Читать книгу The Information Officer - Mark Mills - Страница 7

‘Tea or coffee?’

‘Which do you recommend?’

‘Well, the first tastes like dishwater, the second like slurry run-off.’

‘I’ll try the slurry run-off.’

Max summoned the attention of the waiter hovering nearby. He was new—squat and toad-like—some member of the kitchen staff drafted in to replace Ugo, whose wife had been wounded in a strafing attack at the weekend while out strolling with friends near Rabat. Gratifyingly, the pilot of the Messerschmitt 109 had paid for this outrage with his life, a Spitfire from Ta’ Qali dropping on to his tail moments later and bringing him down in the drink off the Dingli Cliffs.

‘How’s Ugo’s wife?’ Max enquired of the waiter.

‘She dead.’

‘Oh.’

In case there was any doubt, the waiter tilted his head to one side and let a fat tongue roll out his mouth. The eyes remained open, staring.

‘Two coffees, please.’

‘Two coffee.’

‘Yes, thank you.’

Max’s eyes tracked the waiter as he waddled off, but his thoughts were elsewhere, with Ugo, and wondering how long it would be before he smiled his crooked smile again.

He forced his attention back to the young man sitting across from him. Edward Pemberton was taking in his surroundings—the tall windows, the elaborately painted walls and the high, beamed ceiling—apparently immune to the mention of death.

‘What a beautiful place.’

‘It’s the old Auberge de Provence.’

Once home to the Knights of St John, the grand Baroque edifice now housed the Union Club, a welcome haven from the hard realities of war for the officer classes. The building seemed to bear a charmed life, standing remarkably unscathed among the ruins and rubble of Kingsway, Valletta’s principle street. With its reassuring whiff of a St James’s gentleman’s club, there was no better place to break the news to young Pemberton. It might help soften the blow.

‘Who’s Ugo?’

So he had been listening, after all.

‘The head waiter.’

‘How did his wife die?’

Max hesitated then told him the story. No point in pretending that things hadn’t turned nasty of late. In fact, it might fire his sense of outrage, winning him over to the cause, although, when it came to it, Pemberton would have very little say in the matter. He wouldn’t be leaving Malta any time soon; he just didn’t know it yet. Another bird of passage ensnared by the beleaguered garrison. Poor bastard.

Max spelled it out as gently as he could. The Lieutenant-Governor’s office had already been in touch with the brass in Gibraltar, who appreciated that Malta’s back was up against the wall. If Pemberton’s services were required on the island, then so be it. Needs must, and all that. Force majeure. First dibs to the downtrodden. You get the picture.

‘I understand,’ said Pemberton.

‘Really?’

‘Absolutely, sir. No objections.’

Max wanted to ask him if he had any notion of what lay in store for him: the breathless heat and the choking dust, the mosquitoes, sandflies and man-eating fleas, the sleepless nights and the starvation rations. Oh, and the Luftwaffe, who, together with the Regia Aeronautica, were intent on wiping the island off the map, on bombing it into oblivion.

‘I never wanted to go to Gib,’ Pemberton went on. ‘It never appealed…as a place, I mean.’

War as tourism, thought Max. Well, that’s one way of coming at it, and probably no better or worse than any other.

‘Malta has a lot to offer,’ said Max. ‘When the history of the war comes to be written, this little lump of rock in the middle of the Med will figure large.’

‘If you’re appealing to my vanity, it might just work.’

Max gave a short loud laugh which drew glances from a couple of artillery types at a nearby table. Pemberton was smiling coyly, faultless teeth flashing in his wide, strong mouth. Matinee idol looks and a sense of humour. Perfect fodder for Rosamund, Max mused. She’ll never forgive me if I don’t offer her right of first refusal.

Pemberton explained (with a degree of candour he would soon learn to curb) that he was sick of being shunted from pillar to post under the protective tutelage of his uncle, a big-wig in the War Office.

‘I should warn you, he won’t be best pleased.’

‘Then you can tell him that Malta has already saved your life. The seaplane you should have flown out on last night is missing.’

‘Missing?’

‘Brought down near Pantelleria, we think. They have Radio Direction Finding and a squadron of 109s stationed there. We won’t know for sure until we hear what Rome Radio has to say on the matter. They talk a lot of rubbish, of course, but we’ve grown pretty adept at panning for the small truths that matter to us.’

Pemberton stared forlornly at his cup of coffee before looking up. ‘I had lunch with the pilot yesterday. Douglas. I knew him from Alex. Douglas Pitt.’

Max had never heard of Pitt, but then the seaplane boys at Kalafrana Bay rarely mingled, not even with the other pilots. They were always on the go, running the two thousand-mile gauntlet between Alexandria and Gibraltar at opposite ends of the Mediterranean, breaking the journey in Malta—the lone Allied outpost in a hostile, Nazi-controlled sea.

‘You’ll get used to it.’

Pemberton’s eyes locked on to Max, demanding an explanation.

‘Look, I’d be lying if I said casualty rates weren’t running pretty high right now. People, they…well, they’re here one day, gone the next.’

When Pemberton spoke, there was a mild note of irritation in his tone. ‘That doesn’t mean you have to stop remembering them.’

Well actually it does, thought Max. Because if you spent your time thinking about the ones who’d copped it, you wouldn’t be able to function. In his first year he had written four heartfelt letters to the families of the three men and one woman he had known well enough to care for. He hadn’t written any such letters in the past year.

‘No, you’re right, of course,’ he said.

Pemberton would find his own path through it, assuming he survived long enough to navigate one.

‘So, tell me, what do you know about Malta?’

