The Information Officer

DAY THREE

MAX WAS AT HIS DESK, TAKING A RED PEN TO A NEWS item, when the phone rang. He snatched up the receiver distractedly, irritably.

“Yes?”

“I know the feeling.”

“Freddie.”

“Bad morning?”

“That new chap we took on, you met him at the party …”

“Pemberton.”

“Turns out he thinks he’s Shakespeare.”

“He’ll learn. You did.”

“Thanks for that.”

“Listen, Max, I know who she is.”

Max’s smile died on his lips. “The girl?”

“She has a name now. Carmela Cassar. Her father was here earlier and identified the body. It’s as we thought, another sherry queen.”

“You spoke to him?”

“Don’t worry. I was very discreet.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Yes, it is. Have you got a pen?”

Max scribbled down everything Freddie had gleaned, both from the official paperwork at the mortuary and from his conversation with the father. Carmela had lived with her parents in the family home on the hillside near Paola, just up the slope from Santa Maria Addolorata Cemetery. She always got back from work late, between one and two in the morning, but in the five months she had been working at the Blue Parrot she had never before failed to return.

Max knew the Blue Parrot, not intimately, and not of late. It was one of the few dance halls in the Gut reserved for officers, which meant that the establishment was slightly more spacious than most, the floor show moderately superior, and the drinks vastly more expensive. He’d been there several times soon after his arrival on the island, when the star attraction, the big draw—the very big draw—had been an act from Hungary.

Budapest Bessie hadn’t been graced with either the build or the poise of a prima ballerina, but this hadn’t prevented her from puffing her way through her version of “The Dying Swan” before the disbelieving eyes of Britain’s officer classes. For some reason, veils had been a feature of her routine, he remembered, angina the reason for her sudden retirement from the stage. Ammunition had been scarce even back then, but a couple of the shore batteries had been ordered to fire off a salute when the frigate bearing Bessie to a gentler life in Gibraltar had slipped out of Grand Harbour.

Max hadn’t been back to the Blue Parrot since that time, but he could see the flaking gilt of the mirrors in the narrow dining room, the greasy velvet upholstery, and the tired palms dotted about the place.

“Did she work anywhere before?”

“I didn’t ask. Should I have?”

“Anything else?”

“Yes. Something that doesn’t make sense. She left for work on Thursday afternoon at five o’clock—she always allowed an hour for the walk, apparently—but she wasn’t found till the Saturday morning.”

“Where exactly was she found?”

“A backstreet in Marsa. Marsa was on her route home, but she can hardly have lain out there for a whole day without anyone seeing her.”

Max weighed a range of explanations, rejecting each in turn. Only one withstood the test, and it didn’t sit happily in the head.

“She was held somewhere for twenty-four hours.”

“It looks that way.”

“Or maybe she was already dead; he just couldn’t dispose of the body for whatever reason, maybe it was too risky.”

As explanations went, it wasn’t quite as grim as the thought of her being held hostage for those missing hours, with the disturbing images that accompanied it.

“The rigor mortis suggests otherwise. It was well set in when I first saw her on Saturday around noon. It generally peaks somewhere between twelve and twenty-four hours after death, closer to twelve in this kind of heat.”

Which suggested that her life was ended some time on Friday night. And probably not in Marsa. Marsa had simply been the dumping ground. As to where she was abducted, it could have been anywhere along her route home; a quiet spot, most likely. But where did he hold her captive during Friday? And how did he transport her there? The questions were coming in a torrent now.

“Max, I’ve been thinking. We have to go to someone with this.”

“The lieutenant governor’s office shut you out last time. What makes you think they won’t do it again? We need evidence they can’t ignore.”

It was a disingenuous response, and he knew it: presenting himself as the champion of truth when all he really wanted was a bit more time to follow through on the consequences of a scandal of this scale breaking across the island.

“Freddie, I just need a day or two.”

“I’m happy to give it to you. But is he?”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying I don’t want another death on my conscience.”

“You think I do?” Max paused. “I’m asking you to trust me on this. A couple of days to check some things out. I’ll get straight onto it. I promise.”

Freddie remained silent for a moment. “Okay, but you’re on your own. They’ve got me working out of Mtarfa for the foreseeable.”

It was a testimony to Freddie’s skill as a surgeon that he spent much of his time being shunted among the island’s hospitals, according to where his gifts were required. There was certainly no lack of call for them.

“When are you heading out there?”

“Ten minutes ago. A Beaufighter just pancaked at Luqa. The navigator is pretty chewed up, by all accounts.”

“I’m going to need the exact dates when the other two girls were found.”

“Then stay on the line. I’ll be right back.”

Max spent half an hour clearing his desk and briefing the members of his team. They were quite capable of holding the fort in his absence. He was on the point of leaving when the rising dirge of the air-raid siren stopped him in his tracks.

“Damn,” he muttered, making for the staircase that led to the roof. Fleur-de-Lys occupied the high ground between Hamrun and Birkirkara, and the zinc-clad roof of Saint Joseph’s offered one of the finest views on the island: a sweeping three-hundred-sixty-degree panorama that took in Rabat and the walled city of Mdina to the west, roosting on their spur of white rock, keeping watch over the parched southern plain, where towns and villages lay scattered like dice on a tabletop. To the east, beyond Valetta and her twin harbors, lay a seemingly endless expanse of viridian-green water. The corrugated hills that rolled off to the north beyond Mdina held little strategic importance for the enemy. Almost everything that was of interest to them—the airfields, the dockyards, and the submarine base—lay within the field of vision of a person standing on the roof of Saint Joseph’s.

It was a biblical landscape—sun-bleached, shadeless, harsh to the eye—broken up into miniature fields by a dense lacework of stone walls. The walls were there to prevent the precious dusting of soil from being blown about by the hot summer winds from Africa. In the winter, the gregale blew in from the northwest, bringing the heavy rains that turned everything to mud.

Right now, though, a brassy sun was overhead, and the first white galleon clouds of the year were gathering over the island.

Max turned as the big guns up on Ta’ Giorni ridge slammed a salvo into the air. Pale puff-balls of bursting ack-ack fire mottled the sky to the northeast, heralding the arrival of a vast and heavily escorted formation of 88s.

