Tommy was at his desk, sharpening a pencil with a rusty scalpel.
“Well, well, well …,” he said cheerily when Max entered.
Others at Lazaretto might have lost some of their usual lustre, but Tommy’s trademark brand of Boy’s Own Paper enthusiasm appeared unscathed.
“To what do I owe this pleasure—nay, honor?”
“I was passing.”
“Come now, my dear fellow, we’re too old and too wise for that.”
“So what are we doing here?”
Tommy exploded in laughter, casting a quick look around his dusty empire. “God only knows. Maybe we sinned in a previous life.”
“I hadn’t figured you for a reincarnationist.”
“My grandmother’s to blame. She loved all that nonsense. A committed naturist, too, right up until the day she died. ‘I believe in the two sexes airing their differences,’ she used to say. Drink?”
“What have you got?”
“Gin or gin.”
“Have we earned it?”
“I know I have.”
Max pulled up a chair. “Well, if only to dim the image of your grandmother airing her differences …”
It was Plymouth gin, favored by the navy men; Gordon’s was strictly army.
Max raised his tumbler in a toast. “The fourth of May.”
Tommy frowned, trying to figure the significance of the current day’s date.
“One has to be celebrating something, or else one is simply a common drunk.”
His impression of Hugh’s sonorous bass voice must have been close enough, because Tommy laughed and asked, “How is old Hugh, and the lovely Rosamund?”
Tommy downed his gin as if making up for lost time, which in some respects he was. The enemy’s recent fixation with the submarine base had kept him at his post and away from the clubs and dinners for the past month or more. As a senior member of the headquarters staff, he had barely any time for leisure when the heat was on. Max duly served up as much of the gossip as he could recall.
“Elliott was down here a couple of weeks ago,” said Tommy, topping off their tumblers.
“Elliott? What was he doing?”
“What he does best—snooping. I sometimes get the feeling he thinks we Brits are little more than a bunch of incompetents.”
“Then he’s not as stupid as he looks.”
Tommy smiled. “Apparently not. Speaks a very passable Greek, according to some of our Hellenic friends who were here at the time. One of them thought he recognized him from Crete, just before it fell.”
It seemed unlikely. Crete had fallen to the Germans almost exactly a year before, in May—a good many months before the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor had persuaded the Americans to join the fray. But when it came to Elliott, you could never be quite sure. Despite the bonhomie and robust sense of humor, there was something of the dark horse about him. He seemed to have been everywhere, lived everywhere, including England, where he’d spent several years as a pupil at Charterhouse School in Surrey.
Max could recall one of their early conversations, not long after the tall American had materialized in Malta. While berating the British for their innate lack of hospitality, Elliott had remarked that they could learn a thing or two from the people of Kazakhstan.
“I’m telling you, in Kazakhstan when a stranger turns up at your place and asks for shelter, you house him and feed him, no questions asked—not who he is, where he comes from, or where he’s going, not even how long he plans on staying. Nothing. Not a sausage. After three days, you’re allowed to ask him where he’s going, but that’s it. Anything more is an insult to your guest.”
“You’ve been to Kazakhstan?”
“There’s oil in Kazakhstan,” had been Elliott’s typically elusive response.
Max sometimes sensed that these subtle deflections were designed to tantalize, that Elliott enjoyed the aura of mystery that hung around him. Everyone knew that he had access to the very highest echelons of Malta Command. More than once he had been seen leaving the offices of the mysterious Y Service and the even more secretive Special Liaison Unit, although, as Tommy said, for much of the time he seemed to just drift about, observing and absorbing.
But Max hadn’t come to speculate about Elliott; he’d made the journey in search of information. With that mission in mind, he nudged the conversation back to the here and now.
“How are the Lazarene swine bearing up?”
“Surprisingly well, if a little jumpy.”
No one begrudged the submariners their foibles—the dark and inhuman universe they inhabited while on patrol earned them the right to act pretty much as they wished when on terra firma—but their quasi-religious devotion to the herd of pigs they’d been rearing still raised a chuckle or two.
“What’s going to happen to them?” Max inquired.
“Happen to them?”
“The pigs. When you’ve gone.”
“Aaaahhh,” drawled Tommy knowingly. “And I thought you’d come here to see how your old chum was getting on, but really it’s bacon you’re after.”
Max smiled. “It’s true, then.”
Tommy leaned across the desk and stubbed out his cigarette in the aluminum casing of a spent German flare that now served as an ashtray.
“When?” Max asked.
Tommy looked up. “P34 left a few days ago. The others over the next week or so.”
“That’s all that’s left?”
As the information officer, he might have felt stupid asking the question, but he knew the hard truth: that he was regarded as little more than a journalist, that privileged information was fed to him only when it was deemed expedient.
“Best not to shout it from the parapets.”
“Of course not.”
“Don’t think for a moment we’re happy about pulling out. We know how it’ll look, what message it’ll send to the Maltese.”
“No one’s going to blame you, Tommy. Everyone knows the pounding you’ve been taking. I mean, half the bloody island has watched it from their rooftops.”
“The powers that be are calling it a ‘tactical redeployment,’ but the truth is we’re bolting while we still can.”
Tommy’s dejection steered his hand once more toward the gin bottle.
“There’s only one reason you’ve been targeted—because you’ve hurt them so badly. Rommel can’t make headway in north Africa with you taking out his supply lines from Italy. Frankly, I’m amazed it’s taken them so long to wake up to that fact.”
“True. If they’d taken a serious pop at us a year ago, they’d have saved themselves seventy-five ships.”
“That many?”
“Four hundred thousand tons of shipping.”
“It’s a hell of an achievement, Tommy. And there’ll be more to come, wherever you end up.”
Max was fishing now.
“Alexandria. But it still feels like a retreat.”
“It isn’t. And my job’s to make people understand that.”
“Time for a bit of buffing and polishing.”
“Exactly, and it would help if I had a few more facts at my fingertips.”
“What sort of thing?”
Max tried to sound as casual as possible. “I don’t know. I imagine you have some kind of log that records the sorties of all the subs.”
“That’s confidential information.”
“I’m not the enemy, Tommy, and I’m not an idiot. I wouldn’t use anything that gave away operational practices. It’s just to get a sense of what you’ve all been through … the scale of it, the relentlessness.”
He didn’t feel good lying to Tommy, but the prize was within his grasp now, and he tried to remain focused on it.
“I don’t know, Max.”
“It’ll help bring your achievements to life.”
Tommy scrutinized him for a moment before deciding. “Okay. But I’ll tell you what you can and can’t use.”
He left the room, returning with a hefty leather-bound volume, which he dropped onto the desk in front of Max. Tommy pulled up his chair and they sat side by side, flicking through it.