V.

"Why America is sitting on its ass," brooded Johnny, "is the same reason our ship is sitting on its ass. Crosscurrents, seismic movements, unknown things in the night. But you can't help thinking it's somebody's fault."

"The jolly, jolly balloon," said Maurice. "Going up."

"Did you hear a bloke got murdered just as we came in." David leaned forward, melodramatic.

"More blokes than that will get murdered in Egypt," said Maurice, "and don't I wish they would truss up a few M.P.'s now, in those jumping rigs and chutes. Send them out the door. They're the ones who want it. Not us.

"But my brother is on Cyprus, and I shall never live it down if he gets there first."

The Commandos outdrank them two-for-one. Johnny, never having talked to anyone who might be dead inside a week, was curious in a macabre way. Clyde, who had, only felt unhappy.

The group on the stand had moved from Route 66 to Every Day I Have the Blues. Antoine Zippo, who had wrecked one jugular vein last year with a shore-based Navy band in Norfolk and was now trying for two, took a break, shook the spit out of his horn and reached for the beer on the piano. He looked hot and sweaty, as a suicidal workhorse trumpet should. Alum however being what it is, the predictable occurred.

"Ech," said Antoine Zippo, slamming the beer down on the piano. He looked around, belligerent. His lip had just been attacked. "Sam the werewolf," said Antoine, "is the only sumbitch here who could get alum." He couldn't talk too well.

"There goes Pappy," said Clyde, grabbing for his hat. Antoine Zippo leaped like a puma from the stand, landing feet first on Sam Mannaro's table.

David turned to Maurice. "I wish the Yanks would save their energy for Nasser."

"Still," said Maurice, "it would be good practice."

"I heartily agree," pip-pipped David in a toff's voice: "Shall we, old man?"

"Bung ho." The two Commandos waded into the growing meleé about Sam.

Clyde and Johnny were the only two heading for the door. Everybody else wanted to get in on the fight. It took them five minutes to reach the street. Behind them they heard glass breaking and chairs being knocked over. Pappy Hod was nowhere in sight.

Clyde hung his head. "I suppose we ought to go to the Metro." They took their time, neither savoring the night's work ahead. Pappy was a loud and merciless drunk. He demanded that his keepers sympathize and of course they always did, so much that it was always worse for them.

They passed an alley. Facing them on the blank wall, in chalk, was a Kilroy, thus:

flanked by two of the most common British sentiments in time of crisis: WOT NO PETROL and END CALL-UP.

"No petroI, indeed," said Johnny Contango. "They're blowing up oil refineries all over the Middle East." Nasser, it seems, having gone on the radio, urging a sort of economic jihad.

Kilroy was possibly the only objective onlooker in Valletta that night. Common legend had it he'd been born in the U.S. right before the war, on a fence or latrine wall. Later he showed up everywhere the American armies moved: farmhouses in France, pillboxes in North Africa, bulkheads of troop ships in the Pacific. Somehow he'd acquired the reputation of a schlemiel or sad sack. The foolish nose hanging over the wall was vulnerable to all manner of indignities: fist shrapnel, machete. Hinting perhaps at a precarious virility, a flirting with castration, though ideas like this are inevitable in a latrine-oriented (as well as Freudian) psychology.

But it was all deception. Kilroy by 1940 was already bald, middle-aged. His true origins forgotten, he was able to ingratiate himself with a human world, keeping schlemiel-silence about what he'd been as a curly-haired youth. It was a masterful disguise: a metaphor. For Kilroy had sprung into life, in truth, as part of a band-pass filter, thus:

[...]

Inanimate. But Grandmaster of Valletta tonight.

"The Bobbsey Twins," said Clyde. Running around the corner in a jog trot came Dahoud (who'd discouraged little Ploy from taking a Brody) and Leroy Tongue the widget storekeeper, both of them with night sticks and SP armbands. It looked like a vaudeville act, Dahoud being one and a half times as high as Leroy. Clyde had a general idea of their technique for keeping the peace. Leroy would hop up on Dahoud's shoulders piggyback and rain pacification about the heads and shoulders of boisterous bluejackets, while Dahoud exerted his calming influence down below.

"Look," yelled Dahoud approaching. "We can do it running." Leroy slowed down and cut in behind his running mate. "Hup-hup-hup," said Dahoud. "YO." Sure enough: neither of them breaking stride, up hopped Leroy, clinging to Dahoud's big collar to ride his shoulders like a jockey.

"Giddap there, boss," Leroy screamed, and away they dashed for the Union Jack. A small detachment of Marines, all in step, came marching out of a side street. One farm lad, blond and candid-faced, counted cadence unintelligibly. Passing Clyde and Johnny, he broke off for a moment to ask: