"You mean soul don't you. Of course you do. I wondered about the soul of that place. If it had a soul. Because their music, poetry, laws and ceremonies come no closer. They are skin too. Like the skin of a tattooed savage. I often put it that way to myself - like a woman. I hope I don't offend."

"It's all right."

"Civilians have curious ideas about the military, but I expect in this case there's some justice to what they think about us. This idea of the randy young subaltern somewhere out in the back of beyond, collecting himself a harem of dusky native women. I dare say a lot of us have this dream, though I've yet to run across anyone who's realized it. And I won't deny I get to thinking this way myself. I got to thinking that way in Vheissu. Somehow, there -" his forehead furrowed - "dreams are not, not closer to the waking world, but somehow I think, they do seem more real. Am I making sense to you?"

"Go on." She was watching him, rapt.

"But as if the place were, were a woman you had found somewhere out there, a dark woman tattooed from head to toes. And somehow you had got separated from the garrison and found yourself unable to get back, so that you had to be with her, close to her, day in and day out . . ."

"And you would be in love with her."

"At first. But soon that skin, the gaudy godawful riot of pattern and color, would begin to get between you and whatever it was in her that you thought you loved. And soon, in perhaps only a matter of days, it would get so bad that you would begin praying to whatever god you knew of to send some leprosy to her. To flay that tattooing to a heap of red, purple and green debris, leave the veins and ligaments raw and quivering and open at last to your eyes and your touch. I'm sorry." He wouldn't look at her. The wind blew rain over the wall. "Fifteen years. It was directly after we'd entered Khartoum. I'd seen some beastliness in my Oriental campaigning, but nothing to match that. We were to relieve General Gordon - oh you were, I suppose, a chit of a girl then, but you've read about it, surely. What the Mahdi had done to that city. To General Gordon, to his men. I was having trouble with fever then and no doubt it was seeing all the carrion and the waste on top of that. I wanted to get away, suddenly; it was as if a world of neat hollow squares and snappy counter-marching had deteriorated into rout or mindlessness. I'd always had friends on the staffs at Cairo, Bombay, Singapore. And in two weeks this surveying business came up, and I was in. I was always weaseling in you know, on some show where you wouldn't expect to find naval personnel. This time it was escorting a crew of civilian engineers into some of the worst country on earth. Oh, wild, romantic. Contour lines and fathom-markings, cross-hatchings and colors where before there were only blank spaces on the map. All for the Empire. This sort of thing might have been lurking at the back of my head. But then I only knew I wanted to get away. All very good to be crying St. George and no quarter about the Orient, but then the Mahdist army had been gibbering the same thing, really, in Arabic, and had certainly meant it at Khartoum."

Mercifully, he did not catch sight of her comb.

"Did you get maps of Vheissu?"

He hesitated. "No," he said. "No data ever got back, either to F.O. or to the Geographic Society. Only a report of failure. Bear in mind: It was bad country. Thirteen of us went in and three came out. Myself, my second-in-command, and a civilian whose name I have forgotten and who so far as I know has vanished from the earth without a trace."

"And your second-in-command?"

"He is, he is in hospital. Retired now." There was a silence. "There was never a second expedition," old Godolphin went on. "Political reasons, who could say? No one cared. I got out of it scotfree. Not my fault, they told me. I even received a personal commendation from the Queen, though it was all hushed up."

Victoria was tapping her foot absently. "And all this has some bearing on your, oh, espionage activities at present?"

Suddenly he looked older. The cigar had gone out again. He flung it into the grass; his hand shook. "Yes." He gestured helplessly at the church, the gray walls. "For all I know you might be - I may have been indiscreet."

Realizing that he was afraid of her, she leaned forward, intent. "Those who watch the cafes. Are they from Vheissu? Emissaries?"

The old man began to bite at his nails; slowly and methodically, using the top central and lower lateral incisors to make minute cuts along a perfect arc-segment. "You have discovered something about them," she pleaded, "something you cannot tell." Her voice, compassionate and exasperated, rang out in the little garden. "You must let me help you." Snip, snip. The rain fell off, stopped. "What sort of world is it where there isn't at least one person you can turn to if you're in danger?" Snip, snip. No answer. "How do you know the Consul-General can't help. Please, let me do something." The wind came in, lorn now of rain, over the wall. Something splashed lazily in the pool. The girl continued to harangue old Godolphin as he completed his right hand and switched to his left. Overhead the sky began to darken.

