the next story.

"What?" Nick said suspiciously.

"It sounds like you actually believe this stuff."

"It pays the mortgage," Nick said. He had offered this rationalization so many times now that it was starting to take on the ring of a Nuremberg defense: I vas only paying ze mortgage.

"He just called, Nick. He wants to see you. Now."

Tempted as he was to make his other calls, there was the matter of the mortgage, and also, somewhere underneath Jeannette's landfill of papers, the tuition bill for Joey's next semester at Saint Euthanasius— $11,742 a year. How did they arrive at such sums? What was the forty-two dollars for? What did they teach twelve-year-olds that it cost $11,742? Subatomic physics?

Nick walked pensively down the corridor to BR's office. It was lined with posters of opera and symphony and museum exhibitions that the Academy had underwritten. In JJ's day there had been glorious color posters of drying tobacco plants, the sun shining luminously through the bright leaf.

Sondra, BR's secretary, looked up at him unsmilingly and nodded him in. Also into health. No ashtray on her desk.

It was a large, woody, masculine corner suite, richly paneled in Circassian walnut that reminded Nick of the inside of a cigar humidor. So far, BR had not ripped out all of JJ's lovely wood and replaced it with brushed steel.

Budd Rohrabacher raised his eyebrows in greeting. He was leaning back in his big chair reading Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, standard reading matter around the Academy. BR was forty-nine years old, but exuded the energy of a younger man. His eyes, light green, intense and joyless and looking at life as a spreadsheet, might strike some as belonging to an older man who had been fundamentally disappointed early on and who had therefore decided to make life unpleasant for those around him. He was rumored to play squash at five a.m. every morning, not an encouraging habit in a boss, who would therefore arrive at the office at six-thirty, all pumped up and aerobicated and ready to eat the day, and any less-than-1000-percent-committed staffers along with it. Nick suspected he wore shirts one size too small to make his upper body bulge more, though it was true that twice a week he lunched on V-8 juice while lifting weights at a health club. He was tall, six-four, and he had a tendency to throw his height around in little, subdued ways, like holding the door open for you while waving you through under the archway formed by his arm. It gratified Nick to notice, when he did this to him once at the end of a day, a whiff of B.O. It is always consoling to discover humiliating bodily imperfections in those who dominate our lives. He had begun his tobacco career working in the grubby, rough-and-tumble — and not always strictly legit — arena of cigarette vending machines. He was known to have an inferiority thing about it, so staffers tended to avoid references to vending machines, unless it was unavoidable. Since taking over the Academy, BR had flexed a number of executive muscles and made some impressive gains for the industry. He had worked closely with the U.S. trade representative to make Asian countries allow U.S. cigarette manufacturers to advertise during children's morning TV programming. (In Japan alone, teenage smoking of U.S. cigarettes was up almost 20 percent.) He had fought off two congressional print-advertising bans here at home, gotten three southern state legislatures to declare "Tobacco Pride" weeks, and had brilliantly maneuvered the Los Angeles City Council into including a provision in their smoking ban ordinance that permitted smoking in the bar section of restaurants, a coup for which he had been lavishly congratulated by the chairman of the board of the Academy of Tobacco Studies, the legendary Doak Boykin. BR had what Napoleon's favorite generals had — luck. Since coming aboard, three of the people who had been suing the tobacco industry because they'd gotten cancer from smoking had died from smoking in their beds, causing their heirs and assigns to drop the suits; out of sheer embarrassment, as one lawyer at Smoot, Hawking had put it.

"Hey, Nick," BR said. Nick was tempted to say "Hey" back. "How were the lungs?"

"Clean," Nick said.

"Get any face time?"

Nick replied that he had jumped in front of every TV camera in sight in order to emphasize the industry's concern for responsible advertising, health, and underage smoking, but that he doubted that his face would be prominently featured, if at all, in the newscasts. Face time for tobacco smokesmen was a disappearing electronic commodity, more dismal handwriting on the wall. Not so long ago, TV producers would routinely send a camera crew over to the Academy to get an official industry rebuttal, only a five- or ten-second bite casting the usual aspersions on the integrity of the medical research that showed that American cigarette companies were doing the work of four Hiroshima bombs a year. But recently there had been fewer and fewer of these dutiful little opposing-viewpoint cabooses. More likely, the reporter would just close with "Needless to say, the tobacco industry disputes the NIH's report and claims that there is no— and I quote—'scientific evidence that heavy smoking by pregnant mothers is harmful to unborn fetuses.' "

"Did you bring the Kraut along with you?" BR asked, his eyes going back to his MMWR, a slightly distracting habit — in truth, a maddeningly rude but managerially effective habit — that he had acquired at Stanford Biz. Keeps underlings on their toes. By "Kraut" he meant G — for Graf — Erhardt von Gruppen-Mundt, the Academy's "scientist-in-residence." Erhardt had a degree in Forensic Pathology from the University of Steingarten, perhaps not Germany's leading academic center, but it made him sound smart. JJ had brought him onboard back in the seventies and had built a "research facility" around him out in Reston, Virginia, called the Institute for Lifestyle Health, consisting mostly of thousands of pampered white rats who never developed F344 tumors no matter how much tar they were painted with. The mainstream media hadn't taken Erhardt seriously in years. Mainly he testified in the endless tobacco liability trials, trying to confuse juries with erudite, Kissingerian-accented, epidemiological juju about selection bias and multivariable regressions. The decision to have him appear in court during the Luminotti trial wearing his white lab coat had not been well received by the judge.

