didn’t quite make it; I hadn’t gone more than five yards when a heavy hand fell on my shoulder, and a harsh voice snarled in the Neapolitan dialect, “Halt, you! Didn’t you hear the orders?”
I spun, staggering slightly, to face an armed expediter-officer. I stood at attention and said crisply, “Sorry. I’m Thomas Wills, Claims Adjuster. I thought I might be able to help.”
The officer stared at me for a moment. His cheeks moved; I had the impression that, under other circumstances, he would have spat on the floor at my feet. “Papers!” he ordered.
I passed him my travel orders. He looked them over briefly, then returned them. Like the Customs expediter at Carmody Field, he gave me a snap salute, militarily precise and, in a way I could not quite define, contemptuous. “You should just stay here, Adjuster Wills,” he advised—in a tone that made it a command. “This will be over in a moment.”
He was gone, back to his post. I stood for a moment, but it was easier to listen to his orders than to obey them; the Neapolitan crowd didn’t seem to take too well to discipline, and though there was no overt resistance to the search squads, there was a sort of Brownian movement of individuals in the throng that kept edging me back and away from where I had been standing. It made me a little uncomfortable; I was standing close to the edge of a platform, and a large poster announced that the Milan Express was due to arrive on that track at any moment. In fact, I could hear the thin, effeminate whistle of its Diesel locomotive just beyond the end of the platform. I tried to inch my way from the edge. I dodged around an electric baggage cart, and trod heavily on someone’s foot.
*
“Excuse me,” I said quickly, looking at the man. He glared back at me. There was a bright spark in his eyes; I could tell little about his expression because, oddly enough in that country of clean-shaven faces, he wore a heavy, ragged, clipped beard. He wore the uniform of a porter. He mumbled something I could not quite catch, and moved as if to push me away. I suppose I put up my arm. My papers, with the Company seal bright gold upon them, were still in my hand, and the bearded man caught sight of them.
If there had been anger in his eyes before, there was now raging fury. He shrilled, “Beast! Animal!” He thrust at me blindly and leaped past me, out of the shelter of the bags; he went spinning furiously through the crowd, men and women ricocheting off him.
I heard a harsh bellow: “There he goes! Zorchi! Zorchi!” And I could hear the bearded man shrieking curses as he hurtled up the platform, up toward the oncoming train, over to the edge—and off the platform to the tracks!
He fell less than a yard in front of the slim nose of the Diesel. I don’t suppose the speed of the train was even five miles an hour, but the engineer hadn’t a chance in the world to stop.
While I watched, struck motionless, along with all the others on that platform, the engine passed over the huddled form. The brakes were shrieking, but it was much, much too late. Even in that moment I thought he would not be killed—not instantly, at least, unless he died of loss of blood. The trunk of his body was safely in the well between the tracks. But his legs were sprawled over a rail. And the slow click-click of the wheels didn’t stop until his uniformed body was far out of sight. It was shocking, sickening, unbelievable.
And it didn’t stop there. A strange thing happened. When the man had dived into the path of the train, there was a sudden fearful hush; it had happened too suddenly for anyone to cry out. And when the hush ended, there was only a momentary, instinctive gasp of horror. Then there was a quick, astonished babble of voices—and then cheers! And applause, and ringing bravos!
I didn’t understand.
The man had thrown himself deliberately under the train. I was sure of it. Was that something to cheer?
*
I finally made it to where the Regional Director was waiting for me—nearly an hour late.
It was at a hotel overlooking the Bay, and the sight was thrilling enough to put the unpleasant accident I had seen out of my mind for a moment. There was nothing so beautiful in all the world, I thought, as the Bay of Naples at sunset. It was not only my own opinion; I had seen it described many times in the travel folders I had pored over, while my wife indulgently looked over my shoulder, back in those remote days of marriage. “La prima vista del mundo,” the folders had called it—the most beautiful sight of the world. They had said: “See Naples, and die.”
I hadn’t known, of course, that Marianna would die first…
But that was all behind me. After Marianna’s death, a lot of things had happened, all in a short time, and some of them very bad. But good or bad, I had laid down a law for myself: I would not dwell on them. I had started on a new life, and, I was going to put the past in a locked compartment in my mind. I had to!
I was no longer an ordinary civilian, scraping together his Blue Heaven premiums for the sake of a roof over his head, budgeting his food policies, carrying on his humdrum little job. I was a servant of the human race and a member of the last surviving group of gentleman-adventurers in all the world: I was an Insurance Claims Adjuster for the Company!
All the same, I couldn’t quite forget some of the bad things that had happened, as I walked into the hotel dining room to meet the Regional Director.
*
Regional Director Gogarty was a huge, pale balloon of a man. He was waiting for me at a table set for four. As he greeted me, his expression was sour. “Glad to meet you, Wills. Bad business, this. Bad business. He got away with it again.”
I coughed. “Sir?” I asked.
“Zorchi!” he snapped. And I remembered the name I had heard on the platform. The madman! “Zorchi, Luigi Zorchi, the human jellyfish. Wills, do you know that that man has just cashed in on his twelfth disability policy? And not a thing we could do to stop him! You were there. You saw it, didn’t you?”
“Well, yes, but—”
“Thought so. The twelfth! And your driver said on the phone it was both legs this time. Both legs—and on a common carrier. Double indemnity!” He shook his enormous head. “And with a whole corps of expediters standing by to stop him!”
I said with some difficulty, “Sir, do you mean that the man I saw run over by the train was—”
“Luigi Zorchi. That’s who he was. Ever hear of him, Wills?”
“Can’t say I have.”
Gogarty nodded his balloonlike head. “The Company has kept it out of the papers, of course, but you can’t keep anything from being gossiped about around here. This Zorchi is practically a national hero in Naples. He’s damn near a millionaire by now, I guess, and every lira of it has come right out of the Company’s indemnity funds. And do you think we can do anything about it? Not a thing! Not even when we’re tipped off ahead of time—when, what, and where!
“He just laughs at us. I know for a fact,” Gogarty said bitterly, “that Zorchi knew we found out he was going to dive in front of that express tonight. He was just daring us to stop him. We should have! We should have figured he might disguise himself as a porter. We should—”
I interrupted, “Mr. Gogarty, are you trying to tell me this man deliberately maims himself for the accident insurance?” Gogarty nodded sourly. “Good heavens,” I cried, “that’s disloyal!”
Gogarty laughed sharply and brought me up standing. There was a note to the way he laughed that I didn’t like; for a moment there, I thought he was thinking of my own little—well, indiscretion. But he said only, “It’s expensive, too.” I suppose he meant nothing by it. But I was sensitive on the subject.
Before I could ask him any more questions, the massive face smoothed out in a smile. He rose ponderously, greeting someone. “Here they are, Wills,” he said jovially. “The girls!”
The headwaiter was conducting two young ladies toward us. I remembered my manners and stood up, but I confess I was surprised.