IV.

The eighth floor at Piazza delta Signoria 5 was murky and smelled of fried octopus. Evan, puffing from the last three flights of stairs, had to light four matches before he found his father's door. Tacked to it, instead of the card he'd expected to find, was a note on ragged-edged paper, which read simply "Evan." He squinted at it curiously. Except for the rain and the house's creakings the hallway was silent. He shrugged and tried the door. It opened. He groped his way inside, found the gas, lit it. The room was sparsely furnished. A pair of trousers had been tossed haphazard over the back of a chair; a white shirt, arms outstretched, lay on the bed. There were no other signs that anyone lived there: no trunks, no papers. Puzzled, he sat on the bed and tried to think. He pulled the telegram out of his pocket and read it again. Vheissu. The only clue he had to go on. Had old Godolphin really, after all, believed such a place existed?

Evan - even the boy - had never pressed his father for details. He had been aware that the expedition was a failure, caught perhaps some sense of personal guilt or agency in the droning, kindly voice which recited those stories. But that was all: he'd asked no questions, had simply sat and listened, as if anticipating that someday he would have to renounce Vheissu and that such renunciation would be simpler if he formed no commitment now. Very well: his father had been undisturbed a year ago, when Evan had last seen him; something must therefore have happened in the Antarctic. Or on the way back. Perhaps here in Florence. Why should the old man have left a note with only his son's name on it? Two possibilities: (a) if it were no note but rather a name-card and Evan the first alias to occur to Captain Hugh, or (b) if he had wished Evan to enter the room. Perhaps both. On a sudden hunch Evan picked up the pair of trousers, began rummaging through the pockets. He came up with three soldi and a cigarette case. Opening the case, he found four cigarettes, all hand-rolled. He scratched his stomach. Words came back to him: unwise to say too much in telegram. He sighed.

"All right then young Evan," he muttered to himself, "we shall play this thing to the hilt. Enter Godolphin, the veteran spy." Carefully he examined the case for hidden springs: felt along the lining for anything which might have been put underneath. Nothing. He began to search the room, prodding the mattress and scrutinizing it for recently-stitched seams. He combed the armoire, lit matches in dark corners, looked to see if anything was taped to the bottoms of chair seats. After twenty minutes he'd still found nothing and was beginning to feel inadequate as a spy. He threw himself disconsolate into a chair, picked up one of his father's cigarettes, struck a match. "Wait," he said. Shook out the match, pulled a table over, produced a penknife from his pocket and carefully slit each cigarette down the side, brushing the tobacco off onto the floor. On the third try he was successful. Written in pencil on the inside of the cigarette paper was: "Discovered here. Scheissvogel's 10 P.M. Be careful. FATHER. "

Evan looked at his watch. Now what in the devil was all this about? Why so elaborate? Had the old man been fooling with politics or was it a second childhood? He could do nothing for a few hours at least. He hoped something was afoot, if only to relieve the grayness of his exile, but was ready to be disappointed. Turning off the gas, he stepped into the hall, closed the door behind him, began to descend the stairs. He was wondering where Scheissvogel's could be when the stairs suddenly gave under his weight and he crashed through, clutching frantically in the air. He caught hold of the banister; it splintered at the lower end and swung him out over the stairwell, seven flights up. He hung there, listening to the nails edge slowly out of the railing's upper end. I, he thought, am the most uncoordinated oaf in the world. That thing is going to give any second now. He looked around, wondering what he should do. His feet hung two yards away from and several inches above the next banister. The ruined stairway he'd just left was a foot away from his right shoulder. The railing he hung on swayed dangerously. What can I lose, he thought. Only hope my timing isn't too off. Carefully he bent his right forearm up until his hand rested flat against the side of the stairway: then gave himself a violent shove. He swung out over the gaping well, heard the nails shriek free of the wood above him as he reached the extreme point of his swing, flung the railing away, dropped neatly astride the next banister and slid down it backwards, arriving at the seventh floor just as the railing crashed to earth far below. He climbed off the banister, shaking, and sat on the steps. Neat, he thought. Bravo, lad. Do well as an acrobat or something. But a moment later, after he had nearly been sick between his knees, he thought: how accidental was it, really? Those stairs were all right when I came up. He smiled nervously. He was getting almost as loony as his father. By the time he reached the street his shakiness had almost gone. He stood in front of the house for a minute, getting his bearings.

