The Information Officer

DAY FIVE

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MANY DAYS, MAX WAS NOT SHAKEN awake by the wailing of a siren. Rather, it was the un natural silence that stirred him—the curse of existing in a permanent state of vacant alertness, even when asleep.

He checked his watch, dismissing the idea that the Germans were running late. It just wasn’t the sort of thing they did. They were probably holding themselves back for a big midday blitz.

He felt surprisingly alert, even invigorated. His head hurt, but the throbbing at his temples brought with it good memories of the night before. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d passed such an enjoyable evening in the company of his friends. It seemed somehow to have stiffened his resolve overnight. He felt alive, refreshed, eager to get out there and at it. He would set up a meeting with Lilian. After that, there would be no turning back.

He was right not to have involved Hugh.

He was heading for the door when the phone rang. It was an unfamiliar sound. The line to his flat was down for so much of the time that he’d dismissed its trill from his life.

“Chadwick.”

“Max, it’s me.”

“Hi.”

“Hi,” said Mitzi. “No raid this morning.”

“Doesn’t look like it.”

“I called last night. Several times.”

“I got back late.”

“I know. I just spoke to Hugh. He sounded a little the worse for wear.”

He wanted to ask her what she was doing calling Hugh at this hour of the morning, but before he could, she said, “I need to see you.”

“I was just on my way to work.”

“I’m working too. Later. This evening.”

“Where’s Lionel?”

“Out. He won’t be back.” There was a short silence. “I need to see you, Max.”

They had spoken many times on the phone, but always in a vague sort of code in case one of the girls at the exchange were listening in. “I need to see you, Max” wasn’t code; it was a bald and brazen statement.

“I’m meeting Elliott this evening.”

“I’m sure you can rearrange it,” she said.

Under other circumstances, maybe.

“It’s not a moveable feast, I’m afraid.”

“My, it must be important.”

She was annoyed now, unaccustomed as she was to him calling the tune. He could picture the obstinate tightening of her jaw at the other end of the line.

“Just one of those things, I’m afraid.”

“Well, this is more than just one of those things,” she replied flatly. “So if you could find a moment in your busy schedule …”

He knew what she was like; she wasn’t going to give up.

“How late tonight?”

“I’m not going anywhere, and I believe you still have a key.”

If the girls at the exchange were listening in, there’d be a flurry of speculation. It was Mitzi’s way of saying she didn’t care.

“Okay.”

“I’m honored,” said Mitzi tersely before hanging up.

The key was where he had always kept it—in the drawer of his bedside table, along with the letters from home. There had been no mail in months, and the bundle of envelopes with their out-of-date news seemed only to deepen his sense of isolation. For all he knew, his father had finally seen sense and separated from his stepmother; Elizabeth was bearing the child of the stockman’s son; and Roland, well, there were any number of things he could wish upon Roland, syphilis springing readily to mind, but the irritating truth was that Roland would probably be kicking his heels with his regiment somewhere in southern England and sneaking as much leave as was humanly possible.

He spread the letters on the bed, searching for the one from his good friend Lucinda. There was no address, no stamp, only his Christian name, because she had handed it to him in person just a week before he’d gone abroad. He had taken the train to Lewes, where, in her own words, she was now living in sin with a painter old enough to be her father. If that was sin, then the devil really did have all the best tunes.

The painter was named Roger and the house was a large brick-and-flint-built affair on the edge of a hamlet at the foot of the South Downs. The garden was wild and unkempt, not unlike Roger’s hair.

They ate lunch outside on the terrace beneath a cotton awning slung between wooden posts. Roger’s son was away at boarding school, but his daughter, Clare, was there, with her sulky pout and downcast gaze, as befitted a thirteen-year-old. She attended the school in Lewes where Lucinda taught French.

“I was also Max’s teacher,” Lucinda explained. “Many, many moons ago.”

“La femme de Monsieur Dupont a les yeux bleus.”

“Excellent, Chadwick—give yourself a gold star.”

“We used to ascribe a whole load of other attributes to Madame Dupont when you weren’t listening. There’s nothing I don’t know about Madame Dupont.”

Roger had erupted in laughter, and even Clare had smiled.

Whenever Max was feeling down and desolate, he would think of the house and its garden bursting with blossom and lime-green loveliness on that warm day in early May. He could see it now as he pulled the four pages of paper from the envelope.

He hadn’t read Lucinda’s letter in a while, probably because he knew he had failed to live up to her kind and flattering words.

It started with a simple statement, barely legible. Her handwriting had always been atrocious, like a doctor’s scrawl.Our friendship began with a letter, and this letter is all you shall have to sustain it over the coming months or, God forbid, years.

Well, God hadn’t been listening; it had been almost two years since she had handed him the letter on the platform at Lewes station as he’d been boarding the train back to London. He had waited till Haywards Heath before opening it, and he had still been pondering its contents when the train drew into Victoria station a good while later.

In the letter, she went on to say that she would not be writing to him again while he was away at war. Anything she had to report would only appear trite and commonplace when set alongside his own experiences. Also, there was a strong likelihood that her letters would not reach him, and as strong a likelihood that any reply of his would not reach her. These silences would only fuel her fear that he had been killed.

Rather, she preferred to trust entirely to Providence that he would return safely—as she knew he would—and she looked forward to that moment. Meanwhile, these words would have to suffice. He could carry them with him wherever he went, dip into them at will. They were not limited by time or place. They were eternal and infinite.

He knew that there had always been a special bond between them—even when he was a ten-year-old schoolboy and she his twenty-one-year-old French teacher—but it was strange to see it spelled out in her hieroglyphic scrawl. Hunched on a bed in a crumbling room in a bombed and besieged city, her words, paradoxically, now made more sense to him than they ever had.

In many ways, the letter was a declaration of love—not a physical love (although she confessed that not long after he had graduated from Oxford there had been a moment when she had wanted to carry him off to bed with her, and had even come within a hairs-breadth of putting the proposition to him).

The love she spoke of was something else. It was to do with a man having many fathers in his life, and sometimes more than one mother. She wasn’t looking to set herself up as a replacement, but she couldn’t deny that she had sometimes felt and acted as such. She listed the qualities in him that had stirred those feelings in her.

