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. I had heard that discipline in the field wasn’t the same as at the Home Office, but after all—Gogarty was a Regional Director!
It was a little informal of him to arrange 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.”