Before he knew it he'd been flanked by two policemen. "Your papers," one of them said.

Evan came aware, protesting automatically.

"Those are our orders, cavaliere." Evan caught a slight note of contempt in the "cavaliere." He produced his passport; the guardie nodded together on seeing his name.

"Would you mind telling me -" Evan began.

They were sorry, they could give him no information. He would have to accompany them.

"I demand to see the English Consul-General."

"But cavaliere, how do we know you are English? This passport could be forged. You may be from any country in the world. Even one we have never heard of."

Flesh began to crawl on the back of his neck. He had suddenly got the insane notion they were talking about Vheissu. "If your superiors can give a satisfactory explanation," he said, "I am at your service."

"Certainly, cavaliere." They walked across the square and around a corner to a waiting carriage. One of the policemen courteously relieved him of his umbrella and began to examine it closely. "Avanti," cried the other, and away they galloped down the Borgo di Greci.

V.

Earlier that day, the Venezuelan Consulate had been in an uproar. A coded message had come through from Rome at noon in the daily bag, warning of an upswing in revolutionary activities around Florence. Various of the local contacts had already reported a tall, mysterious figure in a wideawake hat lurking in the vicinity of the Consulate during the past few days.

"Be reasonable," urged Salazar, the Vice-Consul. "The worst we have to expect is a demonstration or two. What can they do? Break a few windows trample the shrubbery."

"Bombs," screamed Raton, his chief. "Destruction, pillage, rape, chaos. They can take us over, stage a coup set up a junta. What better place? They remember Garibaldi in this country. Look at Uruguay. They will have many allies. What do we have? You, myself, one cretin of a clerk and the charwoman."

The Vice-Consul opened his desk drawer and produced a bottle of Rufina. "My dear Raton," he said, "calm yourself. This ogre in the flapping hat may be one of our own men, sent over from Caracas to keep an eye on us." He poured the wine into two tumblers, handed one to Raton. "Besides which the communique from Rome said nothing definite. It did not even mention this enigmatic person."

"He is in on it," Raton said, slurping wine. "I have inquired. I know his name and that his activities are shady and illegal. Do you know what he is called?" He hesitated dramatically. "The Gaucho."

"Gauchos are in Argentina," Salazar observed soothingly. "And the name might also be a corruption of the French gauche. Perhaps he is left-handed."

"It is all we have to go on," Raton said obstinately. "It is the same continent, is it not?"

Salazar sighed. "What is it you want to do?"

"Enlist help from the government police here. What other course is there?"

Salazar refilled the tumblers. "First," he said, "international complications. There may be a question of jurisdiction. The grounds of this consulate are legally Venezuelan soil."

"We can have them place a cordon of guardie around us, outside the property," Raton said craftily. "That way they would be suppressing riot in Italian territory."

"Es posibile," the Vice-Consul shrugged. "But secondly, it might mean a loss of prestige with the higher echelons in Rome, in Caracas. We could easily make fools of ourselves, acting with such elaborate precautions on mere suspicion, mere whimsy."

"Whimsy!" shouted Raton. "Have I not seen this sinister figure with my own eyes?" One side of his mustache was soaked with wine. He wrung it out irritably. "There is something afoot," he went on, "something bigger than simple insurrection, bigger than a single country. The Foreign Office of this country has its eye on us. I cannot, of course, speak too indiscreetly, but I have been in this business longer than you, Salazar, and I tell you: we shall have much more to worry about than trampled bushes before this business is done."

"Of course," Salazar said peevishly, "if I am no longer party to your confidences . . ."

"You would not know. Perhaps they do not know at Rome. You will discover everything in due time. Soon enough," he added darkly.

"If it were only your job, I would say, fine: call in the Italians. Call in the English and the Germans too, for all I care. But if your glorious coup doesn't materialize, I come out of it just as badly."

"And then," Raton chuckled, "that idiot clerk can take over both our jobs."

Salazar was not mollified. "I wonder," he said thoughtfully, "what sort of Consul-General he would make."

Raton glowered. "I am still your superior."

"Very well then, your excellency -" spreading his hands hopelessly - "I await your orders."

"Contact the government police at once. Outline the situation, stress its urgency. Ask for a conference at their earliest possible convenience. Before sundown, that means."

"That is all?"