Rounding off the letter, she wrote:I don’t know what you made of what you saw today, but if the house under the Downs is still my home when you return, then it is also your home. And if I have moved on, then I will have packed your bags and carried them with me. This is as much as I have ever promised anyone, but it is far less than you deserve.

“Deserve” was a big word. It suggested that he had earned the right to her feelings, and he could find little in his behavior of late to justify this exchange. The brass door key in his hand was evidence enough of that.

He felt the tears brimming in his eyes and he willed them to disappear. When that failed, he wiped them away on the back of his arm.

He didn’t know what he was weeping for.

For Lucinda? Her kind words? England on a May day? The person he used to be? The person he had become? The lack of sleep? The pinch of hunger? The remorseless hail of bombs? The death of his friends? The faceless German pilot in the burns ward? Carmela Cassar?

Maybe he wept for all of these things.

Or maybe just one: his mother, Camille.

The morning limped by, hot and humid. Max spent much of it editing copy for the Weekly Bulletin and waiting impatiently for Lilian to call him back. By noon, everyone was remarking on the fact that an air raid had not yet materialized.

Neither had Lilian.

There was still no sign of her at the office, and no one was answering the phone at her aunt’s palace in Mdina. There was nothing in the reports to worry about; two bombs had fallen on Rabat at about three A.M., but that was it.

An hour later, Maria put the call through to his office.

“Good of you to show up at work,” he joked.

“I’m not at work; I’m at home.”

She sounded tired, drained, downcast. And with good cause, it turned out. A childhood friend of hers, Caterina Gasan, had been killed by one of the two bombs that had fallen on Rabat, her family home receiving a direct hit that had made a mockery of the concrete shelter in the basement. Caterina’s mother and her younger brother had also perished in the ruins. Her father and her elder brother, the two men who had laid the concrete with such confidence, had both survived almost entirely unscathed.

Max had met Caterina only once, back in March, but he could see her clearly: short, voluptuous, full-lipped, and feisty. He could see her rapt expression, lit by the screen, while Dennis O’Keefe and Helen Parrish warbled their way through I’m Nobody’s Sweetheart Now at the Rabat Plaza. They hadn’t agreed on the merits of the film, but he had enjoyed her efforts to persuade him of the error of his ways.

“God …,” he said, pathetically.

“What God?” Lilian replied.

“You don’t mean that.”

“Don’t I? It doesn’t make sense, not Caterina.”

“It’s not meant to make sense.”

There was a short silence before she spoke. “I want to see you.”

“That’s lucky. I want to see you too.”

“Can you come to Mdina?”

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes—Luftwaffe permitting.”

Ena, the younger of Lilian’s two cousins, answered the door to Max. He could see from her eyes that she’d been crying.

“They’re in the garden,” she said simply, taking him by the hand and leading him there in silence.

They were seated at a tin table in the shade of an orange tree: Lilian, her aunt Teresa, and Ralph. It was a surprise to see Ralph there, and Max experienced a momentary twinge of jealousy.

“I saw Squadron Leader Tindle in the street and told him about Caterina,” Teresa explained. Like Lilian, she was dressed in black.

“I was just leaving,” said Ralph, stubbing out his cigarette and getting to his feet. “My sincere condolences again.” He graced both women with something between a nod and a bow.

“Lilian …,” Teresa prompted.

“No, stay,” said Ralph. “I’m sure Max will see me out.”

The tall glazed doors at the back of the palace were crisscrossed with tape, and as two men entered the building, Ralph said, “Bad blow for them. Caterina was a great girl.”

“You knew her?”

“Only to ogle. She used to come to the Point de Vue every now and then.”

The Point de Vue Hotel stood on the south side of the Saqqajja, the leafy square separating Mdina and Rabat. Like the Xara Palace, the hotel had been requisitioned by the RAF as a billet for pilots stationed at Ta’ Qali. The hotel barman was known for his John Collinses, the bar itself for the local girls who were drawn there come nightfall, like moths to a candle flame. For some reason the pilots called these flirtatious encounters “poodle-faking.” Well, that had all stopped the month before, when the Point de Vue had taken a direct hit during an afternoon raid, killing six.

“That place is cursed. When I think of the times we had there, and those who are gone …”

It wasn’t like Ralph to come over all maudlin—breeziness was his stock-in-trade—and Max wasn’t sure how to respond.

“Thanks for last night” was the best he could come up with.

“Might be a while before we get to do it again. Had a summons from the CO this morning, and the fly-in’s definitely set for the ninth.”

“Three days …”

“Believe me, I’m counting. He passed me fit to fly Spits again.”

“Congratulations.”

“It’s going to be one hell of a scrap. That bastard Kesselring’s going to throw everything he’s got at us.”

“But this time you’re ready. I saw the new blast pens when I passed by Ta’ Qali.”

“What counts is up there,” said Ralph, nodding heavenward. “If the new Spits really do have four cannons and are faster in the climb, we stand a chance. Who knows, we might even bloody their noses. We’d better, or it’s all over.”

“You think?”

“I know. This is it—the last roll of the dice.”

Max paused in the hallway at the front door.

“When we’re old and sitting in a pub somewhere, I’m going to remind you of this conversation.”

Ralph smiled weakly. “Tell me more about the pub.”

“It’s at the end of a long track, and there’s a river, with trout, and a garden running down to the water. It’s summer and the sun is shining, and there’s a weeping willow near the jetty where our grandchildren are playing. They’re naked, jumping off the jetty, flapping around in the river, splashing the people drifting past in punts.”

Ralph gave a sudden loud laugh. “Damn your detractors. Now I know why you got the job.”

“What detractors?”

“Come on, you’re at least ten years too young for the post.”

“I forgot to mention … at the pub, you’re in a wheelchair. You lost both legs when you got shot down over Malta in May 1942.”

Ralph laughed some more as he pulled open the front door. After the cool of the palace and its shaded garden the heat in Bastion Square hit them like a hammer.

“She’s a great girl, Max, war or no war. She’s the real thing.”

“She’s just a friend.”

“Then you’re a bloody fool.”

“If you say so.”

“Hugh says so too.”

“Hugh?”

“And Freddie.”