It soon became clear that the airfields were about to take another bad knock, and Max could feel his plans for the day slipping away from him. Traveling, like much of life on Malta, was something you did in between raids, and even then you kept one eye on the heavens for the lone marauders who slipped in under the radar screen. The scarcity of gasoline had stripped the streets of motor vehicles in the past couple of months, and a lone motorcycle throwing up a cloud of dust was more of an invitation than ever to an enemy pilot with an itchy trigger finger.

He had been strafed only once—on the old dirt road that switch-backed its way between Ghajn Tuffieha and Mdina—but the suddenness and ferocity of the attack were indelibly etched in his memory. One moment he was barreling along, the wind in his face; the next moment the road in front of him was erupting. The fighter was well past by the time Max registered it, and it was a further few seconds before his brain was able to make the connection between the dot twisting away into the distance and the strip of earth torn out of the ground across his path. He might have processed the information more rapidly if he hadn’t been so joyously distracted at the moment when the attack occurred. Three dreamlike days by the sea at Ghajn Tuffieha had dulled his reactions.

He had earned the short break, his first in more than a year since arriving on the island and taking up his post as deputy to Charles Headley, the information officer at the time. Headley had also performed the function of deputy chief censor, which he had taken as an excuse to do neither job properly. Max was hardly industrious by nature, but he had never before witnessed anything approaching Headley’s eagerness to shirk his duties (or, for that matter, Headley’s curious desire to share with anyone who would listen that the art to skiving lay in cultivating a faintly embattled air).

Connections counted, though, and Headley’s Oxford education might well have seen him through if he hadn’t graduated from one of the more minor colleges. Few were surprised when Headley failed to return from one of his “recces” to Alexandria, and the attitude toward his “reassignment” was best summed up by Hugh, who had known him at university.

“Good chap, old Headers, but strictly front-of-house, if you know what I mean.”

Max had never been quite sure if Hugh’s observation had made a slight nod to the rumor doing the rounds that Headley had been caught in flagrante with a young Egyptian boy.

Either way, Max had found himself promoted, far beyond his years and experience, to run the department. Any pride in this meteoric rise was short-lived; he quickly realized what others had figured out long before him: that he had already been running the department. He had acquitted himself well in the top job—he knew that—but it was still strange to him that the task of manipulating minds came so naturally to him. He had always regarded himself as something of a loner. That had certainly been the picture presented to him by his family over the years, and one he had come to believe in. Yet here he was, deep in the minds of the masses, second-guessing their reactions to events, guiding and enlightening them, a high priest at the altar of the great god Morale.

It hadn’t all been plain sailing. A month after his promotion he had been hit in the shoulder by shrapnel from a parachute mine, and it had looked for a moment as though he might be replaced. Then in early September the letter had arrived from Eleanor, requesting that he call off their engagement. It was dated May, and his first thought had been of all the letters, all the sweet words, he had written to her over the previous three months while her thoughts had been elsewhere, with the faceless and nameless Canadian pilot who had stolen her heart. It was telling, he now realized, that this should have been his first thought: pragmatic and self-pitying. Hardly the reaction of a man who has just lost the love of his life.

Word of his misfortune soon circulated, largely thanks to Rosamund and Hugh, who had long since set themselves up in his life as surrogate parents, psychiatrists, and general busybodies. He also sensed their hand behind the order that had come down from on high that he take a few days off from his duties to lick his wounds. Gozo had been an option. The fertile little island sat just off the north coast, a short ferry ride away, and was a popular destination for those looking to leave the war behind them for a bit. The Riviera Hotel at Ghajn Tuffieha had been Mitzi’s recommendation, and she’d sold the place to him hard.

It didn’t disappoint. The stone-built hotel was perched high above a shallow bay guarded by two towering headlands and backed by one of the few sandy beaches on the island. It was a remote and peaceful spot, a small oasis in the rugged stretch of coastline. The hotel was clean and comfortable, its kitchen offered a bewildering array of fresh fish and vegetables, and its bar was stocked to overflowing. On his arrival, Max ate his first full and proper meal in months, washing it down with a surprisingly good bottle of white wine. He then took to his bed for an afternoon nap and slept like a fallen statue for sixteen hours straight.

The same base need for rest and recovery was written on the faces of the other guests, and while the odd polite word was exchanged, they generally gave one another a wide berth. The enemy planes passing high overhead every so often were studiously ignored. Most of the guests adhered to the same regime: loafing about with lightweight novels on the beach in between bouts of swimming, eating, and drinking. The water in the bay was clear, warm, and inviting, even with summer slipping away. The fish, oblivious of the war, were abundant, as were the fishermen, who appeared from God-knew-where each morning, bobbing about in their colorful boats. Some sold straight to the Riviera, and every morning the stumpy little head chef would pick his way down the precipitous path to the beach, examine their catch, and feign disappointment—the standard prelude to a spell of noisy bartering.

The fishermen were keen to know when the Italian bombers would return. It was not a question Max could answer, or, for that matter, one that he properly understood, until it was explained to him that the Italians, unlike their fearless German allies, were inclined to jettison their bombs short of the island and turn tail at the first sign of resistance. When this occurred, a fisherman was no longer obliged to wring his living from the depths; he could pluck it willynilly from the surface. It was an impressive sight, apparently, the surface of the sea carpeted white with the bellies of stunned fish.

On his third day there, Max struck out south along the coastal path. It was a bright, windless morning, unnaturally still, and a millpond sea licked lazily at the base of the cliffs. A strange feeling crept over him as he walked, a sense of timelessness. Whose footsteps was he treading in? How many others had negotiated the same twisting path over the aeons? The same path, but different men, each carrying his own hopes, dreams, and regrets.

Malta’s history was rich, romantic, and violent. How could it be anything else? The island stood at the crossroads of the Mediterranean, closer to Europe than Africa, though not by much. It also happened to possess one of the finest natural harbors in the world. No wonder that so many seafaring peoples had sought to make it their own. The Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, and Byzantines had all held sway over the island, only to be displaced. The Fatimid Arabs had gone the way of the others, although their language still lived on in the speech of the modern-day islanders. Since that time, Norman knights, Spanish grandees, and Napoleonic generals had all made their home here. How different was he, a commissioned officer of His Majesty’s Army?