‘I know about Faith, Hope and Charity.’

Everyone knew about Faith, Hope and Charity; the newspapers back home had made sure of that, enshrining the names of the three Gloster Gladiators in the popular imagination. The story had courage-in-the-face-of-adversity written all over it, just what the home readership had required back in the summer of 1940. While Hitler skipped across northern Europe as though it were his private playground, on a small island in the Mediterranean three obsolescent bi-planes were bravely pitting themselves against the full might of Italy’s Regia Aeronautica, wrenched around the heavens by pilots barely qualified to fly them.

And so the myth was born. With a little assistance.

‘Actually, there were six of them.’

‘Six?’

‘Gloster Gladiators. And a bunch more held back for spares.’

Pemberton frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Three makes for a better story, and there were never more than three in the air at any one time, the others being unserviceable.’

The names had been coined then quietly disseminated by Max’s predecessor, their biblical source designed to chime with the fervent Catholicism of the Maltese.

‘It’s part of what we do at the Information Office.’

‘You mean propaganda?’

‘That’s not a word we like to use.’

‘I was told you were independent.’

‘We are. Ostensibly.’

Max detected a worrying flicker of youthful righteousness in the other man’s gaze. Six months back, he might have retreated and allowed Pemberton to figure it out for himself, but with Malta’s fortunes now hanging by a thread, there was no place for such luxuries. He needed Pemberton firmly in the saddle from day one.

‘Look, none of us is in the business of dragging people’s spirits down. The Huns and the Eyeties have cornered that market.’

He manufactured a smile, which Pemberton politely mirrored.

‘You’re evidently a bright young man, so I’m going to save you some time and tell you the way it is.’

He opened with a history lesson, partly because Pemberton’s file made mention of a respectable second-class degree in that subject from Worcester College, Oxford.

It was best, Max explained, to take the stuff in the newspapers back home about ‘loyal little Malta’ with a pinch of circumspection. At the outbreak of hostilities with Italy in June 1940, when that sawdust caesar Mussolini threw in his hand with Hitler, Malta was a far more divided island than the British press had ever acknowledged. The Maltese might have offered themselves up to the British Empire back in 1800, but almost a century and a half on there were many who wanted out of the relationship, their hearts set on independence from the mother country. Seated across the table from these Nationalists in the Council of Government were the Constitutionalists, defenders of the colonial cross. Not only were they superior in number, but they had the backing of the Strickland family, who effectively controlled the Maltese press, putting out two dailies: The Times of Malta and its vernacular sister paper, Il-Berqa.

The war had played into the hands of the Strickland loyalists, the first Italian bombs to rain down on the island severely denting the affinity felt by many of the Maltese for their nearest neighbours, a short hop to the north across the blue waters of the Mediterranean. But neither were the Maltese fools—far from it—they could spot a lie at a hundred paces, and many were wary of the Strickland rags, which they knew to be slanted towards the British Establishment.

Hence the Information Office, whose Daily Situation Report and Weekly Bulletin offered up for public consumption a cocktail of cold, factual and apparently unbiased news. In essence, the Daily Situation Report was a scorecard. How many of their bombs had found their mark? And how many planes had both they and we lost in the course of that day’s raids? There were grey areas, of course, not least of all, the often conflicting claims made by the RAF and the Artillery. In the wild confusion of a heavy raid on Grand Harbour, who could say with absolute certainty that a diving Stuka had been brought down by ack-ack fire and not the Hurricane on its tail?

Mediating such disputes had ruined many a pleasant evening for Max, all thanks to the Late Situation Report—an update to the Five O’clock Report which he was expected to put out at 10.45 p.m. He’d lost count of the number of times he’d been summoned to the phone in the middle of an enjoyable dinner party to listen to the tedious bleatings of HQ Royal Artillery and RAF Intelligence, each so eager to stake their claim to another precious scalp.

He thought it best to hold this information back from Pemberton. He certainly didn’t explain that the main reason he’d lobbied the Lieutenant-Governor’s office for an assistant to take over the editorship of the Daily Situation Report was so that his own evenings might remain uncluttered by such irritations.

Instead, he played up his own onerous workload, spelling out in some detail the other activities of the Information Office: the monitoring of enemy radio stations in the Mediterranean; the translation of BBC broadcasts and speeches by the Governor into Maltese; and the production of light entertainments, which, along with the relentless stream of news items, were put out over the island’s Rediffusion system.

‘Gilding the pill,’ said Pemberton distractedly, when Max was finished.

‘Nicely put.’

‘But not propaganda.’

‘Perish the thought.’

‘Well, not ostensibly.’

‘Never ostensibly. Before the week’s out, I’ll be up in front of the Finance Committee fighting to justify the additional expense to the department of one Edward Pemberton.’

No lie there. He would have to make his case, then the Maltese representatives would haul him over the coals, and then they would agree to his demands. In its own small way, this predictable little theatre, played out with tedious regularity, laid bare one of the grander themes of colonial administration: Allow them a voice, then tell them what to say.

‘I think I get the picture.’

‘Excellent. Now, where are you staying?’

‘The Osbourne.’

‘We’ll have to find you more permanent digs. There’s a drinks party later. It would pay you to show your face. We might be able to rustle up something for you.’

‘Sounds good.’

‘If you don’t mind riding pillion, I can pick you up around five.’

‘You have a motorcycle?’

‘Technically, it’s three motorcycles, held together with wire and will-power.’

Pemberton flashed his film-star smile.

Yes, thought Max, Rosamund will be most pleased with her unexpected guest.

She was.

Her hand even went to her hair when she greeted them at the door, something it had never done for Max.

