The Information Officer

DAY NINE

THERE WAS NO SUDDEN AWAKENING. HE CAME BACK TO consciousness slowly, on a building wave of pain. It carried him inexorably toward the shore and dumped him in a heap onto the beach. Only it wasn’t a beach, because there was a wall and something lying on top of him, pressing down on his leg.

He remembered now: the stick of bombs converging on him, the motorcycle sliding away, then flying, weightless, airborne …

As his eyes adjusted to the pale wash of moonlight, he saw that he was lying at the bottom of a steep bank, jammed up against a stone wall, his left leg caught beneath the motorcycle. How long he’d been there, he didn’t know. There was a smell of gasoline, and the thought of the precious liquid leaking away stirred him into action.

Once he’d freed his leg, he was surprised to find he was able to stand. He checked himself over with his hands, his palms raw and throbbing. The bleeding seemed superficial—lots of grazes and some deeper cuts on his legs. There was also a large bump on the back of his head, congealed with blood. He couldn’t place too much weight on his left ankle. It didn’t feel broken, though, just badly sprained.

He was more worried about the motorcycle, but she also seemed to have survived. There was still air in both tires, and although the handlebars were slightly out of alignment, the steering felt fine. From the sound of it, there was also enough gas in the tank to see him to Valetta.

He made his way up the bank, trying to piece together what had happened. He had come off the road at a bend. He hadn’t seen it at the time, and it wasn’t the reason he’d hit the back brake so hard. He had braked because some survival instinct had told him it was better to be close to the ground when a bomb went off. He could make out the large crater the bomb had torn in the shoulder of the road. He’d been lucky. The bend had probably saved him, the steep bank shielding him from the blast as he’d left the road.

The airfield at Luqa was recovering from the onslaught. He could see a few fires still burning, and every so often a delayed-action bomb would go off.

He turned at the sound of an approaching vehicle, traveling fast. He guessed what it was before he saw it—an ambulance racing to the scene. They were about the only things left on the roads since gas rationing had been tightened, and he often joked with Freddie that he and his kind were a bloody menace to other drivers.

He was right. It was an ambulance going hell-for-leather. He was about to flag it down when something stayed his hand—something Elliott had said to him, something he hadn’t thought about since.

The question isn’t where he took Carmela Cassar, but how he took her there.

He tried to reject the idea taking shape in his head, but it refused to be budged. The thought ripped through his brain, touching and changing everything in its path. The world as he’d been looking at it blurred into nothingness, and when it fell back into focus, he was no longer on the outside looking in. He was right at the heart of it, able to see things from all angles with a crisp and terrifying clarity.

“Oh my God,” he said quietly.

He knew there were seventy-two steps because he’d counted them before. He counted them now, not for old times’ sake but because each one sent a sharp pain shooting up his left leg. Maybe the ankle was broken after all.

He knew there was a good chance Lionel would be there—his last night on the island—but Max didn’t care. He didn’t even pause on the landing before knocking.

Mitzi eventually answered the door looking like something out of Dickens, with a dressing gown tightly tied at her waist, and carrying a chamber candlestick.

He was leaning against the doorjamb for support.

Her face fell. “My God, Max, what happened to you?”

“Who did you tell about us?”

“He’s here,” she said tightly.

“Who did you tell about us?”

“Max …,” she pleaded.

It was too late. Lionel materialized from the gloom behind her.

“I say, old man, are you all right?”

Max ignored him. “Who did you tell?”

Mitzi turned to Lionel. “He’s obviously not himself.”

“I’ll say. What’s going on? What do you mean?”

Max stared at them both. He saw the silent pact that had brought them together and the emptiness hanging between them, the lies. He could change it all in a moment. He could take it from them. He could hand the hurt straight back to Mitzi. It was so easy. Too easy.

“I’ve been seeing a girl in the office,” he said finally. “She’s Maltese. She’s also married. I made the mistake of telling your wife here. It now seems that half the bloody garrison knows.”

“Are you drunk?”

“A little. Enough to crash my motorcycle.”

Lionel edged past Mitzi protectively. “I think you should leave.”

Mitzi placed a restraining hand on Lionel’s arm.

“Freddie,” she said. “I told Freddie.”

There was gratitude in her eyes for the lie he’d concocted.

“When?”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake—”

“Shut up, Lionel.” Mitzi looked back at Max. “A few months ago, maybe more. January, I think.”

Max nodded his thanks, and she turned and wandered back to the bedroom. Lionel wasn’t done with him yet, though.

“You’re a bloody disgrace to your service!”

“Am I, Ken?”

He saw a satisfying flicker of alarm in Lionel’s eyes. “I know about you and Mary Farrugia, and I’m guessing you also brushed with Loreta Saliba and Carmela Cassar.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do. They’re all dead. Murdered.”

“Murdered?”

