The Information Officer (4 page)

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 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 toward his friends.

“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?” Freddie grimaced.

“Well, it sure as hell is for their commanding officers.”

“Sounds intriguing,” said Max.

“It rapidly becomes disgusting,” Freddie replied.

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

“It’s got nothing to do with prudishness,” Freddie said, bristling. “It’s a question of … well, morality.”

“Ah, morality …”

“To say nothing of the law.”

“Ah, the law,” Elliott parroted, with even more skepticism.

“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 Saint 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 know 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 Brits would call a ‘press-on’ type.” Elliott 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 from being able to make a judgment 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 the American’s surefooted 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. He still looked that way now, even after the laughter had died away and the conversation had turned to Ralph, the missing member of their gang. Ralph 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 natural 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.

They had all been expecting it. Breakfast, lunch, and cocktail hour—you could almost set your wristwatch by the Germans and their Teutonic timekeeping.

They turned as one toward Valetta. 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, Valetta reared majestically from the water, standing proud on her long peninsula, thrusting toward 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 Valetta.

“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—seventeen miles from top to toe, and only nine at its widest point—but its teeming population numbered more than a quarter of a million. Towns and villages bled into one another 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—that 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 raised their pyramids. The threat might now be of a different nature, but the impulse remained the same.

He could remember running this 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?” she asked.

“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 onto the roof. Too polite to question the behavior 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 that you were aware of only 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 inquired.

“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 the American, 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 Eye-tie on the warpath?”

“Ignore him,” said Max. “He’s having you on.”

“Yank humor,” 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 American charm. 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,” Elliott put in.

“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 that 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 toward the north, toward Saint Julian’s Bay, Saint George’s Bay, and beyond.

An unnatural silence descended upon the terrace, everyone’s 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 Bofors 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 rigor when it came to formation flying. Like a boxer in his prime swaggering toward 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 Me109Fs, which had already begun to break for their preordained 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.