The Information Officer

TACITUS CONTACTED HIM AT THE USUAL TIME.

He had made a point over the past days of neither broad casting nor receiving, choosing instead to leave the machine tucked well away in its wooden box. He could imagine Tacitus’s frustration, but he couldn’t picture the man behind the code name. He vacillated between an unassuming character, easily underestimated, and a more obvious type in the Lutz Kettelmann mold: tall, officious, blandly handsome. His tastes ran naturally to the former. He liked a dark horse, being something of one himself.

The message brought a smile to his lips. It was the first time that Tacitus had addressed him in English.Silence is not always golden. Tacitus.

He punched his reply into the machine, noting down the enciphered text before transmitting it.And talk is not always cheap. Virgil.

It was a satisfying riposte: a play on the same proverb while at the same time implying that they would have to pay dearly for any more information. He was over his little sulk, now that his plans were back on track, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t punish them for throwing those plans into disarray in the first place.

It was a while before he heard back from them, time to read a couple of chapters of his book. Their request, when it finally came through, was predictable enough. They wanted to know everything he’d learned about the reinforcement flight of Spitfires heading for the island. Did he have an exact date? An idea of the numbers involved? What preparations were under way at the airfields? How did they plan to disperse the aircraft? In short, had they learned from their mistakes last time round, and if so, what new measures were they adopting?

He thought about lying; the idea amused him. One hundred and twenty Mark V Spitfires due at first light tomorrow morning. That would certainly have had Tacitus tearing his hair out, or what was left of it. His preferred incarnation of Tacitus was thin on top.

In the end, he was a good boy, and answered the questions as precisely as possible. He even threw in a bonus, advising that it would be worth keeping an eye on the seaplane base in Kalafrana Bay that evening. A well-timed raid might just kill two birds with one stone—the outgoing governor and his replacement.

When he was done, he packed the machine away and wandered through to the living room. He poured himself a large whisky and wound up the gramophone. Sitting there with a glass in one hand, a cigarette in the other, his thoughts turned to Max—handsome, hopeless Max, torn between two such different women.

Was he even aware of the true scale of the cliché? It was a corny conundrum straight from the pages of Ivanhoe or Daniel Deronda: the young man whose heart is divided between the blond embodiment of his own kind and a creature altogether more dark and exotic. Sir Walter Scott and George Eliot had each chosen to throw a Jewess in the path of their hero. Max, it seemed, had fallen hard for a Maltese of mixed ancestry. He knew that Max had fallen hard because he’d watched them up close and he’d watched them from afar, and the body language was unmistakable.

Max had proved himself a far more capable dissimulator with Mitzi. Even when observing the dumb play of their moving lips across a crowded room, when they’d thought they were alone, he’d been able to detect little of their private history. Almost nothing in their behavior betrayed them. You really had to know what had been going on in order to see it.

He poured himself another whisky and recovered his notebook from its hiding place. If he were any different, he might have been able to sustain his natural sympathy for Max. A part of him even wished it were possible. It wasn’t, though. That became evident as soon as he began to write.

The characters lost their lustre, like wet clay hardening in the sun. Baked, cracked, and flawed, the tiny effigies were hard to care for. He shunted them about, choreographing the final act as best he could. The days ahead would be turbulent and unpredictable. He couldn’t foretell the exact hour when the new Spitfires would fly in, or when the Upstanding would slip away to Alexandria, or where exactly the official duties of the various players, himself included, would carry them during the inevitable chaos.

His meditations were interrupted by the building wail of the siren. Yet another raid, the third of the night. He lit a cigarette, annoyed by the distraction that had caused him to lose his train of thought. Extinguishing the candle, he crossed to the window and pushed open the shutters.

The blue-white fingers of the searchlights groped around the heavens, their efforts thwarted by a low blanket of clouds that played in the Germans’ favor. Before long, he heard the grumbling roar of unseen Junkers approaching. There weren’t many of them, a mere handful by the sound of it. The reason for that became clear a few moments later.

They dropped through the clouds in the hundreds, sputtering into life—bright white, falling silently to earth, dripping phosphorescence, illuminating the underbelly of the clouds. And still they kept coming, hundreds of them, thousands of them, like swarming fireflies, turning night into day, lighting up the whole island now, laying bare the undulating mosaic of the Maltese landscape.

It was a spectacle he’d witnessed before, but never quite on this scale, and it was impressive, almost moving, until you remembered that it was the harmless prelude to a far more devastating display of pyrotechnics. The other bombers, the ones carrying death in their bellies, were already approaching, the air throbbing with the menacing beat of their engines.

The revelation came to him as the searchlights converged on the first wave of planes to break cloud cover: a new ending, a bold and unexpected finale, one at which Max and Lilian would both be present.