The Information Officer

by Mark Mills

  Max and he wandered down to the slender strip of sand at the water’s edge for a smoke.

  “I didn’t know you played the harmonica.”

  “Don’t tell Rosamund. She thinks it’s an uncouth instrument.”

  They stood in silence for a moment, the dark Mediterranean stretching out before them.

  “‘What from the cape can you discern at sea?’”

  “You’re going to have to give me a little more than that,” said Max.“Nothing at all: it is a highwrought flood;

  I cannot, ’twixt the heaven and the main,

  Descry a sail.”

  “You’ve got me there.”

  “Othello. Montano is searching for the Turkish fleet with some gentlemen of Cyprus. It turns out the fleet’s gone down in a storm.”

  “We should be so lucky.”

  Hugh shrugged. “We don’t need luck; we need determination. History’s on our side.”

  Hugh had always been taken with the idea that the siege in which they were caught up was not so very different from that endured by Malta in 1565, when Suleiman the Magnificent had dispatched forty thousand men to take the island. Malta had held out against the Ottomans on that occasion, saving Europe in the process, and the little seagirt sentinel of the Mediterranean was now engaged in a similar showdown against the Nazi scourge.

  It was a romantic notion, and one that Max was quite happy to go along with in his capacity as the information officer. Hugh, on the other hand, embraced it with an almost mystical fervor, latching on to the parallels and ignoring the differences. It was true that in both instances there was much more at stake than a dust-blown lump of limestone in the middle of the Mediterranean. It was also true that in 1565 the defense of the island had been coordinated by outsiders, men from the north of Europe.

  Hugh revered the Knights of Saint John and knew their story intimately. They were a relic from the crusading era, when the order had provided lodging and security to pilgrims visiting the Holy Land. When forced to repair to Rhodes, they effectively ruled that island for two centuries before being driven out by Suleiman. Malta became their next home—a grant from the Emperor Charles V—but it wasn’t long before Suleiman pursued them there and the stage was set for one of the bloodiest and most brutal sieges in history.

  At one point, soon after Fort Saint Elmo had fallen to the Ottomans, the defenders began using the severed heads of their prisoners as cannonballs. This wasn’t because they lacked for ammunition. It was a ghoulish gesture of defiance by the knights, a response to the sight of their headless comrades from Fort Saint Elmo floating toward them across Grand Harbour, lashed to wooden crosses.

  Against impossible odds, the besieged towns of Senglea and Birgu (now known as Vittoriosa) held out against the Ottoman Turks for a further two months. Continuously bombarded day and night from the heights around Grand Harbour, their defensive walls breached on numerous occasions, they stood firm under the resolute leadership of Jean de Valette, Grand Master of the order, a man more than willing to snatch up a pike and step into the fray like a common foot soldier.

  Many thousands died on both sides in any number of gruesome ways before the Ottoman army finally withdrew from the island, taking to their galleys, their tails between their legs. It was a setback from which their territorial ambitions never fully recovered. Malta had stemmed the Turkish tide; Europe could rest easy once more.

  “How bad do you think things will get if they invade?”

  “Not as bad as last time,” quipped Hugh. “But you might actually have to get that service revolver out of its holster.”

  “I’m a hopeless shot. Always was. The pheasants’ friend.”

  “‘The pheasants’ friend’?”

  “It’s what my stepmother used to call me.”

  Hugh laughed. “Then I’ll make damn sure I’m standing behind you.”

  Maybe it was the fatherly hand that settled onto his shoulder, but Max experienced a sudden impulse to unburden himself, to seek approval for the hazardous course he’d settled on in his head. Hugh liked to play the buffoon, but it was a colorful cloak. Beneath it lurked a serious and somewhat high-minded soul. Hugh would understand. He might even be willing to help.

  “Hugh …”

  “Yes?”

  Max dropped his cigarette onto the sand and ground it out beneath his boot.

  “I’d better run you home.”

  THE MESSAGE WAS SHORT AND STRAIGHTFORWARD, THE means of delivering it considerably more complex.

  To an uneducated eye, the apparatus in question might well have passed for a typewriter, but the keyboard belied the sophisticated mechanics buried away inside. First, the rotors had to be selected and inserted in the correct order, the alphabet ring set relative to them, and the plug board wired. These were easy enough tasks to perform. All you needed was the codebook listing the daily key settings. This being one of the naval machines with the extra rotors, it required a naval codebook, and the numbers were printed in red water-soluble ink.

  It gave him pleasure to think that out there, somewhere, there were people listening, waiting attentively for his next transmission. For some of the eavesdroppers, the message would read as gobbledygook and forever remain that way. Field Marshal Kesselring, on the other hand, would have the correct text on his desk within the hour:Everything progressing according to plan. Virgil.

  His German was up to the task of sending the message in the language of his paymasters—they’d asked him to do so for reasons of security—but the idea of bucking their instructions appealed to the contrary streak in him. Besides, the devilish piece of equipment in front of him was too good at its job. He could just as well have signed off using his own name; the Allied signals operators would have been none the wiser. The chances of them ever deciphering the text were so remote that they could be ignored.

