There were twenty of us, all in this glossy paper pack wrapped in cellophane. It was claustrophobic, getting stacked on top of each other. I felt our lives were in peril. Here we were in this apartment, on somebody’s table. There was a phone call to whoever had the apartment. The jangling sound of this phone rattled all of us as if we’d been in a deep sleep and were now awakened to reality. “Yes,” a male voice said.

The female voice on the other end was loud enough to be heard. “I’m bringing it over now,” she said.

“Don’t let anyone follow you,” the male voice said.

“You think I’m stupid?”

Next the fingers opened the pack that held us and tapped one end of it. I felt the rush of air enter where we were stuck. It was sweet and liberating. But then, tragedy! Maurice, or at least that’s what we called him, was pulled out of our container and a match was put to his backside. I could smell the sulfur. Maurice screamed hideously. We shuddered when we heard it but kept still. His ass was on fire, burning him from one end to the other. The screaming stopped. Maurice’s ass became an ash. His head was held up to the man’s mouth, where this ceremony was consummated, the smoke of his remains entering the man’s mouth and coming out his nose. Finally Maurice was snuffed out in a glass thing on the man’s table. The man steadied himself and went to the window.

We were all stunned. Why did this have to happen to Maurice? We never really got a chance to know him. He seemed like a regular guy – straight, with a strong tobacco scent, tightly packed. Maybe what happened to Maurice would happen to the rest of us. We studied the man – our first encounter with a human being. He seemed less nervous than before. It was early evening. There was very little light in his apartment. He pulled back the curtains and watched outside, where we could hear the murmur of city traffic. We deduced he was waiting for the woman. What kind of person murders innocent guys like Maurice? Desperate people, that’s who. We were helpless, and we kept watching him.

Then the doorbell rang. It was like an electric shock. The man did not hurry to the door. He took his time as if he’d planned what to do all along. There was a slight smile on his face. Before he pulled it open, he listened to what was on the other side and then turned the knob.

A woman waited, a tall woman with a pillbox hat. A tall woman, a pillbox hat and a package. Her face was like a poker player’s face that had something she was going to keep secret as long as she could. It wasn’t a smile or a smirk. It was a steady, discomforting gaze.

“Here it is,” she announced, handing the man the package. It was a small thing, wrapped in brown paper. I compared it to the box we were held captive in. It was bigger and longer, though not quite so thick. It could have been money. “It’s all there,” she said.

The man opened the package. His fingers pried open a clasp and withdrew the contents. It was a large sheaf of papers that he went through one by one. He nodded as he thumbed each page. When he’d looked at each one he said, “This isn’t all of it, is it?’

“Yes, of course,” she said. “Of course it’s all of it.”

Then he seemed to relax a bit and put on that smile again. “Sure, you’re right,” he allowed. “I’m just a little antsy. I thought there were some pictures, that’s all.”

“They got destroyed in the fire.”

He nodded again and then came our way. He had a deadly look in his eyes. He picked up the pack we were trapped in. He yanked out Claude and Henriette, shaking them with a predisposed violence I have never been witness to. Claude and Henriette, two valued comrades, were about to receive the death sentence like Maurice. They went stoically, their faces blank, transfixed with misery and the anticipation of a gruesome end. A match flared, and they went up in smoke. The man and the woman each satisfied themselves by inhaling the smoke of their remains and then dumping the bodies in the glass container on the end table.

“He’ll be here shortly,” the man said.

“And when this is all over,” the woman murmured, “We can finally get out of here and be together. Oh, darling, this has been such a nightmare. After all we’ve been through.”

“I have two tickets for later tonight, on Air France. You’ll love Paris. This time of year it’s a little cool, a bit foggy. The fog is like smoke that makes everything a little mysterious, a little hard to figure out. But then the fog goes away and everything gets clear,”

“I like it when the fog goes away,” she said.

“But it comes back, the fog,” he said.

“Please don’t say that!”

“OK, OK. The fog goes away and never comes back.”

The woman clasped her arms together like she was shivering and looked hesitantly at the man, who said, “Want another cigarette?” He was talking about us. That’s what we were – cigarettes. I’d heard about them. I never knew I was one, though. The woman refused his offer. We sighed in relief.

The man put everything back in the manila folder. “When Pasternak gets here, I’ll hand him the package. He’ll go through it just to make sure. Then he’ll hand us the money. That’s when he gets to see this.” The man pulled a revolver out of his suit coat and showed it to the woman. It was big and shiny. “Isn’t it a beaut?”

“He has no idea,” she murmured.

Then there was the sound of a door opening on the first floor foyer. The man and woman looked up. There were footsteps clomping up the bare wood stairway to the man’s second floor apartment, then the sound of a hand twisting the doorknob from the outside. The man went to the door.

