"You're pretty, too," I snarled. The damp heat had leached the last vestiges of chivalry from my soul. "Get on with your pitch, will you? I want to turn your job down and get back to my air-conditioned lab in New Mexico."
"Give me five minutes to persuade you to stay," she said, making a steeple with her fingertips and resting the steeple against her chin.
I checked my wrist watch.
"The S.B.E.A. is responsible for a special type of strategic intelligence," she said. "We are analyzing the economic processes of the USSR."
"I am familiar with the multiplication table," I said. "Otherwise, I don't see how I can be of use to you. My specialty is rocket-fuel injection systems. I'd dearly love to get back to that."
"You're cutting into my three hundred seconds of grace, Doctor Huguenard," she protested.
I sucked bitterly on the cigar she'd given me. "Okay," I sighed through the smoke. "Continue, Professor."
"Money, to a nation, is like blood to a man," she said. "This is true even in Russia's manipulative economy. Were you to trace the movement of blood through the human body, you'd soon know its every tissue. Just so, by tracing the flow of wealth through the USSR, we can discover precisely what's going on over there. We have overt means of observation, such as the Soviet studies published in Industriia, Sovetskaya Metallurgiia, Voprosy Ekonomiki, and other journals; and we have our clandestine sources as well."
"Do you read Russian?" I asked, feeling a little more respect for this miss with the PhD.
"Russian, Polish, German, and French," she said impatiently. "I was born in Gdansk, née Danzig, a community where being a polyglot is simple self-preservation. But I'd best get on. My time is running low."