V. (68 page)

"I see."

Demivolt was out at Hamrun, conferring with agents among the millers. They were frightened. Had Fairing been too frightened to stay? Stencil had supper in his room. He'd drawn no more than a few times on his pipe when there was a timid knock.

"Oh, come. Come."

A girl, obviously pregnant, who stood, only watching him.

"Do you speak English, then."

"I do. I am Carla Maijstral." She remained erect, shoulderblades and buttocks touching the door.

"He will be killed, or hurt," she said. "In wartime a woman must expect to lose her husband. But now there is peace."

She wanted him sacked. Sack him? Why not. Double agents were dangerous. But now, having lost the priest . . . She couldn't know about La Manganese.

"Could you help, signor. Speak to him."

"How did you know? He didn't tell you."

"The workers know there is a spy among them. It has become a favorite topic among all the wives. Which one of us? Of course, it is one of the bachelors, they say. A man with a wife, with children, could not take the chance." She was dry-eyed, her voice was steady.

"For God's sake," Stencil said irritably, "sit down."

Seated: "A wife knows things, especially one who will be a mother soon." She paused to smile down at her belly, which upset Stencil. Dislike for her grew as the moments passed. "I know only that something is wrong with Maijstral. In England I have heard that ladies are 'confined' months before the child is born. Here a woman works, and goes out in the street, as long as she can move about."

"And you came out looking for me."

"The priest told me."

Fairing. Who was working for whom? Caesar wasn't getting a fair shake. He tried sympathy. "Was it worrying you that much? That you had to bring it all into the confessional?"

"He used to stay home at night. It will be our first child, and a first child is the most important. It is his child, too. But we hardly speak any more. He comes in late and I pretend to be asleep."

"But a child also must be fed, sheltered, protected more than a man or woman. And this requires money."

She grew angry. "Maratt the welder has seven children. He earns less than Fausto. None of them has ever gone without food, or clothing, or a home. We do not need your money."

God, she could blow the works. Could he tell her that even if he sacked her husband, there'd still be Veronica Manganese to keep him away nights? Only one answer: talk to the priest. "I promise you," he said, "I will do all I can. But the Situation is more complicated than you may realize."

"My father -" curious he'd not caught that flickering edge of hysteria in her voice till now - "when I was only five also began to stay away from home. I never found out why. But it killed my mother. I will not wait for it to kill me."

Threatening suicide? "Have you talked to your husband at all?"

"It isn't a wife's place."

Smiling: "Only to talk to his employer. Very well, Signora, I shall try. But I can guarantee nothing. My employer is England: the King." Which quieted her.

When she left, he began a bitter dialogue with himself. What had happened to diplomatic initiative? They - whoever "they" were - seemed to be calling the tune.

The Situation is always bigger than you, Sidney. It has like God its own logic and its own justification for being, and the best you can do is cope.

I'm not a marriage counselor, or a priest.

Don't act as if it were a conscious plot against you. Who knows how many thousand accidents - a variation in the weather, the availability of a ship, the failure of a crop - brought all these people, with their separate dreams and worries, here to this island and arranged them into this alignment? Any Situation takes shape from events much lower than the merely human.

Oh, of course: look at Florence. A random pattern of cold-air currents, some shifting of the pack ice, the deaths of a few ponies, these helped produce one Hugh Godolphin, as we saw him. Only by the merest happenstance did he escape the private logic of that ice-world.

The inert universe may have a quality we can call logic. But logic is a human attribute after all; so even at that it's a misnomer. What are real are the cross-purposes. We've dignified them with the words "profession" and "occupation." There is a certain cold comfort in remembering that Manganese, Mizzi, Maijstral, Dupiro the ragman, that blasted face who caught us at the villa - also work at cross-purposes.

But what then does one do? Is there a way out?

There is always the way out that Carla Maijstral threatens to take.

His musings were interrupted by Demivolt, who came stumbling in the door. "There's trouble."

"Oh indeed. That's unusual."

"Dupiro the ragman."

Good things come in threes. "How."

"Drowned, in Marsamuscetto. Washed ashore downhill from Manderaggio. He had been mutilated." Stencil thought of the Great Siege and the Turkish atrocities: death's flotilla.

