I explained my business. He contemptuously waved me to a brocaded chair, and left me alone for a good half hour.
By the time Zorchi was ready to see me, I was boiling. Nobody could treat a representative of the Company like an errand boy! I did my best to take into consideration the fact that he had just undergone major surgery—first under the wheels of the train, then under the knives of three of Naples’ finest surgeons.
I said as pleasantly as I could, “I’m glad to see you at last.”
The dark face on the pink embroidered pillow turned coldly toward me. “Che volete?” he demanded. The secretary opened his mouth to translate.
I said quickly, “Scusí; parlo un po’ la lingua. Non bisogno un traduttore.”
Zorchi said languidly in Italian, “In that case, Mario, you may go. What do you want with me, Weels?”
I explained my duties as a Claims Adjuster for the Company, pointing out that it was my task, indeed my privilege, to make settlement for injuries covered by Company policies. He listened condescendingly. I watched him carefully while I talked, trying to estimate the approach he might respond to if I was to win his confidence.
He was far from an attractive young man, I thought. No longer behind the shabby porter’s uniform he had worn on the platform of the station, he still had an unkempt and slipshod appearance, despite the heavy silken dressing gown he wore and the manifest costliness of his room. The beard was still on his face; it, at least, had not been a disguise. It was not an attractive beard. It had been weeks, at the least, since any hand had trimmed it to shape and his hair was just as shaggy.
Zorchi was not impressed with my friendly words. When I had finished, he said coldly, “I have had claims against the Company before, Weels. Why is it that this time you make speeches at me?”
I said carefully, “Well, you must admit you are a rather unusual case.”
“Case?” He frowned fiercely. “I am no case, Weels. I am Zorchi, if you please.”
“Of course, of course. I only mean to say that—”
“That I am a statistic, eh?” He bobbed his head. “Surely. I comprehend. But I am not a statistic, you see. Or, at best, I am a statistic which will not fit into your electronic machines, am I not?”
I admitted, “As I say, you are a rather unusual ca—a rather unusual person, Mr. Zorchi.”
He grinned coldly. “Good. We are agreed. Now that we have come to that understanding, are we finished with this interview?”
I coughed. “Mr. Zorchi, I’ll be frank with you.” He snorted, but I went on, “According to your records, this claim need not be paid. You see, you already have been paid for total disability, both a lump sum and a continuing settlement. There is no possibility of two claims for the loss of your legs, you must realize.”
He looked at me with a touch of amusement. “I must?” he asked. “It is odd. I have discussed this, you understand, with many attorneys. The premiums were paid, were they not? The language of the policy is clear, is it not? My legs—would you like to observe the stumps yourself?”
He flung the silken covers off. I averted my eyes from the white-bandaged lower half of his torso, hairy and scrawny and horribly less than a man’s legs should be.
I said desperately, “Perhaps I spoke too freely. I do not mean, Mr. Zorchi, that we will not pay your claim. The Company always lives up to the letter of its contracts.”
He covered himself casually. “Very well. Give the check to my secretary, please. Are you concluded?”
“Not quite.” I swallowed. I plunged right in. “Mr. Zorchi, what the hell are you up to? How do you do it? There isn’t any fraud, I admit it. You really lost your legs—more than once. You grew new ones. But how? Don’t you realize how important this is? If you can do it, why not others? If you are in some way pecu—that is, if the structure of your body is in some way different from that of others, won’t you help us find out how so that we can learn from it? It isn’t necessary for you to live as you do, you know.”
He was looking at me with a hint of interest in his close-set, dull eyes. I continued, “Even if you can grow new legs, do you enjoy the pain of having them cut off? Have you ever stopped to think that someday, perhaps, you will miscalculate, and the wheels of the train, or the truck, or whatever you use, may miss your legs and kill you? That’s no way for a man to live, Mr. Zorchi. Why not talk freely to me, let me help you? Why not take the Company into your confidence, instead of living by fraud and deceit and—”
I had gone too far. Livid, he snarled, “Ass! That will cost your Company, I promise. Is it fraud for me to suffer like this? Do I enjoy it, do you think? Look, ass!” He flung the covers aside again, ripped at the white bandages with his hands— Blood spurted. He uncovered the raw stumps and jerked them at me.
I do not believe any sight of my life shocked me as much as that; it was worse than the Caserta hemp fields, worse than the terrible gone moment when Marianna died, worse than anything I could imagine.