He knew Freddie was a fan of Lilian’s. The three of them had spent a raucous evening together at Captain Caruana’s bar in Valetta a few weeks back. He struggled to recall when Hugh had ever set eyes on her.

“Now go in there and look after her. She needs it.”

Lilian didn’t appear particularly needy. She sat there silent and grim-faced while he made the right noises, and the moment Teresa withdrew, leaving them alone together, she suggested that they head for Boschetto Gardens. Actually, it was more of a command than a suggestion, and there was something wild and reckless in her eyes when she issued it.

“On the motorcycle?”

Until now, she had always refused to be seen with him on the motorcycle.

“Well, I’m not walking there in this heat.”

It was a short trip, a few miles at most along the ridge toward the coast. He took it slowly, savoring the experience.

Lilian rode sidesaddle because of her skirt, and as Rabat fell away behind them, she shifted closer on the seat, holding him around the waist just that little bit tighter.

She was a good pillion passenger, not fighting the curves in the road, leaning with him.

“You’ve done this before,” he called over his shoulder.

“I’ve never done what I’m about to do.”

“And what’s that?” he asked, turning to look her in the eye.

“I think it’s a goat,” she replied calmly.

They missed the emaciated creature by a matter of inches.

It would have been a pity to kill it, a survivor like that. Most had gone the way of the pot long before now.

Boschetto Gardens offered the only genuine patch of woodland on Malta—a rare glimpse of what the island must have looked like long ago, before it was stripped of trees by early shipbuilders. Max had walked its weaving pathways a handful of times, often with Ralph, who loved to go there to paint. It was a tranquil, sun-dappled world where dark pines towered over groves of lemon, orange, and olive trees. There was an ancient atmosphere about the place, a whiff of dusty fables by classical authors you’d heard of but never read.

“I half expect a unicorn to come trotting round the corner any moment.”

They were making their way along a shaded path lined with ivy-threaded walls.

“Or Pan,” replied Lilian.

“I’ve never liked Pan.”

“Why not?”

“I’m sorry, he’s too creepy.”

“But he’s the god of music and nature and love.”

“Exactly, so why’s he got goat legs?”

He told her about The Wind in the Willows, and the bizarre chapter in the book where Pan helps Rat and Mole locate Otter’s lost son.

She liked the sound of the book, especially Toad, and he promised to send her a copy of it when he got home.

Maybe it was the mention of home, but she grew silent before asking, “It is going to end, isn’t it?”

“Of course it is. And one day Germans will come here in peace and walk this path and admire this view.” He spread his hands before him.

“I hate them.”

It was said in a calm, low voice, and was all the more menacing for it.

“They’re only doing their job. It doesn’t mean they enjoy it, or even that they agree with it.”

“How can you be so reasonable? You’ve lost friends too.”

She sounded almost angry with him, and maybe she was, but he also sensed she was searching for answers she hoped he might hold. He didn’t have any to offer her, though. What could he say? Ivor, Wilf, Delia, Dicky … they had all died defending a cause in which they believed, for which they’d been ready to fight. That was his consolation. Caterina, on the other hand, had been obliterated while watching from the sidelines—an innocent bystander caught in the cross fire.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t.” He stopped on the pathway, staring down at his dusty desert boots before looking up into her lambent brown eyes. “But I know that being unreasonable doesn’t help. It doesn’t do justice to those who have died. It doesn’t honor them. They’re the ones who matter, not the man—the boy, most likely—who pulled the lever or pressed the button or did whatever he was ordered to do. I doubt he’s so very different from the rest of us, just happy to be alive and eager for it all to end.”

She weighed his words awhile.

“So who do I blame? I have to blame someone.”

“Try the politicians—the idiots who dragged us into this mess in the first place. I find that works best.”

Not long after, she led him off the path, through the trees, until they found themselves in a small glade. When she sat herself down at the base of a gnarled old olive tree, he followed suit, remembering what she had said on the motorcycle about doing something she’d never done before.

“Can I have a cigarette?” she asked.

“You don’t smoke.”

“But I want to try.”

He lit two cigarettes and handed her one, amused by his presumption.

She didn’t cough and she didn’t complain about the taste; she just smoked the cigarette, then stubbed it out in the sandy soil.

“Verdict?”

“Not so special. I feel a bit dizzy.”

She sat back against the trunk and closed her eyes. There was nothing awkward about the silence that now enveloped them. It gave him the opportunity to think about how he was going to broach the subject. It was hardly the time to do it, not while she was still reeling from the death of her friend, but time was a luxury he couldn’t afford right then.

Over the tops of the trees he could make out Verdala Palace, the governor’s summer residence, rising foursquare on the ridge above, lording over the gardens. With its corner towers and crenellations, it resembled a medieval castle, although the pale stonework lent it an exotic and less forbidding air. He could picture the vast barrel-vaulted hall with its frescoes, where he had dined soon after his promotion. Being a Plymouth Brother, Governor Dobbie was a teetotaler, but he had nevertheless kept the wine waiter on his toes that night, ensuring that his guests’ glasses had been properly charged.

“What are you thinking?” Lilian asked. She still had her head resting against the trunk, but her eyes were open now, locked on to him. “It looks serious,” she added lightheartedly.

He placed his hand over hers and gave it a small squeeze. “It is, I’m afraid.”

He told her everything, from the moment when Freddie had first summoned him to the Central Hospital to show him Carmela Cassar’s corpse. First, though, he made her swear on all she held dear that she wouldn’t share a word of what he was about to tell her with any living soul.

She was on her feet before he had finished his account, and only when he was done did she speak.

“The lieutenant governor tried to stop you?”

“He wasn’t present.”

“But he was still in the room.”

“I suppose they must have been acting with his authority.”

“I can’t believe it.”

She was angry now, pacing around.

“It’s true. They threatened us both in no uncertain terms.”

“But they’re doing something about it. They must be.”

“I wouldn’t bank on it. They don’t want to have the drains up at a time like this. It’s like Elliott said—when the Upstanding leaves, the problem goes with her.”

“The problem?” she fired back crisply. “Is that what you call murderers in your country?”

He raised his hands in placatory gesture. “Don’t get angry with me.”

