The Information Officer

by Mark Mills

  Elliott listened attentively to the theory before announcing, “You’re wrong. As far as I’m concerned, what you get up to is your own business. But this”—he wagged the sheet of paper at Max—“is taking you nowhere fast. I mean, look at it. Where did he take Carmela Cassar? It’s the wrong question. Valetta’s a ghost town, so are the Three Cities, even Sliema and Gzira. Most of the people have left. He’s got options coming out of his ears. The question should be: How did he take her there?”

  It was a good point. Gasoline was so scarce that motor vehicles had become a rare sight on the roads in the past month or more. Most servicemen were reduced to getting around on foot or on bicycle or in the horse-drawn gharries favored by the Maltese. These were open-sided carriages on four large sprung wheels—hardly an ideal mode of transport for moving a victim about.

  “Okay,” said Max, “I’ll add it to the list.”

  “You’re really set on seeing this through?”

  “You think it’s a bad idea?”

  “Yes, because they’ll be watching you closely.”

  “Then you can stop me. All it takes is a quick word in the ear of your ginger-haired friend.”

  “He’s not my friend. And I’d never do that to you.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past you.”

  “Hey, now I’m insulted.”

  “Something tells me you’ll get over it.”

  Elliott smiled. “Coffee?”

  “Really?”

  “Colombian or Sumatran?”

  “Now I know you’re joking.”

  But he wasn’t. The pantry off the bare stone kitchen was stocked with both. It also housed a range of other rarities: tinned fruits, several varieties of tea, a bowl of hens’ eggs, bottles of olive oil. There were even a couple of cured hams hanging from hooks.

  “Bloody hell, Elliott, where did this lot come from?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  The pantry had been impressive, but it was nothing compared to the barn. Small wonder the doors were secured with a hefty padlock.

  “Promise not to tell?” asked Elliott as he led Max inside. The light from the hurricane lamp cast wild shadows around the interior, revealing a storehouse of goods piled high in boxes. In one corner stood a stack of gleaming ten-gallon fuel canisters.

  “Impressive, huh?”

  “I’m not sure the military police would see it the same way.”

  “We don’t get a lot of Red Caps out in these parts.”

  Max strolled through the cases.

  “I’m not a profiteer, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Elliott said.

  “Just a hoarder?”

  “Not even. This is work. I’m the sole representative of the United States government on the island, and sometimes I need to get things done. This lot counts for more than money right now.”

  “Ah, ambassadorial privilege.”

  “Nicely put. I like that.”

  “Well, let’s hope you don’t ever have to plead it.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “Nothing that a small bribe can’t rectify.”

  Max was joking, of course, but when he set off back to Valetta after two cups of very fine coffee, it was with a full tank of gasoline sloshing between his legs and half a dozen eggs secreted about his person.

  HE USUALLY WROTE WITH A FOUNTAIN PEN. HOWEVER, ink had grown scarce on the island, obliging him to fall back on a pencil. The words lacked their usual authority on the page, but they still spoke clearly to him.

  The witless Germans might have lost their nerve, but he wasn’t ready to hang up his boots, not quite yet. It would be like abandoning a game of chess just when the board was set for a perfect endgame. Risks had been taken, sacrifices made, in order to maneuver the pieces into position. There was no question of walking away. The question, rather, was one of how exactly to proceed.

  He had listed his options neatly on the page, and by the light of the guttering candle he pondered them in turn, playing each of the little dramas through to its conclusion.

  Caution dictated that he be extremely thorough, more so than ever. Released from his contract with the Germans, he was a free agent, and a whole new range of possibilities presented themselves for wrapping up the affair in his own fashion. He knew what he was like, though; he knew he was liable to leap at the most ambitious of these, ignoring the added dangers for the sake of the greater satisfaction it would bring. He needed to keep his instincts in check, to keep his perspective.