The house sat near the top of Prince of Wales Road in Sliema, just shy of the police station. It was typical of many Maltese homes in that the unassuming façade gave no indication of the treasures that lay behind it. The wooden entrance door was flanked by two windows, with three more windows on the upper floor united by a stone balcony overhanging the street. Perfectly symmetrical, the front of the house was unadorned except for a brass nameplate set in the white stucco—Villa Marija—and a small glazed terracotta roundel above the entrance which showed a disconsolate-looking Virgin clutching her child.

Rosamund was wearing an oyster-grey satin evening gown, and once her hand had tugged self-consciously at her auburn locks, Max made the introductions. Rosamund offered a slender hand, drawing Pemberton inside as they shook, which permitted her to fire an approving look over his shoulder at Max as she did so.

The entrance hall was cool and cavernous, impeccably decked out with antique furniture. A Persian rug sprawled at their feet and a handful of colourful, impressionistic paintings hung from the walls. Pemberton looked mildly stunned.

‘Tell me, Edward, you aren’t by any chance related to Adrian Pemberton, are you?’

‘If he lives in Chepstow Crescent, then he’s my cousin, I’m afraid.’

‘Why should you be afraid?’

‘You obviously haven’t heard.’

‘No, but I can’t wait.’

She hooked her arm through his, steering him across the drawing room towards the large walled garden at the rear of the house.

‘Has he done something terribly wicked? I do hope he’s done something terribly wicked. It would bear out all my suspicions about him.’

Max dumped his scuffed leather shoulder bag on the divan and followed them outside.

Rosamund had three rules when it came to her ‘little get-togethers’. The first was that she personally greeted everyone at the door. The second was that it was unforgivably rude to speculate about the source of the copious quantities of spirits on offer, when it was barely possible to locate a bottle of beer on the island. The third rule stated quite simply that there was to be no ‘talking shop’ after the first hour, to which end she would ring a small hand bell at the appointed time.

‘All week I get nothing from Hugh but barrages and Bofors and Junker 88s. For a few small hours, I’d like to talk about something else, and I’m sure you all would too.’

Hugh was her husband, a lieutenant-colonel in the Royal Artillery. A mathematician of some standing before the war, it was Hugh who had worked out the intricate calculations behind the coordinated box barrage over Grand Harbour—an impressive feat, and one which had seen him elevated to the position of senior staff officer at RA HQ. In his early forties, he looked considerably older, which played to his private passion—the theatre—making him eligible for a host of more senior roles, which he scooped up uncontested every time the Malta Amateur Dramatic Club put on one of their plays. He was always trying to get Max to audition for some token part to make up the numbers: butler, chauffeur, monosyllabic house guest.

While Rosamund abandoned her first rule in order to parade her new catch around the garden, Max made for the drinks table in the grateful shade beneath one of the orange trees. True to form, there was no one to pour the drinks. It wouldn’t be good for relations if the Maltese staff were to witness the excesses of their brothers-in-suffering. Max was concocting a whisky-and-soda when he heard a familiar voice from behind him.

‘Ah, thou honeysuckle villain.’

‘Henry the Fourth,’ Max responded, without turning.

‘Not good enough and you know it.’

Max swivelled to face Hugh, whose forehead, as ever, was beaded with perspiration. It was an old and slightly tedious game of theirs. Hugh liked to toss quotations at him, usually Shakespeare, but not always.

‘Henry the Fourth, Part II,’ said Max.

‘Damn.’

‘Mistress Quickly to Falstaff. I studied it at school.’

‘Double damn. That makes three in a row.’

‘But only twenty-two out of thirty-eight.’

Hugh gave a little chortle. ‘Glad to see I’m not the only one keeping score.’

‘Speaking of scores, congratulations on your century.’

‘Yes, quite a month. One hundred and two, all told.’

‘One hundred and one; 249 Squadron are claiming the Stuka over Ta’ Qali.’

‘Bloody typical.’

‘Let them have it. Their heads are down right now.’

‘Not for much longer.’

Max hesitated. ‘So the rumours are true.’

‘What’s that, old man?’

‘They’re sending us another batch of Spitfires.’

‘Couldn’t possibly say—it’s Top Secret.’

‘Then I’ll just have to ask Rosamund.’

Hugh laughed. His wife had a reputation for being ‘genned up’ on everything. No news, however trivial, slipped through Rosamund’s net. Given her connections across the Services, it was quite possible that she knew near on as much as the Governor himself. The fact that she had cultivated a close friendship with His Excellency—or ‘H. E.’, as she insisted on referring to him—no doubt boosted her store of knowledge.

‘I’ll be right back,’ said Hugh, grabbing a bottle. ‘Damsel in distress over by the bougainvillea. Trevor Kimberley’s better half. A bit on the short side, but easy on the eye. And thirsty.’

‘We like them thirsty.’

‘Thou honeyseed rogue.’

‘Henry the Fourth, Part II.’

‘Doesn’t count,’ said Hugh, disappearing with the bottle.

Max turned back to the drinks table and topped up his glass. Hugh was right; April had been quite a month—the darkest yet. The artillery might have knocked down over a hundred enemy aircraft, but that was largely due to the more frequent and promiscuous raids. The figures were in, and the Luftwaffe had flown a staggering 9,600 sorties against the island in April, almost double the number for March, which itself had shattered all previous records. The lack of any meaningful competition from the boys in blue had also contributed to the artillery’s impressive bag. There weren’t many pilots who’d logged more than a few hours of operational flying time all month, thanks to the glaring lack of serviceable Spitfires and Hurricanes. Even when the airfields at Ta’ Qali, Luqa and Hal Far pooled their resources, you were still looking at less than ten. The pilots were used to taking to the air with the odds mightily stacked against them—things had never been any different on Malta, and you rarely heard the pilots complain—but what could a handful of patched-up, battle-scarred crates really hope to achieve against a massed raid of Junker 88s with a covering fighter force of sixty?

