The Information Officer

by Mark Mills

  “Pawlu, it’s me, Major Chadwick. We met before.”

  The dog was big and black and of dubious parentage. Pawlu silenced it with a sharp reprimand.

  “Is Elliott around?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “No.”

  “Nice-looking dog,” he lied. “What’s his name?”

  “Why are you here?”

  “I ran out of gas near Boschetto Gardens. I know Elliott’s got some cans of the stuff in the barn because he filled me up last time.”

  “He’s not here.”

  “I’m sure he won’t mind me helping myself. I’m in a bit of a fix.”

  Max started edging toward the barn. Pawlu moved to block his way.

  “It is locked.”

  “The key’s under that rock there,” said Max, pointing.

  “No. Elliott has the key and he is not here. I’m sorry I cannot help you.”

  He wasn’t sorry, and he was probably lying about the key, but he had a gun and a mean-looking dog, and Max was in no position to push the point, not unless he came up with some way of turning the tables. He didn’t care about the gasoline anymore, but he wasn’t going to leave without taking a look inside that barn. Pawlu’s suspicious behavior demanded it.

  “Do you at least have a flashlight? I’ll never find my way back in the dark.”

  When Pawlu headed back inside the farmhouse, Max loitered at the kitchen door. Pawlu snapped a command to the dog, and it curled up dutifully near the fireplace. That was good. Pawlu then laid the shotgun on the kitchen table, which was even better, before returning to the door with a hurricane lamp.

  “Thanks,” said Max.

  Reaching for the lamp, he seized Pawlu’s wrist, yanking him with all his force into the courtyard. Almost in the same movement, he pulled the door shut on the charging, snarling dog.

  Pawlu had stumbled and fallen to the ground, dropping the hurricane lamp, but he was on his feet quickly.

  “What’s in the barn, Pawlu?”

  Pawlu didn’t reply. He dropped his head and charged, a bull-necked battering ram, sending Max sprawling back onto the ground. Pawlu was on him in an instant, astride him, pummeling him with both fists, going for the head, working his little arms like windmills. It might have been comical if the fists hadn’t been granite-hard.

  Pawlu should have pressed home his advantage; it was a mistake to go for the service revolver at Max’s hip. Max seized the moment, unleashing a scything right that caught Pawlu on the side of his head, knocking him clean off. The revolver skittered away into the darkness.

  Max had never been a violent man by nature, but he knew how to box and he was fighting for a good cause. When Pawlu came at him again, he was ready, and he was angry, and he didn’t stop till Pawlu was on his knees, flailing blindly, weakly, like some automaton running down. Max finished him off with an uppercut that laid him out cold.

  The dog was going wild inside the kitchen, scrabbling at the base of the door. Max recovered the revolver and stripped Pawlu of his belt, using it to lash Pawlu’s hands behind his back. The key to the barn was in his pocket.

  Max lit the hurricane lamp before entering.

  “Lilian …,” he called hopefully, working his way through the jumble of hoarded goods.

  She wasn’t there.

  Busuttil was.

  He was laid out on the floor behind a heap of boxes. His hands and feet were bound, he was gagged, and dried blood masked one half of his face. He lay utterly still.

  Max stared in abject horror at the spectacle, until he registered the slight rise and fall of the detective’s chest.

  Dropping to his knees, Max untied Busuttil. Then he hurried outside and used the same ropes to truss up Pawlu good and proper before dragging him by the heels across the courtyard to the door of the barn. Busuttil was finally stirring, but was in no state to stand, so Max carried him to the entrance and sat him against a pile of boxes.

  “Have you seen Lilian?” Max asked.

  Busuttil shook his head groggily. He was fighting and failing to come to his senses, as if he’d been drugged.

  The interrogation of Pawlu didn’t go much better, even after Max had emptied half a canister of gasoline over him to bring him round.

  “Where is she?”

  “Who?”

  Max lit a match. “You think I care what happens to you? I don’t.”

