02 _ Maltese Goddess, The (15 page)

The Mountie and I looked at each other again. The conversation got more confusing the more the Hedgehog drank. “What might that be?” Rob ventured to ask.

“Most recently, you mean? Switched to the Republic party as soon as it got elected. Ran in the next election. Got to be a Cabinet minister right away as a reward. Typical! External relations minister, no less. Turncoat! And that’s the best I can say about him. Him I don’t want to talk about.” The Hedgehog looked as if he might spit out his beer, but then he thought better of it, no doubt not wanting to waste so much as a drop.

“Always liked Marcus the young bull, though, I’ll admit. Certainly turned out better than some of the rest of them, like Giovanni and the other one, Franco
ta’Xiwwiex,
Franco the troublemaker, from Xemxija. He grew up to be a gangster.” The old man giggled. After another swig, he added, “Although there’s lots of folks around here don’t think too highly of Marcus either, not after what he did. At least, as far as I know, he never changed his politics!”

We all sat in silence, thinking this over for a while. Rob opened another beer and offered it to him, asking casually, “And what was it he did that people didn’t like him for?”

The Hedgehog swilled his beer. “Ran off and left the little Cassar girl in a bit of a mess, didn’t he? At least that’s what everybody thinks. Always wondered whether Joe
tas Saqqafi,
Joe the roofer, knew. He should have been called
ta‘ Tontu,
the stupid, if he didn’t,” he cackled.

I was starting to get the general drift of the conversation. “So Martin—Marcus—Galea left the Cassar girl—was it Marissa Cassar?—in the family way so to speak, did he?”

“Exactly!” he said. “Quite the scandal it would have been, if Joe
tas Saqqafi
hadn’t come forward and married her. They moved to the other end of the island right away, but we heard about the boy, born shortly after the wedding. She was the prettiest girl in the town, you know, quite the prettiest girl in the town. Might have helped her out myself, if I’d known,” he snorted. “Is there another beer, dearie?”

“Why don’t you keep the rest?” Rob offered. “We should probably be on our way. Thanks for helping us out.”

“Are you sure you have to go?” the old man asked. “I could tell you about lots of other people around these parts, you know.”

“I’m afraid we do. We have an appointment in Valletta,” Rob said. “But thank you, and enjoy the beer.” We left the Hedgehog happily hugging his bottle, and went back to the car. I was so despondent about what we’d learned—everyone I liked seemed to have a motive for murder—and convinced in some irrational way that it was the Mountie’s fault, that I could not speak to him as I drove back.

He made a couple of attempts at conversation, chattering away into my black silence. “Got all the bases covered, these fishermen,” he said, as we made our way past St. Paul’s Bay with its lovely fishing boats. “Named the boats after saints, but do you see they’ve got eyes painted on the prows? They’re the eyes of Horus, the Egyptian god. If one god doesn’t protect them, the other one will.” He laughed.

Then later, “It does speak to the fact that this is a very religious country, doesn’t it? If what we’ve learned today is true, it would be pretty disgraceful for a good Catholic girl to get pregnant with the father nowhere to be found. I guess this means Galea is Anthony’s father, if I followed the conversation. Which I’m not sure I did. I have a hard time understanding these people, even though they’re speaking English. Marissa Cassar is left high and dry by Marcus Galea, who’s a friend of the foreign minister, a fact that may or may not be relevant. Joe the roofer rescues her, and they move to the other end of the island and have a son. Anthony’s seventeen, I think Marissa told me, and Tabone just said this morning that Galea emigrated about eighteen years ago.

“We can’t be sure they’re the same people, though, can we? Joseph Farrugia is a tradesman but not necessarily a roofer. It would sort of explain the hundred thousand for Anthony, though, wouldn’t it?”

His stream of consciousness thought patterns roughly paralleled mine, but still I couldn’t bring myself to take part in the conversation. When we got back to the house I left him there and walked for a couple of hours along the bluffs. I felt heartsick. Whichever way I looked at it, someone I liked appeared guilty of a most terrible crime.

When I got back to the house, I could tell the Mountie had been busy cooking. I walked in the door and began to make my way up the stairs, still not speaking. I got about halfway up, when he said, “I’ve cooked us a nice supper.”

