The Information Officer (18 page)

So what was going on? Colonel Gifford was in the dark while the
others knew more than they were letting on? And where did Elliott fit? In one or other of the camps, or somewhere in between?

The questions kept proliferating, and Max was beginning to wish he’d taken Elliott up on his offer of barbecued fish, burgundy, and a heart-to-heart, when the steady wail of the “Raiders Passed” siren sounded outside.

He took himself up to the roof, where he smoked a cigarette and watched the dense pall of dust hanging over Ta’ Qali slowly disperse on the breeze.

Down below in the courtyard a fretful Father Bilocca was doing his best to marshal a bunch of boys into an ordered line, oblivious to the obscene gestures and the faces being pulled whenever his back was turned.

“Is everything okay, sir?”

Max hadn’t heard Pemberton join him.

“Fine. Just dandy. Smoke?”

Pemberton took a cigarette, and Max lit it for him.

“I hear Rosamund came up trumps.”

“She certainly did. I even have my own bathroom, not that there’s any water in the pipes.”

Rosamund had found him digs in Saint Julian’s, living with the Copnalls. Their eighteen-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, was a pale and pretty creature prone to blushing who worked in the naval cipher department at Fort Saint Angelo. Max could picture her state of agitation at having Pemberton living under the same roof. The same thought must surely have occurred to Rosamund.

“How’s Elizabeth?”

“She’s a fine pianist.”

It all sounded very Jane Austen: the daughter tickling the ivories for the benefit of the handsome house guest. Rosamund was definitely up to something, but he couldn’t see it yet.

“I had a shot at that piece for the
Weekly Bulletin.”

Max took the sheet of typed text. “That was quick.”

“It probably shows.”

He was clearly eager for Max to cast an eye over it there and then.

“The length looks good. I’ll let you know.”

For want of anything better to do, he started to read the moment Pemberton had disappeared back down the stairwell.

He read it twice, trying to find fault with it, something, anything. The tone was spot on, muscular and defiant yet not too triumphalist. He didn’t play to the heroism of the Manchester boys working the Bofors gun—that spoke for itself—rather, he presented the young gunners as workers at the coal face, grinding out a slow but inexorable victory. The mining metaphor was a small stroke of genius. It resonated with danger and hardship and collective enterprise, and it carried with it the shared experience of a people who daily descended into the earth. The theme also permitted him to round off the piece with a comic touch. There were no coal mines on Malta, a detail that seemed to have escaped the notice of the Italians, who in the early days of the conflict had proudly announced the destruction of a Maltese coal mine by the Regia Aeronautica—still the cause of much hilarity across the island.

Pemberton had done well, more than well; the article was pitch-perfect. So why, then, did it leave Max cold? A few hours before, it would have had him racing downstairs to congratulate the author.

Pemberton would get his pat on the back, and the piece would go out in the
Weekly Bulletin
, but Max would know it for what it was: another lie peddled to the masses. They weren’t one happy family pulling together in adversity. His experience at the Cassars’ house had made that starkly clear to him.

He remembered something that Charles Headley, his former boss and mentor, had said to him soon after his arrival at the Information Office.

“You know what the great thing about our line of work is, old man? I’ll tell you, it’s very simple. A lie can make its way halfway round the world before the truth has a chance to put its boots on.”

There was probably no less truth in those words now than there had been at the time, but for once Max found himself calling into question the words’ central assumption—that the power of a lie was something to be admired and cherished.

How much angrier would those grieving women at the Cassars’ have been with him had they known the truth about Carmela’s
death? The answer, he suspected, was that they would have been less angry.

Thanks to Lilian, he knew the Maltese well enough by now to say that they would at least have respected him for his honesty. They were an ancient people, a wise people. They had seen civilizations come and go around their island home, and yet they were still there, as they would always be, with their wry humor, their rough savoir faire, and their burning faith. Max and his kind were simply passing through. Maybe their hosts deserved a little more credit, a little more respect.