  Pawlu writhed like a maggot on the ground, trying to distance himself from the flame. He claimed to know nothing about a girl. All he knew was that Elliott had asked him to guard the barn, to let no one in there.

  If it was a lie, it was a convincing one. Three more matches failed to shake the truth from him, and he was almost weeping when Max tossed the last one away.

  “There were two men,” slurred Busuttil.

  “You saw them?”

  Busuttil shook his head.

  “I have to go now,” said Max. “I’ll send help.” He pressed the revolver into Busuttil’s hand. “Try not to shoot them when they get here.”

  Busuttil mumbled something that Max didn’t catch.

  “What?”

  “Ken …”

  “What about him?”

  “I think he has a mustache.”

  Max lost most of the skin off his knees slogging back up the escarpment. It didn’t help, having a hurricane lamp in one hand and a gas canister in the other. He almost discarded the lamp once he was clear of the quarries, which would have been a mistake. He might have been able to find the motorcycle again without it, but he couldn’t have stripped the carburetor down by the light of the moon alone. It was clogged with rust, the tank having run dry. The gods, it seemed, were set on having a good laugh at his expense, and he cursed them at the top of his lungs.

  It was a fiddly operation, time-consuming, and it gave him a chance to think things through. Busuttil had mentioned two men. One had to be Elliott, but who was the second? The mysterious Ken who now, it seemed, had a mustache? Max knew only one submariner with a mustache, and that was Lionel. But it was a preposterous notion: Elliott and Lionel in cahoots, a team, killing off girls together. He even laughed at the thought of it.

  He strained to find another explanation, anything that would exonerate his friend, but there was no escaping the fact that Elliott had abducted Busuttil, thwarting the investigation, which meant that he sat at the heart of the affair, and had probably done so all along. If anyone knew where Lilian was, then it was Elliott. Finding him, and finding him fast, was the obvious—the only—course of action open to Max.

  He was finally able to kick the motorcycle into life. He knew where he was going, and he knew what he was going to do when he got there. He wouldn’t involve the lieutenant governor’s office; they weren’t to be trusted. No, he would go straight to his own kind, to the Combined Operations Room in Valetta. At a time like this, brass hats from all the services would be gathered in the underground HQ. There would be no ignoring his story. How long could Elliott hope to remain hidden once the news had been spread that wide?

  Max had passed through Zebbug and was making good time when the German bombers began to unload over the Luqa airfield. It was a heavy and systematic raid, and it lay almost directly in his path. He pulled to a halt, buffeted by the concussions, the bomb bursts ripping red holes in the darkness, blanketing the airfield. He decided to chance it. The road to Valetta skirted the airfield to the north—the direction from which the bombers were making their runs. It was well known that bombs tended to overshoot their targets, and that certainly seemed to be the case now. The southern end of the airfield was suffering badly.

  He had the throttle wide open when he saw it—a rogue line of bomb bursts coming at him out of the darkness to his left—and he realized almost instantly that he was done for. The geometry was against him, the leaping trail of destruction destined to converge with his own trajectory a short way down the road, any moment.

  He braked hard, the back wheel sl
iding away from under him. He was aware of a strange feeling of weightlessness, of flying, before a blinding white light snuffed out his senses.

  CARMELA CASSAR HAD SOBBED AND SQUIRMED AND struggled the moment the sedative had worn off. Lilian, on the other hand, just lay there on the table, inert, denying him any satisfaction. Or so she thought. She wasn’t to know that it didn’t matter to him either way. If anything, her self-possession was a welcome challenge. It gave him something to work with.

  He rose from the chair and approached the table.

  She was spread-eagled on her back, her wrists and ankles lashed to the four legs. The gag and the blindfold were the same ones he had used on Carmela.

  She flinched when he placed his hand on her chest, assuming that he was feeling for her breast.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “Not yet.”

  He was feeling for her heart. Again, he was impressed. It wasn’t thumping away beneath her rib cage, betraying her apparent composure.

