The Maltese Goddess

ONE

I like to think of myself as an honorable person, but once I’ve explained to someone slowly, in words of one syllable, why it would be cheaper for them to deal with someone else, then if they insist, I’m as happy as the next person to take their money.

At least that is what I thought when Martin Galea, the best of the best of the Toronto architectural scene, came into my shop, Greenhalgh and McClintoch by name, accompanied by his timid wife and his platinum credit card, and began to spend what seemed at the time to be almost breathtaking amounts of money. We—my business partner Sarah Greenhalgh and I— were suffering through the doldrums of an economic downturn, a seemingly chronic turn of events, and Galea’s purchase looked almost too good to be true. Which it was—and had I been gifted with the ability to foretell the future, no amount of money would have enticed me to agree to his terms.

It all started innocuously enough, though. It was a clear winter day in Toronto, and if there were tremors in the cosmic fabric that should have warned me of what was to come, I didn’t notice them. Diesel, aka The Deez, the official Shop Cat, was at his favorite post, curled up in the front window enjoying the sunshine, as usual ignoring the activity of the mere mortals around him.

Even Galea’s visit followed its normal course. He’d been in the store several times before, and the routine was always the same. A Jaguar pulled up in front of the shop, facing the wrong way, half on the narrow street and half on the even narrower sidewalk. Galea leapt out and bounded up the few steps to the store, leaving Mrs. Galea—if she had a first name, I was not privy to it—to negotiate her way out of the car on the street side, painfully aware, it seemed to me, of the hostile looks and rude gestures of the motorists and pedestrians inconvenienced by this display of automotive bad manners.

It never seemed possible for Galea to simply walk into a room. His entrance was always a dramatic event of some kind, although I would be hard-pressed to tell you exactly what he did to make it seem that way.

It helped, of course, that he was, let’s face it, extraordinarily good-looking. Not particularly tall, but well built, and obviously a man who worked at it, he had a very stylish look to him. On this particular occasion he wore some kind of collar-less shirt—it was silk, I think, although nobody has ever called me an expert on clothes—black, nicely cut pants, and a black coat, in what I’m sure was cashmere, which he rather cavalierly tossed onto the front desk on arrival. The clothes went well with the perennial tan and the dark hair, cut just long enough to be artsy but not long enough to offend his well-heeled clients. His features were almost perfect, except perhaps for a certain softness about the mouth, which men, jealous no doubt, liked to call effeminate, but which women found charmingly boyish.

In any event, we all—Sarah and I; my neighbor and our right-hand man Alex Stewart; and our only other customer, a young woman in the shortest black skirt I have ever seen, black tights and boots, and leather jacket, and who was not, my instincts told me, planning to buy anything at all—looked in his direction as he entered the shop, his driving gloves in one hand, his sunglasses twirling nonchalantly in the other. Sarah, who was a whiz on the business side but who found dealing with difficult clients troublesome, disappeared quickly into the little office in the back. Alex moved to assist our other customer.

“Ms. McClintoch.” Galea smiled in my general direction as he looked about him. “I’m very glad to see you are here. I’d appreciate your advice and assistance with my latest project.” Galea had a way of making you think your opinion was important to him, although my experience with him to date would indicate that the only opinion that mattered was his own.

“I’m building a house in Malta. I was born there, you know. A bit of a return to my roots. Nice little piece of property, sea view of course. I’ll be needing some furnishings for it, so let us see what you have,” he said, taking me by the elbow and guiding me toward the back of the store. He smelled very nice, I noticed, some exotic aftershave or men’s cologne I did not recognize. “A little more Mediterranean in feel than what I usually do. A little more relaxed. More like my place in the Caribbean, which you may recall.”

I nodded. Of course I recalled it. The last time we had supplied some furniture for Galea, it had been for the home he was referring to, a luxurious retreat on an exclusive island in the Caribbean. The house had been featured in one of the upscale architectural magazines, and indeed had won an award for its design, and Galea had been good enough to give Greenhalgh and McClintoch a credit. It had moved us into an entirely different league, so to speak, and had brought us some very exclusive customers. The point was, I didn’t need to be reminded. This was Galea’s way of telling me that I owed him, and while it was true, it irritated me because I had a feeling that payback time was near.

“Now, what have we here? Very nice—Indonesian, I believe,” he said, pausing in front of a very expensive antique teak armoire and chewing thoughtfully on the arm of his sunglasses in a way that I confess I found suggestive. “I think that will do quite nicely, don’t you?

“And what about this, Lara?” he said, sliding easily to a first-name basis while pointing to a large old teak dining table and eight slat chairs. “What do you think?” he asked, standing much too close for comfort.

“I, of course, think they’re perfect,” I replied, backing away slightly. “But I should point out to you that the price quoted covers the cost of their having been shipped from Jakarta to Toronto, and I’d have to charge you to ship it from here to Malta. Malta, if my knowledge of geography serves me correctly, is very close to Italy, a country whose design industry is among the best in the world, so it might be better for you to shop a little closer to your new home.” I tried to sound crisp and professional.

This apparently was not the answer he wanted. “What do you think?” he asked, turning to our only other customer. “Miss… ?”

“Perez,” she said, blushing from the attention. “Monica Perez. I think it’s…” Her voice trailed off as she thought about it. I could tell she was thinking by the way she chewed her lip and wrinkled her brow prettily. “It’s lovely,” she concluded.

“What do you think would look nice on the patio?” he asked her, drawing away from me and leading her toward a set of wrought-iron patio furniture, leaving me feeling in some unfathomable way bereft. I found myself wondering how Galea managed to turn the act of buying furniture into a seduction. He had a way with women that went with the looks, and it was said at least some of his design commissions owed much to urging on the part of his clients’ wives, several of whom he was rumored to have had affairs with. These affairs never seemed to last long. When I wasn’t falling under his spell, I liked to think that it was his incessant use of the first person singular that caused even the most infatuated to lose interest. More likely, however, it was he who did the dumping.

I couldn’t hear what he and Ms. Perez were saying; they were almost whispering to each other by this time, their heads almost touching, but I couldn’t argue with the results: the armoire, an antique Indonesian cabinet, the teak table and chairs, two carved mirrors, the wrought-iron and glass patio set, two side tables, and a large, intricately carved coffee table. The bill would be satisfyingly well into five digits, and even The Deez sat up and took notice, surprised no doubt to find a kindred spirit, someone who viewed the world as his oyster in the same way he did.

Throughout the entire performance, ignored by her husband and almost forgotten by the rest of us, Mrs. Galea stood, back to the wall, near the front door. Not once in this whole process did Galea consult with, or even acknowledge, his wife, although presumably she too would spend time in the house in Malta. Her opinion, at least insofar as furniture was concerned, did not appear to be of any consequence.

Rumored to be considerably older than her husband, she certainly looked it. She was a rather plain woman, about her husband’s height, her features too sharp—perhaps patrician would be a kinder way of describing them—to be attractive. Her hair was cut way too severely, a blunt cut that accentuated the sharpness of her features and the square of her jaw. Her clothes—of the powder-blue twin sweater set and pearls variety, matching pleated skirt unfashionably long, pleats sewn down over the hips—while no doubt expensive, could only be described as dull. To be fair, I suppose, I should say that it was possible that twin sweater sets were back in style—where clothes fashion is concerned, I’d be the last to know—but more than anything else Mrs. Galea gave the impression of a colorless creature intent on blending into the background as much as possible. The only feature that commanded attention were her eyes, intelligent and inquisitive. If her husband was the charmer of the pair, she was the born observer.

Monica Perez, on the other hand, whose opinion apparently did matter, was quite die opposite of Mrs. Galea, flashy and, in my opinion, definitely more style than substance. And there I was to complete the female triangle, not entirely immune to his charms but definitely wary. For a moment I had a vision of the three of us as three little planets revolving around his sun, held there by the strength of his personality and the brightness of his charm.

Then, the selections made, Galea, bored already with Ms. Perez, turned his attention back to me. His most charming smile on his face, teeth perfect, head cocked disarmingly to one side, he once again took my elbow and steered me toward the desk. I knew that I was about to learn the quid pro quo to all this money being spent: Galea’s propensity to keep a mental tally of owe-me’s aside, there almost always is one when somebody spends that much money in the shop, and I tried to steel myself for what was to come.

He was standing way too close again, and since he was only a little taller than I am, his eyes were disconcertingly focused directly on mine.

“I have a small favor to ask of you,” he began.

Say no, I told myself. Out loud I said, “If I can help, I will,” trying to keep my tone neutral as possible.

“I am going to be entertaining some very important people at my house in Malta very soon, in about ten days, actually, and I need the place to be arranged to my standard, which as you know is rather exacting, shall we say. Unfortunately I can’t go there myself right away—I have to make a presentation to one of the banks here—so I can’t supervise the work personally. I need all of these pieces consolidated with some furniture at my house and shipped to this address,” he said, handing me a slip of paper with the address neatly typed on it. “But most importantly, I need you to go over there and see that the finishing is up to snuff and that all the furniture is placed correctly. I will, of course, cover your airfare and compensate you for your time.”

“I’m not sure I could be away from the store right now,” I said, “and furthermore…” My voice trailed off as I searched for an excuse not to go.

“You could stay in the house too, which is already partially furnished, and I will reimburse you for your meals and other expenses while you are there. You could look upon it as a bit of a holiday,” he said in a wheedling tone and giving me the high voltage smile.

“This will be expensive, Mr. Galea,” I said, but I could feel myself weakening. “First of all, the deadline means we’ll have to ship by air, not sea. And why not have someone there see to the placement of the furniture?”

“There is no one over there I can trust to do this to my standards. In fact there are very few people anywhere I would trust with tins task,” he said smoothly. “The meeting is an important one for me,” he added.

I would accept, of course. I knew it, and so did he, but I didn’t want to look like a pushover to his charms.

“Here is a check for $2500 as an advance on expenses. You can have the shipping and insurance charges billed directly to me, as usual,” he said. “Will you do it?”

I nodded. There was no question we needed the sale. I looked at the check and capitulated totally. I called Sarah to come and do the paperwork, and then feeling slightly guilty, turned my attention to Mrs. Galea. She was now intently examining a small wooden carving, only three or four inches high, one of several we had in a basket at the front desk, a conversation piece and an inexpensive purchase for those just browsing.

“I’m Lara, Lara McClintoch, Mrs. Galea. I don’t think we have been officially introduced. That’s an Indonesian Worry-man you’re looking at. If you look closely you can see it is a man all hunched over. The idea is that you rub all your troubles onto his back, and he takes them all on for you.”

She smiled tentatively. “You’re the owner, then,” she said.

“One of them,” I replied. “Sarah Greenhalgh, who is with your husband now, is me other.”

“You have lovely things,” she said, smiling rather shyly.

At this point, her husband, his business done, turned to me and said, as if my time was now his alone to command, “Come to the house at ten o’clock tomorrow morning to see the furniture I want shipped and to pick up a set of plans.”

“Is ten convenient for you too, Mrs. Galea?” I asked, turning to her. If he wasn’t going to ask her, I was. She nodded, blushing at the attention.

Ignoring her, Galea headed down the steps to the car, leaving her to follow him out of the store. As she got to the door, I rushed after her and pressed the Worryman into her hands. If anyone needed it, she did.

“With our compliments, Mrs. Galea,” I said.

She looked surprised. “Thank you,” she said. “And it’s Marilyn.”

With that they were gone, a screeching of brakes from another car as Galea pulled away without so much as a glance at the rest of the traffic, leaving all of us, particularly Monica Perez, slightly breathless.

“Dreadful man!” Sarah sighed when Monica Perez had also left and we once again had the store to ourselves. “Imagine having a husband who flirts with other women right in front of you. That poor woman!”

“He certainly thinks he’s God’s gift to women, that’s for sure,” I agreed.

“That expression, ”God’s gift,“ implies the existence of a Being of higher consequence than Martin Galea himself, and therefore not something Galea could bring himself to support, I suspect,” Alex said dryly.

We all laughed. “I have to say I like his work, though,” Alex continued, naming several of Galea’s better known commissions. Galea did work all over the world.

I had to agree with Alex. Galea, despite his less ennobling qualities, had enormous talent to match the ego.

“You also have to agree he’s good for business, Sarah,” I said. “Monica Perez, who I’m sure was just browsing, was so entranced she bought a mirror similar to one Galea bought! With any luck, she’ll be back for more—furniture, I mean.”

“Why do you figure a man like that married a woman like that?” Sarah mused, ignoring the compliments we’d given Galea and our rather jejune attempts at humor.

“Money,” Alex replied. “McLean money to be precise,” he said, naming a well-known Toronto family. “Married while he was still an architectural student. Got him off to a good start, I’d think. Money and connections.”

“Do you think she actually had something to say, opinions and such, before she took up with him?” Sarah went on.

“We’ll probably never know,” I said. “Now, we’d better get started arranging all this. We don’t have much time. Are you sure you don’t want this one, Sarah? You wouldn’t have to deal with him directly very much, and you might enjoy having a few days in an exotic locale.”

Sarah had purchased the business from me but had asked me to come back in with her when she found she didn’t like the incessant travel it required nearly as much as she thought she might. She disliked the haggling with suppliers, the frustrating dealings with import and export officials in various countries around the world, the loneliness of being so far from home for so long.

I, on the other hand, loved it. It was why I had started the business in the first place. But I still felt a little guilty that I got all the travel while she minded the shop.

“Oh, I think learning to communicate with teenagers is about as exotic as I want to get right now,”‘ she replied. Sarah had a new beau who came as a package deal with two teen-aged sons.

“I’ll look after things at this end, while you’re over there, and we’ll ask Alex to do his usual wonders with our shippers,” she said.

I was happy with this, I had to admit. My partner in life, Lucas May, a Mexican archaeologist, had agreed to supervise a dig in Belize. He’d be off at a site in the middle of nowhere, out of cellphone range, for several weeks, so our regular time together, usually in Merida or Miami, had been postponed until he returned.