"Yes," Nick said. "NHK — Japanese TV — did an interview with him. He was very good on secondhand smoke. He's really got that down cold. He'll get face time in Tokyo. I'm certain."

"That won't do us a whole lot of good in Peoria."

"Well. " So Erhardt was next. Twenty years of devoted service to science and auf Wiedersehen, you're history, Fritz.

"I think we ought to get ourselves a black scientist," BR said. "They'd have to cover a black scientist, wouldn't they?"

"That's got heavy backfire potential."

"I like it."

Well, in that case.

"Sit down, Nick." Nick sat, craving a cigarette, and yet here, in the office of the man in charge of the entire tobacco lobby, there were no ashtrays. "We need to talk."

"Okay," Nick said. Joey could always go to public school.

BR sighed. "Let's do a three-sixty. This guy" — he hooked a thumb in the direction of the White House, a few blocks away—"is calling for a four-buck-a-pack excise tax, his wife is calling for free nicotine patches for anyone who wants them, the SG is pushing through an outright advertising ban, Bob Smoot tells me we're going to lose the Heffeman case, and lose it big, which is going to mean hundreds, maybe thousands more liability cases a year, the EPA's slapped us with a Class A carcinogen classification, Pete Larue tells me NIH has some horror story about to come out about smoking and blindness, for Chrissake, Lou Willis tells me he's having problems with the Ag Committee with next year's crop insurance appropriations. There is zero good news on our horizon."

"Fun, ain't it, tobacco," Nick said companionably.

"I like a challenge as much as the next guy. More than the next guy, if you want the honest truth."

Yes, BR, I want the honest truth.

"Which is what I told the Captain when he begged me to take this on." BR stood up, perhaps to remind Nick that he was taller than him, and looked out his window onto K Street. "He gave me carte blanche, you know. Said, 'Do what you have to do, whatever it takes, just turn it around.' "

BR was being elliptical this morning.

"How much are we paying you, Nick?"

"One-oh-five," Nick said. He added, "Before tax."

"Uh-huh," BR said, "well, you tell me. Are we getting our money's worth?"

It made for a nice fantasy: Nick coming over BR's desk with his World War I trench knife. Unfortunately, it was followed by a quick-fade to a different fantasy, Nick trying to get a second mortgage on the house.

"I don't know, BR. You tell me. Are you getting your money's worth?"

"Let's be professional about this. I'm not packing a heavy agenda. I'm putting it to you straight, guy-to-guy: how are we doing out there? I get this sense of… defeatism from your shop. All I see is white flags."

Nick strained to cool his rapidly boiling blood. "White flags?"

"Yeah, like that stupid proposal you floated last month suggesting we admit that there's a health problem. What was that all about, for Chrissake?"

"Actually," Nick said, "I still think it was a pretty bold proposal. Let's face it, BR, no one appears to be buying into our contention that smoking isn't bad for you. So why not come out and say, 'All right, in some cases, sure, smoking's bad for you. So's driving a car for some people. Or drinking, or flying in airplanes, or crossing the street, or eating too much dairy product. But it's a legitimate, pleasurable activity that, done moderately, probably isn't that much more dangerous than… I don't know… life itself.' I think a lot of people would think, 'Hey, they're not such liars after all.' "

"Stupidest idea I ever heard," BR said with asperity. "Stupid and expensive. I had to have every copy of that memo burned. Can you imagine what would happen if it turned up in one of these goddamn liability trials? An internal document admitting that we know smoking is bad for you? Jesus Christ on a toasted bagel — do you have any idea what a disaster that would be?"

"Okay," Nick shrugged, "let's go on pretending there's no proof that it's bad for you. Since that's working so well…"

"See what I mean," BR shook his head, "defeatism." Nick sighed. "BR, I'm putting in the hours. This is the first time in six years that my dedication has been called into question."

"Maybe you're burned out. Happens."

Jeannette walked in without knocking. "Whoops," she said, "sorry to interrupt. Here's that Nexis search you wanted on 'sick building syndrome.' "

She was attractive, all right, though a tad severe-looking for Nick's taste, business suit and clickety-click heels, icy blond hair pulled back into a tight bun, plucked eyebrows, high cheekbones, eager-beaver black eyes, and dimples that managed to make her even more menacing, somehow, though dimples weren't supposed to do that. She apparently went horseback riding in Virginia on weekends. This made perfect sense to Nick. Put a riding crop in her hand and she was the very picture of a yuppie dominatrix.

"Thanks," BR said. Jeannette walked out, shutting the door behind her with a firm click.

"Since we're talking 'guy-to-guy,' " Nick said, picking up where they'd left off, "you want to just give it to me straight?"

"Okay," said BR, tapping a pencil on his desk. "For one-oh-five a year, I think we could do better."

"I don't think I'm going to end up talking the surgeon general into deciding that smoking is good for you. I think we're past that point, frankly, BR."

"That's your whole problem! Don't think about what you can't do. Think about what you can do. You're spending your whole time stamping out wastebasket fires when you ought to be out there setting forest fires."

Forest fires?

"You're stuck in a reactive mode. You need to think proactive. Don't just sit behind your desk waiting for your phone to ring every time someone out there spits up some lung. You're supposed to be our communications guy. Communicate. Come up with a plan. Today's what?"

"Friday," Nick said glumly.

"Okay, Monday. Let me see something Monday." BR looked at his appointment book. "Whaddya know?" he grinned. It was the first time Nick had seen him do this. "My six-thirty a.m. slot is wide open."