Frederik Pohl Super Pack. Frederik Pohl

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ we do not agree. And never shall.” I stared at her blankly. She was being very difficult. Really, I shouldn’t be bothering with her, someone I barely knew, someone I hadn’t even heard of until—

      That reminded me. I said, “Rena, how did you know my name?”

      Her eyes went opaque. “Know your name, Tom? Why, Mr. Gogarty introduced us.”

      “No. You knew of me before that. Come clean, Rena. Please.”

      She said flatly, “I don’t know what you mean.” She was beginning to act agitated.

      I had seen her covertly glancing at her watch several times; now she held it up openly—ostentatiously, in fact. “I am sorry, but you’d better go,” she said with a hint of anxiety in her voice. “Please excuse me.”

      Well, there seemed no good reason to stay. So I went—not happily; not with any sense of accomplishment; and fully conscious of the figure I cut to the unseen watcher in the other room, the man whose coffee I had usurped.

      Because there was no longer a conjecture about whether there had been such a person or not. I had heard him sneeze three times.

      *

      Back at my hotel, a red light was flashing on the phone as I let myself in. I unlocked the playback with my room key and got a recorded message that Gogarty wanted me to phone him at once.

      He answered the phone on the first ring, looking like the wrath of God. It took me a moment to recognize the symptoms; then it struck home.

      The lined gray face, the jittery twitching of the head, the slow, tortured movements; here was a man with a classic textbook case of his ailment. The evidence was medically conclusive. He had been building up to a fancy drinking party, and something made him stop in the middle.

      There were few tortures worse than a grade-A hangover, but one of those that qualified was the feeling of having the drink die slowly, going through the process of sobering up without the anesthetic of sleep.

      He winced as the scanning lights from the phone hit him. “Wills,” he said sourly. “About time. Listen, you’ve got to go up to Anzio. We’ve got a distinguished visitor, and he wants to talk to you.”

      “Me?”

      “You! He knows you—his name is Defoe.”

      The name crashed over me; I hadn’t expected that, of all things. He was a member of the Council of Underwriters! I thought they never ventured far from the Home Office. In fact, I thought they never had a moment to spare from the awesome duties of running the Company.

      Gogarty explained. “He appeared out of nowhere at Carmody Field. I was still in Caserta! Just settling down to a couple of drinks with Susan, and they phoned me to say Chief Underwriter Defoe is on my doorstep!”

      I cut in, “What does he want?”

      Gogarty puffed his plump cheeks. “How do I know? He doesn’t like the way things are going, I guess. Well, I don’t like them either! But I’ve been twenty-six years with the Company, and if he thinks… Snooping and prying. There are going to be some changes in the office, I can tell you. Somebody’s been passing on all kinds of lying gossip and—” He broke off and stared at me calculatingly as an idea hit him.

      Then he shook his head. “No. Couldn’t be you, Wills, could it? You only got here, and Defoe’s obviously been getting this stuff for weeks. Maybe months. Still— Say, how did you come to know him?”

      It was none of his business. I said coldly, “At the Home Office. I guess I’ll take the morning plane up to Anzio, then.”

      “The hell you will. You’ll take the night train. It gets you there an hour earlier.” Gogarty jerked his head righteously—then winced and clutched his temple. He said miserably, “Oh, damn. Tom, I don’t like all of this. I think something happened to Hammond.”

      I repeated, “Happened? What could happen to him?”

      “I don’t know. But I found out a few things. He’s been seen with some mighty peculiar people in Caserta. What’s this about somebody with a gun waiting at the office for him when you were there?”

      It took a moment for me to figure out what he was talking about. “Oh,” I said, “you mean the man at the car? I didn’t know he had a gun, for certain.”

      “I do,” Gogarty said shortly. “The expediters tried to pick him up today, to question him about Hammond. He shot his way out.”

      I told Gogarty what I knew, although it wasn’t much. He listened abstractedly and, when I had finished, he sighed. “Well, that’s no help,” he grumbled. “Better get ready to catch your train.”

      I nodded and reached to cut off the connection. He waved half-heartedly. “Oh, yes,” he added, “give my regards to Susan if you see her.”

      “Isn’t she here?”

      He grimaced. “Your friend Defoe said he needed a secretary. He requisitioned her.”

      *

      I boarded the Anzio train from the same platform where I had seen Zorchi dive under the wheels. But this was no sleek express; it was an ancient three-car string that could not have been less than fifty years out of date. The cars were not even air-conditioned.

      Sleep was next to impossible, so I struck up a conversation with an expediter officer. He was stand-offish at first but, when he found out I was a Claims Adjuster, he mellowed and produced some interesting information.

      It was reasonable that Defoe would put aside his other duties and make a quick visit to Anzio, because Anzio seemed to need someone to do something about it pretty badly. My officer was part of a new levy being sent up there; the garrison was being doubled; there had been trouble. He was vague about what kind of “trouble” it had been, but it sounded like mob violence. I mentioned Caserta and the near-riot I had been in; the officer’s eyes hooded over, and about five minutes after that he pointedly leaned back and pulled his hat over his eyes. Evidently it was not good form to discuss actual riots.

      I accepted the rebuke, but I was puzzled in my mind as I tried to get some sleep for myself.

      What kind of a place was this Naples, where mobs rioted against the Company and even intelligent-seeming persons like Renata dell’Angela appeared to have some reservations about it?

      Chapter Five

      I slept, more or less, for an hour or so in that cramped coach seat. I was half asleep when the train-expediter nudged my elbow and said, “Anzio.”

      It was early—barely past daybreak. It was much too early to find a cab. I got directions from a drowsing stationmaster and walked toward the vaults.

      The “clinic,” as the official term went, was buried in the feet of the hills just beyond the beaches. I was astonished at the size of it. Not because it was so large; on the contrary. It was, as far as I could see, only a broad, low shed.

      Then it occurred to me that the vaults were necessarily almost entirely underground, for the sake of economy in keeping them СКАЧАТЬ