V.

Maijstral was asleep at his table. "Don't haunt me, Stencil," he mumbled, still dreamy and belligerent.

"Stencil is passing on the discomfort of being haunted," Stencil shivered.

They huddled over tea in chipped cups.

"She cannot be dead," Stencil said.

"One feels her in the city," he cried.

"In the city."

"In the light. It has to do with the light."

"If the soul," Maijstral ventured, "is light. Is it a presence?"

"Damn the word. Stencil's father, had he possessed imagination, might have used it." Stencil's eyebrows puckered, as if he would cry. He weaved irritably in his seat, blinked, fumbled for his pipe. He'd left it at the lodginghouse. Maijstral tapped across a pack of Players.

Lighting up: "Maijstral. Stencil expresses himself like an idiot."

"But your search fascinates me."

"Did you know, he's devised a prayer. Walking about this city, to be said in rhythm to his footsteps. Fortune, may Stencil be steady enough not to fasten on one of these poor ruins at his own random or at any least hint from Maijstral. Let him not roam out all Gothic some night with lantern and shovel to exhume an hallucination, and be found by the authorities mud-streaked and mad, and tossing meaningless clay about."

"Come, come," muttered Maijstral. "I feel uncomfortable enough, being in this position."

Stencil drew in his breath too loudly.

"No, I am not beginning to requestion. That is long done."

Beginning then Maijstral took up the study of Stencil more closely. Though suspending judgment. He'd aged enough to know the written apologia would only be a first step in exorcising the sense of sin that had hung with him since '43. But this V. was surely more than a sense of sin?

Mounting crisis in the Suez, Hungary and Poland hardly touched them. Maijstral, leery like any Maltese of the Balloon's least bobbing, was grateful for something else - Stencil - to take his mind off the headlines. But Stencil himself, who seemed more unaware each day (under questioning) of what was happening in the rest of the world, reinforced Maijstral's growing theory that V. was an obsession after all, and that such an obsession is a hothouse: constant temperature, windless, too crowded with particolored spots, unnatural blooms.

Stencil, returning to the lodging-house, walked into a loud argument between Paola and Profane.

"So go," he was yelling. Something crashed against the door.

"Don't try to make up my mind for me," she yelled back. Stencil opened the door warily, peered around and was hit in the face with a pillow. Shades were drawn and Stencil saw only blurred figures: Profane still ducking out of the way, Paola's arm in follow-through.

"What the hell."

Profane, crouching like a toad, flapped a newspaper at him. "My old ship is in." All Stencil could see were the whites of his eyes. Paola was crying.

"Ah." Stencil dived for the bed. Profane had been sleeping on the floor. Let them use that, thought spiteful Stencil; snuffled, and drifted off to sleep.

At length it occurred to him to talk with the old priest, Father Avalanche, who according to Maijstral had been here since 1919.

The moment he entered the church he knew he'd lost again. The old priest knelt at the communion rail: white hair above a black cassock. Too old.

Later, in the priest's house:

"God lets some of us wait, in queer backwaters," said Father Avalanche. "Do you know how long it's been since I have shriven a murderer? At the time of the Ghallis Tower murder last year I had hopes . . ." He maundered thus, taking Stencil by an unwilling hand, and began to charge aimless about thickets of memory. Stencil tried to point them toward the June Disturbances.

"Oh, I was only a young lad then, full of myth. The Knights, you know. One cannot come to Valletta without knowing about the Knights. I still believe" – chuckling - "as I believed then, that they roam the streets after sunset. Somewhere. And I had only served as padre - in the actual fighting - long enough to have illusions left about Avalanche as crusading Knight. But then to compare the Malta that was, in 1919, to their Malta . . . You'd have to talk, I suppose, to my predecessor here, Father Fairing. He went to America. Though the poor old man, wherever he is, must be dead by now."

Politely as he could Stencil took leave of the old priest, plunged into the sunlight and began to walk. There was too much adrenalin, contracting the smooth muscle, deepening his breathing, quickening his pulse. "Stencil must walk," he said to the street: "walk. "

Foolish Stencil: he was out of condition. He returned to his pied-a-terre long after midnight, hardly able to stand. The room was empty.

"Clinches it," he muttered. If it were the same Fairing.