The Information Officer

DAY FOUR

MAX HAD BEEN HOPELESSLY AWAKE FOR HOURS, WRESTLING with the sheet, when the building wail of the siren cut through his thoughts. The windows were shuttered, but a pale dawn light leaked into the bedroom through the crack in the wall. He’d tracked the progress of this jagged fissure over the past month with a mixture of curiosity and alarm. It had set off on its journey from the floor beside the chest of drawers, traveling in fits and starts on a diagonal path toward the ceiling, widening to a hand’s width as it went. At a certain moment it had disappeared behind the only picture in the room—a naïve watercolor of some unidentifiable fruit in a bowl—only to reemerge a week or so later from behind the shell and coral frame and carry on its way.

There was no stopping it. What it would do when it reached the ceiling was anyone’s guess; structural engineering had never been his forte at college. Diagonal was bad, though; he knew that much. So was the fact that the doors in the apartment no longer closed properly.

His neighbors had long since fled, part of the great exodus that had all but emptied Valetta, Floriana, and the Three Cities, stuffing the surrounding towns and villages to bursting point. His refusal to budge had both puzzled and pleased them; at least someone was left to deter looters. But there was nothing noble and defiant in his decision to remain. From his bedroom window he had a direct view of Mitzi and Lionel’s flat in Valetta, and that kind of proximity was not something he’d been ready to give up. Well, not until now.

Theirs was a third-floor flat, large and light, overlooking Hastings Gardens. Max knew it well. He still had a key to the entrance door downstairs. The key was tucked away in the drawer of his bedside table, redundant for more than two months, ever since Mitzi’s abrupt termination of their relationship.

It had been hard to fault her logic.

“Everyone reaches for a crutch in war. That’s what we’ve done. We’re like two cripples leaning on each other. It can’t continue, Max. I’m a married woman. It has to stop.”

He knew her well enough by then not to argue. She rarely spoke in haste. She had thought the matter through and drawn her conclusion. Nothing he said or did would dissuade her.

“Okay.”

“I knew you’d understand.”

“I didn’t say I understood.”

They had been naked at the time. Five minutes later, he was fully dressed and heading home on foot, sticking to the shadows, as he always did. That’s when he remembered the key in his hip pocket. The black void beyond the bastion wall called out for it, but he kept it clutched tightly in his fist. He had always prided himself on his ability to cope with rejection, and he was happy to be able to ascribe the tears pricking his eyes to the dust carried on the stiff wind whipping through the streets.

His attitude had hardened considerably over the following days and weeks, especially when it became clear there was to be no change of heart on Mitzi’s part. Numb resignation slowly gave way to indignation, then to morose self-absorption.

Tellingly, Lilian was the first to note the change in him.

“What’s wrong?” she had asked as they were winding up one of their weekly meetings. “You’re not yourself.”

“Who of us is?”

She cocked her head at him as if to say, You’ll have to do better than that.

“I mean it. Life here … it’s like another incarnation. I can’t remember who I was.”

“So tell me.”

“What?”

“Tell me. It might help you remember.”

He spoke mostly about architecture, the curious and inexplicable passion that had nibbled at the fringes of his consciousness during childhood, and that he had finally acknowledged, just in time, a week shy of taking up the post he’d been offered by the Foreign Office while still a student at Oxford.

His university friends, taking the first teetering steps in their respective careers, were baffled by his decision to start over from scratch, dismissing it as the whimsy of someone who was an eternal student at heart, which probably wasn’t so far from the truth. His father, on the other hand, had embraced the idea. He’d even embraced Max—something he hadn’t done in years—congratulating him on his courage and offering to cover the cost of a small apartment in London for the duration of his studies.

His time at the Architectural Association had been a revelation, both thrilling and humbling after the dilettante posturing of Oxford, the endless round of dining clubs and debating societies. No one cared if he thought Ezra Pound or T. S. Eliot was the daddy of contemporary poetry. He felt stripped bare, naked, exhilarated. The work came first, their work, not someone else’s. He even learned to find beauty in the tedium of a technical drawing class, the utter silence of people doing rather than discussing. Yes, they talked about architecture—as he did now to Lilian—about its power to make the human spirit soar, and about the green shoots of the exciting new aesthetic pushing through the establishment soil. If he bored her, she didn’t show it.

That one conversation had marked a notable shift in their relationship. She might have been the instigator, but they both played their part in it. Almost imperceptibly, their weekly get-together became a twice-weekly get-together, and he found himself manufacturing further excuses to drop by the offices in Saint Paul’s Street whenever he was in town. The first time he invited her for a drink at the Union Club, it was on some doubtful professional pretext.

Perched on a chair in the ladies’ bar—amusingly nicknamed the snake pit, which didn’t amuse her—she told him the story of her father, a captain in the Yorkshire Light Infantry who had spent a year of his life on Malta, recuperating from injuries sustained in the Salonika campaign. Malta had catered to well over one hundred thousand sick and wounded during the Great War, and had come to be known as “the nurse of the Mediterranean.” Lilian’s mother, like so many other Maltese girls at the time, had been a volunteer nurse, and she’d lost her heart to the lanky Yorkshireman in her care, marrying him a few months before he was sent back to the front. George Flint wasn’t killed by a Bulgar bullet or bomb; he died from malaria in September 1918, a few days before the war in Salonika ended.

Her mother had never remarried, unable to square the concept with her faith, although it hadn’t stopped her from disappearing off to Italy a couple of years before the outbreak of war, on the arm of a visiting professor of archaeology from the University of Padua. This was the reason Lilian now lived with her aunt’s family in Mdina. The invitation to dinner there had followed a few weeks later.

With its walls and ramparts and sweeping views, Mdina reminded him of a number of hilltop towns he had visited in France with his father before the war, and while it lacked a cathedral to match those of Laon or Vézelay, it more than made up for this in other ways. As the seat of the Maltese nobility, its streets and squares were lined with stately palaces, mostly built in a restrained baroque style. The same graceful architecture was evident in the churches, convents, and seminaries that accounted for almost all the other buildings in the compact citadel. The effect was ordered, aristocratic, ecclesiastical; and an ancient peace seemed to hang over the place, a silence broken every so often by the slap and scuff of leather sandals on stone as friars and nuns shuffled about their business.

Lilian’s aunt, her mother’s younger sister, had married into one of the more ancient families, acquiring a convoluted title in the process, although she insisted on being addressed simply as Teresa. Her husband, the twentieth baron of something or other unpronounceable, was an officer in the Royal Malta Artillery. He commanded an antiaircraft battery near the fuel reservoirs at Birzebbuga in the south of the island, and he was rarely around, which left his wife, his niece, and his two young daughters free run of the palace on Bastion Square.

At dinner, Max had been a little put out to find himself seated next to Teresa at one end of the long table, while a handsome and amusing young captain with the 2nd Battalion Cheshire Regiment monopolized Lilian at the other end. He drew some consolation from the fact that Teresa appeared to know a fair amount about him already, although this didn’t stop her from quizzing him further. She was an attractive woman with a ready laugh and large eyes made for drawing confidences from strangers, especially ones who had consumed too much fine red wine.

He told her about his life back home in England, about the big house in Oxfordshire where he had grown up, the farm that came with it, and the fields and woods and lakes that had served as his playground when he was a boy. She wanted more, though. What was his father like? A modest, soft-spoken man. Kindhearted, if slightly remote. And his mother? She was dead. How? In childbirth. Giving birth to him.

Silence. The same awkward silence that always followed this revelation, as if people were weighing in their minds the exact extent of his culpability. But Teresa was different.

“How terrible that you did not know your mother.”

“I couldn’t say. I’ve nothing to compare it with.”

“Are her family still in your life?”

“They’re French. She was French.”

“And her name?”

It didn’t come readily to his lips. In fact, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d uttered it.

“Camille.”

He was too far in by now to extract himself, so he told her the story, in so much as it had been handed down to him. His father, the youngest of three sons, had always harbored dreams of being a painter, dreams that had carried him to Paris against the wishes of his parents. The advent of war, along with a creeping recognition of his own creative limitations, conspired to foul his plans, and in 1914 he returned to England with his French bride—the daughter of a notary who had lived in the same apartment building in Paris. Both of his brothers were dead within a year. Miraculously, he survived the Western Front to find himself first in line, the sole heir, to a small estate north of Oxford.

It was the kind of life Max’s father had never wanted or imagined for himself, but Camille’s death in childbirth a short while later sealed his fate. A number of local ladies pounced on him, and he was too disorientated and weak—yes, weak—to repel the pushiest candidate.

“Your stepmother?”

“Sylvia.”

“How old were you?”

“Too young to remember.”

This was a lie. Strange and mildly unsettling memories still came to him from time to time, static images, snapshots, cold and stark and remote: the high shine of his father’s shoes on the day of the wedding … a faceless woman dressed all in white and framed in a doorway … his nanny holding him at the nursery window, watching the wedding party return from the church. Whether or not they were reliable memories, he couldn’t say. It was quite possible that his brain had assembled them from photographs and hearsay. He knew for a fact, however, that Sylvia had insisted he shouldn’t attend the ceremony.

“Did they have children?”

“I have a half brother and sister, not much younger than me. Roland and Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s a fine woman.”

“And Roland?”

Max hesitated, reaching for his wineglass. Idle. Overweight. Overbearing. Cruel.

“Roland’s all right.”

Any pretense of a relationship had disappeared long ago, when Roland—not for the first time—had referred to Max’s mother as “that French whore.” Dr. Tomkins, the local GP, had done a good job of resetting Roland’s nose, although it still veered a little to the left when viewed in certain lights.

Even as he had landed that punch, Max had known that Roland hadn’t been wholly to blame, that he had only been parroting the words of his mother. Sylvia had worked tirelessly over the years to drive a wedge between Max and her own son. Everyone knew the reason why. Everyone knew what was at stake.

Max had toyed with the idea of forgoing his birthright, of stepping aside and allowing the estate to pass to Roland—and maybe he still would—but prolonging their distress offered some small satisfaction for their hostile treatment of him over the years, the injustice of which still filled him with impotent and uncomprehending anger in his darker moments.

