The Information Officer - Mark Mills

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.

“Christ,” muttered Freddie.

“Holy shit,” said Elliott.

Poor sods, thought Max.

It was clear now that the airfields had been singled out for attention: Ta’ Qali, Luqa, Hal Far, maybe even the new strips at Safi and Qrendi. They all lay some way inland, beyond Valetta and the Three Cities, strung out in a broken line, their runways forming a twisted spine to the southern half of the island.

The 88s shaped up for their shallow bombing runs, and a token splatter of shell bursts smudged the sky. Arcing lines of tracer fire from a few Bofors joined the fray. From this distance the Bofors appeared to be doing little more than tickling the underbellies of the bombers, but a shout suddenly went up.

“Look, a flamer!”

Sure enough, an 88 was deviating from its course, streaming black smoke. It climbed uncertainly toward the north, heading for home. This would normally have been the cue for a Spitfire to pounce on the stricken aircraft and finish it off, but the handful of fighters they had seen clawing for height just minutes before had probably been vectored away from the island for their own safety. It was easy to see why. The carpet bombing was well under way now, great pillars of smoke and dust rising into the sky, reaching for the lowering sun.

They all stared in silent sympathy at the remote spectacle. Earlier in the year, Max had been caught in a raid at Ta’ Qali, one of the mid-afternoon specials the Germans liked to throw in from time to time. He had spent twenty minutes lying as flat to the ground as nature would allow him in a ditch that bounded the airfield. There had been other close calls in the past couple of years—he still bore the odd scar to prove it—but nothing that even approached the deranging terror of his time in that ditch. His greatest fear at the time, strangely, had been of choking to death on the cloud of sickly yellow-gray dust, talcum-powder fine, that had enveloped everything, blotting out the sun, turning day into night. The ground beneath him had bucked like a living thing, and all around him the air had rung to the tune of flying splinters, a lethal symphony of rock and metal overlaid by more obvious notes: the whistle and shriek of falling bombs, the thump and crump of explosions, the staccato bark of the Bofors firing back blindly, and the screams of the diving Stukas.

His hearing had never fully recovered, and he suspected that something essential within him had been changed that day, almost as if he were a machine that had been rewired. It still functioned, though not quite as it had before.

He felt a light touch on his arm. It was Freddie.

“I need to talk to you,” he said in a low, confidential voice. “Not here. Alone.”

“Okay.”

“How’s tomorrow morning?”

Max nodded.

“Can you come to the Central Hospital?”

“What time?”

“Early. How does eight sound?”

“Barely acceptable.”

“Meet me at the mortuary.”

Max was obliged to curb his curiosity. Elliott had drifted toward the parapet for a better view of the raid, but he now turned to them and said, “Looks like old Zammit’s got himself a new gun.”

Vitorin Zammit lived in the house directly across the street. Well into his sixties, he was a slight and vaguely comical character who had been a regular dinner guest at Villa Marija until the death of his wife the year before. He had amassed a small fortune exporting lace, a business that had allowed him to travel the world widely, and he spoke impeccable English in the way that only a foreigner can. His wife’s passing had hit him hard, and although she had been brought down by the same diabetes that had plagued her for years, he held the enemy unreservedly to blame. He now kept his own company, when he wasn’t caught up in the activities of the Sliema Home Guard Volunteers, through whose ranks he had risen rapidly to become something of a leading light.

He owned a pistol, and when a raid was in progress, he was often to be found on his roof terrace taking potshots at the planes. Not only was this a futile gesture, it was in flagrant breach of the regulations. He should have known better, and he probably did, but no one begrudged him his bit of sport. If anyone took exception, Hugh invariably ensured that they came to see things differently.

Sometimes Zammit wore his uniform, sometimes a suit. He never went into battle in his shirtsleeves. Today he was wearing a black suit and a home guard armband, and he prowled around his roof terrace like some dark ghost, eyes on the skies, apparently oblivious to the large crowd gathered on the neighboring rooftop. Instead of his usual pistol, he carried a rifle in his hand.

“Is that a Lee-Enfield?” asked Freddie.

“Might just as well be a goddamn broomstick for all the good it’s going to do him,” replied Elliott.

The last of the bombers were making their runs now, dropping to four or five thousand feet before unloading over the airfields. Resistance was minimal, and they climbed safely away with a covey of fighters assigned to see them safely home. High above, all around, 109s blackened the sky like bees, keeping a wary guard. Their job done, the island’s artillery all but spent, they would soon descend and begin picking over the carcass, making low-level attacks on targets of opportunity. If there was a time to be scared, now was it. Even a residential district like Sliema was fair game.

Knowing this, a few people started to drift below. Most stood their ground, though, eager to see how things would play out. Freddie made a drinks run downstairs. By the time he returned with their glasses, the dockyards in Grand Harbour were under attack, the enemy fighters rising into view behind Valetta like rocketing pheasants as they pulled up out of their dives. They couldn’t hope to inflict much real damage with their cannon and machine-gun fire, but they were making a point. Max had heard from Ralph that a 109 had even made a touch-and-go landing at Ta’ Qali the other day, rubbing their noses in it.

Today, pleasingly, this arrogance came at a price. A 109 banking over Fort Saint Elmo appeared to stagger, then its starboard wing dipped sharply and it spun away. There was no question of the pilot baling out at that height, and the aircraft hit the water, throwing up a white feather of spume near the harbor entrance.

“Welcome to Malta, you sonofabitch,” said Elliott darkly, as the cheers resounded around them.