"We got to go back," Leroy said. The driver made a U-turn and they circled back to the scene of the free-for-all. No more than fifteen minutes had passed; but the street was deserted. Quiet: no more firecrackers, shouts; nothing.

"I'll be damned," said Dahoud.

"You'd think it never happened," said Leroy.

"Dockyard," Clyde instructed the driver, yawning. "Dry dock two. American tin can with the teeth marks of a screw-chewing fish."

All the way out to the Dockyard Pappy snored.

Liberty had been expired an hour when they arrived. The two SP's bounded past the rows of latrines and across the gangplank. Clyde and Johnny, with Pappy in the middle, lagged.

"Now none of that was worth it," Johnny said bitterly. Two figures, fat and slim, stood by the latrine wall.

"Come on," Clyde urged Pappy. "Few more steps."

Nasty Chobb came running by, wearing an English sailor hat with H.M.S. Ceylon printed on the hand. The shadow-figures detached themselves from the latrine wall and approached. Pappy tripped.

"Robert," she said. Not a question.

"Hello Pappy," said the other.

"Who zat," said Clyde.

Johnny stopped dead and Clyde's momentum carried Pappy round to face her directly. "I'll be dipped in messhall coffee," said Johnny.

"Poor Robert." But she said it gently, and was smiling, and had either Johnny or Clyde been less chunk they would have bawled like children.

Pappy waggled his arms. "Go ahead," he told them, "I can stand. I'll be along." From over on the quarterdeck Nasty Chobb was heard arguing with the OOD. "What you mean go away," yelled Nasty.

"Your hat says H.M.S. Ceylon, Chobb."

"So."

"So what can I say? You're on the wrong ship."

"Profane," said Pappy. "You came back. I thought you would."

"I didn't," Profane said. "But she did." He went off to wait. Leaned against a latrine wall out of earshot, looking at the Scaffold.

"Hello Paola," said Pappy. "Sahha." It means both.

"You -"

"You -" at the same time. He motioned her to talk.

"Tomorrow," she said, "you'll he hung over and probably will think this didn't happen. That the Metro's booze sends visions as well as a big head. But I'm real, and here, and if they restrict you -"

"I can put in a chit."

"Or send you off to Egypt or anywhere else, it should make no difference. Because I will be back in Norfolk before you, and be there on the pier. Like any other wife. But wait till then to kiss or even touch you."

"If I can get off?"

"I'll be gone. Let it be this way, Robert." How tired her face looked, in the white scatter from the brow lights. "It will be better, and more the way it should have been. You sailed a week after I left you. So a week is all we've lost. All that's gone on since then is only a sea-story. I will sit home in Norfolk, faithful, and spin. Spin a yarn for your coming-home present."

"I love you," was all he could find to say. He'd been saying it every night to a steel bulkhead and the earthwide sea on the other side.

White hands flickered up, behind her face. "Here. In case you think tomorrow it was a dream." Her hair fell loose. She handed him an ivory comb. Five crucified Limeys - five Kilroys - stared briefly at Valletta's sky till he pocketed it. "Don't lose it in a poker game. I've had it a long time."

He nodded. "We ought to be back early December."

"You'll get your good-night kiss then." She smiled, withdrew, turned, was gone.

Pappy ambled on past the latrine without looking back. The American flag, skewered by spotlights, fluttered limp, high over them all. Pappy began his walk to the quarterdeck, across the long brow, hoping he'd be soberer when he reached the other end.

II.

Of their dash across the Continent in a stolen Renault; Profane's one-night sojourn in a jail near Genoa, when the police mistook him for an American gangster; the drunk they all threw which began in Liguria and lasted well past Naples; the dropped transmission at the outskirts of that city and the week they spent waiting its repair in a ruined villa on Ischia, inhabited by friends of Stencil - a monk long defrocked named Fenice who spent his time breeding giant scorpions in marble cages once used by the Roman blood to punish their young boy and girl concubines, and the poet Cinoglossa who had the misfortune to be both homosexual and epileptic - wandering listlessly in an unseasonable heat among vistas of marble fractured by earthquake, pines blasted by lightning, sea wrinkled by a dying mistral; of their arrival in Sicily and the difficulty with local bandits on a mountain road (from which Stencil extricated them by telling foul Sicilian jokes and giving them whisky); of the day-long trip from Syracuse to Valletta on the Laferla steamer Star of Malta, during which Stencil lost $100 and a pair of cufflinks at stud poker to a mild-faced clergyman who called himself Robin Petitpoint; and of Paola's steadfast silence through it all, there was little for any of them to remember. Malta alone drew them, a clenched fist around a yo-yo string.