He labored under no illusions—he’d had a privileged upbringing, and to complain about it seemed somehow perverse—but he had always felt himself very much alone in the world, and he held Sylvia and Roland largely to blame for this. His father was exonerated on the grounds that he had never given Max cause to doubt their special bond. They shared many of the same interests. Whether it was facing each other across a chessboard or fiddling with the guts of some motorcycle or casting flies for trout on the river, they both knew that those private moments were more about reinforcing their silent alliance than about the activity itself. They discussed literature and art and films, and all the other things that Sylvia deemed too trivial to be aired at the dinner table, such as the book his father had been working on for the past ten years or more.

It was a biography of the young Frenchman Jean-François Champollion, who, in spite of his lowly origins, had won the race to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphs, beating the most eminent orientalists in Europe to the coveted prize. It was a story well worth telling, but why his father should have devoted so many years of his life to the subject was anyone’s guess. Max suspected it was something to do with the idea of a young man setting his sights on a goal and persevering in the face of insuperable odds—something his father had failed to do. He also suspected that the book would never be completed, because if it ever were, his father would no longer have an excuse to potter off to the London Library or the British Museum on the train.

Max had had no intention of sharing any of this with Teresa, but the words had just tumbled from his lips, almost as if he were under the spell of some sorceress, which he began to think he might be.

“Maybe he has a lover in London,” Teresa remarked.

“That’s … well, an unexpected observation.”

“Why?”

“From a Catholic.”

“Say what you like about us Catholics, but we understand human weakness.” She gave a knowing smile. “And I see from your face that the idea is not such a bad one for you.”

No, it wasn’t: his father stealing a few moments of happiness in the arms of a lady friend. He just felt a little foolish that it hadn’t occurred to him before.

Meanwhile, down at the other end of the table, the captain from the Cheshires was evidently doing a good job of entertaining Lilian, judging from her laughter. A few weeks before, it wouldn’t have mattered to him. Now it did. So much so that when the evening finally broke up, he was quite ready to leave, to be gone. That impulse vanished the moment Lilian asked him to stay on a while longer. There was a work matter she needed to discuss with him.

It was a chilly, clear night, and she held her woolen cardigan tight around her shoulders as they strolled in the palace garden, their feet crunching softly on the gravel pathway.

“You looked like you were enjoying yourself with the blond Adonis from the Cheshires.”

“Tristran.”

“Of course. How could I forget?”

“He’s very brave.”

“Really?”

“Yes, he told me.”

In the darkness he could just make out the gleam of her teeth.

“You know what? He probably is. The Cheshires have had the dirty end of the stick for quite a while.”

“You’re defending him?” she asked.

“Yes. No. I hate him.”

They both knew there was another message buried in the words—an admission on his part—and he quickly filled the awkward silence with a question.

“So, what did you want to talk about?”

She had a couple of questions about some material sent by the Ministry of Information to the Times of Malta that had found its way through to her at Il-Berqa.

“Ignore it,” was Max’s advice. “Most of what we get from them is complete rubbish or out of date—usually both.”

“That’s no way to talk about your superiors.”

“I can only imagine it’s done on purpose.”

“On purpose?”

“To confuse the Germans, should they ever intercept a dispatch.”

Lilian laughed before drawing to a halt on the pathway.

“Over here,” she said quietly, setting off across the grass.

“Why?”

“My cousins.”

“What about them?” he asked, falling into step with her.

Felicia and Ena were two leggy creatures in their early teens.

“I know what they’re like. They’ll be watching from their bedroom.”

She led him beneath the boughs of a large orange tree. It was so dark that he sensed rather than saw her take a step toward him.

They kissed briefly, almost cursorily, their lips barely touching.

There was nothing cursory about their second kiss. She pressed her body against his, and the warm tip of her tongue forced its way between his lips.

“Don’t stop,” she said, when they broke off briefly.

And when they finally separated, he bent to recover her cardigan from the ground and replaced it around her shoulders.

“Oh dear,” she said. “Now I’ll have to lie to them at breakfast.”

“Oh well. In for a penny, in for a pound.” He slipped an arm around her waist and pulled her toward him. She avoided his lips.

“And then I’ll have to tell Father Tabone in confession that I lied to them, and he will want to know why.”

“And when you tell him, he’ll say, ‘Lilian, Lilian, not the soldier under the orange tree story again.’”

She gave a horrified gasp and playfully pinched his arm. “You think I am like that, do you?”

“I think I want to kiss you again.”

She didn’t resist, and this time her hands roamed beneath his shirt and up his back.

No thoughts of Mitzi had intruded at the time. Only later, during the long ride back to Floriana on the motorcycle, the searchlights roving the heavens high above his head, did he weigh those first tentative embraces against the urgent abandon that had always marked his lovemaking with Mitzi.

Mitzi had unleashed something in him, presented him with a side of himself that he’d never known existed—a dark and sometimes unsavory side. Maybe it was her guilt, but there were occasions when she had required him to dominate, even demean her. And he had duly obliged, warily at first, like an observer hovering above the bed, then more willingly.

He had since abandoned his theory of an errant wife’s unconscious desire for castigation, partly because it was insulting to her. Did errant husbands feel obliged to act out their guilt with their lovers? Somehow he doubted it. And besides, who was he to pass judgment? An embarrassingly brief encounter with a girl named Felicity after a May Ball at Oxford and a bit of awkward fumbling with Eleanor had represented the entire scope of his sexual experience. Who was he to say what people got up to in the privacy of their bedrooms?

Moreover, since terminating their affair, Mitzi had shown no signs of guilt or regret for what had passed between them. He had fully expected her to withdraw from him, to avoid him whenever possible, but their public relationship had suffered no such reverse. If anything, it had flourished under the unsuspecting eyes of their friends and acquaintances. He still found it strange to spend time with her in company—knowing every inch of the lean body beneath the cotton frock, as well as its most intimate requirements—but her ability to carry on with life regardless had allowed him to package up and parcel off the memories.

That had all changed at Hugh and Rosamund’s drinks party.

My God, I’ve missed you.

A voice straight from their private past, from the flat overlooking Hastings Gardens.

Me too, he had wanted to shout. Me too.

This was the reason he’d been unable to sleep, his brain in open rebellion, deaf to the dictates of his weary body, thoughts of Lilian and Mitzi swirling endlessly, aimlessly, around and around in his head, overlapping, intertwining. And as if that hadn’t been bad enough already, the dead dance hostesses had somehow entered the mix, the pale, lifeless features of Carmela Cassar rising to the surface every so often like some ghoulish phantasm clamoring to be heard. She was unhappy with him, and she had every right to be. What had he done for her? What had he really done for her? No more than the bare minimum, hoping that the affair would somehow resolve itself, or simply go away.

He knew of a number of individuals, men as well as women, who had cracked up and been carted off—one had even tried to end it all with a tube of Veronal—but until now it had never occurred to him to feel much sympathy toward them.

Outside, the first bombs were beginning to fall on Grand Harbour, and a couple of the big guns were barking back. The Bofors wouldn’t open up until the Stukas showed, which they would after the 88s had had their sport, if the pattern of the past week was anything to go by.

Flakes of plaster showered from the ceiling as he wandered through to the living room. Strangely, the prospect of observing a bombing raid on his doorstep almost seemed like light relief after the mental inquests of the past few hours. He pushed open the shutters and stepped out onto the balcony.

He just had time to register the pall of dust hanging over the dockyards and Senglea before a column of water erupted from French Creek. It stood tall and upright, frozen in motion, before collapsing in on itself. Down below, by the bastion wall, the boys in the Bofors gun pit were scanning the skies. If anyone had a right to crack, it was them, especially since the Germans had started targeting the gun emplacements. They didn’t appear too perturbed, though. A couple of them were even laughing.

A few minutes later, they weren’t.

The Stukas came in waves, a cascade of dropping planes, plunging almost vertically through the barrage, shrugging aside the few puffs of pale smoke writhing in the sky. Gone were the days when the Grand Harbour barrage had looked like a giant chestnut tree in full flower, and admiration for the gallantry of the enemy pilots had been at its height. This ack-ack was small beer by comparison, little more than a thin splatter.

He spotted a bare section of four Spitfires following the Stukas in, looking to get among them, waiting for them to come out of their dives. This was the moment when the Stuka was at its most vulnerable, when its bombs had been released and the German pilot flicked the gizmo that pulled the aircraft up on its tail and for a few brief seconds both he and the rear gunner blacked out from the rapid climb. Easy meat for a Spitfire pilot who knew how to time his attack.

So it proved. Max saw two rising Stukas shredded by cannon fire, spinning away and dropping into the harbor. Their ammo exhausted, the Spitfires headed for home, running the gauntlet of 109s waiting for them over Hamrun. Meanwhile, the Stukas kept coming, sharp-angled birds of prey swooping from out of the blue.

Down on the bastion wall, the Bofors crew had yet to fire their gun. The long barrel swept the sky, searching for targets that warranted the precious ammunition. It found one as the raid was petering out: a lone Stuka whose dive didn’t seem to be directed at the dockyards. It wasn’t. The aircraft was bearing straight down on the gun pit.

“Traverse left … Down two … Lateral zero.”

Max was close enough to hear the bombardier’s shouts even above the scream of the diving Stuka.

“On!” yelled the layers almost simultaneously.

“Engage.”

“Fire!”

Pom-pom-pom-pom …

Pom-pom-pom-pom …

The stream of shells ascended toward the plane, bursting in its path, but not hitting it. A moment later, the pilot unloaded his twin bombs.

Max watched, mesmerized, as the two dark objects fell earthward, his brain processing their trajectory and struggling to make the calculation. Bang on target? Or a touch too short?

The gunners appeared oblivious to the menace, their minds on other matters. The Bofors’s barrel swung round to pick up the Stuka as it came out of its dive.

“Engage. …”

Max didn’t hear the command to fire. It was drowned out by a mighty explosion that shook the balcony beneath his feet and sent him reaching for the rail to steady himself.

The bombs had fallen short, slamming into the sheer bastion wall below the gun pit.

Pom-pom-pom-pom …

Pom-pom-pom-pom …

Max raised his eyes toward the Stuka, guided by the red phosphorescence of the tracers, and saw the tail section part company with the main body of the aircraft, cleaved clean away as if by a knife. He glimpsed the pilot and the rear gunner, strangely inert in the high Perspex hood, unconscious still because of the g-forces. The Stuka spiraled away over the rooftops. He hoped for their sakes that they wouldn’t regain consciousness before the end, but it was a good few seconds before a distant crump was heard—time enough for them to have come to and seen death rushing up at them.