Things might have been less dispiriting if a large flock of spanking new Spits hadn’t flown in just ten days ago—forty-six in all, fresh from Greenock in Scotland by way of Gibraltar. The US Navy’s aircraft carrier USS Wasp had seen them safe as far as the waters off Algiers, and the fly-off had gone without a hitch, all but two of the batch making it to Malta on the long-range fuel tanks. It had seemed too good to be true. And it was. Field-Marshal Kesselring, sitting safely in Sicily, was no fool. He had obviously got wind of the reinforcement flight and figured it best to wait for the aircraft to land before making his move. Within three days of their arrival almost half of the new Spitfires had been destroyed, and the rest had been put out of action by the Luftwaffe’s intensive carpet-bombing of the airfields.

Kesselring had his man on the ropes and was going for the knockout. He knew it, they knew it. Because without fighter aircraft to challenge the Luftwaffe’s aerial dominance, there was little hope of any supply convoys getting through. And if that didn’t happen very soon, the guns would fall silent and the island would starve. Invasion, an imminent threat for months now, would inevitably follow.

Christ, it was unthinkable. So best not to think about it, Max told himself, topping up his glass once more and turning to survey the garden.

He found himself face to face with Mitzi.

She had crept up on him unannounced and was regarding him with a curious and slightly concerned expression, her startling green eyes reaching for his, a stray ray of sunlight catching her blonde hair. Not for the first time, he found himself silenced by her beauty.

‘What were you thinking?’

‘Nothing important.’

‘Your shoulders were sagging. You looked…deflated.’

‘Not any more.’

‘Flatterer.’

‘It’s true.’

‘If it’s true, then why didn’t you even look for me?’

‘I did.’

‘I was watching you from the moment you arrived.’

‘You were talking to that bald chap from Defence Security over by the bench.’

‘Well, I must say, you have excellent peripheral vision.’

‘That’s what my sports master used to say. It’s why he stuck me in the centre of the midfield.’

‘You don’t really expect me to talk about football, do you?’

‘When Rosamund rings her bell we might have no choice.’

A slow smile broke across her face. ‘My God, I’ve missed you,’ she said softly and quite unexpectedly.

The desire in her voice was palpable, almost painful to his ears.

‘You’re breaking the rules,’ said Max.

‘Damn the rules.’

‘You’re forgetting—you were the one who made the rules.’

‘Self-pity doesn’t suit you, Max.’

‘It’s the best I can come up with under the circumstances.’

‘Now you’re being abstruse.’ She handed him her empty glass. ‘Mix me another, will you?’

‘Remind me.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Bandits at one o’clock,’ he said in a whisper.

He had spotted them approaching over her shoulder: Hugh with Trevor Kimberley’s dark and pretty wife in tow.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Mitzi sighed volubly. ‘Another gin-and-French.’

Max took her glass. ‘So where’s Lionel? Out on patrol?’

Hugh was within earshot now. ‘Be careful, old chap, asking questions like that can land a man in deep water.’

‘Hello, Margaret,’ said Max.

Margaret Kimberley nodded benignly and maybe a little drunkenly.

‘I mean,’ Hugh persisted, ‘why would you want to know the details of what our noble submariners are up to?’

‘Besides, I’m hardly the person to ask,’ said Mitzi. ‘Lionel doesn’t tell me anything. One day he’s gone, then one day he’s back, that’s all I know.’

‘It’s all any of us needs to know.’

‘Trevor tells me nothing,’ chipped in Margaret.

Hugh peered down at her. ‘That, my dear, is because your Trevor does next to nothing for most of the time. Take it from me as his commanding officer.’

‘Somehow, Hugh, I can’t think of you as a commanding officer,’ Mitzi chimed, a playful glint in her eye. ‘A genial one, maybe, and slightly inept, but not a commanding one.’

Margaret’s hand shot to her mouth to stifle a laugh, which drew an affronted scowl from Hugh.

‘Bang goes Trevor’s promotion,’ said Max, to more laughter.

A little while later the ladies left together for the far end of the garden. Max fought to ignore the lazy sway of Mitzi’s slender hips beneath her cotton print dress.

‘Entre nous,’ said Hugh, considerably less abashed about admiring the view, ‘all the subs will be gone for good within a week or so.’

‘Really?’

‘Well, you’ve seen the pasting they’ve been taking down at Lazaretto Creek. And since Wanklyn came a cropper…’

The loss of the Upholder a couple of weeks back had rocked the whole garrison, right down to the man on the street. Subs had been lost before, subs driven by good men known to all, men who had once lit up the bar at the Union Club and whose bones were now resting somewhere on the seabed. ‘Wankers’ Wanklyn was different, though. A tall, softly spoken Scotsman with a biblical beard, he was modest in the way that only the truly great can afford to be. With well over 100,000 tons of enemy shipping under his belt and a Victoria Cross on his chest, he exuded a quiet invincibility which others fed off, drew strength from. Not one of his peers begrudged him his star status because he never once played to it; he just got on with the job. And now he was gone, sent to the bottom, a mere human being after all.

As the Information Officer, Max had been the first to learn of the Upholder’s fate. It was buried away in the transcript of an Italian broadcast—a brief mention of a nameless submarine destroyed in an engagement off Tripoli. He had made some discreet enquiries, enough to narrow the field to the Upholder, and then he had sat on the news for a couple of days.

