branch office, sweltering in the smell of the hemp fields, pushing across the mountains of lire to the grimfaced policyholders left me a little less sure of things. Nearly all of the first hundred or so to pass my desk had been in the crowd that the expediters had fired on. A few had fresh bandages to show where stones had missed the expediters, but found targets all the same. Nearly all of them were hostile. There was no casual conversation, very few “Grazies” as they received their payments.
But at last the day was at an end. Hammond snapped an order to one of the clerks, who shoved his way through the dwindling line to close the door and bang down the shutters. I put through the last few applications, and we were through.
It was hot and muggy out in the streets of New Caserta. Truce teams of expediters were patrolling the square, taken off their regular assignments of enforcing the peace between Naples and Sicily to keep down Caserta’s own mobs. Hammond suggested dinner, and we went to a little Blue Plate in the palace itself.
Hammond held Class-A food policies, but he was politeness itself; he voluntarily led the way to the Class-B area. We presented our policy-cards to the waiter for canceling, and sat back to enjoy the air conditioning.
I was still troubled over the violence. I said, “Has there been any trouble around here before?”
Hammond said ruefully, “Plenty. All over Europe, if you want my opinion. Of course, you never see it in the papers, but I’ve heard stories from field workers.
They practically had a revolution in the Sudeten strip after the Prague-Vienna affair.” He stopped talking as the waiter set his Meal-of-the-Day in front of him. Hammond looked at it sourly. “Oh, the hell with it, Wills,” he said. “Have a drink with me to wash this stuff down.”
*
We ordered liquor, and Hammond shoved his Class-A card at the waiter. I am not a snoop, but I couldn’t help noticing that the liquor coupons were nearly all gone; at his present rate, Hammond would use up his year’s allotment by the end of the summer, and be paying cash for his drinks.
Dinner was dull. Hammond made it dull, because he was much more interested in his drinking than in me. Though I was never much of a drinker, I’d had a little experience in watching others tank up; Hammond I classified as the surly and silent type. He wasn’t quite rude to me, but after the brandy with his coffee, and during the three or four straight whiskies that followed that, he hardly spoke to me at all.
We left the Blue Plate in a strained silence and, after the cooled restaurant, the heat outside was painful. The air was absolutely static, and the odor from the hemp fields soaked into our clothes like a bath in a sewer.
Overhead it was nearly dark, and there were low black clouds. “We’d better get going,” I ventured. “Looks like rain.”
Hammond said nothing, only grunted. He lurched ahead of me toward the narrow street that led back to the branch office, where our transport was waiting.
The distance was easily half a mile. Now I am not terribly lazy, and even in the heat I was willing enough to walk. But I didn’t want to get caught in a rain. Maybe it was superstition on my part—I knew that the danger was really slight—but I couldn’t forget that three separate atomic explosions had gone off in the area around Caserta and Naples within only a few months, and there was going to be a certain amount of radioactivity in every drop of rain that fell for a hundred miles around.
I started to tell Hammond about it, but he made a disgusted noise and stumbled ahead.
It wasn’t as if we had to walk. Caserta was not well equipped with cabs, but there were a few; and both Hammond and myself ranked high enough in the Company to have been able to get a lift from one of the expediter cars that were cruising about.
There was a flare of lightning over the eastern mountains and, in a moment, the pounding roll of thunder. And a flat globule of rain splattered on my face.
I said, “Hammond, let’s wait here for a lift.”
Surprisingly he came along with me.
If he hadn’t, I would have left him in the street.
*
We were in a street of tenements. It was almost deserted; I rapped on the nearest door. No answer, no sound inside. I rapped again, then tried the door. It was locked.
The next door—ancient and rickety as the first—was also locked, and no one answered. The third door, no one answered. By then it was raining hard; the knob turned under my fingers, and we stepped inside.
We left the door ajar, on the chance that a squad car or cab might pass, and for light. It was almost dark outside, apart from the light from the lightning flashes, but even so it was darker within. There was no light at all in the narrow, odorous hall; not even a light seeping under the apartment doors.
In the lightning flare, Hammond’s face was pale. He was beginning to sober up, and his manner was uneasy.
We were there perhaps half an hour in that silent hall, watching the rain sleet down and the lightning flare and listening to the thunder. Two or three times, squad cars passed, nosing slowly down the drenched streets, but though Hammond looked longingly at them, I still didn’t want to get wet.
Then the rain slowed and almost simultaneously a civilian cab appeared at the head of the block. “Come on,” I said, tugging at his arm.
He balked. “Wait for a squad car,” he mumbled.
“Why? Come on, Hammond, it may start to pour again in a minute.”
“No!”
His behavior was exasperating me. Clearly it wasn’t that he was too niggardly to pay for the cab; it was almost as if he were delaying going back to the branch office for some hidden reason. But that was ridiculous, of course.
I said, “Look, you can stay here if you want to, but I’m going.” I jumped out of the doorway just in time to flag the cab; it rolled to a stop, and the driver backed to where I was standing. As I got in, I looked once more to the doorway where Hammond was standing, his face unreadable.
He made a gesture of some sort, but the lightning flashed again and I skipped into the cab. When I looked again he was invisible inside the doorway, and I told the driver to take me to the branch office of the Company.
Curious; but it was not an end to curious things that night. At the branch office, my car was waiting to take me back to Naples.
I surrendered my travel coupons to the cab driver and jumped from one vehicle to the other.
Before my driver could start, someone appeared at the window of the car and a sharp voice said, “Un momento, Signore ’Ammond!”
I stared at the man, a rather badly dressed Neapolitan. I said angrily, “Hammond isn’t here!”
The man’s expression changed. It had been belligerent; it now became astonished and apologetic. “A thousand times excuse me,” he said. “The Signore ’Ammond, can you say where he is?”
I hesitated, but only for a moment. I didn’t like the little man peering in my window, however humble and conciliatory he had become. I said abruptly, “No.” And my driver took off, leaving the man standing there.
I turned to look back at him as we drove off.
It was ridiculous, but the way he was standing as we left, holding one hand in his pocket, eyes narrowed and thoughtful, made me think that he was carrying a gun. But, of course, that was impossible. The Company didn’t permit lethal weapons, and who in all the world would challenge a rule of the Company?
*
When I showed up in the Naples office the next morning, Susan had my coffee ready and waiting for me. I said gratefully, “Bless you.”
She chuckled. “That’s not all,” she said. “Here’s something else you might like. Just remember though, if anyone asks, you got it out of the files yourself.”
She