Sure enough, the pilots were there, a bevy of slender young things with flushed complexions hanging on their every word. Others hovered nearby, one ear on the tales of doughty deeds. The airmen were the only ones in the garrison capable of carrying the battle to the enemy, and their stories offered a tonic against the daily round of passive resistance.
Freddie and Elliott were at the far end of the roof terrace. Freddie was making good use of a large pink gin, his face a picture of evident distaste at whatever it was that the tall American was telling him. Max pushed his way through the throng toward his friends.
“Gentlemen.”
“Ah, Maximillian,” said Elliott. “Just in time.”
“For what?”
“A little conundrum I was posing to Freddie here.”
“Is that what you call it?” Freddie grimaced.
“Well, it sure as hell is for their commanding officers.”
“Sounds intriguing,” said Max.
“It rapidly becomes disgusting,” Freddie replied.
Elliott laughed. “I hadn’t figured you for an old prude.”
“It’s got nothing to do with prudishness,” Freddie said, bristling. “It’s a question of … well, morality.”
“Ah, morality …”
“To say nothing of the law.”
“Ah, the law,” Elliott parroted, with even more skepticism.
“You trained as a lawyer. You must have some respect for the law.”
“Sure I do. You don’t want to screw with an institution that can send an innocent man to the electric chair.” Elliott turned to Max before Freddie’s frustration could shape itself into a response. “You want to hear it?”
“Fire away.”
“It’s very simple. You’re a wing commander taking a break from it all up at the pilots’ rest camp on Saint Paul’s Bay. You know it? Sure you do, from when Ralph was wounded.”
“I do.”
“Then you can picture it. It’s late and, okay, you’re a bit tight. But, hey, who wouldn’t be, after all you’ve been through these past months? Anyway, you’re feeling good and you’re looking for your room. And you find your room. Only it isn’t your room. It’s someone else’s room. And that someone else is in what you think is your bed with someone else.”
“You’re losing me.”
“Stay lost,” was Freddie’s advice.
“There are two guys in the bed, okay? And they’re, well, I don’t know how to put it….”
“I think I get your meaning.”
“Of course you do. You went to an English boarding school.”
“As did you,” said Freddie, “in case you’d forgotten.”
“And a sorry dump it was too. Anyway, they’re good men, officers, both of them. One’s in your squadron. The other’s not, but you know him. And he’s a first-class pilot, reliable, what you Brits would call a ‘press-on’ type.” Elliott paused. “What do you do?”
“What do I do?”
“What do you do?”
“Well, I order them to desist at once.”
Elliott laughed. “I think you can assume they desisted the moment you opened the goddamn door. Do you report them?”
“Report them?”
“To the air officer commanding. It’s not a question of morality, or the law, or even of taste. I mean, I’ve never felt the need to place my penis in another man’s dung—”
“Oh Christ,” Freddie blurted into his gin.
“But it doesn’t stop me from being able to make a judgment on the situation.”
Max thought on it. “I don’t report them.”
“Why not?”
“Morale. A squadron’s like a family.”
“You’re ready to lie to your family?”
“No. Yes. I suppose. If the situation calls for it.”
“Go on,” said Elliott. “What else, aside from morale?”
“Well, the two individuals in question, of course. They’d be packed off home, and everyone would know why. It would leak out.”
“An unfortunate turn of phrase, under the circumstances.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Elliott!” exclaimed Freddie.
Elliott ignored him. “Interesting,” he said. “Three differing views. Freddie said he’d report them, you’re a no, and I’m for reporting them.”
“I thought you said three.”
“There’s a difference between me and Freddie. He’s a moralist. Me, I’m a pragmatist. I’d report them, but only cos if I didn’t and word got out that I hadn’t, then it’d be my head on the block.”
“So what does that make me?” asked Max.
“That makes you a sentimentalist,” was the American’s surefooted response.
“Oh, come on—”
“Relax. There are worse things to be than a sentimentalist.”
“Yeah,” said Freddie, “you should try being a moralist.”
It was good to hear Freddie crack a joke. He had seemed strangely withdrawn, somehow not himself. Max was in a position to judge. They had been firm friends, the best of friends, for almost two years now, and in that time he’d learned to read Freddie’s rare down moods: the faint clouding in the cobalt-blue eyes, the slight tightening of the impish grin. He still looked that way now, even after the laughter had died away and the conversation had turned to Ralph, the missing member of their gang. Ralph was a pilot with 249 Squadron at Ta’ Qali, a burly and garrulous character who had taken the squadron’s motto to heart one too many times: Pugnis et calcibus—“With Fists and Heels.” Elliott had come late to the party, materializing as if from nowhere around Christmas, hot on the heels of Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the war, but in four short months he’d stitched himself into the fabric of their little brotherhood lorded over by Hugh. He’d even got them all playing poker.
Elliott had a natural ear for scandal and was recounting a lurid story he’d heard from Ralph involving a chief petty officer’s wife and a Maltese gardener when the tinkle of Rosamund’s bell rang around the rooftop.
“Most of you know what this means,” she announced from the top of the steps. “Turn your minds and your talk to higher matters, to life and to art and, I don’t know, past loves and future plans.”
“But I was just hitting my stride.”
“My dear Elliott, I doubt it was anything more than mere gossip.”
“True, but of the most salacious kind.”
“Then be sure to search me out before you leave.”
This drew a few chuckles from the assembled company. These died suddenly as the plaintive wail of the air-raid siren broke the air.
They had all been expecting it. Breakfast, lunch, and cocktail hour—you could almost set your wristwatch by the Germans and their Teutonic timekeeping.
They turned as one toward Valetta. From the high ground of Sliema, Marsamxett Harbour was spread out beneath them like a map, its lazy arc broken by the panhandle causeway connecting Manoel Island, with its fort and submarine base, to the mainland. In the background, Valetta reared majestically from the water, standing proud on her long peninsula, thrusting toward the open sea. Beyond the city, out of sight, lay the ancient towns and deepwater creeks of Grand Harbour, home to the naval dockyards, or what remained of them.
One of the more eagle-eyed pilots was the first to make out the flag being raised above the Governor’s Palace in Valetta.
“Big jobs,” he announced.
“There’s a surprise.”
“Where do you think they’re headed?”