“But I am angry with you. I’m angry with all of you—the way you treat us, the way you think of us, the way you talk about us. ‘The natives are getting restless’—I heard that yesterday in the Union Club. And I saw the looks and the smiles. They all thought it was very funny, until they saw me listening. Then they were embarrassed. Good. I’m glad the little native embarrassed them.”

“Lilian—”

“It’s true. You know it is.”

“Not everyone thinks like that, or talks like that.”

“Oh, you’re innocent, are you? I read what you write, and I see the same thing in your words. What was it last week? ‘Malta Can Take It’? Well, good old Malta.”

“That was a line from a BBC broadcast,” he bleated in his defense.

“Yes, Malta can take it, because Malta has got to take it. But we’re not doing it for you; we’re doing it for us.” She slapped her palm against her chest to make her point. “It’s our island. It’s not yours, and it’s not theirs. It’s ours.”

Technically, the island was a British crown colony, but it probably wasn’t the best moment to point out this detail.

“If it wasn’t for us, you’d be under German occupation by now.”

“Well, at least they wouldn’t be dropping their bombs on us.”

“No, we would be.”

The words popped out of his mouth unbidden, illuminating Malta’s grim and perennial predicament, a toothless lump of limestone prey to the whims of mightier nations.

“Don’t you see? People have always come here because they can. But they always leave. If the Germans invade, one day they will go.” She paused. “And one day you will go too.”

Her republican rant had strayed into dangerous territory with that last comment. They both knew it.

“I’m not the only one to think it,” she said defensively.

“I don’t doubt it. But keep it under your hat unless you fancy a holiday in Uganda.”

“And that says it all, doesn’t it?”

He wasn’t going to argue the point, because at heart he agreed with her about the “pro-Italians” and the other “subversive elements” who had been shipped out to Uganda earlier in the year. They’d had a number of heated discussions on this thorny issue, with Max trotting out the official platitude: “Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures.” When it came down to it, though, there was something chillingly draconian about the stretch of power that allowed the British to intern and deport Maltese citizens at will, without due process. They came from all walks of life—dockyard workers to priests, pensioners to university professors—and not one of them had ever been formally charged with a crime.

It was an injustice that had touched Lilian on a personal level. A friend of hers, the daughter of the chief justice, had spent two years under house arrest with her family before opting to board the Breconshire and follow her father into exile. Sixteen years of loyal service to the crown had, apparently, not been enough to place the family’s loyalty beyond doubt.

“You’re probably right,” conceded Max. “I’m no better than the rest of them. But maybe I’ve learned something. Maybe that’s why I’m here, why I told you.”

“Yes, you tell me, but first you make me swear my silence. I can’t stay silent.”

“You must. They’ll shut you down in a moment.”

“They can’t.”

“They told me they would. That’s what they threatened me with.”

She cast him a curious glance. “They think you care what happens to me?” She seemed almost amused by the idea.

“They’re right. I do.”

She stared down at him, her body now still, the agitation gone. He reached up, took her hand, and drew her back onto the ground beside him.

“You have to trust me. You have to let me do this my way. I need your help—a small favor—but that’s as far as your involvement goes.”

She stared off through the trees.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked eventually, without turning.

At three o’clock, when Max returned to the Information Office, an enemy air raid had yet to materialize over the island, and this had shaped itself into the hopeful speculation that the Luftwaffe had been pulled out of Sicily, summoned back to the Russian front. It had happened before, but never at this time of year, and Max remained skeptical.

At four o’clock, Elliott called from the Combined Operations Room.

“Is there anything on the table?” Max asked.

“Nothing. Niente. Nada. Dead as a dodo.”

“Maybe it’s Hitler’s birthday.”

“That was a couple of weeks back.”

Max laughed.

“It’s true. April twentieth. The sonofabitch just turned fifty-three. You’ve got to hand it to the guy: it takes a special gift to fuck up a planet in fifty-three years.”

“He’s had a little help.”

“True, but I doubt we’d be frying our asses in Malta if young Adolf had been hit by a streetcar on his way to school forty-odd years ago.”

Elliott was calling to confirm their dinner plans and to give Max directions.

“Elliott, I know where you live.”

He’d spent any number of enjoyable evenings on the roof terrace at Elliott’s apartment in Gzira.

“I’m talking about my country residence.”

“Your country residence?”

“You mean you don’t have one? Now grab a pen; it’s a little off the beaten track.”

This was putting it mildly. Wayside shrines, stone gateposts, and oddly shaped trees figured large in the directions.

“Shall we say seven o’clock?”

“With directions like these it might be nearer ten.”

Elliott chuckled. “Well, don’t expect to find any of the Chassagne-Montrachet left.”

The last town of any note before Elliott’s directions degenerated into obscure landmarks was Siggiewi. The road there ran through Qormi and Zebbug, bisecting the low southern plain, passing between the airfields at Luqa and Ta’ Qali. The men had had a whole day to lick their wounds from the previous day’s pasting, and Max could picture the scene: the ground crews and infantry busily filling bomb craters and repairing blast pens, one wary eye on the heavens. The early evening raid was due any moment. The unnatural silence that had hung over the island all day surely had to end soon.

It hadn’t by the time Max had reached Siggiewi. The inhabitants were milling around the main square, moving tentatively, unaccustomed to being aboveground at that hour. Max stopped at a bar near the church and begged a glass of water, not to slake his thirst so much as wash the dust from his mouth. An old man asked him hopefully if the war was over, and when he got back on his motorcycle, a gaggle of barefoot boys chased him through the narrow streets, falling away in dribs and drabs as he opened the throttle.

The rutted road south of Siggiewi wound its way toward the sea and one of the few corners of the island he had never explored. He knew the coastline to the east because that’s where the megalithic temples of Hagar Qim and Mnajdra were to be found, standing like two mini-Stonehenges atop the cliffs. Lilian had insisted he visit them, delivering a lecture on their unique place in the panoply of ancient European sites. She was biased. The professor of archaeology who had whisked her mother off to Italy was a leading expert on Hagar Qim. That’s how the couple had met, some years before the war, during one of the professor’s many visits to his precious temple.

