V. (67 page)

"Are we looking for anything particular," Stencil asked.

A lantern came on behind them and a voice said, "Turn round slowly. Hands away from your sides."

Stencil had a strong stomach and all the cynicism of a non-political career and an approaching second childhood. But the face above the lantern did give him a mild shock. It is too grotesque, too deliberately, preciously Gothic to be real, he protested to himself. The upper part of the nose seemed to have slid down, giving an exaggerated saddle-and-hump; the chin cut off at midpoint to slope concave back up the other side, pulling part of the lip up in a scarred half-smile. Just under the eye socket on the same side winked a roughly circular expanse of silver. The shadows thrown by the lantern made it worse. The other hand held a revolver.

"You are spies?" the voice inquired, an English voice twisted somehow by a mouth cavity one could only infer. "Let me see your faces." He moved the lantern closer and Stencil saw a change begin to grow in the eyes, all that had been human in the face to begin with.

"Both of you," the mouth said. "Both of you then." And tears began to squeeze from the eyes. "Then you know it is she, and why I am here." He repocketed the revolver, turned, slumped off toward the villa. Stencil started after him, but Demivolt put out an arm. At a door the man turned. "Can't you let us alone? Let her make her own peace? Let me be a simple caretaker? I want nothing more from England." The last words were spoken so weakly the sea wind nearly carried them off. The lantern and its holder vanished behind the door.

"Old running mate," Demivolt said, "there is a tremendous nostalgia about this show. Do you feel it? The pain of a return home."

"Was that in Florence?"

"The rest of us were. Why not?"

"I don't like duplication of effort."

"This occupation sees nothing else." The tone was grim.

"Another one?"

"Oh hardly so soon. But give it twenty years."

Although Stencil had been face to face with her caretaker, this was the fast meeting: he must have reckoned it even then as a "first meeting." Suspecting anyway that Veronica Manganese and he had met before, why surely they would meet again.

II

But the second meeting had to wait on the coming of a kind of false spring, where smells of the Harbour drifted to the highest reaches of Valletta and flocks of sea birds consulted dispiritedly down in the Dockyard country, aping the actions of their human co-tenants.

There had been no attack on the Chronicle. On 3 February political censorship of the Maltese press was abolished. La Voce del Popolo, the Mizzist paper, promptly began agitating. Articles praising Italy and attacking Britain; excerpts copied from the foreign press, comparing Malta to certain Italian provinces under a tyrannical Austrian rule. The vernacular press followed suit. None of it worried Stencil particularly. When the freedom to criticize a government had been suspended four years by the same government, a great deal of pent-up resentment would obviously be released in a voluminous - though not necessarily effective - torrent.

But three weeks later, a "National Assembly" met in Valletta to draft a request for a liberal constitution. All shades of political opinion - Abstentionists, Moderates, the Comitato Patriottico - were represented. The gathering met at the club Giovine Malta, which was Mizzist-controlled.

"Trouble," Demivolt said darkly.

"Not necessarily." Though Stencil knew the difference between "political gathering" and "mob" is fine indeed. Anything might touch it off.

The night before the meeting a play at the Manoel Theatre, dealing with Austrian oppression in Italy, worked the crowd into a gloriously foul humor. The actors tossed in several topical ad libs which did little to improve the general mood. Rollickers in the street sang La Bella Gigogin. Maijstral reported that a few Mizzists and Bolshevists were doing their best to drum up enthusiasm for a riot among the Dockyard workers. The extent of their success was doubtful. Maijstral shrugged. It might only be the weather. An unofficial notice had also gone out, advising merchants to close up their establishments.

"Considerate of them," Demivolt remarked next day as they strolled down Strada Reale. A few shops and cafes had been closed. A quick check revealed that the owners had Mizzist sympathies.

As the day progressed small bands of agitators, most of them with a holiday air (as if rioting were a healthy avocation like handicrafts or outdoor sports), roamed the streets, breaking windows, wrecking furniture, yelling at the merchants still open to close up their shops. But for some reason a spark was missing. Rain swept by in squalls at intervals throughout the day.