Unlike Galea, Lucas was self-effacing, equally attractive, I thought, but quietly so. A brilliant archaeologist, an ardent supporter of the indigenous peoples of Mexico, he had a way about him that I had come to find immensely reassuring. But we were both feeling the strains of a long-distance relationship, and I had a sense a bit of a break might help us sort out our feelings. I thought a few days in Malta, away from the distractions of daily life, might focus things a bit for me.

I called our shipper, Dave Thomson, and understood his expressions of dismay when I told him what needed to be done, by when.

“Money is no object here, Dave,” I said. “You know Galea. Just tell me how you want to do it. I’ll take measurements of the stuff at the house tomorrow and mark it for you.”

“Well, this is a new one for me. Can’t say I’ve ever shipped to Malta,”‘ he said. “Do they have a lot of falcons there, do you think?” he joked. “I’ll have to check into routings and costs. My favorite old movie, by the way, The Maltese Falcon. Humphrey Bogart at his best, I’d say. Anyway, I’ll make a few calls, find the best way to do this, and the best rate I can. It’ll be expensive, though, at least $3000, probably. But as you say, money is no object for this guy.”

After some discussion about insurance and logistics and so on, he rang off, and I relaxed a little knowing that if it could be done, Dave was the one to do it. He’d performed miracles for me more than once, starting a few years ago when he found a furniture shipment lost out of Singapore and got it to a fancy design show only hours before it opened.

I’d been the supplier to a young up-and-coming designer who’d been asked to decorate a room in the show house that was to raise money for charity. That was the event that launched his career and my business. The designer was a man by the name of Clive Swain, who after that show became my first employee and then my husband. But Dave could hardly be held accountable for that, and Thomson Shipping had been my shipper of choice ever since.

When I came out of the office, Alex had already started moving Galea’s purchases into our storage area and replacing them with stuff from our stock. Then we all surveyed the shop floor. Even with some replacements, it looked a little bare. Galea had certainly cut a swath through the place.

“I’d better get on to Dave about that shipment Lucas sent us from Mexico before he went to Belize,” Alex said. Lucas, in addition to our personal relationship, was Greenhalgh and McClintoch’s agent in Mexico. “We can fill some of the holes with the Mexican pottery and leather chairs he said he sent us,” Alex said.

The next morning I drove over to the Galea residence. It was located in a part of town which had once been thought to have charm. But now interspersed between the older, more gracious homes, were what are commonly called monster houses, those in which ostentation and sheer size have replaced aesthetics and good taste.

In such a neighborhood, Galea’s home came as something of a relief and a bit of a surprise to me, something more to the taste of Marilyn Galea, nee McLean, more old Toronto than the work of a noted modern architect. The face it showed to the street was refreshingly simple, a pleasant Georgian facade, a simple circular driveway of interlocking paving stones leading through iron gates to a European-style courtyard, and a very plain door surrounded by ivy.

The door was opened by a pleasant-faced young woman in a grey uniform. Filipina, I thought, and we were joined almost immediately by the unpretentious Marilyn Galea herself, dressed in the camel version of what she had worn the previous day. I stepped into an elegant octagonal-shaped entrance, all creamy marble. Even the flowers matched, a sumptuous bouquet of lilies arranged in a crystal vase on a table in the middle of the foyer.

Leading off the entrance toward the back of the house was a hallway, more art gallery than hall actually, with several works of modern art, a couple of them signed by Galea himself, discreetly lit from above. When we got to the end of the hall, I stepped into a large open area at the rear and the house’s secret revealed itself.

I think I actually gasped out the word “Wow!” then immediately regretted it, such an inarticulate expression certainly not in keeping with the sophisticated veneer I liked to think I projected. Neither did it do justice to what I saw.

All the houses on this side of the street back on one of the many lovely ravines that crisscross Toronto. But no others, I’m sure, made such exceptional use of the landscape. The back of the Galea house was two storeys of clear glass—perhaps two and a half, since the house was built down into the ravine at the back. The house seemed to float out over the ravine with no visible means of support. The eye was drawn into the trees, then above them, seemingly forever, to the office towers of the downtown core. Here, for certain, was the Galea touch.

I’m not certain how long I stood there, just gaping at the sight. When I looked around I found Galea himself watching, a look of amusement in his eyes. “Like it?” he said.

“It’s magnificent!” I said.

“You should see it at night, actually,” he went on. “From where we are standing, all the lights in the ceiling of the living room—there are 360 of them—light up like little stars, and reflected in the glass, they stretch out as far as the lights from the city towers.” He seemed to take a boyish pleasure in his own work and my evident admiration. “Come and have a better look.”

We descended a couple of steps into the living room, to a very elegant off-white sofa flanked by cream leather Barcelona chairs. At one side of the room was a huge marble fireplace which soared to the ceiling. Behind was the outside wall of the old house, its original red brick now whitewashed to suit its new environs in the addition of glass and steel. Most of the furnishings were antique white, and everything was done on a grand scale. Despite the proportions, however, the feeling was one of calm and contemplation, a kind of pure space.

“Would you like a tour of the house before we get down to work?” he asked.

“Sure,” I replied.

The rest of the house was also lovely, the main living spaces complemented by a palette of honey, cream, and buttermilk. Wooden floors were the color of pale straw, covered in some places with antique carpets, their colors worn to the same golden hues.

The dining room was spectacular. It also had a view of the ravine. But in a departure from the colors in the rest of the house, it featured a black lacquered table that reflected the myriad lights from a chandelier, designed by Galea himself, he assured me, which caught the light in hundreds of pieces of crystal, then burnished it and threw it back in sparkling starburst patterns on the wall, the table, and the floor.

The upstairs hallway was the upscale equivalent of a trophy room, decorated with framed drawings of some of the buildings he had designed and was famous for. Galea had attained a point in his career where he was always referred to as the award-winning architect, never just the architect, and here it was easy to see why. I recognized a town hall that had won an international competition in Milan, a grand public space in Riyadh, a concert hall in Australia. It was all very grand. Next to these were photographs of Galea accepting various prizes and hobnobbing with assorted famous people—politicians, movie stars, and the like. He pointed each of them out to me with obvious pleasure, like a little boy boasting about his exploits in the schoolyard.

After the tour was over and my genuine exclamations of admiration expressed and accepted, Galea got down to business and showed me the plans for the house in Malta. His drawings already incorporated the furniture he’d purchased the day before. “There’s one shipment of furniture already there, and some Oriental carpets I picked up last time I was working in Turkey. Marilyn knows what furniture is to go from here. She has the list. And we have a tight deadline. I’ll be there a week from Friday or Saturday.”

“I’ll get it done, Mr. Galea. And we appreciate the business,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “Now I must run. I have a meeting with the board of directors of an oil company. I’ll be adding a new dimension to the skyline of Toronto soon.” He smiled.

Marilyn Galea and I walked him to the front door. By this time he appeared to be in a bit of a hurry, but not so much that he couldn’t stop to flirt. “I haven’t mentioned how lovely you look this morning,” he said to me as he took my arm. “I feel so much more confident my gathering in Malta will go well now that you have taken the house in hand.” He started to go out the door, holding my arm until the very last moment.

“Martin,” Marilyn said quietly. He looked back. She was holding his briefcase and his sunglasses.

He grinned at her. “What would I do without you, my love?” he said, his arm briefly circling her waist, giving her a quick kiss on the cheek. “My guardian angel,” he said, turning to me. “I’d be lost without her.”

Then with a boyish grin and a wave, he was gone. Marilyn’s face softened as she watched him go.

It would have been a touching gesture had it not been for the fact that on his way out he brushed past me in a certain way. It is always edifying to be in the presence of greatness, but it is unfortunate that some of those who possess it are really revolting people. I turned my attention to his wife. If she had noticed the incident, she didn’t mention it “You have an absolutely beautiful home, Mrs. Galea— Marilyn. You must be very proud of it.”

“My husband is an exceptional designer, I know. But it is the colors I love the most,” she replied. “They remind me of Italy, of Florence. It is one of my favorite places in all the world. It is where I learned to love architecture, and I suppose set the stage for my life with Martin. When I told him that, he said he chose the colors for me,” she said.

Then I got down to work, Marilyn very obligingly and competently helping me by taking down the measurements as I called them out. There were five pieces of furniture ranging from a huge mahogany sideboard to a large armoire that were to be consolidated with the shipment from the shop. Most of them were in the front of the house, not far from the door. I measured each one of them, estimated their weight to help Dave out, and then marked each with a yellow sticker with my initials on it to make sure there would be no mistake when Dave’s men arrived to get the furniture. I was going on ahead to Malta, and Marilyn had pointed out to me that while the maid was home every day except Wednesdays, her day off, she and Martin were normally out during the day.

“I go to my club, every day, once I’ve gotten the house organized. I love it there. Do you know it? The Rosedale Women’s Club downtown,” she said, naming a very swank women’s club that I had taken out a trial membership in a couple of years earlier during a period of forced inactivity shortly after my divorce.

It had seemed like a good idea at the time, getting fit in the company of women only. But after subjecting my somewhat zaftig figure and my grey jogging sweats to the scrutiny of women whose tights and headbands actually matched their leotards, and whose main topic of conversation seemed to focus on the latest color of nail polish, I had returned to my solitary morning jog. I was surprised that an obviously intelligent but shy woman like Marilyn Galea would be a member of such a club, but perhaps she was more gregarious in other people’s company, or more likely she was simply to the manor born, which I was not.

I changed the subject. “Tell me more about your husband,” I said. “He mentioned he is going back to his roots with this house in Malta. Is that where he is from originally?”

“Yes, it is. Galea is a very common Maltese name. He was born in the town of Mellieha on the main island. His family was not well-off—his father had a little shop in the town. But Martin, Martin was born ambitious, I think. He and a friend of his talked their way into the international school in Malta and charmed their way into the homes of the international set. The principal of the school recognized his talent and helped him get a scholarship in architecture at the University of Toronto—Canada and Malta continue to have ties because of the old British Commonwealth connection.”

“Are his parents still living there?”

“No. Both of them died several years ago. Before I met him.”

“Have you seen the house?” I asked.

“Not yet,” she replied. “I’ve never been to Malta. I’m looking forward to it, to seeing where Martin comes from, the village where he grew up. He doesn’t talk about it much.”

“Will I see you there then?”

“No. This is a business trip. Martin is going to Rome for a couple of days to see to a project he’s working on there, then he goes on to Malta. You know Martin.” She smiled. “Always looking for the next big commission. He’s gotten back in touch with a boyhood friend of his, who’s also done very well for himself in the interim, and who hopefully will see that Martin gets connected to all the right people in Malta. Martin is entertaining some people as soon as he gets there. I’m not at liberty to say whom. But here, come and have a coffee with me in the kitchen. Would you like an espresso or a cappuccino?” she said, changing the subject abruptly.

“Sure,” I said. I’d already noticed during the house tour that the kitchen was equipped with a commercial-sized espresso machine. It was an impressive space. White marble floors, brushed stainless-steel counters and cupboards, and the de rigueur, in that neighborhood, huge built-in refrigerator and six-burner professional stove. “Do you enjoy cooking, Marilyn?” I asked. You could run a small restaurant out of this kitchen.

“Not really.” She smiled. “Coralee does most of the cooking,” she said, gesturing toward the young woman who had opened the door when I arrived, and who was now chopping some vegetables at the far end of the kitchen. “

“Cooking has never been my forte, neither for that matter has housekeeping. Sheltered childhood!” She smiled again. I recalled her bluestocking upbringing.

After asking Coralee to make us cappuccinos, she led me off the kitchen to a small room. I say small, but it was probably the size of my living room. Here it seemed small. It was decorated quite uncharacteristically in a pink chintz, and seemed, and I do not mean this unkindly, a little worn. I noted with some surprise that the Indonesian Worryman I had given her the day before was sitting in a prominent place on the desk.

“This is my office,”‘ she said, noticing my glance about the room. The room was very neat, and I could see what looked to be financial ledgers, indicating to me that she was the one who looked after the smooth running of the Galea household. I found myself wondering why Marilyn Galea could not have taken on the house in Malta. She struck me as perfectly capable of managing the project as well as I could.

“The office was originally my mother’s,” Marilyn went on. “She died when I was very young, but I remember being in this room with her. Martin let me keep the room the way it was. You know how architects are,” she said. “Even something so small as the placement of a bar of soap in the bathroom is a design feature, and one they must therefore control. It was a major concession on his part.”

“This is your family home, then, is it?”

“Yes. We moved in after my father died about ten years ago. He’d roll over in his grave if he could see what Martin has done to it.” She laughed. “But it seemed to be the sensible thing to do. Martin was just getting started, and building a new house seemed out of the question. Now I think we both like it.” As she spoke she twisted her pearls, which I had the impression she always wore, and I knew, somehow, that the pearls had been her mother’s, and like the office meant a very great deal to her for that reason.

Coralee brought us the coffee and we began to chat. I must say it never ceases to amaze me what we’ll tell a relative stranger. Here I had just met Marilyn Galea and soon we were chattering away like old friends. At least I was chattering. She asked a lot of questions. I told her all about the shop—she was fascinated by the idea that I had just made up my mind to go into business and had done so.

I told her about meeting Alex Stewart when I moved into my little house in Cabbagetown, about how he had kind of adopted me, and how now, on a pension, he came into the shop every day to help us, out of the goodness of his heart, and certainly not because of the pittance we were able to pay him. How, even in his seventies, he was a whiz on the Internet and was probably, even as we spoke, online getting me an airline ticket to Malta.

I told her about my parents, my father a retired diplomat, about my two-year relationship with Lucas, who was, I told her, probably the nicest man on the planet. In short I told her everything. Well, not quite everything. I did not tell her that in the dying days of my marriage, when I was coming to realize that Clive’s penchant for very young women and his distaste for an honest day’s work were not a temporary aberration but a permanent condition, I had come dizzyingly close to succumbing to the charms of Martin Galea.

