WHERE THERE'S SMOKE

Ed McBain is an American institution. With his authentic depictions of investigative procedure and his unparalleled portraits of life inside the concrete canyons of urban America, McBain writes novels of crime and punishment, and he does it better than anyone else.

Benjamin Smoke is a retired police lieutenant who walked away from the job for one reason alone: he was bored. Bored of the criminals. Bored of the crimes. Bored of answers that came too easy, too fast, and too often the same. Now, working as an unlicensed private detective, Smoke finally gets his wish. Someone has committed the perfect crime — a perfectly senseless crime — by stealing a dead body. And when Smoke starts investigating he’s in for one surprise after another, from black magic to murder and a woman who believes she’s Cleopatra and is lighting a fire right before Smoke’s eyes..

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Chapter 1

MY NAME IS Benjamin Smoke.

Spare me, please, the tired queries and pointless witticisms. I’m proudly descended from a long line of Dutch burghers, one of whom, three generations back, arrived in the country bearing the name Evert Johannes van der Smoak. A petty immigration official promptly changed my grandfather’s name and recorded it for posterity as Everett Smoke. This was common practice during the early part of the century, when the American melting pot reduced to common residue European names that had survived for generations. There was neither malice nor grand design in this simplification of names too difficult to spell or pronounce; there was merely expediency, and perhaps foresight. A great deal of paperwork was involved in the naturalization process, you see. Errors both present and future could easily be avoid by taking a person named Sygmunt Laskiewicz and renaming him Sig Lasky at the port of entry. You might argue that the process was dehumanizing. On the other hand, it was small enough price to pay for admission to this great land of opportunity.

I’m a retired police lieutenant.

I used to command an eighteen-man squad of detectives in one of this city’s busier precincts. I quit because I got bored. Without attempting to sound immodest (I’m normally shy and self-effacing), there’s really very little challenge to police work. Once you get the knack of it, it becomes easy. And boring. You most certainly get the knack of it after twenty-four years on the force–as Patrolman, Detective Third, Detective Second, Detective First, and finally, Detective-Lieutenant in charge of a squad. Burglaries, muggings, robberies, rapes; forgeries, frauds, arsons, and common misdemeanors; murders by ax, dagger, switchblade, shotgun, rope, ice pick, poison, pistol, shovel, hammer, hatchet, baseball bat, or fists; crimes of commission or omission–all lose whatever sense of poetry or glamour they may have once possessed. Tedium. It all reduces itself to tedium in triplicate.

I’m forty-eight years old.

I’m six feet three inches tall, and I weigh an even two hundred pounds. (My weight hasn’t varied since I was twenty. Not an ounce. I make sure it doesn’t.) I have green eyes and hair I prefer to think of as iron-gray, worn short but not close-cropped, parted on the left-hand side. There’s a knife scar on my right cheek, memento of a scuffle I had with a cheap thief three days after I’d been promoted to Detective Third. To complete the B-sheet, I have a tattoo on the biceps of my left arm, “Peg” in a blood-red heart, blue dagger piercing it, a permanent reminder of a foolish love affair I had while serving with the United States Navy in San Francisco during World War II. Peg was a prostitute, I later learned.

Since my retirement, I’ve privately investigated only four cases. I do not have a private investigator’s license, and I never expect to apply for one. Whatever anyone may tell you abut licensed private eyes, they’re hired to find missing persons or to get the goods on adulterous husbands; my aspirations are higher. I have a Carry permit for a .38 Detective’s Special, but I’ve never had to use the gun since I left the force, and I rarely bother clipping it to my belt. I also own a gold lieutenant’s shield which I carry in a small leather case. It was a personal retirement gift from the Chief of Detectives and it has served me well over the past three years. I would rather part with my pistol and my shoes than that magic little shield. I live fairly comfortably on my pension and on the dividends from some stocks I inherited when my father died. I suppose I might be considered a happy man.

In fact, I have only one regret.

I’ve never investigated a case I couldn’t solve. I’ve never encountered the perfect crime.