To the west lay the Dingli Cliffs, mile upon mile of sheer limestone rock face rising two hundred feet from the water. The Dingli Cliffs were home to another kind of temple, one that celebrated the new technology, for it was there that the island’s primary radio direction finding station was located. In between, though, lay a stretch of coast Max hadn’t even known existed. There seemed to be only one dirt track in and out, and without Elliot’s directions he would hardly have noticed the junction.

The track elbowed its way up a hillside of stunted trees and rock-strewn fields. It then dipped away sharply toward the cliffs, before veering to the right and hugging the coastline. To his left the ground descended in narrow cultivated terraces until the slope became too steep to hold them. On his right rose a rocky escarpment. True to form, the Maltese had responded by pouncing on this meagre scrap that nature had tossed them, this precarious step of land at the edge of the world. Judging from the age of the few farmhouses he passed, people had been there for centuries, scratching a living from the powdery soil.

He was on the point of turning back when he saw the isolated chapel with the faded blue doors that Elliott had mentioned. A few hundred yards farther on he came across the sorry-looking cypress where the track bifurcated. The lower route petered out at a cluster of whitewashed farm buildings arranged around an open courtyard and towered over by two Aleppo pines. It was just as Elliott had described it, although he hadn’t mentioned the short wireless mast on the roof of the farmhouse.

Beyond the compound, the ground fell away in stone-trimmed terraces toward the cliff edge, and it was here that Max saw a tall figure silhouetted against the lowering sun. Elliott appeared to be scything grass, but as Max drew closer, it became clear that he was swinging a golf club.

Max propped the motorcycle against one of the pines and made his way over.

“Do you play?” asked Elliott.

“Badly.”

“Then you’re in excellent company.”

The tin pail at Elliott’s feet was brimming with golf balls.

“From the Marsa Golf Club,” he explained. “They’ve got no use for them anymore.” Not since the club’s fairways and greens had been plowed up and turned into allotments.

“There’s a whole load more in the barn, so don’t hold back,” he added, making for the farmhouse. He returned a little while later with the promised bottle of white burgundy, two wineglasses, and a Maltese man carrying a folding side table.

“Pawlu helps me out from time to time.”

Pawlu was the sort of fellow you’d want on your side in a fight—not tall, but thickset and bull-necked. When they shook hands, Max’s felt like a child’s in a bear’s paw.

“I am pleased to meet you.”

“Pawlu speaks good English. He used to work down at the docks as a stevedore but now has a farm up on the ridge there, as well as a beautiful wife and two young sons who make a good living picking up the golf balls that don’t go over the cliff.”

“Which is most of them.”

“He’s also extremely insolent, and I’m thinking of dispensing with his services.”

Pawlu gave a disarmingly warm smile, then excused himself. He was expected home for dinner.

Max and Elliott spent the next half hour quaffing the excellent wine and driving golf balls out to sea, toward the setting sun. Anything clearing the cliff (which required a perfectly struck three iron) scored one point; anything less scored no points, even if the ball bounced over the edge. Elliott liked to play dirty: “You’re forcing it with your shoulders” … “Stop lifting your head” … “Let the club do the work” … “You’re getting a bit wristy, must be the wine”—irritating observations intended to throw Max off his game.

They were level at a far-from-impressive four points apiece when the contest was brought to a halt by the building roar of an aircraft engine.

“Here,” said Elliott, thrusting a seven iron into Max’s hand. “You’re going to need more loft.”

“What?”

“On my word, okay?”

They both set themselves, ready to swing.

Max saw them now: four fighters coming at them from the west in wide line abreast, hugging the cliff top. They were enemy aircraft, new Me109Fs with their distinctive yellow noses.

“Now!”

They swung their clubs in unison. In his eagerness, Max topped his ball, but Elliott’s sailed high into the air with just the right amount of lead on it. For a moment it seemed that the impossible was about to be achieved, and if the ball had carried another fifty yards or so, it might well have been.

The four fighters thundered past unscathed. It was probably just a trick of the light, but Max could have sworn that he saw one of the pilots wave.

“He waved,” said Max. “One of them waved.”

“That’s because they know me.”

They were regulars, apparently, marauders who often appeared at this hour.

“They turn inland just down from here, coming at Safi and Luqa out of the low sun. Didn’t think they’d show today, though—nothing else has.”

The remote crackle of light antiaircraft fire carried up the coast to their ears.

“There they go. First action of the day.”

It also proved to be the last. By eight o’clock, there was still no sign of any bombers, and the last slither of the sun was sinking into the sea.

The warm orange light suffusing the courtyard gave way by almost imperceptible degrees to the distinctive purples and blues of a Maltese twilight. Elliott had got a fire going in an upturned dustbin lid that served as his barbecue, and a second bottle of Burgundy had appeared from the cellar. He had another white wine in mind for when the fish hit the table.

There were two of them, big and fresh and in need of gutting.

“Pawlu gets them for me.”

“I thought the fishermen had stopped going out.”

There had been a number of fatal strafing attacks on fishing boats in the last month—all part of the new policy of deliberately targeting the locals.

“These two beauties would suggest otherwise,” Elliott said, grinning.

He sat himself down across from Max at the rough lumber table in the courtyard and began to prepare the fish, working the knife with an expert hand.

“You look like you know what you’re doing.”

“Don’t be fooled. Pawlu showed me how.” He glanced up at Max. “It’s not in my blood, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m from mountain stock.”

It was near enough the first information Elliott had ever volunteered about himself, and it didn’t stop there.

He had grown up in the Berkshire Hills in western Massachusetts. Writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville had lived there and waxed lyrical about its stubborn and stony beauty, its soaring peaks and plunging valleys, but such romantic considerations had probably not figured very large in the minds of Elliott’s forebears on his mother’s side when they had chopped their farm out of the wilderness.

Winters there were long and harsh. Elliott could remember milk freezing in a pail left by an open door, and his mother thawing out the buttonholes on his jacket with a hot flatiron. He could also recall his grandfather getting caught in a blizzard and being carried home in the back of a cart, closer to death than life, not long for the world.

Elliott had been twelve at the time, and when it had finally been his turn to say his farewells, he had gone upstairs to the bed where his grandfather lay. Drawing him close by the hand, the old man had whispered weakly into his ear: “It is appointed unto man once to die.”

