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 self-conscious--"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."