They came in to Valletta, cold, yawning, in the rain. They rode to Maijstral's room neither anticipating nor remembering-outwardly, at least, apathetic and low-keyed as the rain. Maijstral greeted them calmly. Paola would stay with him. Stencil and Profane had planned to doss at the Phoenicia Hotel, but at 2/8 per day the agile Robin Petitpoint had had his effect. They settled for a lodging-house near the Harbour. "What now," said Profane, tossing his ditty bag in a corner.

Stencil thought a long time.

"I like," Profane continued, "living off of your money. But you and Paola conned me into coming here."

"First things first," said Stencil. The rain had stopped; he was nervous. "See Maijstral. See Maijstral."

See Maijstral he did: but only next day, and after a morning-long argument with the whisky bottle which the bottle lost. He walked to the room in the ruined building through a brilliant gray afternoon. Light seemed to cling to his shoulders like fine rain. His knees shook.

But it wasn't hard to talk to Maijstral.

"Stencil has seen your confession to Paola."

"Then you know," Maijstral said, "I only made it into this world through the good offices of one Stencil."

Stencil hung his head. "It may have been his father."

"Making us brothers."

There was wine, which helped. Stencil yarned far into the night but with a voice always threatening to break, as if now at last he were pleading for his life. Maijstral kept a decorous silence, waiting patiently whenever Stencil faltered.

Stencil sketched the entire history of V. that night and strengthened a long suspicion. That it did add up only to the recurrence of an initial and a few dead objects. At one point in Mondaugen's story: "Ah," Maijstral said. "The glass eye."

"And you." Stencil mopped his forehead. "You listen like a priest."

"I have wondered." Smiling.

At the end of it: "But Paola showed you my apologia. Who is the priest? We have heard one another's confessions."

"Not Stencil's," Stencil insisted. "Hers."

Maijstral shrugged. "Why have you come? She is dead."

"He must know."

"I could never find that cellar again. If I could: it must be rebuilt now. Your confirmation would lie deep."

"Too deep already," Stencil whispered. "Stencil's long over his head, you know."

"I was lost."

"But not apt to have visions."

"Oh, real enough. You always look inside first, don't you, to find what's missing. What gap a vision could possibly fill. I was all gap then, and there was too wide a field to choose from."

"Yet you'd just come from -"

"I did think of Elena. Yes. Latins warp everything to the sexual anyway. Death becomes an adulterer or rival, need arises to see one rival at least done in . . . But I was bastardized enough, you see, before that. Too much so to feel hatred or triumph, watching."

"Only pity. Is that what you mean? At least in what Stencil read. Read into. How can he -"

"More a passiveness. The characteristic stillness, perhaps, of the rock. Inertia. I'd come back - no, in - come in to the rock as far as I would."

Stencil brightened after a while and changed course. "A token. Comb, shoe, glass eye. The children."

"I wasn't watching the children. I was watching your V. What I did see of the children - I recognized none of the faces. No. They may have died before the war ended or emigrated after it. Try Australia. Try the pawnbrokers and curio shops. But as for placing a notice in the agony column: 'Anyone participating in the disassembly of a priest -'"

"Please."

Next day, and for days after, he investigated the inventories of curio merchants, pawnbrokers, ragmen. He returned one morning to find Paola brewing tea on the ring for Profane, who lay bundled up in bed.

"Fever," she said. "Too much booze, too much everything back in New York. He hasn't been eating much since we arrived. God knows where he does eat. What the water there is like."

"I'll recover," Profane croaked. "Tough shit, Stencil."

"He says you're down on him. "

"O God," said Stencil.

