Mark Mills - The Information Officer

Drusilla’s room lay on Max’s corridor, just two doors down, so come midnight he was the one who found himself tiptoeing through the darkness, the tiles cold beneath his bare feet. Mitzi was waiting for him, naked under a cotton sheet. She had placed the mattress on the floor, presumably to avoid any undue noise. The curtains were open, the room awash with silver moonlight. They knew that silence was essential—they had even discussed it while swimming in the bay—but when Max joined her beneath the sheet, the first thing he did was say, “I’m afraid I’m not overburdened with experience.”

Mitzi stroked his face. “There’s no rush. I don’t know about you, but I don’t intend to sleep a wink tonight.”

“I don’t think anyone saw me.”

“Good.”

“And I locked the door.”

“Ssshhh,” she said, silencing him with a kiss.

The Maltese liked to rise early, and to be safe he left her room soon after four o’clock. He should have felt exhausted, drained, but there was a spring in his step, even a slight swagger. After reaching the safety of his room, he flopped onto the bed and tried to sleep, but his thoughts kept returning to the mattress on the floor, to the welcoming warmth of her body, its taut and slender beauty, her gift to him.

What had he done to deserve it? And how had he misread her so badly? The remote, imperious creature he had come to know was gone forever, laid to rest on that lumpy mattress. She had shown no signs of guilt at her betrayal of Lionel—far from it—just a hunger and urgency that had drawn the same from him. Apart from a few hushed words of encouragement, they had barely spoken, and the pauses between their lovemaking had been brief and breathless interludes. Even now he wanted more, and it was to prevent himself from doing something dangerously rash that he swung his legs off the bed and headed to the beach for a final swim.

An hour later, his bag was strapped to the back of the motorcycle and he was gone, tearing along the old dirt road that wound through the hills toward Mdina, his eyes screwed up against the wind and the low glare of the rising sun. He was a mile or so shy of Fort Bingemma when it happened, the enemy fighter swooping silently down on him and laying a trail of death across his path.

His first thought at the time had been of an avenging angel dispatched by Lionel to seek amends, and while this brush with his conscience hadn’t persuaded him to leave Mitzi well alone, eight months on he was still incapable of mounting his motorcycle without thinking that the avenging angel was watching and waiting.

Standing there on the roof of Saint Joseph’s, the skies over the airfields speckled with enemy planes, he certainly had no intention of making for Valetta before the siren had sounded its steady note of “Raiders Passed.”

He tried to use the time constructively, planning how to proceed, formulating excuses for his inquiries so that they wouldn’t arouse suspicion. But there was no ignoring the cruel coincidence of the thing, the eerie sense of predestination. All roads led to the Upstanding, the submarine driven by Lionel “Campers” Campion, lieutenant commander and cuckold.

It had been some months since he had visited the submarine base on Manoel Island, and the change was evident the moment he crossed the short causeway on his motorcycle. This time, he wasn’t waved through by the guard detail. They stopped him and questioned him and almost turned him away. He recognized the look in their eyes, the hollow stare of men who have been on the receiving end for so long that they’re itching to strike back at anything, even their own kind.

There were two of them, young and lean and mean-looking, members of the Special Service Detachment assigned to the defense of HMS Talbot, as the submarine base was also known. They softened to his cause when he asked them if they’d heard about the Macchi brought down by Vitorin Zammit after its strafing run at the base. They had, and they were eager for details from an eyewitness. Their sense of camaraderie restored, they allowed Max to proceed. They even helped him bump-start the motorcycle.

The 10th Submarine Flotilla was housed in the Lazaretto, a run of old buildings that had once served as a quarantine center for the Knights of Saint John. They were strung out along the southern shore of Manoel Island, staring Valetta in the face, sandwiched between the water’s edge and the soaring wall of rock on which Fort Manoel was perched. The Lazaretto had stood there unscathed for centuries but now wore a tired and decidedly sorry appearance.

The approach road was a patchwork of bomb craters, great gobbets of earth lay scattered about, and the small chapel had been gutted, although by some miracle its façade was still standing. The floating gangways where the subs berthed were deserted and damaged, reaching into Lazaretto Creek like the splayed fingers of an arthritic hand. The buildings themselves had fared far worse. At the western end, many of the roofs were gone, having taken the floors below with them.

When the base was viewed from this angle, the decision to pull what remained of the 10th Submarine Flotilla out of Malta made considerably more sense.