"You might request that this Gaucho be put under apprehension." Salazar did not answer. After a moment of glaring at the Rufina bottle, Raton turned and left the office. Salazar chewed on the end of his pen meditatively. It was midday. He gazed out the window, across the street at the Uffizi Gallery. He noticed clouds massing over the Arno. Perhaps there would be rain.

They caught up with the Gaucho finally in the Ufiizi. He'd been lounging against one wall of the Sala di Lorenzo Monaco, leering at the Birth of Venus. She was standing in half of what looked like a scungille shell; fat and blond, and the Gaucho, being a tedesco in spirit, appreciated this. But he didn't understand what was going on in the rest of the picture. There seemed to be some dispute over whether or not she should be nude or draped: on the right a glassy-eyed lady built like a pear tried to cover her up with a blanket and on the left an irritated young man with wings tried to blow the blanket away while a girl wearing hardly anything twined around him, probably trying to coax him back to bed. While this curious crew wrangled, Venus stood gazing off into God knew where, covering up with her long tresses. No one seemed to be looking at anyone else. A confusing picture. The Gaucho had no idea why Signor Mantissa should want it, but it was none of the Gaucho's affair. He scratched his head under the wideawake hat and turned with a still-tolerant smile to see four guardie heading into the gallery toward him, His first impulse was to run, his second to leap out a window. But he'd familiarized himself with the terrain and both impulses were checked almost immediately. "It is he," one of the guardie announced; "avanti!" The Gaucho stood his ground, cocking the hat aslant and putting his fists on his hips.

They surrounded him and a tenente with a beard informed him that he must be placed under apprehension. It was regrettable, true, but doubtless he would be released within a few days. The tenente advised him to make no disturbance.

"I could take all four of you," the Gaucho said. His mind was racing, planning tactics, calculating angles of enfilade. Had il gran signore Mantissa blundered so extravagantly as to be arrested? Had there been a complaint from the Venezuelan Consulate? He must be calm and admit nothing until he saw how things lay. He was escorted along the "Ritratti diversi"; then two short rights into a long passageway. He didn't remember it from Mantissa's map. "Where does this lead?"

"Over the Ponte Vecchio to the Pitti Gallery," the tenente said. "It is for tourists. We are not going that far." A perfect escape route. The idiot Mantissa! But halfway across the bridge they came out into the back roam of a tobacconist's. The police seemed familiar with this exit; not so good then, after all. Yet why all this secrecy? No city government was ever this cautious. It must therefore be the Venezuelan business. In the street was a closed landau, painted black. They hustled him in and started toward the right bank. He knew they wouldn't head directly for their destination. They did not: once over the bridge the driver began to zigzag, run in circles, retrace his way. The Gaucho settled back, cadged a cigarette from the tenente, and surveyed the situation. If it were the Venezuelans, he was in trouble. He had come to Florence specifically to organize the Venezuelan colony, who were centered in the northeast part of the city, near Via Cavour. There were only a few hundred of them: they kept to themselves and worked either in the tobacco factory or at the Mercato Centrale, or as sutlers to the Fourth Army Corps, whose installations were nearby. In two months the Gaucho had squared them away into ranks and uniforms, under the collective title Figli di Machiavelli. Not that they had any particular fondness for authority; nor that they were, politically speaking, especially liberal or nationalistic; it was simply that they enjoyed a good riot now and again, and if martial organization and the aegis of Machiavelli could expedite things, so much the better. The Gaucho had been promising them a riot for two months now, but the time was not yet favorable: things were quiet in Caracas, with only a few small skirmishes going on in the jungles. He was waiting for a major incident, a stimulus to which he could provide a thunderous antiphonal response back across the Atlantic's nave. It had been, after all, only two years since settlement of the boundary dispute with British Guiana, over which England and the United States nearly came to blows. His agents in Caracas kept reassuring him: the scene was being set, men were being armed, bribes given, it was only a matter of time. Apparently something had happened, or why should they be pulling him in? He had to figure out some way of getting a message to his lieutenant, Cuernacabron. Their usual rendezvous was at Scheissvogel's beer garden, in Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele. And there was still Mantissa and his Botticelli. Regrettable about that. It would have to wait till another night . . .

Imbecile!