“Well, well, Pasternak,” the man said. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

The man named Pasternak had a small manila folder of his own in his left hand. His right hand was in his coat pocket. Something told me there was a gun in his pocket. You know why? I started figuring this thing out about people. People are very predictable. Watch one of them. The others do exactly what the first one does. The man had a gun. So Pasternak probably had a gun. There was something fishy going on. Fishy people hang around other fishy people. The man was fishy. Pasternak was fishy. The woman was a fisherman, or maybe the bait. It was too early to tell. Then Pasternak pulled his hand out of his pocket.

He had a fish.

Pasternak plopped the fish on the table next to us. It flopped softly. “Know where I got that?” he asked.

“Let me guess,” the man said. “The lake?”

“Nope.”

“The river?”

“Nope, try again,” Pasternak said. “The airport?” the man asked.

“Lucky guess,” Pasternak said. “But you’re right. Air France. The pilot is a personal friend of mine. They’re serving trout meuniére amandine tonight. I brought you your dinner because you won’t be eating dinner on your way to Paris.”

The man looked suspicious. “How’d you know, hey, wait.” He took a step back from Pasternak and the woman. “Oh, I get it, a double-cross.”

The woman drifted to Pasternak’s side. She ran her hands up and down his topcoat, all along his pockets. The man started nodding. Pasternak started nodding. So did the woman. I swear I saw the fish start to nod, too. “Did you really think I’d betray Pasternak? After what we’ve been through?”

The man stopped nodding. “Let’s have a smoke and think this over.” So tragedy was programmed to strike again. There went three more of our compatriots – Jules, Pierre and Hermione. Truer friends there had never been. They were about to become just a memory. The man lit up a match and three young lives were extinguished forever. The man and the woman and Pasternak stood in the afternoon gloom smoking, thinking, inhaling, exhaling, doing all the crummy things fishy people do when there is a trout flopping in the room and a pair of revolvers. Finally the man spoke. “Yes, I thought you’d betray Pasternak. What was that name you called him?”

“I never called him an invertebrate.”

“You called me an invertebrate?” Pasternak asked incredulously. His eyes narrowed reptile-like.

“She called you an invertebrate,” the man sneered.

I took a sidelong look at the fish, who couldn’t speak, of course. But I read his lips. His lips said, ‘invertebrate.’

I wondered what that meant. It was probably some kind of insult. I just wasn’t used to it. When a cigarette insults another of his kind he says something like ‘you half-lit sawed-off runt’ or if it’s another male cigarette, ‘you Virginia Slim-Jim.’ ‘Invertebrate’ was a new one for me. I liked the sound of it. It sounded like a frog or something.

“No one calls me an invertebrate. I’m no darn frog!” Pasternak yelled. I guessed he had a gun in there. It had to be somewhere. Pasternak took a step back and reached in his pocket. Out came – another fish.

The man, expecting to see a revolver instead of a brown trout, drew his own gun and shot Pasternak, who flopped on the floor. Then the second brown trout flopped on the floor. They both flopped side by side for a moment and then all grew calm.

“Looking for this?” the woman said to the brown trout and Pasternak flopping around on the man’s crummy rug. She produced a shiny, lethal revolver. “Ha! Men are such nincompoops!”

The bewildered man stared at the woman with the gun, and said, “Let’s have a smoke and think this through.”

Again, more tragedy. This time Jacques and Eloise were selected for elimination. Again, the match. Again, the smell of sulfur. Again, the piteous screams of two Resistance fighters suffering an early and unnecessary death. The man and woman huffed and puffed till Jacques and Eloise were no more, then squished their remains into the bottom of that glass thing that held the bodies of all those I loved so dearly. Then there was a sound, a new sound, not the hum of traffic, not the far-off roar of Air France or Braniff or Emirates Airlines or Tan-Sahsa heading off to Paris, or the flopping of Pasternak or the brown trout on the man’s crummy rug. It was a siren. “

It’s a siren,” the man said.

“Did you ever read the Odyssey?” the woman said. “The siren seduces the man, emasculates him, fools him. Men are such ninnies. Pasternak was an invertebrate.”

“Had it all figured out with your long words, didn’t you, sis? You’d pull a fast one on me and then skip town with Pasternak and keep the dough. Wait! The dough! Pasternak has the dough!” The man stepped on Pasternak to keep him from flopping his last and went through his manila envelope and his pockets. There was not one red cent. There were a couple of red snappers, but no money. “You, you tricked me,” he yelled at the woman. “There never was any money. It was all one big lie.”

The woman smiled and aimed the revolver at him. “This is what Pasternak was looking for. But I just took it away from him. This way, I get rid of you both and I go to Havana alone where I can live like a queen.”

The woman pulled the trigger and shoots. The man pulled his gun and shoots. They both fell dead on the crummy carpet in the man’s crummy apartment in the sad afternoon as the rain fell and the traffic moaned like a turboprop with a leaky crankcase. Then more footsteps scrambled up the wood stairs, and the door burst open.

