“This is my sister Rosa,” she said happily, introducing him to the young woman with the cropped hair and sutured skull. The invalid’s right eye was puffy and bloodshot, her lower right leg was encased in a clumsy plaster cast and she held her left hand resting immobile in her lap. She seemed unnaturally pale for a native-born Maltese but oddly, considering the circumstances which had brought her to Mdina, not remotely sorry for herself.
Peter Christopher bent low and shook Samuel Calleja’s widow’s small right hand.
“It is nice to meet you,” he murmured awkwardly.
“My sister,” Rosa Calleja replied, dredging an unlikely mischief from somewhere deep in her battered psyche, “never told me that you were as handsome as your famous father, Commander Christopher?”
Marija sucked her teeth in mock despair.
The two women giggled like schoolgirls.
“Rosa is making an amazing recovery,” Alan Hannay said, recognising his commanding officer was, for the moment, all at sea and a little out of his depth.
“I would have been lost without my sister,” the woman in the wheelchair said, suddenly not so certain of herself and unconsciously reaching for Marija’s hand. Instantly, her sister-in-law was by her side.
“These are strange times,” Peter blurted, finally recollecting the one and only time he had met the third woman in the courtyard. “Isn’t that so, Miss Pullman?”
Clara Pullman looked and felt older than she had the last time she had encountered the dashing young naval officer in a waterfront taverna overlooking the estuary of the River Tagus in Lisbon. She was dressed soberly in a calf-length fawn dress and an off cream blouse beneath a dark jacket, and her hair was trimmed severely, at least two inches off her shoulders. She saw his suspicion and mistrust.
“Commander Christopher and I met in Portugal when HMS Hermes put into Lisbon for repairs after the, er, modern day Battle of Trafalgar,” she explained to the others with irony playing in her dulcet tone. “I think he was a little down in the dumps at the time and I was able to cheer him up a little bit. I was working as an embassy courier, you see. Delivering messages, that sort of thing. It was very boring most of the time but occasionally, as in life, one meets interesting people.”
Peter Christopher wondered what a spook like Clara Pullman was doing here in St Catherine’s Hospital on the day he happened to pay a house call? It was not lost on him that the woman was already known to, and apparently, comfortable in the company of, and liked by the others. He said nothing, waited for her to explain what was going on.
Clara’s smile confirmed that she was reading his thoughts.
“I don’t work for British Intelligence any more, Commander,” she said. “I only ever ran errands and in these times one has a duty to do what one can to help, to pull one’s weight. I trained as a nurse many years ago. Just before you arrived I had an interview with Doctor Seiffert about the possibility of my employment either here, or in some other place or capacity with the medical wing of the Malta Defence Force.”
“Clara will be joining us here in Mdina,” Marija announced happily.
“From tomorrow morning, actually,” the older woman added.
“I see…”
Alan Hannay, Clara Pullman and Rosa Calleja were aware that the Marija and her beau wanted — badly needed and positively yearned — to be alone.
“If you would be willing to push my chair, Lieutenant Hannay,” Rosa decided, “I could show you and Clara around the hospital.”
“I’d be delighted,” the young officer beamed. “Just point the way!”
Clara Pullman paused as Rosa’s rather rickety wheelchair was gently coaxed across the cobbles and tiles to the door.
“Please believe me when I say I am honestly and truly not here to spy on anybody, Commander,” she said simply. “I don’t do that anymore.”
Peter shrugged.
“Whatever you say, Miss Pullman.”
The woman nodded and turned away.
“What was all that about, Peter?” Marija inquired, her brow furrowing in a way that he suspected was going to fascinate him for as long as they both lived. He grinned uncomfortably.
“I think that you and I have been persons of interest to people like Miss Pullman for longer than we know.”
“You mean all that stupid censoring of our letters after the war?”
“Yes. Among other things.” He looked to the empty bench and they sat down, not touching, each in their different ways suddenly shy to make the first renewal of physical contact. “I met your little brother this afternoon,” he confessed, feeling foolish and a little guilty.
His tone was the warning; and Marija decoded it instantly.
“Oh, no,” she groaned, resignedly. “What has Joe done now?”
“I think he’s got himself and some of his comrades on the Workers’ Council into a deal of hot water. He led a wild-cat strike,” he saw the term did not mean anything to Marija, hastily rephrased it, “he and his friends downed tools and walked off the Talavera without telling anybody first. The new Admiralty Dockyard Superintendent — a chap called Commodore Renfrew who arrived on the Sylvania — wanted to lock all the strikers out of the yard but I persuaded Joe to lead his comrades back to work and I refused to allow the dockyard police to board the ship to execute the new policy.”
“Oh,” Marija’s frown deepened. “Will you be in trouble with this Commodore Renfrew for helping Joe?”
“Probably, but I’m a new boy in Malta. I can always claim I was unaware of the new regulations and just wanted to get my ship’s repairs under way. Joe’s shift was onboard to plug the biggest holes and make the old girl safe for the surveyors to crawl over her tomorrow morning.”
“I am sorry. My brother is a good man, but,” she sighed, “very stupid sometimes. He was badly treated by the British,” she stopped herself, “sorry, by the security people after the October War. He was wrongfully imprisoned for nearly a year without trial. Sometimes I think he is okay, but he doesn’t laugh as much as he did before.”
Peter nodded.
“You and your family have been through a lot,” he sympathised. “What with Joe being locked away for no good reason and what happened to Samuel last month.”
“I think it is worst for my Mama,” Marija replied, forcing a brave smile. “Joe was always her favourite and she feels guilty now that Sam is gone…”
Peter reached for Marija and took her in his arms, onto his lap and cradled her as she began to weep the tears she had been afraid to cry until today. Presently, she quietened, and rested her head on his shoulder.
Chapter 13
The Securitate had filmed the entire interrogation on incredibly scarce 8-millimetre Kodak colour film stock. They had filmed it all; right up to the end of the last session, by then their victim had been reduced to a pulped, unrecognisable mess chained to a steel chair in the ‘interview room’ sitting in the middle of an expanding puddle of his own blood, piss and shit. Nicolae Ceaușescu had watched a few minutes of the footage and told the technicians to turn off the projector. Now the words in the file on his desk burned at him off the page.
Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov had wept, pleaded, screamed, squealed for his life and told his inquisitors everything. The beating, the torture had not stopped. Everybody lied to stop the pain; every word they uttered had to be verified by additional agonies. Spilling the beans did not help a man, or a woman, once the Securitate had one at their mercy.