Common sense and good taste had won a moral victory then, but it was by a narrow margin, and it still caused me some embarrassment to think of the way I’d behaved. Above all, I hated to think that this down-to-earth woman, in whose kitchen I was sitting, knew anything about it. It was yet another reason why Martin Galea usually got what he wanted where I was concerned, with the one exception, of course. I really wanted him to keep his mouth shut about those unhappy days of my past, and Galea, from what I’d heard, was not above using what he knew about people to advance his career. Nothing so sordid as blackmail, to be sure, just a sense that there was a little tally of past sins to accompany the list of owe-me’s.

While we were still chatting, my cellphone rang. It was Alex. “How do you feel about flying out tonight?” he asked. I muttered something. “I’m having real difficulty getting you connecting flights. Essentially from here you can get to Malta through London, Paris, or Rome. London is fully booked. In Rome they’re having one of those regular strikes of theirs. There’s a seat on an Air Canada flight that will get you into Paris in time to make an Air Malta connection to Luqa.”

“Where?”

“Luqa—Malta’s airport. I’d better get you some reading material on the country, I can tell. Will you go tonight?”

“Sure. No problem. I’ll head home now and pack. Got a weather report for me too?”

“Of course. Winter. Rain gear a good idea, a jacket for evenings. But lots warmer than here. We’re supposed to have an arctic blast in the next few days—minus fifteen or so at night”

“In that case, I’m on my way,” I said, laughing, not realizing that even while I was thousands of miles away the Canadian deep freeze would cause me no end of trouble.

I said good-bye to Marilyn Galea and thanked her for the coffee and her help with the furniture. I told her that Thomson Shipping would be picking it up in the next day or so, and that Alex or Sarah would call her to let her know when. She gave me the names and telephone number of the couple who were the caretakers for the property in Malta, checked to see that her husband had given me the right set of plans, and made j careful note of Dave Thomson’s address and phone number, as well as that of Sarah and Alex.

Then I left her. I still have a vision of her standing in the doorway as I pulled out of the driveway. A tall, plain woman painfully shy but rather nice, married to a little boy—a disarming, talented little boy, perhaps, but a little boy nonetheless.

TWO

First the animals, creatures of the Pleistocene. Driven before a great wall of ice that almost imperceptibly encroaches on their grazing lands, they move further and further south, onto a narrow band of land, a bridge, that stretches across the sea. But then the thunder of a great earthquake, the waters rush in. The land bridge becomes a chain of little islands, and then a very few. In this tiny archipelago, there is no going forward and no turning back. Trapped on this rocky shore, struggling for survival, they become, as the ages go by, smaller and smaller. Stunted hippopotami, elephants the size of dogs. Then silence, the Cave of Darkness, extinction.

But what is this? Digging in, cowering in the dark of caves. Troglodyte! Will you move into the light?

I was in such a dazed state when I arrived in Malta, the previous day a blur of activity that got me to the Paris flight just in the nick of time, then to the Air Malta flight by the same narrow margin, mat I almost missed the hand-lettered sign with the interesting phonetic treatment of my name.

MISSUS MCLEENTAK, it read, held by a rather nice-looking young man in jeans and a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt Presumably the age of mass media and production has brought us more than the comfort of seeing T-shirts advertising the same establishment anywhere in the world, but at that very moment I could not think what.

Actually the reason I almost missed it was that I was absolutely mesmerized by the appearance and antics of one of my fellow passengers on the Air Malta flight from Paris. He was dressed safari-style, whether because he thought Malta was the kind of place that required that sort of attire or as a matter of affectation, I couldn’t know. In any event, he was wearing cowboy boots, khaki pants, one of those matching khaki short-sleeved shirts with an excess of pockets, and a wide-brimmed hat of the bush ranger variety, one side snapped up, that one associates with the Australian outback or the Serengeti. This one sported a leopard print band, and dipped over a pockmarked face, a bulbous nose, and florid complexion that indicated its owner should probably swear off the booze from time to time.

This fellow, whom I’d named for my own amusement GWH for Great White Hunter, had begun his performance even before the plane got off the ground in Paris. While everyone else was attempting to get seated, he was up and waving bills in assorted currencies in the direction of the cabin attendants. It seemed he wanted them to put the bottle of champagne— Dom, he called it—he’d brought on board in the refrigerator and to serve it to him at his seat. He was sitting with a lovely lady, he said in a stage whisper that could be heard halfway to Nairobi, and wanted to impress her.

The well-trained cabin crew, who had the good taste to regard the proffered money and the champagne as they would a basket of scorpions, explained to him that one was not supposed to bring one’s own liquor for consumption on the aircraft. GWH apparently felt the rules did not apply to him. Finally the head cabin steward, realizing that GWH would be very disruptive to the comfort of the other passengers if they did not comply, agreed to take care of the champagne.

The “lovely lady” in question was an attractive middle-aged woman who appeared never to have met GWH, and was, I suspect, no more thrilled than I would be by this intimacy forced upon her by Fate in the form of the Air Malta computer.

In fact, she looked as if this flight was to be the longest three hours of her life. The aircraft was small, and had been overbooked, so it was absolutely full, even after some passengers volunteered, lured by the offer of cash and accommodation, to wait for a later plane. I myself had been tempted by the thought of a few hours in Paris and a nice afternoon nap after an all-night flight, but had decided to forge on.

In any event, I was seated across the aisle and back one row from the lovely lady and the GWH, and could tell that about thirty minutes into the flight, she was becoming desperate. At this point, in what I took to be a splendid gesture of Christian charity, a gentleman seated behind me, a priest in black robes and a cross on a long chain around his neck, told the cabin attendants that he would be pleased to change seats with her. The message was discreetly delivered and accepted with genuine gratitude, I’m sure, and the priest took his seat beside GWH.

I could see only the side of the priest’s head, and thought rather uncharitable thoughts, considering his kindness, about his hairdresser. There was no part in his hair. Instead it hugged his skull, emanating in all directions from a tiny bald spot on the top of his head, perched like a polar ice cap on some small planet. At the front it looked from this angle as if his hair stopped just above his eyebrows, giving very much the impression of a man with a bowl on his head.

I was very tired from the overnight flight, and after reading the Paris papers for a few minutes and realizing that I had made the right decision to press on to Malta—there were reports of labor unrest and the chance of wildcat strikes possibly affecting the airport, and there had been bomb threats in the Metro—I fell asleep and did not waken until the “tables and chair backs in the upright position” announcement as we began our descent into Malta.

I peered past my seatmate by the window, straining to get a view of the island. Alex had told me that Malta is shaped like a fish—Alex knows the most amazing things—and that where I was going, Galea’s house, was, if one assumed the top of the fish was to the north, just below the gill area. Not a particularly inviting location description and certainly not one I would expect to hear from the Maltese National Tourism Organization, but definitely descriptive. All I saw from the plane was a rocky and rather desolate island. It was raining, as Alex had predicted.

I did not see GWH and the priest exiting the aircraft, but they soon joined the rest of us at the baggage carousel. The priest had a duffel bag only, but the GWH had three large suitcases and a golf bag filled with clubs. There was the usual routine to get out of the airport, a red zone and a green zone, depending on whether or not you had anything to declare, and I headed for the green zone several steps behind the priest and GWH.

GWH was looking a little the worse for wear. He had had too much champagne, I suppose, and his khaki pants had slipped down below his paunch, so that he was now walking on the back hem of his trousers. He stumbled slightly, and the priest, who by this time surely deserved multitudes of credits in the hereafter, went to assist him. Both were stopped in the spot check in the green zone, but after sharing a joke with the priest, probably at the expense of GWH, the customs officers waved the priest through. GWH did not fare as well, and as I went through the outer door, I wondered if they would notice the metal detector amongst his golf clubs. It was the last I thought I would see of either of them.

It took me a few seconds to realize that Missus Mcleentak meant me, since I really hadn’t expected to be met at the airport. I approached the young man and introduced myself.

“I’m Lara McClintoch,” I said. “Are you looking for me?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the nice young man said. “I’m Anthony Farrugia. My mother and father look after Mr. Galea’s house for him. Mother thought it would be nice if I were to come and meet you.”

“That is very thoughtful of you and your mother,” I said. “Where to?”

He took my bag and led me out to a parking area and a very old car. An acid-yellow car, a British Ford of some kind, I think, conservatively twenty years old, and maybe closer to thirty. It looked well cared for, however, and Anthony’s pride in it was evident.

“Nice car,” I said and he beamed.

He loaded my luggage in the trunk and we got into the car. Alex’s notes had warned me they drive on the left in Malta, so I was prepared for mat. Not for what came next, however. Anthony put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb, then accelerated until the gears were screaming. Just when the smell of burning rubber or oil permeated the car, he pushed in the clutch, pulled it into neutral, put in the clutch again, and whipped it into third. He noticed me watching him.

“No second gear.” He grinned. “Have to go like a bomb in first, then ease it into third.”

“I see,” I said.

At the exit of the airport, we roared around a corner in third gear, and I could hear my suitcase flying about in the trunk.

“Not good to slow down,” he said. “It stalls.”

“I see,” I said again. Just then we went around another corner at breakneck speed, and with a thud the window beside me slid down into the door frame.

“Rats,” he said. “It does that sometimes.”

I tried to roll the window back up, but the handle spun uselessly in my hand.

“You have to pull the window up by hand,” he offered. “I’ll pull over and we’ll do mat.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I like the fresh air.”

“Me too.” He smiled.

“Mr. Galea gave me money to go out and buy a car for the house. I got a really good deal on this one,” he said conversationally.

“Good for you,” I said. “It’s lovely.”

“It belongs to the house, so you get to drive it while you’re here,” he said.

“I can hardly wait,” I said. What I meant, of course, was that I’d rather ride a donkey than drive this car. We sat in companionable silence for a while, the damp air blowing in our faces.

“How old are you, Anthony, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Almost seventeen,” he replied. Then after a pause, “But I’ve been driving since I was twelve.” He looked sideways at me to try to ascertain why I was asking.

“Do you help your mother and father look after the Galea place?” I asked him.

“Sure. But only after school. I’m trying to do well at school so I can go to university. I want to be an architect like Mr. Galea. The Cassars are born architects.”

“I thought your name was Farrugia. Who are the Cassars?”

“You haven’t heard of Gerolamo Cassar?” he asked incredulously. “He was our greatest architect. He designed Valletta, the capital city, and the most beautiful buildings on Malta. My mother is a Cassar.”

“Anthony,” I said, “this is my first visit to your country, and my knowledge of it is woefully inadequate, but I’m looking forward to learning a lot about it while I’m here.”

He digested that for a moment or two. “I think maybe I’ll have to show you around, then,” he said. “After school.”

“I’d really like that,” I said. “We sure can’t see much now.”

“Yes. You got here just in time. The fog is coming in.”

He was right. As we traveled away from the airport, the mist got thicker until you could only see a few feet in front of the car and I had absolutely no sense of where we were going, nor how I would ever retrace my route. I had the impression, despite the rain, of a rather arid land, very rocky, with little vegetation. Everything seemed grey at worst, or at best, a kind of sere yellow.

After about twenty minutes or so, we made a sharp right turn and went up what appeared to be a driveway, lined with bushes and a low stone wall in what at closer distance was a rather pretty buttery yellow. Halfway up the hill, we reversed the pattern on the gears, coming perilously close to stalling, then rolled to a stop in front of a garage. An even older car was parked there.

The sound of the car brought a tiny woman with very fine features and a beautiful smile to the front door and out to the driveway. “My mom,” Anthony said, although she needed no introduction. Their smiles, the kind that light up whole rooms, were identical.

“I’m Marissa, missus,” she said. “Take the missus’s suitcase upstairs, Anthony,” she said. “And don’t forget to give the missus the car keys.”

I was about to offer to let Anthony keep the car, but I could tell—something in her eyes—that this would not be considered a good idea by his mother, so I kept quiet.

We entered the house. I’d had a chance to look at the plans and was beginning to recognize the Galea design trademark, so I was not surprised when the rather unpretentious facade opened into a spectacular space. The floors were all tiled in terra-cotta, and the walls, the pale yellow stone I’d seen in the driveway, had been stuccoed over in a pale ochre color. I knew the moment I entered the place that the furniture from the shop would be perfect here. It was a good feeling.

The design was open concept, only the stairway to the second floor segregating the kitchen from the rest of the space. There was a huge fireplace, and beside it a man directing a couple of workmen, who were putting finishing touches to the stucco, in a language that was totally incomprehensible to me. I knew from Alex’s brief geography lesson that virtually all Maltese, young and old, are fluent in English, the result of almost two centuries of British rule and influence that ended only very recently. He had assured me that English was one of two official languages for business in Malta, so I’d have no problems. The native language of the island, however, is Malti, one of those minority languages that have survived over the ages despite invasion, repression, and active attempts to stamp them out, and it was this, I assumed, that the man was speaking.

As I approached, the older man tipped his cap and said, “Hello, missus.” I took this to be Joseph, Anthony’s father and custodian of the house. He had a pleasant, open face, the large hands of a laborer, and appeared to be considerably older than his wife, although perhaps years of backbreaking labor had added lines to his face.

Over in one corner of the large room there was what on closer examination I found to be a large amount of furniture protected by drop cloths. Beside it, rolled in plastic were several carpets. Galea had told me he wanted to use carpets to delineate the various living areas, and he had given me a carefully annotated list of all the carpets and where they were to be placed. I sincerely hoped I remembered how to distinguish a Tabriz from a Bakhtiari, or this would be trouble.

The back of the house was all glass, and there were no curtains in evidence. While I couldn’t see more than twenty or thirty feet beyond the windows because of the fog, I assumed the bare windows meant there were no neighbors nearby. The windows would be protected from the summer heat of the Mediterranean by a terrace with a weathered brick floor and Greek columns. Large terra-cotta pots were already filled with flowers.

“I’ll show you around upstairs,” Marissa said, and I followed her up the staircase. There were three bedrooms on the second floor, all of them with large windows and a doorway onto a deck over the terrace below. Only one of the bedrooms, the largest, was furnished, and Marissa had seen to it that it was made up for me. There was a king-size bed, and an en suite bathroom with all the amenities. I wondered exactly where Galea was planning for me to sleep once he got there.

“You’ll be tired from your long journey,” Marissa said.