He tried to shrug off this fanciful notion, but it trailed him like his shadow. It was oddly comforting, the sense of connection coupled with the cyclical futility of it all. For a brief moment he could have died and it wouldn’t have mattered to him one jot.

Set against this, his troubled saga with Eleanor took on a new complexion. He found himself feeling happy for her. She had no more wanted their marriage than he had. At least she had found the courage to do something about it. He sat on a rock, pulled the letter from his pocket, and read it again. This time he was proud of her, and he found himself hoping that they could remain friends. That’s what they had always been—good friends, ever since they were young and he had played Joseph to her Mary in the church nativity play. That was long before they both began to sense that others expected something more of them. Well, his stepmother, to be more precise.

He was back at the Riviera in time for lunch, and he entered the dining room in high spirits. They soared higher still when he spotted Mitzi at a corner table. She was alone, although as he approached, he noticed that the chair across from her had recently been vacated, if the full glass of wine and the cigarette smouldering away in the ashtray were anything to go by.

“Lionel back from patrol?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” Mitzi replied sweetly, before tilting her head to peer past him. “Drusilla, look who’s here.”

Max turned to see Drusilla Gleeson bearing down on him. Secretary to the Naval Wives Association, she was a formidable creature known for wearing her husband’s stripes. There was something of the overgrown Girl Guide about her, but she was redeemed by a certain gruff charm.

“Well, Major Chadwick. You look hot.”

“I’ve been walking.”

“Mad dogs and Englishmen, eh? We come here to walk—don’t we, Mitzi?—but only at first light or last.”

“I thought you had gone to Gozo,” said Mitzi.

Max knew this to be a bald-faced lie, and while he struggled to make sense of it, he played along. “Someone persuaded me to give the Riviera a go.”

“First time here?” snapped Drusilla. “Won’t be your last.”

“I’ve had a good time.”

“Needed to, from what I hear. Fiancée slipped her moorings, eh?”

“Drusilla, a touch more tact wouldn’t go amiss,” Mitzi replied.

“No doubt, my dear, no doubt.”

“Well, I won’t keep you from your meal,” said Max.

And he didn’t. He ate lunch alone at his allotted table, then headed for the beach. He tried to lose himself in his book—Wet and Windy, a light romp by John Glyder—but his thoughts kept turning to Mitzi and her unexpected arrival and the lie she had laid on him in front of Drusilla. He was dozing facedown on his towel when she joined him, the citrus smell of her perfume invading his half dream, alerting him to her presence. By the time his filmy eyes had focused, she was settled on her towel beside him.

She was wearing dark glasses and a safari-print swimsuit with slender shoulder straps.

“Drusilla’s sleeping.”

“I’m happy for her.”

“She can be a bit heavy-handed at times, but her heart’s in the right place.”

He felt her eyes straying over his body.

“You look well … if a little undernourished.”

“Can’t think why,” he replied.

“We’re all wasting away. I’ve had to take this in twice since I’ve been here.” She tugged at the material of her swimsuit. “For the first time in my life I’m actually happy with the size of my derrière.”

They were lying on their sides, facing each other across a respectable strip of sand. “I can’t see it from here,” said Max, “but I’m sure it’s a very fine derrière.”

A small smile played about the corners of her mouth, then she slowly turned to get her cigarettes from the straw bag on the sand behind her, twisting on her towel as she did so. It was done for his benefit.

“My God, you’re right to be happy,” said Max, more breathlessly than he would have liked. Like the rest of her, it was as close to perfection as anything he’d ever set eyes on.

She lit a cigarette, then tossed him the packet and the lighter. Thanks to Freddie, their mutual friend, he had got to know her well over the previous six months, well enough to come straight out with it.

“Why are you here, Mitzi?”

Exhaling, she replied, “I’ll give you a clue—not to go walking with Drusilla.”

He hoped she didn’t notice the tremor in his hand as he raised the lighter to his cigarette.

“Your hand’s trembling.”

“It does that when I’m nervous.”

“If it’s any consolation, you’re not the only one who’s out of their depth. I shouldn’t be here. This is not me, not what I do.” She lowered her eyes, tapping some ash onto the sand. “I’m sorry if I’ve embarrassed you.”

“I’m not embarrassed. Shocked, yes. And flattered. And trying very hard not to crawl across the sand and kiss you.”

“That would be a deviation from my plan.”

“You have a plan?”

“Everyone knows you have to have a plan.”

“When it comes to matters military, I’m not the real McCoy, I’m afraid.”

“So I’ve heard.” She stared off into the bay. “You’re hairier than I imagined.”

“I’m pleased to say you aren’t.”

Mitzi laughed. “You’ve always made me laugh. Maybe that’s why I’m here.”

“Not the rugged good looks?”

“Oh, those too. Eleanor’s a damned fool.”

“I’m not so sure anymore.”

He told her about his little epiphany on the cliff top, and for the first time he shared with her the truth about the relationship, not the finished picture he had presented to her in the past—touched up, varnished, and framed—but the raw canvas.

Mitzi listened attentively, her eyes never leaving his. When he was done, she remained silent for a moment.

“I know all about the expectations of others, and I’m not just saying that.”

She had been promised to Lionel pretty much at birth, she explained, a union intended to seal the bond between two navy families who had lived in the same village near Portsmouth for several generations. It was a good life, too good to question when young, impossible to question when a little wiser. She had never held Lionel responsible for his attitude toward her, although neither had she enjoyed the sense of entitlement instilled in him from an early age. It had colored their relationship. She had passed through life never knowing what it was like to be courted by a man, because the only man who had ever been allowed to have eyes for her happened to have believed she was already his by right.

“He has never once looked at me the way you are now.”

“With desire?”

“As an equal.”

“I’ve never considered myself your equal.”

“Maybe that’s the other reason I’m here—because you know your place.”

He laughed and lay back on his towel, staring at the blue vault of the sky. “You do a very good job of hiding all this.”

“I’ve had a lot of practice. I’ve also said too much. Let’s talk about something else.”

“Better still, let’s go for a swim, and you can tell me about that plan of yours.”