The “Raiders Passed” siren sounded as Max was running a razor over his chin. He dressed quickly and headed downstairs, out into the unearthly silence that always followed a raid. The stench of cordite sat heavily in the chill morning air, and the flocks of pigeons were once more settling warily onto the rooftops, having spent the past half hour whirling around in agitated flight. A crowd of admirers was gathered around the Bofors gun pit. The Maltese boys had abandoned their nearby flag station and were reenacting the final moments of the doomed Stuka. The gunners were smoking and laughing and looking justifiably pleased with themselves. It had been a fine piece of shooting, each of them playing their part, a true team effort.

“Congratulations,” said Max.

“Thank you, sir,” replied the bombardier, the oldest of the bunch, a skinny fellow with jug ears and tombstone teeth.

“I saw it all from up there.” Max nodded toward his balcony.

“Wish I had too, sir,” said one of the layers, to a round of laughter.

“There’s only one thing troubling me.” Max threw in a brief pause for effect. “I was watching closely, and the way I saw it, you fired off four clips at four rounds apiece.”

One round more than their daily allowance of fifteen. They quickly figured Max was joking, and the bombardier spun round to the No. 4, the man who worked the pedal that fired the gun. “Oi, Bennett, you plonker. You hear that?” Bennett was the best footballer of the bunch, a sturdy little left-footer who could send an opponent the wrong way with the merest dip of a shoulder. “You’re in for it when the battery commander gets wind.”

“Go easy on him, sir.”

“Yeah. Bennett can’t count for nowt.”

“Don’t know the difference between fifteen and sixteen.”

“Just like his sister, sir. She told me she was sixteen.”

More laughter, and more cigarettes, and a promise from Max that they’d get a special mention in the Information Office’s Weekly Bulletin, something to show the folks back home.

He meant it. He was impressed, not only by the accuracy of their shooting, but by their sheer bloody doggedness. Even as the Stuka’s bombs had been dropping toward them, they had stayed focused on the task of bringing their gun to bear on the enemy. Max knew that he would have frozen; he knew that he would have suffered some quaint metaphysical moment, rooting him to the spot. And it took only one to freeze for the whole team to fall apart.

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

This was the tired expression he toyed with as he headed for Paola, dodging the craters in the road. He wouldn’t use it, but he could take its essence, extrapolating the courage of a single gun crew to the bigger picture of the besieged garrison. Better still, he could give it to young Pemberton to play with. The fellow was itching to flex his literary muscles.

The Cassars lived in a long, squat farmhouse on the hillside above Paola, just off the Luqa road. It was an ugly building, notable only for the large beds of brightly colored flowers that hemmed it in on all sides.

Max heard the wailing before he reached the front door. It was loud enough to justify entering the house without knocking.

A dozen or so women were gathered in the drawing room, dressed entirely in black, some sporting faldettas, the ugly, yawning black headdresses favored by the more elderly. The door on the far side of the room was ajar, and through the crack he could just make out the bare feet, poking from beneath a white robe, of someone laid out on a table.

The urge to spin on his heel was sudden and overwhelming, but he had been spotted.

She caught up with him as he stepped outside into the sunlight.

“Excuse me …”

She was young, twenty or so, and she spoke English with barely any accent.

“May I help you?”

The syntax suggested that she worked in some kind of official capacity—a nurse or a teacher, maybe, or an employee at one of the regional Protection Offices. Her name was Nina and she was Carmela’s cousin.

Max had formulated a story that wouldn’t arouse too much suspicion, and she seemed to fall for it, suggesting that it was probably best right now if he spoke to Carmela’s father. News had just reached them that the coffin intended for Carmela had been destroyed by a wayward bomb while en route from Rabat, along with the cart, the horse, and the driver.

“Victor speaks English, but I am here if you need me.”

Victor Cassar was younger than Max had imagined, although his stooped shoulders suggested a man well into old age. He was at the back of the house, watering the flowers with his son, Joe. They moved mechanically, in silent tandem, Joe charging his father’s watering can with buckets of water hauled from below by hand.

It had been a miserable winter, one of the wettest in memory, but at least the wells were full.

Max introduced himself, explaining that he’d known Carmela from the Blue Parrot and had come to express his condolences at her death. Victor visibly perked up, touched by the gesture, which made Max feel worse for lying. He had no choice. The only other excuse for the visit he’d been able to think of—that it was part of a new policy of following up on civilian casualties—would have rung alarm bells with any Maltese worth their salt.

This story, though, was swallowed whole, even if it didn’t endear Max to Joe, who scrutinized him with a sullen scowl. When Joe was sent in search of refreshments, Victor explained that his son, like his wife, had never approved of Carmela’s line of work. He, on the other hand, knowing she was a good girl who would never have allowed herself to be drawn into bad ways, had sanctioned her decision.

Max offered up the words Victor was seeking.

“She was a great girl, fun and intelligent and very … proper.”

“Proper?”

He evidently didn’t know the word.

“Moral. Not like some of the other girls.”

Victor beamed, his conscience clear, the memory of his dead daughter secure.

Refreshments arrived in the form of two tumblers of ambeet, a winelike drink still in circulation. Max took a small sip of the poisonous liquid and smiled as best he could. When Joe retired, the two men sat themselves down on a sun-bleached plank of wood set in a low stone wall.

In the valley below them, Santa Maria Addolorata Cemetery lay spread out like a map, some sprawling city of the dead, with its high perimeter walls and tree-lined avenues, a soaring Gothic cathedral at its heart. The Cassars, Max discovered, were intimately connected with the cemetery. For three generations they had sold flowers at its main gates. Carmela had learned the trade at her father’s knee, excelling at it, effortlessly attracting customers—a gift that, presumably, she had carried over to the Blue Parrot.

Mention of Carmela’s name permitted Max to steer the conversation back to her. Feigning ignorance, he asked what exactly had happened on the night in question. It soon became clear that the family wasn’t aware of the exact date and time when Carmela’s body had turned up in the streets of Marsa. In the confusion and upset of identifying the corpse, that information had evidently not found its way through to them. This was good. It meant they had no unanswered questions about the missing day between her disappearance and her discovery. It meant that the situation could be contained.

Having satisfied himself on this score, Max moved on to the other reason for his visit. This was a more delicate subject to broach because it threatened to make him sound like some jealous or neglected admirer. He wanted to know if Carmela had ever mentioned anyone in particular from the Blue Parrot, any of the customers.

Victor sweetly confessed that he couldn’t recall her ever speaking of Max, but that meant little—he had a terrible head for names. However, his memory clearly wasn’t as bad as he thought, judging from the list of other individuals he was able to reel off.

Max was making a mental note of the names when he sensed the disturbance. They both turned to see a tide of black advancing toward them from the house. At the front strode a dumpy but pretty woman. This was clearly Carmela’s mother, and her eyes burned with a fierce grievance.

Max rose to his feet to face the onslaught, the tumbling babble of Maltese. She reserved the rough side of her tongue for her husband, but her hand flicked dismissively, disdainfully, toward Max every so often.

The sight of Joe smugly observing from a safe distance confirmed that it was time to be going. Max was clearly persona non grata for everyone other than Victor, and maybe Carmela’s cousin, Nina, whose expression hovered somewhere between embarrassment and pity.

Max mumbled an excuse, leaving poor Victor to his fate. An ancient woman with a gnarled and knotted face refused to move out of his way, raising her cane as if to strike him. He stared into her milky eyes, waiting for the blow to fall, almost willing it—just punishment for the lies he’d told.

Maybe she read something of this in his face, but she lowered the cane and let him pass.

The ride to Saint Joseph’s from Paola passed in a daze, Max’s brain struggling to process the encounter, the open display of hostility. In all his time on Malta, he’d experienced nothing even approaching it.

His secretary, Maria, was already at her desk, sifting through the mail. A few years older than Max, she was an attractively bookish woman who had worked in the Education Department before the war. Her contacts on the island were invaluable, her cheery disposition a daily tonic. She greeted him with one of her ready smiles and the news that the lieutenant governor had just called in person. He wished to see Max in his office at eleven o’clock sharp.

“Did he say why?”

“He didn’t sound happy.”

That meant nothing; he was a solemn soul at the best of times. The calling in person was worrying, though. The lieutenant governor rarely soiled his own hands with matters relating to the Information Office, not when he had a whole team of cronies to do the dirty work for him. It had to be something important, and top of the agenda right then was the dread prospect of the estimates.

In a week’s time they would all be up in front of the council of the Malta government with their begging bowls, justifying the expenditures of their various departments. It was irritating enough that the Maltese held the purse strings on funds that came straight from the pockets of British taxpayers; it was downright absurd that they should have to haggle over money while being bombed and starved to the brink of extinction.

That was the way of it, though. If anything, the bureaucratic behemoth that ruled their lives had actually prospered since the beginning of the year, as if feeding off the downpour of bombs, bogging them down in pointless paperwork and futile committee meetings. There were clearly some who sought comfort from the trials of war in the machinery of administration, but Max didn’t number himself among them.

They would get their money—they always did—but they would have to rehearse their performances first, which meant sitting down with the lieutenant governor. Hence the summons.

Max knew his lines pretty well already—Vincent Falzon in accounts had been busy during the past couple of weeks, juggling the books and padding out certain costs so that the Information Office had something to concede on the big day—but Max thought it best to reacquaint himself with the finer details. He just had time to brief Pemberton on the Bofors gun crew and dictate two quite pointless letters—one to the postmaster general, the other to the provost marshal—before heading next door for his meeting.

The Vincenzo Bugeja Conservatory had started life as an orphanage for girls, and judging from its palatial proportions, it had not lacked for wealthy benefactors in those early days. Set some distance back from the road beyond iron railings and an imposing stone gateway, the building soared majestically around a vast open courtyard. There was another courtyard, out of sight beyond the domed chapel, that stood at the center of the complex.

Saint Joseph’s Institute felt like a poor cousin in comparison, cramped and huddled in the conservatory’s shadow. But what Saint Joseph’s lacked in stature it more than made up for with rough-and-ready charm. At least its corridors thronged with bright-eyed and mischievous orphan boys, not puffed-up paper-pushers who seemed to have become infected by the grandiosity of their new home.

