Mark Mills - The Information Officer

“I don’t know, Max.”

“Let’s see the photos.”

She pulled a folder from a pile of papers and spread a handful of black-and-white photos on the desk. They were almost identical. In a couple of them Vitorin Zammit was shaking the hand of the downed Italian pilot, whose parachute was piled up at his feet, and in all of them a ragtag band of grinning Maltese stood stiffly behind.

The young Italian was ridiculously handsome, and knew it; he had run his fingers through his thick hair to give his fringe some lift as Max had been preparing to take the first shot. Old Zammit’s suit was powdered white with dust from their breakneck dash up into the hills. Wedged in between Max and Pemberton on the back of the motorcycle, he had complained all the way about his abduction, and had only ceased his moaning when they’d spotted the black smoke billowing from the wreck of the Macchi. It had piled into the base of a low escarpment just south of Gharghur, the pilot drifting to earth in a rock-strewn field nearby, where he had been promptly surrounded by a mob of blue-chinned and barefooted laborers brandishing sickles and hoes. His relief at the arrival of two uniformed officers on a motorcycle had been patent—although he must have known that the Maltese weren’t the lynching kind—and when it had finally been conveyed to him through a series of gestures that the old man in the suit had shot him down, he’d put his pride in his pocket and laughed along heartily with everyone else.

“This is the best one,” said Lilian.

She was right. Zammit’s hand was resting on the Italian’s shoulder—a protective, almost tender gesture—and the younger man’s expression was an endearing picture of amused resignation. It was exactly the sort of image the Maltese would respond to—quietly triumphal and tinged with humor.

“Yes,” Max concurred.

He could see from Lilian’s face that she was still hesitating, and he knew why. She had crossed swords with the British authorities enough times in the past to have developed a reputation as something of a troublemaker. When the siege was in its infancy, she had fought for the rights of the islanders to dig their own shelters on public property, and she’d also unsuccessfully championed the cause of the Maltese internees—Italian sympathizers, or so it was claimed—who had been locked up like common criminals at the outbreak of hostilities and who had recently been shipped off to Uganda.

Running a story that might promote illegal behavior among the islanders could have consequences for her. She was thinking of her job.

“What he did might have contravened regulations, but look at it.” Max handed her the photo. “This is what we all need right now. A hero. An improbable hero.”

“I know that. You know that.”

“Then I’ll report it in the Weekly Bulletin, and you’ll have your excuse to run it. The worst I’ll get is a slapped wrist. Believe me, even the lieutenant governor will see the logic of putting it out there at a time like this.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Why are you doing this?”

Mistrust, antagonism even, was part and parcel of their professional relationship, and they’d stopped pretending it wasn’t. The Information Office and the only Maltese-language newspaper on the island might make for natural bedfellows, but Lilian’s loyalties were to her own people, whose interests were not always best served by the British policy that Max was bound to promote. This made for an uneasy collaboration, a tentative trade of services. Lilian advised Max on how best to pitch the tone of his publications and broadcasts to appeal to a Maltese audience, and in return she received access to the kind of information she couldn’t hope to get from anyone else. And both remained skeptical about the motives of the other.

Lilian was right to be wary in this instance. Max couldn’t tell her the truth: that he knew a German invasion was imminent, and the signals from the summit were that they’d be fighting to the last man. If they were to stand any chance of turning back the Nazi tide, they needed the islanders at their side, willing and eager to take up arms. Vitorin Zammit in his dusty suit could do more to foster the necessary spirit of resistance than any number of pious speeches put out over the Rediffusion by the governor.

“Look, I’m just saying a story like this is good for everyone.”

Lilian wasn’t convinced. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

If you only knew the half of it, thought Max, images of the dead girl stretched out on the gurney in the mortuary suddenly crowding his thoughts, tightening his stomach.

He crushed out his cigarette against the sole of his shoe, anything to avoid her eyes. “There are a lot of things I don’t tell you—can’t tell you. You know that.”

He kept grinding away at the dead cigarette.

“Max, look at me.”

I can’t, he thought. Because if I do, I’ll see her in you, you in her, and I won’t be able to pretend that it doesn’t matter. I won’t be able to walk away from it.