Twelve policemen barged through the door, guns drawn, eye blazing, badges shining. “Don’t anybody move!” They fanned out like an occupying force, into the rooms beyond my line of vision. I didn’t move a muscle. Everyone here was dead except for the trout, who stopped flopping around long enough to take a look around and take in what just happened. Only I knew, me and my eleven remaining loyalist pals. Then there was a dead silence, the kind of silence you see after a long rain, or the long reign of a terrible king like King John, King Mswati III or Louis XVI. But I couldn’t talk. I was a cigarette. I had vocal chords, but no one could hear me. Just other cigarettes. Other cigarettes who called me names like Shorty and Virginia Slim-Jim. Tears swelled up in my breast. If anybody tried to light me, I would go out, all squishy from crying.

Finally, one of the twelve cops spoke up. “Hey, guys, let’s have a smoke and try to piece together what happened here.” He walked over to the pack of cigarettes and started passing out my pals to his pals. I watched them go one by one. I won’t mention the names of my eleven remaining friends. It is too hurtful. Maybe their spirits will unite to join the Free French garrison in Brazzaville and continue the fight. I gave them a silent word of encouragement, knowing they would die, hoping they would die honourably. Finally the policeman’s fingers came to me. “Hey, Sarge, there’s one left. You gonna light up that Stogie or what?”

The policeman identified as Sarge said, “Nah, I’ll just chomp on this thing awhile longer. It helps the thought process.”

The stogie and I stared at each other. “What’s a Stogie?” I asked. What did I have to lose? Maybe stogies talked.

“I go by lots of monikers – Corona, Churchill, Macanudo. But to you, pal, it’s cigar. Señor Cigar, to be precise. Now what happened?”

Señor Cigar had an attitude. He was authority personified. I had a feeling of mistrust about him. After watching the man and the woman and Pasternak act out for the last hour or so, I had a pretty good idea of what human nature was like. It works like this – you use whoever is around you so one day you can screw them all and get rich. There is no consideration given to anyone just because he or she is of the same species. It doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman, you’re in this game for just yourself. You could be aborigines, aliens, the King of France, Odysseus searching for Penelope and Telemachus. You basically feel alone in this world, the way I was now, abandoned by nineteen of my friends to the bitter loneliness of this tobacco-filled room.

But now the fog had gone away and everything had gotten clear.

And I was not alone. The pair of trout kept flopping desperately. Who was I to look down on them and their species? They might even be vertebrates. There was a place for them in my kingdom. But there was no place for Stogie, who might have been from my species but was a sorry, bloated example of it. He and his ilk typified those fattened by luxury and cushy life in a humidor.

“Señor Cigar,” I whispered, “A pail of water, por favor, for my dying friends. And then, maybe I can provide a tale of mistrust, betrayal and death.”

“Not a chance, Slim-Jim,” he answered. “I can hear you. You can hear me. That’s as far as it goes. You and I belong to another caste.”

Alas! I witnessed the sad, final flopping of my two finned friends, gasping their last on the man’s crummy rug in his crummy flat on this crummy evening. They perished a pointless and futile death like my nineteen comrades of the Resistance. At least I, and I alone, knew what befell these three desperadoes that lie dead on the rug beside them. I was indispensable to unravel this mystery.

Then Sarge spoke up. “The first guy got shot by the second guy. Then the second guy and the gal kill each other. Case closed. Anything of value laying around?”

“Just this,” one of the cops said, handing Sarge the manila envelope.

He looked in the folder and frowned. “Huh, blackmail. What about the fish? Are they holding?”

One of the cops inspected the trout. Their gills had turned blue. They’d stopped flopping. “Nah, just some almonds, canola oil and a whisk of vinegar, Sarge.”

Sarge took the stogie out of his mouth and stared at it. “I need a smoke, but not this. Where’s that last cigarette?”

A cop grabbed me and the pack and brought it to Sarge. I had been bawling my eyes out, not for my comrades, not for the brown trout, but for myself. Whatever befell me was a cruel hoax, the hoax of existence itself. No matter what you do, you are part of a powerless caste – invertebrates, frogs, Slim-Jims, some sub-group no one listens to. I wondered what were the chances someone might offer me a last cigarette before I faced the firing squad. That made me smile. Slim and none, but the irony would be impeccable. Soon my ass would be an orange spark, disintegrating to a cinder.

Sarge’s thick fingers retrieved me from the glossy paper pack and let go of me instantly. I fell on the rug beside a pile of dead bodies and fish. I was all squishy.

“Hey!” shouted Sarge. “That cigarette is all squishy. How’d he get all squishy in the box like that?”

I’d tell him it was my tears, but he wouldn’t listen.

“I’ll smoke this, then,” he said, picking up the match box and lighting Stogie. Nobody could hear his screams but me. It was music to my ears, hearing that fat slob of a cigar go up in smoke. So much for liberty, equality and fraternity. The only fraternity I belonged to was the one of me, myself and I.

Then the cops started laughing. I don’t know what they were laughing at. Maybe they laughed because there were twelve of them, all uniformed, all scheming to make this predicament pay off. Maybe they secretly wanted to see Stogie finally get lit after watching Sarge suck on Stogie’s fat torso until it got all slobbery and disgusting. Or maybe it was the fog the man spoke of.