Max had had cause to visit the lieutenant governor’s office only once since they’d all been relocated from Valetta, and now he lost his way in the labyrinth of corridors.

“Second floor, then ask again.”

This curt response was delivered in passing by a tall rake of a man hurrying along a hallway with a bunch of files under his arm. He didn’t even deign to glance at Max as he carried on by.

He did, though, when Max called after him, “Your shirt’s hanging out.”

The man groped behind him with his free hand, discovering only that he’d been duped.

“My mistake,” said Max.

It was a juvenile triumph, but strangely satisfying, and he was still smiling when he entered the suite of rooms occupied by the lieutenant governor and his team.

Hodges, the department’s bespectacled gatekeeper, was seated at his desk, poring over a pile of papers.

“Ah, Major Chadwick.”

Hodges checked his wristwatch, clearly disappointed that he couldn’t berate Max for being late. It was eleven o’clock on the dot.

“I know how much it means to you,” said Max. “That’s why I make the effort.”

Hodges was a remarkable character, a dour, taciturn little man, always scrubbed and pristine. He was utterly without a sense of humor, which somehow compelled one to take up humor as a weapon against him.

“Please,” said Hodges, gesturing to the corner. “Take a seat.”

It was the one corner of the room Max had not surveyed on entering, and it was a moment before he registered that the man on the low divan was Freddie.

“What are you doing here?” asked Max, settling down beside him.

“I wasn’t sure till you walked in.”

“Oh Christ …”

“That’s what I thought when they showed up at the hospital. I would have called, but they had a car waiting for me.”

“No talking, please,” called Hodges flatly.

“Excuse me?”

“No talking, please.”

“Why not?”

“I wasn’t aware that I needed a reason, Major Chadwick.” His features shaped themselves into a pinched and condescending smile. “Besides, from what I hear, the two of you have been doing quite enough of that already.”

They knew. And there was no other way that they could know, not unless Freddie had let it slip, which seemed unlikely, given the inquiring and mildly accusatory look in the eyes that were now fastened on Max.

It had to be Iris. It could only be Iris. He was a fool to have trusted her with the confidence in the first place. He was twice the fool for having believed her when she had sworn her eternal silence on the matter.

“We’ll be okay,” said Freddie in a whisper. “Just take your lead from me, and with any luck we’ll get to keep our jobs on this godforsaken island.”

Max tried to stifle the laugh. Hodges’s head snapped up, but before he could spit out a reprimand, a door swung open and a man whom Max had never seen before said, “Gentlemen …”

Max found himself transported back to prep school: he and Freddie like two schoolboys being summoned into the headmaster’s study for a thrashing, denounced by matron for talking after lights-out.

It soon became clear that the deputy head would be dishing out the punishment today. Colonel Gifford was at the lieutenant governor’s desk, warming his master’s seat.

“Congratulations, sir,” said Freddie, after they had saluted. “I had no idea.”

Bad lead, thought Max. So did Colonel Gifford.

“Under the circumstances, Lieutenant Colonel Lambert, do you think it’s wise to take that tone with me?”

“No tone intended, sir. And I’m not sure I know what circumstances you’re referring to.”

“Sit down,” said Gifford wearily. He made no attempt to introduce the other three men present. One was short, stocky, and dark; the second long-limbed and flame-haired. The third required no introductions. It was Elliott, the American, sitting off to one side near the window. His lean face gave nothing away.

“The lieutenant governor has been called away on urgent business, I’m afraid,” Colonel Gifford said.

Already distancing himself from a dirty business, it occurred to Max. And why not? He knew he had a devoted servant happy to fall on his sword if the affair turned sour.

“I suggest we drop the pretense,” Colonel Gifford continued. “We all know why you’re here.”

But what exactly did they know? Max had mentioned nothing to Iris about the discovery of the shoulder tab pointing to the involvement of a British submariner in the deaths.

“We were going to tell you,” said Freddie.

“It’s the ‘we’ that I find interesting.” Colonel Gifford placed his palms flat on the surface of the desk. “What made you think the two of you were equipped to tackle something like this on your own?”

“It’s my fault,” said Freddie. “I involved Major Chadwick.”

“How very noble of you to take the blame.”

“It’s true.”

“And what exactly were you going to tell us?” inquired Elliott, leaning forward in his chair.

Colonel Gifford wasn’t happy about losing the floor to him, but Elliott wasn’t to be deterred. “I may be wrong, Colonel, but it’s possible that some new evidence has come to light.”

All eyes in the room settled on Max and Freddie.

“Well, has it?” demanded Colonel Gifford, snatching the reins back from Elliott.

“It has,” said Freddie.

He told them everything, holding back till the very end the revelation about the shoulder tab he’d found in Carmela Cassar’s clenched fist.

A number of looks were traded around the room in the silence following this bombshell.

“You have it?” asked Colonel Gifford, his studied composure faltering.

Max fished the tab from the breast pocket of his shirt. Getting to his feet, he approached the desk and handed it over. Colonel Gifford scrutinized the scrap of cloth.

“There’s not very much of it.”

“There’s enough of it,” said Max.

“May I?” asked Elliott.

The tab was passed to him. It then passed through the hands of the other two men before being returned to Colonel Gifford.

“Why didn’t you come to us with this?” the colonel asked.

Freddie shifted in his seat. “Maybe because I didn’t see a whole lot of progress the last time I came to you.”

Colonel Gifford flicked through a file in front of him. “I have your original statement here, along with a note suggesting that your suspicions be brought to the attention of the police.”

“And were they? No one came to speak to me.”

“The police were alerted.”

“And will you alert them this time? Or do you want me to do it on my way out?”

Police headquarters in Valetta had recently been relocated from the Sacra Infermeria in Valetta to the conservatory.

“What I would like you to do,” said Gifford starchly, “is give us a moment alone.”

A moment proved to be about fifteen minutes, during which time Max and Freddie sat in strained silence in the entrance room under the watchful glare of Hodges, who grudgingly permitted them to smoke a cigarette. Freddie was summoned back into the office alone. He reappeared a short while later with one of the nameless men—the small, dark one of the pair.

“You can go in now, Major Chadwick,” the man said, escorting Freddie toward the door. Freddie managed to slip Max a reassuring look that said: It’ll be okay.

And it was, but only just.

Colonel Gifford fired off his opening salvo as Max lowered himself into the chair.

“You’re a bloody fool, Chadwick. What in God’s name possessed you to turn detective? If I had my way, I’d sling you out on your ear—I would—but Major Pace here has argued convincingly in your defense.” Max glanced at Elliott. “The last thing we need right now is any disruption to the Information Office. But let me be quite clear: I was against your appointment in the first place, and I want you to think of this as a reprieve rather than a pardon.”

Max was to put the matter from his mind and talk to no one about it, on pain of court-martial. Gifford wound up his speech with a peculiar flourish.

“Non omnia possumus omnes.”

“We can’t all do everything,” or something like that.

“I’m sorry, sir, my Italian’s a little rusty.”

Max saw a whisper of a smile appear on Elliott’s lips.

“It’s Latin. Virgil. From the Eclogues.”

“It means, just stick to your bloody job, Chadwick.” This from the fourth man in the room, the one with ginger hair and lobster-pink skin. They were the first words he’d spoken, and his accent screamed high birth, summoning up images of Henley Royal Regatta and riding to hounds and tea on the lawn at the family pile in the country. His pale blue eyes were the color of thick ice, and possibly just as hard.

“Tell me about Lilian Flint,” he drawled, with an air of cold command.

Max was momentarily thrown by the question. “What’s there to tell? She’s the deputy editor of Il-Berqa. She’s also very good at her job.”

“Well, you would know, given the amount of time you spend liaising with her.”

Max ignored the thinly veiled insinuation. “Yes, I suppose I’m better placed than most to make that judgment.”

“Her mother is in Italy, if I’m not mistaken.”

“That’s right. She was in Padua when Italy declared war. She was unable to make it home.”

“Home? I would have thought home was at her husband’s side.”

It wasn’t just the cold blue eyes, it was their steady, piercing scrutiny that was so unsettling.

“She’s not married.”

“As good as, though, wouldn’t you say?”

“I have no idea.”

“I believe he’s a professor of archaeology at the University of Padua.”

“I believe so.”

“And do you also believe it’s possible for a man to hold such a post at an Italian university if he isn’t in some way sympathetic to the regime?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Hazard a guess.”

Max generally burned a long fuse, but was struggling now to hold himself in check. He could see what was being done to him. He had boxed at Oxford; he had been on the receiving end of the irritating jabs designed to make you drop your guard and risk it all on a roundhouse.

“For what it’s worth,” he said icily, “I would stake my job, my reputation—my life, even—on Lilian’s loyalty.”

The ginger one seemed almost amused. “There’s really no need for such grandiloquence. Do you think for a moment she would be the deputy editor of Il-Berqa if we weren’t of the same mind?”

“So what, with respect, is your point?”

“My point, Major Chadwick, is this: we like her, we like what she does, we like the fact that the two of you work so well together. She’s inclined to sail a little close to the wind at times, but her readers value her forthright opinions, and it’s important that they’re permitted a vent for their frustrations. You seem to temper her more extreme tendencies.” He paused. “So you see, we’re quite content with the way things are, and it would be unfortunate if—how shall I put it?—those of a more prejudiced disposition were allowed to prevail on the question of her current employment.”

Diplomatic doublespeak, but the threat was plain and simple: back off or we pack her off.

Lilian’s job meant everything to her. She had dreamed of it since childhood; she had fought for it against the wishes of her family. It was her life, the one fixed point in her universe.

“I think I get your meaning.”

“Then you may go now.”

Max noted that Colonel Gifford wasn’t aggrieved by this man subverting his authority, as he had been with Elliott. In fact, he seemed almost in awe of him.

“I’ll see Major Chadwick out,” said Elliott, levering himself to his feet.

“There’s no need for that,” said the colonel.

“I’d like to.”

Colonel Gifford was about to object, but something in coppertop’s expression silenced him.

Max made a point of ignoring Hodges on the way out.

“That went well, don’t you think?” Elliott declared chirpily when they were alone in the corridor.

Max wasn’t in the mood for lightheartedness. “For God’s sake, Elliott, what the hell were you doing there?”

“They thought I might be in on it, knowing the two of you as I do. And I’ve got to say, I’m a little insulted I wasn’t in the loop.”