Wasn't the Venezuelan Consulate located only some fifty meters from the Uffizi? If there were a demonstration in progress, the guardie would have their hands full; might not even hear the bomb go off. A diversionary feint! Mantissa, Cesare and the fat blonde would all get away cleanly. He might even escort them to their rendezvous under the bridge: as instigator it wouldn't be prudent to remain at the scene of the riot for very long.

This was all assuming, of course, that he could talk his way out of whatever charges the police would try to press, or, failing that, escape. But the essential thing right now was to get word to Cuernacabron. He felt the carriage begin to slacken speed. One of the guardie produced a silk handkerchief, doubled and redoubled it, and bound it over the Gaucho's eyes. The landau bounced to a halt. The tenente took his arm and led him through a courtyard, in a doorway, around a few corners, down a flight of stairs. "In here," ordered the tenente.

"May I ask a favor," the Gaucho said, feigning embarrassment. "With all the wine I have drunk today, I have not had the chance - That is, if I am to answer your questions honestly and amiably, I should feel more at ease if -"

"All right," the tenente growled. "Angelo, you keep an eye on him." The Gaucho smiled his thanks. He trailed down the hall after Angelo, who opened the door for him. "May I remove this?" he asked. "After all, un gabinetto e un gabinetto."

"Quite true," the guardia said. "And the windows are opaque. Go ahead."

"Mille grazie." The Gaucho removed his blindfold and was surprised to find himself in an elaborate W. C. There were even stalls. Only the Americans and the English could be so fastidious about plumbing. And the hallway outside, he remembered, had smelled of ink, paper and sealing wax; a consulate, surely. Both the American and the British consuls had their headquarters in Via Tornabuoni, so he knew that he was roughly three blocks west of Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele. Scheissvogel's was almost within calling distance.

"Hurry up," Angelo said.

"Are you going to watch?" the Gaucho asked, indignant. "Can't I have a little privacy? I am still a citizen of Florence. This was a republic once." Without waiting for a reply he entered a stall and shut the door behind him. "How do you expect me to escape?" he called jovially from inside. "Flush myself and swim away down the Arno?" While urinating he removed his collar and tie, scribbled a note to Cuernacabron on the back of the collar, reflected that occasionally the fox had his uses as well as the lion, replaced collar, tie and blindfold and stepped out.

"You decided to wear it after all," Angelo said.

"Testing my marksmanship." They both laughed. The tenente had stationed the other two guardie outside the door. "The man lacks charity," mused the Gaucho as they steered him back down the hall.

Soon he was in a private office, seated on a hard wooden chair. "Take the blindfold off," ordered a voice with an English accent. A wizened man, going bald, blinked at him across a desk.

"You are the Gaucho," he said.

"We can speak English if you like," the Gaucho said. Three of the guardie had withdrawn. The tenente and three plainclothesmen who looked to the Gaucho like state police stood ranged about the walls.

"You are perceptive," the balding man said.

The Gaucho decided to give at least the appearance of honesty. All the inglesi he knew seemed to have a fetish about playing cricket. "I am," he admitted. "Enough to know what this place is, your excellency."

The balding man smiled wistfully. "I am not the Consul-General," he said. "That is Major Percy Chapman, and he is occupied with other matters."

"Then I would guess," the Gaucho guessed, "that you are from the English Foreign Office. Cooperating with Italian police."

"Possibly. Since you seem to be of the inner circle in this matter, I presume you know why you have been brought here."

The possibility of a private arrangement with this man suddenly seemed plausible. He nodded.

"And we can talk honestly."

The Gaucho nodded again, grinning.

"Then let us start," the balding man said, "by your telling me all you know about Vheissu."

The Gaucho tugged perplexedly at one ear. Perhaps he had miscalculated, after all. "Venezuela, you mean?"

"I thought we had agreed not to fence. I said Vheissu."

All at once the Gaucho, for the first time since the jungles, felt afraid. When he answered it was with an insolence that rang hollow even to himself. "I know nothing about Vheissu," he said.

The balding man sighed. "Very well." He shuffled papers around on the desk for a moment. "Let us get down to the loathsome business of interrogation." He signaled to the three policemen, who closed swiftly in a triangle around the Gaucho.

VI.

