V. (61 page)

"Pappy says the Limeys are going to kidnap us."

"I don't know."

"What about the screw?"

"Drink your beer, Fat Clyde." Johnny Contango felt guilty about the mangled ship's propeller not so much in a world-political way. It was personal guilt which, Fat Clyde suspected upset him more than he showed. He'd been OOD. the midwatch old Scaffold boat had hit whatever it was - submerged wreck, oil drum - going through the Straits of Messina. Radar gang had been too busy keeping tabs on a fleet of night fishing boats who'd chosen the same route to notice the object - if it had protruded above the surface at all. Set, and drift, and pure accident had brought them here to get a screw fixed. God knew what the Med had brought into Johnny Contango's path. The report had called it "hostile marine life," and there'd been much raillery since about the mysterious screw-chewing fish, but Johnny still felt it was his fault. The Navy would rather blame something alive - preferably human and with a service number - than pure accident. Fish? Mermaid? Scylla, Charybdis, wha. Who knew how many female monsters this Med harbored?

"Bwaagghh."

"Pinguez, I'll bet," Johnny said without looking around.

"Yup. All over his blues." The owner had materialized and stood now truculent over Pinguez, steward's mate striker, hollering "SP, SP," with no results. Pinguez sat on the floor afflicted with the dry heaves.

"Poor Pinguez," Johnny said. "He's an early one."

Out on the floor Pappy was up to about a dozen and showed no signs of stopping.

"We ought to get him into a cab," Fat Clyde said.

"Where is Baby Face." Falange the snipe, and Pinguez's buddy. Pinguez now lay sprawled among the legs of a table, and had begun talking to himself in Filipino. A bartender approached with something dark in a glass that fizzed. Baby Face Falange, wearing as was his wont a babushka, joined the group around Pinguez. A number of British sailors looked on with interest.

"Here, you drink it," the bartender said. Pinguez lifted his head and moved it, mouth open, toward the bartender's hand. Bartender got the message and jerked his hand away: Pinguez's shiny teeth closed on the air with a loud snap. Johnny Contango knelt by the steward.

"Andale, man," he said gently, raising Pinguez's head. Pinguez bit him on the arm. "Let go," just as quiet. "It's a Hathaway shirt, I don't want no cabron puking on it."

"Falange!" Pinguez screamed, drawing out the a's.

"You hear that," said Baby Face. "That's all he has to say on the quarterdeck and my ass has had it."

Johnny took Pinguez under the arms; Fat Clyde, more nervous, lifted his feet. They bore him to the street, found a cab, and got him off in it.

"Back to the great gray mother," said Johnny. "Come on. You want to try the Union Jack?"

"I should keep an eye on Poppy. You know."

"I know. But he'll be busy dancing."

"As long as he doesn't get to the Metro," said Fat Clyde. They strolled down half a block to the Union Jack. Inside Antoine Zippo, captain of the second division head, and Nasty Chobb the baker, who periodically used salt in place of sugar in the early morning's pies to discourage thieves, had taken over not only the bandstand in back but also a trumpet and guitar respectively; and were now making Route 66, respectfully.

"Sort of quiet," said Johnny Contango. But this was premature because sly young Sam Mannaro, the corpsman striker, was even now sneaking alum into Antoine's beer which sat uneyed by Antoine on the piano.

"SP's will be busy tonight," said Johnny. "How come Pappy came over at all?"

"I never had that happen to me, that way," Clyde said, a little brusque.

"Sorry. I was thinking today in the rain how it was I could light a king-sized cigarette without getting it wet."

"Oh I think he should have stayed on board," said Clyde, "but all we can do is keep an eye out that window."

"Right ho," said Johnny Contango, slurping beer.

A scream from the street. "That's tonight's," said Johnny. "Or one of tonight's."

"Bad street."

"Back during the beginning of all this in July the Gut ran one killing a night. Average. God knows what it is now."

In came two Commandos, looking around for somewhere to sit. They picked Clyde and Johnny's table.

David and Maurice their names were, and heading off for Egypt tomorrow.

"We shall be there," said Maurice, "to wave hello when you people come steaming in."

"If ever," said Johnny.

"World's going to hell," said David. They'd been drinking heavily but held it well.

"Don't expect to hear from us till the election is over," said Johnny.

"Oh is that it then."

"Why America is sitting on its ass," brooded Johnny, "is the same reason our ship is sitting on its ass. Crosscurrents, seismic movements, unknown things in the night. But you can't help thinking it's somebody's fault."

