"That is Veronica Manganese."

"Gustavus V is ruler of Sweden. You are brimful of intelligence, aren't you."

Demivolt gave Stencil a thumbnail dossier on Veronica Manganese. Origins uncertain. She'd popped up in Malta at the beginning of the war, in the company of one Sgherraccio, a Mizzist. She was now intimate with various renegade Italians, among them D'Annunzio the poet-militant, and one Mussolini, an active and troublesome anti-socialist. Her political sympathies weren't known; whatever they might be, Whitehall was less than amused. The woman was clearly a troublemaker. She was reputed to be wealthy; lived alone in a villa long abandoned by the baronage of Sant' Ugo di Tagliapiombo di Sammut, a nearly defunct branch of the Maltese nobility. The source of her income was not apparent.

"He's a double agent, then."

"It would seem so."

"Why don't I go back to London. You seem to be doing quite well -"

"Negative, negative, Sidney. You do remember Florence."

A waiter materialized with more Barcelona beer. Stencil fumbled for his pipe. "This must be the worst brew in the Mediterranean. You deserve another, for that. Can't Vheissu ever be a dead file?"

"Call Vheissu a symptom. Symptoms like that are always alive, somewhere in the world."

"Sweet Christ, we've only now concluded one. Are they quite ready, do you think, to begin this foolishness again?"

"I don't think," Demivolt smiled grimly. "I try not to. Seriously, I believe all elaborate games of this sort arise from someone in the Office - high up, of course - getting a hunch. Saying to himself, 'Look here: something is wrong, you know.' He's usually right. In Florence he was right, again only as far as we're talking about symptoms and not about any acute case of whatever the disease is.

"Now you and I are only private-soldiers. For myself, I wouldn't presume. That manner of guesswork draws from a really first-rate intuitiveness. Oh we have our own minor hunches, of course: your following Maijstral tonight. But it's a matter of level. Level of pay-grade, level of elevation above the jumble, where one can see the long-term movements. We're in it, in the thick, after all."

"And so they want us together," Stencil murmured.

"As of now. Who knows what they'll want tomorrow?"

"And I wonder who else is here."

"Look sharp. There they go." They let the two across the street move off before they arose. "Like to see the island? They're probably on their way out to the Villa. Not that the rendezvous is apt to prove very exciting."

So they made their way down Strada Streeta, Demivolt looking like a jaunty anarchist with the black bundle under one arm.

"The roads are terrible," Demivolt admitted, "but we have an automobile."

"I'm frightened to death of automobiles."

Indeed he was. On route to the villa Stencil clutched the Peugeot's seat, refusing to look at anything but the floorboards. Autos, balloons, aeroplanes; he'd have nothing to do with them.

"Isn't this rather crude," he gritted, huddled behind the windscreen as if expecting it to vanish at any moment. "There's no one else on the road."

"At the speed she's going she'll lose us soon enough," Demivolt chirruped, all breezy. "Relax, Sidney."

They moved southwest into Floriana. Ahead Veronica Manganese's Benz had vanished in a gale of cinders and exhaust. "Ambush," Stencil suggested.

"They're not that sort." After awhile Demivolt turned right. They worked their way thus round Marsamuscetto in near-darkness. Reeds whistled in the fens. Behind them the illuminated city seemed tilted toward them, like some display case in a poor souvenir shop. And how quiet was Malta's night. Approaching or leaving other capitals one always caught the sense of a great pulse or plexus whose energy reached one by induction; broadcasting its presence over whatever arete or sea's curve might be hiding it. But Valletta seemed serene in her own past, in the Mediterranean womb, in something so insulating that Zeus himself might once have quarantined her and her island for an old sin or an older pestilence. So at peace was Valletta that with the least distance she would deteriorate to' mere spectacle. She ceased to exist as anything quick or pulsed, and was assumed again into the textual stillness of her own history.

The Villa di Sammut lay past Sliema near the sea, elevated on a small prominence, facing out toward an invisible Continent. What Stencil could see of the building was conventional enough, as villas go: white walls, balconies, few windows on the landward side, stone satyrs chasing stone nymphs about dilapidated grounds; one great ceramic dolphin vomiting clear water into a pool. But the low wall surrounding the place drew his attention. Normally insensitive to the artistic or Baedeker aspect of any city he visited, Stencil was now ready to succumb to the feathery tentacles of a nostalgia which urged him gently back toward childhood; a childhood of gingerbread witches, enchanted parks, fantasy country. It was a dream-wall, swirling and curlicuing now in the light of a quarter moon, seeming no more solid than the decorative voids - some almost like leaves or petals, some almost like bodily organs not quite human - which pierced its streaked and cobbled substance.

"Where have we seen this before," he whispered.

One light in an upper story went out. "Come," said Demivolt. They vaulted the wall and crept round the villa peering in windows, listening at doors.

"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."

"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."