"Grasp this moment," Demivolt said, "hold it close, examine it, treasure it. It is one of those rare occasions on which advance intelligence has proved to be correct."

True: no one had been particularly excited. But Stencil wondered about that missing catalyst. Any minor accident: a break in the clouds, a catastrophic shivering at the first tentative blow to a shop window, the topology of an object of destruction (up a hill or down - it makes a difference) - anything might swell a merely mischievous humor to suddenly apocalyptic rage.

But all that came from the meeting was adoption of Mizzi's resolution calling for complete independence from Great Britain. La Voce del Popolo gibbered triumphantly. A new meeting of the Assembly was called for 7 June.

"Three and a half months," Stencil said. "It will be warmer then," Demivolt shrugged. Whereas Mizzi, an Extremist, had been secretary of the February meeting, one Dr. Mifsud, a Moderate, would be secretary next time. The Moderates wanted to sit down and discuss the constitutional question with Hunter-Blair and the Secretary of State for the Colonies, rather than make any total break with England. And the Moderates, come June, would be in the majority.

"It seems rather a good lookout," Demivolt protested. "If anything was going to happen, it would have happened while Mizzi was ascendant."

"It rained," said Stencil. "It was cold."

La Voce del Popolo and the Maltese-language papers continued their attacks on the government. Maijstral reported twice a week, giving a general picture of deepening discontent among the yardbirds, but they were afflicted by a soggy lethargy which must wait for the heat of summer to dry it, the spark of a leader, a Mizzi or equivalent, to touch it into anything more explosive. As the weeks passed Stencil came to know more about his double agent. It came out that Maijstral lived near the Dockyard with his young wife Carla. Carla was pregnant, the child was due in June.

"How does she feel," Stencil asked once with unaccustomed indiscretion, "about your being in this occupation."

"She will be a mother soon," Maijstral answered, gloomy. "That's all she thinks about or feels. You know what it is to be a mother on this island."

Stencil's boy-romanticism seized on this: perhaps there was more than a professional element to the nighttime meetings out at the Sammut villa. He was almost tempted to ask Maijstral to spy on Veronica Manganese; but Demivolt, the voice of reason, was reluctant.

"Tip our hand that way. We have an ear already in the villa. Dupiro, the ragman, who is quite genuinely in love with a kitchen maid there."

If the Dockyard were the only trouble spot to watch Stencil might have fallen into the same torpor that afflicted the yardbirds. But his other contact - Father Linus Fairing, S.J., the voice whose call for help had been heard among the mass mirth of November and set a-clattering the emotional and intuitive levers, pawls or ratchets to propel Stencil across a continent and sea for solid reasons as yet unclear to him - this Jesuit saw and heard (possibly did) enough to keep Stencil moderately hagridden.

"Being a Jesuit," said the priest, "of course there are certain attitudes . . . we do not control the world in secret, Stencil. We have no spy net, no political nerve-center at the Vatican." Oh, Stencil was unbiased enough. Though with his upbringing he could hardly have sidestepped exposure to a certain C. of E. leeriness toward the Society of Jesus. But he objected to Fairing's digressions; the fog of political opinion that crept in to warp what should have been cleareyed reporting. At their initial meeting - shortly after the first trip out to Veronica Manganese's villa - Fairing had made a poor first impression. He'd tried to be chummy, even - good God - to talk shop. Stencil was reminded of certain otherwise competent Anglo-Indians in the civil service. "We are discriminated against," seemed to be the complaint: "we are despised by white and Asian alike. Very well, we shall play to the hilt this false role popular prejudice believes us to play." How many deliberate heightenings of dialect, breaches of conversational taste, gaucheries at table had Stencil seen dedicated to that intention?

So with Fairing. "We are all spies in this together," that was the tack he took. Stencil had been interested only in information. He wasn't about to let personality enter the Situation; this would be courting chaos. Fairing realizing soon enough that Stencil was not, after all, a No Popery man, did give up this arrogant form of honesty far more exasperating behavior. Here, seemed to be his assumption, here is a spy who has risen above the political turmoil of his time. Here is Machiavelli on the rack, less concerned with immediacy than idea. Accordingly the subjective fog crept in to obscure his weekly reports.

