Thank You for Smoking

"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: / 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, subde 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?"