"But, but. But he did. Wait a minute--" he held up a hand to stop my
questions--"just take a look through the folder. See for yourself." He
waited while, incredulously, I finished going through the dossier. It
was true. I looked at Gogarty wordlessly.
He said resentfully, "You see what we're up against? And none of
the things you are about to say would help. There is no mistake
in the records--they've been double and triple-checked. There
is no possibility that another man, or men, substituted for
Zorchi--fingerprints have checked every time. The three times he lost
his arms, retina-prints checked. There is no possibility that the
doctors were bribed, or that he lost a little bit more of his leg, for
instance, in each accident--the severed sections were recovered, and
they were complete. Wills, _this guy grows new arms and legs like a
crab_!"
I looked at him in a daze. "What a fantastic scientific discovery!" I
said.
* * * * *
He snorted. "Fantastic pain in the neck! Zorchi can't go on like this;
he'll bankrupt the Company. We can't stop him. Even when we were tipped
off this time--we couldn't stop him. And I'll tell you true, Wills,
that platform was loaded with our men when Zorchi made his dive. You
weren't the only Adjuster of the Company there."
He picked a folded sheet of paper out of his desk. "Here. Zorchi is
still in the hospital; no visitors allowed today. But I want you to
take these credentials and go to see him tomorrow. You came to us with
a high recommendation from the Home Office, Wills--" That made me look
at him sharply, but his expression was innocent "You're supposed to
be a man of intelligence and resourcefulness. See if you can come up
with some ideas on dealing with that situation. I'd handle it myself,
but I've got--" he grimaced--"certain other minor administrative
difficulties to deal with. Oh, nothing important, but you might as
well know that there appears to be a little, well, popular underground
resentment toward the Company around here."
"Incredible!" I said.
He looked at me thoughtfully for a moment. "Well," he said, "it's
quitting time. See you in the morning."
I had a lonely dinner at the same cheap restaurant where I'd had my
lunch. I spent an hour in my room with my Company-issued _Adjuster's
Handbook_, looking for some precedent that had some sort of bearing
on the case of a man who could grow new arms and legs. There wasn't
anything, of course. I went out for a walk ... and still it wasn't
nearly time for me to retire to bed.
So I did what I had been avoiding doing. I looked in the phone book
for Rena dell'Angela's number. There was, it developed, a Benedetto
dell'Angela at the address she'd given the cab driver; but the phone
was disconnected.
So I wandered around some more, and then I went to sleep, dreaming
about Benedetto dell'Angela. I saw him as a leather-faced,
white-bearded and courtly old gentleman. Rena's father, surely.
Possibly even her elder brother. Certainly not her husband.
It was a dull finish to the first full day of my rich, exciting new
life....
* * * * *
The "minor administrative difficulties" got major. So I didn't get to
see Zorchi the next day, after all.
A Junior Adjuster named Hammond--he was easily sixty, but the
slow-moving, unenterprising type that would stay junior till the day he
died--came white-faced into the office a few minutes after opening and
huddled with Gogarty for a quarter of an hour.
Then Gogarty called me over. He said, "We're having a spot of trouble.
Hammond needs a little help; you're elected. Draw what you need, take
a couple of expediters along, report back to me this evening."
Hammond and I stopped at the cashier's office to draw three
dispatch-cases full of lira-notes. Outside, an armored car was waiting
for us, with a full crew of six uniformed expediters. We raced off down
the narrow streets with the sirens wailing, climbing the long hill road
past the radioactive remains of Capodichino, heading out toward the
farmlands.
Hammond worriedly filled me in on the way. He had got in early to his
branch office that morning, but no earlier than the first of a long
line of policyholders. There had, it appeared, been some kind of rumor
spread that the Company was running out of money. It was preposterous
on the face of it--after all, who _printed_ the money?--but you can't
argue with a large group of people and, before the official hour of
opening the branch, there were more than a hundred in the knotted line
outside the door.
Hammond had rushed into the Naples office for help, leaving his staff
to do the best they could. He said gloomily, staring out through the
view-slits at the farmlands and vineyards we were passing through, "I
just hope we still have a branch office. This is a bad spot, Wills.
