V.

Footsteps behind him. On passing the next street lamp he saw the elongated shadows of helmeted heads bobbing about his quickening feet. Guardie? He nearly panicked: he'd been followed. He turned to face them, arms spread like the drooping wings of a condor at bay. He couldn't see them. "You are wanted for questioning," a voice purred in Italian, out of the darkness.

For no good reason he could see, life returned to him all at once, things were as they had always been, no different from leading a renegade squad against the Mahdi, invading Borneo in a whaleboat, attempting the Pole in midwinter. "Go to hell," he said cheerfully. Skipped out of the pool of light they'd trapped him in and went dashing off down a narrow, twisting side street. He heard footsteps, curses, cries of "Avanti!" behind him: would have laughed but couldn't waste the breath. Fifty meters on he turned abruptly down an alley. At the end was a trellis: he grasped it, swung himself up, began to climb. Young rose-thorns pricked his hands, the enemy howled closer. He came to a balcony, vaulted over, kicked in a set of French windows and entered a bedroom where a single candle burned. A man and a woman cringed nude and dumbfounded on the bed, their caresses frozen to immobility. "Madonna!" the woman screamed. "E il mio marito!" The man swore and tried to dive under the bed. Old Godolphin, blundering through the room, guffawed. My God, he was thinking irrelevantly, I have seen them before. I have seen this all twenty years ago in a music hall. He opened a door, found a stairway, hesitated briefly, then started up. No doubt about it, he was in a romantic mood. He'd be let down if there weren't a dash over the rooftops. By the time he gained the roof the voices of his pursuers were roaring in confusion far to his left. Disappointed, he made his way over the tops of two or three more buildings anyway, found an outside stairway and descended to another alley. For ten minutes he jogged along, taking in great breaths, steering sinuous course. A brilliantly lighted back window finally attracted his attention. He catfooted up to it, peered in. Inside, three men conferred anxiously amid a jungle of hothouse flowers shrubs and trees. One of them he recognized, and chuckled in amazement. It is a small planet indeed, he thought, whose nether end I have seen. He tapped on the window. "Raf," he called softly.

Signor Mantissa glanced up, startled. "Minghe," he said, seeing Godolphin's grinning face. "The old inglese. Let him in, someone." The florist, red-faced and disapproving, opened the rear door. Godolphin stepped in quickly, the two men embraced, Cesare scratched his head. The florist retreated behind a fan palm after resecuring the door.

"A long way from Port Said," Signor Mantissa said.

"Not so far," Godolphin said, "nor so long."

Here was the sort of friendship which doesn't decay, however gapped it may be over the years with arid stretches of isolation from one another; more significant: a renewal of that instant, motiveless acknowledgment of kinship, one autumn morning four years back on the coaling piers at the head of the Suez Canal. Godolphin, impeccable in full dress uniform, preparing to inspect his man-o'-war, Rafael Mantissa the entrepreneur, overseeing the embarkation of a fleet of bumboats he'd acquired in a drunken baccarat game in Cannes the month before, had each touched glances and seen immediately in the other an identical uprootedness, a similarly catholic despair. Before they spoke they were friends. Soon they had gone out and got drunk together, told each other their lives; were in fights, found, it seamed, a temporary home in the half-world behind Port Said's Europeanized boulevards. No rot about eternal friendship or blood brotherhood ever needed to be spoken.

"What is it, my friend," Signor Mantissa said now.

"Do you remember, once," Godolphin said, "a place, I told you: Vheissu." It hadn't been the same as telling his son, or the Board of Inquiry, or Victoria a few hours before. Telling Raf had been like comparing notes with a fellow sea dog on a liberty port both had visited.

Signor Mantissa made a sympathetic moue. "That again," he said.

"You have business now. I'll tell you later."

"No, nothing. This matter of a Judas tree."

"I have no more," Gadrulfi the florist muttered. "I've been telling him this far half an hour."

"He's holding out," Cesare said ominously. "Two hundred and fifty lire he wants, this time."

Godolphin smiled. "What chicanery with the law requires a Judas tree?"

Without hesitation Signor Mantissa explained. "And now," he concluded, "we need a duplicate, which we will let the police find."

Godolphin whistled. "You leave Florence tonight then."

"One way or the other, on the river barge at midnight, si."

"And there would be room far one more?"