“No,” Malone said. He tapped his lips. “Here.”
She laughed, bent closer and pecked him on the cheek. Then, before he could say anything else, she was gone.
10
On the way to FBI Headquarters on 69th Street, he read the Post a little more carefully. The judge and his union suit weren’t the only things that were fouled up, he saw. Things were getting pretty bad all over.
One story dealt with the recent factional fights inside the American Association for the Advancement of Medicine. A new group, the United States Medical-Professional Society, appeared to be forming as a competitor to the AAAM, and Malone wasn’t quite so sure, when he thought about it, that this news was as bad as it appeared on the surface. Fights between doctors, of course, were reasonably rare, at least on the high hysterical level the story appeared to pinpoint. But the AAAM had held a monopoly in the medical field for a long time; maybe it was about time some competition showed itself. From what he could find out in the story, the USMPS seemed like a group of fairly sensible people.
But that was one of the few rays of light Malone could discern amid the encircling bloom of the news. The gang wars had reached a new high; the Post was now publishing what it called a Daily Scoreboard, which consisted in this particular paper of six deaths, two disappearances and ten hospitalizations. The six deaths were evenly scattered throughout the country: two in New York, one each in Chicago and Detroit, and two more in San Francisco. The disappearances were in Los Angeles and in Miami, and the hospitalizations were pretty much all over.
The unions had been having trouble, too. Traditional forms of controversy appeared to have gone out the window, in favor of startling disclosures, beatings, wild cries of foul and great masses of puzzling evidence. How, for instance, Malone wondered, had the president of Local 7574 of the Fishermen’s Fraternal Brotherhood managed to mislay a pile of secret records, showing exactly how the membership was being bilked of dues, on a Boston subway train? But, somehow, he had, and the records were now causing shakeups, denials and trouble among the fishermen.
Of course, the news was not all bad. There were always the comic strips. Pogo was busily staving off an approaching wedding between Albert Alligator and a new character named Tranquil Portly, who appeared to be a brown bear. He was running into some resistance, though, from a wolflike character who planned to abscond with Albert’s cigars while Albert was honeymooning. This character, Don Coyote by name, looked like a trouble-maker, and Malone vowed to keep a careful eye on him.
And then there were other headlines:
FUSION POWER SOON COMMERCIALLY