  “I’m beginning to understand what Max sees in you.”

  She didn’t like the mention of Max. The thought of him upset her. It showed in her face.

  He smiled, sensing an opening. She might be able to close down her body, but she couldn’t shut off her ears.

  “He has a certain quality about him, doesn’t he? Oh, I’m not talking about the good looks—those will fade with time. It’s something else, something more lasting. Men feel it too. He’s not a threat to men. Maybe that’s what it is. He doesn’t try to impose himself on people. He’s not looking to prove anything.”

  He lit a cigarette. Rather than blowing out the match, he held it close to her thigh—absently, almost without thinking—the flame licking at the skin just below the hem of her black skirt. Her leg jerked, twisting away from the heat. He dropped the match onto the floor.

  “You have great legs, you know? They’re not quite as long as Mitzi’s, but your breasts are larger. Oh, I’m sorry, I’m forgetting, you don’t know about Mitzi, do you? I can’t imagine Max has told you about her. Why would he?”

  All the while, he was searching her body for signs.

  “I’m not sure you would like her. She’s very different from you. Not unintelligent, but frivolous, unreliable. Flighty—that’s the word I’m looking for.”

  Still no reaction.

  “Why he needs her in his life as well as you, I don’t know.”

  The sinews stood out in her slender arms as she clenched her fists.

  “The truth is often unkind. But it is what it is, and we just have to put up with it. In the grand scheme of things, a man torn between two women is hardly news, especially if he’s sleeping with only one of them.” He paused to allow his words to sink in. “He was with her three nights ago. I saw him go in and I saw him come out, and at one o’clock in the morning I don’t think they were playing backgammon.”

  Lilian was visibly upset now, doing her best to hide it.

  “Maybe with time he would have told you about her. Between you and me, I think he would have. Sadly, we’ll never know.”

  DAY NINE

  THERE WAS NO SUDDEN AWAKENING. HE CAME BACK TO consciousness slowly, on a building wave of pain. It carried him inexorably toward the shore and dumped him in a heap onto the beach. Only it wasn’t a beach, because there was a wall and something lying on top of him, pressing down on his leg.

  He remembered now: the stick of bombs converging on him, the motorcycle sliding away, then flying, weightless, airborne …

  As his eyes adjusted to the pale wash of moonlight, he saw that he was lying at the bottom of a steep bank, jammed up against a stone wall, his left leg caught beneath the motorcycle. How long he’d been there, he didn’t know. There was a smell of gasoline, and the thought of the precious liquid leaking away stirred him into action.

  Once he’d freed his leg, he was surprised to find he was able to stand. He checked himself over with his hands, his palms raw and throbbing. The bleeding seemed superficial—lots of grazes and some deeper cuts on his legs. There was also a large bump on the back of his head, congealed with blood. He couldn’t place too much weight on his left ankle. It didn’t feel broken, though, just badly sprained.

  He was more worried about the motorcycle, but she also seemed to have survived. There was still air in both tires, and although the handlebars were slightly out of alignment, the steering felt fine. From the sound of it, there was also enough gas in the tank to see him to Valetta.

  He made his way up the bank, trying to piece together what had happened. He had come off the road at a bend. He hadn’t seen it at the time, and it wasn’t the reason he’d hit the back brake so hard. He had braked because some survival instinct had told him it was better to be close to the ground when a bomb went off. He could make out the large crater the bomb had torn in the shoulder of the road. He’d been lucky. The bend had probably saved him, the steep bank shielding him from the blast as he’d left the road.

  The airfield at Luqa was recovering from the onslaught. He could see a few fires still burning, and every so often a delayed-action bomb would go off.

  He turned at the sound of an approaching vehicle, traveling fast. He guessed what it was before he saw it—an ambulance racing to the scene. They were about the only things left on the roads since gas rationing had been tightened, and he often joked with Freddie that he and his kind were a bloody menace to other drivers.

