That long, long day in Hammond's puny little branch office, sweltering in the smell of the hemp fields, pushing across the mountains of lire to the grim-faced policyholders left me a little less sure of things. Nearly all of the first hundred or so to pass my desk had been in the crowd that the expediters had fired on. A few had fresh bandages to show where stones had missed the expediters, but found targets all the same. Nearly all of them were hostile. There was no casual conversation, very few "Grazies" as they received their payments.
But at last the day was at an end. Hammond snapped an order to one of the clerks, who shoved his way through the dwindling line to close the door and bang down the shutters. I put through the last few applications, and we were through.
It was hot and muggy out in the streets of New Caserta. Truce teams of expediters were patrolling the square, taken off their regular assignments of enforcing the peace between Naples and Sicily to keep down Caserta's own mobs. Hammond suggested dinner, and we went to a little Blue Plate in the palace itself.
Hammond held Class-A food policies, but he was politeness itself; he voluntarily led the way to the Class-B area. We presented our policy-cards to the waiter for canceling, and sat back to enjoy the air conditioning.
I was still troubled over the violence. I said, "Has there been any trouble around here before?"
Hammond said ruefully, "Plenty. All over Europe, if you want my opinion. Of course, you never see it in the papers, but I've heard stories from field workers. They practically had a revolution in the Sudeten strip after the Prague-Vienna affair." He stopped talking as the waiter set his Meal-of-the-Day in front of him. Hammond looked at it sourly. "Oh, the hell with it, Wills," he said. "Have a drink with me to wash this stuff down."
We ordered liquor, and Hammond shoved his Class-A card at the waiter. I am not a snoop, but I couldn't help noticing that the liquor coupons were nearly all gone; at his present rate, Hammond would use up his year's allotment by the end of the summer, and be paying cash for his drinks.
Dinner was dull. Hammond made it dull, because he was much more interested in his drinking than in me. Though I was never much of a drinker, I'd had a little experience in watching others tank up; Hammond I classified as the surly and silent type. He wasn't quite rude to me, but after the brandy with his coffee, and during the three or four straight whiskies that followed that, he hardly spoke to me at all.
We left the Blue Plate in a strained silence and, after the cooled restaurant, the heat outside was painful. The air was absolutely static, and the odor from the hemp fields soaked into our clothes like a bath in a sewer.