The Information Officer (16 page)

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Excuse me …”

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

“May I help you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Max offered up the words Victor was seeking.

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

“Proper?”

He evidently didn’t know the word.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Did he say why?”

“He didn’t sound happy.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Second floor, then ask again.”

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

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

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

“My mistake,” said Max.

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

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

“Ah, Major Chadwick.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I wasn’t sure till you walked in.”

“Oh Christ …”

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

“No talking, please,” called Hodges flatly.

“Excuse me?”

“No talking, please.”

“Why not?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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