Max ignored the comment.

“They’re not going to do anything, are they?”

“I doubt it. Not with Upstanding about to leave the island.”

“And what happens when dead girls start showing up in Alexandria?”

Elliott hesitated. “I see you’ve been doing your research.”

“What happens?”

“Not our jurisdiction, old man.” He stretched out the vowels in a convincing parody of the ginger-haired chap.

“Who is he?”

“You know, under different circumstances I can see the two of you hitting it off.”

“Christ, Elliott, can’t you ever give a straight answer to a question?”

Elliott looked affronted. “It doesn’t matter who he is. What do you want to know? He’s part of the stuff that goes on behind the scenes.”

“Behind the scenes?”

“You think war is all bombs and bullets, aircraft and subs?”

“Yes. I think if you can hurt your enemy more than he hurts you, then you win.”

Elliott weighed his words. “You’re right, of course. But you’re also wrong. An enemy can be persuaded to squander its assets. Take the Battle of Hastings. A lot of crap’s been written about the Battle of Hastings—believe me, I read most of it at West Point. You want to know the long and short of it? Harold holds the high ground; William has to attack uphill. William fakes a retreat. Harold forsakes the high ground. Harold loses. Yes, horses and men and spears and arrows helped determine the outcome, but that’s a battle Harold should have won. He gave up his advantage.”

“Thanks for the history lesson.”

“Simple deception—that’s why he lost it.”

Max stopped at the top of the staircase. “And is that what you do, Elliott?”

“I wouldn’t have the first clue about faking a retreat.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Put it this way: I don’t fly planes and I don’t fire guns.”

“Yet again, I’ve learned nothing new about you whatsoever.”

Descending the staircase in stony silence, they passed the gangling fellow, no longer with files under his arm, coming in the opposite direction. “Your shirt’s hanging out,” he said curtly to Max.

“No it isn’t,” Max fired back.

Elliott cast a puzzled glance behind him as they carried on down the stone steps. “What is that, code or something?”

Max let him stew in his ignorance.

“Jeez, there are some things about you Brits I’ll never understand.”

They emerged from the building into the dancing heat and the cyclopean glare of the sun. Elliott put on his sunglasses—he was very proud of his Polaroid sunglasses.

“Look, if you want to talk truth, come and see me tonight.”

“I can’t,” said Max. “I’m dining with Ralph at the mess in Mdina.”

“You call Maconochies stew and tack biscuits dining?”

“I’m hoping corned beef’s on the menu tonight.”

“How does grilled fish and a chilled bottle of Chassagne-Montrachet sound?”

“Chassagne-Montrachet?”

“You just have to know where to look.” Elliott grinned.

A shot of truth was an undeniable temptation. So was a glass or two of white burgundy.

“I can’t. I promised Ralph, and I haven’t seen him in a while.”

“Maybe I’ll join you.”

“I’m sure you’d be welcome.”

“I’m detecting a lack of enthusiasm.”

“That’s because I’m sulking.”

Elliott smiled. “I’ll call you later, when you’re over it.”

“Yes, do that.”

Elliott made off across the courtyard before stopping and turning back.

“Don’t let them get you down,” he called. “Like my granddaddy used to say: ‘There’s more horses’ asses in the world than there is horses.’”

The very first thing Max did on returning to the Information Office was snatch up one of the phones on his desk. He twirled the handle and asked the operator to put him through to the 90th General Hospital at Mtarfa.

Freddie wasn’t back yet. The car had probably been held up by the raid developing over Ta’ Qali.

Max replaced the receiver and stared at the papers that Maria had laid out in prioritized piles for his perusal. There was no point in even trying to work his way through them. He was too distracted, his thoughts turning to the ordeal of the past hour, skipping among Iris’s betrayal, his roasting in the lieutenant governor’s office, and Elliott’s promise of some answers.

It was a while before he was able to bring any order to bear in his head. Something about the meeting had struck a false note at the time, and he now realized what it was. Assuming that they’d learned of Max’s interest in the deaths from Iris, then there was no way they could have known about the shoulder tab. But if that was the case, then what were the two mystery men doing at the meeting? They had the distinct whiff of military intelligence about them—hardly the types to get involved in such an affair, not unless they knew there was more at stake than just a couple of local girls dying in what might or might not be suspicious circumstances.

Colonel Gifford, on the other hand, had appeared genuinely shocked when presented with the shoulder tab. His face had betrayed all the signs of someone coming to terms with the dire ramifications of such a discovery.

So what was going on? Colonel Gifford was in the dark while the others knew more than they were letting on? And where did Elliott fit? In one or other of the camps, or somewhere in between?

The questions kept proliferating, and Max was beginning to wish he’d taken Elliott up on his offer of barbecued fish, burgundy, and a heart-to-heart, when the steady wail of the “Raiders Passed” siren sounded outside.

He took himself up to the roof, where he smoked a cigarette and watched the dense pall of dust hanging over Ta’ Qali slowly disperse on the breeze.

Down below in the courtyard a fretful Father Bilocca was doing his best to marshal a bunch of boys into an ordered line, oblivious to the obscene gestures and the faces being pulled whenever his back was turned.

“Is everything okay, sir?”

Max hadn’t heard Pemberton join him.

“Fine. Just dandy. Smoke?”

Pemberton took a cigarette, and Max lit it for him.

“I hear Rosamund came up trumps.”

“She certainly did. I even have my own bathroom, not that there’s any water in the pipes.”

Rosamund had found him digs in Saint Julian’s, living with the Copnalls. Their eighteen-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, was a pale and pretty creature prone to blushing who worked in the naval cipher department at Fort Saint Angelo. Max could picture her state of agitation at having Pemberton living under the same roof. The same thought must surely have occurred to Rosamund.

“How’s Elizabeth?”

“She’s a fine pianist.”

It all sounded very Jane Austen: the daughter tickling the ivories for the benefit of the handsome house guest. Rosamund was definitely up to something, but he couldn’t see it yet.

“I had a shot at that piece for the Weekly Bulletin.”

Max took the sheet of typed text. “That was quick.”

“It probably shows.”

He was clearly eager for Max to cast an eye over it there and then.

“The length looks good. I’ll let you know.”

For want of anything better to do, he started to read the moment Pemberton had disappeared back down the stairwell.

He read it twice, trying to find fault with it, something, anything. The tone was spot on, muscular and defiant yet not too triumphalist. He didn’t play to the heroism of the Manchester boys working the Bofors gun—that spoke for itself—rather, he presented the young gunners as workers at the coal face, grinding out a slow but inexorable victory. The mining metaphor was a small stroke of genius. It resonated with danger and hardship and collective enterprise, and it carried with it the shared experience of a people who daily descended into the earth. The theme also permitted him to round off the piece with a comic touch. There were no coal mines on Malta, a detail that seemed to have escaped the notice of the Italians, who in the early days of the conflict had proudly announced the destruction of a Maltese coal mine by the Regia Aeronautica—still the cause of much hilarity across the island.

Pemberton had done well, more than well; the article was pitch-perfect. So why, then, did it leave Max cold? A few hours before, it would have had him racing downstairs to congratulate the author.

Pemberton would get his pat on the back, and the piece would go out in the Weekly Bulletin, but Max would know it for what it was: another lie peddled to the masses. They weren’t one happy family pulling together in adversity. His experience at the Cassars’ house had made that starkly clear to him.

He remembered something that Charles Headley, his former boss and mentor, had said to him soon after his arrival at the Information Office.

“You know what the great thing about our line of work is, old man? I’ll tell you, it’s very simple. A lie can make its way halfway round the world before the truth has a chance to put its boots on.”

There was probably no less truth in those words now than there had been at the time, but for once Max found himself calling into question the words’ central assumption—that the power of a lie was something to be admired and cherished.

How much angrier would those grieving women at the Cassars’ have been with him had they known the truth about Carmela’s death? The answer, he suspected, was that they would have been less angry.

Thanks to Lilian, he knew the Maltese well enough by now to say that they would at least have respected him for his honesty. They were an ancient people, a wise people. They had seen civilizations come and go around their island home, and yet they were still there, as they would always be, with their wry humor, their rough savoir faire, and their burning faith. Max and his kind were simply passing through. Maybe their hosts deserved a little more credit, a little more respect.

He could see where he was going with this, and he knew the reason why. He had just been insulted, intimidated, threatened with court-martial, even blackmailed. More than anything, it was the blackmail that angered him. Exploiting his friendship with Lilian to keep him in line was about as low as it got. So much for the happy family.

Feeling his hackles rising again, he lit another cigarette and did something he hadn’t done in a long while when caught in a quandary: he asked himself what his father’s advice would be to him.

The sun was at its zenith, and the heat rising in waves from the zinc roof was almost unbearable, but a small chill ran the length of Max’s spine when the answer came to him.

The town of Mtarfa lay scattered along the ridge just north of Mdina, its skyline dominated by the austere military architecture of the 90th General Hospital. The sprawling complex of wards and accommodation blocks had consumed the army barracks nearby to offer more than a thousand beds to the sick and wounded.

An attractive Maltese VAD eventually tracked Freddie down to the burns ward. Infection was a problem, apparently, and she asked Max to wait outside. He was quite happy to oblige. The few glimpses he got through the swing-doors as nurses came and went were enough of a trial. Some of the patients were so swaddled in bandages that they looked like Egyptian mummies laid out in state. Others were having their fresh burns scrubbed and sprayed, their eyes irrigated, or old dressings changed. There seemed to be so much activity, all of it centered on flesh that was either red raw or black and encrusted. The sweet smell of ether carried through the doors, along with a low murmur of morphine-dulled pain.

When Freddie finally appeared, they made for the long terrace at the back of the building. It had a grandstand view of the hills to the north and would normally have been thronging with invalids of all varieties making the most of the low, late sunshine, but people had grown more wary since the targeted raid on the 39th General Hospital at Saint Andrew’s.

It was the first chance Max and Freddie had had to talk openly about the meeting that morning, and Freddie didn’t hang about.

“I should just have gone to them again. I shouldn’t have involved you.”

“They’re not going to do anything, Freddie. They’re going to bury it.”

“I suppose.”

“You suppose?”

“It’s what they do.”

“And you’re happy with that?”

