"You have business now. I'll tell you later."

"No, nothing. This matter of a Judas tree."

"I have no more," Gadrulfi the florist muttered. "I've been telling him this far half an hour."

"He's holding out," Cesare said ominously. "Two hundred and fifty lire he wants, this time."

Godolphin smiled. "What chicanery with the law requires a Judas tree?"

Without hesitation Signor Mantissa explained. "And now," he concluded, "we need a duplicate, which we will let the police find."

Godolphin whistled. "You leave Florence tonight then."

"One way or the other, on the river barge at midnight, si:"

"And there would be room far one more?"

"My friend." Signor Mantissa gripped him by the biceps. "For you," he said. Godolphin nodded. "You are in trouble. Of course. You need not even have asked. If you had come along even without a word I would have slain the barge captain at his first protest." The old man grinned. He was beginning to feel at least halfway secure for the first time in weeks.

"Let me make up the extra fifty lire," he said.

"I could not allow -"

"Nonsense. Get the Judas tree." Sullenly the florist pocketed the money, shambled to the corner and dragged a Judas tree, growing in a wine vat, from behind a thick tangle of ferns.

"The three of us can handle it," Cesare said. "Where to?"

"The Ponte Vecchio," Signor Mantissa said. "And then to Scheissvogel's. Remember, Cesare, a firm and united front. We must not let the Gaucho intimidate us. We may have to use his bomb, but we shall also have the Judas trees. The lion and the fox."

They formed a triangle around the tree and lifted. The florist held the back door open for them. They carried the tree twenty meters down an alley to a waiting carriage.

"Andiam'," Signor Mantissa cried. The horses moved off at a trot.

"I am to meet my son at Scheissvogel's in a few hours," Godolphin said. He had almost forgotten that Evan was probably now in the city. "I thought a beer hall would be safer than a cafe. But perhaps it is dangerous after all. The guardie are after me. They and others may have the place under surveillance."

Signor Mantissa took a sharp right expertly. "Ridiculous," he said. "Trust me. You are safe with Mantissa, I will defend your life as long as I have my own." Godolphin did not answer for a moment, then only shook his head in acceptance. For now he found himself wanting to see Evan; almost desperately. "You will see your son. It will be a jolly family reunion."

Cesare was uncorking a bottle of wine and singing an old revolutionary song. A wind had risen off the Arno. It blew Signor Mantissa's hair into a pale flutter. They headed toward the center of town, rattling along at a hollow clip. Cesare's mournful singing soon dissipated in the seeming vastness of that street.

VII.

The Englishman who had questioned the Gaucho was named Stencil. A little after sundown he was in Major Chapman's study, sitting bemused in a deep leather chair, his scarred Algerian briar gone out unnoticed in the ashtray beside him. In his left hand he held a dozen wooden penholders, recently fitted with shiny new nibs. With his right hand he was hurling the pens methodically, like darts, at a large photograph of the current Foreign Minister which hung on the wall opposite. So far he had scored only a single hit, in the center of the Minister's forehead. This had made his chief resemble a benevolent unicorn, which was amusing but hardly rectified The Situation. The Situation at the moment was frankly appalling. More than that, it seemed to be irreparably bitched up.

The door suddenly burst open and a rangy man, prematurely gray, came roaring in. "They've found him," he said, not too elated.

Stencil glanced up quizzically, a pen poised in his hand. "The old man?"

"At the Savoy. A girl, a young English girl. Has him locked in. She just told us. Walked in and announced, calmly enough -"

"Go check it out, then," Stencil interrupted. "Though he's probably bolted by now."

"Don't you want to see her?"

"Pretty?"

"Rather."

"No then. Things are bad enough as it is, if you see my point. I'll leave her to you, Demivolt."

"Bravo, Sidney. Dedicated to duty, aren't you. St. George and no quarter. I say. Well. I'm off, then. Don't say I didn't give you first chance."

Stencil smiled. "You're acting like a chorus boy. Perhaps I will see her. Later, when you're done."

Demivolt smiled woefully. "It makes The Situation halfway tolerable, you know." And bounded sadly back out through the door.

