Thank You for Smoking

She reached over and with her thumb and forefinger started playing with his silk Hermes tie. "But rarely have I seen it so attractively packaged." Her eyes raised slowly from the tie to his. Dimples. "Sick, isn't it?"

"Oh," Nick shrugged, "I'm not much into judging."

"I've actually gone to shrinks about it. They say it's all bound up with my feelings about religion and authority. Some women are turned on by dirty talk. I'm turned on by moral degenerates."

"Well, I don't really see myself as—"

"Oh," she said huskily, "shut up and tell me again about your plans to get more children to smoke." "Don't you have it backwards?"

"Oh no," Heather said, dipping into her zabaglione and putting a custardy finger into her mouth, "I don't think so." "Off the record?"

Her chest swelled. "What about very. deep. background?" "Check." Nick waved to the waiter.

10

A Thoroughly Modern Merchant of Death: Nick Naylor, Tobacco's Chief "Smokesman"

An Evil Yuppie or Merely a Mass Enabler to 55 Million Smokers? Claims He Is 'Proudest' of ATS's Anti-Underage Smoking Program

BY HEATHER HOLLOWAY MOON CORRESPONDENT

Robby Jay and Polly were waiting for him at their usual table by the fake fire at Bert's. Bobby Jay was wearing a smirk the size of the Trump Tower. Polly appeared not to have drawn a conclusion yet about the full-page story in the Moon's "Lifestyles" section, but she looked at Nick as he sat down — late — with more than usual curiosity. "You look tired," she said pointedly.

"Rough morning," Nick said. "Advertising-ban strategy session, sick-building-syndrome position paper to get out, radio debate with Craighead. Get this — Helpless, Hopeless, and Stupid is going to start using the phrase 'tobacco and other drugs' in all its literature. So now we're just like heroin. Or alcohol," he tweaked her.

Nick ordered a vodka negroni. It was nice, these Mod Squad lunches. You could drink hard liquor in the middle of a school day without people assuming you were an alcoholic underachiever. Strange how in America in the 1950s, at the height of its industrial and imperial power, men drank double-martinis for lunch. Now, in its decline, they drank fizzy water. Somewhere something had gone terribly wrong.

"What's with him?" Nick said. Bobby Jay was poring over Heather's article, running his hook down the columns of ink as though he was looking for something crucial.

"I can't quite figure out if I won my hundred bucks," Bobby Jay said. " 'Merchant of Death,' huh? Well I guess she got that right." "You didn't. " Polly said with a look of latent ferocity. "Of course not. What do you take me for?"

"I'm not," she said, tapping loose her cigarette ash, "entirely sure." Bobby Jay read aloud from the Moon:

" 'Morality is not the issue here,' Naylor told the Moon.

'Tobacco is a hundred percent legal product that nearly sixty million American adults enjoy, just as they do coffee, chocolate, chewing gum, or any number of other oral refreshments.' "

" 'Oral refreshments'?" Polly snorted. "That's new."

Nick winked. "Sounds like a breath mint, doesn't it?"

Bobby Jay continued:

"Even his adversaries, and there are many of them, admit that Naylor is a formidable opponent. 'He's very, very slick,' said Gordon R. Craighead, head of Health and Human Services' Office of Substance Abuse Prevention, the tobacco lobby's principal federal opponent, 'and very, very smart, and that makes him very, very dangerous. This is an industry that kills about half a million Americans a year, and this nicely dressed, smooth-talking, BMW-driving Joseph Goebbels manages to make it sound like we're against free speech.' "

"The BMW-driving bit really hurt," Nick grinned.

Fortunately, Dr. Wheat had had a cancellation and was able to see Nick after lunch. Though his delicious evenings with Heather went jar toward stress reduction, and were a darn sight more fun than Prozac, the Larry King phone threat, plus having bodyguards, had gotten to him.