Yes, he had wanted Wanklyn to prove him wrong, he had wanted to see the Maltese packing the bastions again, cheering the Upholder home, straining to see if there were any new chevrons stitched to the Jolly Roger she was flying. But he had known in his bones that it wasn’t going to happen, he had known that what he needed was a couple of days to figure out how to play it, how to soften the blow for his readers and listeners.

But that was then, and this was now, and while he understood that pulling the subs out of the island might be the judicious thing to do, he wasn’t thinking about his job and how he was going to break the news on the island, he was thinking about Mitzi. If the subs were really leaving, then she would be too; posted elsewhere with her husband. Where would they end up? Alexandria, probably. He wrestled with the notion—separated from Mitzi by nigh on a thousand miles of water—but it was too big and unwieldy to get a grip on.

Hugh misconstrued his silence as professionalism. ‘Mum’s the word, but I thought I should tip you the wink.’

‘Thanks, Hugh, I appreciate it.’

‘You’ll find a way to present it in a positive light, you always do.’ He rested a hand on Max’s shoulder. ‘Now go and join the other renegades in the crow’s nest. Freddie and Elliott are already up there. No Ralph, though—he called earlier to say he can’t get away.’

Max did as he was told, eager for the distraction of his friends, the chance to throw a blanket over his feelings. Villa Marija had been occupied by a naval officer before the war, and its large flat roof, still referred to as the crow’s nest, was where the younger crowd generally gathered to flap and caw. Anything under the age of thirty was deemed to be young, and you were never quite sure what you were going to find when you stepped from the stairwell into the glare.

There was usually a pleasing smattering of adolescent daughters in colourful home-stitched frocks, still coming to terms with their new breasts, which they wore with a kind of awkward pride. Circling them, inevitably, would be the younger pilots, barely more than boys but their speech already peppered with RAF slang. They were always taking a view on things—a good view, a dim view, an outside view, a ropey view—or accusing each other of ‘shooting a line’. Enemy bombers were ‘big jobs’, enemy fighters ‘little jobs’; the cockpit was their ‘office’; and they never landed, they ‘pancaked’. The thing they feared most in a flap was being bounced by a gaggle of little jobs from up-sun.

Sure enough, the pilots were there, a bevy of slender young things with flushed complexions hanging on their every word. Others hovered nearby, one ear on the tales of doughty deeds. The airmen were the only ones in the garrison capable of carrying the battle to the enemy, and their stories offered a tonic against the daily round of passive resistance.

Freddie and Elliott were well out of earshot at the far end of the roof terrace. Freddie was making good use of a large pink gin, his face a picture of evident distaste at whatever it was that the tall American was telling him. Max pushed his way through the throng towards them.

‘Gentlemen.’

‘Ah, Maximillian,’ said Elliott. ‘Just in time.’

‘For what?’

‘A little conundrum I was posing to Freddie here.’

‘Is that what you call it?’ grimaced Freddie.

‘Well, it sure is for their commanding officers.’

‘Sounds intriguing,’ said Max.

‘It rapidly becomes disgusting.’

Elliott laughed. ‘I hadn’t figured you for an old prude.’

‘It’s got nothing to do with prudishness,’ Freddie bristled. ‘It’s a question of…well, morality.’

‘Ah, morality…’

‘To say nothing of the law.’

‘Ah, the law…’ Elliott parroted, with even more scepticism.

‘You trained as a lawyer, you must have some respect for the law.’

‘Sure I do. You don’t want to screw with an institution that can send an innocent man to the electric chair.’ Elliott turned to Max before Freddie’s frustration could shape itself into a response. ‘You want to hear it?’

‘Fire away.’

‘It’s very simple. You’re a wing commander taking a break from it all up at the pilots’ rest camp on St Paul’s Bay. You know it? Sure you do, from when Ralph was wounded.’

‘I do.’

‘Then you can picture it. It’s late and, okay, you’re a bit tight. But, hey, who wouldn’t be, after all you’ve been through these past months? Anyway, you’re feeling good and you’re looking for your room. And you find your room. Only it isn’t your room. It’s someone else’s room. And that someone else is in what you think is your bed with someone else.’

‘You’re losing me.’

‘Stay lost,’ was Freddie’s advice.

‘There are two guys in the bed, okay? And they’re, well, I don’t how to put it…’

‘I think I get your meaning.’

‘Of course you do, you went to an English boarding school.’

‘As did you,’ said Freddie, ‘in case you’d forgotten.’

‘And a sorry dump it was too. Anyway, they’re good men, officers, both of them. One’s in your squadron, the other’s not, but you know him. And he’s a first-class pilot, reliable, what you fellows would call a “press-on” type…’ Elliot paused. ‘What do you do?’

‘What do I do?’

‘What do you do?’

‘Well, I order them to desist at once.’

Elliott laughed. ‘I think you can assume they desisted the moment you opened the goddamn door. Do you report them?’

‘Report them?’

‘To the Air Officer Commanding. It’s not a question of morality, or the law, or even of taste. I mean, I’ve never felt the need to place my penis in another man’s dung—’—‘Oh Christ,’ Freddie blurted into his gin—‘but it doesn’t stop me being able to make a judgement on the situation.’

Max thought on it. ‘I don’t report them.’

‘Why not?’

‘Morale. A squadron’s like a family.’

‘You’re ready to lie to your family?’

‘No. Yes. I suppose. If the situation calls for it.’

