V.

"He is afraid. Because if she went there to wait out one war, a war she'd not started but whose etiology was also her own, a war which came least as a surprise to her, then perhaps too she was there during the first. There to meet old Sidney at its end. Paris for love, Malta for war. If so then now, of all times . . ."

"You think there'll be a war."

"Perhaps. You've been reading the newspapers." Profane's newspaper reading was in fact confined to glancing at the front page of the New York Times. If there was no banner headline on that paper then the world was in good enough shape. "The Middle East, cradle of civilization, may yet be its grave.

"If he must go to Malta, it can't be only with Paola. He can't trust her. He needs someone to - occupy her, to serve as buffer zone, if you will."

"That could be anybody. You said the Crew was at home anywhere. Why not Raoul, Slab, Melvin."

"It's you she loves. Why not you."

"Why not."

"You are not of the Crew, Profane. You have stayed out of that machine. All August."

"No. No, there was Rachel."

"You stayed out of it." And a sly smile. Profane looked away.

So they went up Third Avenue, drowned in the Street's great wind: all flapping and Irish pennants. Stencil yarned. Told Profane of a whorehouse in Nice with mirrors on the ceiling where he thought, once, he'd found his V. Told of his mystical experience before a plaster death-cast of Chopin's hand in the Celda Museo in Mallorca.

"There was no difference," he caroled, causing two strolling bums to laugh along with him: "that was all. Chopin had a plaster hand!" Profane shrugged. The bums tagged along.

"She stole an airplane: an old Spad, the kind young Godolphin crashed in. God, what a flight it must have been: from Le Havre over the Bay of Biscay to somewhere in the back country of Spain. The officer on duty only remembered a fierce - what did he call her - 'hussar,' who came rushing by in a red field-cape, glaring out of a glass eye in the shape of a clock: 'as if I'd been fixed by the evil eye of time itself.'

"Disguise is one of her attributes. In Mallorca she spent at least a year as an old fisherman who evenings, would smoke dried seaweed in a pipe and tell the children stories of gun-running in the Red Sea."

"Rimbaud," suggested one of the bums.

"Did she know Rimbaud as a child? Drift up-country at age three or four through that district and its trees festooned gray and scarlet with crucified English corpses? Act as lucky mascot to the Mahdists? Live in Cairo and take Sir Alastair Wren for a lover when she came of age?

"Who knows. Stencil would rather depend on the imperfect vision of humans for his history. Somehow government reports, bar graphs, mass movements are too treacherous."

"Stencil," Profane announced, "you are juiced."

True. Autumn, coming on, was cold enough to've sobered Profane. But Stencil appeared drunk on something else.

V. in Spain, V. on Crete: V. crippled in Corfu, a partisan in Asia Minor. Giving tango lessons in Rotterdam she had commanded the rain to stop; it had. Dressed in tights adorned with two Chinese dragons she handed swords, balloons and colored handkerchiefs to Ugo Medichevole, a minor magician, for one lustless summer in the Roman Campagna. And, learning quickly, found time to perform a certain magic of her own; for one morning Medichevole was found out in a field, discussing the shadows of clouds with a sheep. His hair had become white, his mental age roughly five. V. had fled.

It went on like this, all the way up into the 70's, this progress-of-four; Stencil caught up in a compulsive yarning, the others listening with interest. It wasn't that Third Avenue was any kind of drunk's confessional. Did Stencil like his father suffer some private leeriness about Valletta - foresee some submersion, against his will, in a history too old for him, or at least of a different order from what he'd known? Probably not; only that he was on the verge of a major farewell. If it hadn't been Profane and the two bums it would have been somebody: cop, barkeep, girl. Stencil that way had left pieces of himself - and V. - all over the western world.

V. by this time was a remarkably scattered concept.

"Stencil's going to Malta like a nervous groom to matrimony. It is a marriage of convenience, arranged by Fortune, father and mother to everyone. Perhaps Fortune even cares about the success of these things: wants one to look after it in its old age." Which struck Profane as outright foolish. Somehow they had wandered over by Park Avenue. The two bums, sensing unfamiliar territory, veered away toward the west and the Park. Toward what assignation? Stencil said: "Should one bring a peace-offering?"

"Wha. Box of candy, flowers, ha, ha."

"Stencil knows just the thing," said Stencil. They were before Eigenvalue's office building. Intention or accident?