Stencil gritted his teeth. Oh, The Situation. The bloody Situation. In his more philosophical moments he would wander about this abstract entity The Situation, its idea, the details of its mechanism. He remembered times when whole embassiesful of personnel had simply run amok and gibbering in the streets when confronted with a Situation which refused to make sense no matter who looked at it, or from what angle. He had once had a school chum named Covess. They had entered the diplomatic service together, worked their way up neck and neck. Until last year along name the Fashoda crisis and quite early one morning Covess was discovered in spats and a pith helmet, working his way around Piccadilly trying to recruit volunteers to invade France. There had been some idea of commandeering a Cunard liner. By the time they caught him he'd sworn in several costermongers, two streetwalkers and a music-hall comedian. Stencil remembered painfully that they bad all been singing Onward, Christian Soldiers in various keys and tempi.

He had decided long ago that no Situation had any objective reality: it only existed in the minds of those who happened to be in on it at any specific moment. Since these several minds tended to form a sum total or complex more mongrel than homogeneous, The Situation must necessarily appear to a single observer much like a diagram in four dimensions to an eye conditioned to seeing its world in only three. Hence the success or failure of any diplomatic issue must vary directly with the degree of rapport achieved by the team confronting it. This had led to the near-obsession with teamwork which had inspired his colleagues to dub him Soft-shoe Sidney, on the assumption that he was at his best working in front of a chorus line.

But it was a neat theory, and he was in love with it. The only consolation he drew from the present chaos was that his theory managed to explain it. Brought up by a pair of bleak Nonconformist aunts, he had acquired the Anglo-Saxon tendency to group northern/Protestant/intellectual against Mediterranean/Roman Catholic/irrational. He had thus arrived in Florence with a deep-rooted and chiefly subliminal ill will toward all things Italian, and the subsequent conduct of his running mates from the secret police confirmed it. What sort of Situation could one expect from such a scurvy and heterogeneous crew?

The matter of this English lad, for example: Godolphin, alias Gadrulfi. The Italians claimed they had been unable after an hour of interrogation to extract anything about his father, the naval officer. Yet the first thing the boy had done when they'd finally brought him round to the British Consulate was to ask for Stencil's help in locating old Godolphin. He had been quite ready to answer all inquiries about Vheissu (although he'd done little more than recapitulate information already in F.O.'s possession); he had gratuitously made mention of the rendezvous at Scheissvogel's at ten tonight; in general he'd exhibited the honest concern and bewilderment of any English tourist confronted with a happening outside the ken of his Baedeker or the power of Cook's to deal with it. And this simply did not fit in with the picture Stencil had formed of father and son as cunning arch-professionals. Their employers, whoever they might be (Scheissvogel's was a German beer hall, which might be significant, especially so with Italy a member of the Dreibund), could not tolerate such simplicity. This show was too big, too serious, to be carried out by any but the top men in the field.

The Department had been keeping a dossier on old Godolphin since '84, when the surveying expedition had been all but wiped out. The name Vheissu occurred in it only once, in a secret F.O. memorandum to the Secretary of State for War, a memo condensed from Godolphin's personal testimony. But a week ago the Italian Embassy in London sent round a copy of a telegram which the censor at Florence, after informing the state police, had let go through. The Embassy had included no explanation except for a scribbled note on the copy: "This may be of interest to you. Cooperation to our mutual advantage." It was initialed by the Italian Ambassador. On seeing Vheissu a live file again, Stencil's chief had alerted operatives in Deauville and Florence to keep a close eye on father and son. Inquiries began to be made around the Geographical Society. Since the original had been somehow lost, junior researchers started piecing together the text of Godolphin's testimony at the time of the incident by interviewing all available members of the original Board of Inquiry. The chief had been puzzled that no code was used in the telegram; but it had only strengthened Stencil's conviction that the Department was up against a pair of veterans. Such arrogance, he felt, such cocksureness was exasperating and one hated them for it, but at the same time one was overcome with admiration. Not bothering to use a code was the devil-may-care gesture of the true sportsman.

The door opened hesitantly. "I say, Mr. Stencil."

"Yes, Moffit. Do what I told you?"

"They're together. Mine not to reason why, you know."

"Bravo. Give them an hour or so together. After that we let young Gadrulfi out. Tell him we have nothing really to hold him on, sorry for the inconvenience, pip-pip, a rivederci. You know."