"It must have been I Banditti," Demivolt continued: "a gang of terrorists or professional assassins. They vie with one another in finding new and ingenious ways to murder. Poor Dupiro's genitals were found sewn in his mouth. Silk suturing worthy of a fine surgeon."

Stencil felt ill.

"We think they are connected somehow with the fasci di combattimento who've organized last month in Italy, around Milan. The Manganese has been in intermittent contact with their leader Mussolini. "

"The tide could have carried him across."

"They wouldn't want it out to sea, you know. Craftsmanship of that order must have an audience or it's worthless."

What's happened, he asked his other half. The Situation used to be a civilized affair.

No time in Valletta. No history, all history at once . . .

"Sit down, Sidney. Here." A glass of brandy, a few slaps to the face.

"All right, all right. Ease off. It's been the weather." Demivolt waggled his eyebrows and retreated to the dead fireplace. "Now we have lost Fairing, as you know, and we may lose Maijstral." He summarized Carla's visit.

"The priest."

"What I thought. But we've had an ear lopped off out at the villa."

"Short of starting an affair, one of us, with La Manganese, I can't see any way to replace it."

"Perhaps she's not attracted to the mature sort."

"I didn't mean it seriously."

"She did give me a curious look. That day at the church."

"You old dog. You didn't say you'd been slipping out to secret trysts in a church." Attempting the light touch. But failing.

"It has deteriorated to the point where any move on our part would have to be bold."

"Perhaps foolish. But confronting her directly . . . I'm an optimist, as you know."

"I'm a pessimist. It keeps a certain balance. Perhaps I'm only tired. But I do think it is that desperate. Employing I Banditti indicates a larger move - by them - soon."

"Wait, in any event. Till we see what Fairing does."

Spring had descended with its own tongue of flame. Valletta seemed soul-kissed into drowsy complaisance as Stencil mounted the hill southeast of Strada Reale toward Fairing's church. The place was empty and its silence broken only by snores from the confessional. Stencil slipped into the other side on his knees and woke the priest rudely.

"She may violate the secrecy of this little box," Fairing replied, "but I cannot."

"You know what Maijstral is," Stencil said, angry, "and how many Caesars he serves. Can't you calm her? Don't they teach mesmerism at the Jesuit seminary?" He regretted the words immediately.

"Remember I am leaving," coldly: "speak to my successor, Father Avalanche. Perhaps you can teach him to betray God and the Church and this flock. You've failed with me. I must follow my conscience."

"What a damned enigma you are," Stencil burst out. "Your conscience is made of India rubber."

After a pause: "I can, of course, tell her that any drastic step she takes - threatening the welfare of the child, perhaps - is a mortal sin."

Anger had drained away. Remembering his "damned": "Forgive me, Father."

The priest chuckled. "I can't. You're an Anglican."

The woman had approached so quietly that both Stencil and Fairing jumped when she spoke.

"My opposite number."

The voice, the voice - of course he knew it. As the priest - flexible enough to betray no surprise-performed introductions, Stencil watched her face closely, as if waiting for it to reveal itself. But she wore an elaborate hat and veil; and the face was as generalized as that of any graceful woman seen in the street. One arm, sleeveless to the elbow, was gloved and nearly solid with bracelets.

So she had come to them. Stencil had kept his promise to Demivolt - had waited to see what Fairing would do.

"We have met, Signorina Manganese."

"In Florence," came the voice behind the veil. "Do you remember?" turning her head. In the hair visible below the hat was a carved ivory comb, and five crucified faces, long-suffering beneath their helmets.

"So."

"I wore the comb today. Knowing you would be here."

Whether or not he must now betray Demivolt, Stencil suspected he'd be little use henceforth in either preventing or manipulating for Whitehall's inscrutable purposes whatever would happen in June. What he had thought was an end had proved to be only a twenty-year stay. No use, he realized, asking if she'd followed him or if some third force had manipulated them toward meeting.