It was a simple plan, and they followed it to the letter. As soon as the sun dipped away and the heat dropped, Mitzi and Drusilla went for their walk along the coast. They returned in time for a late supper, just as Max was finishing up his meal. He stopped by their table, explaining that he would be leaving first thing in the morning and might not see them at breakfast. He wished them a pleasant stay, then walked to the ancient watchtower at the tip of the headland, where he smoked two cigarettes in the gathering gloom.

Drusilla’s room lay on Max’s corridor, just two doors down, so come midnight he was the one who found himself tiptoeing through the darkness, the tiles cold beneath his bare feet. Mitzi was waiting for him, naked under a cotton sheet. She had placed the mattress on the floor, presumably to avoid any undue noise. The curtains were open, the room awash with silver moonlight. They knew that silence was essential—they had even discussed it while swimming in the bay—but when Max joined her beneath the sheet, the first thing he did was say, “I’m afraid I’m not overburdened with experience.”

Mitzi stroked his face. “There’s no rush. I don’t know about you, but I don’t intend to sleep a wink tonight.”

“I don’t think anyone saw me.”

“Good.”

“And I locked the door.”

“Ssshhh,” she said, silencing him with a kiss.

The Maltese liked to rise early, and to be safe he left her room soon after four o’clock. He should have felt exhausted, drained, but there was a spring in his step, even a slight swagger. After reaching the safety of his room, he flopped onto the bed and tried to sleep, but his thoughts kept returning to the mattress on the floor, to the welcoming warmth of her body, its taut and slender beauty, her gift to him.

What had he done to deserve it? And how had he misread her so badly? The remote, imperious creature he had come to know was gone forever, laid to rest on that lumpy mattress. She had shown no signs of guilt at her betrayal of Lionel—far from it—just a hunger and urgency that had drawn the same from him. Apart from a few hushed words of encouragement, they had barely spoken, and the pauses between their lovemaking had been brief and breathless interludes. Even now he wanted more, and it was to prevent himself from doing something dangerously rash that he swung his legs off the bed and headed to the beach for a final swim.

An hour later, his bag was strapped to the back of the motorcycle and he was gone, tearing along the old dirt road that wound through the hills toward Mdina, his eyes screwed up against the wind and the low glare of the rising sun. He was a mile or so shy of Fort Bingemma when it happened, the enemy fighter swooping silently down on him and laying a trail of death across his path.

His first thought at the time had been of an avenging angel dispatched by Lionel to seek amends, and while this brush with his conscience hadn’t persuaded him to leave Mitzi well alone, eight months on he was still incapable of mounting his motorcycle without thinking that the avenging angel was watching and waiting.

Standing there on the roof of Saint Joseph’s, the skies over the airfields speckled with enemy planes, he certainly had no intention of making for Valetta before the siren had sounded its steady note of “Raiders Passed.”

He tried to use the time constructively, planning how to proceed, formulating excuses for his inquiries so that they wouldn’t arouse suspicion. But there was no ignoring the cruel coincidence of the thing, the eerie sense of predestination. All roads led to the Upstanding, the submarine driven by Lionel “Campers” Campion, lieutenant commander and cuckold.

It had been some months since he had visited the submarine base on Manoel Island, and the change was evident the moment he crossed the short causeway on his motorcycle. This time, he wasn’t waved through by the guard detail. They stopped him and questioned him and almost turned him away. He recognized the look in their eyes, the hollow stare of men who have been on the receiving end for so long that they’re itching to strike back at anything, even their own kind.

There were two of them, young and lean and mean-looking, members of the Special Service Detachment assigned to the defense of HMS Talbot, as the submarine base was also known. They softened to his cause when he asked them if they’d heard about the Macchi brought down by Vitorin Zammit after its strafing run at the base. They had, and they were eager for details from an eyewitness. Their sense of camaraderie restored, they allowed Max to proceed. They even helped him bump-start the motorcycle.

The 10th Submarine Flotilla was housed in the Lazaretto, a run of old buildings that had once served as a quarantine center for the Knights of Saint John. They were strung out along the southern shore of Manoel Island, staring Valetta in the face, sandwiched between the water’s edge and the soaring wall of rock on which Fort Manoel was perched. The Lazaretto had stood there unscathed for centuries but now wore a tired and decidedly sorry appearance.

The approach road was a patchwork of bomb craters, great gobbets of earth lay scattered about, and the small chapel had been gutted, although by some miracle its façade was still standing. The floating gangways where the subs berthed were deserted and damaged, reaching into Lazaretto Creek like the splayed fingers of an arthritic hand. The buildings themselves had fared far worse. At the western end, many of the roofs were gone, having taken the floors below with them.

When the base was viewed from this angle, the decision to pull what remained of the 10th Submarine Flotilla out of Malta made considerably more sense.

By some stroke of good fortune, the officers’ quarters at the far end of the Lazaretto had not suffered to the same degree, and a surly rating directed Max to Tommy Ravilious’s office. It lay off a sun-drenched loggia on the first floor, where a couple of officers, one of whom Max recognized from the Union Club, were lounging in wicker armchairs, smoking.

“I’m looking for Tommy Ravilious.”

He was thumbed in the general direction. “His day cabin’s three doors down on the left.”

Max had picked up enough naval jargon to know that “day cabins” were offices, just as floors were “decks,” and going out for lunch was “going ashore.” It was the same at Fort Saint Angelo on the Grand Harbour side, a “stone frigate” renamed HMS Saint Angelo by the navy when they’d adopted it as their headquarters. The urge to scream You’re on dry land now, not a bloody ship had never quite deserted Max.

One part of the corridor he picked his way down was open to the heavens, and the door to Tommy’s office was hanging off its top hinge.

Tommy was at his desk, sharpening a pencil with a rusty scalpel.

“Well, well, well …,” he said cheerily when Max entered.

Others at Lazaretto might have lost some of their usual lustre, but Tommy’s trademark brand of Boy’s Own Paper enthusiasm appeared unscathed.

“To what do I owe this pleasure—nay, honor?”

“I was passing.”

“Come now, my dear fellow, we’re too old and too wise for that.”

“So what are we doing here?”

Tommy exploded in laughter, casting a quick look around his dusty empire. “God only knows. Maybe we sinned in a previous life.”

“I hadn’t figured you for a reincarnationist.”