“I’m sorry,” I said with my back still turned to him. “I am feeling so rotten about all this. I feel as if at best I’m digging up things from Marissa’s past that I never should have known, and at worst, I could be sending her to prison.”

“I know you do, and I know that my being here is making it worse, for which I am sorry. But nothing of what we learned today makes her a murderer,” he said gently. “Come and eat.”

I might have been able to keep going up the stairs if I hadn’t looked back at him. He was wearing an apron and waving a spatula in my general direction, and I had to smile. He poured me a glass of wine, and then served up a very respectable bowl of spaghetti in a meat sauce made with spicy sausage, and a green salad. He’d even sliced up oranges for dessert.

“You must have gone shopping while I was out,” I said.

“I did,” he replied. “Found a nice little grocery store, but regrettably I have no idea where I was, nor how to find it again!”

After dinner, Rob called home. He had, he’d told me, a sixteen-year-old daughter, Jennifer. While I tried not to listen, I could not help but hear the tone of the conversation, which was not a happy one, and Rob was in a foul mood when he rejoined me. “Kids,” he muttered, then sat in a black silence for several minutes.

“Do you have kids?” he finally asked.

“Nope.”

“My girlfriend Barbara moved in with us just a few weeks before I came over. She’s having a tough time with Jennifer, who won’t do anything she asks and is generally raising hell while I’m away. What a mess.”

That’s probably, I was thinking, because you threw her mother over for some bimbo who’s barely older than she is. I said, however, “Perhaps Jennifer could go and stay with her mother for a while.”

“Hard to do,” he said. “Her mother died when Jen was seven. Cancer. I’ve brought her up by myself. She needed a mother, I know that, but… I don’t know. Either she’s going through a bad phase, or,” he sighed, “I’ve botched her upbringing. Totally,” he added.

Even though I hadn’t voiced my caustic thoughts, I felt dreadful. I really had to stop, I thought, judging all men by my ex-husband’s standard. “I’m sure it’s the former,” I said. “It’s a long time ago, of course, but I can still remember that being a sixteen-year-old girl is no picnic.”

He looked at me. “Thank you for saying that,” was all he said. Then he rallied, “How about a liqueur? I found some of that in the grocery store too.”

We sat in the living room, filled with my furniture, and I chatted away, answering his questions and making up, I hoped, for my silence earlier in the day and my recent uncharitable thoughts. It was, I suppose, one of the more pleasant police interrogations I’ve been through. I told him about the shop, how Galea had sent me to Malta, about the party that would never happen. I told him about Anna Stanhope’s play and all the preparations for the performance. I told him all about trying to get the house ready, and all the funny, and not so funny things that had happened. I told him about Nicholas the plumber, the electrician, the paint job, and how, at the very last minute, Joseph had gone missing.

“I wonder where he went,” I said, not really expecting an answer.

“I’m afraid I know the answer to that one,” he said slowly.

I looked at him.

“Joseph went to Rome.”

NINE

Wandering knights, rudely wrenched from your most holy temple, Jerusalem. Pursued across the Mediterranean by a wave of history you call the Infidel. To Rhodes, only to be exiled again. To where? Will no one give you sanctuary? Here
—
My tiny island, the fee one falcon. A home at last, the Knights now mine. But not a haven. You are not yet safe.

Whatever his shortcomings in life, in death Martin Galea seemed, like Imhotep, designer of Egypt’s first great stone building, the step pyramid of King Zoser, to be headed for deification. In eulogizing him as one of Malta’s greatest sons and counting him among the world’s greatest architects, Malta’s English-language media seemed incapable of mentioning Galea without comparing him to Frank Lloyd Wright or Mies van der Rohe. His youth on the island, his rising above poverty and adversity, his flight to America and triumphant return as prodigal son took on almost mythic proportions.

It was no different back home, I discovered, in speaking to Sarah and Alex. Reporters and editors had gathered Galea to their collective bosom, his all-too-human frailties lost in the hyperbole that surrounded his design achievements, his talents appearing god-given, if not god-like, in proportion.

