The Information Officer (6 page)

“I heard what happened—of course I waited.”

“Yes, a nasty business.”

It certainly was. A passing orderly had explained the situation to Max. A wayward bomb had fallen well short of the dockyards during the early-morning raid and exploded at the entrance to a shelter in Marsa. Everyone had been safely inside by then, but it would have been far better for all of them if they’d stayed at home. The steel doors of the shelter had been blown in, and the Maltese not torn apart by the hail of metal had found themselves consumed by the ensuing fireball.

Freddie had obviously made an effort to scrub up after his labors, but had missed a couple of spots of blood on his cheek. Max tried his best to ignore them.

“I don’t know how you do it.”

“It’s what I trained for.” Freddie shrugged.

“Really? This?”

Freddie smiled weakly. “Well, not quite this.” He fished a lighter
and a packet of Craven “A”s from his pocket. “Sometimes I wish they’d just invade. Then it would all stop.”

“If it stops here, it just gets worse in a lot of other places.”

“I suppose.”

They all knew the reasoning; there was no point in going over it again.

“Do you want to get some air?” asked Max.

“No. Let’s get it over with.” Freddie held out the packet of cigarettes.

Max raised his hand, declining the offer. “I’ve just put one out.”

“Take one,” said Freddie. “For the smell.”

Max had been in hospitals before, but only ever to visit wounded friends. Those airy, spotless wards with their ordered rows of beds and their gruff thick-ankled nurses had nothing in common with the mortuary of the Central Hospital.

The mortuary occupied a run of vast and gloomy ground-floor rooms. The windows were partially shuttered, allowing in just enough light to make identification possible. Corpses carpeted the tiled floors. Some of the bodies were covered, others not, and some weren’t bodies at all.

“We’re out of blankets, I’m afraid,” said Freddie as they picked their way through the first room. He might just as well have been apologizing to a house guest, and his matter-of-factness went some way toward calming Max’s nerves. An orderly in what must once have been a white coat was mopping the floor. He was young—too young, you couldn’t help thinking, to be exposed to such sights. His tin pail screeched in protest as he maneuvered it around the floor with the mop. It was the only sound. The stench was indescribable.

The second room was almost as large as the first, and the thing Max noticed immediately was a pile of limbs stacked up in the corner like so much firewood. The next thing he noticed was a Maltese man emptying the contents of his stomach onto the floor. He was being held around the shoulders by a ragged old fellow in a threadbare suit emitting deep and sonorous sobs. They had evidently just identified
the body at their feet, and an orderly looked on awkwardly, clipboard poised to register the details.

It was a pathetic sight, upsetting—two broken men bent over a broken body—and Max was relieved when Freddie led him through double swing-doors out of the charnel house and into a long corridor.

“There are so many.”

“It’s been a bad week. And coffins are hard to come by, so they lie here for days, backing up.”

“Some of them are, well, remarkably intact.”

“Blast victims, snuffed out by the shock wave. Although it often scalps them.”

Their destination was a small room at the far end of the corridor. Aside from a wooden desk in the corner, the room was empty. Max’s relief was short-lived, though; he hadn’t spotted the gurney pushed up against the wall behind the door. A body lay on it—a woman, judging from the bare feet poking out from beneath the piece of tarpaulin that covered her.

“This is what you wanted to show me?”

“She was found yesterday morning in Marsa, lying in the street.” He reached for the tarpaulin.

“Freddie, I’m not sure I …” He trailed off.

“There are some wounds, but I’ve cleaned them up.”

“What’s this all about? I don’t understand.”

“You will.”

“Try telling me now.”

He was already steeling himself against the long walk back past the silent ranks of damaged and dismembered corpses; the thought of scrutinizing one of them up close filled him with alarm and horror.

Freddie didn’t release the tarpaulin. “Max, you’re my friend, and I don’t know who else to tell.”

They looked at each other in silence. Then Max nodded and Freddie folded back the tarpaulin.