Freddie drew hard on his cigarette and exhaled. “No, Max,” he said with a slight stiffening of tone, “I’m not happy with it. But what do you want me to say? I followed my conscience. I came to you first. It didn’t work out.” After a brief pause, he added, “Someone messed up, and I know it wasn’t me.”

Fair point. There was no getting away from it.

“It was Iris,” admitted Max.

“Iris?”

“It couldn’t have been anyone else. I didn’t tell anyone else.”

“Forgive me,” said Freddie, “I’m tired, not thinking straight, but what on God’s earth possessed you to tell Iris, of all people!”

Max did his best to explain his thinking at the time, the logic of his argument failing miserably to translate itself into words.

“Okay,” he conceded, “I was naïve.”

“It’s not the first word that springs to mind. The most ambitious girl in Christendom? You’d have done better to take out a page in the Times.”

“Maybe we should have.”

It sounded glib, but it was a serious statement, intended to test Freddie’s mettle.

“Listen, Max, this is way beyond us now. It’s a dirty business. This whole damn thing is a dirty business. You know what I was doing in there when you showed up? There’s a man, I couldn’t tell you how old exactly because his face is gone. I know he’s German, though, and that he bailed out of a burning 88. He should have stayed in that plane, gone down with it. He has no lips, no eyelids, no eyes, and his nose is all but gone. I’m hoping for his sake that a bug gets him. This is what we do to one another. After God knows how many millennia of human evolution, this is how we choose to treat one another still.”

“That’s your excuse? People do bad things? We’re talking about murder. There’s a principle at stake.”

Freddie dropped his cigarette on the tiled terrace and crushed it underfoot. When he finally looked up, he said a little shamefacedly, “They scared me in there today. They threatened to take it all away, everything I’ve worked for, everything I do. I don’t know how to do anything else.”

“For God’s sake, Freddie, you’re young. This war will end, life will return to normal, people like that won’t be running the show when this mess is over.”

“You really believe that?”

“I know it.”

“I think you underestimate them. Our cards are marked and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

You’re wrong, thought Max. There is.

He wanted to tell Freddie the what and the how of it, but there was no point. Freddie’s mind was made up and it was an undeniable disappointment. The two of them had always stood apart from the others. Ralph and Hugh were career servicemen trained and primed for combat. Max and Freddie were mere guests at the table of war, competent amateurs shipped in to make up the numbers after a big chunk of Czechoslovakia had failed to appease Hitler. Yes, they’d both learned the ropes in the Officers’ Training Corps at their respective schools, but the experience had fired neither of them with enthusiasm. They knew this because they’d discussed it one night when there were no “real soldiers” within earshot.

Max had been packed off to Wellington College at the age of thirteen at his stepmother’s insistence, on the grounds that the men in her family had always gone there—a perplexing line of reasoning, given the assortment of disagreeable uncles and male cousins Sylvia had brought with her into their lives. Wellington was reputed to be Britain’s most military of schools, and Max had done just enough to get by without insulting that tradition, learning to march and fire a gun and bumble around with a blackened face up on the heathland toward Broadmoor during field day.

His failure to become commander of the Picton platoon had been taken by Sylvia as further evidence of his utter fecklessness. All the men in her family had commanded their house platoons. This was a lie that, after some cursory research in the school records, he’d felt obliged to point out to her over Christmas dinner one year—his first public challenge to her authority, and a declaration of open warfare as far as Sylvia was concerned.

Maybe he was doing her an injustice, but he sometimes suspected that she’d waited years to exact a suitable revenge. The family strings she’d pulled, supposedly on his behalf, had seen him carried first to Egypt and then to Malta, and although she couldn’t possibly have known at the time what horrors lay in store for the little island, he wouldn’t have put it past her.

Perversely, surviving the war had become as much about denying Sylvia the pleasure of his extinction as anything else. And maybe, just as perversely, standing up to the Colonel Giffords of the world, refusing to be cowed by the sort of high-handed military types whom he associated with Sylvia, had its roots in the same ancient animosity.

The reasons didn’t matter. He had picked his path and was set in his resolve. Yes, it would have been good to have a companion on the road, but Freddie wasn’t essential to the plan taking shape in his head. The real issue now was one of time, or rather the lack of it. With the Upstanding set to leave for Alexandria in less than a week, the clock was ticking.

Freddie and Max quietly shunted the topic into the shadows and talked of other things, such as dinner with Ralph at the officers’ mess in Mdina. Freddie wasn’t on duty again until the following morning and asked to tag along.

“If you’ll have me, that is,” he said a little sheepishly.

“After this morning, I think we could both do with a dose of Ralph.”

They also got a dose of Hugh.

Apparently he’d become something of a regular at the Xara Palace in the past few weeks, ever since Royal Artillery HQ had relocated to Saint Agatha’s Convent in Rabat following the bombing of the Castille. Rabat and Mdina stood cheek by jowl on the ridge, almost one and the same, and Hugh had taken to stopping off for a “swift sundowner” with Ralph on his way home to Sliema.

The Xara Palace—a grand fifteenth-century building close by the main gate in Mdina—had been requisitioned by the RAF as an officers’ mess for the Ta’ Qali squadrons, although Ralph treated the place as if it were his private residence. As ever with Ralph, this was done with playful insouciance, his tongue firmly in his cheek.

Ralph was tall, with a shock of sand-colored hair that the sun bleached to a startling white in summer. He wore it longer than regulations permitted, but regulations didn’t figure large in his thinking. He set store by the adage that “rules are made for the guidance of wise men and the obedience of fools”—a line he was quite happy to quote to his superiors.

The brass tolerated his idiosyncratic ways because they knew he had qualities far above the general run. He also served a useful purpose. The Xara Palace was a beautiful building, but ghosts stalked its wide corridors: the ghosts of dead pilots. Beds fell free at an alarming rate, and the young replacements shipped in to fill them knew they stood a fair chance of going the same way as the previous occupants. At twenty-nine, Ralph wasn’t the oldest member of 249 Squadron, but he’d been around the longest, and his presence offered some hope of survival to the new arrivals.

Ralph’s lack of respect for “the machine,” as he called it, was a product of hard experience reaching back to his very first day on the island. Of the reinforcement flight of twelve Hurricanes that took off from the aircraft carrier Argus, Ralph’s was one of only four to make land. The others were lost to the unforgiving waters of the Mediterranean because someone, somewhere, had miscalculated the amount of aviation spirit required to see them safely as far as Malta. Ralph had crossed the Dingli Cliffs on vapors, gliding in to Luqa on a dead propeller. He had lost his best friend that day, and he’d lost many more friends since, thanks to the “sheer bloody incompetence of the machine operators.”

Bovine compliance didn’t come naturally to him; his trust had to be earned. He would have cut his hair if the order had come from someone he respected, but the few people he esteemed tended to rate him highly in return and were happy to let him operate with a certain latitude. His reputation helped. With ten “destroyed” and six “probables” to his name, he was one of the few aces on the island, albeit one who had badly blotted his copybook.

The incident had occurred the summer before while Ralph was convalescing at the pilots’ rest camp on Saint Paul’s Bay following his accident. Jumped by a gaggle of 109s over Qormi, he’d been forced to crash-land in a field—a nearly impossible thing to do on Malta without hitting a stone wall. Unconscious, he only survived the burning wreckage because a couple of Maltese women working nearby heaped earth on the flames (after struggling and failing to haul his inert six-foot-something frame from the crumpled cockpit). Patched up by Freddie, he had spent two months in traction at Mtarfa Hospital, successfully resisting all efforts to have him posted home “non-effective sick.” The air battle for Malta was one fight he intended to see through to its bitter conclusion, and he’d managed to secure for himself a further period of convalescence at the pilots’ rest camp on Saint Paul’s Bay.

“Camp” was something of a misnomer. It was a villa with a sloping lawn and honeysuckle arbors and a winding pathway leading down through a shaded avenue of trees to the water’s edge, where a couple of rowboats and an offshore swimming platform bobbed lazily on the swell. At the mouth of the bay lay the flat little island where Saint Paul had been shipwrecked in a storm some two thousand years before. Struggling ashore, Paul had been welcomed in Mdina by Publius, the chief man of the island, whose father had been gravely ill at the time. When Paul healed him, Publius promptly converted to the new religion, carrying his people with him and building the first ever Christian church in Mdina. With a heritage like that, it was hardly surprising that the Christian faith remained the mainspring of Maltese life.

The proximity of Saint Paul’s Island with its solitary statue of the healer saint lent a certain logic to the location of the rest camp: a peaceful spot where men came to repair themselves, a haven amidst all the suffering and destruction. Max had grown to know the place well during Ralph’s stay, riding out there on his motorcycle whenever he could snatch a moment. It was the day after one such visit when Ralph overstepped the mark.

He and some others had been lazing in the garden, listening to gramophone records, when a dogfight broke out high over their heads. They strained to make sense of the specks darting around the heavens, but as the aircraft lost altitude in a bid to gain speed, it became clear that two Hurricanes were taking a pasting from a covey of determined 109s.

One of the Hurricanes broke for home with a German on his tail; the other Hurricane didn’t fare so well. Streaming a white plume of glycol, it spun away earthward and piled into the hillside at the back of Saint Paul’s with a sickening crump.

By the time Ralph and the others made their way to the crash site, the army was already on the scene and a wallet had been recovered. It revealed that the pulped mess amidst the smouldering wreckage had once been Greg Dyer, a young Canadian based at Hal Far. Ralph knew him—not well, but well enough to take issue with the army major who ordered his men to dig the body in. The fellow had come halfway round the world to join the fight, Ralph protested, and he deserved a decent burial, just as his family deserved the right to come and stand at a white cross in a cemetery and pay their tributes when the war was over. The family could have their white cross, was the major’s reply, and if Ralph wanted to bag up some bits of flesh and bone to bury at the foot of it, then he had five minutes to do so.

Opinions were divided as to which of them threw the first punch—the witnesses were split along predictable army/RAF lines—but there was no doubt about who came off worst. The major’s jaw was broken in two places, and he was still eating through a straw when he flew out of Malta a few weeks later.

