Clara had thoroughly ‘briefing’ him ahead of their visit. ‘This will work much better if you pretend to be a doctor engaged by Rosa’s parents and maintain the fiction that you are a regular visitor. Consistent with this the Russian’s head was full of superfluous information about the Royal Naval Hospital Bighi.
The hospital’s design was apparently attributed an officer of the Royal Engineers, a certain Colonel, later Major-General Sir George Whitmore. The foundation stone had been laid in March 1830 by Vice-Admiral Sir Pulteney Malcolm, the Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet; and the main works on the original building completed some two-an-a-half years later at a total cost of around twenty thousand pounds, a veritable Prince’s ransom in those days. The East and West Wings of the hospital were built in the Doric style — that is, with Doric columns and high ceilings — and the Surgical and Fever Wings, added between 1901 and 1903. RNH Bighi had been the Royal Navy’s principle hospital facility in the region for over a hundred and thirty years; the reason Malta had become known to generations of servicemen as ‘the nurse of the Mediterranean’. Although the hospital had been heavily damaged by bombing in the Second World War, the British had completely rebuilt and restored it to modern standards in the latter 1940s and the early 1950s.
Sometimes Arkady Pavlovich Rykov hated his remarkable capacity to absorb ‘facts’.
“Commander McNeil!” Marija Calleja declared, a little vexed, looking up from a dog-eared paperback book — The Far Country by Nevil Shute — she had been reading. “If that is really your name?” She carefully placed a dried flower to mark her page, put down the book and rose stiffly from the chair on the door side of the room to confront the newcomers. “Which I doubt.” Her long dark hair was drawn back in a tightly severe pigtail, her almond eyes flashing suspicion. “You can’t come in here, anyway. Whoever you are.”
The last time Clara had seen the other woman she had been intimidating — peacefully, politely but very effectively — a nervous young British Officer who’d been sent across the road from the gates of the since destroyed, British Military Administration Headquarters on Manoel Island to detach her from her sisters in the Women of Malta movement. That day Marija Calleja had clearly been a little tired and sore from standing for several hours holding a corner of a large banner which plaintively asked IS THIS HOW YOU TREAT YOUR FRIENDS? Tired and sore or not, she had radiated an aura of calm, pacific dignity that had infuriated, bewildered and embarrassed the young subaltern who’d been sent out from the base to speak to her.
“My name is Clara Pullman,” she smiled, holding out her hand.
“How do you do, Miss Pullman,” the younger Maltese woman responded pleasantly, shaking the proffered hand. Marija was wearing a calf-length pleated brown skirt, and wore an unbuttoned thin cardigan over a plain blouse. A crucifix hung on a slender silvery chain over her girlish bust. She wore tired cork sandals, and no make-up. But then she had the sort of natural prettiness — yes, prettiness rather than outright beauty — that made foundation and face paint superfluous in practically any situation. As before Clara was struck by the calmness in the younger woman’s brown eyes, brown eyes that so desperately wanted to twinkle with mischief and questions.
Clara half-turned to her companion, who was trying hard not to scowl.
“As you guessed, Miss Calleja, Commander McNeil is not my friend’s real name,” she confessed. “However, we very much want to know what happened to your brother.”
“I am sure that many people want to know what has happened to Sam,” the wartime child heroine of Vittoriosa-Birgu remarked seraphically. She switched her stare to the man standing at the attractive blond woman’s shoulder. Since their previous meeting at Fort Manoel his hair had grown to conceal the worst scars on his scalp. He was a dapper, handsome man in his forties, perhaps ten years his partner’s senior. “The last time I spoke to Commander McNeil he tried to blackmail me, or at least I think he did. He told me he was worried that I would embarrass Admiral Christopher. He gave me the impression that would be a bad thing for everybody.” Again, her brown eyes appraised the man, meeting his hard dark stare fearlessly. “Thank you for stopping the censoring of Peter’s letters. Well,” she added in qualification, “thank you if you actually had anything to do with it, anyway. I know you probably lied about that too, so why should I believe a single word that you, of Miss Pullman say to me?”
Involuntarily, the former KGB man couldn’t help himself mellowing.
“Marija,” the woman in the bed whispered in a frightened, little girl lost voice. Instantly, her sister-in-law turned and went to take her right hand between her own hands. “Who are these people?”
Clara stepped closer to the bed.
“We are trying to find out what happened to Samuel, Rosa. We work for Admiral Christopher.”
“Shall I make them go away, Rosa?” Marija asked solicitously.
“Yes, no, I don’t know…”
“My sister was very close to the explosion,” Marija explained to the visitors. She and Rosa hadn’t even liked each other until Jim Siddall had been blown up, his life extinguished in the blink of an eye. Marija had been helpless for several hours after Lieutenant Hannay had broken the news to her. Margo Seiffert had hugged her and let her cry until she ran out of tears; and then she had come to be with Rosa. Whatever had happened to her brother, whoever was responsible for the death of her good friend Jim Siddall, she and Rosa were sisters now. “Her ears still ring a little, I think. If you bully her I will scream very loudly and you will both be arrested.”
Clara bit her lip, knowing the younger woman wasn’t bluffing.
Her lover and partner patted her arm and stepped around her to stand before Marija Calleja.
“My name,” he said, not bothering to affect gravitas or severity, or to entirely conceal every last trace of his childhood Moskva accent, “is Arkady Pavlovich Rykov and until the Cuban Missiles War I was a Colonel in the Special Political Directorate of the KGB reporting directly to the Chairman of the Party, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev. I now work for the Head of British Intelligence in England and I, and my…”
“Partner,” Clara said simply.
“Partner,” the man continued, “have been sent to Malta to provide Admiral Christopher with answers.”
Marija absorbed this, and decided not to scream her lungs out quite yet.
“The Nikita Khrushchev?” She asked, her face scrunching into a quizzical mask.
“He was one of a kind,” nodded the ex-KGB man.
“Sam was,” Rosa blurted unhappily, “is a good man.”
The former KGB Colonel gave the woman in the bed a sad-eyed look.
“Your husband was recruited by the First Main Directorate of the Ministerstvo gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti — the Ministry of State Security of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in April 1950.” He said it so matter of factly, conversationally that what he had said hardly registered with the two young Maltese women in the room for some seconds. ‘Some time in 1951 or 1952 he was approached by and inducted into a subversive movement within the Soviet apparat called Krasnaya Zarya. Two months ago your husband proudly claimed to me that he was one of the gunmen who assassinated the then Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, Admiral Sir Douglas Holland-Martin and his wife, shortly after the Cuban Missiles War. He believed me to be a representative of the Central Mediterranean Directorate of Krasnaya Zarya, or as you would say in English, Red Dawn. In my experience there is nothing more dangerous than a man who has never believed in anything who suddenly discovers a focus for his rage.”