'You do that,' she said, and swung back toward the glowing computer screen. For a moment he was stunned, unable to grasp his good fortune. The interview was over.

By the time Pearson left the building it was pouring, but the Ten O'Clock People - now they were the Three O'clock People, of course, but there was no essential difference - were out just the same, huddled together like sheep, doing their thing. Little Miss Red Skirt and the janitor who liked to wear his cap turned around backward were sheltering beneath the same sodden section of the Boston Globe. They looked uncomfortable and damp around the edges, but Pearson envied the janitor just the same. Little Miss Red Skirt wore Giorgio; he had smelled it in the elevator on several occasions. And she made little silky rustling noises when she moved, of course.

What the h.e.l.l are you thinking about? he asked himself sternly, and replied in the same mental breath: Keeping my sanity, thank you very much. Okay by you?

Duke Rhinemann was standing under the awning of the flower shop just around the corner, his shoulders hunched, a cigarette in the corner of his own mouth. Pearson joined him, glanced at his watch, and decided he could wait a little longer. He poked his head forward a little bit just the same, to catch the tang of Rhinemann's cigarette. He did this without being aware of it.

'My boss is one of them,' he told Duke. 'Unless, of course, Douglas Keefer is the sort of monster who likes to cross-dress.'

Rhinemann grinned ferociously and said nothing.

'You said there were three others. Who are the other two?'

'Donald Fine. You probably don't know him - he's in Securities. And Carl Grosbeck.'

'Carl . . . the Chairman of the Board? Jesus!'

'I told you,' Rhinemann said. 'High places are what these guys're all about - Hey, taxi!'

He dashed out from beneath the awning, flagging the maroon-and-white cab he had spotted cruising miraculously empty through the rainy afternoon. It swerved toward them, spraying fans of standing water. Rhinemann dodged agilely, but Pearson's shoes and pantscuffs were soaked. In his current state, it didn't seem terribly important. He opened the door for Rhinemann, who slid in and scooted across the seat. Pearson followed and slammed the door.

'Gallagher's Pub,' Rhinemann said. 'It's directly across from - '

'I know where Gallagher's is,' the driver said, 'but we don't go anywhere until you dispose of the cancer-stick, my friend.' He tapped the sign clipped to the taximeter. SMOKING IS NOT PERMITTED IN THIS LIVERY, it read.

The two men exchanged a glance. Rhinemann lifted his shoulders in the half-embarra.s.sed, half-surly shrug that has been the princ.i.p.al tribal greeting of the Ten O'Clock People since 1990 or so. Then, without a murmur of protest, he pitched his quarter-smoked Winston out into the driving rain.

Pearson began to tell Rhinemann how shocked he had been when the elevator doors had opened and he'd gotten his first good look at the essential Suzanne Holding, but Rhinemann frowned, gave his head a minute shake, and swivelled his thumb toward their driver. 'We'll talk later,' he said.

Pearson subsided into silence, contenting himself with watching the rain-streaked highrises of midtown Boston slip by. He found himself almost exquisitely attuned to the little street-life scenes going on outside the taxicab's smeary window. He was especially interested in the little cl.u.s.ters of Ten O'Clock People he observed standing in front of every business building they pa.s.sed. Where there was shelter, they took it; where there wasn't, they took that, too - simply turned up their collars, hooded their hands protectively over their cigarettes, and smoked anyway. It occurred to Pearson that easily ninety per cent of the posh midtown high-rises they were pa.s.sing were now no-smoking zones, just like the one he and Rhinemann worked in. It occurred to him further (and this thought came with the force of a revelation) that the Ten O'Clock People were not really a new tribe at all but the raggedy-a.s.s remnants of an old one, renegades running before a new broom that intended to sweep their bad old habit clean out the door of American life. Their unifying characteristic was their unwillingness or inability to quit killing themselves; they were junkies in a steadily shrinking twilight zone of acceptability. An exotic social group, he supposed, but not one that was apt to last very long. He guessed that by the year 2020, 2050 at the latest, the Ten O'Clock People would have gone the way of the dodo.

Oh s.h.i.t, -wait a minute, he thought. We 're just the last of the world's diehard optimists, that's all - most of us don't bother with our seatbelts, either, and we'd love to sit behind home plate at the ballpark if they'd just take down that silly f.u.c.king screen.

'What's so funny, Mr. Pearson?' Rhinemann asked him, and Pearson became aware he was wearing a broad grin.

'Nothing,' Pearson said. 'Nothing important, at least.'

'Okay; just don't freak out on me.'

'Would you consider it a freak-out if I asked you to call me Brandon?'

'I guess not,' Rhinemann said, and appeared to think it over. 'As long as you call me Duke and we don't get down to BeeBee or Buster or anything embarra.s.sing like that.'

'I think you're safe on that score. Want to know something?'

'Sure.'

'This has been the most amazing day of my life.'

Duke Rhinemann nodded without returning Pearson's smile. 'And it's not over yet,' he said.

2.

Pearson thought that Gallagher's had been an inspired choice on Duke's part - a clear Boston anomaly, more Gilley's than Cheers, it was the perfect place for two bank employees to discuss matters which would have left their nearest and dearest with serious questions about their sanity. The longest bar Pearson had ever seen outside of a movie curved around a large square of shiny dance-floor on which three couples were currently dry-humping dreamily as Marty Stuart and Travis Tritt harmonized on 'This'One's Gonna Hurt You.'

In a smaller place the bar proper would have been packed, but the patrons were so well s.p.a.ced along this amazing length of mahogany-paved racetrack that bra.s.s-rail privacy was actually achievable; there was no need for them to search out a booth in the dim nether reaches of the room. Pearson was glad. It would be too easy to imagine one of the batpeople, maybe even a bat-couple, sitting (or roosting) in the next booth and listening intently to their conversation.