“I’ve left you something to eat, fenek and some bread and wine, and there is food in the refrigerator for your breakfast. I hope everything is satisfactory.”

“It’s wonderful, thank you, Marissa. And please call me Lara. We’re going to be working together a lot over the next few days, and I hope we can be friends.” She looked horrified at the thought of calling me by my first name. “I work for him just as you do,” I said.

She seemed pleased.

“Tomorrow… It’s the Sabbath, and Joseph and I normally do not work that day. We go to Mass… but I know there is a lot of work to be done before Mr. Galea comes.”

“That’s fine. You take the day off. I’ll need some time to figure out where everything is here, and I’ll do a plan so we can move the furniture in the easiest possible way. I’ll see you on Monday.”

“Thank you, Missus Lara,” she said.

“Your son has offered to show me around Malta, after school. Is that all right with you?”

“Of course it is, but don’t let him be a pest. He is so excited when someone from far away comes here, he can be a little, I don’t know, clingy?” she replied.

“He’s a really nice young man,” I said. “You must be very proud of him.”

“I am. We are,” she replied. “In a way we have Mar— Mr. Galea to thank for that. Anthony was not doing well at school, always in trouble. Joseph and I, we didn’t know what to do. Then Mr. Galea came to build this house. He has convinced Anthony he can be an architect. Now he has settled down, he works hard at school, he has a nice girlfriend.”

“That’s wonderful,” I said, thinking there might be a side to Martin Galea I hadn’t known. We headed downstairs, where Marissa showed me the dinner she had prepared for me. It looked good—a stew of some kind of meat with onions and tomatoes, and a large very crusty-looking loaf of bread.

She showed me where the telephone was, and put their phone number beside it. “It sometimes works, it sometimes doesn’t,” Anthony said from behind us. “Can I take Missus Mcleentak out to look around Valletta after Mass tomorrow, Mum?”

“If she’d like to go?” she said, looking at me.

“That would be just great, Anthony,” I said. “What time should I expect you? In fact, what time is it now? I’m still on Toronto time, I think.”

“It’s four-thirty,” Anthony said. “I’ll come and get you about one tomorrow?”

“Done,” I said.

Joseph joined us in the kitchen. “Now, missus,” he said, “you lock up the place after we leave. And don’t you go walking around in the fog. There’s a very big drop at the back of the yard here. We wouldn’t want to lose you before my boy here can even show you around.” He gave his son an affectionate pat and smiled at me. They were really nice people.

I walked them to their car, the three Farrugias and the two workmen, and waved as they left. They disappeared into the fog very quickly, then I heard the engine reverse and they came back up the driveway. Anthony leapt out and handed me the car keys with a grin and a wave. Then they were off a second time. I regarded the keys with unease.

The house did not seem all that welcoming now that they were gone. With so little furniture and none of the carpets placed, my footsteps made an unpleasant hollow sound as I walked about. There were also not many lights. The kitchen lights worked, but the ceiling lights in the main room were still wires hanging from the ceiling. There was one lamp, a desk lamp that had been plugged in and left on the floor, there being no desk to put it on. I had a feeling it was going to be a long evening.

It would still be late morning Toronto time, and I’d promised to check in when I arrived. I put through the call, and was glad to hear Sarah’s crisp voice.

“I’m here,” I said. “It’s quite the place. How are things there?”

“I’m having a special day,” she replied. “You know how it was freezing rain when you left? Well, this morning it’s even colder. I had my car washed yesterday, and this morning the car doors were frozen shut, not just the locks, the door frames as well. Luckily I caught Alex at home, and he came in early and opened the shop. Please don’t tell me it’s eighty degrees in the shade where you are!”

“It’s closer to sixty-five degrees, and it’s raining and foggy, and I can’t see twenty feet outside the window. The place is empty and there is hardly any light. Feel better?”

“Much.” She laughed. “Misery loves company. Will you be okay there by yourself?”

“Oh, sure. It’s just a little creepy, that’s all. Any word from Dave?”

“He’s having a tough time figuring out how to get the stuff there. Yesterday there was a strike in Italy. He says that’s pretty normal. Now one of the public service unions in France is calling for a one-day strike that will virtually shut the country down for twenty-four hours. But he says not to worry, not yet anyway.”

“That’s encouraging. Be sure and tell me when to start worrying then.”

“Oh, we will.” She laughed. “Alex says to tell you he checked your house this morning because it’s so cold. Everything is fine. No burst pipes or anything.”

“Tell him thanks for me. We’ll stay in touch until we get this job done.”

I felt better talking to her, and realized I was hungry. I warmed up the stew as instructed by Marissa. It was close enough to dinnertime here. It was really very good. Fenek, I decided, meant rabbit. Rabbit stew. The bread was exceptional. It had a very crusty exterior, but the interior would almost melt in your mouth. I had to stop myself from eating the whole loaf, it was that good. There was a pleasant enough bottle of wine, local at that, to wash it all down. Soon I was feeling very mellow.

Dinner took up all of thirty minutes of the evening. It’s amazing how slowly time goes by when you really just want to go to sleep but won’t let yourself. I’m a firm believer that the way to get over jet lag is to adjust your activities to local time right away even if you have missed a whole night’s sleep on the way over. I told myself I couldn’t go to bed before ten, or maybe nine-thirty. And it was now only six-thirty.

I went upstairs and unpacked my suitcase. There were hangers in the closet, and the bathroom was fully equipped. There was even a nice, new, white terry bathrobe. Just like a fancy hotel. I had a shower in the white-tiled walk-in shower, and then with a towel around my wet hair and the bathrobe on, I eyed the bed. It looked very good—soft, down duvet, lots of pillows. I succumbed to the temptation.

A noise woke me sometime later. It was very dark, and it took me a few seconds to remember where I was. I could not identify the noise that had wakened me, but I could tell the wind had come up in the night. My eyes adjusted to the light a little, and I got up and made my way to the window. I did not turn on the bedside light. The house had a goldfish bowl feel to me, with no curtains or shutters, and I would have felt exposed by the light.

I stood at the window. I found the door to the upstairs deck was unlocked. That didn’t make me feel good, but I stepped out onto the deck. It was a little chilly, but the fog was lifting, the wind whipping it in drifts across the yard.

As I peered into the darkness, I suddenly saw, or thought I did, at the far end of the yard, the figure of a man, standing very still. He was dressed in dark clothes, his head appeared to be hooded. I shrank back from the railing, my heart pounding. As quietly as possible, I backed into the house and closed and locked the door behind me. Then I went from room to room checking the doors to the balcony. All except mine had been locked. In the dark I made my way down the staircase and checked all the doors on the main floor. They too were locked. From the windows at the back of the house, I peered out into the yard again. I could see no one. The mist lifted, and the moon came out. There was no one there.

“It’s your imagination, Lara, jet lag,” I said out loud, my voice echoing in the empty room. “Go back to bed.”

I didn’t think I’d go back to sleep, but I did. I dreamed about a man in dark robes, beckoning me toward the edge of the abyss at the back of the yard.

THREE

Temples of stone, huge and round. Megaliths, tons of rock carved with the most primitive of tools, moved without the wheel. What fervor, what piety drives you, the temple builders? It is I. Life, death, rebirth. Built in My image, below ground first, then above, stretched above the sea. Offerings, animal sacrifice, the acrid smell of burning herbs. Then suddenly, silence once again. Where have you gone, you worshipped Me best?

“Why is he sitting like that?” I asked.

“Who?” Sophia replied.

“The bus driver. Why is he sitting way over to the left, on the edge of the seat, and reaching back over to the steering wheel?”

“Because Jesus is driving the bus, not him,” she said.

Alex had told me that Malta is a devoutly Catholic country, but I had no idea of the extent of it. Part of me, the cynical part, wanted to laugh out loud. Another side of me ached for the simple faith the statement and the act implied.

I was wedged in a seat designed for two between Anthony and Sophia, his utterly charming and sweet girlfriend, on a bus headed for Valletta, the capital city.

Despite my disturbed sleep, I had awakened very early, and after a moment’s hesitation, walked out on the balcony. The scene which had seemed so menacing in the night now looked quite different. As I stood there, the sun rose to my left, turning the rocks that had seemed so lifeless the day before to the color of honey. The sea—for the property, perched on the edge of a cliff, had a magnificent view over the Mediterranean— turned from black to yellow to finally the most beautiful blue, almost cobalt, over the space of several minutes. My vision of the night, a dream perhaps, now seemed preposterous.

I had a few hours to fill before Anthony was due to arrive, and divided them between the view and the work I had to do to get ready for Galea’s arrival. I found the breakfast supplies Marissa had left for me—coffee, bacon, and eggs. The bread which I had enjoyed so much the day before was hard as a rock in the morning. I had learned something about Maltese bread, and the power of the food additives we put in ours. Maltese bread is made to be eaten the day it’s baked.

After about an hour of resisting the temptation to check the back of the yard, I went out and nervously eyed the edge. There was, as Joseph had warned me, a sharp drop down many feet to the water below. Just in case, I looked for footprints, but the ground was very rocky. If someone had been there in the night, he had left no trace.

Back at the house, I took the drop sheets off the pile of furniture in the corner of the living room and checked it against the list Galea had given me. Everything appeared to be in order, and I found the place for each piece on the very precise plans he had given me. I unrolled a couple of the carpets and checked them as well. I also had made notes on the dimensions of the furniture still to come from Galea’s house and from the shop. With all this information, I began to develop a plan to get the place ready for Galea’s arrival.

The ceiling fixtures still needed to be installed in the living room, the stucco required repair in several places, and there was a fair amount of painting still to be done. A large tapestry was to go over the sofa, so it would have to be hung once the walls were ready, and before the furniture was in place. After a couple of hours work, I had determined how to proceed. It would be touch and go, but I thought we could see it all got done, as long as the shipment from home arrived sometime in the next three days.

Just after one, a very old orange and yellow bus came along the road and slowed down enough for Anthony, accompanied by a rather plump but pretty young woman, to get off.

He waved when he saw me. “This is Sophia Zammit, my girlfriend,” he said, panting slightly after they had run arm in arm up the driveway. “She’s going to come with us, if it’s okay with you.”

“Of course it is,” I said. “Nice to meet you, Sophia.” I handed the car keys to Anthony. “Perhaps you’d like to drive?”

“You don’t mind?” he said, his eyes lighting up.

“Not at all.”

But the car wouldn’t start. After several tries, with his sunny disposition still intact, Anthony leapt out of the car and raced down the driveway waving his arms frantically. Another bus, even older than the first, pulled up, and the three of us ran to catch it.

Not for the Maltese the anonymity of a public bus service. I could only assume from the interesting decor that the bus was owned by its driver. I had noticed as the bus had approached us that the front of it was gaily painted with red flowers and several ornaments, the flags of various countries on metal decals attached to the radiator grille. The bus had a name too. Elaborately painted letters across the back declared it to be “Old but Sexy.” It occurred to me that as I slipped inexorably into middle age, such a tide might be the best I myself could hope for.

The personalized decor carried inside. Here there was a neon sign behind the driver, which from time to time flashed out the words “Ave Maria.” Above the front window a plastic statue of the Virgin and Child surrounded by dried flowers and encased in a clear plastic bell swayed with the motion of the bus. Over to one side, however, closer to the driver, was a photo of a rather healthy-looking young woman who was definitely not the Virgin Mary. Malta and its people were beginning to develop a distinct personality to me.

In retrospect, I don’t know what I expected Malta to be, if indeed Martin Galea’s breakneck schedule had given me enough time to develop any expectations at all. Alex had given me the basic details—a group of small islands in the middle of the Mediterranean about sixty miles from Sicily and a little over 200 miles from Libya. Population about 350,000. Malta, the largest island, is only about seventeen miles long and nine miles wide. Gozo, the other inhabited island, is about a third the size. Comino, the third island, boasts a resort, but only a handful of permanent residents.

Alex had also told me that one of Malta’s largest industries was tourism, so I think I expected the Mediterranean equivalent of a Caribbean isle—lots of sun, sand, and sea.

In any event, I was totally unprepared for what I saw. The countryside, naturally yellow from the rock that is its foundation, gives the impression of a painting in pastels. The landscape is punctuated by low walls that evidently trap enough soil and moisture so that there are large patches of green and some very pretty flowers. I did not see any rivers or waterways, and few trees of any height. Nonetheless, the place had a kind of rugged beauty I found quite enchanting.

We passed towns built entirely of the yellow stone, the skyline punctuated at regular intervals by the dome of a church. Horse-drawn carriages shared the road with buses such as ours and cars of all ages and descriptions. The island, like the bus in which we were riding, gave the impression of a society both ancient and modern.

After a while, the bus pulled into a terminal and I caught my first glimpse of Valletta. It is a completely walled city built almost entirely of the local yellow stone, but on a promontory of land higher than its surroundings. We walked across a bridge spanning a very large ditch—in a climate with more water I would have assumed it had been a moat. We passed through a gate and found ourselves in a square surrounded by shops, billboards, and the inevitable hamburger chain outlet.

It was here mat Anthony commenced his grand tour of the works of his ancestor, Gerolamo Cassar.

“Gerolamo Cassar was our greatest Maltese architect, architect to the famous Knights of Malta,” he began. He looked at me carefully for some sign that I knew who he was talking about. I did, but barely. The Knights of Malta were, if memory served me, the Knights of St. John, the Knights Hospitaller, who had been driven from the Holy Land in the fifteenth century and had eventually settled in Malta. This was the extent of my knowledge, but I, fearing there might be a test later, nodded and attempted to look knowledgeable. Anthony, apparently satisfied, continued. “It was Cassar who built this city. He was originally assistant to Francesco Laparelli, an Italian who had worked with Michelangelo and who was the architect of die Pope and the de Medici family in Italy.

“The Pope sent Laparelli here in 1566 to help the Knights build a new capital city after the terrible destruction of the island during the great siege of Malta by the Turks. Laparelli is said to have done a master plan for the city in only three days. After two years Laparelli left, and the work of building the city, and of designing its greatest buildings, was left to Cassar. Cassar first leveled the ridge on which we are standing to make a place for a great city, and men supervised the building of the fortification walls,” Anmony said, gesturing to the city walls behind us. “He built the church across from us, the Church of St. Catherine of Italy.”

