It was a puzzlement. Why had she been crying? What had I done?
I reviewed my conduct all the way back to the hotel, but nothing much came of it. Perhaps I had been brusque—but brusque enough to bring tears? I couldn't believe it.
Curious new life! I fell asleep with the pale moon shining in the window, brooding about the life I was just beginning, and about the old life behind me that was buried in the same grave with Marianna.
II
The Naples branch of the Company lay in the heart of the city. I took a cab to a sort of dome-roofed thing called a galleria, and walked under its skeletal steel ceiling to my new office. Once the galleria had been roofed with glass, but the glass had powdered down from the concussion of the Mt. Vesuvius bomb, or the Capodichino bomb, or one of the other hammerblows the Sicilians had rained on the principality of Naples in the recent unpleasantness.
I entered the office and looked around. The blonde girl named Susan appeared to double as the office receptionist. She nodded efficiently and waved me to a fenced-off enclosure where Sam Gogarty sat, plump and untroubled, at an enormous desk.
I pushed open the swinging gate.
Gogarty looked at me icily. "You're late," he said.
He had no hangover, it was clear. I said apologetically, "Sorry, I'm—"