He raved, “See this fraud, look at it closely! Truly, I grow new legs, but does that make it easier to lose the old? It is the pain of being born, Weels, a pain you will never know! I grow legs, I grow arms, I grow eyes. I will never die! I will live on like a reptile or a fish.”
His eyes were staring. Ignoring the blood spurting from his stumps, ignoring my attempts to say something, he pounded his abdomen. “Twelve times I have been cut—do you see even a scar? My appendix, it is bad; it traps filth, and the filth makes me sick. And I have it cut out—and it grows again; and I have it cut out again, and it grows back. And the pain, Weels, the pain never stops!” He flung the robe open, slapped his narrow, hairy chest.
I gasped. Under the scraggly hair was a rubble of boils and wens, breaking and matting the hair as he struck himself in frenzy. “Envy me, Weels!” he shouted. “Envy the man whose body defends itself against everything! I will live forever, I promise it, and I will always be in pain, and someone will pay for every horrible moment of it! Now get out, get out!”
I left under the hating eyes of the sharp-faced secretary who silently led me to the door.
* * * *
I had put Zorchi through a tantrum and subjected myself to as disagreeable a time as I’d ever had. And I hadn’t accomplished a thing. I knew that well enough. And if I hadn’t known it by myself, I would have found out.
Gogarty pointed it out to me, in detail. “You’re a big disappointment to me,” he moaned sourly. “Ah, the hell with it. What were you trying to accomplish, anyway?”
I said defensively, “I thought I might appeal to his altruism. After all, you didn’t give me very explicit instructions.”
“I didn’t tell you to remember to wipe your nose either,” he said bitterly. He shook his head, the anger disappearing. “Well,” he said disconsolately, “I don’t suppose we’re any worse off than we were. I guess I’d better try this myself.” He must have caught a hopeful anticipatory gleam in my eye, because he said quickly, “Not right now, Wills. You’ve made that impossible. I’ll just have to wait until he cools off.”
I said nothing; just stood there waiting for him to let me go. I was sorry things hadn’t worked out but, after all, he had very little to complain about. Besides, I wanted to get back to my desk and the folder about Rena dell’Angela. It wasn’t so much that I was interested in her as a person, I reminded myself. I was just curious…
Once again, I had to stay curious for a while. Gogarty had other plans for me. Before I knew what was happening, I was on my way out of the office again, this time to visit another Neapolitan hospital, where some of the severely injured in the recent war were waiting final settlement of their claims. It was a hurry-up matter, which had been postponed too many times already; some of the injured urgently required major medical treatment, and the hospital was howling for approval of their claims before they’d begin treatment.
This one was far from a marble palace. It had the appearance of a stucco tenement, and all of the patients were in wards.
I was a little surprised to see expediters guarding the entrance.
I asked one of them, “Anything wrong?”
He looked at me with a flicker of astonishment, recognizing the double-breasted Claim Adjuster uniform, surprised, I think, at my asking him a question. “Not as long as we’re here, sir,” he said.
“I mean, I was wondering what you were doing here.”
The surprise became overt. “Vaults,” he said succinctly.
I prodded no further. I knew what he meant by vaults, of course. It was part of the Company’s beneficent plan for ameliorating the effects of even such tiny wars as the Naples-Sicily affair that those who suffered radiation burns got the best treatment possible. And the best treatment, of course, was suspended animation. The deadly danger of radiation burns lay in their cumulative effect; the first symptoms were nothing, the man was well and able to walk about. Degeneration of the system followed soon, the marrow of the bone gave up on its task of producing white corpuscles, the blood count dropped, the tiny radiant poisons in his blood spread and worked their havoc. If he could be gotten through the degenerative period he might live. But, if he lived, he would still die. That is, if his life processes continued, the radiation sickness would kill him. The answer was to stop the life process, temporarily, by means of the injections and deep-freeze in the vaults. It was used for more than radiation, of course. Marianna, for instance—
Well, anyway, that was what the vaults were. These were undoubtedly just a sort of distribution point, where local cases were received and kept until they could be sent to the main Company vaults up the coast at Anzio.
I wasn’t questioning the presence of vaults there; I was only curious why the Company felt they needed guarding.
I found myself so busy, though, that I had no time to think about it. A good many of the cases in this shabby hospital really needed the Company’s help. But a great many of them were obvious attempts at fraud.
