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 long for the post. What did they teach you?”
“Well—” I hesitated—“just the sort of thing you’d 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