With that introduction, we turned to die right and walked along to a large building with a green door flanked by two cannons and a uniformed guard at the entrance. The exterior was very ornately carved, and it had rows of large uniformly spaced windows and large cornerstones.

“This building houses the offices of the Prime Minister. It is one of the buildings Cassar designed, but it was remodeled later by another Maltese architect, Andrea Belli. Cassar believed that as this was a fortified city, the buildings in it should reflect that—dignified, with no embellishments like columns and carvings. Belli added the more ornate, baroque details-Mr. Galea said that Belli ‘tarted it up’—but the design of the building is still Cassar’s.”

As informative as this all was, I found myself working hard to suppress a smile. Anthony sounded as if he was making a well-rehearsed speech, a school presentation perhaps, every word chosen carefully for its effect, and memorized. His mother had said that Martin Galea had been a major influence on Anthony, and I could almost hear Galea’s inflection, slightly tinged with pomposity, in Anthony’s speech. Galea had shown Anthony around Valletta, I was quite sure, and I could almost imagine the two of them, Anthony hanging on every word, Galea basking in the young man’s admiration. I hoped, for Sophia’s sake, that a love of architecture and an affectation of speech were the only things about Galea that Anthony, immature in many ways it seemed to me, chose to emulate.

Anthony appeared to be looking to me for some comment, so in as serious a tone as I could muster, I told him that the building was handsome, tarted up or not, and he seemed pleased. After I had had a few minutes to admire it at some length, Anthony turned to retrace his steps.

“Let’s take her to the Gardens,” Sophia said. “They’re beautiful.”

Anthony did not wish us to be deterred from the Cassar tour. “Later,” he said.

But Sophia insisted. I could see she had a stubborn streak beneath the shyness. And she was right. The Gardens, the Upper Barrakka Gardens to be precise, were in themselves quite lovely, filled as they are with trees, shrubs, flowers, and sculpture. What made them special, however, was a spectacular view of Malta’s famed Grand Harbour, surrounded by defensive walls, guarded at the entrance by what Sophia told me was the seventeenth-century Fort Ricasoli and further along Fort Saint Angelo. The vantage point from the Gardens gave me an appreciation for the choice of site so long ago, a fortified city surrounded on three sides by water, with a huge natural harbor for shipping and for protection as well.

Continuing on with the tour, we doubled back and turned up a street that ran parallel to the main street where Anthony pointed out another building, the General Post Office, also a Cassar design, of course. As I stepped back to admire a particular feature of the building that Anthony was pointing out, I inadvertently stepped on someone’s toe. I turned to apologize profusely, and found myself face-to-face with the strange fellow from the Air Malta flight the day before—he of the khaki safari gear, my Great White Hunter.

He did not appear to recognize me, which was fine with me, and after suitable expressions of regret on my part, and forgiveness on his, we parted company and the Cassar/Farrugia tour continued on. From the Post Office we went back to the main street via a little road called Melita Street. Republic Street, as the main street was called, was clearly the main shopping thoroughfare of the city, filled with shops and boutiques tucked into the fronts of some very old buildings, and we turned right, or away from the city gate, onto it.

A block or so further on, Anthony stopped to point out the National Museum of Archaeology. “Built by Cassar,” he said. Then added in a more boyish aside, “It’s now filled with pots and fat ladies.”

Sophia glared at him, and he put an arm around her waist and gave her an affectionate squeeze. “Soph is studying really early history, not Cassar’s architecture,” he said. “She’s interested in archaeology and spends a lot of time here. The fat ladies are statues that have been found in ancient sites around the island.”

“I’m interested in archaeology too, Sophia,” I said, “so you must tell me something about that later.”‘ She blushed but nodded and we moved on. Coming up the street behind us I saw the Great White Hunter again. I think he saw me too, but he gave no indication. In fact, he ducked rather quickly into the doorway of a shop.

A few yards further on we came upon a large church. Like the other Cassar projects, this one was of a very severe design, almost ponderous, but it had a certain solemnity to it I could appreciate. There was a little market set up in front of the church, and Sophia and I hesitated for a moment, both of us no doubt feeling the urge to shop, but Anthony, ignoring it, pressed on to the steps of the church. “This is one of Cassar’s greatest projects, St. John’s Co-Cathedral,” he said. “It is not the first church in the city, but it is the largest and the most impressive. It’s called a co-cathedral,” he said with some pride, “because Malta, unlike most other countries, has two official Cathedrals. Unfortunately, the inside has been completely redone in the baroque style and is not Cassar’s work,” he said severely.

“Can we look inside anyway?” I asked. As charmed as I might be by Anthony’s obvious enthusiasm for the accomplishments of his illustrious forebear, I wanted to see more of Valletta than this. “It would prove an interesting comparison, I’m sure, and would help to emphasize the finer points of Cassar’s work,” I ventured.

He looked somewhat mollified. “Okay, let’s go in,” he said. Sophia gave me a sunny smile that indicated she could see through my subterfuge but was quite prepared to go along with it.

The interior of the cathedral bears no resemblance to the austerity of the exterior whatsoever. It is in fact staggering in its ornamentation, almost every surface, every inch of the place, covered with arabesque carvings and gilt. The high altar is marble, silver, and lapis lazuli, the vaulted ceiling is covered in paintings, and the floor is emblazoned with elaborate marble tombstones. Both sides of the cathedral are lined with chapels; I counted eight or nine of them, linked by narrow little corridors.

As I wandered about, I saw in front of one of the prettiest chapels which was enclosed with a silver gate, the man in the safari suit. He did not hear me approach, intent as he was on inspecting the interior of the chapel through the gate.

Not wishing to engage him in conversation again, I made to quietly move on past him, but the toe of my shoe caught in a raised stone in the floor and I stumbled. He turned quickly around and saw me. I assumed that he would think me a complete klutz what with my first stepping on his toe, and now stumbling around behind him, so I tried a wan smile. He tried to look as if he had not noticed me, a studied nonchalance I found amusing, and we both moved on. Obviously he was no more eager to talk to me than I was to him.

When I’d finished my quick tour of the cathedral, resolving to return when I’d have more time, I found Anthony and Sophia sitting in a pew near the back of the church, and we left together. We moved a little further along the main street and came to a pleasant square filled with tables and umbrellas and presided over by a large statue of Queen Victoria. On one side of this square was another large impressive building of a rather stolid nature that I was beginning to recognize. “Cassar?” I asked, pointing.

Anthony beamed. “You recognized it! It’s the House of Representatives,” he added.

I noticed Sophia looking longingly at a tray of sweets at one of the cafes on the square. “Can I treat to coffee and a sweet?” I asked. “In appreciation of a great tour?”

“We’ll come back here,” Anthony said. “There’s one more building I want to show you,”‘ he said, gesturing further down the street. “The Mediterranean Conference Centre.”

I was not paying much attention to Anthony at this point, partly because jet lag had set in once again, but also because I was mesmerized by the now familiar khaki hat bobbing among the Sunday crowds, heading in the direction Anthony had pointed. When I turned my attention back to the two of them, Sophia, sensing my fatigue, gave Anthony a warning nudge.

“Actually,” he said, catching on, “a coffee would be great!” Despite my intentions, I turned back to where I had last caught sight of die hat, but it was nowhere to be seen.

As we selected a table in the square beside the House of Representatives, and I had a chance to sit down and really look around me, I began to forget the occasionally tacky shops and the advertising billboards, and to see Valletta as I think Anthony did, as a beautiful city of plazas, palaces, and churches laid out on an elegant grid. I could see that the plan and the style of Anmony’s hero, the great Gerolamo Cassar, had been a pervasive influence; indeed, he had set the tone for the city and influenced its structure over the centuries since he had first envisioned and built it. It really was a magnificent achievement, and I was pleased for Anmony, for some inexplicable reason.

We ordered coffees and I, hungry for lunch, bought a couple of little pastry pies called pastizzi, filled with cheese and peas and onions. Both Anthony and Sophia ordered sweets, he a cheesecake of sorts, she something called a treacle tart. I, as me tourist and host, got to try everything, but found my new young friends’ sweet tooth far exceeded mine.

While we were eating, I mentioned that I would like a good guidebook on the islands so I could see as much as possible in the time I was there. Anmony leapt up as soon as he was finished and said he knew exactly the guide I needed, and that he would get me one immediately. I insisted on giving him some money despite his protestations, and off he went.

Sophia and I sat enjoying the sunshine but saying little. She was very shy.

“I expect the guidebook will have a section on Gerolamo Cassar,” I said as an opening conversational gambit.

She giggled. “I think you may be right. A long section, probably.”

“He’s a very nice young man,” I said, sounding to my own ears, at least, like a doting auntie or something. Nothing like being with a couple of teenagers in love to make you feel old and tired.

“He is, isn’t he?” she glowed. “Even if he does go on about Cassar.”

“It’s difficult to be an architect, you know,” I said, continuing on in my aged auntie mode. “It takes years of study and dedication. Lots of people never qualify. And then it’s hard to get commissions, to get started. And it must be very difficult to put so much of yourself into a design and then have people criticize it. I think you have to be pretty committed and focused.”

She nodded. “I think he’ll do it,” she said.

“Are you married?” she asked in a moment or so, glancing at my ringless hands.

“Not anymore,” I said.

“Have a boyfriend?”

I thought to explain to her that at her age you had boyfriends; at mine you had the chronic problem of coming up with a suitable description for the man, like partner, or significant other, or whatever. But I restrained myself.

“Yes,” I said. “His name is Lucas, and he’s an archaeologist.”

“Oh!” she exclaimed. “Then you really are interested in archaeology!” I nodded.

“I’m studying history. You know they don’t teach us much of anything in school about our own history, just everybody else’s,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at the statue of Queen Victoria in the square.

“I have this great new teacher. She’s here from England, on a sabbatical, but she knows more about the history of Malta than anyone I’ve ever met. She’s teaching us about the ancient archaeological sites—she says they are among the oldest and most important in the Mediterranean. I’ve been going to see them since I was a little girl and I had no idea! I can hardly believe what she’s teaching us. We’re even doing a play about Malta’s history right from ancient times. The teacher calls it a tableau, or something. I have a small part in it.” She smiled shyly.

“I think it sounds wonderful!”

“Do you, honestly?”

“I do, yes.”

“She’s giving a public lecture Tuesday night at the University. I really want to go, but I’m not allowed to go by myself. I can’t ask my parents. The teacher talks about ancient gods and goddesses, and my parents would think that’s heretical. Anthony says maybe he’ll come, but I know he’s not really interested in anything except architecture, and anyway he has to study every night if he’s to get into the Academy next year. I don’t suppose…”

“I’d love to come,” I said. And why not? I thought. By that time the painting and electrical work at the house would be done and the furniture would be mere, or at least on its way. A couple of hours off would be fine. “Just tell me where and when,” I said.

Just then Anthony returned with the guidebook, and immediately showed me the section on Cassar. Sophia gave me a conspiratorial grin. Anthony, on learning that I planned to attend the lecture, suddenly announced that he too would attend. I told them I’d meet them there, and Anthony spread out the map that came with the guidebook and began to give me directions. He also pointed out other sights of interest, all designed by Cassar, of course, including something called Verdala Palace, not too far from the house.

Then we sat companionably together watching as the late afternoon sun began to turn the yellow stones of the buildings around us to gold.

As we did so, I got that feeling we all get occasionally, the feeling that we are being watched. I don’t know why or how we know. Perhaps it’s some vestigial remnant of an ability inherited from our earliest ancestors who lived in more dangerous times. But I think we are almost always right when we get this feeling. I scanned the crowd, and caught a glimpse of a now familiar figure near a column in the shade of the arcade that runs down one side of the square.

“This island sure is a small place,” I said to my companions, trying to hide my unease as I pointed my fellow tourist out to them.

“Neat outfit!” Anthony said admiringly. Sophia rolled her eyes.

As we turned our attention to him, the Great White Hunter drew back quickly and vanished into the darkness of the arcade.

“Skittish too,” Anthony said.

“Creepy,” Sophia demurred.

I agreed with her. I also think that in addition to knowing when we’re being watched, we sometimes have a sixth sense when a stranger wishes us ill. I had that feeling now.

I shook off my apprehension, however, as the sun and the beauty of the surroundings soaked in, and was actually reluctant to leave the square when the three of us headed back. The house looked much the same as it had when I left. Except for a dead cat, strung up and swinging from the branch of a little tree in the backyard.

FOUR

From tyre and sidon they come, the seafarers, children of Melqart, puissant protector of Phoenician sailors. Neither chart nor compass guides them, sights set on distant lands. Is it My temples, long abandoned, that beckon you from the safety of North African shores? Traders, craftsmen, keepers of the color purple, leave us alone. But leave your language, your alphabet, when you go.

It took all the courage I could muster to stay in the house that night, but I managed it. Indeed, by the next morning, I’d persuaded myself that the dead cat incident, as it became known in my mind, was a childish prank of some sort. An exceptionally cruel one, but a prank nonetheless.

Anthony had cut the cat down, as Sophia and I clutched each other, and we found a little patch of ground to bury it in. They’d stayed with me a while, but then Sophia had to get home, so I found myself alone. I spent the evening checking the doors and windows, peering out into the darkness, but most of all thinking about The Deez, my shop cat, whom I loved even though he was a rather standoffish little beast. In the end, mercifully, I slept.

The next day, though, there was an even nastier surprise in store for me.

Anthony had obviously told Marissa and Joseph about our problem with the car, because as soon as they and two workmen arrived on Monday morning, the men began to inspect the vehicle. Despite my protestations—the car could sit in the driveway forever, as far as I was concerned—it was decided that before work on the house could begin, the car would have to be repaired. After much gesticulating, sounds of annoyance, and shrugging of shoulders, one of the men, Eddie by name, headed off somewhere in Joseph’s car.

“Have you found what’s wrong?” I asked, hoping for an affirmative and a diagnosis that would not take long to fix.