‘Go on,’ said Elliott. ‘What else, aside from morale?’

‘Well, the two individuals in question, of course. They’d be packed off home and everyone would know why. It would leak out.’

‘An unfortunate turn of phrase, under the circumstances.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Elliott!’ exclaimed Freddie.

Elliott ignored him. ‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘Three differing views. Freddie said he’d report them, you’re a “no”, and I’m for reporting them.’

‘I thought you said three.’

‘There’s a difference between me and Freddie. He’s a moralist. Me, I’m a pragmatist. I’d report them, but only ’cos if I didn’t and word got out that I hadn’t then it’d be my head on the block.’

‘So what does that make me?’ asked Max.

‘That makes you a sentimentalist,’ was Elliott’s sure-footed response.

‘Oh, come on—’

‘Relax, there are worse things to be than a sentimentalist.’ ‘Yeah,’ said Freddie, ‘you should try being a moralist.’

It was good to hear Freddie crack a joke—he had seemed strangely withdrawn, somehow not himself. Max was in a position to judge. They had been firm friends, the best of friends, for almost two years now, and in that time he’d learned to read Freddie’s rare down moods: the faint clouding in the cobalt blue eyes, the slight tightening of the impish grin. They were still there now, even after the laughter had died away and the conversation had turned to Ralph, the missing member of their gang. He was a pilot with 249 Squadron at Ta’ Qali, a burly and garrulous character who had taken the squadron’s motto to heart one too many times: Pugnis et calcibus—‘With Fists and Heels’. Elliott had come late to the party, materializing as if from nowhere around Christmas, hot on the heels of Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the war, but in four short months he’d stitched himself into the fabric of their little brotherhood lorded over by Hugh. He’d even got them all playing poker.

Elliott had a keen ear for scandal and was recounting a lurid story he’d heard from Ralph involving a chief petty officer’s wife and a Maltese gardener when the tinkle of Rosamund’s bell rang around the rooftop.

‘Most of you know what this means,’ she announced from the top of the steps. ‘Turn your minds and your talk to higher matters, to life and to art and, I don’t know, past loves and future plans.’

‘But I was just hitting my stride.’

‘My dear Elliott, I doubt it was anything more than mere gossip.’

‘True, but of the most salacious kind.’

‘Then be sure to search me out before you leave.’

This drew a few chuckles from the assembled company. These died suddenly as the plaintive wail of the air-raid siren broke the air.

Some groaned. They had all been expecting it. Breakfast, lunch and cocktail hour, you could almost set your wristwatch by the Germans and their Teutonic time-keeping.

They turned as one towards Valletta. From the high ground of Sliema, Marsamxett Harbour was spread out beneath them like a map, its lazy arc broken by the panhandle causeway connecting Manoel Island, with its fort and submarine base, to the mainland. In the background, Valletta reared majestically from the water, standing proud on her long peninsula, thrusting towards the open sea. Beyond the city, out of sight, lay the ancient towns and deepwater creeks of Grand Harbour, home to the naval dockyards, or what remained of them.

One of the more eagle-eyed pilots was the first to make out the flag being raised above the Governor’s Palace in Valletta.

‘Big jobs,’ he announced.

‘There’s a surprise.’

‘Where do you think they’re headed?’

‘The airfields, probably Ta’ Qali.’

‘The dockyards are due a dose.’

It was a strange time, this lull before the inevitable storm, the seven or so minutes it took the enemy aircraft to make the trip from Sicily. All over the island people would be hurrying for the underground shelters they had hewn from the limestone rock, the same rock with which they had built their homes, soft enough for saws and planes when quarried, but which soon hardened in the Mediterranean sun.

Had Malta been blanketed with forests, had the Maltese chosen to build their homes of wood, then the island would surely have capitulated by now. Stone buildings might crumble and pulverize beneath bombs, but they didn’t catch fire. And it was fire that did the real damage, spreading like quicksilver through densely populated districts, of which there were many on Malta. The island was small, considerably smaller than the Isle of Wight, but its teeming population numbered more than a quarter of a million. Towns and villages bled into each other to form sprawling conurbations ripe for ruin, and while they had suffered terribly, the devastation had always remained localized.

In the end, though, it was the underground shelters—some of them huge, as big as barracks—which had kept the casualty rates so low. The Maltese simply descended into the earth at the first sign of danger, taking their prayers and a few prized possessions with them. Max liked to think of it as an inborn urge. The island was honeycombed with grottoes, caves and catacombs where their ancestors had sought refuge in much the same way long before Christ walked the earth or the Egyptians threw up their pyramids. The threat might now be of a different nature, but the impulse remained the same.

He could remember running his theory past Mitzi on their first meeting. And he could remember her response.

‘Once a troglodyte, always a troglodyte.’

She had said it in that mildly mocking way of hers, which he had misread at the time as haughtiness.

‘Have I offended you?’

‘Not at all.’

‘I’m sorry. It’s a lovely theory, I’ve always loved it.’

The subtext was plain: Don’t think for a moment that you’re the first person to whom it has occurred.

He knew now that she had been sparring with him, playfully batting his pretentiousness straight back at him to see how he reacted. He had failed that first test, lapsing into silence, obliging her to end his suffering.

‘But to tell you the truth, I’d love it more if I didn’t spring from a long line of Irish potato-pickers.’

The memory of her words brought a smile to his face.

‘We’re about to have seven kinds of shit knocked out of us and you’re smiling?’ Elliott remarked.

‘I think we’re safe.’