  As for the message, well, it didn’t tell the whole story. The submarines were such a feature of life on Malta that he hadn’t even considered the possibility of their withdrawal from the island. This unexpected turn of events had repercussions for his plans, but there seemed little point in worrying those up the line with the details. He would have to rise to the challenge, adapt his strategy to the new time constraints.

  Last night, he had flirted with the idea that another girl might have to die, only to dismiss it as too much of a risk. Today, it seemed like a risk worth taking. If he had been burdened with a conscience, he might have tried to convince himself that it was a necessary move, that it served the plan, but he had long since given up lying to himself. He knew that he had probably done enough already. He had lit the touch paper and disappeared safely into the night. Common sense dictated that he lie low and allow the affair to play itself out.

  But where was the fun in that? This is what Malta had taught him: that he enjoyed the killing.

  It hadn’t always been that way. The first, the very first, before the war—Elsie, the theater usherette with the crooked front tooth—had brought him little pleasure that he could recall now. He hadn’t set out to take her life, but she had recognized him, and silencing her for good had been the only sensible option.

  A very observant girl, that one. He had made three visits to the theater in the course of a year, and on all three occasions had carefully avoided showing any interest in her, let alone talking to her. And yet, on a moonless night in a dense patch of woodland she had recognized him. An observant girl. And a foolish one. If she’d kept her mouth shut, she’d still be alive, not moldering in a coffin beneath a cheap headstone bearing the hopeful epitaph Now Flying with the Angels.

  He had left it a good long while before visiting her grave, curious to know how it would feel. Standing over her, he had experienced no emotions of any real note—no guilt, no self-loathing, no regrets—just a mild puzzlement when he recalled the last moments of her life. Unlike the ones who had gone before her (and survived to tell the tale), she had not fought him; she had almost given herself to him. Why had she been so biddable
, so unresisting, so accepting of the inevitable?

  “Not my face. Don’t hurt my face,” she had said.

  The voice of experience? Was her father to blame? Or an uncle? Had she spent her childhood submitting to the unnatural advances of some man in her life? It seemed quite likely. The thought had occurred to him at the time, and he had struggled to enter her, although once inside, he had soon hardened. And when it was over, she had wiped herself with the hem of her skirt and calmly announced that she had seen him before. She was even able to list two of the three productions he’d attended at the theater. She was searching for the name of the third—“No, don’t tell me”—when he closed his hands around her throat.

  She resisted then, but succumbed so quickly that he thought she might be faking. She wasn’t, so he got to his feet and brushed himself down. He left her handbag in the narrow lane that led to her parents’ house, at the spot where he’d snatched her into the trees, so that she wouldn’t lie there undiscovered for too long. It was a small gesture to her. She had asked him not to harm her face, and he wanted the world to know that he hadn’t, before she became so much carrion for the animals and insects. And maybe her father, or whoever he was, would see his own sin reflected back at him in her unblemished features.

  The car he had borrowed from a friend had been parked well off the beaten track, beyond the wood and over a hill. He drove through the night, passing through sleeping towns and villages, making good time, and was back in his bed before first light. Not one of the two hundred or so miles he’d covered in the round-trip was registered on the car’s odometer because he’d disconnected the cable.

  Over the next few months he had grown sullen and depressed, disappointed by the experience. He had broken the ultimate taboo, and it had stirred almost nothing in him. He had tried to analyze why this might be, concluding that the answer lay in the fact that the situation had been forced on him. He had not set out to do it. He had simply responded to a pragmatic need, that of protecting his identity. He had not been in control of the situation, and control was where much of the pleasure lay. Control and anticipation. On both these scores, the incident with Elsie had been a disappointment.

  Looking back, it was clear to him that he was always going to test this analysis. At the time, he had felt no overwhelming urge to do so. Well, not immediately. As always, the compulsion to strike again built up slowly, invading his thoughts by small but insistent degrees, taking them over until nothing else mattered.

  He opted for a prostitute, a small and undernourished girl, birdlike in her brittleness. He had never been with a prostitute before, but something in the clinical character of the services on offer chimed with the experimental nature of what he was about to do. She was more than happy to drive off with him to a remote corner of the countryside; somewhat less happy when he produced the rope.

  The promise of a substantial bonus and the fact that he was clearly a gentleman—A gentleman! That still brought a smile to his lips—persuaded her to play along. He gagged her as soon as her wrists and ankles were tied. It was a warm evening in June, and in the late, long twilight he could see hope in her eyes: the hope that she hadn’t just made the biggest mistake of her life.

  Control, he discovered over the following few hours, was indeed the key, and the taking of a life because you wanted to, because you could—not because it was forced on you—was the quintessence of that control.

  Peggy, the name she had given him, proved to be her nom de guerre. The sandstone tablet placed flush in the turf at her grave revealed that one Cybil Hughes had spent eighteen years on earth and was now In God’s Keeping.

