flanked by two of the most common British sentiments in time of crisis: WOT NO PETROL and END CALL- UP.
'No petroI, indeed,' said Johnny Contango. 'They're blowing up oil refineries all over the Middle East.' Nasser, it seems, having gone on the radio, urging a sort of economic jihad.
Kilroy was possibly the only objective onlooker in Valletta that night. Common legend had it he'd been born in the U.S. right before the war, on a fence or latrine wall. Later he showed up everywhere the American armies moved: farmhouses in France, pillboxes in North Africa, bulkheads of troop ships in the Pacific. Somehow he'd acquired the reputation of a schlemiel or sad sack. The foolish nose hanging over the wall was vulnerable to all manner of indignities: fist shrapnel, machete. Hinting perhaps at a precarious virility, a flirting with castration, though ideas like this are inevitable in a latrine-oriented (as well as Freudian) psychology.
But it was all deception. Kilroy by 1940 was already bald, middle-aged. His true origins forgotten, he was able to ingratiate himself with a human world, keeping schlemiel-silence about what he'd been as a curly-haired youth. It was a masterful disguise: a metaphor. For Kilroy had sprung into life, in truth, as part of a band-pass filter, thus:
[...]
Inanimate. But Grandmaster of Valletta tonight.
'The Bobbsey Twins,' said Clyde. Running around the corner in a jog trot came Dahoud (who'd discouraged little Ploy from taking a Brody) and Leroy Tongue the widget storekeeper, both of them with night sticks and SP armbands. It looked like a vaudeville act, Dahoud being one and a half times as high as Leroy. Clyde had a general idea of their technique for keeping the peace. Leroy would hop up on Dahoud's shoulders piggyback and rain pacification about the heads and shoulders of boisterous bluejackets, while Dahoud exerted his calming influence down below.
'Look,' yelled Dahoud approaching. 'We can do it running.' Leroy slowed down and cut in behind his running mate. 'Hup-hup-hup,' said Dahoud. 'YO.' Sure enough: neither of them breaking stride, up hopped Leroy, clinging to Dahoud's big collar to ride his shoulders like a jockey.
'Giddap there, boss,' Leroy screamed, and away they dashed for the Union Jack. A small detachment of Marines, all in step, came marching out of a side street. One farm lad, blond and candid-faced, counted cadence unintelligibly. Passing Clyde and Johnny, he broke off for a moment to ask:
'Wot's all that noise we hear?'
'Fight,' said Johnny. 'Union Jack.'
'Right ho.' Back in formation, the boy ordered a column left and his charges set course dutifully for the Union Jack.
'We're missing all the fun,' whined Clyde.
'There is Poppy.'
They entered the Metro. Poppy sat at a table with a barmaid who looked like Paola but fatter and older. It was pitiful to watch. He was doing his 'Chicago' bit. They waited till it was over. The barmaid, indignant, arose and waddled off. Poppy used the handkerchief to swab off his face which was sweating.
'Twenty-five dances,' he said as they approached. 'I broke my own record.'
'There is a nice fight on at the Union Jack,' suggested Clyde. 'Wouldn't you like to go to it, Poppy?'
'Or how about that whorehouse the chief off the Hank that we met in Barcelona told us about,' said Johnny. 'Why don't we try to find it.'
Poppy shook his head. 'You guys ought to know this was the only place I wanted to come.'
So they begin: these vigils. Having put up their token resistance, Clyde and Johnny straddled chairs to either side of Poppy and settled down to drinking as much as Poppy but staying soberer.
The Metro looked like a nobleman's pied-a-terre applied to mean purposes. The dancing floor and bar lay up a wide curving flight of marble steps lined with statues in niches: statues of Knights, ladies and Turks. Such was a quality of suspended animation about them that you felt – come the owl-hours, the departure of the last sailor and the extinguishment of the last electric light – these statues must unfreeze, step down from their pedestals, and ascend stately to the dance floor bringing with them their own light: the sea's phosphorescence. There to form sets and dance till sunup, utterly silent; no music; their stone feet only just kissing the wood planks.
Along the sides of the room were great stone urns, with palms and poincianas. On the red-carpeted dais sat a small hot-jazz band: violin, trombone, saxophone, trumpet, guitar, piano, drums. It was a plump middle-aged lady, playing the violin. At the moment they were playing C'est Magnifique tailgate fashion, while a Commando six and a half feet tall jitterbugged with two barmaids at once and tree and four friends stood around, clapping hands, cheering them on. It was not so much a matter of Dick Powell, the American Singing Marine, caroling Sally and Sue, Don't Be Blue: more a taking-on of traditional attitudes which (one suspects) must be latent in all English germ plasm: mother loony chromosome along with afternoon tea and respect for the Crown; where the Yanks saw novelty and an excuse for musical comedy, the English saw history, and Sally and Sue were only incidental.
Early tomorrow deck hands would come out in the bleaching glare of the pier's lights and single up all lines for some of these green berets. The night before, then, was for sentiment, larking in shadows with jolly barmaids, another pint and another smoke in this manufactured farewell-hall; this enlisted men's version of that great ball, the Saturday night before Waterloo. One way you could tell which ones were going tomorrow: they left without looking back.
Pappy got drunk, stinking drunk: and drew his two keepers into a personal past neither wanted to investigate. They endured a step-by-step account of the brief marriage: the presents he'd given her, the places they'd gone, the cooking, the kindnesses. Toward the end, half of it was noise: maundering. But they didn't ask for clarity. Didn't ask anything, not so much from booze-tangled tongues as from a stuffiness-by-induction in the nasal cavities. So susceptible were Fat Clyde and Johnny Contango.
But it was Cinderella liberty in Malta, and though the drunk's clock slows down, it doesn't stop. 'Come on,' said Clyde finally, floundering afoot. 'It is about that time.' Pappy smiled sadly and fell out of his chair.