“I can tell you,” Elliott went on, “I was pretty glum when I woke the next morning. And you know what? The first thing I saw when I went down to breakfast was that hard-shelled old bastard moaning to my grandma that she’d overcooked the bacon again.”

His father’s side of the family was an altogether different story, one of New Yorkers drawn to the forest-clad slopes of the Berkshires by the fortunes to be made from paper. The Berkshire mills manufactured the paper from which United States currency was made, and this near enough amounted to a license to print their own money.

It was paper that carried the family to England when Elliott was a teenager, his father taking up a post with Wiggins Teape in Basing-stoke.

“Do you know Basingstoke?”

“Only to pass through.”

“That’s the best way to know it. It’s like Hawthorne said of Liverpool: ‘a most convenient and admirable point to get away from.’”

Max laughed. Elliott placed the fish on the grille over the glowing embers and continued with his account.

He hadn’t enjoyed his time in England, although his few years at Charterhouse School had been pleasant enough. His Calvinist boarding school back in the Berkshires had prepared him well for the vagaries of life in a prewar English public school: several hundred young men paying fearful homage to a handful of slightly older young men while a bunch of rather bewildered old men looked on.

Being a foreigner with a funny accent, he’d found himself the subject of ridicule, which had taught him a valuable lesson: to keep his mouth shut. Also, to bide his time; opportunities for revenge would present themselves sooner or later.

“I was the ‘lanky Yankee,’ a figure of fun.” He smiled as a thought came into his head. “Which is pretty much how people look at me here.”

“And are you plotting your revenge on us?”

Elliott’s voice took on a sinister edge. “Don’t worry. You get off light.”

Max smiled. “Why are you here, Elliott?”

“Because we’re allies.”

“I mean, why are you really here?”

“Because we’re allies.”

“You promised me some answers.”

“It’s an honest answer. We’re allies, and allies don’t always see eye to eye.”

“That’s a half answer.”

“We’ve been watching things over here for a good long while. It gives us a different perspective, and of course we’re going to take a view on what we see.”

“What’s the view?”

“The only one there is: that the two-bit upstart with the smudge on his upper lip has taken the first few rounds without breaking a sweat.”

“And … what? Now that you’re in the ring, he’s punching above his weight?”

Elliott gave a little shrug. “You wrote us out of your history of the last war, and you’ll do the same with this one. But the truth is, without us you’re screwed; with us, you stand a chance. A bold statement, I know.”

“And some might say an arrogant one.”

“Now, that’s one area where you beat us hands down. You’re the only people in the world who could turn Dunkirk into a victory—a mass retreat, for Christ’s sake!”

“I suppose.”

“What is it about you Brits and your constant refusal to know when you’re beaten? Don’t get me wrong, I admire you for it. I mean, last month, when the Penelope was in port for repairs, you remember?”

How could anyone forget? The Germans had hurled everything they’d had at the damaged cruiser. Day after day the Stukas had come to finish her off, reducing the dockside to a mesh of craters. The ship’s quarterdeck became known as the “rock garden,” and when she finally slipped away under darkness to Alexandria, there were more than two thousand wooden pegs in her, stopping up the shrapnel holes and earning her the nickname HMS Porcupine.

“I got caught down there one morning during a raid. It was bedlam, like nothing I’d ever seen, and right in the middle of it the ship’s company started singing. Singing, for Christ’s sake, to keep the spirits of the gunners up! I don’t get you guys, I really don’t.”

“So why did they pick you for the job?”

“I asked for the posting.”

“Regretting it yet?” Max inquired with a faint smile.

“Things are a bit hotter than I’d hoped, but hey, look around you….” He spread his hands. “Nine miles below hell, it ain’t.”

Elliott flipped the fish on the grille.

“Why Malta?” Max asked.

“Because we’re making history here.”

“Not that they don’t have enough of it already.”

“This will be right up there with the best of it. The war can turn on what happens here.”

“You’ve been speaking to Hugh.”

“Hugh’s a romantic, but he also happens to be right. Malta saved Europe once before, and it might just do it again. You won’t know this, but Mandalay fell to the Japs a couple of days back. Burma’s as good as gone, and they’re coming at India through Ceylon. If Egypt falls to Rommel, there’s nothing to stop the enemy linking up. They’ll cut the world in half and lay their hands on all that oil in the Middle East. If that happens, well, I know which horse my money’s on. Egypt has to hold out, and that’s where we fit in—this dot of an island in the middle of nowhere, so easy to ignore.”

“You call this being ignored? Every day for the past God-knows-how-many months they’ve dropped the same tonnage of bombs on us as they did on Coventry.”

“Field Marshal Kesselring’s no fool. Far from it,” conceded Elliott. “He knows the importance of Malta. But does he have Hitler’s ear? Because in the end, that’s what counts.”

“None of it’s going to matter when they invade.”

“They’re not going to invade.”

“I’m so glad you told me,” Max replied, with casual sarcasm.

“I mean it. The invasion’s off.”

“Off?”

“Put back. But that’s enough. Once the new Spitfires get here, it’s dead and done for. This was their one chance, and it looks like Hitler’s made the same mistake again. He should have invaded you guys two years ago. July 1940. That was his moment, and he missed it. This time, his big mistake was listening to Rommel. Rommel thinks he can get to Cairo, Malta or no Malta. But Rommel’s not an administrator; he’s a tactician—and a good one, if only because he’s unorthodox and therefore hard to read. Logistics like supply lines are beneath his dignity; it’s quartermaster stuff. He takes for granted he’ll get whatever he needs, and right now he is getting it. But if we gain air superiority over this island, then the Wellingtons and Blenheims will start flying again from Luqa, and he’ll know what it’s like to feel the pinch. Maybe he’ll take Tobruk—odds are he will, in my book—but Cairo’s a step too far.”

“Anything else I should know while you’re at it?”

Max intended the question as a joke.

“Depends if you can keep a secret or not,” replied Elliott, lighting a cigarette. “The governor’s about to be relieved.”

“Dobbie?”

“That’s impressive—the information officer knows the name of his commander in chief.”

