our first meeting at dinner, in the first place. But to make a social occasion of it was—in the straitlaced terms of the Home Office where I had been trained—almost unthinkable.
And it was apparent that the girls were mere decoration. I had a hundred eager questions to ask Gogarty—about this mad Zorchi, about my duties, about Company policy here in the principality of Naples—but it would be far out of line to bring up Company matters with these females present. I was not pleased, but I managed to be civil.
The girls were decorative enough, I had to admit.
Gogarty said expansively, all trace of ill humor gone, “This is Signorina dell’Angela and Miss Susan Manchester. Rena and Susan, this is Tom Wills.” I said stiffly, “Delighted.”
Susan was the blonde one, a small plump girl with the bubbly smile of a professional model. She greeted Gogarty affectionately. The other was dark and lovely, but with a constant shadow, almost glowering, in her eyes.
So we had a few drinks. Then we had a few more. Then the captain appeared with a broad menu, and I found myself in an embarrassing position. For Gogarty waved the menu aside with a gesture of mock disgust. “Save it for the peasants,” he ordered. “We don’t want that Blue Plate slop. We’ll start with those little baby shrimps like I had last night, and then an antipasto and after that—”
I broke in apologetically, “Mr. Gogarty, I have only a Class-B policy.”
Gogarty blinked at me. “What?”
I cleared my throat. “I have only Class-B coverage on my Blue Plate policy,” I repeated. “I, uh, I never went in much for such—”
He looked at me incredulously. “Boy,” he said, “this is on the Company. Now relax and let me order. Blue Plate coverage is for the peasants; I eat like a human being.”
It shook me a little. Here was a Regional Director talking about the rations supplied under the Company’s Blue Plate coverage as “slop.” Oh, I wasn’t naive enough to think that no one talked that way. There were a certain number of malcontents anywhere. I’d heard that kind of talk, and even worse, once in a while from the Class-D near-uninsurables, the soreheads with a grudge against the world who blamed all their troubles on the Company and bleated about the “good old days.” Mostly they did their bleating when it was premium time, I’d noticed.
But I certainly never expected it from Gogarty.
Still—it was his party. And he seemed like a pretty nice guy. I had to allow him the defects of his virtues, I decided. If he was less reverent to the Company than he should have been, at least by the same token he was friendly and democratic. He had at least twenty years seniority on me, and back at the Home Office a mere Claims Adjuster wouldn’t have been at the same table with a Regional Director. And here he was feeding me better than I had ever eaten in my life, talking as though we were equals, even (I reminded myself) seeing to it that we had the young ladies to keep us company.
*
We were hours at dinner, hours and endless glasses of wine, and we talked continually. But the conversation never came close to official business.
The girl Rena was comfortable to be with, I found. There was that deep, eternal sadness in her eyes, and every once in a while I came up against it in the middle of a laugh; but she was soft-voiced and pleasant, and undeniably lovely. Marianna had been prettier, I thought, but Marianna’s voice was harsh Midwest while Rena’s—
I stopped myself.
When we were on our after-dinner liqueurs, Rena excused herself for a moment and, after a few minutes, I spotted her standing by a satin-draped window, looking wistfully out over a balcony. Gogarty winked.
I got up and, a little unsteadily, went over to her. “Shall we look at this more closely?” I asked her. She smiled and we stepped outside.
Again I was looking down on the Bay of Naples—a scene painted in moonlight this time, instead of the orange hues of sunset. It was warm, but the Moon was frosty white in the sky. Even its muddled reflection in the slagged waters was grayish white, not yellow. There was a pale orange halo over the crater of Mount Vesuvius, to our left; and far down the coast a bluish phosphorescence, over the horizon, marked Pompeii. “Beautiful,” I said.
She looked at me strangely. All she said was, “Let’s go back inside.”
Gogarty greeted us. “Looking at the debris?” he demanded jovially. “Not much to see at night. Cheer up, Tom. You’ll see all the damage you want to see over the next few days.”
I said, “I hope so, sir.”
Gogarty shook his head reprovingly. “Not ‘sir,’ Tom. Save that for the office. Call me Sam.” He beamed. “You want to know what it was like here during the war? You can ask the girls. They were here all through. Especially Susan—she was with the Company’s branch here, even before I took over. Right, Susan?”
“Right, Sam,” she said obediently.
Gogarty nodded. “Not that Rena missed much either, but she was out of town when the Sicilians came over. Weren’t you?” he demanded, curiously intent. Rena nodded silently. “Naples sure took a pasting,” Gogarty went on. “It was pretty tough for a while. Did you know that the Sicilians actually made a landing right down the coast at Pompeii?”
“I saw the radioactivity,” I said.
“That’s right. They got clobbered, all right. Soon’s the barges were in, the Neapolitans let them have it. But it cost them. The Company only allowed them five A-bombs each, and they had to use two more to knock out Palermo. And— well, they don’t like to tell this on themselves, but one of the others was a dud. Probably the only dud A-bomb in history, I guess.”
He grinned at Rena. Astonishingly, Rena smiled back.
She was, I thought, a girl of many astonishing moments; I had not thought that she would be amused at Gogarty’s heavy-handed needling.
*
Gogarty went on and on. I was interested enough—I had followed the Naples–Sicily war in the papers and, of course, I’d been briefed at the Home Office before coming over—but the girls seemed to find it pretty dull. By the time Gogarty finished telling me about the Sicilian attempt to trigger Mt. Vesuvius by dropping an A-bomb into its crater, Rena was frankly bored and even Susan was yawning behind her palm.
We finally wound up under the marquee of the restaurant. Gogarty and the blonde politely said good night, and disappeared into a cab. It was clearly up to me to take Rena home.
I hailed a cab. When I made up my new insurance schedule at the Home Office before coming over, I splurged heavily on transportation coverage. Perhaps I was making up for the luxuries of travel that life with Marianna hadn’t allowed me. Anyway, I’d taken out Class AA policies. And as the cab driver clipped my coupons he was extremely polite.
Rena lived a long way from the hotel. I tried to make small talk, but she seemed to have something on her mind. I was in the middle of telling her about the terrible “accident” I had seen that evening at the station—suitably censored, of course—when I observed she was staring out the window.
She hadn’t been paying attention while I talked, but she noticed the silence when I stopped. She gave a little shake of the head and looked at me. “I’m sorry, Mr. Wills,” she said. “I am being rude.”
“Not at all,” I said gallantly.
“Yes.” She nodded and smiled, but it was a thoughtful, almost a sad, smile. “You are too polite, you gentlemen of the Company. Is that part of your training?”
“It’s easy to be polite to you, Miss dell’Angela,” I said by rote. Yes, it was part of our training: A Claims Adjuster is always courteous. But what I said was true enough, all the same. She was a girl that I enjoyed being polite to.
“No, truly,” she persisted. “You are an important officer in the Company, and you must have trained