By some stroke of good fortune, the officers’ quarters at the far end of the Lazaretto had not suffered to the same degree, and a surly rating directed Max to Tommy Ravilious’s office. It lay off a sun-drenched loggia on the first floor, where a couple of officers, one of whom Max recognized from the Union Club, were lounging in wicker armchairs, smoking.

“I’m looking for Tommy Ravilious.”

He was thumbed in the general direction. “His day cabin’s three doors down on the left.”

Max had picked up enough naval jargon to know that “day cabins” were offices, just as floors were “decks,” and going out for lunch was “going ashore.” It was the same at Fort Saint Angelo on the Grand Harbour side, a “stone frigate” renamed HMS Saint Angelo by the navy when they’d adopted it as their headquarters. The urge to scream You’re on dry land now, not a bloody ship had never quite deserted Max.

One part of the corridor he picked his way down was open to the heavens, and the door to Tommy’s office was hanging off its top hinge.

Tommy was at his desk, sharpening a pencil with a rusty scalpel.

“Well, well, well …,” he said cheerily when Max entered.

Others at Lazaretto might have lost some of their usual lustre, but Tommy’s trademark brand of Boy’s Own Paper enthusiasm appeared unscathed.

“To what do I owe this pleasure—nay, honor?”

“I was passing.”

“Come now, my dear fellow, we’re too old and too wise for that.”

“So what are we doing here?”

Tommy exploded in laughter, casting a quick look around his dusty empire. “God only knows. Maybe we sinned in a previous life.”

“I hadn’t figured you for a reincarnationist.”

“My grandmother’s to blame. She loved all that nonsense. A committed naturist, too, right up until the day she died. ‘I believe in the two sexes airing their differences,’ she used to say. Drink?”

“What have you got?”

“Gin or gin.”

“Have we earned it?”

“I know I have.”

Max pulled up a chair. “Well, if only to dim the image of your grandmother airing her differences …”

It was Plymouth gin, favored by the navy men; Gordon’s was strictly army.

Max raised his tumbler in a toast. “The fourth of May.”

Tommy frowned, trying to figure the significance of the current day’s date.

“One has to be celebrating something, or else one is simply a common drunk.”

His impression of Hugh’s sonorous bass voice must have been close enough, because Tommy laughed and asked, “How is old Hugh, and the lovely Rosamund?”

Tommy downed his gin as if making up for lost time, which in some respects he was. The enemy’s recent fixation with the submarine base had kept him at his post and away from the clubs and dinners for the past month or more. As a senior member of the headquarters staff, he had barely any time for leisure when the heat was on. Max duly served up as much of the gossip as he could recall.

“Elliott was down here a couple of weeks ago,” said Tommy, topping off their tumblers.

“Elliott? What was he doing?”

“What he does best—snooping. I sometimes get the feeling he thinks we Brits are little more than a bunch of incompetents.”

“Then he’s not as stupid as he looks.”

Tommy smiled. “Apparently not. Speaks a very passable Greek, according to some of our Hellenic friends who were here at the time. One of them thought he recognized him from Crete, just before it fell.”

It seemed unlikely. Crete had fallen to the Germans almost exactly a year before, in May—a good many months before the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor had persuaded the Americans to join the fray. But when it came to Elliott, you could never be quite sure. Despite the bonhomie and robust sense of humor, there was something of the dark horse about him. He seemed to have been everywhere, lived everywhere, including England, where he’d spent several years as a pupil at Charterhouse School in Surrey.

Max could recall one of their early conversations, not long after the tall American had materialized in Malta. While berating the British for their innate lack of hospitality, Elliott had remarked that they could learn a thing or two from the people of Kazakhstan.

“I’m telling you, in Kazakhstan when a stranger turns up at your place and asks for shelter, you house him and feed him, no questions asked—not who he is, where he comes from, or where he’s going, not even how long he plans on staying. Nothing. Not a sausage. After three days, you’re allowed to ask him where he’s going, but that’s it. Anything more is an insult to your guest.”

“You’ve been to Kazakhstan?”

“There’s oil in Kazakhstan,” had been Elliott’s typically elusive response.

Max sometimes sensed that these subtle deflections were designed to tantalize, that Elliott enjoyed the aura of mystery that hung around him. Everyone knew that he had access to the very highest echelons of Malta Command. More than once he had been seen leaving the offices of the mysterious Y Service and the even more secretive Special Liaison Unit, although, as Tommy said, for much of the time he seemed to just drift about, observing and absorbing.