Everyone else did too, judging from the number of people abandoning the garden for the grandstand view of the crow’s nest. Max spotted young Pemberton among the stream of souls pouring on to the roof. Too polite to question the behaviour of the other guests, he nevertheless looked very ill at ease. Who could blame him? Common sense dictated that they all seek shelter. A year back they would have done so, but somehow they were beyond that now. Exhaustion had blunted their fear, replacing it with a kind of resigned apathy, a weary fatalism which you were only aware of when you saw it reflected back at you in the shifty expression of a newcomer.

Max caught Pemberton’s nervous eye and waved him over.

‘Who’s that?’ Freddie enquired.

‘Our latest recruit, bound for Gib when we snapped him up.’

‘Handsome bastard,’ said Elliott. ‘There’ll be flutterings in the dovecote.’

‘Go easy on him. He’s all right.’

‘Sure thing,’ said Elliott, not entirely convincingly.

Max made the introductions, with Pemberton saluting Freddie and Elliott in turn.

‘So what’s the gen, Captain?’ Elliott demanded with exaggerated martial authority.

‘The gen, sir?’

‘On the raid, Captain, the goddamn air raid.’

‘I’m afraid I’m new here, sir.’

‘New!? What the hell good is new with Jerry and Johnny Eyetie on the warpath?’

‘Ignore him,’ said Max, ‘he’s having you on.’

‘Yank humour,’ chipped in Freddie.

‘And that’s the last time you salute him.’

Elliott stabbed a finger at his rank tabs. ‘Hey, these are the real deal.’

‘Elliott’s a liaison officer with the American military,’ Max explained. ‘Whatever that means.’

‘None of us has ever figured out quite what it means.’

Tilting his head at Pemberton, Elliott said in a conspiratorial voice, ‘And if you do, be sure to let me know.’

Max’s laugh was laced with admiration, and maybe a touch of jealousy. Anyone who knew Elliott had felt the pull of his boisterous charm, and it was easy to think you’d been singled out for special attention until you saw him work his effortless way into the affections of another.

‘Freddie here’s a medical officer,’ said Max.

‘Never call him a doctor. He hates it when you call him a doctor.’

‘He spends his time stitching people like us back together.’

Freddie waggled his pink gin at Pemberton. ‘Well, not all my time.’

‘Don’t be fooled by the handsome, boyish looks. If you’re ever in need of a quick amputation, this is your man.’ Elliott clamped a hand on Freddie’s shoulder. ‘Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick Lambert, a whiz with both saw and scalpel. His motto: What’s an Arm or a Leg between Friends?’

Freddie was used to Elliott presenting him as some medieval butcher, and he smiled indulgently, confident of his reputation, his renown.

Pemberton acquitted himself admirably during the brief interrogation which ensued. He judged his audience well, painting an amusing and self-deprecating portrait of his time in Alexandria, his meagre contribution to the war effort to date.

It was then that the first arms started to be raised, fingers pointing towards the north, towards St Julian’s Bay, St George’s Bay and beyond.

An unnatural silence descended on the terrace, ears straining for the discordant drone of approaching aircraft.

‘You’re about to witness a very one-sided show,’ said Freddie. ‘Try not to let it get you down.’

He wasn’t joking. The Artillery had just been rationed to fifteen rounds per gun per day. A Bofor could fire off its quota in all of seven seconds.

The enemy seemed to know this. There was something uncharacteristically loose about the first wave of fighters staining the sky, a lack of the usual German rigour when it came to formation flying. Like a boxer in his prime swaggering towards the ring, the adversary was confident.

A couple of the big guns barked an early defiance, and a few desultory puff-balls of flak appeared around the Me 109s, which had already begun to break for their pre-ordained targets. They swooped in flocks, birds of ill-omen, the real danger following close behind them.

A great staircase of Junker 88 bombers came out of the north, fringed with a covering force of yet more fighters.

‘Christ,’ muttered Freddie.

‘Holy shit,’ said Elliott.

Poor sods, thought Max.

It was clear now that the airfields had been singled out for attention: Ta’ Qali, Luqa, Hal Far, maybe even the new strips at Safi and Qrendi. They all lay some way inland, beyond Valletta and the Three Cities, strung out in a broken line, their runways forming a twisted spine to the southern half of the island.

The 88s shaped up for their shallow bombing runs and a token splatter of shell bursts smudged the sky. Arcing lines of tracer fire from a few Bofors joined the fray. From this distance they appeared to be doing little more than tickling the underbellies of the bombers, but a shout suddenly went up.

‘Look, a flamer!’

Sure enough, an 88 was deviating from its course, streaming black smoke. It climbed uncertainly towards the north, heading for home. This would normally have been the cue for a Spitfire to pounce on the stricken aircraft and finish it off, but the handful of fighters they had seen clawing for height just minutes before had probably been vectored away from the island for their own safety. It was easy to see why. The carpet bombing was well under way now, great pillars of smoke and dust rising into the sky, reaching for the lowering sun.

They all stared in silent sympathy at the remote spectacle. Earlier in the year, Max had been caught in a raid at Ta’ Qali, one of the mid-afternoon specials the Germans liked to throw in from time to time. He had spent twenty minutes lying as flat to the ground as nature would allow him in a ditch bounding the airfield. There had been close calls in the past couple of years—he still bore the odd scar to prove it—but nothing that even approached the deranging terror of his time in that ditch. His greatest fear at the time, strangely, had been of choking to death on the cloud of sickly yellow-grey dust, talcum-powder fine, which had enveloped everything, blotting out the sun, turning day into night. The ground beneath him had bucked like a living thing, and all around him the air had rung to the tune of flying splinters, a lethal symphony of rock and metal overlaid by more obvious notes: the whistle and shriek of falling bombs, the thump and crump of explosions, the staccato bark of the Bofors firing back blind, and the screams of the diving Stukas.

