“I believe he does have some sort of a doctor’s degree. But everybody in the trade calls him Kettle Belly. I asked you how he is.”
(Watch it, Friday!) “He’s dead.”
“Yeah, I know. I wondered if you knew. In this business you get a lot of ringers. All right, let’s see this marsupial pouch of yours.”
“Excuse me?”
“Look, I’m in a hurry. Show me your bellybutton.”
(Just where did the leak occur? UhÄ No, we killed that gang. All
of themÄor so Boss thought. Doesn’t mean it couldn’t have leaked from there before we killed them. No matterÄit did leak . . . as Boss said it would.) “Frankie boy, if you want to play bellybuttons with me, I must warn you that the bleached blonde in your outer office is listening and almost certainly recording.”
“Oh, she doesn’t listen. She has her instructions about that.”
“Instructions she carries out the way she carries out your injunction not to call you Frankie during working hours. Look, Mr. Mosby, you started discussing classified matters under not-secure conditions. If you want her to be part of this conference, bring her in. If not, get her out of the circuit. But let’s have no more breaches of security.”
He drummed on his desk, then got up very suddenly, went into his outer office. The door was not totally soundproof; I heard angry voices, muffled. He came back in, looking annoyed. “She’s gone to lunch. Now don’t give me any more guff. If you are who you say you are, Friday Jones, also known as Marjorie Baldwin, formerly a courier for KettleÄfor Dr. Baldwin, managing director of System Enterprises, you have a pouch created by surgery back of your navel. Show it to me. Prove your identity.”
I thought about it. A requirement that I prove my identity was not unreasonable. Fingerprint identification is a joke, at least inside the profession. Clearly the existence of my courier’s pouch was now a broached secret. It would never be useful againÄexcept that right now it could be used to prove that I was me. I was I? It sounds silly either way. “Mr. Mosby, you paid a kilobuck to interview me.”
“I certainly did! So far I’ve had nothing from you but static.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve never been asked to show my trick bellybutton before, because up to recently it has been a closely held secret. Or so I thought. Evidently it is no longer a secret, since you know of it. That tells me that I can no longer use it for classified work. If the job you have for me requires the use of it, perhaps you had better reconsider. A secret just a little bit broached is like a girl just a little bit pregnant.”
“Well . . . yes and no. Show me.”
I showed him. I keep a smooth nylon sphere one centimeter in diameter in my pouch so that the pouch won’t shrink between jobs.
I popped out the sphere, letting him watch, and then replaced itÄ then let him see that it was not possible to tell my navel from a normal navel. He studied it carefully. “It doesn’t hold very much.”
“Maybe you would rather hire a kangaroo.”
“It’s big enough for the purposeÄbarely. You’ll be carrying the most valuable cargo in the galaxy, but it won’t occupy much space. Zip up and adjust your clothing; we’re going to lunch and we mustn’tÄmust notÄbe late.”
“What is all this?”
“Tell you on the way. Hurry up.”
A carriage was already waiting for us. Back of Beverly Hills, in the hills that name that town, is a very old hotel that is also very swank. It has the stink of money, an odor I don’t despise. Between fires and the Big Quake it has been rebuilt several times, always to look just as it did but (so I hear) the last time it was rebuilt to be totally fire- and earthquakeproof.
It took about twenty minutes to drive, at a spanking trot, from the Shipstone Building to the hotel; Mosby used it to fill me in. “During this ride is about the only time that both of us can be sure that we don’t have an Ear planted on usÄ”