“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.