“I had nothing to do with the troubles after the war,” Joe said before he could stop himself. He couldn’t help himself compounding his admission. “None of my people had anything to do with the killings or the sabotage.”
The big man already knew that.
Within hours of the October War while the firestorms still raged in the devastated cities of Northern Europe and the Soviet Union, sleeper agents had emerged from their long slumber. In Italy and across the Mediterranean and in the surviving cities of the old country there had been a wave of assassinations and bombings. Leading politicians, businessmen and churchmen had been gunned down. Power stations, oil refineries and railways had been sabotaged. Here on Malta the C-in-C Mediterranean Fleet and his wife had been murdered outside their official residence. Other senior officers had been butchered in broad daylight. The American Consul had been burned alive in a petrol bomb attack on his car. Aircraft had been blown up on the tarmac at Luqa. A cruiser, HMS Lion, had had her decks raked with sub-machine gun fire as she left Marsamxett Harbour one morning. There had been random bombings in Valetta and on the Sliema waterfront targeted at bars and restaurants frequented by British officers and other ranks. The wave of attacks had only stopped with the massive roundups of last December and January. Joe Calleja remembered those times with terror and confusion.
“Marija is okay?” He checked. He might not be very happy being locked up in this hole but he could live with it so long as he knew his family was all right. Especially, Marija.
“She’s a little thinner, I think. Standing in the road holding up that bloody banner for hours on end can’t be good for her,” the soldier replied, glumly. “But she’s okay.”
“Most times you tell me very little when we have these little chats?”
“I tell you about your family. That they’re okay.”
“I mean apart from that?”
“I’m in the Army. I don’t pick and chose which orders I obey. Nobody’s ordered me not to tell you that your family is okay.” Jim Siddall checked his wristwatch. “If you were a real communist agent provocateur you’d know that, Joe.”
The younger man bristled then realised he was being teased.
“I am a communist,” he hissed.
“Maybe.” Jim Siddall shrugged as if it didn’t matter. “I have to go.”
Joseph Calleja watched the tall man stride away.
Then he began to worry about Marija.
Chapter 6
“Can I offer you a cup of tea, Miss Calleja?”
Marija looked at the sinewy man of about her own height — five feet and five or six inches — in the immaculate dark blue uniform of a commander in the Royal Navy with politely quizzical brown eyes. She guessed the officer sitting on the other side of the polished mahogany desk was in his late thirties or early forties. His severely cropped dark hair failed to conceal the tracks of two separate scalp injuries. One was just inside the hairline above his left eye, two inches long and jagged. The other was above his left ear, a straight forty-five degree slash with ugly suture marks. Shrapnel injuries, she assumed. She’d grown up in a war-scarred generation and this man’s scars bore no comparison with her own, mercifully hidden wounds. He was returning her gaze with eyes that betrayed absolutely nothing of his real thoughts.
The man had introduced himself as William McNeil. And added: ‘I’m attached to the Staff of the C-in-C Middle East in Alexandria. I’m on my way back to the United Kingdom and I’ve been asked to review a number of outstanding files here, on Malta, and other places. En route, as it were.’
The man wore an expensive-looking watch on his left wrist. Marija guessed it was an aviator’s chronometer similar to those she seen RAF pilots at Luqa and Hal Far wearing. It distracted her eye. Seeing this Commander McNeil glanced down at the timepiece, half-smiling.
“A gift from my brother,” he explained. “He was a fighter pilot.”
He had a clipped, pitch perfect accent that was in some small way a caricature of an actor in some old British World War II movie. It rather reminded Marija of Alec Guinness in The Malta Story and she’d tried not to smile. Marija’s father liked to remind his children that ‘if something seems to be too good to be true, it probably is’, and for some reason she couldn’t put her finger on, the scarred, cool-eyed man studying her from across the other side of his borrowed desk, seemed if not ‘too good to be true’ then somehow, too…English. Another film she’d seen as a teenager was In Which We Serve and Commander William McNeil sounded exactly like Noel Coward. Nobody she’d ever met had ever sounded exactly like Noel Coward.
“I thought I was under arrest Commander McNeil?” Marija replied, finding no difficulty sounding a little vexed. She sat on the edge of the hard chair a sour faced Wren had pulled up for her while she was waiting. She sat very still, careful to maintain an appearance of seraphic calm that suggested complete indifference to her current situation. “Now you are asking me if I would like a cup of tea? Forgive me, I am a simple Catholic girl and I am confused?”
“A simple Catholic girl? That I doubt, Miss Calleja.” The man half-smiled as he spoke but his eyes weren’t laughing.
“Am I not under arrest?”
“No. Should you be under arrest?”
Acknowledging that the question was rhetorical Marija didn’t dignify it with an answer. She folded her hands in her lap, waited for her interrogator to continue. She’d known that sooner or later the British would pull her in, attempt to persuade and if persuasion failed, attempt to frighten and intimidate her into acquiescence. Her fortnightly column in the Times of Malta — no more than two hundred and fifty politely, moderately scolding words — was a thorn in the ISD’s side that they couldn’t risk removing without abandoning the fiction that they weren’t behaving like Fascists. Miraculously, the Times of Malta remained sacrosanct; the one public organ of information untouched by martial law because the British knew that without at least one trustworthy means of speaking to every Maltese, the archipelago would eventually become ungovernable.
Commander McNeil grunted and opened the well-thumbed Manila file on his blotter. The file was an inch thick and several pages were partly torn. It was a file that had been in transit and had passed through many hands.
“Your brother doesn’t seem to care what happens to the rest of his family.”
Marija recognised this for a statement and replied accordingly.
“Joseph answers to his own conscience,” she said evenly, “as do we all.”
“Really?” The man didn’t look up. “I’m told young Joseph has been a constant trial to your father. Your father holds a very responsible position. Deputy Dockyard Superintendent. You and he must have had words many times about Joseph?”
Marija understood what was going on.
“My father and I have never had words, Commander. About Joe, or on any other subject.” Sitting still on the hard chair was beginning to hurt. Her old injuries and their lasting effects caught up with her when she was tired, unable to move freely, or stretch. However, if a little pain was the cost of her apparent serenity then it was worth it. She had no intention of showing weakness in front of this man. “My father is a good and an honourable man.”
“I’m sure he is.”
Marija ignored the sneering undertone. Instead, she began to look around the office. There were pictures of cruisers and destroyers on the wall. ISD operated out of huts erected outside the walls of Fort Manoel, not inside citadel. Yet Jim Siddall had driven straight past those ramshackle post-war buildings into the fortress. He’d jumped out, held the door for her. He’d offered her his arm in support like a perfect gentleman; she’d declined it. The photographs of the room’s normal occupant’s family were placed face down to one side of the blotter in their gilded frames. Had they survived the cataclysm of the October War? So many of the sailors, soldiers and airmen on the island had lost people they’d loved. A little voice in her head reminded her that even in these strange times she remained one of the lucky ones. She’d lost nobody and by the grace of God, Peter had survived.