We'd have had a pleasant view of the bay on a clear night, but the sky was overcast and an occasional buoy-light and an unpleasantly rapid searchlight were all that shone above the dark swells of the ocean. Bayner decided that he had a bit of an appetite left and ordered a full meal. He shoveled away a mound of spaghetti and a mess of bloody looking sausages before I'd half-finished my steak, and he moved on to shortcake, cheesecake and coffee.
"Ah, that was good!" he said, and he immediately inserted a toothpick into the upper portion of the first smile I'd seen him smile in, say, forty years.
"Cigar?" I offered.
"Thank you, I believe I will."
The toothpick went away, the cigars were lit, the check arrived. I always do that in crowded places when they're slow to bring me the check. A lit stogie, a quick blue haze and they're right beside me with the tab.
"This is on me," he announced as I accepted the bill.
"Nonsense. You're my guest."
"Well ... All right."
After all, Bill Bayner is the forty-fifth wealthiest man in the galaxy. It isn't every day I get a chance to dine with successful people.
As we left, he said, "I've got a place where we can talk. I'll drive."
So we took his car, leaving a uniform and a frown behind us, and spent about twenty minutes driving around the city, shaking off hypothetical tails, and we finally arrived at an apartment building about eight blocks from Bartol Towers. As we entered the lobby, he nodded to the doorman, who nodded back to him.
"Think it'll rain tomorrow?" he asked.
"Clear," said the doorman.
Then we rode up to the sixth floor. The wainscotting in the hallway was full of artificial gems, some of which had to be eyes. We stopped and he knocked at an ordinary-looking door: three, pause, two, pause, two. He'd change it tomorrow, I knew. A dour-faced young man in a dark suit answered the door, nodded, and departed when Bayner gestured over his shoulder with a thumb. Inside, he secured the door, but not before I'd noticed from its edge that a metal plate was sandwiched between its inner and outer veneers of fake wood. For the next five or ten minutes, he tested the room with an amazing variety of bug-detection equipment, after giving me a keep-quiet sign, and then set several bug-scramblers into operation as an added precaution, sighed, removed his jacket and hung it on the back of a chair, turned to me and said, "It's okay to talk now. Can I fix you a drink?"
"Are you sure it'll be safe?"
He thought about it for a moment, then said, "Yes."
"Then I'll have bourbon and water if you've got it."
He withdrew into the next room and returned after about a minute with two glasses. His was probably filled with tea if he was planning on talking any kind of business with me. I couldn't have cared less.
"So what's up?" I asked him.
"Damn it, the stories they tell about you are true, aren't they? How'd you find out?"
I shrugged.
"But you're not going to move in on me on this one, not the way you did on those Vegan mining franchises."
"I don't know what you're talking about," I said.
"Six years ago."
I laughed.
"Listen," I told him, "I don't pay much attention to what my money does, so long as it's there when I want it. I trust various people to handle it for me. If I got a good deal in the Vegan system six years ago, it's because some good man in my employ lined it up. I don't run around shepherding money the way you do. I've delegated all that."
"Sure, sure, Frank," he said. "So you're incognito on Driscoll and you arrange to run into me the night before I deal. Who'd you buy on my staff?"
"Nobody, believe me."
He looked hurt.
"I'd tell _you_," he said. "I won't hurt him. I'll just transfer him somewhere where he won't do any more harm."
"I'm really not here on business," I said, "and I ran into you by pure chance."
"Well, you're not going to grab the whole thing this time, whatever you've got up your sleeve," he said.
"I'm not even in the running. Honest."
"Damn it!" he said. "Everything was going so smoothly!" and his right fist smashed against his left palm.
"I haven't even seen the product," I said.
He got up and stalked out of the room, came back and handed me a pipe.
"Nice pipe," I said.
"Five thousand," he told me. "Cheap."
"I'm really not much of a pipe-smoker."
"I won't cut you in for more than ten percent," he said. "I've been handling this thing personally, and you're not going to queer it."
And then I got mad. All that bastard thought about, besides eating, was stacking up his wealth. He automatically assumed I spent my time the same way, just because a lot of leaves on the Big Tree say "Sandow." So, "I want a third, or I make my own deal," I said.
"A third?"
He leaped to his feet and began screaming. It was a good thing that the room was soundproof and debugged. It had been a long time since I'd heard some of those expressions. He grew red in the face and he paced. Greedy, money-grubbing, unethical me sat there thinking about pipes while he ranted.
A guy with a memory like mine has many odd facts in his head. Back in my youth, on Earth, the best pipes were made either of meerschaum or briar. Clay pipes draw awfully hot and wooden ones crack or burn out quickly. Corncobs are dangerous. In the latter part of the twentieth century, possibly because of a generation growing up in the shadow of a Surgeon General's Report on respiratory diseases, pipe smoking had undergone something of a renaissance. By the turn of the century, the world's supply of briar and meerschaum was largely exhausted. Meerschaum, or hydrous magnesium silicate, is a sedimentary rock which occurred in strata composed in part of seashells that had fused together over the ages, and when it was all gone, that was it. Briar pipes were made from the root of the White Heath, or _Erica Arborea_, which grew only in a few areas about the Mediterranean and had to be around a hundred years old before it was of any use. The White Heath had been subjected to wanton harvesting, with anything like a reforestation plan far from mind. Consequently, substances like pyrolitic carbon now do for the bulk of pipe smokers, but meerschaum and briar linger in memories and collections. Small deposits of meershaum have been discovered upon various worlds and turned into fortunes overnight. Nowhere but on Earth, however, has _Erica Arborea_ or a suitable substitute ever turned up. And pipe smoking is the mainliner's way of smoking these days, DuBois and me being mavericks. The pipe Bayner had shown me was a pretty, fiame-grained briar. Therefore ...
"...