The next day brought momentary encouragement to Stencil. A shopowner named Cassar did know of an eye such as Stencil described. The girl lived in Valletta, her husband was an auto mechanic at the garage which cared for Cassar's Morris. He had tried every device he knew to purchase the eye, but the foolish girl would not pant with it. A keepsake, she said.

She lived in a tenement. Stucco walls, a row of balconies on the top floor. Light that afternoon produced a "burn" between whites and blacks: fuzzy edges, blurrings. White was too white, black too black. Stencil's eyes hurt. Colors were nearly absent, leaning either to white or black.

"I threw it into the sea." Hands on hips, defiant. He smiled uncertainly. Where had Sidney's charm fled? Under the same sea, back to its owner. Light angling through the window fell across a bowl of fruit - oranges, limes - bleaching them and throwing the bowl's interior to black shadow. Something was wrong with the light. Stencil felt tired, unable to pursue it further - not just now - wanting only to leave. He left.

Profane sat in a worn flowered robe of Fausto Maijstral's, looking ghastly, chewing on the stump of an old cigar. He glared at Stencil. Stencil ignored him: threw himself on the bed and slept soundly for twelve hours.

He awoke at four in the morning and walked through a sea-phosphorescence to Maijstral's. Dawn leaked in, turning the illumination conventional. Along a mudway and up twenty steps. A light burned.

Maijstral was asleep at his table. "Don't haunt me, Stencil," he mumbled, still dreamy and belligerent.

"Stencil is passing on the discomfort of being haunted," Stencil shivered.

They huddled over tea in chipped cups.

"She cannot be dead," Stencil said.

"One feels her in the city," he cried.

"In the city."

"In the light. It has to do with the light."

"If the soul," Maijstral ventured, "is light. Is it a presence?"

"Damn the word. Stencil's father, had he possessed imagination, might have used it." Stencil's eyebrows puckered, as if he would cry. He weaved irritably in his seat, blinked, fumbled for his pipe. He'd left it at the lodginghouse. Maijstral tapped across a pack of Players.

Lighting up: "Maijstral. Stencil expresses himself like an idiot."

"But your search fascinates me."

"Did you know, he's devised a prayer. Walking about this city, to be said in rhythm to his footsteps. Fortune, may Stencil be steady enough not to fasten on one of these poor ruins at his own random or at any least hint from Maijstral. Let him not roam out all Gothic some night with lantern and shovel to exhume an hallucination, and be found by the authorities mud-streaked and mad, and tossing meaningless clay about."

"Come, come," muttered Maijstral. "I feel uncomfortable enough, being in this position."

Stencil drew in his breath too loudly.

"No I am not beginning to requestion. That is long done."

Beginning then Maijstral took up the study of Stencil more closely. Though suspending judgment. He'd aged enough to know the written apologia would only be a first step in exorcising the sense of sin that had hung with him since '43. But this V. was surely more than a sense of sin?

Mounting crisis in the Suez, Hungary and Poland hardly touched them. Maijstral, leery like any Maltese of the Balloon's least bobbing, was grateful for something else - Stencil - to take his mind off the headlines. But Stencil himself, who seemed more unaware each day (under questioning) of what was happening in the rest of the world, reinforced Maijstral's growing theory that V. was an obsession after all, and that such an obsession is a hothouse: constant temperature, windless, too crowded with particolored sports, unnatural blooms.

Stencil, returning to the lodging-house, walked into a loud argument between Paola and Profane.

"So go," he was yelling. Something crashed against the door.

"Don't try to make up my mind for me," she yelled back. Stencil opened the door warily, peered around and was hit in the face with a pillow. Shades were drawn and Stencil saw only blurred figures: Profane still ducking out of the way, Paola's arm in follow-through.

"What the hell."

Profane, crouching like a toad, flapped a newspaper at him. "My old ship is in." All Stencil could see were the whites of his eyes. Paola was crying.

"Ah." Stencil dived for the bed. Profane had been sleeping on the floor. Let them use that, thought spiteful Stencil; snuffled, and drifted off to sleep.

At length it occurred to him to talk with the old priest, Father Avalanche, who according to Maijstral had been here since 1919.

The moment he entered the church he knew he'd lost again. The old priest knelt at the communion rail: white hair above a black cassock. Too old.