“Part missing probably,” Joseph replied. “If Eddie moves fast enough, he may get it back. For a price, of course.”

I looked from Joseph to Marissa. “I’m not following this conversation,” I said.

Marissa smiled at me. “We have a lot of old cars here. People grow very attached to them. Parts are scarce; sometimes they aren’t even manufactured anymore. So they get stolen fairly regularly if you’re not careful. We thought the place was far enough off the beaten track that it wouldn’t be a problem. But I guess we were wrong.

“There are body shops around that miraculously always seem to have parts. Everyone knows who they are. So Eddie will visit a couple of them and get the part. It could even be the one we lost.” She smiled wryly.

“Isn’t that theft, or extortion, or something?”

“Probably. Here we call it the way things go. Joseph will clear some of the construction materials out of the garage so you can lock the car in at night.”

“You know, the first night I was here I thought I saw someone out by the edge of the cliff. Someone wearing a hood. Perhaps he’s our thief!”

“Did you now?” Joseph said. “Strange things go on here from time to time,” he added. Marissa’s usual sunny smile faded somewhat, but neither said anything more.

Eddie returned about a half hour later with a mechanic, and the two of them got to work. At first Eddie was very talkative: he told me that while he was at the body shop he’d also checked for a part that would fix the transmission, which is to say, give it a second gear. He’d had no luck. Someone had beaten him to one by minutes, he told me.

But suddenly there seemed to be a chill in the air, metaphorically speaking, and both Eddie and the mechanic grew silent. Soon there was a whispered consultation with Joseph, who in turn whispered to Marissa, who looked really upset. Joseph started clearing his tools and construction materials out of the garage, and Eddie headed out again, returning this time with a huge padlock which he went about installing on the garage door.

All of this was making me nervous, and by extension, annoyed. “We need to talk, Marissa,” I said to her. “I want to know what is going on around here!”

“Let me talk to Joseph,” was the reply. The two of them held another whispered conversation, Joseph finally nodded, and Marissa came back to me.

“The problem with the car was a bit more serious than we thought,” she began.

“More serious than a stolen part?”

“A bit worse than that,” she replied carefully. I waited.

“It’s not so much a part missing. The mechanic said nothing was missing, actually. Some minor problem with the carburetor,” she said. “It’s just there was also a broken line, or something.”

I watched her face carefully. She was frightened, I could tell.

“To the brakes,” she said finally. “You… we were all lucky the car wouldn’t start,” she said. “I’m sure it’s just because the car is so old,” she went on. “But the mechanic says there is a possibility that the line didn’t break, that it was cut.”

I just looked at her. “It’s fixed now, of course,” she said, then burst into tears.

Anyone with any sense would have moved out of the house after this, I know, and I’ve often asked myself since why I stayed. It was partly my capacity for self-delusion, which is as strong as anyone’s. I, like Marissa, preferred to believe the brakes were just old, not tampered with. In addition, I just decided, I think, that these horrible events were not directed at me. Furthermore, I had a job to do, and I didn’t like the idea of telling Martin Galea his house wasn’t ready for his important entertaining. Somehow I didn’t think he’d find a dead cat and what was probably just an accident with the brakes a good excuse for not getting the house finished.

In any event, the job of getting the house ready took up more and more of my time and energy. I’d assumed, more than a little optimistically as it turned out, that by the time Sophia’s lecture rolled around, the house would be shipshape and the furniture winging its way to me.

Instead, after the incident with the car, I put in a rather exasperating and anxiety-ridden couple of days as our work on the house not only did not progress as quickly as it should, but we actually seemed to be losing ground. Galea had said he’d arrive Friday or Saturday to inspect the place, and we were far from ready. I was getting worried.

The electrician, for example, was supposed to arrive Monday morning. However, he and most of the other tradespeople I encountered ascribed to a casual philosophy I’d call a Mediterranean version of manana, and it was late Monday afternoon before he got there. Then what had seemed like a simple matter of installing a few ceiling fixtures had turned into a major wiring problem requiring several holes in the ceiling and walls to put right.

Next we ran out of the glaze for the stucco and had to match it. A good designer, for example my ex-husband on one of the rare days when he was actually prepared to work, would have matched it in a minute or two. Joseph, Marissa, and I took considerably longer, and in the end we agreed we’d have to redo one whole wall to get it right.

Even this would have been manageable. The really big problem was the shipment from home, and my early optimism that meeting Galea’s deadline would be reasonably easy was fast beginning to fade.

A massive winter storm had blanketed much of the Great Lakes region and was now moving on to the eastern seaboard of the U.S. and Canada. Nearly twenty inches of snow had dumped on the Toronto area; temperatures had plummeted to way, way below zero; schools and offices were closed, as was the airport.

“We’re completely socked in,” Alex told me. I was in almost constant touch with him and with Dave Thomson as my anxiety levels headed for the stratosphere.

“Dave sent a truck out from his warehouse at the airport to pick up the furniture here and at Galea’s place on Saturday afternoon. He’d found an Air Canada cargo flight headed for Heathrow that night that had room for the shipment. But it was so cold the truck blew a tire on the highway.

“Dave tried to find another truck but couldn’t, then… Well, anyway, they never got here or to Galea’s house and we missed that flight. Then the storm moved in. The airport authorities estimate they’ll be back in business by tonight, so we’ll try and find a flight then. Dave says don’t panic yet!”

“Yet!” I grumped. But there was nothing I could do.

By late Monday night, Malta time, the situation didn’t look any better. The airport might be reopening, but the flights were backed up and Dave was having trouble finding space for such a large shipment at such short notice. Furthermore, a pipe had burst in his warehouse out near the airport, and he hadn’t been able to bring the two shipments there to pack them.

“I could probably get the stuff to Paris tonight,” he said. “But I’m told there’s going to be a countrywide transportation strike in France as early as tomorrow, and they’re saying it may last several days. I don’t want to risk getting the stuff there and then not being able to get it out again.”

I knew he was telling the truth. I’d read the Paris papers on the way over and they’d said as much.

“So I’m working on something to Italy. Both Air Malta and Alitalia fly to Malta from Rome. Hang in, Lara,”‘ he told me. “I’ll get it there somehow. As soon as I know which flight we’ve got, I’ll get all the stuff picked up and packed in a container, and deliver it direct to the plane. I’ve already contacted a customs broker at the airport in Malta, and he’s standing by to clear it through in a hurry and transport it to the house. You be ready to move fast. Mrs. Galea is being very nice about this, by the way.” Then he added, “But I haven’t talked to the Great One himself yet. Can’t say I’m looking forward to that conversation!”

By late Tuesday afternoon I was truly despairing of ever meeting my commitment to Galea. There was nothing more I could do that day, however, except worry, and I didn’t want to disappoint Sophia, so I decided to go to the lecture and to try to forget all the aggravations of the past couple of days, for an hour or so, at least.

But there was the small matter of making my way to the University on time.

Marissa had given me rather complicated directions for taking the bus into the terminal and then another one out again. The bus route network in Malta seemed to operate on a hub and spoke model, with all routes radiating out from the Valletta terminal. This meant it was not possible to take one bus from the house to the University. On top of that the lecture was in the evening, and Marissa had told me the last bus service was about ten. I decided to drive. The car had been locked in the garage ever since it had been repaired, and I checked the padlock carefully to reassure myself it would be safe to use the car.

I knew from Marissa’s instructions that the University was at the intersection of the regional road to Mellieha and the road to Balzan. When I consulted the map she had given me, it seemed to be almost due north of the house. The island was only eight or nine miles wide, and I prided myself on my sense of direction. I also prided myself on my ability to drive almost anywhere. My buying trips had taken me all over the world, and I’d found myself in pretty obscure places. I’d driven on the left and the right. Why, I’d even driven in Rome. And I was used to almost any kind of vehicle. I once rode a donkey up a steep slope to get to a village that had particularly lovely weavings. How difficult could this be?

As the saying goes, pride goeth before a fall.

I mapped out a route that took me to a place called Siggiewi, then Zebbug, to Attard, then Balzan, then on to the University. But I ended up on the road to someplace called Rabat. Cars roared past me on both the passing lane and on the inside shoulder; I dodged donkey carts and potholes the size of craters on the moon; I passed through towns that reminded me of illustrations in my childhood book of Bible stories; I whizzed around roundabouts; and I got totally, utterly, irretrievably lost.

I also learned that second gear is a really important feature in a car. Without it I either had to go very slowly, or speed along in third. Stalling was only a hairsbreadth away at any given time. I listened enviously to the sound of more fortunate drivers gearing smoothly up or down. I became obsessed with not slowing down.

Finally I got on a relatively well-kept road that unfortunately headed in the wrong direction, toward the aforementioned Rabat and something called Verdala Palace, which if I remembered Anthony’s lecture was built by his idol, Gerolamo Cassar. That meant, at least I thought it did, that I was headed west, not north, but my innate sense of direction had totally deserted me so I couldn’t be sure. I could only hope it would lead to something headed north, or at least a place name I recognized.

As I moved along this road, I overtook a car moving relatively slowly. There was an approaching truck, but it was still quite far away, and rather than slow down, I decided to go for it and pass the other vehicle. I floored it, roared past, then pulled quickly in front of the other car, in a way that, if I’m being honest, I would have to consider rather rude, if not a bit reckless.

I glanced guiltily at the driver as I passed the car. He was looking at me too. We were both surprised to see each other. It was the Great White Hunter yet again, and he was not pleased to see me.

Normally I think I would have found this a funny coincidence, but now, with the business with the brakes, there was an edge of menace to it, not the least because of what happened next. When the oncoming truck passed us, he geared down, then passed me much too closely, pulling in so tightly that I had to slam on the brakes, which mercifully worked in a manner of speaking. The car started to skid, and for a few seconds I thought I’d lost control of it, but I was able to pull over to the side of the road, where I sat for a few minutes listening intently to my heart pound. The Great White Hunter I couldn’t see for dust.

It took me a few minutes to stop shaking. I kept telling myself I sort of deserved it, what with my rush past him. But to be forced off the road? I could hardly believe what had happened.

While I sat there, a man on an aged bicycle pedaled by, and I flagged him down. He was a pleasant person who gave me new directions, briefly explaining the intricacies of navigating around Malta: which is to say, road signs, where they exist, are only relative. One gets a general sense of the direction one is going, then sticks to it, ignoring signs for towns and sites along the way.

It was good advice and I managed to find the University, then most fortuitously a place to park. I got out, pulled up the window on the passenger side which had done its trick of falling down into the door at the first roundabout I encountered, then eyed the car. I sincerely hoped I would not return to find it minus several critical body parts. A young boy offered to watch the car for me—such a nice car, he said—for a small fee of course. I paid him on the spot, walked into the hall, flinging myself—there is no other word to describe my hasty and inelegant entrance—into the seat that Sophia and Anthony had saved for me just as the speaker mounted the platform and moved to the podium.

“Who will speak for the Goddess?” she began, a tall, big-boned woman with wispy, greying hair, owlish glasses, a less than stylish print dress, and what my mother would call sensible shoes. Not that my mother would be caught dead wearing sensible shoes herself, mind you.

The lights in the hall dimmed, then were extinguished, a single reading lamp on the podium the only light in the room, casting eerie shadows on the wall behind the speaker as she spoke.

“Who will speak for the Goddess? Try now, if you can, to set aside the kind of world we know today, and imagine yourself living in the world of six thousand years ago. To do so, you must leave behind you all those technological wonders we take for granted. Lights, cars, running water, telephones, television, computers. You must also forget all you know about the world around us: what causes the rain to fall, lightning to strike, the wind to howl, a bright orb to rise in the sky and then disappear into darkness, plants to grow, and most especially, for a child to be born and for people to die.

“Imagine yourself a fisherman, perhaps, or a sailor, setting out from your shelter in a cave or a mud-brick hut on the island we now call Sicily, to cast your nets on the sea, or ply your trade along the coast.

“As your small craft nears these islands, you catch your breath in amazement and perhaps in fear. For rising from this rocky terrain you see huge structures that you can scarcely believe are made by human hands, bigger and higher than anything you have seen before, maybe thirty feet or more in height, towering from the cliffs above you.

“‘You may wonder who built them, or even how they were constructed. But you do not ask yourself what they are used for, or to whom they are dedicated. Because when you and your ancestors before you try to explain the unexplainable, when you turn to a deity for succor, inspiration, or an explanation of the mysteries of nature around you, the god you turn to is female. She is the Great Goddess, giver of life, wielder of death, and for at least twenty-five thousand years and arguably much, much longer, She has provided the focus for human existence.”’

The speaker’s name was Anna Stanhope, Dr. Anna Stanhope, Sophia and Anthony had told me. Principal of a posh English girls’ school, she had taken a sabbatical to come to Malta to study the Neolithic Age on the islands. While here, she had taken it upon herself to enlighten Maltese students as to their own history, and had taken a part-time teaching assignment at the school Sophia attended. As she spoke, I sat in the darkness and tried to concentrate on her words.

But it was difficult work trying to keep my mind off the unsettling journey I’d taken to get here. Try as I might, I could not keep from thinking about the incident with the Great White Hunter, a man I’d regarded as something of a buffoon when I first laid eyes on him on the plane. Now his ridiculous outfit and pretensions of grandeur had taken on a more sinister cast. Could it have been he who killed the cat and tampered with the brakes? Did he know where I was staying? Had he followed me home from the airport? That seemed a ridiculous idea, and anyway, he’d been in no shape to do much of anything, and he’d been delayed in customs.

Furthermore, it couldn’t have been he who killed the cat. I’d seen him several times in Valletta, and I didn’t think he’d have had time to get to the house ahead of us. Did that mean he had an accomplice? The hooded man at the back of the yard?

The more I thought about it, the more difficult it was to assume that it was a coincidence that our paths had crossed so often. Could I recall seeing anyone else from the airplane since we’d landed? GWH’s original seatmate, his “lovely lady,” for example? The priest? My own seatmate, an executive with Renault, I think he’d said. No, not one of them. Only the Great White Hunter. Why? I told myself to stop thinking about it. I was driving myself crazy.