“My grandmother’s to blame. She loved all that nonsense. A committed naturist, too, right up until the day she died. ‘I believe in the two sexes airing their differences,’ she used to say. Drink?”

“What have you got?”

“Gin or gin.”

“Have we earned it?”

“I know I have.”

Max pulled up a chair. “Well, if only to dim the image of your grandmother airing her differences …”

It was Plymouth gin, favored by the navy men; Gordon’s was strictly army.

Max raised his tumbler in a toast. “The fourth of May.”

Tommy frowned, trying to figure the significance of the current day’s date.

“One has to be celebrating something, or else one is simply a common drunk.”

His impression of Hugh’s sonorous bass voice must have been close enough, because Tommy laughed and asked, “How is old Hugh, and the lovely Rosamund?”

Tommy downed his gin as if making up for lost time, which in some respects he was. The enemy’s recent fixation with the submarine base had kept him at his post and away from the clubs and dinners for the past month or more. As a senior member of the headquarters staff, he had barely any time for leisure when the heat was on. Max duly served up as much of the gossip as he could recall.

“Elliott was down here a couple of weeks ago,” said Tommy, topping off their tumblers.

“Elliott? What was he doing?”

“What he does best—snooping. I sometimes get the feeling he thinks we Brits are little more than a bunch of incompetents.”

“Then he’s not as stupid as he looks.”

Tommy smiled. “Apparently not. Speaks a very passable Greek, according to some of our Hellenic friends who were here at the time. One of them thought he recognized him from Crete, just before it fell.”

It seemed unlikely. Crete had fallen to the Germans almost exactly a year before, in May—a good many months before the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor had persuaded the Americans to join the fray. But when it came to Elliott, you could never be quite sure. Despite the bonhomie and robust sense of humor, there was something of the dark horse about him. He seemed to have been everywhere, lived everywhere, including England, where he’d spent several years as a pupil at Charterhouse School in Surrey.

Max could recall one of their early conversations, not long after the tall American had materialized in Malta. While berating the British for their innate lack of hospitality, Elliott had remarked that they could learn a thing or two from the people of Kazakhstan.

“I’m telling you, in Kazakhstan when a stranger turns up at your place and asks for shelter, you house him and feed him, no questions asked—not who he is, where he comes from, or where he’s going, not even how long he plans on staying. Nothing. Not a sausage. After three days, you’re allowed to ask him where he’s going, but that’s it. Anything more is an insult to your guest.”

“You’ve been to Kazakhstan?”

“There’s oil in Kazakhstan,” had been Elliott’s typically elusive response.

Max sometimes sensed that these subtle deflections were designed to tantalize, that Elliott enjoyed the aura of mystery that hung around him. Everyone knew that he had access to the very highest echelons of Malta Command. More than once he had been seen leaving the offices of the mysterious Y Service and the even more secretive Special Liaison Unit, although, as Tommy said, for much of the time he seemed to just drift about, observing and absorbing.

But Max hadn’t come to speculate about Elliott; he’d made the journey in search of information. With that mission in mind, he nudged the conversation back to the here and now.

“How are the Lazarene swine bearing up?”

“Surprisingly well, if a little jumpy.”

No one begrudged the submariners their foibles—the dark and inhuman universe they inhabited while on patrol earned them the right to act pretty much as they wished when on terra firma—but their quasi-religious devotion to the herd of pigs they’d been rearing still raised a chuckle or two.

“What’s going to happen to them?” Max inquired.

“Happen to them?”

“The pigs. When you’ve gone.”

“Aaaahhh,” drawled Tommy knowingly. “And I thought you’d come here to see how your old chum was getting on, but really it’s bacon you’re after.”

Max smiled. “It’s true, then.”

Tommy leaned across the desk and stubbed out his cigarette in the aluminum casing of a spent German flare that now served as an ashtray.

“When?” Max asked.

Tommy looked up. “P34 left a few days ago. The others over the next week or so.”

“That’s all that’s left?”

As the information officer, he might have felt stupid asking the question, but he knew the hard truth: that he was regarded as little more than a journalist, that privileged information was fed to him only when it was deemed expedient.

“Best not to shout it from the parapets.”

“Of course not.”

“Don’t think for a moment we’re happy about pulling out. We know how it’ll look, what message it’ll send to the Maltese.”

“No one’s going to blame you, Tommy. Everyone knows the pounding you’ve been taking. I mean, half the bloody island has watched it from their rooftops.”

“The powers that be are calling it a ‘tactical redeployment,’ but the truth is we’re bolting while we still can.”

Tommy’s dejection steered his hand once more toward the gin bottle.

“There’s only one reason you’ve been targeted—because you’ve hurt them so badly. Rommel can’t make headway in north Africa with you taking out his supply lines from Italy. Frankly, I’m amazed it’s taken them so long to wake up to that fact.”

“True. If they’d taken a serious pop at us a year ago, they’d have saved themselves seventy-five ships.”

“That many?”

“Four hundred thousand tons of shipping.”

“It’s a hell of an achievement, Tommy. And there’ll be more to come, wherever you end up.”

Max was fishing now.

“Alexandria. But it still feels like a retreat.”

“It isn’t. And my job’s to make people understand that.”

“Time for a bit of buffing and polishing.”

“Exactly, and it would help if I had a few more facts at my fingertips.”

“What sort of thing?”

Max tried to sound as casual as possible. “I don’t know. I imagine you have some kind of log that records the sorties of all the subs.”

“That’s confidential information.”

“I’m not the enemy, Tommy, and I’m not an idiot. I wouldn’t use anything that gave away operational practices. It’s just to get a sense of what you’ve all been through … the scale of it, the relentlessness.”

He didn’t feel good lying to Tommy, but the prize was within his grasp now, and he tried to remain focused on it.

“I don’t know, Max.”

“It’ll help bring your achievements to life.”

Tommy scrutinized him for a moment before deciding. “Okay. But I’ll tell you what you can and can’t use.”

He left the room, returning with a hefty leather-bound volume, which he dropped onto the desk in front of Max. Tommy pulled up his chair and they sat side by side, flicking through it.