The girl was young, maybe eighteen or nineteen, with an innocent beauty that even the cold pallor of death couldn’t erase. Her hair was long, straight, black as bitumen, and it framed an oval face that descended to an elfin chin. Her lips were large and surprisingly red.
Lipstick, he realized. Which was odd. It was in short supply, and not many Maltese girls wore it at the best of times.

Freddie tilted her head to the right and gently drew back her hair. A raw and ragged gash ran from beneath her right ear toward her collar bone, widening as it went.

“Christ …”

Freddie’s hand delved beneath the tarpaulin and produced a jagged shard of metal, twisted and razor-edged. “Ack-ack shrapnel. It was still in her when she was brought in.”

It was a common cause of injuries and deaths, the lethal hail of metal dropping back to earth from exploding artillery shells. You could hear the splinters tinkling merrily in the streets and on the rooftops whenever a raid was on, a deceptively harmless sound.

“She bled to death?”

“It looks that way.”

“So?”

Freddie hesitated. “I think it was made to look that way.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean these … and these.” Freddie raised her wrists in turn. The marks were faint, easy to miss.

“Rope burns?”

“Her hands weren’t bound when she was found. And look at her nails.”

They were long, painted red, and several of them were cracked or broken.

“She fought back. There’s also some bruising around her shoulders and her thighs. Also her labia.”

What a horrible word. It struck Max, enough to extinguish all thoughts of carnality. It was about all he could think as he struggled to take in what Freddie was telling him.

“You think she was violated?”

“I
know
she was violated. And probably by the same man who then killed her.”

“Freddie, come on. That’s a leap too far.”

“She’s not the first.”

“What?”

“There have been others, two others I’ve seen since the beginning of the year. Not like this, not exactly. One had been crushed by falling masonry; the other one had drowned.”

“Drowned?”

There were many ways to die on Malta, but drowning wasn’t the first that sprang to mind, certainly not since the beaches had been wired off against invasion.

“She fell into a collapsed cistern while walking home in the dark. At least, that’s the way it looked. Both were sherry queens from the Gut.”

“Sherry queens” was service slang for the Maltese dance hostesses who worked the bars and bawdy music halls that infested the lower end of Strait Street in Valetta, a disreputable quarter dubbed the Gut.

“Jesus Christ, Freddie. You should have told someone.”

“What makes you think I didn’t? Apparently the matter is now in the hands of the appropriate authorities.”

“Sounds like lieutenant governor’s office speak.”

“You should know.”

He certainly did. The Information Office answered directly to the lieutenant governor and his coterie of self-important lackeys.

“So why am I here?”

“Because she had something on her that changes everything. Something in her hand. I had to pry it out. Rigor mortis had set in.”

Freddie reached into the hip pocket of his khaki shorts and handed something to Max. It was a piece of material—a cloth shoulder tab, torn where it had been ripped from a uniform. Enough of it remained, though.

“Oh Christ,” said Max.

“That’s one way of putting it.”

Max’s apartment was a short walk from the hospital through the streets of Floriana. He passed a long line of women queuing for paraffin. There was some kind of scuffle taking place that involved a lot of raised voices. Spotting Max approach, a rangy young woman with fire
in her eyes appealed to him in accented English, “Tell her she wait like all of us.”

“You have to wait,” said Max, without breaking his stride or even turning to identify the culprit.

His indifference was rewarded with a bank of baleful glares and a couple of mumbled curses in Maltese. He ignored them, too numb to care.

He was still trying to process the information sprung on him by Freddie in the mortuary. Whichever way he came at it, it spelled big trouble. Freddie had taken a certain amount of persuading to keep his latest findings to himself, at least for a couple of days. It would give Max time to think the matter through properly, make a few inquiries. What those might be exactly, he wasn’t yet sure. Things would become clearer once they knew who the girl was. Her absence couldn’t go unnoticed for long. She probably had family and friends who even now were discussing the dread prospect of doing the rounds of the mortuaries.

Her makeup, the livid nail polish, everything pointed to her occupation. It also pointed to a pattern: three dance hostesses from the Gut—more, for all they knew—not unlucky victims of the war but of a man who had violated them before killing them. And not just any man, a British serviceman, a submariner. And not just any submarine, the
Upstanding
—commanded by Lionel Campion, Mitzi’s husband.