“Twenty-five thousand years! Since the end of the last great Ice Age! Not one of the great religions of today can claim a fraction of that! From the steppes of Russia, through the caves of France, all through what we now call Europe and beyond, humankind worshipped the Goddess. How do we know? For one reason, for every phallic symbol or male statue we find in these times, we find many, many more triangles or female statues. All over the ancient world, people buried their dead with tiny statues of the Goddess, they dyed the bones with ochre, the color of blood, symbol of life and of the Great Goddess.

“It is here in Malta that Her worship reached its peak, its most creative expression. Here the Goddess became the presiding deity of every aspect of life. At least forty temples, the oldest freestanding structures in the world, older than the Great Pyramid of Egypt, older than Stonehenge, were built to honor Her. Hagar Qim, Gigantija, Tarxien, names you know well.

“The tools that built these massive structures have been found. Remnants of the huts and cave dwellings of the workers and worshippers have been uncovered. What we do not find from that time period is archaeological evidence of weapons. What does this mean ? Quite simply that these people lived in peace with their neighbors, in harmony with nature, secure in the workings of the universe. That they knew their place, part of the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. That they understood the interrelationship of all things. That they saw life and all things of it as a circle, not a line.

“But even as She flourished here, Her worship was under threat elsewhere. …”

Maybe he was following me. Maybe right this minute, as I sat in the darkness, he was watching me, or outside watching my car, I thought. Or perhaps he was back at the house doing something even more awful than before. Try to get a grip, I told myself. Your imagination is running away with you. Think this one through logically.

I tried to do that. Either it was a coincidence that our paths kept crossing, or it wasn’t. Either way, there had to be some rational explanation, a missing piece of information that would make it all make sense.

“What happened to the Goddess? Where did She go? Around about the fifth millennium b.c.e., a new group of people moved into the area which later became known as Europe. These people, some historians have called them Kurgans, brought a different belief system, a different religion. They worshipped what have come to be called sky gods, gods not of the Earth as the Goddess was, but rather deities, usually male and warlike, who ruled humankind from another place, a place without. Like Mount Olympus, for example, or the Elysian Fields, or more recently and perhaps closer to home, Heaven.

“Gradually these people, warlike like their gods, began to take over. In some cases, they lived in coexistence with the people of the Goddess, but by the time of the ascendancy of Greece, and even earlier, active attempts were made to stamp Her worship out, attempts that would ultimately be successful. Here in Malta, isolated in many ways from the rest of the Mediterranean world, the Goddess ruled supreme, omnipotent, long after Her worship had vanished elsewhere. Longer, but not forever. Suddenly, about 2500 B.C.B., the part of Malta’s history that belongs to the temple builders abruptly and mysteriously ends.”‘

Maybe, I thought, I needed to know more about the places where I had seen him, the places built by Gerolamo Cassar. I had the guidebook Anthony had chosen for me, and had already started reading it, in part because I thought he might quiz me later and I didn’t want to appear to be a total ignoramus where his country was concerned, but also because I was beginning to find the history of this tiny island absolutely fascinating. If I could do some study on the places Anthony had taken me to, I might find a connection. At the very least, it should take my mind off the morbid thoughts I was having about the Great White Hunter and his intentions toward me. I resolved to do that.

“While we may not know exactly what happened to the Goddess here in Malta, we can find hints as to what happened elsewhere in the stories, the epic poems, the mythology of those times. Many say myths are born of fantasy, but I believe they often have an historical basis, and that a careful reading will give us clues to the political and religious events of the day.

“And many tell of the replacement and subjugation of the Great Goddess and those who worshipped Her by ‘heroes’ of invading peoples. By the time we reach the world of classical Greece, we have an active attempt to rewrite the story of the Goddess to justify the new order as defined by the Greeks, and to denigrate the old. In the stories of that time, we have numerous examples of the conquest of centers of Goddess worship. We find these in the stories of Zeus and other members of that quarrelsome pantheon of Gods of Mount Olympus.

“Zeus’ rape of Europa, for example, probably tells us of an invasion of Crete, where the Goddess was worshipped for centuries. Think also of the story of Ariadne of Crete, whose name means holy or sacred, and who was probably an earth Goddess. She helped Theseus slay the dreaded Minotaur on his promise that he would carry her away with him. He did, but then he abandoned her on the island of Naxos. There are many stories of this kind—the beheading of Medusa by Perseus, Apollo’s attempted rape of Daphne—all representing invading peoples’ conquest and assimilation of centers of Goddess worship. The Goddess had been tamed.

“Oh, not gone entirely, of course. Tamed but not obliterated. She can be found, if you look for Her, but hidden, the dangerous other. In Greek mythology, She is demoted to mere demonhood: She is Charybdis, the bottomless whirlpool who drags sailors to their deaths, and Scylla, the six-headed sea monster whose lower half rests in a cave and who springs up to snatch hapless passersby. On Gozo, Malta’s sister isle, She is Calypso, the mesmerizing siren goddess who diverts Odysseus from his purpose for seven years. In the Old Testament She is Leviathan, and the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Still later She is the dragon slain by St. George. And in our own times, we find vestiges of the Goddess, much diminished, in the Virgin Mary.

“What did we lose when we lost the Goddess? We lost our place in Nature, our sense of the sacred circle, of the Cosmic whole of existence. We underwent one of those major shifts of perception, a paradigm shift if you will, that came to govern how we saw everything. We began to see the universe in what has been called binary polarities, or opposites, and we thought one polarity better than the other. Like good and evil. Or male and female, from which came sexism. Black and white, from which came racism. We also moved from a belief in a relationship between all parts of creation to a belief that we were, like our gods in whose image we believed ourselves made, something apart from nature.

“From there it was a very small step to wanting to master Nature, and believing we could do so. Master? Perhaps conquer is a better word for it. And if Nature could be conquered, so could other people.

“And from there it was only a tiny step to Hiroshima.” She paused. “Who will speak for the Goddess?” For several seconds after Dr. Stanhope stopped speaking, you could have heard the proverbial pin drop. Then she turned and abruptly left the stage. Pandemonium erupted. I looked over at my young charges. Sophia’s eyes were shining. Anthony looked thoughtful, his usual cheerful face altered by a somewhat puzzled frown. Everyone spoke at once. Some applauded, others left, offended, still others shouted outrage. Regardless of whether you agreed with her or not, Dr. Stanhope had made an impression.

The three of us made our way out of the noisy crowd and over to the car. The young boy was still there, smiling happily, and the car looked fine. That was one problem taken care of, but there was another.

“I got lost,” I said to Anthony.

“Yes,” he said. “Everyone new here does.”

“Can you direct me back?”

“Sure. How about we take Sophia home, and then go on to my place? Mr. Galea’s house isn’t far from there, and it’s easy to describe the route.”

“Thanks. Would you like to drive as far as your house?”

“Sure.” He grinned.

So that is what we did, and I got home without incident. None of us had much to say on the way, all lost in our own thoughts. Sophia gave me a hug at her place. I could see a man, her father presumably, silhouetted in the window waiting for her. Then Anthony gave me very careful directions from his home, seeing me off with a cheery wave.

As I carefully checked that all the doors and windows were locked, I thought how friendly and accommodating all the Maltese I’d met had been. Indeed, the first exception might be Martin Galea when he found out I hadn’t got the job done.

Then I thought about the foreigners I’d become acquainted with, in a manner of speaking. Dr. Anna Stanhope, who’d probably insulted half the population of Malta in the short space of an hour or two by implying their religion was responsible for most of the world’s ills, including the atomic bomb. To say nothing of her opinion of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Next the Great White Hunter. He obviously didn’t like me at all. Maybe even, I’d have to admit, he was trying to kill me. And for what reason I absolutely could not fathom. Surely not for stepping on his toe! Perhaps for some reason I did not understand, I was the Hunter’s prey.

And then there was the unknown. What had Dr. Stanhope called it? The dangerous other. The hooded figure at the back of the yard. Was he just a car parts thief? Somehow I didn’t think so.

All in all, I could only hope the Goddess was looking out for me.

FIVE

What do you think I am? A mere pawn in the battle for control of this sea called Mediterraneo? Your Hannibal, am I to admire his audacity in challenging Rome? Elephants in the Alps? Do you not hear it, the thump and groan of the Roman galley, the clang of the Roman legion? They are coming. Soon those among you who have ruled here, who have used My tiny island for your forays across the sea, you who have taken My people as slaves, will know what it is to be a slave. Go home. Your cities are in flames. Delenda est Carthago. Carthage must be destroyed!

Just when I thought nothing else could go wrong, Thursday Joseph went AWOL. Well, perhaps not exactly AWOL. Marissa probably knew where he was, but she wasn’t saying. Her pale, tired face and slightly teary eyes when she told me her husband wouldn’t be coming to work that day forestalled any questions I might have liked to ask.

To be fair, he’d seen to it there was lots of help. A handful of cousins stood by, ready to unload the furniture the minute it arrived. It wasn’t the same, though. I missed his quiet and somehow solid demeanor and perpetual air of calm. I even missed hearing him call me missus, a practice he persisted in, despite his wife’s having come to call me Lara with ease. Even Anthony did so when his parents, who would not have approved of such license, weren’t around. Still, Joseph would have been a definite asset on this rather harried of days, the one when, at last, the furniture was due to arrive.

One would think that by this time I might have noticed that the alignment of whichever celestial bodies were responsible for the events in my life was hurtling me down a steep and slippery slope. At the time, though, I thought Joseph’s disappearance merely another in a series of rather vexatious events, all part of the project at hand.

To my mind, every day brought its particular trial. The problem of the previous day, Wednesday, for example was water, or rather the lack thereof, as I discovered when I went to shower the morning after Dr. Stanhope’s lecture. This brought Nicholas, the plumber. I was always surprised by the British-sounding names attached to people who were obviously Maltese, like Anthony for example, but I shouldn’t have been. The last British barracks closed for good in 1979, and the British influence was still pretty pervasive.

Nicholas, a greying man with considerable paunch, insufficient teeth, and what I took to be a perpetually grave and worried air, tsked and clucked his way around the house until the source of the problem was found. This took two hours— and four holes in the walls.

“The paint is barely dry on the repairs to one disaster before it’s time to mix some more,” I whined to Marissa.

“Why don’t you go and do some sight-seeing?” she replied. “We can look after this.” I took this to mean I was fussing and getting in the way. Actually, with the exception of the adventure of Tuesday evening, the days were beginning to be remarkably the same. Every morning I’d survey the progress and discover the next disaster. Repairmen would be summoned, and I’d spend the rest of the day and well into the evening literally watching paint dry. And listening to the one decent tape I’d been able to find to play on the antiquated tape player—the workmen preferring late seventies disco music— a collection of Italian arias sung by a Maltese soprano, Miriam Gauci. Fortunately it was a wonderful tape.

There was my research, of course, on the Great White Hunter, a project I began as soon as I got back to the house after Dr. Stanhope’s lecture, stimulated by the fear of another encounter with that dreadful man. I sat on the edge of the bed with the guidebook and a map spread out, and tried to figure out if in fact it was mere coincidence that I kept running into him. One thing I learned very quickly: Malta had the most amazing history. Almost everyone seems to have come to Malta at some point. It might be more accurate to say everyone and everything because even animals escaping the Ice Age crossed over a land bridge that linked Malta to Europe and possibly to Africa, back in the mists of time. For a while it seemed to be impossible to find any connection between my peregrinations and those of GWH, other than the somehow unlikely assumption that he, like Anthony, was a fan of Gerolamo Cassar, but in the end it proved reasonably simple.

Anna Stanhope would probably have said that the most important age for Malta was that of the temple builders, and if longevity counts, she would be right. The temple builders may have been on Malta for as many as six hundred years, and after they left, just about everyone in the Mediterranean used the island for some purpose at some time. The Phoenicians used it as a base, as did the Carthaginians. Hamilcar, Hannibal’s father, is said to have surrendered to the Romans there, for example. The Greeks were there, the Romans, even St. Paul, who is said to have been shipwrecked off Malta’s coast.

But if one were to look for the most prominent influence on the island, in terms of its landscape, its customs and practices, arguably this title would belong to the Knights. And it was here that I began to see some consistency in the places I’d seen GWH.

The story of the Knights began, I learned, in about 1085 when a group of monks known as Hospitallers began to minister to Christians who required medical attention on pilgrimages to the Holy Land. It soon became evident, though, that what these pilgrims really needed was protection from the so-called Infidel, in other words the followers of Islam, much more so than medical attention. Thus the Knights of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem came into being, an order that offered care and service to those in need, backed up by knights prepared to do battle if need be.

Gradually the Ottoman Turks began to gain the ascendancy in the Holy Land and the Knights of St. John were driven out of Jerusalem by Saladin, then out of Acre, then Cyprus, at which point they got to Rhodes. Here they stayed a while, only to be driven out again, this time by Sulieman the Magnificent. Sulieman allowed them to leave Rhodes, but this time they had no fallback position. They had nowhere to go.

Charles V of Spain, at the time Holy Roman Emperor, had various lands in his possession for which he apparently felt no great need. The island of Malta was among them. At first the Knights were not interested—they thought the island disagreeable at best—but in the end, what choice did they have? Beggars can’t be choosers. It was that or Tripoli, which was even worse, and they couldn’t argue with the rent: one falcon a year for Charles, the real Maltese falcon. After seven years of negotiation, they agreed to go to Malta, and most of Christendom heaved a collective sigh of relief, homeless knights being an embarrassment to all. Henceforth the Order came to be associated with Malta, and they built the great cities and fortifications that are so much a part of Malta today.

What was relevant for my research of the day, however, was that while Anthony had emphasized the architecture and the current use of the buildings: the Post Office, the Prime Minister’s residence, and so on, the original use of every one of these places we had gone, and everywhere I had seen GWH, lurking in that way he had, led back directly to the Knights: either the inns or auberges in which various orders of the Knights had lived, their cathedral, their hospital, and so on.