Each submarine in the flotilla had a section devoted to it in which every detail of its time on Malta was noted chronologically in a neat cursive hand, everything from changes in personnel to maintenance and repair records to latitudes and longitudes of enemy sightings and engagements. The log would sometimes end with the ominous phrase “Last Known Position” or “Overdue, Presumed Lost,” and when this was the case, Tommy was inclined to reminisce about the cold-drawn courage of the men of the “Fighting Tenth,” many of whom had disappeared in circumstances that might never be entirely clear.

Max was impatient, eager to get to the relevant pages, but it was hard to remain immune to the tales of derring-do (and derring-don’t). Subs slithered into foreign harbors under the cloak of darkness to wreak happy havoc, apparently oblivious to their own meagre chances of escape. Others braved minefields to head off enemy convoys that might otherwise have eluded them. Wanklyn in the Upholder once went it alone against nine heavily armed ships and, in spite of a faulty gyrocompass that forced him to fire by sight from a choppy surface at night, bagged three before slipping away. The Porpoise, well known on Malta for ferrying crucial supplies and personnel to the island, had once survived eighty-seven depth charges during one of her “magic carpet” runs.

The stories were coming thick and fast, and Max was so absorbed in the swan song that he almost missed his moment.

Staying Tommy’s hand, he said, “Ah, the Upstanding. Lionel’s sub.”

“Hell of a man. Hell of a crew.”

“Where are they now?”

“Well, if Lionel has any sense, he’ll be lying in Mitzi’s arms.”

Max rose above the thought and even managed a small laugh. “And the crew?”

“Not here. We lost the mess decks last month to a parachute mine. They’re in syndicate flats in Sliema when they’re not on duty watch.”

Max ran his finger slowly down the page, pausing at the details of an engagement off Tripoli, but his eyes were elsewhere, scanning ahead.

February 17 and March 8: the dates he’d got from Freddie, the dates that marked the discovery of the two other dance hostesses, the ones who had died in circumstances suspicious enough for Freddie to have alerted the lieutenant governor’s office.

Max willed the Upstanding to have been on patrol, far away in the waters off Sardinia or some such place. But she’d been in port on both occasions, resting between sorties.

“Well?” said Tommy.

“Huh?”

He hadn’t been listening.

“Mitzi … When we’re gone … you’ll see she’s all right? Until she joins us in Alex, that is.”

“I have the feeling she’s quite capable of looking after herself.”

“Oh, she likes to cut a certain figure, but she’s not as tough as she makes out.”

“You think?”

“I know.”

Tommy seemed on the point of elaborating when the door creaked open behind them.

It was good to know that Lionel wasn’t curled up somewhere with Mitzi. It wasn’t quite so good to think of the flotilla’s log spread open on the desk at the pages relating to the Upstanding. Max shifted in his chair to obstruct Lionel’s view of it.

“Max, old man.”

“Lionel.”

Lionel turned his inquiring eyes to Tommy. “Cat out of the bag?”

“He knows.”

“Fair enough.” Lionel shrugged. “Can’t keep it secret forever, I suppose.”

He was a handsome man, blue-eyed and flaxen-haired, although his mustache was of a slightly darker tinge (and a touch too bushy to be taken seriously). He was not as tall as he would have liked to be. It annoyed him that he had never quite reached six feet, but he knew he was well proportioned, and he was proud of his long legs and narrow hips, both of which he believed made him appear taller than he was.

These were just some of the facts Max had learned from Mitzi about her husband. Max also knew that Lionel only ever made love in the dark; that he’d been circumcised; and that when he snored, he sounded not unlike a bullfrog. Max derived no pleasure from these insights; he would have preferred not to know. Anything that rendered Lionel more human also made it harder to look him in the eye.

Getting to his feet, Max calmly closed the log before turning back. “I don’t know what to say. It’s a sad day indeed. Have you told Mitzi?”

“Last night.”

“How did she take it?”

Tommy gave a dry little laugh. “What? Forced to leave a besieged island before it falls to the enemy?”

“Malta won’t fall,” Max found himself saying with a vehemence that surprised him.

Lionel ignored the statement. “Well, actually, she took it rather badly. What with her job and everything, she feels she’s doing her bit for the war effort.”

“I’m sure we can drum up some letter-writing for her in Alex.”

“That’s what I told her, though with slightly more tact.”

Max knew he had to smile along with them—anything less would have been too revealing—but he wanted to scream at them. Were they really so blind? Was that really how they saw her: the little woman troubling her head with the affairs of men? He knew what she did, and he knew she did it well because he had sometimes helped her with it when Lionel was away on patrol.

By any standards, it was a grim job. Unable to attend to their own affairs, dead RAF personnel required others to do the business on their behalf, and that duty fell to the Standing Committee of Adjustment. From their ground-floor offices on Scot Street, they sifted through the personal effects of the victims. Small objects of sentimental value were dispatched free of charge to the next of kin; bulkier items were either shipped home at the expense of the families or sold for the benefit of the RAF Benevolent Fund.

Mitzi was in charge of the correspondence. She read all the letters the casualties had received during their time on Malta, judging which of them to hold back. It wouldn’t do for a grieving widow to find a love note from another woman buried away in her dead husband’s mail. When she wasn’t preserving the memory of the dead, Mitzi was drafting the official letters that accompanied the personal effects back home. Most people would have dashed them off mechanically, but Mitzi worked hard to lend them a thoughtful and human touch, knowing that her words could make a difference.

“I’ve asked her to leave the flat in Valetta till she ships out to Alex. The Reynolds have said they’ll have her in Saint Julian’s.”

“Good idea,” said Tommy. “It’s a far safer place to be right now.”

“She’s dead against it, won’t listen to common sense.” Lionel turned to Max. “A word in her ear would be appreciated, old man.”

“Of course,” said Max.

Tommy and Lionel accompanied him back to his motorcycle, stopping to show him the stone wall on which Lord Byron had scratched his name while quarantined at the Lazaretto.

Tommy ran his finger over the sloping script.

“Adieu thou damnedst quarantine, / That gave me fever and the spleen,” he intoned, presumably quoting from one of Byron’s poems. “He didn’t like Malta.”

“And who can bloody blame him?” muttered Lionel.