Max was genuinely shocked. Dobbie was—well, he wasn’t just part of the furniture, he was Malta itself.

“Why?”

“He’s lost the confidence of his service chiefs, and they’ve started sneaking to teacher. Personally, I blame the command structure you’ve put in place. It’s a goddamn shambles. You’ve got a governor who’s answerable to the colonial secretary and to the War Office, and a general officer commanding who can’t coordinate the defense of the island because your naval and air force commanders report directly to their C-in-Cs in Cairo.”

“When you put it like that …”

“It is like that, and Dobbie’s taking the fall for it. I’d play the ‘poor health’ ticket if I were you, if only because there’s some truth in it. Oh, and better get drafting your piece. It’s going to happen soon, any day now.”

“In the middle of all this?”

“No point in hanging about once the decision’s been made. Thanks for everything, amigo, and adios.”

“Who’s replacing him?”

Elliott smiled. “You don’t expect me to hand you everything on a plate, do you?”

“No, although a piece of fish would be nice, before it’s cooked to buggery.”

They ate the fish with a simple salad of tomatoes so sweet that it suddenly made sense why they were classified as a fruit rather than a vegetable.

“I’ve been doing all the talking,” said Elliott. “Time for a bit of quid pro quo.”

“You really think I have anything up my sleeve to match what I’ve just heard?”

“I was talking about you. Tell me something about Max Chadwick that I don’t already know.”

“There’s a whole load of stuff you don’t know.”

“Don’t be so sure; I’ve read your file.”

“There’s a file on me?”

“You’re the information officer in a key theater of war. What do you think? I even know the name of your housemaster at Wellington.”

“Old Arsebreath?”

Elliott laughed. “That’s a level of detail it doesn’t go into.”

It came pretty close, though. Apparently Max had been described as “coming from a good family.”

“Well, that’s rubbish, for a start,” he protested. “My great-grandfather made a lot of money sending coal miners to their deaths. His son was a drunk, a bully, and a bigamist who never did an honest day’s work in his life.”

“A bigamist?”

“Well, maybe not technically, but he led a double life with another woman and other children.”

“And his son?”

“My father? He’s proof that the apple doesn’t always fall close to the tree.”

“Good on him,” said Elliott. “And that’s from a man who also had a bully for a father.”

Elliott already knew that Max’s mother had died when he was young. He didn’t know that she’d died in labor, giving birth to Max.

“There—something you didn’t know about me.”

“Doesn’t make the grade. I want something more personal.”

Max thought on it. Then he told Elliott about the letter his mother had written him.

It was a common enough practice, certainly for women like his mother, whose narrow hips weren’t best suited for bringing babies into the world. The doctor had warned her that it would be a difficult birth, that she might have to choose between herself and the child. She had chosen Max, and she had survived long enough to hold him in her arms before the loss of blood had killed her. Sometimes he saw himself spread-eagled on her chest, worn out from all the effort, as she slowly slipped away into oblivion. That’s how it had been, apparently; his father had told him so.

His father hadn’t told him about the letter she’d written to him, her unborn child—well, not until Max was sixteen. He’d found it long before then, though, hidden in his father’s desk, biding its time. The desk had always held a deep fascination for him, with its inlaid mother-of-pearl decoration and its drawers and pigeonholes stuffed with detritus from the world of adults. It was an irresistible Aladdin’s cave for a young boy, and whenever the coast was clear, he would go and poke around in it.

He found the letter tucked away with some other correspondence in a leather portfolio. It wasn’t sealed, and at first he was unsure what he was reading. Not long after, when he was packed off to boarding school near Oxford, he took the letter with him, a guard against loneliness. It had worked. The disembodied voice of his mother—recorded in her distinctive handwriting, with its looping p’s and g’s and y’s—had blunted his sense of isolation. She’d been with him, watching over him.

It was a long letter, and in it she spelled out the story of her life, everything from her childhood in the countryside near Versailles to the comical first encounter with his father in the lobby of the apartment building in Paris. She went to great pains to say that he (although she used the neutral “you” throughout) was the product of a fine and fulsome love affair, and she signed off with a line of French that made no sense to him whatsoever.

Had his French teacher been some creaky old chap in a tweed jacket, he probably wouldn’t have sought him out and asked for a translation. Mademoiselle Leckford, as Lucinda was known, had offered an altogether different prospect. She was young and pretty, and all the boys were a little in love with her. Max copied out the line on a piece of paper, which he presented to her after a class:Tu aurais été ma vie

She scrutinized it a moment before asking, “Where does it come from?” Seeing that the question unsettled him, she quickly added, “You don’t have to say.”

But he told her anyway. It was good to have the excuse to tell someone about his mother and the letter she had written him, especially someone like Mademoiselle Leckford.

“It means …,” she said softly, peering down at him with a strange look in her eyes. “It means, ‘You would have been my life.’”

“Oh.”

She turned away, staring out the window. “Now run along, Chadwick.”

Only later did he learn that she had turned her back on him because she hadn’t wanted him to see the tears building in her eyes.

Of course, the pity felt by an adult for a ten-year-old boy could hardly be dignified with the name of friendship, but it had nonetheless been the start of something enduring and important for both of them.

“I still see her,” said Max, speaking of Lucinda. “And maybe I’m still a bit in love with her.”

“That’ll do me,” Elliott replied. “I like that. It’s a good story. Very revealing.”

“If you say so.”

“Oh, I do.”

Only when the plates were cleared away did they broach the subject they both knew they’d been avoiding, and it was Elliott who took the initiative.

“Recovered from the meeting yesterday?”

“Oh, that’s what it was. Seemed more like a court-martial to me.”

“From where I was sitting too.”

“Where exactly were you sitting?”

Elliott leaned back in his chair. “Put it this way: I can see both sides.”

“You think I can’t? You know what I did when Freddie first showed me the shoulder tab?”

“No, but I can guess. You thought about getting rid of it.”

Max was momentarily thrown by the response. “And what would you have done?”

“Same as you, probably—thought about it, changed my mind, snooped around a bit. The only difference is, I wouldn’t have got caught.”

“Well, bully for you.”

Elliott shrugged the comment aside. “I’m trained for that kind of thing. You’re an architect with a gift for writing the kind of upbeat bullshit that people want to hear at times like this.”

