'Perhaps foolish. But confronting her directly . . . I'm an optimist, as you know.'
'I'm a pessimist. It keeps a certain balance. Perhaps I'm only tired. But I do think it is that desperate. Employing I Banditti indicates a larger move - by them - soon.'
'Wait, in any event. Till we see what Fairing does.'
Spring had descended with its own tongue of flame. Valletta seemed soul-kissed into drowsy complaisance as Stencil mounted the hill southeast of Strada Reale toward Fairing's church. The place was empty and its silence broken only by snores from the confessional. Stencil slipped into the other side on his knees and woke the priest rudely.
'She may violate the secrecy of this little box,' Fairing replied, 'but I cannot.'
'You know what Maijstral is,' Stencil said, angry, 'and how many Caesars he serves. Can't you calm her? Don't they teach mesmerism at the Jesuit seminary?' He regretted the words immediately.
'Remember I am leaving,' coldly: 'speak to my successor, Father Avalanche. Perhaps you can teach him to betray God and the Church and this flock. You've failed with me. I must follow my conscience.'
'What a damned enigma you are,' Stencil burst out. 'Your conscience is made of India rubber.'
After a pause: 'I can, of course, tell her that any drastic step she takes - threatening the welfare of the child, perhaps - is a mortal sin.'
Anger had drained away. Remembering his 'damned': 'Forgive me, Father.'
The priest chuckled. 'I can't. You're an Anglican.'
The woman had approached so quietly that both Stencil and Fairing jumped when she spoke.
'My opposite number.'
The voice, the voice - of course he knew it. As the priest - flexible enough to betray no surprise – performed introductions, Stencil watched her face closely, as if waiting for it to reveal itself. But she wore an elaborate hat and veil; and the face was as generalized as that of any graceful woman seen in the street. One arm, sleeveless to the elbow, was gloved and nearly solid with bracelets.
So she had come to them. Stencil had kept his promise to Demivolt - had waited to see what Fairing would do.
'We have met, Signorina Manganese.'
'In Florence,' came the voice behind the veil. 'Do you remember?' turning her head. In the hair visible below the hat was a carved ivory comb, and five crucified faces, long-suffering beneath their helmets.
'So.'
'I wore the comb today. Knowing you would be here.'
Whether or not he must now betray Demivolt, Stencil suspected he'd be little use henceforth in either preventing or manipulating for Whitehall's inscrutable purposes whatever would happen in June. What he had thought was an end had proved to be only a twenty-year stay. No use, he realized, asking if she'd followed him or if some third force had manipulated them toward meeting.
Riding out to the villa in her Benz, he showed none of the usual automobile-anxieties. What use? They'd come in, hadn't they, from their thousand separate streets. To enter, hand in hand, the hothouse of a Florentine spring once again; to be flayed and filleted hermetically into a square (interior? exterior?) where all art objects hover between inertia and waking, all shadows lengthen imperceptibly though night never falls, a total nostalgic hush rests on the heart's landscape. And all faces are blank masks; and spring is any drawn-out sense of exhaustion or a summer which like evening never comes.
'We are on the same side, aren't we.' She smiled. They'd been sitting idly in one darkened drawing room, watching nothing - night on the sea - from a seaward window. 'Our ends are the same: to keep Italy out of Malta. It is a second front, which certain elements in Italy cannot afford to have opened, now.'
This woman caused Dupiro the ragman, her servant's love, to be murdered terribly.
I am aware of that.
You are aware of nothing. Poor old man.
'But our means are different.'
'Let the patient reach a crisis,' she said: 'push him through the fever. End the malady as quickly as possible.'
A hollow laugh: 'One way or another.'
'Your way would leave them strength to prolong it. My employers must move in a straight line. No sidetrackings. Annexationists are a minority in Italy, but bothersome.'
'Absolute upheaval,' a nostalgic smile: 'that is your way, Victoria, of course.' For in Florence, during the bloody demonstration before the Venezuelan Consulate, he had dragged her away from an unarmed policeman, whose face she was flaying with pointed fingernails. Hysterical girl, tattered velvet. Riot was her element, as surely as this dark room, almost creeping with amassed objects. The street and the hothouse; in V. were resolved, by some magic, the two extremes. She frightened him.
'Shall I tell you where I have been since our last closed room?'
'No. What need to tell me? No doubt I have passed and repassed you, or your work, in every city Whitehall has called me to.' He chuckled fondly.
'How pleasant to watch Nothing.' Her face (so rarely had he seen it that way!) was at peace, the live eye dead as the other, with the clock-iris. He'd not been surprised at the eye; no more than at the star sapphire sewn into