  Malta marked a new stage of his journey, but that’s all it was—a stage. There was far more to come. He couldn’t say what exactly, he couldn’t perceive the pattern yet, but he’d be a fool to wager it all on one roll of the dice.

  His eyes strayed to the top of the list, the first entry: Do nothing. Vanish away.

  It was too easy. And too hard. How could he not go and stand at Carmela Cassar’s grave? She was freshly buried and waiting for his visit. It would be wrong to break the tradition. It might even bring bad luck. He sat and saw all the things that wouldn’t come to pass, and he wrote them down. As ever, on the page, things became clearer. The words bristled with undeniable truths.

  He didn’t put a line through the first entry on the list; he didn’t believe in crossing things out. Everything served a purpose, momentary doubts included. Even now, he could feel a new idea taking shape, triggered by a phrase he’d just written: The next girl?

  There were three he had in mind. Two were bar tarts. The third was a slim wand of a girl who worked in the garrison library. Her name was Rosaria Galdes, and she planned to become a schoolteacher when the war was over. She had a small gap between her front teeth that lent her an air of sensuality, although nothing in her bearing suggested the same. In movement and speech she was brisk to the point of awkwardness.

  He had always been intrigued by this apparent contradiction in her, and was tempted to put it to the test. Maybe that time had finally come. She was the obvious candidate, and yet something was holding him back. But what?

  He laid the pencil aside and lit a cigarette. He closed his eyes and emptied his mind, waiting for the answer to present itself to him. It was there, lurking at the periphery of his vision, like some wild animal patrolling the circle of light thrown by a campfire—a palpable presence, yet indistinct. He didn’t encourage it forward for fear of startling it, and when it finally stepped from the shadows, he smiled, more than satisfied with what he saw, amazed that the idea hadn’t occurred to him before.

  It was perfect. She was perfect.

  He spared a thought for gap-toothed Rosaria Galdes and her dream of becoming a teacher, an ambition she would now live to fulfill. He wasn’t going to stand in her way, not anymore. A new and far more satisfactory candidate had just presented herself for the post of last victim.

  Taking up the pencil, he began to write, drawing up a balance sheet, weighing the beauty of the idea against the inevitable risks.

  DAY SIX

  IT WAS PAST MIDNIGHT BY THE TIME MAX REACHED THE Porte des Bombes on the outskirts of Floriana. The journey seemed to have passed in a flash, eaten up by memories of his conversation with Elliott.

  The fellow was unfathomable, impossible to gauge. For a master of irritating circumlocutions, the revelations had come surprisingly thick and fast: the Germans’ aborted invasion plans, the governor’s imminent departure, Field Marshal Kesselring’s standing with Hitler, Rommel’s gifts and failings as a general. Was there nothing Elliott wasn’t privy to? And as for the intimation that the killings were the work of an enemy agent intent on sowing seeds of discord, what was to be made of that? Admittedly, the relationship between the British garrison and the Maltese was more strained than it had ever been, but would the enemy really have hatched such a heinous plan in order to destabilize it further? Rumors abounded of atrocities committed in the name of Hitler’s Reich—and no doubt the British had a few skeletons of their own tucked away in the same closet—but would they really go that far in the name of victory
?

  Quite possibly. War did that to men. Whether it forced such behavior on them or whether it offered a convenient release for some dark impulse deep within them was a debate he’d shared with Freddie on more than one occasion. Freddie subscribed to the dualist school of thought, that men were essentially good and evil at the same time. It was a view rooted in his experiences as a medical officer. He claimed to have observed it at work in the wards.

  It was known that a number of Allied pilots had plummeted to their deaths after baling out, thanks to an enemy fighter making a low pass over their parachutes, collapsing the canopies with the down-draft. By the same token, it was known (though rarely spoken of) that enemy seaplanes clearly marked with red crosses had been shot to pieces while going about their business of recovering downed colleagues from the sea off Malta.