Riding out to the villa in her Benz, he showed none of the usual automobile-anxieties. What use? They'd come in, hadn't they, from their thousand separate streets. To enter, hand in hand, the hothouse of a Florentine spring once again; to be fayed and filleted hermetically into a square (interior? exterior?) where all art objects hover between inertia and waking, all shadows lengthen imperceptibly though night never falls, a total nostalgic hush rests on the heart's landscape. And all faces are blank masks; and spring is any drawn-out sense of exhaustion or a summer which like evening never comes.

"We are on the same side, aren't we." She smiled. They'd been sitting idly in one darkened drawing room, watching nothing - night on the sea - from a seaward window. "Our ends are the same: to keep Italy out of Malta. It is a second front, which certain elements in Italy cannot afford to have opened, now."

This woman caused Dupiro the ragman, her servant's love, to be murdered terribly.

I am aware of that.

You are aware of nothing. Poor old man.

"But our means are different."

"Let the patient reach a crisis," she said: "push him through the fever. End the malady as quickly as possible."

A hollow laugh: "One way or another."

"Your way would leave them strength to prolong it. My employers must move in a straight line. No sidetrackings. Annexationists are a minority in Italy, but bothersome."

"Absolute upheaval," a nostalgic smile: "that is your way, Victoria, of course." For in Florence, during the bloody demonstration before the Venezuelan Consulate, he had dragged her away from an unarmed policeman, whose face she was flaying with pointed fingernails. Hysterical girl, tattered velvet. Riot was her element, as surely as this dark room, almost creeping with amassed objects. The street and the hothouse; in V. were resolved, by some magic, the two extremes. She frightened him.

"Shall I tell you where I have been since our last closed room?"

"No. What need to tell me? No doubt I have passed and repassed you, or your work, in every city Whitehall has called me to." He chuckled fondly.

"How pleasant to watch Nothing." Her face (so rarely had he seen it that way!) was at peace, the live eye dead as the other, with the clock-iris. He'd not been surprised at the eye; no more than at the star sapphire sewn into her navel. There is surgery; and surgery. Even in Florence - the comb, which she would never let him touch or remove - he had noted an obsession with bodily incorporating little bits of inert matter.

"See my lovely shoes," as half an hour before he'd knelt to remove them. "I would so like to have an entire foot that way, a foot of amber and gold, with the veins, perhaps, in intaglio instead of bas-relief. How tiresome to have the same feet: one can only change one's shoes. But if a girl could have, oh, a lovely rainbow or wardrobe of different-hued, different-sized and -shaped feet . . ."

Girl? She was nearly forty. But then - aside from a body less alive, how much in fact had she changed? Wasn't she the same balloon-girl who'd seduced him on a leather couch in the Florence consulate twenty years ago?

"I must go," he told her.

"My caretaker will drive you back." As if conjured, the mutilated face appeared at the door. Whatever it felt at seeing them together didn't show in any change of expression. Perhaps it was too painful to change expression. The lantern that night had given an illusion of change: but Stencil saw now the face was fixed as any death-mask.

In the automobile, racketing back toward Valletta, neither spoke till they'd reached the city's verge.

"You must not hurt her, you know."

Stencil turned, struck by a thought. "You are young Gadrulfi - Godolphin - aren't you?"

"We both have an interest in her," Godolphin said. "I am her servant."

"I too, in a way. She will not be hurt. She cannot be."

III

Events began to shape themselves for June and the coming Assembly. If Demivolt detected any change in Stencil he gave no sign. Maijstral continued to report, and his wife kept silent; the child presumably growing inside her, also shaping itself for June.

Stencil and Veronica Manganese met often. It was hardly a matter of any mysterious "control"; she held no unspeakable secrets over his balding head, nor did she exert any particular sexual fascination. It could only be age's worst side-effect: nostalgia. A tilt toward the past so violent he found it increasingly more difficult to live in the real present he believed to be so politically crucial. The villa in Sliema became more and more a retreat into late-afternoon melancholy. His yarning with Mehemet, his sentimental drunks with Demivolt; these plus Fairing's protean finaglings and Carla Maijstral's inference to a humanitarian instinct he'd abandoned before entering the service, combined to undermine what virtu he'd brought through sixty years on the go, making him really no further use in Malta. Treacherous pasture, this island.