V.

"Wot's all that noise we hear?"

"Fight," said Johnny. "Union Jack."

"Right ho." Back in formation, the boy ordered a column left and his charges set course dutifully for the Union Jack.

"We're missing all the fun," whined Clyde.

"There is Poppy."

They entered the Metro. Poppy sat at a table with a barmaid who looked like Paola but fatter and older. It was pitiful to watch. He was doing his "Chicago" bit. They waited till it was over. The barmaid, indignant, arose and waddled off. Poppy used the handkerchief to swab off his face which was sweating.

"Twenty-five dances," he said as they approached. "I broke my own record."

"There is a nice fight on at the Union Jack," suggested Clyde. "Wouldn't you like to go to it, Poppy?"

"Or how about that whorehouse the chief off the Hank that we met in Barcelona told us about," said Johnny. "Why don't we try to find it."

Poppy shook his head. "You guys ought to know this was the only place I wanted to come."

So they begin: these vigils. Having put up their token resistance, Clyde and Johnny straddled chairs to either side of Poppy and settled down to drinking as much as Poppy but staying soberer.

The Metro looked like a nobleman's pied-a-terre applied to mean purposes. The dancing floor and bar lay up a wide curving flight of marble steps lined with statues in niches: statues of Knights, ladies and Turks. Such was a quality of suspended animation about them that you felt – come the owl-hours, the departure of the last sailor and the extinguishment of the last electric light – these statues must unfreeze, step down from their pedestals, and ascend stately to the dance floor bringing with them their own light: the sea's phosphorescence. There to form sets and dance till sunup, utterly silent; no music; their stone feet only just kissing the wood planks.

Along the sides of the room were great stone urns, with palms and poincianas. On the red-carpeted dais sat a small hot-jazz band: violin, trombone, saxophone, trumpet, guitar, piano, drums. It was a plump middle-aged lady, playing the violin. At the moment they were playing C'est Magnifique tailgate fashion, while a Commando six and a half feet tall jitterbugged with two barmaids at once and tree and four friends stood around, clapping hands, cheering them on. It was not so much a matter of Dick Powell, the American Singing Marine, caroling Sally and Sue, Don't Be Blue: more a taking-on of traditional attitudes which (one suspects) must be latent in all English germ plasm: mother loony chromosome along with afternoon tea and respect for the Crown; where the Yanks saw novelty and an excuse for musical comedy, the English saw history, and Sally and Sue were only incidental.

Early tomorrow deck hands would come out in the bleaching glare of the pier's lights and single up all lines for some of these green berets. The night before, then, was for sentiment, larking in shadows with jolly barmaids, another pint and another smoke in this manufactured farewell-hall; this enlisted men's version of that great ball, the Saturday night before Waterloo. One way you could tell which ones were going tomorrow: they left without looking back.

Pappy got drunk, stinking drunk: and drew his two keepers into a personal past neither wanted to investigate. They endured a step-by-step account of the brief marriage: the presents he'd given her, the places they'd gone, the cooking, the kindnesses. Toward the end, half of it was noise: maundering. But they didn't ask for clarity. Didn't ask anything, not so much from booze-tangled tongues as from a stuffiness-by-induction in the nasal cavities. So susceptible were Fat Clyde and Johnny Contango.

But it was Cinderella liberty in Malta, and though the drunk's clock slows down, it doesn't stop. "Come on," said Clyde finally, floundering afoot. "It is about that time." Pappy smiled sadly and fell out of his chair.

"We'll go get a taxi," said John. "Carry him home in a taxi."

"Jeez, it's late." They were the last Americans in the Metro. The English were quietly absorbed in saying goodbye to at least this part of Valletta. With the departure of the Scaffold boat's men, all things had grown more matter-of-fact.

Clyde and Johnny draped Pappy around them and got him down the stairs, past the Knights' reproachful eyes and into the street. "Taxi, hey," Clyde screamed.

"No taxis," said Johnny Contango. "All gone. God how big the stars are."

Clyde wanted to argue. "You just let me take him," he said. "You're an officer, you can stay out all night."

"Who said I was an officer. I'm a white hat. Your brother, Pappy's brother. Brother's keeper."

"Taxi, taxi, taxi."

"Limey's brother, everybody's brother. Who says I'm an officer. Congress. Officer and gentlemen by act of Congress. Congress won't even go into the Suez to help the Limeys. They're wrong about that, they're wrong about me."

"Paola," Pappy moaned and pitched forward. They grabbed him. His white hat was long gone. His head hung and hair had fallen over his eyes.