"And then follow him, eh. Game is afoot, ha, ha."

"Oh, he'll go to Scheissvogel's. We've advised him to keep the rendezvous, and whether he's straight or not he'll meet the old man. At least if he's playing his game the way we think he is."

"And the Gaucho?"

"Give him another hour. Then if he wants to escape, let him."

"Chancy, Mr. Stencil."

"Enough, Moffit. Back in the chorus line."

"Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay," said Moffit, soft-shoeing out the door. Stencil heaved a sigh, leaned forward in the chair and recommenced his dart game. Soon a second hit, two inches from the first, had transfigured the Minister into a lopsided goat. Stencil gritted his teeth. "Pluck, lad," he muttered. "Before the girl arrives the old bastard should look like a blooming hedgehog."

Two cells away there was a loud morra game in progress. Outside the window, somewhere, a girl sang about her love, killed defending his homeland in a faraway war.

"She's singing for the tourists," the Gaucho complained bitterly, "she must be. No one ever sings in Florence. No one ever used to. Except now and again the Venezuelan friends I told you about. But they sing marching songs, which are useful for morale."

Evan stood by the cell door, leaning his forehead against the bars. "You may no longer have any Venezuelan friends," he said. "They've probably all been rounded up and pushed into the sea."

The Gaucho came over and gripped Evan's shoulder sympathetically. "You are still young," he said "I know how it must have been. That's the way they work. They attack a man's spirit. You will see your father again. I will see my friends. Tonight. We're going to stage the most wonderful festa this city has seen since Savonarola was burned."

Evan looked around hopelessly at the small cell, the heavy bars. "They told me I might be released soon. But you stand a fat chance of doing anything tonight. Except lose sleep."

The Gaucho laughed. "I think they will release me too. I told them nothing. I'm used to their ways. They are stupid, and easily gotten round."

Evan clenched the bars furiously. "Stupid! Not only stupid. Deranged. Illiterate. Some bungling clerk misspelled my name Gadrulfi, and they refused to call me anything else. It was an alias, they said. Did it not say Gadrulfi in my dossier? Was it not down in black and white?"

"Ideas are so novel to them. Once they get hold of one, having the vague idea it is somehow precious, they wish to keep possession of it."

"If that were all. But someone in the higher echelons had got the idea Vheissu was a code name for Venezuela. Either that or it was the same bloody clerk, or his brother, who never learned to spell."

"They asked me about Vheissu," the Gaucho mused. "What could I say? This time I really knew nothing. The English consider it important."

"But they don't tell you why. All they give you are mysterious hints. The Germans are apparently in on it. The Antarctic is concerned in some way. Perhaps in a matter of weeks, they say, the whole world will be plunged into apocalypse. And they think I am in on it. And you. Why else, if they are going to release us anyway, did they throw us into the same cell? We'll be followed wherever we go. Here we are, in the thick of a grand cabal, and we haven't the slightest notion of what's going on."

"I hope you didn't believe them. Diplomatic people always talk that way. They are living always on the verge of some precipice or other. Without a crisis they wouldn't be able to sleep nights."

Evan turned slowly to face his companion. "But I do believe them," he said calmly. "Let me tell you. About my father. He would sit in my room, before I went to sleep, and spin yarns about this Vheissu. About the spider-monkeys, and the time he saw a human sacrifice, and the rivers whose fish are sometimes opalescent and sometimes the color of fire. They circle round you when you go in to bathe and dance a kind of elaborate ritual all about, to protect you from evil. And there are volcanoes with cities inside them which once every hundred years erupt into flaming hell but people go to live in them anyway. And men in the hills with blue faces and women in the valleys who give birth to nothing but sets of triplets, and beggars who belong to guilds and hold jolly festivals and entertainments all summer long.

"You know haw a boy is. There comes a time for departure, a point where he sees confirmed the suspicion he'd had for some time that his father is not a god, not even an oracle. He sees that he no longer has any right to any such faith. So Vheissu becomes a bedtime story or fairy tale after all, and the boy a superior version of his merely human father.