Caserta. It got bombed out, you know; the whole southern end of the
town is radioactive. And it has a long history of trouble. Used to be
the summer royal seat of the old Italian monarchy; then the Americans
used it for a command headquarters in the war Mussolini got into--the
first atom war. It's been fought over time and again."
I said reasonably, "But don't they know the Company has all the
resources in the world?"
"Sure they do--when they're thinking. Right now they're not thinking.
They've got it in their heads that the Company isn't going to pay off.
They're scared. You can't tell them anything. You can't even give them
checks--they want cash on the line."
I said, "That's pretty silly, isn't it? I mean--ugh!" I retched, as
I suddenly got a whiff of the most unpleasant and penetrating odor I
had ever encountered in my life. It was like death and destruction in
gaseous form; a sickly sweet, clinging stink that oozed in through the
pores of my skin to turn my stomach. "Wow!" I said, gasping.
Hammond looked at me in bewilderment; then he grinned sourly. "New
here, aren't you?" he inquired. "That's hemp. They grow the stuff
for the fibers; and to get the fibers out, they let it get good and
rotten. You'll get used to it," he promised.
I tried. I tried pretty hard to get used to it; I hardly heard a word
he said all the rest of the way in to Caserta, I was trying so hard.
But I didn't get used to it.
* * * * *
Then I had my mind taken off my troubles. The branch was still doing
business when we got there, though there were easily three or four
hundred angrily shouting policyholders milling around in front of it.
They scattered before us as the armored car came racing in; we skidded
to a stop, siren blasting, and the expediters leaped out with their
weapons at the ready.
Hammond and I climbed out of the armored car with our bags of money.
There was an audible excitement in the crowd as the word spread back
that the Company had brought in enormous stores of lire, more than any
man had ever seen, to pay off the claims. We could hear the chatter of
many voices, and we almost could feel the tension slack off.
It looked like the trouble was over.
Then there was a shrill whistle. It sounded very much like the alarm
whistle of one of our expediters but, thinking back, I have never been
sure.
Perhaps it was a nervous expediter, perhaps it was an agent provocateur
in the crowd. But, whoever pulled the trigger, the explosion went off.
There was a ragged yell from the crowd, and rocks began whizzing
through the air. The pacifists in the mob began heading for the
doorways and alleys around; women screamed, men shouted and bellowed,
and for a moment it looked like we would be swamped. For not very many
of them were pacifists, and there were at least a hundred screaming,
gesticulating men lunging at us.
One cobblestone shattered the theoretically unbreakable windshield of
the truck next to my head; then the expediters, gas guns spitting, were
ringing around us to protect the money.
It was a short fight but vicious. By the time the first assault was
repulsed there were at least fifty persons lying motionless in the
street.
I had never seen that sort of violence before. It did something to
my stomach. I stood weaving, holding to the armored car, while the
expediters circled the area around the branch office, firing hurry-up
shots at the running rioters. Hammond looked at me questioningly.
"That smell," I said apologetically.
He said only, "Sure." True, the fetid aroma from the hemp fields was
billowing all around us, but he knew as well as I that it was not the
smell that was bothering me.
In a few moments, as we were locking the bags of money into the office
safe, red-crossed vehicles bearing the Company insignia appeared in the
street outside, and medics began tending to the victims. Each one got
a shot of something--an antidote to the sleep-gas from the expediters'
guns, I guessed--and was loaded unceremoniously into the ambulances.
Hammond appeared beside me. "Ready for business?" he asked. "They'll be
back any minute now, the ones that can still walk. We'll be paying off
until midnight, the way it looks."
I said, "Sure. That--that gas doesn't hurt them any, does it? I mean,
after they go to the hospital they'll be all right, won't they?"
Hammond, twirling a pencil in his fingers, stared broodingly at the
motionless body of one policyholder. He was a well-dressed man of fifty
or so, with a reddish mustache, unusual in that area, and shattered
rimless glasses. Not at all the type I would expect to see in a street
fight; probably, I thought, a typical innocent bystander.
Hammond said absently, "Oh, sure. They'll be all right. Never know what
hit them." There was a tiny sharp _crack_ and the two halves of the
pencil fell to the floor. He looked at it in surprise. "Come on, Wills.
Let's get to work."