"The jolly, jolly balloon," said Maurice. "Going up."

"Did you hear a bloke got murdered just as we came in." David leaned forward, melodramatic.

"More blokes than that will get murdered in Egypt," said Maurice, "and don't I wish they would truss up a few M.P.'s now, in those jumping rigs and chutes. Send them out the door. They're the ones who want it. Not us.

"But my brother is on Cyprus and I shall never live it down if he gets there first."

The Commandos outdrank them two-for-one. Johnny, never having talked to anyone who might be dead inside a week, was curious in a macabre way. Clyde, who had, only felt unhappy.

The group on the stand had moved from Route 66 to Every Day I Have the Blues. Antoine Zippo, who had wrecked one jugular vein last year with a shore-based Navy band in Norfolk and was now trying for two, took a break, shook the spit out of his horn and reached for the beer on the piano. He looked hot and sweaty, as a suicidal workhorse trumpet should. Alum however being what it is, the predictable occurred.

"Ech," said Antoine Zippo, slamming the beer down on the piano. He looked around, belligerent. His lip had just been attacked. "Sam the werewolf," said Antoine, "is the only sumbitch here who could get alum." He couldn't talk too well.

"There goes Pappy," said Clyde, grabbing for his hat. Antoine Zippo leaped like a puma from the stand, landing feet first on Sam Mannaro's table.

David turned to Maurice. "I wish the Yanks would save their energy for Nasser."

"Still," said Maurice, "it would be good practice."

"I heartily agree," pip-pipped David in a toff's voice: "Shall we, old man?"

Bung ho. The two Commandos waded into the growing melee about Sam.

Clyde and Johnny were the only two heading for the door. Everybody else wanted to get in on the fight. It took them five minutes to reach the street. Behind them they heard glass breaking and chairs being knocked over. Pappy Hod was nowhere in sight.

Clyde hung his head. "I suppose we ought to go to the Metro." They took their time, neither savoring the night's work ahead. Pappy was a loud and merciless drunk. He demanded that his keepers sympathize and of course they always did, so much that it was always worse for them.

They passed an alley. Facing them on the blank wall, in chalk, was a Kilroy, thus:

[picture missing]

flanked by two of the most common British sentiments in time of crisis: WOT NO PETROL and END CALL-UP.

"No petrol, indeed," said Johnny Contango. "They're blowing up oil refineries all over the Middle East." Nasser it seems having gone on the radio, urging a sort of economic jihad.

Kilroy was possibly the only objective onlooker in Valletta that night. Common legend had it he'd been born in the U.S. right before the war, on a fence or latrine wall. Later he showed up everywhere the American armies moved: farmhouses in France, pillboxes in North Africa, bulkheads of troop ships in the Pacific. Somehow he'd acquired the reputation of a schlemihl or sad sack. The foolish nose hanging over the wall was vulnerable to all manner of indignities: fist, shrapnel, machete. Hinting perhaps at a precarious virility, a flirting with castration, though ideas like this are inevitable in a latrine-oriented (as well as Freudian) psychology.

But it was all deception. Kilroy by 1940 was already bald, middle-aged. His true origins forgotten, he was able to ingratiate himself with a human world, keeping schlemihl-silence about what he'd been as a curly-haired youth. It was a masterful disguise: a metaphor. For Kilroy had sprung into life, in truth, as part of a band-pass filter, thus:

[picture missing]

Inanimate. But Grandmaster of Valletta tonight.

"The Bobbsey Twins," said Clyde. Running around the corner in a jog trot came Dahoud (who'd discouraged little Ploy from taking a Brody) and Leroy Tongue the widget storekeeper, both of them with night sticks and SP armbands. It looked like a vaudeville act, Dahoud being one and a half times as high as Leroy. Clyde had a general idea of their technique for keeping the peace. Leroy would hop up on Dahoud's shoulders piggyback and rain pacification about the heads and shoulders of boisterous bluejackets, while Dahoud exerted his calming influence down below.

"Look," yelled Dahoud approaching. "We can do it running." Leroy slowed down and cut in behind his running mate. "Hup-hup-hup," said Dahoud. "YO." Sure enough: neither of them breaking stride, up hopped Leroy, clinging to Dahoud's big collar to ride his shoulders like a jockey.

"Giddap there, boss," Leroy screamed, and away they dashed for the Union Jack. A small detachment of Marines, all in step, came marching out of a side street. One farm lad, blond and candid-faced, counted cadence unintelligibly. Passing Clyde and Johnny, he broke off for a moment to ask:

"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 (on 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."