Fortunately for Ralph, the air officer commanding was one of his fans, and Ralph was spared the punishment he probably deserved. Other pilots had been sent packing for far more minor misdemeanors, such as drunken behavior in the bars of Valetta. However, the RAF had to be seen to be taking some form of action against him, and he found himself grounded until further notice. This might have sounded like a godsend, but not for a man itching to get back up there and have another crack at the enemy. His only consolation was that it gave him time to fully recover from injuries that might well have affected his performance in the air and cost him his life. When it came to working the rudder pedals, multiple fractures of the lower legs didn’t help. They were considerably less of a hindrance to the duties of the squadron’s chief intelligence officer, a position Ralph filled for several months before being eased back into action with the Photographic Reconnaissance Unit. This was a compromise that satisfied the army and annoyed the hell out of Ralph, although it beat sitting at a desk all day.

The PRU had a couple of unarmed Spitfires with long-range tanks for snooping on enemy convoys, but Ralph flew a Martin Maryland—in his own words, “a big bugger of a kite.” He’d grown strangely fond of the twin-engine bomber. It was surprisingly nippy and maneuverable, and it was well armed, which allowed him to have a pop at the enemy if the opportunity presented itself (which it seemed to do with far more regularity than was the case with the other Maryland pilots).

Since joining the PRU Ralph had added two to his tally: an Italian Cant seaplane in Taranto harbor and, just a few weeks ago, a 109 over Sicily, one of six fighters that had jumped him while he’d been making a study of the Catania plain. The Germans’ determination to bring down the Maryland made sense only the following day, when the photos taken on that sortie were developed. They showed new ground strips being built near Gerbini airfield—glider takeoff areas—confirmation that an airborne assault on Malta was imminent.

This grim news sat like a dark cloud over those in the know, but it failed to dampen Ralph’s spirits; he certainly wasn’t going to let it mess with his social calendar. He still traveled into Valetta to bend his elbow at the bar in the Union Club (or one of the city’s less salubrious establishments), and the invitations to dinner at the Xara Palace kept coming.

Rationing had reduced the quality of the food on offer there to the purely functional role of soaking up the booze, of which there was always plenty, thanks to Ralph’s deep pockets. His father had died when he was a boy, and a small fortune had been settled on him when he was twenty-one: “enough to keep me in snuff and absinthe,” he had once joked to Max. It was money he seemed quite happy to fritter away on his colleagues and friends.

That evening, he had somehow managed to get his hands on two cases of Chianti and six bottles of Johnnie Walker whisky. God only knew where he’d got them from (or what he’d paid for them)—contrary to official pronouncements, the black market was thriving—but the first toast of the evening, as always, was to the good health of his great-aunt Enid, for her generosity with the liquid refreshments.

“Enid,” the whole room bellowed before dropping back into their chairs, everyone except the Maltese orderlies, who returned to the kitchen clutching their tumblers of red wine and “a bottle of the brown stuff for the chef.”

Heavy drinking was just about the fastest route to an early grave for a fighter pilot, but given the shortage of serviceable aircraft on the island, almost everyone present could guarantee that they wouldn’t be flying the following day. And if by some miracle they did find themselves called to readiness, then a few minutes of raw oxygen through the mask while waiting to take off worked wonders when it came to clearing away the cobwebs.

The usual smattering of teetotalers and cautious newcomers abstained, but Hugh was happy to take up the slack.

“Rosamund’s arranged one of her women-only whist drives, so I’m good for a glass or five.”

Max and Freddie were happy to match him. For reasons that soon became clear, Ralph took longer to warm up. He was a painter—a watercolorist, primarily—and not a bad one, and he wasn’t going to let the minor inconvenience of a war keep him from his craft. That morning he had set off on his bicycle, as he often did, to record some little corner of the island. Chiaroscuro was his thing, light and shade, and he had found a subject that played to his strong suit: a small chapel in a sun-dappled glade near Verdala Palace. The proximity to the governor’s summer residence may well have played a part in what then happened.

Someone denounced him to the local police for suspicious behavior, and a small crowd of Maltese was present at the confiscation of his artist’s pad by two local constables. Not one of the grinning natives rose to his defense, even though a few of them knew him by sight. Almost tearful with frustration, he had watched some of his best work carried off.

“Toilet paper is running extremely scarce,” said Hugh.

Somehow, this set the tone for the evening. Serious subjects weren’t ignored, but they were treated with a light hand, which made a change from the synthetic gaiety that usually prevailed in the mess.

A South African flight lieutenant at their table mentioned that he’d also detected a shift in the attitude of the Maltese toward them, a souring of the relationship. The fighter pilots had always been regarded as the heroes of the garrison and were accustomed to being mobbed and cheered by young boys wherever they went. Lately, though, there had been something sneering in the cries of “Speetfire.”

Hugh was horrified to hear this. Ralph, on the other hand, was sympathetic to the Maltese.

“They’ve every bloody right to be browned off, in my book. They saw the new Spits fly in a few weeks ago, and what do they get? More planes in the sky? No. More pilots mooching around Valetta. Meanwhile, they’re dying in droves.”

He had nothing but praise for the gunners and the “poor bloody infantry.” The navy was beyond reproach, and the merchant seamen, well, they were the real heroes of the piece as far as he was concerned, gambling their lives away to feed, fuel, and arm the island. No, his own service—the RAF—was the one at fault. Air superiority was the key to Malta’s survival, but how could they hope to achieve it if the imbeciles back home continued to view Malta as a lost cause, little more than a convenient dumping ground for their shabbiest aircraft and least promising pilots?

“No offense intended, I’m sure,” said Max to a couple of ruddy-cheeked flight lieutenants listening in—new boys from 603 Squadron.

“But best to face the hard truth,” added Ralph. “You’ll last longer if you do. That’s why you’re here. That’s why I’m here. My squadron CO at North Weald couldn’t wait to see the back of me. ‘Tindle,’ he said, ‘I’ve got just the thing for you….’”

“Ralph, you’re scaring them,” said Freddie.

“They’re already scared. And they’re right to be. They’re up against Hitler’s best. Those boys earned their spurs on the Russian front. They say Werner Mölders has bagged more than a hundred. What do you two have in your lockers? A couple of massed sweeps over France?”

At most, judging from their expressions.

Freddie raised his glass to the dejected pair. “Well, here’s hoping the new Spitfires never arrive.”

“They’re coming,” said the youngest of them. “They’ve got us building new blast pens like there’s no tomorrow.”

Ralph drained his glass. “And Kesselring knows it. He has his eyes and ears on this island.”

“You and your bloody fifth columnists,” said Hugh. “You see enemy agents under every rock.”

“Oh, they’re here, all right. For all I know, one of you is one of them.” His eyes made the tour of the table. “Well, are you?”

“Nein,” said Freddie, which set everyone off.

After dinner, the four friends retired upstairs to the terrace with a bottle of Johnnie Walker. Night was falling fast, and as they sat there in the gloaming, Ralph announced, “I didn’t want to say before, but they’ll be here on the ninth.”

“The Spitfires …?”

“Mark Vs is the word. Sixty or so this time. Enough to tip the scales in our favor.”

“Where did you hear this?” asked Hugh, who liked to think he had a jungle telephone attached to every brass hat.

“Elliott.”

“Elliott!”

“Don’t underestimate Elliott. He may be a bloody Yank, but he sees the big picture. And he’s got clout where it counts, which is more than can be said for the congenital idiots running our show.”

Ralph didn’t know for certain, but rumor had it that Elliott had played a significant role behind the scenes in the last reinforcement flight to reach the island. The Spitfires had been delivered deep into the Mediterranean by the U.S. aircraft carrier Wasp—a commitment that, in Ralph’s view, Britain’s new ally wouldn’t have made without the sanction of their man on the spot.

“I wish I could be somebody’s man on the spot,” said Hugh. “It sounds like fun.”

“Not when it all goes wrong. The last fly-in was a complete bloody disaster. And sixty more Spits count for nothing unless we can get them armed, fueled, and back in the air before Kesselring pounces.”

“Elliott should be here,” said Hugh. “When was the last time all five of us were together?”

They calculated that it had been back in late March at the Union Club.

“It would have been the other day if you’d bothered to show up at our drinks party,” Hugh remarked to Ralph.

“Sorry about that. Prior engagement in Naples.”

“How’s the old girl looking?”

“Not too bad from twenty-five thousand feet.”

It seemed unlikely. Ralph was known for flying in foolishly low in search of the perfect picture.

They sat out on the terrace for a good long while, trading stories and other inanities, the darkness coiling around them, the whisky working its silent way through their systems. At a certain point, Ralph declared that he would henceforth be referring to Freddie as “Mr. Ten Degrees,” this being the angle at which Ralph estimated his right foot now stuck out to the side since Freddie had bolted his lower leg back together.

“Believe me,” said Freddie, “others would have saved themselves the trouble and lopped it off at the knee.”

“Well, it’s shoddy work all the same.”

“Ten degrees doesn’t sound like much,” said Hugh.

“Yes,” said Max, turning the screw. “I hardly even notice anymore.”

“Although it looks more like twenty to me,” Hugh said.

“Anything under twenty is deemed acceptable,” said Freddie.

Ralph was looking aghast, raising his lower leg to examine it in the candlelight.

“Come on, old man. You’re lucky to be alive.”

“Yes, Freddie saved your life.”

Freddie spread his hands to Ralph. “That’s what I’m telling everyone, and they seem to be listening.”

“Well, it’s the first I’ve heard of it.”

“That’s because we know how you don’t like to feel beholden to others.”

“Yes,” said Max, concurring with Hugh. “We knew it would wrong-foot you.”

After the laughter had died away, it was Max’s turn to be victimized. That was the way things generally went when they were together: everyone would have the sights turned on them at one time or another. Hugh kicked it off.

“So, Odysseus, how is the fair Calypso?”

“Excuse me?”

“You don’t know the story? It’s from Homer.”

“Pray tell,” said Ralph, eager for revenge.

Legend held that the island of Gozo, just off the north coast, was Ogygia, home to the sea nymph Calypso, who ensnared Odysseus in her web of feminine wiles, holding him hostage for seven years.

It was the first time Max had been ribbed about Lilian, and he wasn’t quite sure how to react. He decided to adopt an air of amused tolerance while they went at him.

“She’s certainly got her claws into him,” said Ralph. “I saw her aunt in the street the other day, and she wanted the lowdown on our friend here.”

“What did you tell her?”

“That he’s an upstanding young man with a fine future ahead of him.”

“It can’t be right to lie to the natives.”