  He was right. It was an ambulance going hell-for-leather. He was about to flag it down when something stayed his hand—something Elliott had said to him, something he hadn’t thought about since.

  The question isn’t where he took Carmela Cassar, but how he took her there.

  He tried to reject the idea taking shape in his head, but it refused to be budged. The thought ripped through his brain, touching and changing everything in its path. The world as he’d been looking at it blurred into nothingness, and when it fell back into focus, he was no longer on the outside looking in. He was right at the heart of it, able to see things from all angles with a crisp and terrifying clarity.

  “Oh my God,” he said quietly.

  He knew there were seventy-two steps because he’d counted them before. He counted them now, not for old times’ sake but because each one sent a sharp pain shooting up his left leg. Maybe the ankle was broken after all.

  He knew there was a good chance Lionel would be there—his last night on the island—but Max didn’t care. He didn’t even pause on the landing before knocking.

  Mitzi eventually answered the door looking like something out of Dickens, with a dressing gown tightly tied at her waist, and carrying a chamber candlestick.

  He was leaning against the doorjamb for support.

  Her face fell. “My God, Max, what happened to you?”

  “Who did you tell about us?”

  “He’s here,” she said tightly.

  “Who did you tell about us?”

  “Max …,” she pleaded.

  It was too late. Lionel materialized from the gloom behind her.

  “I say, old man, are you all right?”

  Max ignored him. “Who did you tell?”

  Mitzi turned to Lionel. “He’s obviously not himself.”

  “I’ll say. What’s going on? What do you mean?”

  Max stared at them both. He saw the silent pact that had brought them together and the emptiness hanging between them, the lies. He could change it all in a moment. He could take it from them. He could hand the hurt straight back to Mitzi. It was so easy. Too easy.

  “I’ve been seeing a girl in the office,” he said finally. “She’s Maltese. She’s also married. I made the mistake of telling your wife here. It now seems that half the bloody garrison knows.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “A little. Enough to crash my motorcycle.”

  Lionel edged past Mitzi protectively. “I think you should leave.”

  Mitzi placed a restraining hand on Lionel’s arm.

  “Freddie,” she
said. “I told Freddie.”

  There was gratitude in her eyes for the lie he’d concocted.

  “When?”

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake—”

  “Shut up, Lionel.” Mitzi looked back at Max. “A few months ago, maybe more. January, I think.”

  Max nodded his thanks, and she turned and wandered back to the bedroom. Lionel wasn’t done with him yet, though.

  “You’re a bloody disgrace to your service!”

  “Am I, Ken?”

  He saw a satisfying flicker of alarm in Lionel’s eyes. “I know about you and Mary Farrugia, and I’m guessing you also brushed with Loreta Saliba and Carmela Cassar.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, you do. They’re all dead. Murdered.”

  “Murdered?”

  “Don’t worry. I know it wasn’t you.”

  He turned and hobbled off down the stairs.

  He had never given his service revolver much thought—he strapped it on each morning, removed it before bed—but now he felt naked without it. Finding a replacement wasn’t going to be easy at five o’clock in the morning. There was an obvious place to start, though. It was also on his route.

  He was surprised to find the boys at the Bofors gun site near his flat already up and about. They were peering down over the bastion wall into the dark abyss of Grand Harbour. It was another half hour till sunrise, but way to the east, beyond the harbor mouth, the sky was already brightening.

  “There!” said one of them, pointing.

  It was just possible to make out the dark form of a ship sliding through the gloom toward them.

  “It’s the Welshman. She made it!”

  There were cheers and slaps on the back, and that’s when they noticed they had company.

  “It’s only me,” said Max.

  “You see that, sir, the Welshman got through!”

  “Cigarette, sir?”

  “Cup of tea, sir?”

  “Foot rub, sir?”

  The joker got his laugh. Max was in favor with the Manchester men since their heroics had been reported in the Weekly Bulletin, as he’d promised they would be.