There was a woman, for instance, in the maternity ward. During the war, she’d had to hide out after the Capodichino bombing and hadn’t been able to reach medical service. So her third child was going to be a girl, and she was asking indemnity under the gender-guarantee clause. But she had only Class-C coverage and her first two had been boys; a daughter was permissive in any of the first four pregnancies. She began swearing at me before I finished explaining these simple facts to her.
I walked out of the ward, hot under the collar. Didn’t these people realize we were trying to help them? They didn’t appear to be aware of it. Only the terribly injured, the radiation cases, the amputees, the ones under anesthetic—only these gave me no arguments, mainly because they couldn’t talk.
Most of them were on their way to the vaults, I found. My main job was revision of their policies to provide for immobilization. Inevitably, there are some people who will try to take advantage of anything.
The retirement clause in the basic contract was the joker here. Considering that the legal retirement age under the universal Blue Heaven policy was seventy-five years—calendar years, not metabolic years—there were plenty of invalids who wanted a few years in the vaults for reasons that had nothing to do with health. If they could sleep away two or three decades, they could, they thought, emerge at a physical age of forty or so and live idly off the Company the rest of their lives.
They naturally didn’t stop to think that if any such practice became common the Company would simply be unable to pay claims. And they certainly didn’t think, or care that, if the Company went bankrupt, the world as we knew it would end.
It was a delicate problem; we couldn’t deny them medical care, but we couldn’t permit them the vaults unless they were either in clearly urgent need, or were willing to sign an extension waiver to their policies…
I saw plenty of that, that afternoon. The radiation cases were the worst, in that way, because they still could talk and argue. Even while they were being loaded with drugs, even while they could see with their own eyes the blood-count graph dipping lower and lower, they still complained at being asked to sign the waiver.
There was even some fear of the vaults themselves—though every living human had surely seen the Company’s indoctrination films that showed how the injected drugs slowed life processes and inhibited the body’s own destructive enzymes; how the apparently lifeless body, down to ambient air temperature, would be slipped into its hermetic plastic sack and stacked away, row on row, far underground, to sleep away the months or years or, if necessary, the centuries. Time meant nothing to the suspendees. It was hard to imagine being afraid of as simple and natural a process as that!
Although I had to admit that the vaults looked a lot like morgues…
I didn’t enjoy it. I kept thinking of Marianna. She had feared the vaults too, in the childish, unreasoning, feminine way that was her characteristic. When the Blue Blanket technicians had turned up the diagnosis of leukemia, they had proposed the sure-thing course of putting her under suspension while the slow-acting drugs—specially treated to operate even under those conditions—worked their cure, but she had refused. There had been, they admitted, a ninety-nine and nine-tenths percent prospect of a cure without suspension…
It just happened that Marianna was in the forlorn one-tenth that died.
I couldn’t get her out of my mind. The cases who protested or whined or pleaded or shrieked that they were being tortured and embalmed alive didn’t help. I was glad when the afternoon was over and I could get back to the office.
* * * *
As I came in the door, Gogarty was coming in, too, from the barbershop downstairs. He was freshly shaved and beaming.
“Quitting time, Tom,” he said amiably, though his eyes were memorizing the pile of incomplete forms on my desk. “All work and no play, you know.” He nudged me. “Not that you need reminding, eh? Still, you ought to tell your girl that she shouldn’t call you on office time, Tom.”
“Call me? Rena called me?”
He nodded absently, intent on the desk. “Against Company rules, you know. Say, I don’t like to push you, but aren’t you running a little behind here?”
I said with some irritation, “I don’t have much chance to catch up, the way I’ve been racing around the country, you know. And there’s plenty to be done.”
He said soothingly, “Now, take it easy, Tom. I was only trying to say that there might be some easier way to handle these things.” He speared a form, glanced over it casually. He frowned. “Take this, for instance. The claim is for catching cold as a result of exposure during the evacuation of Cerignola. What would you do with that one?”
“Why—pay it, I suppose.”
“And put in the paper work? Suppose it’s a phony, Tom? Not one case of coryza in fifty is genuine.”
“What would you do?” I asked resentfully.
He said without hesitation, “Send it back with Form CBB-23A192. Ask for laboratory smear-test reports.”
I looked over the form. A long letter was attached; it said in more detail than was necessary that there had been no laboratory service during the brief war, at least where the policyholder happened to be, and therefore he could submit only the affidavits of three registered physicians. It looked like a fair claim to me. If it was up to me, I would have paid it automatically.
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—”
Preferred Risk Page 4