When old Godolphin awoke it was to a wash of red sunset through the window. It was a minute or two till he remembered where he was. His eyes flickered from the darkening ceiling to a flowered bouffant dress hanging on the door of the armoire, to a confusion of brushes, vials and jars on the dressing table, and then he remembered that this was the girl, Victoria's, room. She had brought him here to rest for a while. He sat up on the bed, peering about the room nervously. He knew he was in the Savoy, on the eastern side of the Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele. But where had she gone? She had said she would stay, keep watch over him, see that no harm came. Now she had disappeared. He looked at his watch, twisting the dial to catch the failing sunlight. He'd been asleep only an hour or so. She had wasted little time in leaving. He arose, walked to the window, stood gazing out over the square, watching the sun go down. The thought struck him that she might after all he one of the enemy. He turned furiously, dashed across the room, twisted the doorknob. The door was locked. Damn the weakness, this compulsion to beg shrift of any random passer-by! He felt betrayal welling up around him, eager to drown, to destroy. He had stepped into the confessional and found himself instead in an oubliette. He crossed swiftly to the dressing table, looking for something to force the door, and discovered a message, neatly indited on scented note paper, for him: If you value your well-being as much as I do, please do not try to leave. Understand that I believe you and want to help you in your terrible need. I have gone to inform the British Consulate of what you have told me. I have had personal experience with them before; I know the Foreign Office to be highly capable and discreet. I shall return shortly after dark.

He balled the paper up in his fist, flung it across the room. Even taking a Christian view of the situation, even assuming her intentions were well-meant and that she was not leagued with those who watched the cafes, informing Chapman was a fatal error. He could not afford to have the F.O. in on this. He sank down on the bed, head hung, hands clasped tightly between his knees. Remorse and a numb impotence: they had been jolly chums, riding arrogant on his epaulets like guardian angels for fifteen years. "It was not my fault," he protested aloud to the empty room, as if the mother=of-pearl brushes, the lace and dimity, the delicate Vessels of scent would somehow find tongue and rally round him. "I was not meant to leave those mountains alive. That poor civilian engineer, dropped out of human sight; Pike-Leeming, incurable and insensate in a home in Wales; and Hugh Godolphin . . ." He arose, walked to the dressing table, stood staring at his face in the mirror. "He will only be a matter of time." A few yards of calico lay on the table, near them a pair of pinking shears. The girl seemed to be serious about her dressmaking scheme (she'd been quite honest with him about her past, not moved by his own confessional spirit so much as wanting to give him some token to prepare the way toward a mutual trustfulness. He hadn't been shocked by her disclosure of the affair with Goodfellow in Cairo. He thought it unfortunate: it seemed to have given her some quaint and romantic views about espionage.) He picked up the shears, turned them over in his hands. They were long and glittering. The ripple edges would make a nasty wound. He raised his eyes to those of his reflection with an inquiring look. The reflection smiled dolefully. "No," he said aloud. "Not yet. "

Forcing the door with the shears took only half a minute. Two flights down the back stairs and out a service entrance, and he found himself in Via Tosinghi, a block north of the Piazza. He headed east, away from the center of town. He had to find a way out of Florence. However he came out of this, he would have to resign his commission and live from here on in a fugitive, a temporary occupant of pension rooms, a dweller in the demimonde. Marching through the dusk, he saw his fate complete, pre-assembled, inescapable. No matter how he tacked yawed or dodged about he'd only be standing still while that treacherous reef loomed closer with every shift in course.

He turned right and headed toward the Duomo. Tourists sauntered by, cabs clattered in the street. He felt isolated from a human community - even a common humanity - which he had regarded until recently as little more than a cant concept which liberals were apt to use in making speeches. He watched the tourists gaping at the Campanile; he watched dispassionately without effort, curiously without commitment. He wondered at this phenomenon of tourism: what was it drove them to Thomas Cook Son in ever-increasing flocks every year to let themselves in for the Campagna's fevers, the Levant's squalor, the septic foods of Greece? To return to Ludgate Circus at the desolate end of every season having caressed the skin of each alien place, a peregrine or Don Juan of cities but no more able to talk of any mistress's heart than to cease keeping that interminable Catalogue, that non picciol' libro. Did he owe it to them, the lovers of skins, not to tell about Vheissu, not even to let them suspect the suicidal fact that below the glittering integument of every foreign land there is a hard dead-point of truth and that in all cases - even England's - it is the same kind of truth, can be phrased in identical words? He had lived with his knowledge since June and that headlong drive for the Pole; was able now to control or repress it almost at will. But the humans - those from whom, prodigal, he had strayed and could expect no future blessing - those four fat schoolmistresses whinnying softly to one another by the south portals of the Duomo, that fop in tweeds and clipped mustaches who came hastening by in fumes of lavender toward God knew what assignation; had they any notion of what inner magnitudes such control must draw on? His own, he knew, were nearly played out. He wandered down Via dell' Orivolo, counting the dark spaces between street lamps as he had once counted the number of puffs it took him to extinguish all his birthday candles. This year, next year, sometime, never. There were more candles at this point perhaps than even he could dream; but nearly all had been blown to twisted black wicks and the party needed very little to modulate to the most gently radiant of wakes. He turned left toward the hospital and surgeons' school, tiny and grayhaired and casting a shadow, he felt, much too large.

