Free Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes by Patricia Highsmith Page A

reminded himself that he had heard about such things before, two or three times before. He knew why he was feeling sickish: Marlucci’s death confirmed Doug’s death. Benny was sick at the thought of Doug in that room half-full of containers, Doug getting weaker from thirst and hunger, from lack of air, moaning unheard, dying. Benny called McWhirty in to tell him.
    “Good Christ.” McWhirty sank into a leather chair in Benny’s office as if all his strength had gone.
    “You think maybe Marlucci tried to get him out?” Benny asked. “Or did get him out—dead?”
    “Or loaders found him and Marlucci got the blame.” McWhirty looked drugged, but was merely exhausted. “I figure Doug would’ve been dead by yesterday morning from asphyxiation.”
    There was no use in trying to figure out exactly what had happened, Benny supposed. “You think they’ll just hush it up—if they found him?”
    “Yes,” Gerry said.
    The Well-Bilt people with their machinery would know how to get rid of a body, Benny was sure. “What’ll we tell his wife?”
    McWhirty looked miserable. “We’ll have to tell her he disappeared—that he’s maybe dead. I’ll tell her. You know—our job has its hazards.”
    “We’ll make sure she gets a generous pension,” said Benny.
    McWhirty went into a daze or depression which he could not shake off, but he still came to the office. He would not take a week’s leave, even though his doctor ordered it.
    In the following week a torrent of letters and a two-day picketing of the NCC grounds—which did much damage to the pretty lawns, what with the police trying to wrestle the more unruly protesters off the premises—disturbed the whole staff of NCC, and caused them to come to work in armored cars which they crawled into at 8:30 in the morning at appointed places. The demonstrators called themselves the New CIO or Citizens in Outrage, and the nucleus of them seemed to have come from the Three Mile Island district, but they were aiming to make Outrage a nationwide movement by teaming up with militant environmentalists. The NCC came to work and departed in a shower of stones, eggs, epithets and threats.
    One day in late September, Gerald McWhirty drove his car, the older of the two he and his wife owned, over the edge of a highway into a valley and killed himself. He left no note behind. It was called an accident.
    Evelyn Ferguson, who had been drinking quite a bit since her husband’s disappearance (as it was called), was admitted to a rehabilitation center in Massachusetts at government expense. Benny wrote her cheerful postcards, when he remembered to do so.
    The NCC came up with an affirmative report on Operation Balsam for Washington, when the site got its official inspection in October. Benny was there, and saw even worse cracks in the concrete than McWhirty had, but Well-Bilt promised to repair them, so the cracks were not mentioned in the report. Still worse, a rem count taken by the NCC at various vents on the exterior of the stadium detected 210 per hour at one, 300-odd at another, and so on, with only one of the twelve vents clean. Where was the radioactive stuff coming from? Well-Bilt promised to look into it, but meanwhile said it believed that the rem discharge was not high enough to cause alarm or to do perceptible damage to human, animal or plant life in the vicinity.
    Benny had other problems now. A plutonium shipment, codenamed the Italian Shipment because it had nothing to do with Italy, out of Houston bound for South Carolina, had disappeared, and could the NCC look into this and see if a friendly country had stolen it, or what? This made at least four lost shipments on land and sea that Benny’s office was supposed to find. Benny missed Gerry McWhirty in a strange way, as if Gerry had been the voice of his conscience, which was now silenced. He missed Doug Ferguson too, but in a different way. He remembered the interesting rust-red tweed jacket that Doug had worn that last