“What is it about you Brits and your constant refusal to know when you’re beaten? Don’t get me wrong, I admire you for it. I mean, last month, when the Penelope was in port for repairs, you remember?”
How could anyone forget? The Germans had hurled everything they’d had at the damaged cruiser. Day after day the Stukas had come to finish her off, reducing the dockside to a mesh of craters. The ship’s quarterdeck became known as the “rock garden,” and when she finally slipped away under darkness to Alexandria, there were more than two thousand wooden pegs in her, stopping up the shrapnel holes and earning her the nickname HMS Porcupine.
“I got caught down there one morning during a raid. It was bedlam, like nothing I’d ever seen, and right in the middle of it the ship’s company started singing. Singing, for Christ’s sake, to keep the spirits of the gunners up! I don’t get you guys, I really don’t.”
“So why did they pick you for the job?”
“I asked for the posting.”
“Regretting it yet?” Max inquired with a faint smile.
“Things are a bit hotter than I’d hoped, but hey, look around you….” He spread his hands. “Nine miles below hell, it ain’t.”
Elliott flipped the fish on the grille.
“Why Malta?” Max asked.
“Because we’re making history here.”
“Not that they don’t have enough of it already.”
“This will be right up there with the best of it. The war can turn on what happens here.”
“You’ve been speaking to Hugh.”
“Hugh’s a romantic, but he also happens to be right. Malta saved Europe once before, and it might just do it again. You won’t know this, but Mandalay fell to the Japs a couple of days back. Burma’s as good as gone, and they’re coming at India through Ceylon. If Egypt falls to Rommel, there’s nothing to stop the enemy linking up. They’ll cut the world in half and lay their hands on all that oil in the Middle East. If that happens, well, I know which horse my money’s on. Egypt has to hold out, and that’s where we fit in—this dot of an island in the middle of nowhere, so easy to ignore.”
“You call this being ignored? Every day for the past God-knows-how-many months they’ve dropped the same tonnage of bombs on us as they did on Coventry.”
“Field Marshal Kesselring’s no fool. Far from it,” conceded Elliott. “He knows the importance of Malta. But does he have Hitler’s ear? Because in the end, that’s what counts.”
“None of it’s going to matter when they invade.”
“They’re not going to invade.”
“I’m so glad you told me,” Max replied, with casual sarcasm.
“I mean it. The invasion’s off.”
“Off?”
“Put back. But that’s enough. Once the new Spitfires get here, it’s dead and done for. This was their one chance, and it looks like Hitler’s made the same mistake again. He should have invaded you guys two years ago. July 1940. That was his moment, and he missed it. This time, his big mistake was listening to Rommel. Rommel thinks he can get to Cairo, Malta or no Malta. But Rommel’s not an administrator; he’s a tactician—and a good one, if only because he’s unorthodox and therefore hard to read. Logistics like supply lines are beneath his dignity; it’s quartermaster stuff. He takes for granted he’ll get whatever he needs, and right now he is getting it. But if we gain air superiority over this island, then the Wellingtons and Blenheims will start flying again from Luqa, and he’ll know what it’s like to feel the pinch. Maybe he’ll take Tobruk—odds are he will, in my book—but Cairo’s a step too far.”
“Anything else I should know while you’re at it?”
Max intended the question as a joke.
“Depends if you can keep a secret or not,” replied Elliott, lighting a cigarette. “The governor’s about to be relieved.”
“Dobbie?”
“That’s impressive—the information officer knows the name of his commander in chief.”
Max was genuinely shocked. Dobbie was—well, he wasn’t just part of the furniture, he was Malta itself.
“Why?”
“He’s lost the confidence of his service chiefs, and they’ve started sneaking to teacher. Personally, I blame the command structure you’ve put in place. It’s a goddamn shambles. You’ve got a governor who’s answerable to the colonial secretary and to the War Office, and a general officer commanding who can’t coordinate the defense of the island because your naval and air force commanders report directly to their C-in-Cs in Cairo.”
“When you put it like that …”
“It is like that, and Dobbie’s taking the fall for it. I’d play the ‘poor health’ ticket if I were you, if only because there’s some truth in it. Oh, and better get drafting your piece. It’s going to happen soon, any day now.”
“In the middle of all this?”
“No point in hanging about once the decision’s been made. Thanks for everything, amigo, and adios.”
“Who’s replacing him?”
Elliott smiled. “You don’t expect me to hand you everything on a plate, do you?”
“No, although a piece of fish would be nice, before it’s cooked to buggery.”
They ate the fish with a simple salad of tomatoes so sweet that it suddenly made sense why they were classified as a fruit rather than a vegetable.
“I’ve been doing all the talking,” said Elliott. “Time for a bit of quid pro quo.”
“You really think I have anything up my sleeve to match what I’ve just heard?”
“I was talking about you. Tell me something about Max Chadwick that I don’t already know.”
“There’s a whole load of stuff you don’t know.”
“Don’t be so sure; I’ve read your file.”
“There’s a file on me?”
“You’re the information officer in a key theater of war. What do you think? I even know the name of your housemaster at Wellington.”
“Old Arsebreath?”
Elliott laughed. “That’s a level of detail it doesn’t go into.”
It came pretty close, though. Apparently Max had been described as “coming from a good family.”
“Well, that’s rubbish, for a start,” he protested. “My great-grandfather made a lot of money sending coal miners to their deaths. His son was a drunk, a bully, and a bigamist who never did an honest day’s work in his life.”
“A bigamist?”
“Well, maybe not technically, but he led a double life with another woman and other children.”
“And his son?”
“My father? He’s proof that the apple doesn’t always fall close to the tree.”
“Good on him,” said Elliott. “And that’s from a man who also had a bully for a father.”
Elliott already knew that Max’s mother had died when he was young. He didn’t know that she’d died in labor, giving birth to Max.
“There—something you didn’t know about me.”
“Doesn’t make the grade. I want something more personal.”
Max thought on it. Then he told Elliott about the letter his mother had written him.
It was a common enough practice, certainly for women like his mother, whose narrow hips weren’t best suited for bringing babies into the world. The doctor had warned her that it would be a difficult birth, that she might have to choose between herself and the child. She had chosen Max, and she had survived long enough to hold him in her arms before the loss of blood had killed her. Sometimes he saw himself spread-eagled on her chest, worn out from all the effort, as she slowly slipped away into oblivion. That’s how it had been, apparently; his father had told him so.
His father hadn’t told him about the letter she’d written to him, her unborn child—well, not until Max was sixteen. He’d found it long before then, though, hidden in his father’s desk, biding its time. The desk had always held a deep fascination for him, with its inlaid mother-of-pearl decoration and its drawers and pigeonholes stuffed with detritus from the world of adults. It was an irresistible Aladdin’s cave for a young boy, and whenever the coast was clear, he would go and poke around in it.