How galling it must have been to those who had seen his darker side: those design colleagues and competitors who had endured his less than gracious demeanor in victory and his scathing and personal criticism of their work; the cuckolded husbands who had given Galea commissions only to find the price tag included their wives; the abandoned mistresses tossed on some emotional slag heap after gambling and losing in a high-stakes and soul-destroying game. All of them were in some way the detritus of a life arrogantly and carelessly lived. And perhaps none of them had suffered more from Galea’s casual cruelty than the young woman abandoned like some lost Ariadne by a callous lover.

I sat alone in the kitchen with Marissa the next morning. I had arranged to meet her early on the pretext of settling the house accounts. Neither of us had any idea what would happen now that Galea was dead and his wife was missing, and I needed to know how much money was left in Malta for house maintenance. I’d decided, at Rob’s suggestion, that I’d have to try to contact Galea’s solicitors and make arrangements for the house and the Farrugia family, as well as for Dave Thomson, whose shipping bills had not been paid before Galea’s untimely demise. We went over the accounts and discussed how I planned to proceed. Then, as delicately as I could, I told her what Rob and I had learned the day before in Mellieha. She looked out the window for a long time before she began to speak, but when she did the words just poured out of her.

“I waited for him for a long, long time,” she began. “Long after I married Joseph, long after Anthony was born. I thought we were a couple, you know. We’d been together for at least three years. I helped him with his schoolwork; he’d never have got the scholarship without me, and I thought he would come back for me as he’d promised, to carry me away with him to an exciting new life in America. But of course he never did.

“He asked me to run away with him, you know. To elope. I can remember his excitement as he described what we would do. He said we’d write my parents after we got to Canada, when we were married, and that when he’d made his fortune, we’d bring them over too. He had very grand plans.

“But I thought it would kill my father. I was an only child, much adored and a little spoiled, a bit like Anthony, perhaps. I could not bring myself to run away. And I wanted to have a wedding. A real wedding. So Marcus went alone. He said he’d write, send me his address as soon as he got settled, but the letter never came. For a while I deluded myself into thinking that something terrible must have happened to him, but in my heart I think I always knew this wasn’t so. He never knew about Anthony. I didn’t know myself until after he had gone.

“Joseph saved me from a terrible disgrace. He is very kind, you know. But more than that, he is direct and dependable. Over time I have come to value these qualities a very great deal.

“Joseph was a widower. His wife and baby daughter died one winter of the flu, a freakish accident really. For several years after that, he remained alone. He was a friend of my uncle, my father’s younger brother, and I guess he heard what happened from him. My father, when I told him about the baby, went into his room and closed the door and stayed there two days. After that he never was the same.

“When Joseph made his offer of marriage to my father, I was reluctant at first to accept. I still expected a letter from Marcus and believed that when he heard about the baby, he would come back to marry me. My father hit me, slapped me across the face, when I told him I wanted to wait for Marcus. It was the first and last time he would ever strike me. I left his house that night and never returned. My father died six months later, my mother shortly after that.

“And so I married Joseph and we moved to Siggiewi. Anthony was born soon after. Joseph is a good man, but life has not been easy, moving to a new town so far from home. Oh, I know by American standards it is not very far, but it seemed a great distance to me. It took a long time to reestablish ourselves, for Joseph to get work. Joseph worked pretty steadily around Mellieha where he was known. When we moved he had to start all over again, and jobs were very slow coming in the early years. Here people deal with those they know, relatives and friends. But we’ve managed. I did what I could. I sold my lace embroidery work, and worked for a while part-time in a store.

“We were very happy when Joseph got several months’ steady work on this house. We were a little worried about what would happen when the project was finished, but then one day, Joseph came home and told me the owner was looking for a couple to watch over the property for him, caretakers of sorts. He suggested we both go and present ourselves to the owner and apply for the job.

“I know you are thinking that it is strange that I didn’t guess by now who the owner was, but Joseph never referred to Marcus… Martin by name. You may think it is even more strange that Joseph didn’t know who Anthony’s father was. But we never spoke of such things. Joseph always said that our lives before we married were to be considered a closed book, never to be reopened. He said we both had loved other people, but that we were now a family. So I have never asked him about his first wife, nor ever talked about Marcus to him. Joseph has always been the type to keep to himself; he hates gossip, so while there was talk around Mellieha, it never reached his ears.