“Don’t worry. I know it wasn’t you.”

He turned and hobbled off down the stairs.

He had never given his service revolver much thought—he strapped it on each morning, removed it before bed—but now he felt naked without it. Finding a replacement wasn’t going to be easy at five o’clock in the morning. There was an obvious place to start, though. It was also on his route.

He was surprised to find the boys at the Bofors gun site near his flat already up and about. They were peering down over the bastion wall into the dark abyss of Grand Harbour. It was another half hour till sunrise, but way to the east, beyond the harbor mouth, the sky was already brightening.

“There!” said one of them, pointing.

It was just possible to make out the dark form of a ship sliding through the gloom toward them.

“It’s the Welshman. She made it!”

There were cheers and slaps on the back, and that’s when they noticed they had company.

“It’s only me,” said Max.

“You see that, sir, the Welshman got through!”

“Cigarette, sir?”

“Cup of tea, sir?”

“Foot rub, sir?”

The joker got his laugh. Max was in favor with the Manchester men since their heroics had been reported in the Weekly Bulletin, as he’d promised they would be.

“Just a quick word in private with Sergeant Deakin, if he’s around.”

“Right here, sir,” came a voice from the darkness.

Max led Deakin a little way off. “I don’t have time to explain. I need to borrow your gun.”

“My gun?”

“Your service revolver. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”

“You know I can’t, sir. It’s against regulations.”

“It’s a matter of life or death.”

“That’s the truth. The CO’d ’ave my guts for garters if he found out.”

“What if I took it off you by force?”

“You’re welcome to give it a go, sir, but if you don’t mind me saying, you’re not moving too good.”

“Okay,” said Max, “here it is. My friend, my best friend, is probably a German agent. He’s also planning to kill a girl I care very much about. For all I know, she’s dead already. So you see, I’m going to have to give it a go whatever.”

“Holy mackerel,” said Deakin softly. “Are you sure you’re all right in the head?”

“Never better. Actually, that’s a lie. But what I’ve just told you is the truth. You have my word on it.”

After a few moments, Deakin handed over his revolver.

“You’re a good man, Sergeant.”

“Yeah, well, just remember to bring that up at my court-martial.”

The road to the naval hospital at Bighi skirted Grand Harbour on its southern side, taking him through the Three Cities, right past the dockyards. He thought about stopping off and enlisting the support of the military police, but procedures would have to be followed, phone calls made, authority sought. Precious minutes, hours even, would tick by. Besides, the situation might call for the kind of behavior not exactly endorsed by the rule book. He had no problem with that, but officialdom would see things differently.

No, this was a personal matter now—or rather, it had been all along. Only his self-absorption had kept him from grasping that fact earlier. It had been right there in front of him, not just staring him in the face but prodding him in the chest, kicking him in the shins.

The notion that the coincidence had been anything more than just that—the capricious hands of chance at work—had never even occurred to him: a killer on the loose, a crew member from the Upstanding, which just so happened to be the submarine commanded by the husband of the woman with whom he’d been having an affair.

He hadn’t made the connection before because he’d assumed that no one else knew about Mitzi and him. But she’d set him straight on that. Freddie knew; Freddie had known since the beginning of the year. Freddie, who had drawn him into the intrigue in the first place. Freddie, with his talk of left-handers and Have you ever wondered if it’s Lionel? Max could almost see Freddie laughing to himself as he tinkered with their sick little triangle of deceits and clandestine affairs, the puppet master surveying them all from on high, pulling their strings, jerking their limbs. Maybe Elliott had been right, maybe Freddie was a moralist at heart—one who had no scruples when it came to his own behavior.

Where Elliott fitted, he didn’t yet know. Why had he helped Max, nudging him toward the answer? Did he already know the truth? Had he suspected all along? For now, Max was happy to forgo the answers. All that mattered to him was finding Lilian. That one goal consumed him. It also scared him, because he saw just how far he was willing to go to get her back. Freddie had made the rules, and Max was ready to play by them.

The naval hospital at Bighi stood square, squat, and ugly on the tip of the cliff-girt promontory beyond Vittoriosa, near the mouth of Grand Harbour. Like the other hospitals on the island, it had suffered at the hands of the Luftwaffe in the past month. Unlike some of them, it was still operational.

The nurse at the main desk couldn’t say for certain where Freddie was, so she directed Max to the surgeons’ sleeping quarters. This was after she had offered to summon the duty medical officer to check him over, assuming that he’d shown up in search of treatment.

He hobbled his way to the low run of stone huts on the grounds near the east wing of the building. A slumbering doctor, not happy at being woken, directed him to Freddie’s digs two huts down.

Freddie wasn’t there, but his roommate was.

“You just missed him. He’s headed for the docks.”

“The docks?”

“To help with the wounded from the Welshman. She hit a couple of mines on her way in.”

