V.

"Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay," said Moffit, soft-shoeing out the door. Stencil heaved a sigh, leaned forward in the chair and recommenced his dart game. Soon a second hit, two inches from the first, had transfigured the Minister into a lopsided goat. Stencil gritted his teeth. "Pluck, lad," he muttered. "Before the girl arrives the old bastard should look like a blooming hedgehog."

Two cells away there was a loud morra game in progress. Outside the window, somewhere, a girl sang about her love, killed defending his homeland in a faraway war.

"She's singing for the tourists," the Gaucho complained bitterly, "she must be. No one ever sings in Florence. No one ever used to. Except now and again the Venezuelan friends I told you about. But they sing marching songs, which are useful for morale."

Evan stood by the cell door, leaning his forehead against the bars. "You may no longer have any Venezuelan friends," he said. "They've probably all been rounded up and pushed into the sea."

The Gaucho came over and gripped Evan's shoulder sympathetically. "You are still young," he said "I know how it must have been. That's the way they work. They attack a man's spirit. You will see your father again. I will see my friends. Tonight. We're going to stage the most wonderful festa this city has seen since Savonarola was burned."

Evan looked around hopelessly at the small cell, the heavy bars. "They told me I might be released soon. But you stand a fat chance of doing anything tonight. Except lose sleep."

The Gaucho laughed. "I think they will release me too. I told them nothing. I'm used to their ways. They are stupid, and easily gotten round."

Evan clenched the bars furiously. "Stupid! Not only stupid. Deranged. Illiterate. Some bungling clerk misspelled my name Gadrulfi, and they refused to call me anything else. It was an alias, they said. Did it not say Gadrulfi in my dossier? Was it not down in black and white?"

"Ideas are so novel to them. Once they get hold of one, having the vague idea it is somehow precious, they wish to keep possession of it."

"If that were all. But someone in the higher echelons had got the idea Vheissu was a code name for Venezuela. Either that or it was the same bloody clerk, or his brother, who never learned to spell."

"They asked me about Vheissu," the Gaucho mused. "What could I say? This time I really knew nothing. The English consider it important."

"But they don't tell you why. All they give you are mysterious hints. The Germans are apparently in on it. The Antarctic is concerned in some way. Perhaps in a matter of weeks, they say, the whole world will be plunged into apocalypse. And they think I am in on it. And you. Why else, if they are going to release us anyway, did they throw us into the same cell? We'll be followed wherever we go. Here we are, in the thick of a grand cabal, and we haven't the slightest notion of what's going on."

"I hope you didn't believe them. Diplomatic people always talk that way. They are living always on the verge of some precipice or other. Without a crisis they wouldn't be able to sleep nights."

Evan turned slowly to face his companion. "But I do believe them," he said calmly. "Let me tell you. About my father. He would sit in my room, before I went to sleep, and spin yarns about this Vheissu. About the spider-monkeys, and the time he saw a human sacrifice, and the rivers whose fish are sometimes opalescent and sometimes the color of fire. They circle round you when you go in to bathe, and dance a kind of elaborate ritual all about, to protect you from evil. And there are volcanoes with cities inside them, which once every hundred years erupt into flaming hell, but people go to live in them anyway. And men in the hills with blue faces, and women in the valleys who give birth to nothing but sets of triplets, and beggars who belong to guilds and hold jolly festivals and entertainments all summer long.

"You know how a boy is. There comes a time for departure, a point where he sees confirmed the suspicion he'd had for some time that his father is not a god, not even an oracle. He sees that he no longer has any right to any such faith. So Vheissu becomes a bedtime story or fairy tale after all, and the boy a superior version of his merely human father.