The question was: So what? It was all very interesting, but it didn’t get me anywhere. GWH was as entitled as anyone to visit those places, and maybe he was just a student of that particular period of history. In the end my research was just about as rewarding as the rest of my evenings at the house.

After the repairs and the research, the daily phone call to Toronto to check on the furniture shipment was about as exciting as it got. Dave Thomson had been right about France. A national transportation strike had shut the country down. Toronto International was still experiencing delays because of the weather, and when I wasn’t bored, I was in a state of high anxiety.

“Anthony told me about the lecture you went to last night. It sounded… interesting,” Marissa said rather hesitantly after a particularly prolonged bout of complaining on my part. She probably thought she was taking her life in her hands to talk to me, my just having had a hissy fit on the subject of the water problem.

“Actually, it was,” I said, cheering up slightly. “Whether you agree with Dr. Stanhope’s point of view or not. I had no idea a little island like this one could sustain such a rich and fascinating heritage!”

“It does.” She smiled. “One of the temple complexes the professor told you about isn’t far from here—Hagar Qim and Mnajdra. They’re very close by car.”

“I’ll bet!” I said, remembering my harried drive of the day before in crystal clear detail.

“Really!” she affirmed, then giggled. I guess Anthony had told her how lost I’d managed to get. I’d given him the edited version on the way home, omitting the part about the Great White Hunter. Tourists trying to find their way around this tiny island seemed to be a grand source of merriment for the locals.

“How far is it, exactly?” I asked.

“It’s exactly a mile… or thereabouts,” she said, not being quite as precise as I’d hoped. “You could actually walk if you wanted to.”

I thought this a much less stressful mode of travel than the car from hell, so soon I headed out with Marissa’s carefully drawn map in hand.

She was right. It was relatively easy. I just had to keep the sea on my right.

Walking is a wonderful way to see a new country and for a little while I was able to enjoy, indeed revel, in the sights and sounds and smells of a new place. It might have been the dead of winter at home, and an exceptionally harsh winter at that, but here it was already spring. There was warmth in the air and fields of poppies everywhere, bright flashes of brilliant color against the subdued pastel of the terrain.

Several times I stopped to look at tiny mauve and white flowers—I had no idea what they were—bravely clinging to existence in the thin and arid soil. I followed a rough path along the edge of the cliffs for a time, then turned inland to pick up a footpath that arched to the north and then angled back toward the water, passing just inland of the temple complex.

You could see the huge stones that formed the temple walls, megaliths indeed, their color bleached almost white in the bright sunlight, long before you reached the site. Maltese temples are circular in shape, made from huge limestone blocks, each weighing several tons, I should think. Some of the stones are covered with what look like pockmarks, put there by ancient craftsmen. The temples reminded me a little bit of the shape and grandeur of Stonehenge or some of the other stone circles you see in Northern Europe and Britain, but the Maltese temples are much older, and their design seemed more complex to my eye: circular chambers that lead into other circular chambers to form either a trefoil or a cinquefoil, three or five rounded chambers or apses leading off a central area. I knew from Dr. Stanhope’s lecture of the previous evening that these temples are the oldest freestanding stone structures in the world, and the huge statues of the Goddess that once rested there, probably the first freestanding statues anywhere as well.

I recalled Dr. Stanhope had said these complexes were built between about 3600 and 2500 b.c.e., by people who had neither copper nor bronze, and who used only blades made from local stones or from flint mined in Pantelleria over 125 miles away, an incredible feat when you thought about it. She had also said the temples were designed in the shape of the Goddess Herself, although I had difficulty conceptualizing what exactly that meant.

I wandered about the site for a while, marveling at the workmanship, enjoying the shade provided by the massive stones. An old woman also resting in the shade smiled at me and gestured in the direction of a path that led toward the sea. I followed her pointing finger and walked down a long stone causeway to a second site nestled on a snug promontory on a steep cliff well over a hundred yards above the sea. I took this to be Mnajdra.

Walking through the portal flanked by large stones, I suddenly felt I was indeed in a sacred place. From time to time we come to places which contain a special power for us. Where each individual feels this power, this mystery, probably says more about the person than the place. I consider myself fortunate to have been touched by this feeling more than once, not, as life would have it, in the monuments deemed spiritual by our society, but instead in the ancient remains of past civilizations.

Mnajdra was such a place for me. I thought about the people who built it, 11,000 of them at the height of the temple building phase Dr. Stanhope had spoken of; how they had chosen this site, perhaps because it also spoke to them; how they had eked out an existence on these rocky shores while seeking to transcend their physical existence through the concrete expression of their spiritual longing in the carving and placement of each of these stones.

I suddenly understood what Dr. Stanhope had meant about entering the body of the Goddess each time you entered a temple. Viewed from the sky above, I realized, a smaller chamber at the top would be Her head, the rounded chamber in the middle Her encircling arms, the much bigger chamber at the entrance Her large belly and thighs. The body of the Great Goddess of Malta, I knew, was large, like her Paleolithic forebears, a symbol of fecundity. Fat Ladies, Anthony had called them.

Outside again, I found a place with a breeze, overlooking the site and the sea, and sat, lost in my thoughts. More than anything else I thought about Lucas. His specialty was Mayan archaeology, of course, but he had a wonderful sense of exploration and delight in new experiences, and I thought how much he would have loved it here.

He would have known, without being told, how the temples were constructed, what kind of roof had covered them, and he would have had a theory about each and every component and artifact. I’d noticed a pitted stone monument at Hagar Qim— I’d assumed it to be an altar—on which was carved what could have been a spinal column but more likely was a plant of some kind growing out of a pot. Lucas would have told me all about tree cults, I’m sure, or about something similar from his part of the world. I could almost see him standing there, tall and slim against the sunlight, his long dark hair streaked with grey, dressed in black jeans and T-shirt as he almost always was. I could picture the way he’d look at me as he spoke, the shape of his arms as he pointed out the features of the sight.

I suddenly missed him so much, I could feel a constriction in my throat and a burning behind my eyes. I could only hope that halfway round the world at his archaeological site, he was thinking of me at that moment too.

These chains of memory were broken by the sounds, faint above the sound of the sea below the site, of giggling schoolgirls, Sophia among them, who soon hove into view on the causeway above me.

At the head of this delegation, in print shirtwaist dress and straw hat, was the redoubtable Dr. Anna Stanhope. Sophia saw me immediately and rushed to give me a hug, introducing me to five or six young girls with her, and then to Dr. Stanhope.

After a minute or two of polite chatter, Dr. Stanhope sent the girls into the temple, reminding them what to look for, and then sat down on a stone near me.

“Nice place you’ve found here,” she said rather breathlessly, wiping her brow with a lace handkerchief, which she then delicately put down the front of her dress like a Victorian spinster. “Hot,” she added.

“It is,” I agreed. “But it’s a wonderful place and I should thank you for bringing me here.”

She looked surprised. “I attended your lecture last night,” I explained.

“Did you? Did you like it? Set some of them back on their bottoms I daresay.” She hooted.

I had to smile. “I believe you did,” I agreed.

“I’m a feminist, you know. A placard-carrying, bra-burning, raving feminist. Came to it rather late, I’m afraid. But you know what they say. Better late than never. Or more likely, there’s no fool like an old fool.” She hooted again. She wasn’t that old, actually. At close range she appeared to be in her mid-fifties.

“Explains a lot, though. Feminism, I mean. Why I never got the senior academic posts I wanted. Why I had to work so hard to get my papers published while my male colleagues, most of them louts, soared through academia.

“Best I could do was head mistress of a girls’ school. But I’ll get my revenge. Inculcating feminist values in hundreds of little British schoolgirls.” Another laugh.

“What brought you to Malta?” I asked, changing the subject. I consider myself a feminist too, but there was an edge to this conversation that I didn’t want to deal with.

“Sabbatical,” she replied. “I’ve had a few in my day, of course. Never been able to get away before, though. Lived with my mum. I’ve been—what’s that horrid expression?— primary caregiver, that’s it. She died last year. I was sorry, of course. We’d been so close. But I felt… free I guess, for the first time. I’d heard my dad talk about Malta when I was a little girl. He died fifteen years ago. That’s when I moved back in with my mum. He’d been stationed here during World War Two—terrible time they had here, nearly starved to death you know, the Maltese, until the British broke the blockade.

“Anyway, my subject is history. And this place has a fascinating one, not the least of which is its place as a center of Goddess worship. So here I am. How about you? Canadian, I expect. The accent.”

“I am,” I said. I told her about my project in Malta, and how I expected it to be completed in a few days, but that I might—the thought was forming as I spoke—stay on a few more days to look around. We talked in a desultory fashion for a while, the heat of the afternoon making us both a little languid, and then we sat in companionable silence enjoying the site.

As we did so, a man appeared on the causeway above us. With all this talk of feminism and Goddess worship, he seemed a little out of place, and indeed he was the first male I’d seen since the ticket taker at the entrance. The man was attractive, almost movie star good-looking actually, well dressed in a nicely designed lightweight suit, Italian cut I’d say, dark complexion and hair, and he wore those reflecting sunglasses. He reminded me a little of Martin Galea. As we sat, he slowly scanned the site, his gaze resting on Dr. Stanhope and me for only a second. That done, he took off his sunglasses for a moment and carefully polished them. Then he walked around the perimeter of the site and was temporarily lost from view.

“Time to get going,” Dr. Stanhope said, hefting her large frame from the stone. “Come along, girls,” she cried. It sounded like “gulls” to my North American ears. The giggling schoolgirls gathered round.

I walked back up the causeway with the little group, Sophia at my side. The girls had started at Mnajdra first, the reverse of my visit, so I said good-bye and started back to the entrance.

“I don’t suppose you’d like to help me with a little project?” Anna Stanhope called after me as I turned to leave. “The gulls and I are putting on a little play for some visiting dignitaries in a few days. My stage crew of one broke his leg water skiing, silly fool. Do you think you might give us a hand?”

“Say yes,” Sophia mouthed at me.

“Yes,” I said. “I’d like to.” Sophia smiled her placid smile.

“Jolly good. Next rehearsal Saturday afternoon, three o’clock at the University. In the auditorium, same as last night.”

“I’ll be there,” I said.

As I leave the Goddess’s sanctuary, I turn back for one last look. The sun is low in the sky.

I find myself the apex of a perfect triangle. I think if I raise my arms to shoulder height in front of me to form a sixty-degree angle with my body, with my left hand I point to Dr. Stanhope, with my right I point to the man. It is a pattern that will repeat itself.

For a few seconds, we are frozen in perfect symmetry, but then I turn to go and the triangle breaks apart. I see the man begin to walk toward Dr. Stanhope, but do not look again.

I feel a vague twinge of memory. Something about the eyes, when he took off his sunglasses for a moment. Or perhaps the way he walks. Was it recently I knew him, or a long, long time ago?

Somewhere in the brain, a command to retrieve data is sent. Billions of neurons spring into action; minute electrical impulses sprint through the mamillary body and round the hippocampus. Dendritic spines stretch out like tiny hands to meet each other; synapses crack across the voids.

The command is encoded low priority. I will not remember in time.

The next morning the phone rang very early, long before dawn. I groped my way to it and heard what I thought was a honking Canada goose. It was, it turned out, Dave Thomson with a dreadful cold, calling me on his cellphone from what sounded like the end of the main runway at Toronto International.

“We did it!” he croaked. “It’s on its way. Four hours start to finish. Warehouse is still a mess, so we picked up the stuff at the store in one truck and at the house with another. Packed it right on the frigging tarmac outside the hangar. Freezing cold, let me tell you. The wife says I’ll catch pneumonia. But it’s on its way. Skyliner Cargo. It’ll be in Rome in less than seven hours. We’ve got an hour’s turnaround. Everybody’s standing by. It’ll be on the two p.m. for Luqa. Let Azzopardi know for me, will you?” he said, naming his Maltese broker. “Docket 7139Q.”

“Dave, you really are the best.” I laughed. “I’m sticking with you for life.”

“Another satisfied customer,” he honked. Then, “By God, this was a squeaker. I’m going home to bed.”

I knew I’d never get back to sleep, so I put on a pot of coffee and watched the early morning light. Most places are enchanting at this time, none more so than Malta, where the early morning light was as beautiful as I’d ever seen it. I was beginning to love the place, idiosyncracies and all.

Later as I waited for the workmen to arrive, sans Joseph, and had left a message for Mr. Azzopardi on his answering machine, I did my own house inspection. I tried the taps: the water came on, hot and cold. I tested the switches: every light worked. The walls were free of holes, the paint matched perfectly to my eye, the woven hanging looked wonderful in the living room. I checked the kitchen cupboards: glassware, flatware, and dishes all lined up in satisfying rows, ready to be called upon at any time.

And best of all, the furniture was on its way.

“We might just be all right here,” I said to the empty rooms. “We might just be all right.”

By 4:45 that afternoon I was in position at the door, clipboard in hand, as a phalanx of small trucks—Mr. Azzopardi must have commandeered every small truck on the island for the occasion—came along the road and up the driveway one at a time to unload. The cousins stood by ready to unload and install.

“Two carved mirrors. Upstairs hallway,” I said.

“Teak dining table and six, seven… eight chairs. Dining area to the left.

“Wrought-iron and glass table, four chairs. Verandah at back.

“Antique etagere, second floor, far end.”

And so it went. Until the very end when there appeared a large oak chest. The cousins stumbled with its weight.

“What’s this?” I said. I checked the list again. “This is supposed to be a sideboard, not a chest.”

I looked the piece of furniture over. The yellow sticker with my initials on it was plainly visible.

“They’ve sent the wrong piece!” I said in exasperation. “I don’t believe this! What am I supposed to do with this?”

I wanted to kick it, valuable though it might be. Instead, I turned the key and flung the lid open with considerable force.

Someone screams and screams. It is a voice I think I recognize. A tiny rational part of the brain sends a high priority message to seek a match and finds one. The voice belongs to me.

Martin Galea is dead. Very dead. Body stuffed awkwardly into the chest, a brown stain on the front of the impeccable silk shirt. Eyes staring toward eternity.

For a few seconds time stands still for me.