"I thought Captain Hugh was mad; I would have signed the commitment papers myself. But at Piazza della Signoria 5 I was nearly killed in something that could not have been an accident, a caprice of the inanimate world; and from then till now I have seen two governments hagridden to alienation over this fairy tale or obsession I thought was my father's own. As if this condition of being just human, which had made Vheissu and my boy's love for him a lie, were now vindicating them both for me, showing them to have been truth all along and after all. Because the Italians and the English in those consulates and even that illiterate clerk are all men. Their anxiety is the same as my father's, what is coming to be my own, and perhaps in a few weeks what will be the anxiety of everyone living in a world none of us wants to see lit into holocaust. Call it a kind of communion, surviving somehow on a mucked-up planet which God knows none of us like very much. But it is our planet and we live on it anyway."

The Gaucho did not answer. He walked to the window, stood gazing out. The girl was singing now about a sailor, halfway round the world from home and his betrothed. From down the corridor floated cries: "Cinque, tre, otto, brrrr!" Soon the Gaucho put his hands to his neck, removed his collar. He came back to Evan.

"If they let you out," he said, "in time to see your father, there is also at Scheissvogel's a friend of mine. His name is Cuernacabron. Everyone knows him there. I would esteem it a favor if you would take him this, a message." Evan took the collar and pocketed it absently. A thought occurred to him.

"But they will see your collar missing."

The Gaucho grinned, stripped off his shirt and tossed it under a bunk. "It is warm, I will tell them. Thank you for reminding me. It's not easy for me to think like a fox."

"How do you propose to get out?"

"Simply. When the turnkey comes to let you out, we beat him unconscious, take his keys, fight our way to freedom."

"If both of us get away, should I still take the message?"

"Si. I must first go to Via Cavour. I will be at Scheissvogel's later, to see some associates on another matter. Un gran colpo, if things work right."

Soon footsteps, jangling keys approached down the corridor. "He reads our minds," the Gaucho chuckled. Evan turned to him quickly, clasped his hand.

"Good luck."

"Put down your bludgeon, Gaucho," the turnkey called in a cheerful voice. "You are to be released, both of you."

"Ah, che fortuna," said the Gaucho mournfully. He went back to the window. It seemed that the girl's voice could be heard all over April. The Gaucho stood on tiptoe. "Un' gazz'!" he screamed.

VIII.

Around Italian spy circles the latest joke was about an Englishman who cuckolded his Italian friend. The husband came home one night to find the faithless pair in flagrante delicto on the bed. Enraged, he pulled out a pistol and was about to take revenge when the Englishman held up a restraining hand. "I say old chap," he said loftily, "we're not going to have any dissension in the ranks, are we? Think what this might do to the Quadruple Alliance."

The author of this parable was one Ferrante, a drinker of absinthe and destroyer of virginity. He was trying to grow a beard. He hated politics. Like a few thousand other young men in Florence he fancied himself a neo-Machiavellian. He took the long view, having only two articles of faith: (a) the Foreign Service in Italy was irreparably corrupt and nitwit, and (b) someone should assassinate Umberto I. Ferrante had been assigned to the Venezuelan problem for half a year and was beginning to see no way out of it except suicide.

That evening he was wandering around secret police headquarters with a small squid in one hand, looking for someplace to cook it. He'd just bought it at the market, it was for supper. The hub of spy activities in Florence was the second floor of a factory which made musical instruments for devotees of the Renaissance and Middle Ages. It was run nominally by an Austrian named Vogt, who worked painstakingly during the daylight hours putting together rebecs, shawms and theorbos, and spied at night. In the legal or everyday segment of his life he employed as helpers a Negro named Gascoigne who would bring in his friends from time to time to test out the instruments, and Vogt's mother, an incredibly aged butterball of a woman who was under the curious illusion that she'd had an affair with Palestrina in her girlhood. She would be constantly haranguing visitors with fond reminiscences about "Giovannino," these being mostly colorful allegations of sexual eccentricity in the composer. If these two were in on Vogt's espionage activities, no one was aware of it, not even Ferrante, who made it his business to spy on his colleagues as well as any more appropriate quarry. Vogt, however, being Austrian, could probably be given credit for discretion. Ferrante had no faith in covenants, he regarded them as temporary and more often than not farcical. But he reasoned that as long as you'd made an alliance in the first place you might as well comply with its rules as long as was expedient. Since 1882, then, Germans and Austrians had been temporarily acceptable. But English most assuredly not. Which had given rise to his joke about the cuckolded husband. He saw no reason for cooperating with London on this matter. It was a plot, he suspected, on Britain's part, to force a wedge into the Triple Alliance, to divide the enemies of England so that England could deal with them separately and at her leisure.

He descended into the kitchen. Horrible screeching noises were coming from inside. Naturally leery of anything deviating from his private norm, Ferrante dropped quietly to hands and knees, crawled cautiously up behind the stove and peered around it. It was the old woman, playing some sort of air on a viola da gamba. She did not play very well. When she saw Ferrante she put the bow down and glared at him.

"A thousand pardons, signora," Ferrante said, getting to his feet. "I did not mean to interrupt the music. I was wondering if I might borrow a skillet and some oil. My supper. Which will take no more than a few minutes." He waved the squid at her placatingly.

"Ferrante," she croaked abruptly, "this is no time for subtlety. Much is at stake."

Ferrante was taken aback. Had she been snooping? Or merely in her son's confidence? "I do not understand," he replied cautiously.

"That is nonsense," she retorted. "The English know something you did not. It all began with this silly Venezuelan business, but by accident, unaware, your colleagues have stumbled on something so vast and terrifying that they are afraid even to speak its name aloud."

"Perhaps."

"Is it not true, then, that the young Gadrulfi has testified to Herr Stencil that his father believes there to be agents of Vheissu present in this city?"

"Gadrulfi is a florist," said Ferrante impassively, "whom we have under surveillance. He is associated with partners of the Gaucho, an agitator against the legally constituted government of Venezuela. We have followed them to this florist's establishment. You have got your facts confused."

"More likely you and your fellow spies have got your names confused. I suppose you are maintaining as well this ridiculous fiction that Vheissu is a code name for Venezuela."

"That is the way it appears in our files."

"You are clever, Ferrante. You trust no one."

He shrugged. "Can I afford to?"

"I suppose not. Not when a barbaric and unknown race, employed by God knows whom, are even now blasting the Antarctic ice with dynamite, preparing to enter a subterranean network of natural tunnels, a network whose existence is known only to the inhabitants of Vheissu, the Royal Geographic Society in London, Herr Godolphin, and the spies of Florence."

Ferrante stood suddenly breathless. She was paraphrasing the secret memorandum Stencil had sent back to London not an hour ago.

"Having explored the volcanoes of their own region," she went on, "certain natives of the Vheissu district were the first to become aware of these tunnels, which lace the earth's interior at depths varying -"

"Aspetti!" Ferrante cried. "You are raving."

"Tell the truth," she said sharply. "Tell me what Vheissu is really the code name for. Tell me, you idiot, what I already know: that it stands for Vesuvius." She cackled horribly.

He was breathing with difficulty. She had guessed or spied it out or been told. She was probably safe. But how could he say: I detest politics, no matter if they are international or only within a single department. And the politics which have led to this worked the same way and are equally as detestable. Everyone had assumed that the code word referred to Venezuela, a routine matter, until the English in formed them that Vheissu actually existed. There was testimony from young Gadrulfi, corroborating data already obtained from the Geographic Society and the Board of Inquiry fifteen years ago, about the volcanoes. And from then on fact had been added to meager fact and the censorship of that single telegram had avalanched into a harrowing afternoon-long session of give-and-take, of logrolling, bullying, factions and secret votes until Ferrante and his chief had to face the sickening truth of the matter: that they must league with the English in view of a highly probable common peril. That they could hardly afford not to.

"It could stand for Venus, for all I know," he said. "Please, I cannot discuss the matter." The old woman laughed again and began to saw away once more on her viola da gamba. She watched Ferrante contemptuously as he took down a skillet from a hook in the wall above the stove, poured olive oil into it and poked the embers into flame. When the oil began to sizzle, he placed his squid carefully in it, like an offering. He suddenly found himself sweating, though the stove gave off no great heat. Ancient music whined in the room, echoed off its walls. Ferrante let himself wonder, for no good reason, if it had been composed by Palestrina.

IX.