Valetta was a welcome tonic after the desolation and destruction of the submarine base, which was saying something. In all its long history, the place had surely never looked worse. It had been almost a month since the opera house close by Kingsgate had received a direct hit, but its tumbled ruins still gave pause for thought. From here, it was a short walk down Kingsway to the shell of the Regent Theatre, where more than a hundred people had lost their lives on Carnival Sunday back in February during an afternoon showing of North West Mounted Police. Freddie, a devoted fan of Madeleine Carroll (and other ice-cool blondes in her mold) had dragged Max to see De-Mille’s curious and rather disappointing epic just the evening before. Several officers whom Max had known well enough to stand a drink for at the Union Club had not been so lucky with their timing.

Close brushes such as these brought to mind the grim words etched into one of the knights’ tombs in Saint John’s Co-Cathedral, remarkably undamaged still, a stone’s throw from the Regent: Hora Venit ejus, Veniet et tua. “Death came for them, and it shall come for you.” Maybe the Maltese had absorbed this stark truth with their mother’s milk, for they had an impressive capacity for carrying on regardless. Even now, they were buzzing about their business, moving with purpose, and Max found himself falling into step with the jittery rhythms of the street, a welcome antidote to the weary defeatism of the submariners. He had to hurry if he was going to make his appointment. Iris had been very clear with him on the phone: she wouldn’t hang around for him if he was late.

Iris was a civilian plotter with RAF Fighter Control in the Combined Operations Room. Sometimes referred to as “the Ops Room” but widely known as “the Hole,” it lay deep within the rock below the Upper Barraka Gardens. A rough-hewn tunnel led to an unprepossessing run of musty and malodorous rooms, and it was from this poorly ventilated little warren that the defense of Malta was coordinated. Max knew the place well from his many meetings with the air officer commanding, and although it was undoubtedly the safest spot to be on the entire island, it still brought out a claustrophobic streak in him.

As ever, a gaggle of off-duty pilots hovered near the entrance, waiting for the girls to come off their shifts.

“Shouldn’t you be up there mixing it with the enemy?” said Max as he pushed past them.

“Get us some bloody kites and we will,” replied one who’d failed to clock the irony in his words.

“Why didn’t you say? How many do you want?”

“A couple of hundred should see us good.”

“Consider it done,” Max replied, slipping inside.

“Bloody comedian,” came an Australian voice as the door swung shut behind him.

One feature of the Hole was the permanent babble of voices echoing off the hard walls, the low urgent hum of men and women engrossed in serious business. Even if the navy plotting room was silent, the wireless signals receiving room next door would invariably be alive with activity, or the antiaircraft gun operations next door to that, or coastal defense. Max passed through each in turn, exchanging brief greetings as he went.

Fighter Control was alive with activity, and Max took up a discreet position on the gallery with a couple of Maltese girls waiting to go on duty. Down in the pit, Iris and her colleagues buzzed around the plotting table, shifting small markers around with long poles according to the instructions they were receiving from the filter room through their headphones. There seemed to be some kind of plot building just north of the island.

From his vantage point high on the shelf, Group Captain “Woody” Woodhall, the senior fight controller, peered down on the proceedings. It was good that he was on duty: good for the pilots in the air, and good for Max, who always enjoyed watching the master at work. Woody was known for his uncanny ability to anticipate the enemy’s movements, and the pilots had developed a fanatical faith in his controlling. Max had often heard it said that even in a freezing cockpit at twenty-five thousand feet, you didn’t feel alone if Woody was on the other end of the line.

“Hello, Pinto Red Leader. This party is about ten miles north of you now, coming south.”

The voice helped: deep, measured, always reassuring.

“Thank you, Woody.”

“Keep your present angels and save your gravy.”

Woody exchanged a few words with the gunnery liaison officer seated beside him on the shelf. Down in the pit, Iris caught sight of Max and sketched a small wave in the air. The tense seconds ticked by. Then voices started to come over the public-address system.

“There they are!”

“Can’t see them.”

“Two o’clock below. Big jobs and a swarm of little boys.”

“Jeez.” Probably an American pilot.

“Still can’t see them. You lead, you lead.”

“Happy hunting, fellers.” Definitely an American.

“Do us a favor, Woody, and tell them to put the kettle on.”

“Milk and two sugars, right, Harry?”

“Just the one sugar. I’m watching my waistline.”

Woody laughed. “Well, don’t forget to watch your back too.”

An unsettling silence followed. Anxious glances were exchanged. There was nothing to do now other than sit back and wait. It wouldn’t take long. The nature of aerial combat in Malta didn’t allow for drawn-out dogfights, not when you were so heavily outnumbered. The handful of Hurricanes and Spitfires would swoop from high above, out of the sun, ignoring the covering force of 109s, each singling out a bomber. It was the bombs that did the damage, and the aim was to prevent the Junker 88s from reaching their targets. Ripping through the German formation with the throttle through the gate, the pilots would be happy if they got off a couple of squirts before racing for home. To linger any longer would be suicide.

The silence stretched out ominously; the atmosphere in the Ops Room grew more expectant. Then the PA crackled into life.

“I got one! I got one!”

“Good show,” said Woody.

“He’s going down over Saint Paul’s.”

“Don’t hang around and gloat.”

“Yes, I can see him. He’s for it.”

“And stop burning up the R/T.”

“Sorry, Woody.”

“Okay, Woody, out of ammo. Think I damaged one.” It was the American.

“Good show, Mac. All Pinto aircraft, pancake as quickly as you can.”

“Emergency, emergency. I’m losing glycol, and my oil’s gone from ninety to twenty. Little yellow bugger jumped me!”

“Harry—”

“I may have to step outside. Transmitting for a fix, transmitting for a fix.” And after a worrying interval: “Yes, I’m going down in the drink off Saint George’s. Here goes. Hope my brolly works.”

“Good luck, Harry. Transport’s on the way.”

It was extraordinary to hear it played out live, this drama of planes and men going down. With luck, Harry’s parachute would open and the high-speed launch would find him bobbing in the ocean in his Mae West, but it was no longer a concern for those in the Ops Room. They were dealing with an ever-evolving situation. Already, Woody was warning the other pilots of a couple of 109s in the circuit at Ta’ Qali, waiting to jump them when they came back in to land. Only when the raid had played itself out would they all stop and reflect on the skirmish.

This occurred some twenty minutes later, by which time the airfield at Luqa had taken another pitiless pounding and news had come in of the downed pilot’s successful rescue from the water. The new girls went on their shift, and Iris joined Max up on the gallery.