  And yet, despite these aberrations, an almost innocent camaraderie prevailed in the hospitals. Injured enemy pilots and crew occupied beds in the same wards as their Allied counterparts. Not only that, they were liable to receive a string of visitors intent on plying them with cigarettes and other creature comforts.

  It was true that not all the pilots condoned this practice. To Ralph’s mind, the enemy was the enemy and not to be fraternized with, although he bore the Italians slightly less rancor than he did the Germans. As a keen fan of motor racing, he felt that any nation that had produced Enzo Ferrari and Tazio Nuvolari couldn’t be all bad. He ascribed both the wariness of their bombers and the flamboyant aerobatics of their fighter pilots to the inferior nature of their aircraft. They were simply reacting to circumstances, making the best of a bad thing, as anyone in their right mind would.

  He was far more wary of the Germans. This prejudice had first lodged itself in him just before the war, when he’d visited the country as part of a rowing eight cobbled together from a number of Cambridge college crews. He had found their German co-competitors at the regatta cold and high-handed and—sin of sins—obsessed with calisthenics. To cap it all, when the British eight’s engagingly amateurish approach to competition rowing had brought them victory, the home crews had proved remarkably ungracious in defeat. This unfortunate experience had flicked a switch in Ralph’s head. He now saw evidence of the German master plan wherever he looked.

  Wagner’s belief in the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art, and Hegel’s concept of the “Absolute Idea,” which amounted to a total philosophy of human culture, were two examples of a Teutonic propensity to extremism. A more plausible prop to Ralph’s theory, maybe, was General Erich Ludendorff’s book, published a few years before the outbreak of hostilities, entitled Total War.

  Max had always found Ralph’s ideas as dangerously extreme as those he purported to despise. But maybe Ralph’s instincts were sound. In the grand scheme of things, what did the lives of a few innocent Maltese girls matter to the enemy if they served a greater purpose? The indiscriminate targeting of the islanders had seen a surge in civilian casualties over the past month, but it had also succeeded in stiffening the resolve of the people. So much better for the Germans to be selective about who they killed, and actually achieve something in the process.

  Max could see the logic in the thinking. It made sense. But it also raised as many questions as it answered, not least of all: Why had Elliott chosen to share the theory with him when there had been no call to do so? It just wasn’t in Elliott’s nature to let slip something like that.

  Max was no closer to determining some invisible agenda by the time he reached the Porte des Bombes, at which point questions of a more immediate kind began jostling for his attention. Would Mitzi still be expecting him to show up, even at this late hour? What if Lionel’s plans had changed and he was now happily tucked up in bed with his wife? It had happened once before, and on that occasion Mitzi had been unable to get word to Max of Lionel’s unexpected return from patrol. Letting himself into the building with the key, Max had crept silently up the staircase to the third floor only to find the door to the flat firmly locked. Thank God he’d conquered the temptation to knock. No excuse, however inspired, could have convincingly explained just what he was doing there in the dead of night.

  On this occasion, common sense dictated that he leave the motorcycle outside his flat and walk the rest of the way, but somehow it wasn’t an option. He drove straight to Hastings Gardens, tucking the machine out of sight in a narrow alleyway, leaning it against a wall daubed with the words “BOMB ROME.”

  As ever, the lock downstairs resisted the initial advances of the key. And, as ever, he paused to catch his breath on the third-floor landing before placing his palm against the door to the apartment. It was unlocked and swung open without resistance.

  A ghostlike apparition stood before him. It was Mitzi, her naked limbs rendered more pale by the dark negligee.

  She drew him silently inside, easing the door shut behind him. “I was beginning to think you wouldn’t come.”

  They stood close, the way they used to stand. And in the deep darkness of the entrance hall he could feel the heat coming off her.

  “Where’s Lionel?”

  “Gzira. He’s spending the night in one of the officers’ rest flats.”

  Gzira sat on the slope right across from the sub base, and ever since the transport infrastructure on the island had all but collapsed, the navy had taken on a number of flats there where officers could overnight.