“If you’re trying to put me in my place, you’re doing a pretty good job—better than Colonel Gifford, even.”

“Gifford’s about as subtle as an anvil. I told him you couldn’t be strong-armed.”

“Well, he proved you wrong.”

“Did he? I doubt it. My guess is you’ve thought about nothing else since then … and what you’re going to do about it now.”

“What do you care?” said Max warily.

“You think I’m completely without principles?”

It was a typical play from Elliott, answering a question with a question. Nevertheless, Max reached into his hip pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. Elliott took it from him, angling it at the light from the candles.

Max had scribbled three questions on it: Where does he find them? Where did he take Carmela Cassar? Why does he do it? He had put a line through the last of these.

“Interesting,” said Elliott. “But why cross out the last one?”

“Because it’s imponderable. Who knows why he does it? Some sick urge buried away deep inside him.”

“Him?” asked Elliott. “Why not them?”

The thought hadn’t occurred to Max. “I just assumed …”

“Well, don’t. Wethern’s Law of Suspended Judgment: assumption is the mother of all screwups.” Elliott pointed to the third item on Max’s list. “For all you know, this is the key to it all. Don’t dismiss it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Jeez, your ignorance is refreshing. I’m saying, what if he’s doing it for reasons other than self-gratification? What if he’s looking to destabilize the situation here? What if he’s working for the enemy and the whole thing is one big setup, all part of a plan to turn the Maltese against you, to break the special relationship?”

“Now you’re sounding like Ralph. He sees spies and fifth columnists everywhere.”

“Ralph is right to be on his guard. They are here. I can tell you that for nothing.”

It was a big statement, and one that raised more questions, but Max tried to remain focused on the issue.

“Freddie said there was evidence of sexual interference.”

“Ah …”

“So either this person—or persons—takes his job very seriously, or he’s getting some kind of pleasure from it.”

“Maybe both.”

“Now you’re reaching.”

“It’s possible, though.”

“Anything’s possible under what’s-his-name’s rule. It’s okay to make assumptions if they’re based on evidence.”

“What evidence? One trip to the sub base?” Elliott paused to allow his words to sink in. “I called Tommy Ravilious this afternoon. Don’t worry, I played my cards close. He still thinks the sun shines out of your skinny fundament.”

“Thank God for that. I can sleep easy tonight.”

“I don’t know,” said Elliott, glancing up at the cloudless sky. “That’s a ‘bomber’s moon.’ I wouldn’t bank on any of us sleeping easy tonight.” Looking back at Max, he asked, “So? Do the dates match with when the Upstanding was in port?”

“Of course. That’s not the sort of slip an enemy agent would make.”

Elliott regarded him with a look that hovered on the fringes of disappointment. “I’ve got to say, I’m surprised at your skepticism.”

“I don’t like to leap to assumptions.”

“Touché,” said Elliott with a little nod. “But maybe they’re more than just assumptions. Maybe I know more than I’m letting on.”

Max swirled the wine in his glass, staring at it, pensive.

“I think I can see what you’re doing,” Max said eventually.

“Enlighten me.”

“It’s complicated.”

“So boil it down.”

Colonel Gifford’s threats might not have worked, but if Max could be made to believe there were other factors at play, things far beyond his understanding, then maybe that would persuade him to back off, especially if he thought that by taking the matter further he would only be playing into the enemy’s hands, serving their nefarious cause. Elliott was simply finishing the job that Gifford had started.

Elliott listened attentively to the theory before announcing, “You’re wrong. As far as I’m concerned, what you get up to is your own business. But this”—he wagged the sheet of paper at Max—“is taking you nowhere fast. I mean, look at it. Where did he take Carmela Cassar? It’s the wrong question. Valetta’s a ghost town, so are the Three Cities, even Sliema and Gzira. Most of the people have left. He’s got options coming out of his ears. The question should be: How did he take her there?”

It was a good point. Gasoline was so scarce that motor vehicles had become a rare sight on the roads in the past month or more. Most servicemen were reduced to getting around on foot or on bicycle or in the horse-drawn gharries favored by the Maltese. These were open-sided carriages on four large sprung wheels—hardly an ideal mode of transport for moving a victim about.

“Okay,” said Max, “I’ll add it to the list.”

“You’re really set on seeing this through?”

“You think it’s a bad idea?”

“Yes, because they’ll be watching you closely.”

“Then you can stop me. All it takes is a quick word in the ear of your ginger-haired friend.”

“He’s not my friend. And I’d never do that to you.”

“I wouldn’t put it past you.”

“Hey, now I’m insulted.”

“Something tells me you’ll get over it.”

Elliott smiled. “Coffee?”

“Really?”

“Colombian or Sumatran?”

“Now I know you’re joking.”

But he wasn’t. The pantry off the bare stone kitchen was stocked with both. It also housed a range of other rarities: tinned fruits, several varieties of tea, a bowl of hens’ eggs, bottles of olive oil. There were even a couple of cured hams hanging from hooks.

“Bloody hell, Elliott, where did this lot come from?”

“I’ll show you.”

The pantry had been impressive, but it was nothing compared to the barn. Small wonder the doors were secured with a hefty padlock.

“Promise not to tell?” asked Elliott as he led Max inside. The light from the hurricane lamp cast wild shadows around the interior, revealing a storehouse of goods piled high in boxes. In one corner stood a stack of gleaming ten-gallon fuel canisters.

“Impressive, huh?”

“I’m not sure the military police would see it the same way.”

“We don’t get a lot of Red Caps out in these parts.”

Max strolled through the cases.

“I’m not a profiteer, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Elliott said.

“Just a hoarder?”

“Not even. This is work. I’m the sole representative of the United States government on the island, and sometimes I need to get things done. This lot counts for more than money right now.”

“Ah, ambassadorial privilege.”

“Nicely put. I like that.”

“Well, let’s hope you don’t ever have to plead it.”

“Is that a threat?”

“Nothing that a small bribe can’t rectify.”

Max was joking, of course, but when he set off back to Valetta after two cups of very fine coffee, it was with a full tank of gasoline sloshing between his legs and half a dozen eggs secreted about his person.