The Maltese Goddess Read online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Do you have kids?” he finally asked.

  “Nope.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  I looked at him.

  “Joseph went to Rome.”

  NINE

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

  *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Can I describe that day to you? Anthony, Joseph, and I, all in our Sunday best, drove over to the house to meet the owner and see if we passed muster as potential caretakers. Sometimes I wonder what we must have looked like, the four of us standing in a little circle outside the house, only Anthony oblivious to the little drama that was unfolding. How the Fates must have laughed at the three of us, each coming almost simultaneously upon a sudden realization that would change our lives forever. Marcus knew right away, I’m sure of it, about Anthony. I could tell from the look he gave me, the way he looked back and forth between the two of us. And Joseph knew too, somehow.

  ”Marcus offered us the work. Joseph said we’d think about it. We had the most terrible row that night. Joseph said there was no way we’d accept the job. I said we had to, that I wanted a decent life for my son. In the end, he agreed. What choice did we have? God knows, we need the money. And Marcus has never touched me, not once. He never even shook my hand.

  “No, what he did was much, much worse than that: It was not me he wanted, it was Anthony. He wanted a son.

  “Anthony has not been an easy child to raise. He has his father’s restlessness, an almost frightening need for affection and approval, ambition way above his station in life, and at times a lack of sensitivity to those about him. But I think he is, at the heart, a good boy, and Joseph could not have loved his own son more.

  “Marcus started spending time with the boy whenever he was in Malta. He took him around the island explaining all about the buildings, taking him to fine restaurants and buying him fancy clothes—all the things Joseph and I could not do. And gradually he began to drive a wedge between Anthony and his father… Joseph, I mean.

  “I don’t blame Anthony. How could I? I was just as dazzled by Marcus Galea when I was his age. Anthony talked incessantly about Marcus, and finally announced he wanted to be an architect. I don’t think I ever noticed how good Anthony is at drawing. I was as proud as any mother at the pictures he drew for me, and I thought some of the chalk drawings he did of the streets around our town were quite lovely, but I didn’t see the talent there. Marcus did.

  “The idea of sending Anthony to study architecture was so far beyond our means that it was ludicrous. But then Marcus came to the house and offered to pay for Anthony’s education. He said he would speak to the dean of a school of architecture in Rome where he’d lectured, and try to get Anthony accepted there. But then he suggested that a preferable alternative would be the University of Toronto where he had graduated and where he was on the Board of Governors. He said that Anthony could live with him and his wife while he was at school to save money. Anthony was thrilled by the idea of going to America. I could see it in his eyes. But I watched the light go out in Jo
seph’s.

  “I looked at Marcus standing there with his smug little smile and his expensive clothes—my God, his sunglasses probably cost more than Joseph could make in a month!—and I hated him. Really, truly hated him. He knew we wouldn’t say no, that we would not jeopardize our son’s future!”

  She sat looking down at her hands for a moment or two, unable to say more.

  “But you could have said no,” I said quietly.

  “And what good would that have done?” she burst out. “Anthony is a lot like Marcus. He would have gone anyway, wouldn’t he? Marcus would have paid his way; and we would have lost Anthony forever.”

  “Does Anthony know Martin Galea is his father? Have you told him?”

  “No!” she said vehemently. “I never will!” Then turning and grasping my arm very tightly, she said to me; “Please promise me you won’t tell him. Promise me!”

  “I promise, Marissa,” I said slowly. “But you will have to tell him eventually, you know.”

  She just looked at me.

  “We know Joseph was in Rome on Thursday, Marissa. He may have some explaining to do should we find Galea was killed there.”

  “Joseph didn’t kill him. He didn’t even know he was there.”

  “Then why was Joseph there, Marissa?” I asked.

  “I have no more to say,” she replied bitterly. “Nothing. I have promised. But Joseph would not—could not—kill Marcus Galea.”

  There was no changing her mind. Not then. I left her sitting there, silent and morose. I would have liked to sit there with her, try to persuade her that to talk about Joseph was better than saying nothing, but I had other responsibilities to consider, a young friend I couldn’t disappoint.

  *

  We were to begin our setup for the performance at Mnajdra, meeting first at the University, and then traveling together by chartered bus to the site. I’d promised Dr. Stanhope, and more importantly Sophia, that I’d be there. When I arrived at the auditorium—Rob having dropped me off there on his way to Tabone’s office in Floriana—there appeared to be an altercation of some sort taking place outside the door to the building. A group of people was shouting and gesticulating at someone, and that someone turned out to be Anna Stanhope. It took me a while to ascertain what all the shouting was about, but it soon became clear that it was a group of parents objecting in the strongest terms to some of the redoubtable Dr. Stanhope’s more feminist teachings. Clearly, they did not want their daughters taking part in the performance. Dr. Stanhope was seriously outnumbered, with only Victor Deva beside her, wringing his hands and making a gesture as if to shoo people away. Mario Camilleri, the PR type from the Prime Minister’s office, tried valiantly to calm the crowd, but being singularly unsuccessful, opted instead to pull Anna and Victor back into the building for safety.