“Sorry about that.”

“You’re a dab hand with that pole of yours.”

Iris checked herself in her vanity mirror. “I’ve had a year of practice.”

On went the lipstick. Some girls ground rice into dust for face powder, but Iris was never short of the real thing, receiving a steady supply of cosmetics from her steady supply of admirers.

“Is it really that long?” Max asked. But looking at her he could believe it. The skin around her eyes appeared looser, her lips less full, and there were dark roots showing in her wavy blond mane.

“I know, I look dreadful.”

“I was about to say quite the opposite.”

Iris capped her lipstick. “You’re a sweetheart. You always were.”

“What do you say to a late lunch at Monico’s? Hot pork sandwiches and John Collinses.”

“I say lead the way.”

Monico’s had been an old haunt of theirs during Iris’s brief stint at the Information Office, and a brace of John Collinses brought out a nostalgic streak in her. She insisted on retracing their history, starting with their first meeting at a dance at the Engine Room Artificer’s Club in Floriana. It had been a rowdy affair, and Iris and her two flatmates had been right in the thick of it.

High-kicking his way across a crowded room while singing “Knees Up, Mother Brown” at the top of his lungs would never be Max’s idea of fun, but Freddie had announced to everyone present that he wouldn’t be banging out any more tunes on the piano until Max joined in. It was Iris who had dragged him from his chair into the fray, Iris who had hooked her arm through his and refused to release him until Freddie turned his gifted hands to some Cole Porter numbers.

At the time, Iris was still a member of the Arabian Knights, a concert party made up of six girls and two young men who walked from the hips down. They were one of the more popular outfits on the island, if only because their routines verged on the downright bawdy. What was it about the English that allowed them to find so much humor in men dressing up as women, and vice versa? Hugh would have said that Shakespeare was to blame.

Max had only once seen the Arabian Knights in action; they’d been mostly on the road in an old Scammell truck provided by the Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes (NAAFI), performing at airfields and forts and remote gun sites. The arrival of the Luftwaffe in Sicily in early ’41 spelled the end of the troupe, the Germans taking over from their Italian allies and teaching them the true meaning of a bombing campaign. Malta shook to a holocaust that left little place for frivolous entertainments, and the Arabian Knights were forced to disband.

Crueler tongues than Max’s had speculated about Charles Headley’s decision to employ Iris at the Information Office. What did Max care if Headley was getting his oil changed in return for offering her a job? She was a performer, fun to have around, and competent enough when it came to reading out the news bulletins for the Rediffusion. Moreover, she hadn’t fled the island when the opportunity to do so had still existed, which suggested a certain commitment to the cause.

Admittedly, there had been something slightly self-serving about this commitment. At the first opportunity, she had left the Information Office for the giddy heights of Fighter Control, but Max had never begrudged her her resourcefulness and ambition. She was a young woman from a tough neighborhood of south London who had pulled herself up by the boot straps, exchanging a sequin-encrusted brassiere for a key job at the heart of the military machine. He knew that the wives of the high-ranking officers with whom she now rubbed shoulders despised her for her pretensions, her efforts to dress more like them and improve her accent—and maybe there was something of the same thinking in their husbands—but as someone who had suffered at the hands of knee-jerk prejudice, Max knew whose side he was on.

His easy companionship with Iris had never been haunted by the spectre of physical attraction. On that score, Max did nothing for her. She had told him as much the day he’d accompanied her and her mangy dog to the blessing of the animals at the church of Santa Maria Vittoriosa.

“I don’t know why. You’re tall and dark and very handsome, and you have perfectly lovely green eyes, but I’m not in the least bit attracted to you.”

“That’s okay, Iris.”

“It’s just the same with Freddie. Something about him leaves me cold.”

“I’m sure he can live with it too.”

Sitting there in Monico’s, Iris ran him through an impressively long list of other men who had managed to stir something in her since they’d last caught up on each other’s news. Her current weakness was a Free French pilot named Henri who had purloined a Latécoère torpedo bomber in north Africa and flown to Malta to join the fight. As ever, she was in love, and this time it was the real thing.

Max waited for her to talk herself to a standstill before making his move.

“Iris, I need your help.”

“My help?”

“It’s a sensitive matter, for your ears only.”

It occurred to him only then just how difficult this might become. For a person bent on reinventing herself, she wasn’t necessarily going to appreciate being reminded of her seamy past.

“What was the name of that place you worked when you first came to Malta?”

He knew the name. And he knew the place. It was still there: an apology for a dance hall just off Strait Street where it dipped away toward Fort Saint Elmo. Like many other girls with a London show or two under their belts, Iris had been lured to Malta before the war with the promise of fame and fortune, only to find herself prancing around a postage-stamp stage for a baying mob of drunk and hormone-fueled sailors.

“Why?” she asked warily.

“I know it’s a world you’ve left behind—and good riddance to it.”

“It wasn’t such a bad life.”

He had heard enough stories from others to know she was stretching the truth.

“Well, maybe it’s got worse. Or maybe it hasn’t. Maybe it’s nothing.”

“And maybe you should spit it out.”

“As I say, it’s probably nothing …”

This was a phrase he kept returning to over the next few minutes. He tried to remain as vague as possible, making out that he was only doing someone else a favor by approaching her. This person—he couldn’t say who exactly, they had asked him not to—was of the feeling that casualty rates were running unnaturally high among the sherry queens of the Gut. He was fumbling his way toward the request when she preempted him.

“You want me to ask around.”

“A few discreet inquiries to some of the people you know—knew. See if there’s any truth in it. As I say, it’s probably nothing.”

“Let me get this straight. You think someone’s killing sherry queens, and you want me to go in there and be discreet?” She seemed amused by the idea, and probably with good reason.

“I don’t think anything.”

“No, that’s right, this ‘person’ thinks someone’s killing sherry queens.” She made no attempt to conceal the heavy irony.

“Iris, look, he doesn’t know anything. He’s just doing his job, making sure. Forget I ever mentioned it, okay?”

He meant it. He should never have approached her with it.

Iris pulled a cigarette from the packet and waited for him to light it for her.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked you.”

“Of course I’ll do it,” she said.