“No, I hear the definite clangor of wedding bells.”

“It’ll mean converting to the Roman Church.”

“Absolutely. They have no truck with our watered-down faith.”

“Well, he could do far worse,” said Freddie. “She’s a beauty.”

“That’s the truth. I’d happily play hide the sausage with her.”

“Ah, but we all know what happens to these Maltese girls when middle age sets in. Suddenly they’re sidestepping through doorways.”

“Less sea nymph than sea cow.”

They talked around him, over him, anything but to him. And as he listened to the imaginary life they were mapping out for him—the meddlesome Maltese relatives, the early-morning masses, his olive-skinned progeny—it dawned on him that Freddie was right: he could do far worse for himself. After all, he almost had.

His thoughts strayed to Lilian, probably in bed by now, just a few streets away, a hop, skip, and jump across the rooftops. He saw her jet-black hair spread across the pillow, and the rise and fall of her breasts beneath the sheet.

Strangely, he had never stopped to think what she really thought of him. What did a kiss in a darkened garden mean to her? Was it loaded with significance? Maybe all she wanted was a pleasing flirtation, a little diversion from the grim realities of life. If so, it was no more than many girls of her social class were looking for. Mdina was home to a number of noble families whose daughters weren’t averse to the odd romantic dalliance. Maybe Lilian was no different. This, after all, was the world she inhabited.

Somehow, he couldn’t see it, though. She was older, too much of her own person to follow the flock simply for the sake of it. He knew immediately that this conclusion flattered him by lending weight to her feelings. It came to him more slowly that they were feelings he was quite happy for her to have.

Or maybe it was the whisky speaking. He had a tendency to turn dewy-eyed under its influence.

Hugh, meanwhile, was growing downright maudlin. He could just as well have been speaking about the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria, so stirring was his account of the destruction by an enemy bomb of the premises of the Malta Amateur Dramatic Club.

No one had been in the building on South Street at the time, but Hugh had been there since and had picked over the rubble, pulling out props and costumes from the plays they’d put on over the years, each one unleashing a memory, many of which he now felt obliged to share with his friends.

The friends, meanwhile, did their best not to laugh. This wasn’t easy, especially when Hugh started to recite lines.

“Do you remember Return to Sender?”

Ralph leaned forward in his chair. “How could we forget, old man?”

This was said for Max and Freddie’s benefit, Hugh being too caught up in the moment to detect the irony.

“‘I say, Margaret, wasn’t that the doorbell? Or could it be that my ears are still ringing from our little contretemps earlier?’”

He gave a smile that said, Step aside, Shakespeare. You’ve had your day.

“Didn’t Olive Bratby play Margaret?” said Freddie.

“She certainly did. And with great authority. Margaret’s not an easy character to play. Remember when her poodle goes missing? That requires a deft touch.”

“Oooo,” said Max, “that’s a horrible moment.”

“It is, it is, and an actress of lesser ability would have over-egged the pudding. Far better, though, that Margaret is seen not to react. She buries the pain away. It’s what she does, you see? As with the poodle, so with life.”

This last line was a tough one to hold out against. They all managed it, though, rising to the challenge of the unspoken game: which one of them would crack first? Freddie, annoyingly, was the master of the poker face and the little glances designed to send you over the edge. Max’s only real chance lay in lighting Ralph’s fuse.

“Maybe I’m wrong, but didn’t I hear that Lord Mountbatten once attended one of your shows?”

“Absolutely. Just before my time, sadly. It was On Approval by Frederick Lonsdale, and he was extremely complimentary.”

Max already knew the story because he had heard it from Ralph, who had heard it from Hugh, who could, apparently, quote by heart from the letter Mountbatten subsequently wrote to the MADC.

He most certainly could. Verbatim.

Ralph had his mouth buried in his glass to hide his smile when Hugh leaned back, staring at the stars, and declared wistfully, “Lord Louis loved us.”

The whisky went everywhere, much of it up Ralph’s nose. The dam then burst for Freddie and Max.

Hugh’s bewildered expression took on a steely edge of realization before softening to one of grudging amusement.

“Bloody Philistines.”

Max was fairly accomplished at riding his motorcycle when drunk, and he knew from his little jaunt with Pemberton and Vitorin Zammit that it was just possible to squeeze three grown men onto the machine. He had never attempted to do both things at the same time.

Fortunately, it was a short trip across the valley to Mtarfa Hospital, where Freddie dismounted and stumbled off in search of his digs. Unfortunately, Hugh was growing more voluble by the minute. As they came down off the ridge onto the plain, he started to recite lines from Tennyson at the top of his lungs while slapping Max on the thigh and exhorting him to go faster.

“‘Forward, the Light Brigade! / Charge for the guns!’ … Faster, faster! …‘Storm’d at with shot and shell, / Boldly they rode and well, / Into the jaws of Death, / Into the mouth of Hell / Rode the six hundred.’”

“Shut up, Hugh.”

“‘Theirs not to make reply, / Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die.’”

They didn’t die, although a gaping bomb crater on the outskirts of Attard tried its best to oblige, swallowing them up before spitting them out again.

“Now that’s more like it!” trumpeted Hugh, clinging on for dear life.

On the outskirts of Floriana, they bore left through Pieta and Msida, taking the road that wound its way around Marsamxett Harbour, but as they approached Sliema, Hugh suggested that they carry on past to Fort Tigne’.

“No point in going home just yet,” he called into Max’s ear. “The coven will still be at their cards.”

Fort Tigne’ felt like the end of the known world, stuck out on its promontory at the harbor mouth. To the east lay almost a thousand miles of clear water and the low horizon where the sun rose every morning. It was a wild and lonely spot, and the gun emplacements there had taken a beating in the past few weeks, targeted attacks intended to annihilate them. A visit by a high-ranking officer from Royal Artillery HQ, albeit at such a late hour, was a timely and welcome thing.

Maybe it was the actor in him, but Hugh did a fine job of concealing his waterlogged state from the battery commander, seemingly sobering up at will. His handling of the gunners when he insisted on making a tour of the gun pits was even more impressive. There was nothing remote or routine about his handling of the men. He was relaxed, familiar, and amusing.

In one of the pits, a jug-eared young corporal was playing a mournful tune on a harmonica for his downcast comrades. A backfire had blown out the breech the day before and killed two men.

Taking the harmonica from the corporal, Hugh tapped it against his hand to clear it.

“There goes tomorrow’s water ration,” he joked, which got a big laugh.

Max experienced a flush of pride in his friend as Hugh proceeded to play a heartfelt rendition of Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again.” He then shook the hand of every man present, wishing them well in the fight ahead and assuring them that victory would be theirs.

Max and he wandered down to the slender strip of sand at the water’s edge for a smoke.

“I didn’t know you played the harmonica.”

“Don’t tell Rosamund. She thinks it’s an uncouth instrument.”

They stood in silence for a moment, the dark Mediterranean stretching out before them.

“‘What from the cape can you discern at sea?’”

“You’re going to have to give me a little more than that,” said Max.“Nothing at all: it is a highwrought flood;

I cannot, ’twixt the heaven and the main,

Descry a sail.”

“You’ve got me there.”

“Othello. Montano is searching for the Turkish fleet with some gentlemen of Cyprus. It turns out the fleet’s gone down in a storm.”

“We should be so lucky.”

Hugh shrugged. “We don’t need luck; we need determination. History’s on our side.”

Hugh had always been taken with the idea that the siege in which they were caught up was not so very different from that endured by Malta in 1565, when Suleiman the Magnificent had dispatched forty thousand men to take the island. Malta had held out against the Ottomans on that occasion, saving Europe in the process, and the little seagirt sentinel of the Mediterranean was now engaged in a similar showdown against the Nazi scourge.

It was a romantic notion, and one that Max was quite happy to go along with in his capacity as the information officer. Hugh, on the other hand, embraced it with an almost mystical fervor, latching on to the parallels and ignoring the differences. It was true that in both instances there was much more at stake than a dust-blown lump of limestone in the middle of the Mediterranean. It was also true that in 1565 the defense of the island had been coordinated by outsiders, men from the north of Europe.

Hugh revered the Knights of Saint John and knew their story intimately. They were a relic from the crusading era, when the order had provided lodging and security to pilgrims visiting the Holy Land. When forced to repair to Rhodes, they effectively ruled that island for two centuries before being driven out by Suleiman. Malta became their next home—a grant from the Emperor Charles V—but it wasn’t long before Suleiman pursued them there and the stage was set for one of the bloodiest and most brutal sieges in history.

At one point, soon after Fort Saint Elmo had fallen to the Ottomans, the defenders began using the severed heads of their prisoners as cannonballs. This wasn’t because they lacked for ammunition. It was a ghoulish gesture of defiance by the knights, a response to the sight of their headless comrades from Fort Saint Elmo floating toward them across Grand Harbour, lashed to wooden crosses.

Against impossible odds, the besieged towns of Senglea and Birgu (now known as Vittoriosa) held out against the Ottoman Turks for a further two months. Continuously bombarded day and night from the heights around Grand Harbour, their defensive walls breached on numerous occasions, they stood firm under the resolute leadership of Jean de Valette, Grand Master of the order, a man more than willing to snatch up a pike and step into the fray like a common foot soldier.

Many thousands died on both sides in any number of gruesome ways before the Ottoman army finally withdrew from the island, taking to their galleys, their tails between their legs. It was a setback from which their territorial ambitions never fully recovered. Malta had stemmed the Turkish tide; Europe could rest easy once more.

“How bad do you think things will get if they invade?”

“Not as bad as last time,” quipped Hugh. “But you might actually have to get that service revolver out of its holster.”

“I’m a hopeless shot. Always was. The pheasants’ friend.”

“‘The pheasants’ friend’?”

“It’s what my stepmother used to call me.”

Hugh laughed. “Then I’ll make damn sure I’m standing behind you.”

Maybe it was the fatherly hand that settled onto his shoulder, but Max experienced a sudden impulse to unburden himself, to seek approval for the hazardous course he’d settled on in his head. Hugh liked to play the buffoon, but it was a colorful cloak. Beneath it lurked a serious and somewhat high-minded soul. Hugh would understand. He might even be willing to help.

“Hugh …”

“Yes?”

Max dropped his cigarette onto the sand and ground it out beneath his boot.

“I’d better run you home.”