His hearing had never fully recovered, and he suspected that something essential within him had been changed that day, almost as if he were a machine that had been re-wired. It still functioned, though not quite as it had before.

He felt a light touch on his arm. It was Freddie.

‘I need to talk to you,’ he said in a low, confidential voice. ‘Not here. Alone.’

‘Okay.’

‘How’s tomorrow morning?’

Max nodded.

‘Can you come to the Central Hospital?’

‘What time?’

‘Early. How does eight sound?’

‘Barely acceptable.’

‘Meet me at the mortuary.’

Max was obliged to curb his curiosity. Elliott had drifted towards the parapet for a better view of the raid, but he now turned to them and said, ‘Looks like old Zammit’s got himself a new gun.’

Vitorin Zammit lived in the house directly across the street. Well into his sixties, he was a slight and vaguely comical character who had been a regular dinner guest at Villa Marija until the death of his wife the year before. He had amassed a small fortune exporting lace, a business which had allowed him to travel the world widely, and he spoke impeccable English in the way that only a foreigner can. His wife’s passing had hit him hard, and although she had been brought down by the same diabetes which had plagued her for years, he held the enemy unreservedly to blame. He now kept his own company, when he wasn’t caught up in the activities of the Sliema Home Guard Volunteers, through whose ranks he had risen rapidly to become something of a leading light.

He owned a pistol, and when a raid was in progress he was often to be found on his roof terrace taking potshots at the planes. Not only was this a futile gesture, it was in flagrant breach of the regulations. He should have known better, and he probably did, but no one begrudged him his bit of sport. If anyone took exception, Hugh invariably ensured that they came to see things differently.

Sometimes he wore his uniform, sometimes a suit. He never went into battle in his shirtsleeves. Today he was wearing a black suit and a Home Guard armband, and he prowled around his roof terrace like some dark ghost, eyes on the skies, apparently oblivious to the large crowd gathered on the neighbouring rooftop. Instead of his usual pistol, he carried a rifle in his hand.

‘Is that a Lee Enfield?’ said Freddie.

‘Might just as well be a goddamn broomstick for all the good it’s going to do him.’

The last of the bombers were making their runs now, dropping to four or five thousand feet before unloading over the airfields. Resistance was minimal, and they climbed safely away with a covey of fighters assigned to see them safely home. High above, all around, 109s blackened the sky like bees, keeping a wary guard. Their job done, the artillery all but spent, they would soon descend and begin picking over the carcass, making low-level attacks on targets of opportunity. If there was a time to be scared, now was it. Even a residential district like Sliema was fair game.

Knowing this, a few people started to drift below. Most stood their ground, though, eager to see how things would play out. Freddie made a drinks run downstairs. By the time he returned with their glasses the dockyards in Grand Harbour were under attack, the fighters rising into view behind Valletta like rocketing pheasants as they pulled up out of their dives. They couldn’t hope to inflict much real damage with their cannon and machine-gun fire, but they were making a point. He’d heard from Ralph that a 109 had even made a touch-and-go landing at Ta’ Qali the other day, rubbing their noses in it.

Today, pleasingly, this arrogance came at a price. A 109 banking over Fort St Elmo appeared to stagger, then its starboard wing dipped sharply and it spun away. There was no question of the pilot baling out at that height, and it hit the water, throwing up a white feather of spume near the harbour entrance.

‘Welcome to Malta, you sonofabitch,’ said Elliott darkly, as the cheers resounded around them.

Moments later, a couple of fighters swooped on Marsamxett Harbour from the direction of Floriana, flying tight down on the water, setting themselves for a strafing run at the submarine base on Manoel Island. There were no subs to be seen; they had recently taken to sitting out the daylight hours on the harbour bottom.

‘Macchis,’ said one of the young pilots.

He was right, they were Italian planes, blue Macchi 202s. If there was any doubt, the showman-like flourish with which they rolled away after releasing a couple of savage bursts of cannon fire settled the question of their nationality. The Italians were known, and mocked, for their aerobatic flair. Both aircraft made a second pass, their guns churning up the water in neat straight lines as they bore down on the base. They pulled away in a climbing turn to the left, making off to the north, skimming over the stepped rooftops of Sliema.

Their course brought them straight towards Villa Marija, the roar of their engines building quickly to a painful pitch, almost deafening, but not so loud that it drowned out the report of the first rifle shot. Or the second.

Max turned in time to see Vitorin Zammit fire off his third shot, in time to see a portion of the lead Macchi’s engine cowling fall away.

‘My God, I think he hit it,’ someone called.

He had not only hit it, he had done some damage. The Macchi’s engine coughed, clearing its throat, then coughed again, and again, misfiring badly now, a ribbon of black smoke snaking out behind it as it climbed towards St Julian’s.

‘Well, Holy Shit…’ said Elliott.

The trickle of smoke soon became a raging torrent and the Macchi started to lose height, falling well behind its companion.

‘Is it possible?’ Freddie asked incredulously.

‘Oh yes,’ replied Max.

A number of enemy fighters had been brought down over the airfields by rifle fire since the long-suffering ground crews had been issued with Lee Enfields—a gesture intended to boost their morale, no one had expected them to actually hit anything.

It came to Max quite suddenly what he had to do. He glanced over at Vitorin Zammit, who was staring in dumb disbelief at his handiwork, then he grabbed Pemberton by the arm and led him off through the crowd.

‘Where are we going?’ Pemberton asked.

‘To work.’