He felt in his pocket for the torn shoulder tab Freddie had recovered from the dead girl’s clenched fist. Instinct had told him to ask for it, and instinct now told him to dispose of it immediately. With the proof gone, it would be Freddie’s word against his. Was he willing to trade their friendship for the alternative, the unthinkable?

The Maltese had not wanted this war; it had been called down upon their heads. And their almost childlike faith in the ability of the British to defend them, to ultimately prevail against the forces of evil, had been tested to its limits by the gathering hell of the past few months. After two long years of siege, they knew the truth about their predicament. How could they not know? The truth had been fed to them to shore up their morale—a badge of honor to be worn with pride.

They knew by heart the words of praise heaped on them by Winston Churchill in the House of Commons (and they joked that they’d be happy to swap those words for a few more Spitfires or a shipload of sausages). They knew that King George VI had awarded them, all of them, the George Cross earlier in the month (and they admired the king’s advisers for their judicious timing). But the fact remained: they were still cut off from the world, alone, surrounded by an enemy intent on starving them into submission and annihilating them from the air. Twice the tonnage of bombs dropped on London during the worst twelve months of the Blitz had rained down on their heads in the last two months alone. It was an extraordinary statistic that conferred on their little island home the dubious honor of being the most bombed patch of earth on the planet. Ever.

Remarkably, in spite of all this, they had barely wavered, making light of their trials. But what would happen if they thought for a moment that they were also fighting an enemy within? How would they react to the news that a British serviceman was picking off their daughters, using the war as a cloak for his crimes? It was impossible to say, but it would change everything in a moment.

As Max turned into Pietro Floriani Street, he drew to a halt. The building at the northern end of the street had taken a direct hit at the beginning of April, collapsing completely, taking much of the adjacent apartment block with it, shearing rooms in half, exposing their contents to the elements and the voyeuristic gaze of passersby—a sideboard pressed up against a drawing room wall hung with framed photographs; a towel still draped over the edge of a cast-iron bathtub; an effigy of the Virgin, which, miraculously, had not been toppled from its perch on the mantelpiece by the sudden disappearance of the other half of the room.

It brought to mind the architectural cross sections he used to run off, slicing through buildings to reveal the guts of his designs. For a fleeting moment he glimpsed himself perched on the high wooden stool, hunched over his drawing board, feverishly applying himself to the task. He wondered what had become of that well-meaning young man dreaming of a bright future in a top firm of architects. It seemed impossible to him that he could have traveled from that to this in
such a brief time, from an airy studio in the Architectural Association to a Mediterranean bomb site, from enthusiastic student to cynical military official.

They were dangerous thoughts, the kind that built swiftly to an over whelming flood, and he pushed them from him before they could.

He gazed at the piece of material in his hand and told himself that his friendship with Freddie wasn’t at stake. Freddie had offered no resistance to his suggestion that he take the shoulder tab with him. If anything, he had seemed eager to rid himself of it.
Take this
, he was saying,
and do with it what you will, because I don’t know what to do with it
.

Shunting his conscience to one side, Max glanced around him to check that he was alone. Then he tossed the piece of material away. It was lost in the heaped rubble of what used to be 35 Pietro Floriani Street.

He set off at a brisk pace, not wishing to dwell on his actions. At the end of his street, he returned the salutes of the scruffy mob of Maltese boys at their flag station.

“No worries, Joe!” they called.

It was about all the English they possessed, that and “Speetfire.”

“Allura,”
Max replied. No worries.

Many of them had older brothers who had been conscripted into the Royal Malta Artillery or the King’s Own Malta Regiment. Eager to emulate their heroes, they had rigged a flagstaff from a toppled telegraph pylon. The moment the red ensign appeared above the Castille in Valetta, the boys hoisted their own scarlet rag for the benefit of their little corner of Floriana. Amazingly, they never abandoned their post, even during an air raid, although they often strayed onto the pitted patch of earth near the bastion wall to play football against the crew of the Bofors gun site—Manchester men who liked the ball at their feet and who weren’t afraid to send a small child sprawling in the dust.