And so the Company had logically and inevitably resolved to wipe out war.
* * * *
I looked up. It was Susan again, this time with a cardboard container of coffee.
“You’re an angel,” I said. She set the coffee down and turned to go. I looked quickly around to make sure that Gogarty was busy, and stopped her. “Tell me something?”
“Sure.”
“About this girl, Rena. Does she work for the Company?”
Susan giggled. “Heavens, no. What an idea!”
“What’s so strange about it?”
She straightened out her face. “You’d better ask Sam—Mr. Gogarty, that is. Didn’t you have a chance to talk to her last night? Or were you too busy with other things?”
“I only want to know how she happened to be with you.”
Susan shrugged. “Sam thought you’d like to meet her, I guess. Really, you’ll have to ask him. All I know is that she’s been in here quite a lot about some claims. But she doesn’t work here, believe me.” She wrinkled her nose in amusement. “And I won’t work here either, if I don’t get back to my desk.”
I took the hint. By lunch time, I had got through a good half of the accumulation on my desk. I ate briefly and not too well at a nearby trattoria with a “B” on the Blue Plate medallion in its window. After the dinner of the night before, I more than half agreed with Gogarty’s comments about the Blue Plate menus.
Gogarty called me over when I got back to the office. He said, “I haven’t had a chance to talk to you about Luigi Zorchi.”
I nodded eagerly. I had been hoping for some explanations.
Gogarty went on, “Since you were on the scene when he took his dive, you might as well follow up. God knows you can’t do worse than the rest of us.”
I said dubiously, “Well, I saw the accident, if that’s what you mean.”
“Accident! What accident? This is the twelfth time he’s done it, I tell you.” He tossed a file folder at me. “Take a look! Loss of limbs—four times. Internal injuries—six times. Loss of vision, impaired hearing, hospitalization and so on—good lord, I can’t count the number of separate claims. And, every one, he has collected on. Go ahead, look it over.”
I peered at the folder. The top sheet was a field report on the incident I had watched, when the locomotive of the Milan express had severed both legs. The one below it, dated five weeks earlier, was for flash burns suffered in the explosion of a stove, causing the loss of the right forearm nearly to the elbow.
Curious, I thought, I hadn’t noticed anything when I saw the man on the platform. Still, I hadn’t paid too much attention to him at first, and modern prosthetic devices were nearly miraculous. I riffled through the red-bordered sheets. The fifth claim down, nearly two years before, was—
I yelped, “Mr. Gogarty! This is a fraud!”
“What?”
“Look at this! ‘On 21st October, the insured suffered severe injuries while trapped in a rising elevator with faulty safety equipment, resulting in loss of both legs above knees, multiple lacerations of—’ Well, never mind the rest of it. But look at that, Mr. Gogarty! He already lost both legs! He can’t lose them twice, can he?”
Gogarty sat back in his chair, looking at me oddly. “You startled me,” he complained. “Wills, what have I been trying to tell you? That’s the whole point, boy! No, he didn’t lose his legs twice. It was five times!”
I goggled at him. “But—”
“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