He could see where he was going with this, and he knew the reason why. He had just been insulted, intimidated, threatened with court-martial, even blackmailed. More than anything, it was the blackmail that angered him. Exploiting his friendship with Lilian to keep him in line was about as low as it got. So much for the happy family.

Feeling his hackles rising again, he lit another cigarette and did something he hadn’t done in a long while when caught in a quandary: he asked himself what his father’s advice would be to him.

The sun was at its zenith, and the heat rising in waves from the zinc roof was almost unbearable, but a small chill ran the length of Max’s spine when the answer came to him.

The town of Mtarfa lay scattered along the ridge just north of Mdina, its skyline dominated by the austere military architecture of the 90th General Hospital. The sprawling complex of wards and accommodation blocks had consumed the army barracks nearby to offer more than a thousand beds to the sick and wounded.

An attractive Maltese VAD eventually tracked Freddie down to the burns ward. Infection was a problem, apparently, and she asked Max to wait outside. He was quite happy to oblige. The few glimpses he got through the swing-doors as nurses came and went were enough of a trial. Some of the patients were so swaddled in bandages that they looked like Egyptian mummies laid out in state. Others were having their fresh burns scrubbed and sprayed, their eyes irrigated,
or old dressings changed. There seemed to be so much activity, all of it centered on flesh that was either red raw or black and encrusted. The sweet smell of ether carried through the doors, along with a low murmur of morphine-dulled pain.

When Freddie finally appeared, they made for the long terrace at the back of the building. It had a grandstand view of the hills to the north and would normally have been thronging with invalids of all varieties making the most of the low, late sunshine, but people had grown more wary since the targeted raid on the 39th General Hospital at Saint Andrew’s.

It was the first chance Max and Freddie had had to talk openly about the meeting that morning, and Freddie didn’t hang about.

“I should just have gone to them again. I shouldn’t have involved you.”

“They’re not going to do anything, Freddie. They’re going to bury it.”

“I suppose.”

“You suppose?”

“It’s what they do.”

“And you’re happy with that?”

Freddie drew hard on his cigarette and exhaled. “No, Max,” he said with a slight stiffening of tone, “I’m not happy with it. But what do you want me to say? I followed my conscience. I came to you first. It didn’t work out.” After a brief pause, he added, “Someone messed up, and I know it wasn’t me.”

Fair point. There was no getting away from it.

“It was Iris,” admitted Max.

“Iris?”

“It couldn’t have been anyone else. I didn’t tell anyone else.”

“Forgive me,” said Freddie, “I’m tired, not thinking straight, but what on God’s earth possessed you to tell Iris, of all people!”

Max did his best to explain his thinking at the time, the logic of his argument failing miserably to translate itself into words.

“Okay,” he conceded, “I was naïve.”

“It’s not the first word that springs to mind. The most ambitious
girl in Christendom? You’d have done better to take out a page in the
Times.”

“Maybe we should have.”

It sounded glib, but it was a serious statement, intended to test Freddie’s mettle.

“Listen, Max, this is way beyond us now. It’s a dirty business. This whole damn thing is a dirty business. You know what I was doing in there when you showed up? There’s a man, I couldn’t tell you how old exactly because his face is gone. I know he’s German, though, and that he bailed out of a burning 88. He should have stayed in that plane, gone down with it. He has no lips, no eyelids, no eyes, and his nose is all but gone. I’m hoping for his sake that a bug gets him. This is what we do to one another. After God knows how many millennia of human evolution, this is how we choose to treat one another still.”

“That’s your excuse? People do bad things? We’re talking about murder. There’s a principle at stake.”

Freddie dropped his cigarette on the tiled terrace and crushed it underfoot. When he finally looked up, he said a little shamefacedly, “They scared me in there today. They threatened to take it all away, everything I’ve worked for, everything I do. I don’t know how to do anything else.”

“For God’s sake, Freddie, you’re young. This war will end, life will return to normal, people like that won’t be running the show when this mess is over.”

“You really believe that?”

“I know it.”

“I think you underestimate them. Our cards are marked and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

You’re wrong
, thought Max.
There is
.

