Stencil smiled at Maijstral's confusion. 'We are old friends,' he said gently. From somewhere - bottom of the tank - came a last burst of duplicity and virtu. He forced himself into the real present, perhaps aware it would be his last time there. Placing a hand on the yardbird's shoulder: 'Come. I have private instructions.' He winked at the woman. 'We're still nominally opponents, you see. There are the Rules.'
Outside his smile faded. 'Now quickly, Maijstral, don't interrupt. You are released. We have no further use for you. Your wife's time is close: go back to her.'
'The signora -' jerking his head back toward the foyer - 'still needs me. My wife has her child.'
'It is an order: from both of us. I can add this: if you do not return to your wife she will destroy herself and the child.'
'It is a sin.'
'Which she will risk.' But Maijstral still shuffled.
'Very well: if I see you again, here or in my woman's company' - that had hit: a sly smile touched Maijstral's lips - 'I turn your name over to your fellow workers. Do you know what they'll do to you, Maijstral? Of course you do. I can even call in the Banditti, if you prefer to die more picturesquely . . .' Maijstral stood for a moment, eyes going numb. Stencil let the magic spell 'Banditti' work for an instant more, then flashed his best - and last - diplomatic smile: 'Go. You and your woman and the young Maijstral. Stay out of the blood bath. Stay inside.' Maijstral shrugged, turned and left. He did not look back; his trundling step was less sure.
Stencil made a short prayer: let him be less and less sure as he gathers years . . .
She smiled as he returned to the drawing room. 'All done?'
He collapsed into a Louis Quinze chair whose two seraphim keened above a dark lawn of green velvet. 'All done.'
Tension grew through 6 June. Units of the civil police and military were alerted. Another unofficial notice went out, advising merchants to close up their shops.
At 3:30 P.M. on 7 June mobs began to collect in Strada Reale. For the next day and a half they owned Valletta's exterior spaces. They attacked not only the Chronicle (as promised) but also the Union Club, the Lyceum, the Palace, the houses of anti-Mizzist Members, the cafes and shops which had stayed open. Landing parties from H.M.S. Egmont, and detachments of Army and police joined the effort to keep order. Several times they formed ranks; once or twice they fired. Three civilians were killed by gunfire; seven wounded. Scores more were injured in the general rioting. Several buildings were set on fire. Two RAF lorries with machine guns dispersed an attack on the millers at Hamrun.
A minor eddy in the peaceful course of Maltese government, preserved today only in one Board of Inquiry report. Suddenly as they had begun, the June Disturbances (as they came to be called) ended. Nothing was settled. The primary question, that of self-rule, was as of 1956 still unresolved. Malta by then had only advanced as far as dyarchy, and if anything moved even closer to England in February, when the electorate voted three to one to put Maltese members in the British House of Commons.
Early on the morning of 10 June 1919, Mehemet's xebec set sail from Lascaris Wharf. Seated on its counter, like some obsolete nautical fixture, was Sidney Stencil. No one had come to see him off. Veronica Manganese had kept him only as long as she had to. His eyes kept dead astern.
But as the xebec was passing Fort St. Elmo or thereabouts, a shining Benz was observed to pull, up near the wharf and a black-liveried driver with a mutilated face to come to the harbor's edge and gaze out at the ship. After a moment he raised his hand; waved with a curiously sentimental, feminine motion of the wrist. He called something in English, which none of the observers understood. He was crying.
Draw a line from Malta to Lampedusa. Call it a radius. Somewhere in that circle, on the evening of the tenth, a waterspout appeared and lasted for fifteen minutes. Long enough to lift the xebec fifty feet, whirling, and creaking, Astarte's throat naked to the cloudless weather, and slam it down again into a piece of the Mediterranean whose subsequent surface phenomena - whitecaps, kelp islands, any of a million flatnesses which should catch thereafter part of the brute sun's spectrum – showed nothing at all of what came to lie beneath, that quiet June day.
THE END
