expect, I guess. A little statistical mathematics—enough so we can understand what the actuaries mean. Company policies, business methods, administration. Then, naturally, we had a lot of morale sessions. A Claims Adjuster—” I cleared my throat, feeling a little selfconscious—“a Claims Adjuster is supposed to be like Caesar’s wife, you know. He must always set an example to his staff and to the public. I guess that sounds pretty stuffy. I don’t mean it to be. But there is a lot of emphasis on tradition and honor and discipline.”
She asked, rather oddly, “And is there a course in loyalty?”
“Why, I suppose you might say that. There are ceremonies, you know. And it’s a matter of cadet honor to put the Company ahead of personal affairs.” “And do all Claims Adjusters live by this code?”
For a moment I couldn’t answer. It was like a blow in the face. I turned sharply to look at her, but there was no expression on her face, only a mild polite curiosity. I said with difficulty, “Miss dell’Angela, what are you getting at?”
“Why, nothing!” Her face was as angelic as her name.
“I don’t know what you mean or what you may have heard about me, Miss dell’Angela, but I can tell you this, if you are interested. When my wife died, I went to pieces. I admit it. I said a lot of things I shouldn’t have, and some of them may have reflected against the Company. I’m not trying to deny that but, you understand, I was upset at the time. I’m not upset now.” I took a deep breath. “To me, the Company is the savior of humanity. I don’t want to sound like a fanatic, but I am loyal to the Company, to the extent of putting it ahead of my personal affairs, to the extent of doing whatever job the Company assigns to me. And, if necessary, to the extent of dying for it if I have to. Is that clear?”
Well, that was a conversation-stopper, of course. I hadn’t meant to get all wound up about it, but it hurt to find out that there had been gossip. The dell’Angela girl merely said: “Quite clear.”
We rode in silence for a while. She was staring out the window again, and I didn’t especially want to talk just then. Maybe I was too sensitive. But there was no doubt in my mind that the Company was the white hope of the world, and I didn’t like being branded a traitor because of what I’d said after Marianna died. I was, in a way, paying the penalty for it—it had been made pretty clear to me that I was on probation. That was enough.
As I said, she lived a long way from the Gran Reale. I had plenty of time for my flare-up, and for brooding, and for getting over it.
But we never did get around to much idle conversation on that little trip. By the time I had simmered down, I began to have disturbing thoughts. It suddenly occurred to me that I was a man, and she was a girl, and we were riding in a cab. I don’t know how else to say it. At one moment I was taking her home from a dinner; and at the next, I was taking her home from a date. Nothing had changed— except the way I looked at it.
All of a sudden, I began to feel as though I were fourteen years old again. It had been quite a long time since I had had the duty of escorting a beautiful girl—and by then I realized this was a really beautiful girl—home at the end of an evening. And I was faced with the question that I had thought would never bother me again at least a decade before. Should I kiss her good night?
It was a problem, and I thought about it, feeling a little foolish but rather happy about it. But all my thinking came to nothing. She decided for me.
The cab stopped in front of a white stucco wall. Like so many of the better Italian homes, the wall enclosed a garden, and the house was in the middle of the garden. It was an attractive enough place—Class A at least, I thought—though it was hard to tell in the moonlight.
I cleared my throat and sort of halfway leaned over to her.
Then she turned and was looking up at me, and the moonlight glinted brightly off what could only have been tears in her eyes.
I stared.
She didn’t say a word. She shook her head briefly, opened the door and was gone behind the gate.
It was a puzzlement. Why had she been crying? What had I done?
I reviewed my conduct all the way back to the hotel, but nothing much came of it. Perhaps I had been brusque—but brusque enough to bring tears? I couldn’t believe it.
Curious new life! I fell asleep with the pale moon shining in the window, brooding about the life I was just beginning, and about the old life behind me that was buried in the same grave with Marianna.
Chapter Two
The Naples branch of the Company lay in the heart of the city. I took a cab to a sort of dome-roofed thing called a galleria, and walked under its skeletal steel ceiling to my new office. Once the galleria had been roofed with glass, but the glass had powdered down from the concussion of the Mt. Vesuvius bomb, or the Capodichino bomb, or one of the other hammerblows the Sicilians had rained on the principality of Naples in the recent unpleasantness.
I entered the office and looked around. The blonde girl named Susan appeared to double as the office receptionist. She nodded efficiently and waved me to a fenced-off enclosure where Sam Gogarty sat, plump and untroubled, at an enormous desk.
I pushed open the swinging gate.
Gogarty looked at me icily. “You’re late,” he said.
He had no hangover, it was clear. I said apologetically, “Sorry, I’m—”
“Never mind. Just don’t let it happen again.” It was clear that, in the office, business was business; the fact that we had been drinking together the night before would not condone liberties the morning after. Gogarty said, “Your desk is over there, Wills. Better get started.”
I felt considerably deflated as I sat down at my desk and stared unhappily at the piles of blue and yellow manifolds before me.
The Company had trained me well. I didn’t need to be coached in order to get through the work; it was all a matter of following established techniques and precedents. I checked the coverage, reduced the claim to tape-code, fed the tapes into a machine.
If the claim was legitimate, the machine computed the amounts due and issued a punch-card check. If there was anything wrong, the machine flashed a red light and spat the faulty claim out into a hopper.
And there were plenty of claims. Every adult in Naples, of course, carried the conventional War-and-Disaster policy—the so-called Blue Bolt coverage. Since few of them had actually been injured in the war, the claims were small—mostly for cost of premiums on other policies, under the disability clauses. (For if war prevented a policyholder from meeting his Blue Plate premiums, for instance, the Company itself under Blue Bolt would keep his policies paid—and the policyholder fed.)
But there were some big claims, too. The Neapolitan government had carried the conventional Blue Bolt policies and, though the policy had been canceled by the Company before hostilities broke out—thus relieving the Company of the necessity of paying damages to the principality of Naples itself—still there were all the subsidiary loss and damage claims of the Neapolitan government’s bureaus and departments, almost every one of them non-canceling.
It amounted to billions and billions of lire. Just looking at the amounts on some of the vouchers before me made my head swim. And the same, of course, would be true in Sicily. Though that would naturally be handled by the Sicilian office, not by us.
However, the cost of this one brief, meager little war between Naples and Sicily, with less than ten thousand casualties, lasting hardly more than a week, must have set the Company’s reserves back hundreds of millions of dollars.
And to think that some people didn’t like the Company! Why, without it, the whole peninsula of Italy would have been in financial ruin, the solvent areas dragged down with the combatants!
Naturally, the Regional Office was understaffed for this volume of work—which is why they had flown