Nearing the hospital, Max had passed a small fleet of ambulances racing down the hill in the opposite direction. This put him no more than fifteen minutes behind, if he stepped on it.

“I’d keep well clear of the docks, if I were you. They’re sure to have a pop at her come sunup.”

As Max hurried back through the grounds to his motorcycle, the first sliver of the new sun appeared out of the eastern sea, illuminating his path.

At first, he thought the Welshman’s precious cargo must be alight. A dense gray-green cloud was rising over the dockyards, spreading like some malevolent fog. He slowed the motorcycle, listening for the accompanying crackle of exploding ammunition, but heard nothing. A smoke screen, he realized, put up to throw off the aim of the enemy bombers. Moments later, he was swallowed up by it.

Chaos ruled along French Creek, much of it caused by the swirling smoke belching from the generators. With visibility reduced to a matter of yards, Max abandoned the motorcycle and set off on foot, searching for the ambulances. The unloading was already under way, and the quayside was a logjam of trucks waiting to bear off the cargo. Men moved through the miasma, appearing and fading like ghosts to a chorus of muffled shouts and orders. These increased in volume as the Welshman loomed into view, long and trim and battle-worn, with streaks of rust staining her flaking paint. She had her own cranes for loading, which was fortunate. Those on the quayside stood broken and twisted like crippled giants.

Max barged a path up the gangway onto the ship. He collared a crewman and asked for the sick bay. A peculiar stillness descended on him as he made his way belowdecks. He felt utterly divorced from the frenetic activity unfolding around him, focused on the imminent confrontation.

Freddie wasn’t in the sick bay, but a man on a bunk with a big bandage on his head mumbled some directions to the forward dressing station where the wounded were being tended to.

A couple of them hadn’t made it. They lay covered in blankets in a corner of the room. The others were on stretchers, patched up and ready to be moved. Freddie was in the thick of things, administering an injection of morphia to a howling sailor whose thigh was swaddled in blood-soaked rags.

Was that how he did it? Was that how he subdued the girls, with pharmaceuticals?

Freddie seemed to sense Max’s thoughts, turning as he got to his feet.

“My God, Max, what are you doing here?”

“I need to talk to you.”

“Hardly the time or the place.”

Freddie gestured the waiting orderlies forward. “Okay, let’s get them out of here.”

Max could only look on as Freddie marshaled his men, leading the party of stretcher-bearers through the belly of the ship. Max brought up the rear, doing his best to keep Freddie in his sights.

The air-raid siren heralded their appearance on the upper deck. This gave them seven minutes at most before the bombs would begin to fall. Somewhere up ahead, lost in the blanket of smoke, Max heard Freddie call, “Clear the gangway! Make way for the wounded!”

Max imagined Freddie slipping away in the man-made fog, but he was waiting at the bottom of the gangway, seeing the party safely off the ship, pointing a path through the torrent of men and clattering carts loaded with crates.

“Where is she, Freddie?”

“What happened? You look terrible.”

“I know it’s you.”

“And you’re not making a whole lot of sense.”

Freddie turned to follow the train of stretcher-bearers across the quayside. Max held him back by the arm. Freddie shook himself free, angry now.

“I don’t know what’s got into you, but there are men there who need attention. So—if you don’t mind—I’ve got a job to do.”

Max hadn’t spotted the ambulances on the quayside because they were parked in the streets of Senglea, just back from the docks. Senglea was a ghost town, long since evacuated by order of the governor. If anything, the smoke sat thicker there than on the quayside, undisturbed by the urgent passage of men.

There were four ambulances in all, but only three were required for the wounded men. Freddie sent them on their way before turning his attention back to Max. They were alone now, and Freddie was still angry.

“Okay, what the bloody hell’s going on?”

Don’t be fooled by the indignation, Max told himself. You’re dealing with a practiced liar, a dangerous man.

“Where’s Lilian?”

“Lilian?”

“Tell me where she is!”

“How the hell should I know?”

Reaching for his gun seemed the right thing to do. Taking his eyes off Freddie for a split second as he did so was definitely the wrong thing.

The fist caught him square in the mouth, snapping his head back. His knees buckled and the world seemed to recede around him. He was dimly aware of the air-raid siren and the taste of blood in his mouth and the sound of an engine starting. He forced himself back to consciousness in time to see the remaining ambulance disappear into the smoke.

He stumbled off in pursuit, pulling the revolver from its holster. That’s when the Grand Harbour barrage opened up. It hadn’t been heard in months, not on this scale, not since the March convoy. The restrictions on ammunition had clearly been lifted, and guns were letting off from every quarter. The shattering cacophony didn’t assault just the ears but all the senses. The street shivered before Max’s eyes; his legs felt leaden, numbed to the bone by the reverberations.