Isn't that what they call a bunker mentality, old buddy? he thought. Certainly didn't take you long to get there, did it?

No, he supposed not, but for the time being he didn't care. He was just grateful he would be able to see in all directions while they talked . . . or, he supposed, while Duke talked.

'Bar's okay?' Duke asked, and Pearson nodded.

It looked like one bar, Pearson reflected as he followed Duke beneath the sign which read SMOKING PERMITTED IN THIS SECTION ONLY, but it was really two . . . the way that, back in the fifties, every lunch-counter below the Mason-Dixon had really been two: one for the white folks and one for the black. And now as then, you could see the difference. A Sony almost the size of a cineplex movie screen overlooked the center of the no-smoking section; in the nicotine ghetto there was only an elderly Zenith bolted to the wall (a sign beside it read: FEEL FREE TO ASK FOR CREDIT, WE WILL FEEL FREE TO TELL YOU TO F!!K OFF). The surface of the bar itself was dirtier down here - Pearson thought at first that this must be just his imagination, but a second glance confirmed the dingy look of the wood and the faint overlapping rings that were the Ghosts of Schooners Past. And, of course, there was the sallow, yellowish odor of tobacco smoke. He swore it came puffing up from the barstool when he sat down, like popcorn farts out of an elderly movie-theater seat. The newscaster on their battered, smoke-bleared TV appeared to be dying of zinc poisoning; the same guy playing to the healthy folks farther down the bar looked ready to run the four-forty and then bench-press his weight in blondes.

Welcome to the back of the bus, Pearson thought, looking at his fellow Ten O'Clock People with a species of exasperated amus.e.m.e.nt. Oh well, mustn't complain; in another ten years smokers won't even be allowed on board.

'Cigarette?' Duke asked, perhaps displaying certain rudimentary mind-reading skills.

Pearson glanced at his watch, then accepted the b.u.t.t, along with another light from Duke's faux-cla.s.sy lighter. He drew deep, relishing the way the smoke slid into his pipes, even relishing the slight swimming in his head. Of course the habit was dangerous, potentially lethal; how could anything that got you off like this not be? It was the way of the world, that was all.

'What about you?' he asked as Duke slipped his cigarettes back into his pocket.

'I can wait a little longer,' Duke said, smiling. 'I got a couple of puffs before we got in the cab. Also, I have to pay off the extra one I had at lunch.'

'You ration yourself, huh?'

'Yeah. I usually only allow myself one at lunch, but today I had two. You scared the s.h.i.t out of me, you know.'

'I was pretty scared myself.'

The bartender came over, and Pearson found himself fascinated at the way the man avoided the thin ribbon of smoke rising from his cigarette. I doubt if he even knows he's doing it . . . but if I blew some in his face, I bet he'd come over the top and clean my clock for me.

'Help you gentlemen?'

Duke ordered Sam Adamses without consulting Pearson. When the bartender left to get them, Duke turned back and said, 'Stretch it out. This'd be a bad time to get drunk. Bad time to even get tight.'

Pearson nodded and dropped a five-dollar bill on the counter when the bartender came back with the beers. He took a deep swallow, then dragged on his cigarette. There were people who thought a cigarette never tasted better than it did after a meal, but Pearson disagreed; he believed in his heart that it wasn't an apple that had gotten Eve in trouble but a beer and a cigarette.

'So what'd you use?' Duke asked him. 'The patch? Hypnosis? Good old American willpower? Looking at you, I'd guess it was the patch.'

If it had been Duke's humorous effort at a curve-ball, it didn't work. Pearson had been thinking about smoking a lot this afternoon. 'Yeah, the patch,' he said. 'I wore it for two years, starting just after my daughter was born. I took one look at her through the nursery window and made up my mind to quit the habit. It seemed crazy to go on setting fire to forty or fifty cigarettes a day when I'd just taken on an eighteen-year commitment to a brand-new human being.' With whom I had fallen instantly in love, he could have added, but he had an idea Duke already knew that.

'Not to mention your life-long commitment to your wife.'

'Not to mention my wife,' Pearson agreed.

'Plus a.s.sorted 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 n.o.bility 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 a.s.s, is still behaving like a horse's a.s.s, 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 f.u.c.ked-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 G.o.dd.a.m.ned 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 gla.s.ses 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 s.h.i.tty 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 a.s.sociation 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. h.e.l.l, 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 a.s.shole, 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 j.a.panese. 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 s.p.a.ce as possible between your wife and the bats. I mean, it's not a ma.s.sage-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.

'You quit . . . then you started chipping . . . but you were smart enough to know that if you weren't careful, you'd be right back where you started in a month or two,' Duke said. 'Right?'

'Yes, but I don't see - '

'You will.' Duke took his handkerchief out and mopped his brow. Pearson's first impression when the man had come back from using the phone had been that Duke was all but blowing his stack with excitement. He stood by that, but now he realized something else: he was also scared to death. 'Just bear with me.'

'Okay.'

'Anyway, you've worked out an accommodation with your habit. A whatdoyoucallit, modus vivendi. You can't bring yourself to quit, but you've discovered that's not the end of the world - it's not like being a c.o.ke-addict who can't let go of the rock or a boozehound who can't stop chugging down the Night Train. Smoking's a b.a.s.t.a.r.d of a habit, but there really is a middle ground between two or three packs a day and total abstinence.'

Pearson was looking at him, wide-eyed, and Duke smiled.

'I'm not reading your mind, if that's what you think. I mean, we know each other, don't we?'

'I suppose we do,' Pearson said thoughtfully. 'I just forgot for a minute that we're both Ten O'clock People.'