wish to keep possession of it.'
'If that were all. But someone in the higher echelons had got the idea Vheissu was a code name for Venezuela. Either that or it was the same bloody clerk, or his brother, who never learned to spell.'
'They asked me about Vheissu,' the Gaucho mused. 'What could I say? This time I really knew nothing. The English consider it important.'
'But they don't tell you why. All they give you are mysterious hints. The Germans are apparently in on it. The Antarctic is concerned in some way. Perhaps in a matter of weeks, they say, the whole world will be plunged into apocalypse. And they think I am in on it. And you. Why else, if they are going to release us anyway, did they throw us into the same cell? We'll be followed wherever we go. Here we are, in the thick of a grand cabal, and we haven't the slightest notion of what's going on.'
'I hope you didn't believe them. Diplomatic people always talk that way. They are living always on the verge of some precipice or other. Without a crisis they wouldn't be able to sleep nights.'
Evan turned slowly to face his companion. 'But I do believe them,' he said calmly. 'Let me tell you. About my father. He would sit in my room, before I went to sleep, and spin yarns about this Vheissu. About the spider- monkeys, and the time he saw a human sacrifice, and the rivers whose fish are sometimes opalescent and sometimes the color of fire. They circle round you when you go in to bathe, and dance a kind of elaborate ritual all about, to protect you from evil. And there are volcanoes with cities inside them, which once every hundred years erupt into flaming hell, but people go to live in them anyway. And men in the hills with blue faces, and women in the valleys who give birth to nothing but sets of triplets, and beggars who belong to guilds and hold jolly festivals and entertainments all summer long.
'You know how a boy is. There comes a time for departure, a point where he sees confirmed the suspicion he'd had for some time that his father is not a god, not even an oracle. He sees that he no longer has any right to any such faith. So Vheissu becomes a bedtime story or fairy tale after all, and the boy a superior version of his merely human father.
'I thought Captain Hugh was mad; I would have signed the commitment papers myself. But at Piazza della Signoria 5 I was nearly killed in something that could not have been an accident, a caprice of the inanimate world; and from then till now I have seen two governments hagridden to alienation over this fairy tale or obsession I thought was my father's own. As if this condition of being just human, which had made Vheissu and my boy's love for him a lie, were now vindicating them both for me, showing them to have been truth all along and after all. Because the Italians and the English in those consulates and even that illiterate clerk are all men. Their anxiety is the same as my father's, what is coming to be my own, and perhaps in a few weeks what will be the anxiety of everyone living in a world none of us wants to see lit into holocaust. Call it a kind of communion, surviving somehow on a mucked-up planet which God knows none of us like very much. But it is our planet and we live on it anyway.'
The Gaucho did not answer. He walked to the window, stood gazing out. The girl was singing now about a sailor, halfway round the world from home and his betrothed. From down the corridor floated cries: 'Cinque, tre, otto, brrrr!' Soon the Gaucho put his hands to his neck, removed his collar. He came back to Evan.
'If they let you out,' he said, 'in time to see your father, there is also at Scheissvogel's a friend of mine. His name is Cuernacabron. Everyone knows him there. I would esteem it a favor if you would take him this, a message.' Evan took the collar and pocketed it absently. A thought occurred to him.
'But they will see your collar missing.'
The Gaucho grinned, stripped off his shirt and tossed it under a bunk. 'It is warm, I will tell them. Thank you for reminding me. It's not easy for me to think like a fox.'
'How do you propose to get out?'
'Simply. When the turnkey comes to let you out, we beat him unconscious, take his keys, fight our way to freedom.'
'If both of us get away, should I still take the message?'
'Si. I must first go to Via Cavour. I will be at Scheissvogel's later, to see some associates on another matter. Un gran colpo, if things work right.'
Soon footsteps, jangling keys approached down the corridor. 'He reads our minds,' the Gaucho chuckled. Evan turned to him quickly, clasped his hand.
'Good luck.'
'Put down your bludgeon, Gaucho,' the turnkey called in a cheerful voice. 'You are to be released, both of you.'
'Ah, che fortuna,' said the Gaucho mournfully. He went back to the window. It seemed that the girl's voice could be heard all over April. The Gaucho stood on tiptoe. 'Un' gazz'!' he screamed.
VIII
Around Italian spy circles, the latest joke was about an Englishman who cuckolded his Italian friend. The husband came home one night to find the faithless pair in flagrante delicto on the bed. Enraged, he pulled out a pistol and was about to take revenge when the Englishman held up a restraining hand. 'I say old chap,' he said loftily, 'we're not going to have any dissension in the ranks, are we? Think what this might do to the Quadruple Alliance.'
The author of this parable was one Ferrante, a drinker of absinthe and destroyer of virginity. He was trying to grow a beard. He hated politics. Like a few thousand other young men in Florence, he fancied himself a neo-Machiavellian. He took the long view, having only two articles of faith: (a) the Foreign Service in Italy was irreparably corrupt and nitwit, and (b) someone should assassinate Umberto I. Ferrante had been assigned to the Venezuelan problem for half a year, and was beginning to see no way out of it except suicide.
That evening he was wandering around secret police headquarters with a small squid in one hand, looking for someplace to cook it. He'd just bought it at the market, it was for supper. The hub of spy activities in Florence was the second floor of a factory which made musical instruments for devotees of the Renaissance and Middle Ages. It was run nominally by an Austrian named Vogt, who worked painstakingly during the daylight hours putting together rebecs, shawms and theorbos, and spied at night. In the legal or everyday segment of his life, he employed as helpers a Negro named Gascoigne who would bring in his friends from time to time to test out the instruments, and Vogt's mother, an incredibly aged butterball of a woman who was under the curious illusion that