He wanted to tell Freddie the what and the how of it, but there was no point. Freddie’s mind was made up and it was an undeniable disappointment. The two of them had always stood apart from the others. Ralph and Hugh were career servicemen trained and primed for combat. Max and Freddie were mere guests at the table of war, competent amateurs shipped in to make up the numbers after a big
chunk of Czechoslovakia had failed to appease Hitler. Yes, they’d both learned the ropes in the Officers’ Training Corps at their respective schools, but the experience had fired neither of them with enthusiasm. They knew this because they’d discussed it one night when there were no “real soldiers” within earshot.

Max had been packed off to Wellington College at the age of thirteen at his stepmother’s insistence, on the grounds that the men in her family had always gone there—a perplexing line of reasoning, given the assortment of disagreeable uncles and male cousins Sylvia had brought with her into their lives. Wellington was reputed to be Britain’s most military of schools, and Max had done just enough to get by without insulting that tradition, learning to march and fire a gun and bumble around with a blackened face up on the heathland toward Broadmoor during field day.

His failure to become commander of the Picton platoon had been taken by Sylvia as further evidence of his utter fecklessness. All the men in her family had commanded their house platoons. This was a lie that, after some cursory research in the school records, he’d felt obliged to point out to her over Christmas dinner one year—his first public challenge to her authority, and a declaration of open warfare as far as Sylvia was concerned.

Maybe he was doing her an injustice, but he sometimes suspected that she’d waited years to exact a suitable revenge. The family strings she’d pulled, supposedly on his behalf, had seen him carried first to Egypt and then to Malta, and although she couldn’t possibly have known at the time what horrors lay in store for the little island, he wouldn’t have put it past her.

Perversely, surviving the war had become as much about denying Sylvia the pleasure of his extinction as anything else. And maybe, just as perversely, standing up to the Colonel Giffords of the world, refusing to be cowed by the sort of high-handed military types whom he associated with Sylvia, had its roots in the same ancient animosity.

The reasons didn’t matter. He had picked his path and was set in his resolve. Yes, it would have been good to have a companion on the road, but Freddie wasn’t essential to the plan taking shape in his head. The real issue now was one of time, or rather the lack of it. With the
Upstanding
set to leave for Alexandria in less than a week, the clock was ticking.

Freddie and Max quietly shunted the topic into the shadows and talked of other things, such as dinner with Ralph at the officers’ mess in Mdina. Freddie wasn’t on duty again until the following morning and asked to tag along.

“If you’ll have me, that is,” he said a little sheepishly.

“After this morning, I think we could both do with a dose of Ralph.”

They also got a dose of Hugh.

Apparently he’d become something of a regular at the Xara Palace in the past few weeks, ever since Royal Artillery HQ had relocated to Saint Agatha’s Convent in Rabat following the bombing of the Castille. Rabat and Mdina stood cheek by jowl on the ridge, almost one and the same, and Hugh had taken to stopping off for a “swift sundowner” with Ralph on his way home to Sliema.

The Xara Palace—a grand fifteenth-century building close by the main gate in Mdina—had been requisitioned by the RAF as an officers’ mess for the Ta’ Qali squadrons, although Ralph treated the place as if it were his private residence. As ever with Ralph, this was done with playful insouciance, his tongue firmly in his cheek.

Ralph was tall, with a shock of sand-colored hair that the sun bleached to a startling white in summer. He wore it longer than regulations permitted, but regulations didn’t figure large in his thinking. He set store by the adage that “rules are made for the guidance of wise men and the obedience of fools”—a line he was quite happy to quote to his superiors.

The brass tolerated his idiosyncratic ways because they knew he had qualities far above the general run. He also served a useful purpose. The Xara Palace was a beautiful building, but ghosts stalked its wide corridors: the ghosts of dead pilots. Beds fell free at an alarming rate, and the young replacements shipped in to fill them knew they stood a fair chance of going the same way as the previous occupants. At twenty-nine, Ralph wasn’t the oldest member of 249 Squadron,
but he’d been around the longest, and his presence offered some hope of survival to the new arrivals.