V.

She wanted him sacked. Sack him? Why not. Double agents were dangerous. But now, having lost the priest . . . She couldn't know about La Manganese.

"Could you help, signor. Speak to him."

"How did you know? He didn't tell you."

"The workers know there is a spy among them. It has become a favorite topic among all the wives. Which one of us? Of course, it is one of the bachelors, they say. A man with a wife, with children, could not take the chance." She was dry-eyed, her voice was steady.

"For God's sake," Stencil said irritably, "sit down."

Seated: "A wife knows things, especially one who will be a mother soon." She paused to smile down at her belly, which upset Stencil. Dislike for her grew as the moments passed. "I know only that something is wrong with Maijstral. In England I have heard that ladies are 'confined' months before the child is born. Here a woman works, and goes out in the street, as long as she can move about."

"And you came out looking for me."

"The priest told me."

Fairing. Who was working for whom? Caesar wasn't getting a fair shake. He tried sympathy. "Was it worrying you that much? That you had to bring it all into the confessional?"

"He used to stay home at night. It will be our first child, and a first child is the most important. It is his child, too. But we hardly speak any more. He comes in late and I pretend to be asleep."

"But a child also must be fed, sheltered, protected more than a man or woman. And this requires money."

She grew angry. "Maratt the welder has seven children. He earns less than Fausto. None of them has ever gone without food, or clothing, or a home. We do not need your money."

God, she could blow the works. Could he tell her that even if he sacked her husband, there'd still be Veronica Manganese to keep him away nights? Only one answer: talk to the priest. "I promise you," he said, "I will do all I can. But the Situation is more complicated than you may realize."

"My father -" curious he'd not caught that flickering edge of hysteria in her voice till now - "when I was only five also began to stay away from home. I never found out why. But it killed my mother. I will not wait for it to kill me."

Threatening suicide? "Have you talked to your husband at all?"

"It isn't a wife's place."

Smiling: "Only to talk to his employer. Very well, Signora, I shall try. But I can guarantee nothing. My employer is England: the King." Which quieted her.

When she left, he began a bitter dialogue with himself. What had happened to diplomatic initiative? They - whoever "they" were - seemed to be calling the tune.

The Situation is always bigger than you, Sidney. It has like God its own logic and its own justification for being, and the best you can do is cope.

I'm not a marriage counselor, or a priest.

Don't act as if it were a conscious plot against you. Who knows how many thousand accidents - a variation in the weather, the availability of a ship, the failure of a crop - brought all these people, with their separate dreams and worries, here to this island and arranged them into this alignment? Any Situation takes shape from events much lower than the merely human.

Oh, of course: look at Florence. A random pattern of cold-air currents, some shifting of the pack ice, the deaths of a few ponies, these helped produce one Hugh Godolphin, as we saw him. Only by the merest happenstance did he escape the private logic of that ice-world.

The inert universe may have a quality we can call logic. But logic is a human attribute after all; so even at that it's a misnomer. What are real are the cross-purposes. We've dignified them with the words "profession" and "occupation." There is a certain cold comfort in remembering that Manganese, Mizzi, Maijstral, Dupiro the ragman, that blasted face who caught us at the villa - also work at cross-purposes.

But what then does one do? Is there a way out?

There is always the way out that Carla Maijstral threatens to take.

His musings were interrupted by Demivolt, who came stumbling in the door. "There's trouble."

"Oh indeed. That's unusual."

"Dupiro the ragman."

Good things come in threes. "How."

"Drowned, in Marsamuscetto. Washed ashore downhill from Manderaggio. He had been mutilated." Stencil thought of the Great Siege and the Turkish atrocities: death's flotilla.

"It must have been I Banditti," Demivolt continued: "a gang of terrorists or professional assassins. They vie with one another in finding new and ingenious ways to murder. Poor Dupiro's genitals were found sewn in his mouth. Silk suturing worthy of a fine surgeon."

Stencil felt ill.

"We think they are connected somehow with the fasci di combattimento who've organized last month in Italy, around Milan. The Manganese has been in intermittent contact with their leader Mussolini. "

"The tide could have carried him across."

"They wouldn't want it out to sea, you know. Craftsmanship of that order must have an audience, or it's worthless."

What's happened, he asked his other half. The Situation used to be a civilized affair.