“I came here today to visit my brother,” she reminded Commander McNeil. Nothing irritated the British so much as to be accused of rudeness.
“Yes. I’m sorry. That cannot be helped.”
“I’m sorry,” she queried, resorting to her most quizzical expression. “It was my understanding that you were the masters on this island?”
The man scowled before he remembered that scowling at this particular young woman wasn’t in his script. He closed the open file, sat back in his chair, took a deep breath.
“I was at the Embassy in Ankara when the curtain went up last year,” he sighed. His left hand went up to his head. “Every window in the city blew out in the first strike. I was lucky. I just got cut up a bit.” He fixed Marija in a cold, sterile stare. “My wife and my two young sons lived in a place called Chatham. That was supposed to be a temporary thing. They were going to come out to join me for the rest of my tour just before Christmas last year. Unfortunately, Chatham doesn’t exist anymore. Neither do any illusions I might once have entertained that any of us are masters of anything.”
Marija glanced at the gilded frames face down on the table.
“I am sorry. If anything happened to my family I don’t know how I would carry on, Commander.”
“Day by day, Miss Calleja.” The man appeared to come to a decision. “Perhaps, we might walk together? If you are able, that is. I know this has probably already been a long day for you. I don’t think you’ve been up here before and the view across to Valetta is quite stunning.”
The mid-afternoon sun was breaking fitfully through threatening, fast scudding clouds as Commander McNeil followed his guest out onto the old parade ground. Several Land Rovers, a couple of Jeeps and half-a-dozen big Bedford trucks were parked, seemingly at random, in the surprisingly large open space within the bastion walls.
Marija paused at the edge of the pavement surrounding the parade ground before stepping, very cautiously the six inches down to the ground. She was stiff and sore from sitting uncomfortably, unmoving on the chair. She swayed, steadied, regained her balance and realised that McNeil had been waiting anxiously, coiled like a spring to catch her if she fell.
“It has been a long day,” she conceded, waving away his concerns.
They began to walk, unhurriedly between the parked vehicles.
“In case you were wondering I am not attached to the Internal Security Division,” Commander McNeil announced. “Or at least, not in any meaningful way. It is simply that by operating under the general umbrella of ISD fewer questions are asked, that sort of thing.”
“If you are not with Internal Security who are you with, Commander?”
“That I am not at liberty to divulge, Miss Calleja.”
“What are we doing here?”
“Ah, now that’s a good question.”
They walked on until they came to the western wall. McNeil led Marija through two doors and a cool, vaulted tunnel to the outside of the ramparts. They emerged onto a platform above terraces of white stone steps that led all the way down to a vacant granite quay. Across the grey blue waters of Marsamxett Creek the great walls of Valetta reared up, filling the horizon like the side of a valley. On the other side of the anchorage Marija watched a car driving slowly along the curve of the Great Siege Road. Looking down Marsamxett towards Floriana she saw an old destroyer tied up alongside the refuelling jetty. She squinted hard but couldn’t make out the ship’s pennant number.
“We can speak privately, now,” the man assured her. There were large, finished stones awaiting their turn to be rebuilt back into the walls of Fort Manoel as part of the slow, ongoing restoration to the ancient fabric of the citadel. The fortress had fallen into general disrepair before the siege of 1940 to 1942 during which the bombing had made things ten times worse. All restoration work had ceased in October last year. “Let’s sit down,” McNeil suggested. “If it starts raining we can shelter in the tunnel.”
Marija sank gratefully onto the nearest stone.
“Things here on Malta,” McNeil began, “are nowhere near as bad as they are elsewhere in the Mediterranean. Obviously, things were chaotic here just after the war. We’d assumed that Soviet war plans included disruptive fifth column operations, assassinations of prominent civil and military figures, sabotage and so forth, but we’d never imagined those activities would be so,” he shrugged, “extreme. Or that they’d continue for so long after major hostilities had ceased.”
Marija listened. The leadership of the Maltese Nationalist Party had been decimated by a series of cold-blooded murders and bombings. A score of senior British officers had been assassinated within hours of the outbreak of war. The Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet and his wife had been gunned down outside their official residence. The offices of the archipelago’s civil administration had been virtually demolished by a massive bomb in a lorry driven into the square next to it. Afterwards, the British claimed that the mass detentions, the street searches, the random arrests were in response to the anarchy of those weeks.
“The situation on Cyprus bordered on an all out civil war for a while. At Gibraltar the Spanish are threatening to invade to quote ‘restore peace’. Meanwhile, the Egyptians have shut the Suez Canal. If Malta wasn’t the key to what remains of my Government’s last hope of retaining a voice in the rebuilding of the old world, I suspect we’d have pulled out long ago. Pulled out and left the island to the tender mercies of its neighbours. That might yet happen, of course.”
Marija didn’t know why she was being told this so she asked what seemed to her to be a very, very obvious question.
“Do you have the authority to have Joseph released, Commander?”
“No. He’s safer where he is for the moment, anyway. Who knows what mischief he’d get up to if we let him out or who he’d associate with?”
“Joe’s no fifth columnist!”
“He’s a communist sympathiser. A union agitator. A troublemaker. What’s the difference?”
“All the difference in the world!”
“On that we shall have to agree to disagree, Miss Calleja.”
Marija wanted to slap the man’s face.
“This is all a game to you people.” This accusation drew no response. “Why did you prevent me visiting my brother?” She knew the answer. Whatever he said there could only be the one answer. He’d done it to make a point. He’d stopped her visiting Joe because he could and because he’d known it would hurt her.
“For which I apologise,” Commander McNeil drawled. “I’m sure Staff Sergeant Siddall will arrange a new visiting pass within the next few days. I’m a busy man. I have several people to meet on Malta and I have a seat booked on a transport to England in thirty-six hours time.”
Marija decided this was a little too mysterious for her taste.
McNeil pulled out a pack of cigarettes. American Lucky Strikes. He offered her the pack.