Footsteps behind him. On passing the next street lamp he saw the elongated shadows of helmeted heads bobbing about his quickening feet. Guardie? He nearly panicked: he'd been followed. He turned to face them, arms spread like the drooping wings of a condor at bay. He couldn't see them. "You are wanted for questioning," a voice purred in Italian, out of the darkness.

For no good reason he could see, life returned to him all at once, things were as they had always been, no different from leading a renegade squad against the Mahdi, invading Borneo in a whaleboat, attempting the Pole in midwinter. "Go to hell," he said cheerfully. Skipped out of the pool of light they'd trapped him in and went dashing off down a narrow, twisting side street. He heard footsteps, curses, cries of "Avanti!" behind him: would have laughed but couldn't waste the breath. Fifty meters on he turned abruptly down an alley. At the end was a trellis: he gasped it, swung himself up, began to climb. Young rose-thorns pricked his hands, the enemy howled closer. He came to a balcony, vaulted over, kicked in a set of French windows and entered a bedroom where a single candle burned. A man and a woman cringed nude and dumbfounded on the bed, their caresses frozen to immobility. "Madonna!" the woman screamed. "E il mio marito!" The man swore and tried to dive under the bed. Old Godolphin, blundering through the room, guffawed. My God, he was thinking irrelevantly, I have seen them before. I have seen this all twenty years ago in a music hall. He opened a door, found a stairway, hesitated briefly, then started up. No doubt about it, he was in a romantic mood. He'd be let down if there weren't a dash over the rooftops. By the time he gained the roof the voices of his pursuers were roaring in confusion far to his left. Disappointed, he made his way over the tops of two or three more buildings anyway, found an outside stairway and descended to another alley. For ten minutes he jogged along, taking in great breaths, steering sinuous course. A brilliantly lighted back window finally attracted his attention. He catfooted up to it, peered in. Inside, three men conferred anxiously amid a jungle of hothouse flowers shrubs and trees. One of them he recognized, and chuckled in amazement. It is a small planet indeed, he thought, whose nether end I have seen. He tapped on the window. "Raf," he called softly.

Signor Mantissa glanced up, startled. "Minghe," he said, seeing Godolphin's grinning face. "The old inglese. Let him in, someone." The florist, red-faced and disapproving, opened the rear door. Godolphin stepped in quickly, the two men embraced, Cesare scratched his head. The florist retreated behind a fan palm after resecuring the door.

"A long way from Port Said," Signor Mantissa said.

"Not so far," Godolphin said, "nor so long."

Here was the sort of friendship which doesn't decay, however gapped it may be over the years with arid stretches of isolation from one another; more significant a renewal of that instant, motiveless acknowledgment of kinship one autumn morning four years back on the coaling piers at the head of the Suez Canal. Godolphin, impeccable in full dress uniform, preparing to inspect his man-o'-war, Rafael Mantissa the entrepreneur, overseeing the embarkation of a fleet of bumboats he'd acquired in a drunken baccarat game in Cannes the month before, had each touched glances and seen immediately in the other an identical uprootedness, a similarly catholic despair. Before they spoke they were friends. Soon they had gone out and got drunk together, told each other their lives; were in fights, found, it seamed, a temporary home in the half-world behind Port Said's Europeanized boulevards. No rot about eternal friendship or blood brotherhood ever needed to be spoken.

"What is it, my friend," Signor Mantissa said now.

"Do you remember, once," Godolphin said, "a place, I told you: Vheissu." It hadn't been the same as telling his son, or the Board of Inquiry, or Victoria a few hours before. Telling Raf had been like comparing notes with a fellow sea dog on a liberty port both had visited.

Signor Mantissa made a sympathetic moue. "That again," he said.