"Any tug in the direction of anarchy is anti-Christian," he protested once, having sucked Stencil into confessing his theory of Paracletian politics. "The Church has matured, after all. Like a young person she has passed from promiscuity to authority. You are nearly two millennia out-of-date."

An old dame trying to cover up a flaming youth? Ha!

Actually Fairing, as a source, was ideal. Malta being, after all, a Roman Catholic island, the Father was in a position to come by enough information outside the confessional to clarify (at least) their picture of every disaffected group on the island. Though Stencil was less than happy over the quality of these reports, quantity was no problem. But what had provoked his complaint to Mungo Sheaves in the first place? What was the man afraid of?

For it was not mere love of politicking and intrigue. If he did believe in the authority of the Church, of institutions, then perhaps four years of sitting sequestered, outside the suspension of peace, which had lately convulsed the rest of the Old World, this quarantine might have brought him to some belief in Malta as a charmed circle, some stable domain of peace.

And then with Armistice to be exposed abruptly at every level to a daftness for overthrow among his parishioners . . . of course.

It was the Paraclete he feared. He was quite content with a Son grown to manhood.

Fairing, Maijstral, puzzlement over the identity of the hideous face above the lantern; these occupied Stencil well into March. Until one afternoon, arriving at the church early for a meeting, he saw Veronica Manganese emerge from the confessional, head bowed, face shadowed as he had seen her in Strada Stretta. She knelt at the altar rail and began to pray penance. Stencil half-knelt in the rear of the church, elbows hung over the back of the pew in front of him. Appearing to be a good Catholic, appearing to be carrying on an affair with Maijstral; nothing suspicious in either. But both at once and with (he imagined) scores of father-confessors in Valletta alone for her to choose from; it was as close to superstition as Stencil ever got. Now and again events would fall into ominous patterns.

Was Fairing too a double agent? If so then it was actually the woman who'd brought F.O. into this. What twisted Italian casuistry advised revealing any plot-in-mounting to one's enemies?

She arose and left the church, passing Stencil on route. Their eyes met. Demivolt's remark came back to him: "A tremendous nostalgia about this show."

Nostalgia and melancholy . . . Hadn't he bridged two worlds? The changes couldn't have been all in him. It must be an alien passion in Malta where all history seemed simultaneously present, where all streets were strait with ghosts, where in a sea whose uneasy floor made and unmade islands every year this stone fish and Ghaudex and the rocks called Cumin-seed and Peppercorn had remained fixed realities since time out of mind. In London were too many distractions. History there was the record of an evolution. One-way and ongoing. Monuments, buildings, plaques were remembrances only; but in Valletta remembrances seemed almost to live.

Stencil, at home everywhere in Europe, had thus come out of his element. Recognizing it was his first step down. A spy has no element to be out of, and not feeling "at home" is a sign of weakness.

F.O. continued to be uncommunicative and unhelpful. Stencil raised the question to Demivolt: had they been turned out to pasture here?

"I've been afraid of that. We are old."

"It was different once," Stencil asked, "wasn't it?"

They went out that night and got maudlin-drunk. But nostalgic melancholy is a fine emotion, becoming blunted on alcohol. Stencil regretted the binge. He remembered rollicking down the hill to Strait Street, well past midnight, singing old vaudeville songs. What was happening?

There came, in time's fullness, One of Those Days. After a spring morning made horrible by another night of heavy drinking Stencil arrived at Fairing's church to learn the priest was being transferred.

"To America. There is nothing I can do." Again the old. fellow-professional smile.

Could Stencil have sneered "God's will"; not likely. His case wasn't yet that far advanced. The Church's will, certainly, and Fairing was the type to bow to Authority. Here was after all another Englishman. So they were, in a sense, brothers in exile.

"Hardly," the priest smiled. "In the matter of Caesar and God, a Jesuit need not be as flexible as you might think. There's no conflict of interests."

"As there is between Caesar and Fairing? Or Caesar and Stencil?"

"Something like that."

"Sahha, then. I suppose your relief . . ."

"Father Avalanche is younger. Don't lead him into bad habits."