But Max hadn’t come to speculate about Elliott; he’d made the journey in search of information. With that mission in mind, he nudged the conversation back to the here and now.

“How are the Lazarene swine bearing up?”

“Surprisingly well, if a little jumpy.”

No one begrudged the submariners their foibles—the dark and inhuman universe they inhabited while on patrol earned them the right to act pretty much as they wished when on terra firma—but their quasi-religious devotion to the herd of pigs they’d been rearing still raised a chuckle or two.

“What’s going to happen to them?” Max inquired.

“Happen to them?”

“The pigs. When you’ve gone.”

“Aaaahhh,” drawled Tommy knowingly. “And I thought you’d come here to see how your old chum was getting on, but really it’s bacon you’re after.”

Max smiled. “It’s true, then.”

Tommy leaned across the desk and stubbed out his cigarette in the aluminum casing of a spent German flare that now served as an ashtray.

“When?” Max asked.

Tommy looked up. “P34 left a few days ago. The others over the next week or so.”

“That’s all that’s left?”

As the information officer, he might have felt stupid asking the question, but he knew the hard truth: that he was regarded as little more than a journalist, that privileged information was fed to him only when it was deemed expedient.

“Best not to shout it from the parapets.”

“Of course not.”

“Don’t think for a moment we’re happy about pulling out. We know how it’ll look, what message it’ll send to the Maltese.”

“No one’s going to blame you, Tommy. Everyone knows the pounding you’ve been taking. I mean, half the bloody island has watched it from their rooftops.”

“The powers that be are calling it a ‘tactical redeployment,’ but the truth is we’re bolting while we still can.”

Tommy’s dejection steered his hand once more toward the gin bottle.

“There’s only one reason you’ve been targeted—because you’ve hurt them so badly. Rommel can’t make headway in north Africa with you taking out his supply lines from Italy. Frankly, I’m amazed it’s taken them so long to wake up to that fact.”

“True. If they’d taken a serious pop at us a year ago, they’d have saved themselves seventy-five ships.”

“That many?”

“Four hundred thousand tons of shipping.”

“It’s a hell of an achievement, Tommy. And there’ll be more to come, wherever you end up.”

Max was fishing now.

“Alexandria. But it still feels like a retreat.”

“It isn’t. And my job’s to make people understand that.”

“Time for a bit of buffing and polishing.”

“Exactly, and it would help if I had a few more facts at my fingertips.”

“What sort of thing?”

Max tried to sound as casual as possible. “I don’t know. I imagine you have some kind of log that records the sorties of all the subs.”

“That’s confidential information.”

“I’m not the enemy, Tommy, and I’m not an idiot. I wouldn’t use anything that gave away operational practices. It’s just to get a sense of what you’ve all been through … the scale of it, the relentlessness.”

He didn’t feel good lying to Tommy, but the prize was within his grasp now, and he tried to remain focused on it.

“I don’t know, Max.”

“It’ll help bring your achievements to life.”

Tommy scrutinized him for a moment before deciding. “Okay. But I’ll tell you what you can and can’t use.”

He left the room, returning with a hefty leather-bound volume, which he dropped onto the desk in front of Max. Tommy pulled up his chair and they sat side by side, flicking through it.

Each submarine in the flotilla had a section devoted to it in which every detail of its time on Malta was noted chronologically in a neat cursive hand, everything from changes in personnel to maintenance and repair records to latitudes and longitudes of enemy sightings and engagements. The log would sometimes end with the ominous phrase “Last Known Position” or “Overdue, Presumed Lost,” and when this was the case, Tommy was inclined to reminisce about the cold-drawn courage of the men of the “Fighting Tenth,” many of whom had disappeared in circumstances that might never be entirely clear.

Max was impatient, eager to get to the relevant pages, but it was hard to remain immune to the tales of derring-do (and derring-don’t). Subs slithered into foreign harbors under the cloak of darkness to wreak happy havoc, apparently oblivious to their own meagre chances of escape. Others braved minefields to head off enemy convoys that might otherwise have eluded them. Wanklyn in the Upholder once went it alone against nine heavily armed ships and, in spite of a faulty gyrocompass that forced him to fire by sight from a choppy surface at night, bagged three before slipping away. The Porpoise, well known on Malta for ferrying crucial supplies and personnel to the island, had once survived eighty-seven depth charges during one of her “magic carpet” runs.