  Her gaunt, pinched face had been added to the gallery of other girls in his head. It was a place he visited every night before falling asleep, an imaginary space, yet somehow as real to him as any room. Its tall windows reached almost to the parquet floor and were swathed in loose blinds so diaphanous they barely muted the light bleeding into the room. It was always sunny outside, and the old wooden floor would creak beneath his feet as he made the rounds of the gilt-framed portraits, lingering every so often to recall the details, beginning with Mrs. Beckett before moving on to Constanze Kettelmann….

  Chronology was important; it allowed him to trace his evolution, the slow mastery of those early impulses into some kind of method. Lying in bed at night, he would make his leisurely, unhurried rounds before selecting one of them, according to his mood, to help ease him into sleep, the memories melding seamlessly with his dreams.

  The Maltese girls lent an exotic touch to his collection. With their honeyed complexions and deep, dark eyes, they exuded the easy sensuality of Gauguin’s native creatures, and he had rehung the gallery to give them their own wall. They marked a new departure, a union of business and pleasure.

  The proposal had come from him. Lutz Kettelmann had then dangled it in front of his superiors, not expecting them to bite. But they had. Anything that undermined the faith of the Maltese in the British could only favor the Germans when they finally invaded the island. The order to proceed with caution had come on New Year’s Day, and he had done just that: five victims carefully selected from the lower reaches of society, dance hall hostesses, their deaths tainted with just enough ambiguity to arouse suspicion and get Maltese tongues wagging.

  He hadn’t foreseen the ruthlessness of the British in burying the crimes. Malta Command had simply suppressed the matter, quite content, it seemed, for local girls to keep on dying. The shoulder tab in Carmela Cassar’s hand had been his way of forcing the affair into the open, and although it hadn’t been discovered by a Maltese, as he’d intended, at least the wheels were finally turning. He would have to keep the momentum up, but he had a few ideas up his sleeve on that score.

  No, the thing was narrowing down to the fine point, not quite as rapidly as he’d planned, but the Upstanding’s imminent departure, far from being a setback, would see things accelerate now. His only mild cause for concern was Carmela Cassar. His baser instincts had got the better of him. Something about her had obliged him to spend time with her—a full twenty-four hours that were not going to go unnoticed. With hindsight, a foolish indulgence. At the time it had made complete, all-consuming sense to him. He would make no such mistakes next time round.

  He was repeating this vow to himself when the transmitter suddenly squawked into life. He snatched up the pencil and scribbled down the Morse code. It was a brief message, a meaningless jumble of enciphered letters. He keyed them into the Enigma machine, the decoded text showing up on the lamp board letter by letter.

  The message was in German:Herkules delayed. Dinner is off until further notice. Tacitus.

  He sat very still, absorbing the information, trying to control his anger.

  They had pulled the plug—on the invasion, on him.

  Ten minutes later, he was still sitting there, motionless, and his decision had been made.

  The plan was his. He had brought it into the world. It was not for them to snuff it out. What did he care for them? He felt no loyalty. How could he? Loyalty was a notion beyond his grasp. The money meant little to him. It was the sweetener, not the spur. He had offered his services to prove a point to himself: that others were not so very different from him, that they were happy to be complicit if it served their own ends.

  Did they really think they could brush him off with a single line of enciphered text?

  All the key pieces were in play and the endgame was approaching. For that’s what it was: a game. He would close up the Enigma machine in its nondescript wooden box and tuck it safely away, and with it would go one part of him.

  The other parts he could perform at will. He covered the full range of moods and emotions now, effortlessly passing for one of the crowd.

  Sometimes he even convinced himself.

  DAY FIVE

  FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MANY DAYS, MAX WAS NOT SHAKEN awake by the wailing of a siren. Rather, it was the un natural silence that stirred him—the curse of existing in a permanent
state of vacant alertness, even when asleep.

  He checked his watch, dismissing the idea that the Germans were running late. It just wasn’t the sort of thing they did. They were probably holding themselves back for a big midday blitz.

  He felt surprisingly alert, even invigorated. His head hurt, but the throbbing at his temples brought with it good memories of the night before. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d passed such an enjoyable evening in the company of his friends. It seemed somehow to have stiffened his resolve overnight. He felt alive, refreshed, eager to get out there and at it. He would set up a meeting with Lilian. After that, there would be no turning back.

  He was right not to have involved Hugh.

  He was heading for the door when the phone rang. It was an unfamiliar sound. The line to his flat was down for so much of the time that he’d dismissed its trill from his life.

  “Chadwick.”

  “Max, it’s me.”

  “Hi.”

  “Hi,” said Mitzi. “No raid this morning.”

  “Doesn’t look like it.”

  “I called last night. Several times.”

  “I got back late.”

  “I know. I just spoke to Hugh. He sounded a little the worse for wear.”

  He wanted to ask her what she was doing calling Hugh at this hour of the morning, but before he could, she said, “I need to see you.”

  “I was just on my way to work.”

  “I’m working too. Later. This evening.”

  “Where’s Lionel?”

  “Out. He won’t be back.” There was a short silence. “I need to see you, Max.”

  They had spoken many times on the phone, but always in a vague sort of code in case one of the girls at the exchange were listening in. “I need to see you, Max” wasn’t code; it was a bald and brazen statement.