'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 part 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 spots, 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.
Later, in the priest's house:
