'Fairing,' Stencil croaked, 'in whose Parish Stencil was shot, preceded your Father Avalanche.'
'I could have told you. Told you the name.'
'But.'
'Saw no advantage in making things worse.'
Stencil's eyes narrowed. Maijstral turned, caught him looking cagy.
'Yes, yes. Thirteen of us rule the world in secret.'
'Stencil went out of his way to bring Profane here. He should have been more careful; he wasn't. Is it really his own extermination he's after?'
Maijstral turned smiling to him. Gestured behind his back at the ramparts of Valletta. 'Ask her,' he whispered. 'Ask the rock.'
III
Two days later Maijstral arrived at the lodging-house to find Profane lying dead drunk and slaunchwise on the bed. Afternoon sun illuminated a swathe of face in which every hair of a week's growth showed up separate and distinct. Profane's mouth was open, he was snoring and drooling and apparently enjoying himself.
Maijstral gave Profane's forehead the back of his hand: fine. The fever had broken. But where was Stencil? No sooner asked than Maijstral saw the note. A cubist moth, alit forever on the gross heap of Profane's beer belly.
'A shipfitter named Aquilina has intelligence of one Mme. Viola, oneiromancer and hypnotist, who passed through Valletta in 1944. The glass eye went with her. Cassar's girl lied. V. used it for an hypnotic aid. Her destination, Stockholm. As is Stencil's. It will do for the frayed end of another clue. Dispose as you will of Profane. Stencil has no further need for any of you. Sahha.'
Maijstral looked around for booze. Profane had finished everything in the house.
'Swine.'
Profane woke. 'Wha.'
Maijstral read him the note, Profane rolled out of bed and crawled to the window.
'What day is it.' After a while: 'Paola's gone too?'
'Last night.'
'Leaving me. Well. How do you dispose of me.'
'Lend you a fiver, to begin with.'
'Lend,' roared Profane. 'You ought to know better.'
'I'll be back,' said Maijstral.
That night Profane shaved, bathed, donned suede jacket, levis and big cowboy hat and went a-roving down Kingsway, looking for amusement. He found it in the form of one Brenda Wigglesworth, an American WASP who attended Beaver College and owned she said, 72 pairs of Bermuda shorts, half of which she had brought over to Europe back around June, at the beginning of a Grand Tour which bad then held high promise. High she had remained all the way across the Atlantic; high as the boat deck and mostly on sloe gin fizzes. The various lifeboats of this most underelict passage east were shared by a purser (summer job) from the academic flatlands of Jersey, who gave her an orange and black toy tiger, a pregnancy scare (hers only) and a promise to meet her in Amsterdam, somewhere behind the Five Flies. He'd not come: she came to herself - or at least to the inviolable Puritan she'd show up as come marriage and the Good Life, someday soon now - in a bar's parking lot near a canal, filled with a hundred black bicycles: her junkyard, her own locust season. Skeletons, carapaces, no matter: her inside too was her outside and on she went, streak-blond, far-from-frail Brenda, along the Rhine, up and down the soft slopes of the wine districts, into the Tyrol and out into Tuscany, all in a rented Morris whose fuel pump clicked random and loud in times of stress; as did her camera, as did her heart.
Valletta was the end of another season and all her friends were long sailed back to the States. She was nearly out of money. Profane couldn't help her. She found him fascinating.
So over sloe gin fizzes for her which took tiny sweet bites out of Maijstral's five-pound note, and beer for Benny, they talked of how it was they had come this far and where they would go after Valletta, and it seemed there were Beaver and the Street for them separately to return to; and both agreed this was nowhere, but some of us do go nowhere and can con ourselves into believing it to be somewhere: it is a kind of Talent, and objections to it are rare, but even at that captious.
That night between them they established at least that the world was screwed up. English Marines, Commandos and sailors who came by - going nowhere also - helped them believe it. Profane saw no Scaffold sailors and decided that since some of them must be clean-living enough to stay away from the Gut, the Scaffold too had left. It made him sadder: as if all his homes were temporary and even they, inanimate, still wandering as he: for motion is relative, and hadn't he, now, really stood there still on the sea like a schlemiel Redeemer, while that enormous malingering city and its one livable inner space and one unconnable (therefore hi-value) girl had all slid away from him over a great horizon's curve comprising, from this vantage, at once, at least one century's worth of wavelets?
'Don't be sad.'
'Brenda, we're all sad.'
'Benny, we are.' She laughed, raucous, having a low tolerance for sloe gin.
They went back to his place and she must have left him sometime during the night, in the dark. Profane was a heavy sleeper. He awoke alone in bed to the sound of forenoon traffic. Maijstral sat on the table, observing a plaid knee sock, the kind worn with Bermuda shorts, which was draped over the electric lamp hanging from the center of the ceiling.
