3
to wait. After all, he wasn't on assignment at the moment, and there was nothing pressing waiting for him. He was even between romances.
If he waited long enough, he told himself, Andrew J. Burris might say something worth hearing. He looked attentive and eager. He considered leaning over the desk a little, to look even more eager, but decided against it; Burris might think he looked threatening. There was no telling.
"You're a congressman," Burris said, "and the government is inefficient. You find evidence of it. What do you do?"
Malone blinked and thought for a second. It didn't take any longer than that to come up with the old, old answer. "I start an investigation," he said. "I get a committee and I talk to a lot of newspaper editors and magazine editors and maybe I go on television and talk some more, and my committee has a lot of meetings--"
"Exactly," Burris said.
"And we talk a lot at the meetings," Malone went on, carried away, "and get a lot of publicity, and we subpoena famous people, just as famous as we can get, except governors or presidents, because you can't--they tried that back in the Fifties, and it didn't work very well--and that gives us some more publicity, and then when we have all the publicity we can possibly get--"
"You stop," Burris said hurriedly.
"That's right," Malone said. "We stop. And that's what I'd do."
"Of course, the problem of inefficiency is left exactly where it always was," Burris said. "Nothing's been done about it."
"Naturally," Malone said. "But think of all the lovely publicity. And all the nice talk. And the subpoenas and committees and everything."
"Sure," Burris said wearily. "It's happened a thousand times. But, Malone, that's the difference. It isn't happening this time."
There was a short pause. "What do you mean?" Malone said at last.
"This time," Burris said, in a tone that sounded almost awed, "they want to keep it a secret."
"A secret?" Malone said, blinking. "But that