  Max reached into his hip pocket, then placed his hand in hers.

  “An egg? I’m lost for words.”

  “There are more where that one came from, if you play your cards right.”

  “Well, let’s see, shall we?”

  He hadn’t meant it that way, and when she dropped to her knees in front of him, her fingers groping for the buttons of his shorts, he protested.

  “Mitzi, don’t …”

  He heard the egg rolling away across the tiled floor, discarded.

  “Mitzi …,” he pleaded.

  “Ssshhh …”

  “I can’t.”

  “If memory serves, you most certainly can.”

  The shorts dropped to his ankles, and her long fingers closed around him.

  “This isn’t right.”

  “Of course it isn’t. That’s the point. It never has been.”

  “Mitzi …” He took her by her bare shoulders and raised her to her feet, proud of his resolve. “I don’t want to.”

  “So why are you getting harder in my hand?”

  Did she really think him so powerless in the face of her desire?

  He was on the point of posing the question when she dropped once more to her knees, and all thoughts of resistance were swept aside by the warm embrace of her mouth. His hands went instinctively to her head, his fingers entwining themselves in her soft hair.

  It always surprised him that she appeared to derive so much enjoyment from having him in her mouth. Her pleasure seemed almost to equal his own, if the low moans she emitted every so often were anything to go by.

  Breaking off, she peered up at him. “You see, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” Rising slowly to her feet, she added, “You don’t have to follow me. I’ll quite understand if you let yourself out.”

  With that, she made off down the corridor, a dim form fading into the gloom.

  His thoughts turned to Lilian. He imagined her standing there in the darkness beside him, observing him, waiting to see what he did, and yet he still stepped out of the shorts gathered around his ankles, leaving them where they lay.

  Mitzi was waiting for him on the bed. He couldn’t see her, but he could hear the faint squeak of the springs as she adjusted her position. He removed his shirt and laid it carefully on the floor, aware of the eggs, two in each of the breast pockets.

  “I should warn you, I’m very wet.”

  He shed his desert boots and his socks and lay down beside her, naked.

  “I’ve been wet for hours, thinking about you.”

  She liked to talk, and she liked to take her time, he
knew that, just as he knew that her lovemaking with Lionel had always been a rushed and entirely silent affair.

  “Are you sure you didn’t start without me?”

  “I might have, just a bit,” she admitted coquettishly. Reaching for his wrist, she drew his hand down her body, guiding his fingers between her legs. She could have raised the hem of the negligee, but chose not to, preferring that he first feel her through the material.

  “You see? I wasn’t lying.”

  He slowly worked a finger inside of her, as far as the restraining tension of the moist satin would permit. Her mouth reached for his, her tongue edging between his lips, mimicking the movement of his finger.

  Apart from the first time, when he had gone to her room at the Riviera Hotel and found her naked beneath the sheet on the mattress on the floor, underwear of some kind or another had always played a role in their lovemaking. Underwear lent an illicit frisson to their trysts, a whiff of the forbidden, its flimsy barrier a token gesture to Victorian prudishness.

  Max didn’t mind; it cost him nothing to play along. It was also an excuse to draw out their few precious moments alone.

  On this occasion, though, Mitzi’s characteristic restraint seemed to desert her suddenly. Straddling him in one swift movement, she guided him into her.

  “I’m sorry, I need to feel you inside me. Just for a moment. Just for a moment …”

  The moment was heralded by the eldritch scream of the air-raid siren, its sickening cadence somehow all the more ominous for the fact that it had gone unheard for so long.

  “Oh God …,” Max breathed.

  It wasn’t the siren. For all he cared, two hundred German bombers could have been closing in on Malta with instructions to obliterate Number 18 Windmill Street. They were nothing when set alongside the sensation of Mitzi lowering herself onto him.

  “I’ll stop if you want,” she teased. “We probably should.”

  He placed his hands on her hips and drew her down the rest of the way. She winced, adjusting her position to accommodate him.