She waited for him to look up. “You’re wrong,” she said gently. “You can tell me. As a friend.”

Oh Christ …

“You should get going,” he suggested.

Now she was offended, and he tried to make amends.

“I’ll give you a lift to Sliema on the motorcycle if you want.”

“People will talk.”

“And we can’t have that, can we?”

“It’s easy for you to say. When you are gone, they will still be talking.”

They parted company in front of the building, though not before Lilian announced that he’d been invited to dinner again at her aunt’s.

“Really?”

“She liked you.”

“I can’t think why. I ranted at her for most of the evening.”

“I know. She said.”

Lilian hurried for Saint Salvatore bastion in search of a dghaisa to row her across Marsamxett Harbour, and he watched her till the slope of the street had swallowed her up.

He didn’t do too badly. Determined thoughts of the papers piling up on his desk successfully carried him all the way to the Porte des Bombes. But it was here that he found himself swinging the motorcycle around and doubling back into the gridlike streets of Floriana.

He located it almost instantly, which was a relief; he would have been hard-pushed to explain what he was doing scrabbling around in the ruins of a wrecked building. It was wedged in a crack between two bomb-spilled cubes of Malta rock. An inch or two to the left and it would have slipped away deep into the rubble, well beyond reach and any hope of recovery.

He dusted off the shoulder tab and stared at it, so light in his hand, so inconsequential. It was hard to believe that a shred of cloth could have so much destructive power locked away in it.

HIGH OVERHEAD, TALL PENCILS OF LIGHT STABBED AND swept the night sky, sightless, searching for the drone of the lone bomber. Maybe it would drop an egg or two before returning to Sicily, or maybe it would hold back its high explosive for another day. Either way a different aircraft would take up the baton before long, a relay designed to keep the defenders at their war stations and away from their beds, wearing them down.

Whatever you thought of the Germans—and he was still divided in his thinking—they approached the dirty business of war with a certain imaginative insolence that was hard not to admire.

He turned his eyes back to the pale thread of earth at his feet and set off once more up the slope.

He had always liked to walk, but alone, never in company. Walking was a time for contemplation, for introspection. The idea of tossing idle banter about at the same time had never appealed to him, even as a boy.

He had started going for walks when he was young—an excuse to get out of the house. The hours would fly by in his own company, whole afternoons sometimes, gone in moments, or so it had seemed at the time. He didn’t much care for the countryside, although he probably knew more about its routine cycles than most. He could predict to the week when the buttercups would appear in the meadow, a yellow carpet reaching to the foot of the chalk hills. Or when the jackdaws would start to nest in the chimney pots, scavenging hair from the backs of supine heifers. Or when the Canada geese would abandon the lake in search of southern warmth.

He observed, and he registered these developments, but as a scientist might record the temperatures and quantities and colors of a chemistry experiment: dispassionately, at one remove. If he gathered up and carried home small trophies from his expeditions, it was only to lend some kind of credibility to his wanderings, to throw his parents off the scent.

He always made a point of returning with some keepsake—a fossil or a lump of fool’s gold from the scree in the chalk quarry; the bone of an indeterminate animal, picked clean by predators and bleached white by the sun; the sloughed skin of an adder. To his parents’ eyes, these tokens indicated a healthy interest in the natural world. To him, they were little more than meaningless debris. Until he discovered that they held the power to placate his father, to momentarily distract him from his strange and pressing need to mistreat his wife and his son.

On returning from his work in the city, his father would light his pipe and ask to see the latest addition to the collection, and they would wander to the hut at the end of the garden where he housed his cabinet of curiosities. There they would sit and talk together, wreathed in blue pipe smoke, and his father would tell him stories of his childhood, of the remote farm where he had grown up. He professed a love of nature, but it was a strange kind of love, one that led him to spend much of his free time shooting all manner of birds and animals with his friends. And when he wasn’t slaughtering the local wildlife, he would be savagely pollarding trees or hacking back undergrowth. The truth was, his father viewed nature much as he viewed his family: as an unruly force, something to be tamed and mastered with a firm hand.

