I temporized. “Suppose it’s legitimate?”
“Suppose it is? Look at it this way, Tom. If it’s phony, this will scare him off, and you’d be saving the Company the expense and embarrassment of paying off a fraudulent claim. If it’s legitimate, he’ll resubmit it—at a time when, perhaps, we won’t be so busy. Meanwhile that’s one more claim handled and disposed of, for our progress reports to the Home Office.”
I stared at him unbelievingly. But he looked back in perfect calm, until my eyes dropped. After all, I thought, he was right in a way. The mountain of work on my desk was certainly a logjam, and it had to be broken somehow. Maybe rejecting this claim would work some small hardship in an individual case, but what about the hundreds and thousands of others waiting for attention? Wasn’t it true that no small hardship to an individual was as serious as delaying all those others?
It was, after all, that very solicitude for the people at large that the Company relied on for its reputation—that, and the ironclad guarantee of prompt and full settlement.
I said, “I suppose you’re right.”
He nodded, and turned away. Then he paused. “I didn’t mean to bawl you out for that phone call, Tom,” he said. “Just tell her about the rule, will you?”
“Sure. Oh, one thing.” He waited. I coughed. “This girl, Rena. I don’t know much about her, you know. Is she, well, someone you know?”
He said, “Heavens, no. She was making a pest out of herself around here, frankly. She has a claim, but not a very good one. I don’t know all the details, because it’s encoded, but the machines turned it down automatically. I do know that she, uh—” he sort of half winked—“wants a favor. Her old man is in trouble. I’ll look it up for you some time, if you want, and get the details. I think he’s in the cooler—that is, the clinic—up at Anzio.”
He scratched his plump jowls. “I didn’t think it was fair to you for me to have a girl at dinner and none for you; Susan promised to bring someone along, and this one was right here, getting in the way. She said she liked Americans, so I told her you would be assigned to her case.” This time he did wink. “No harm, of course. You certainly wouldn’t be influenced by any, well, personal relationship, if you happened to get into one. Oh, a funny thing. She seemed to recognize your name.”
That was a jolt. “She what?”
Gogarty shrugged. “Well, she reacted to it. ‘Thomas Wills,’ I said. She’d been acting pretty stand-offish, but she warmed up quick. Maybe she just likes the name, but right then is when she told me she liked Americans.”
I cleared my throat. “Mr. Gogarty,” I said determinedly, “please get me straight on something. You say this girl’s father is in some kind of trouble, and you imply she knows me. I want to know if you’ve ever had any kind of report, or even heard any kind of rumor, that would make you think that I was in the least sympathetic to any anti-Company groups? I’m aware that there were stories—”
He stopped me. “I never heard any, Tom,” he said definitely.
I hesitated. It seemed like a good time to open up to Gogarty; I opened my mouth to start, but I was too late. Susan called him off for what she claimed was an urgent phone call and, feeling let-down, I watched him waddle away.
Because it was, after all, time that I took down my back hair with my boss.
*
Well, I hadn’t done anything too terribly bad—anyway, I hadn’t meant to do anything bad. And the circumstances sort of explained it, in a way. And it was all in the past, and—
And nothing. I faced the facts. I had spent three solid weeks getting blind drunk, ranting and raving and staggering up to every passerby who would listen and whining to him that the Company was evil, the Company was murderous, the Company had killed my wife.
There was no denying it. And I had capped it all off one bleary midnight, with a brick through the window of the Company branch office that served my home. It was only a drunken piece of idiocy, I kept telling myself. But it was a drunken piece of idiocy that landed me in jail, that had been permanently indorsed on every one of my policies, that was in the confidential pages of my Company service record. It was a piece of idiocy that anyone might have done. But it would have meant deep trouble for me, if it hadn’t been for the intercession of my wife’s remote relative, Chief Underwriter Defoe.
It was he who had bailed me out. He had never told me how he had found out that I was in jail. He appeared, read the riot-act to me and got me out. He put me over the coals later, yes, but he’d bailed me out. He’d told me I was acting like a child—and convinced me of it, which was harder. And when he was convinced I had snapped out of it, he personally backed me for an appointment to the Company’s school as a cadet Claims Adjuster.
I owed a considerable debt of gratitude to my ex-remote-in-law, Chief Underwriter Defoe.
*
While I still was brooding, Gogarty came back. He looked unhappy. “Hammond,” he said bitterly. “He’s missing. Look, was he drunk when you left him last night?” I nodded. “Thought so. Never showed up for work. Not at his quarters. The daily ledger’s still open at his office, because there’s no responsible person to sign it. So naturally I’ve got to run out to Caserta now, and what Susan will say—” He muttered away.
I remembered the file that was buried under the papers on my desk, when he mentioned Susan’s name.
As soon as he was out of the office, I had it open.
And as soon as I had it open, I stared at it in shock.
The title page of the sheaf inside was headed: Signorina Renata dell’Angela. Age 22; daughter of Benedetto dell’Angela; accepted to general Class-AA; no employment. There were more details.
But across all, in big red letters, was a rubber stamp: Policy Canceled. Reassigned Class-E.
It meant that the sad-eyed Rena was completely uninsurable.
Chapter Four
Phone or no phone, I still had her address.
It was still daylight when I got out of the cab, and I had a chance for a good look at the house. It was a handsome place by day; the size of the huge white stucco wall didn’t fit the uninsurable notation on Rena’s claim. That wall enclosed a garden; the garden could hardly hold less than an AA house. And Class-Es were ordinarily either sent to public hostels—at the Company’s expense, to be sure—or existed on the charity of friends or relatives. And Class-Es seldom had friends in Class-AA houses.
I knocked at the gate. A fat woman, age uncertain but extreme, opened a little panel and peered at me. I asked politely, “Miss dell’Angela?”
The woman scowled. “Che dice?”
I repeated: “May I see Miss dell’Angela? I’m a Claims Adjuster for the Company. I have some business with her in connection with her policies.”
“Ha!” said the woman. She left it at that for a moment, pursing her lips and regarding me thoughtfully. Then she shrugged apathetically. “Momento,” she said wearily, and left me standing outside the gate.
From inside there was a muttering of unfamiliar voices. I thought I heard a door open, and the sound of steps, but when the fat woman came back she was alone.
Silently she opened the door and nodded me in. I started automatically up the courtyard toward the enclosed house, but she caught my arm and motioned me toward another path. It led down a flowered lane through a grape arbor to what might, at one time, have been a caretaker’s hut.
I knocked on the door of