He didn’t hear the ambulance until it was almost on him, materializing in a moment, its blunt nose bearing down on him head-on.

He hurled himself to the left, landing hard in a pile of rubble. The ambulance veered to crush him, and it might have succeeded if a large chunk of stonework hadn’t deflected it from its course. The front wheel struck the block with a sickening crunch, and the vehicle reared up, flashing him its dark belly as it passed over him, teetering on two wheels.

Because of the smoke, he didn’t see it roll over, but he heard the sound, even above the thunder of the barrage and the scream of diving Stukas.

He groped for the revolver among the rubble, pushed himself to his feet, and set off after the ambulance.

The vehicle lay on its side, its engine still running. He didn’t bother to check the driver’s compartment because he saw Freddie staggering off through the smoke. Max wasn’t capable of breaking into a sprint, but he did his best under the circumstances and was closing in when Freddie cut right, up some steps.

They led to a church, or what was left of it. A large section of the front façade was gone, and the entrance doors hung drunkenly from their hinges. A small voice told Max to holster his weapon before entering the building. He ignored it.

Freddie had made no attempt to hide. The roof had collapsed into the nave, and he was scrabbling his way toward the back of the building over the twisted beams and broken tiles. Max fired a warning shot, the report echoing off the walls and stopping Freddie in his tracks. He stood upright, turning to face his pursuer.

Outside, the crumping barrage began to fade, the first phase of the raid over. Max picked his way through the rubble. Within the four walls of the church, the smoke seemed to hang in the air like incense at a Catholic Mass.

“Is she alive? Tell me she’s alive.”

“She’s alive.”

“Where is she?”

“In a basement.”

“Where?”

“Within a two-mile radius.”

They both knew what that meant. Grand Harbour’s toothy huddle of cities and towns was reputed to be the most built-over place in Europe.

“You’ll never find her, I can promise you that, not if you pull that trigger. She’ll die a slow death, a horrible death, the worst kind. Starvation and dehydration—is that what you want for her?”

“Why, Freddie?”

“Why?” He gave a short laugh. “My God, that’s a question and a half. How long have you got?”

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t expect you to.”

“We were friends.”

“You mean we aren’t anymore?”

He seemed almost to be enjoying himself, untroubled by the gun leveled at his chest.

“Tell me where she is.”

“You think you can make me with that popgun? Go ahead, try. Better still, don’t bother. There’s no point. I’ll never tell you, not you, not anyone.” He spread his arms wide. “Here before God I give you my word.”

“You’re bluffing.”

“You don’t know me,” said Freddie darkly. “It’ll be my little victory. Go on, do it. She’s dead anyway.”

Max lowered the gun sharply, aiming at Freddie’s leg, his finger tightening around the trigger.

A shot rang out around the church and Max was sent reeling, as if clubbed in the arm. He stumbled and fell, gripping his shoulder, feeling the blood, the shock giving way to a searing pain and the vague realization that he’d just been shot.

Elliott stepped into view from behind a pillar—his gun, his eyes, trained on Max.

“Is he alone?” Elliott asked.

Max was on the point of replying when Elliott turned to Freddie and demanded, “Is he alone?”

“I think so,” replied Freddie, slowly coming out of a crouch.

“You think so, or you know so?”

“I’m pretty sure.”

Freddie’s confusion was becoming more evident with each response.

Keeping his gun on Max, Elliott recovered the revolver from the ground before backing away.

“What are you doing here?” Freddie asked, bewildered.

“My job,” said Elliott. “Covering your back. I work for Tacitus too.”

Tacitus? The significance of the word was lost on Max, and for a moment the same seemed true for Freddie. But then he began to laugh.

“You think it’s funny? You see me laughing? I wouldn’t have to be here if you hadn’t screwed up.”

“Elliott?” said Max pathetically.

“Shut up.”

Elliott turned back to Freddie and nodded toward the main doors. “Get out of here.”

Freddie edged his way past Elliott. “What are you going to do with him?”

“Use your imagination.”

“Goodbye, Max,” said Freddie.

The words sounded almost heartfelt.

Max stared at them both, incapable of speech.

Elliott advanced on him.

“Elliott …,” he pleaded.

“Lie down.”

Max kicked out with his feet, trying to keep him at bay.

It couldn’t end like this. It wasn’t possible.

His efforts to defend himself were rewarded with a crippling boot to the solar plexus. Gasping for breath, he looked up at Elliott, vaguely aware of Freddie—a dim shape in the smoke, watching from near the entrance.

“I’m sorry,” said Elliott, dropping to one knee and placing the muzzle of his revolver against Max’s temple. “But as the old saying goes, ‘It is appointed unto man once to die.’”

The words chimed with some hazy memory. He knew that they had made him laugh at the time, but he couldn’t remember why. Something to do with snow and an old man …

He was still groping for the details when Elliott pulled the trigger.