After the accident—his father dead and buried, truly at one with nature—he took up his private wanderings once more. They were the touchstone against which he was able to test the transformation that had occurred in him. He walked the same paths, clambered high into the canopy of the same ancient chestnut, lobbed stones into the lake to observe the play of intersecting ripples. He did what he had always done, and he felt nothing, nothing whatsoever, not even a dim glow of nostalgia.

This scared him at first, and he ascribed the vacuum inside him to guilt, to the secret he knew he could never share with anyone. He soon came to realize that he was wrong, though. It couldn’t be guilt, because he felt no guilt for what he had done. He was able to play those last moments of his father’s life over and over again in his head and they stirred nothing in him, neither shame nor satisfaction. In fact, he barely recognized himself in the small slice of cinema. It could just as well have been another fourteen-year-old boy sitting in the passenger seat of the swanky new roadster hurtling down the country lane.

His father was always buying new cars, fast cars. They fit with his “work hard, play hard” ethic, and he drove them hard, pushing them to their limits. When they disappointed him, which they invariably did, he simply replaced them. It had been a Saturday morning in early August and they’d been heading for a race meeting at Brooklands motor course. The events at Brooklands drew a rich crowd, an international crowd, and his father liked to gather there with his friends. Wives and daughters rarely showed their faces. Sons were permitted on the understanding that they were neither seen nor heard. This was fine by the sons, who congregated in front of the green-domed clubhouse before making for one of the circuit’s massive banked curves, where they would spend the remainder of the day sneaking cigarettes in the long grass and silently praying for one of the drivers to misjudge the camber and go hurtling over the edge.

That’s what should have happened that day, what would have happened if he hadn’t reached out a hand and opened the glove compartment of his father’s new car. He was used to his father’s sudden jungle furies, used to being screamed at for some minor misdemeanor. He wasn’t used to being slapped across the cheek. He knew that his father struck his mother, he had seen the bruises on her, but he had always been spared such treatment. Until now. He didn’t cry—he knew that if he cried he was truly done for—but his father saw the tears moistening his eyes, and that was enough. The words cut deeper than they ever had before, and the shouts increased in volume, competing with the roar of the wind and the scream of the engine.

That’s when he did it. Even now, he couldn’t say what he had hoped to achieve. He certainly didn’t pause to weigh the consequences. It was a purely instinctual reaction. He lunged for the steering wheel and yanked it toward him. The last thing he remembered before the world went black was his hand, pale and hairless beside his father’s on the polished perfection of the wooden steering wheel.

His father died instantly when the roadster wrapped itself around the tree. Some curious law of physics chose to throw him clear at the moment of impact. All this he discovered some days later, when he came to in the hospital. His head was heavily bandaged, but everything else was intact—externally, at least, which was all the doctors cared about. They used the words “coma” and “miracle” a lot. His mother barely spoke. She did what she was supposed to do. She put on her widow’s weeds and consoled her damaged son. But he knew what she was really thinking; he knew she was struggling to come to terms with her liberation. He saw her in a new light, clear and crisp and cold, a winter light. And it wasn’t just her. He saw everything in this new and unfamiliar light.

Others must have detected something in him, because they started to remark on his behavior. His mother said it was grief. The doctors put it down to shock. One doctor, young and eager to please his superiors, prattled on about some recent case studies of frontal lobe trauma. Apparently there was evidence to suggest an association between a blow to the front of the head and a diminution in the subject’s ability to feel emotion. Words such as “emotion” didn’t sit happily with the consultants, and the young doctor learned a valuable lesson: it’s only a good idea if your boss has had it first.

Enough science had accrued in the intervening years to bear out the theory, but he had known the truth of it at the time. He hadn’t been in shock and he hadn’t been grieving. He’d simply been unable to conjure up any feelings. It was as if he’d been observing the world through the viewfinder of a camera. Some invisible barrier stood between him and the subject of his attentions.

He learned this early on, and he quickly learned to compensate, to fabricate the required responses of a normal person. He must have done a good job, for one day the doctors suddenly announced that he had recovered his wits and was free to go. The bandage was gone by then, the scar on his forehead already healing to a fine fissure.