to steer the conversation back to her. Feigning ignorance, he asked what exactly had happened on the night in question. It soon became clear that the family wasn’t aware of the exact date and time when Carmela’s body had turned up in the streets of Marsa. In the confusion and upset of identifying the corpse, that information had evidently not found its way through to them. This was good. It meant they had no unanswered questions about the missing day between her disappearance and her discovery. It meant that the situation could be contained.
Having satisfied himself on this score, Max moved on to the other reason for his visit. This was a more delicate subject to broach because it threatened to make him sound like some jealous or neglected admirer. He wanted to know if Carmela had ever mentioned anyone in particular from the Blue Parrot, any of the customers.
Victor sweetly confessed that he couldn’t recall her ever speaking of Max, but that meant little—he had a terrible head for names. However, his memory clearly wasn’t as bad as he thought, judging from the list of other individuals he was able to reel off.
Max was making a mental note of the names when he sensed the disturbance. They both turned to see a tide of black advancing toward them from the house. At the front strode a dumpy but pretty woman. This was clearly Carmela’s mother, and her eyes burned with a fierce grievance.
Max rose to his feet to face the onslaught, the tumbling babble of Maltese. She reserved the rough side of her tongue for her husband, but her hand flicked dismissively, disdainfully, toward Max every so often.
The sight of Joe smugly observing from a safe distance confirmed that it was time to be going. Max was clearly persona non grata for everyone other than Victor, and maybe Carmela’s cousin, Nina, whose expression hovered somewhere between embarrassment and pity.
Max mumbled an excuse, leaving poor Victor to his fate. An ancient woman with a gnarled and knotted face refused to move out of his way, raising her cane as if to strike him. He stared into her milky eyes, waiting for the blow to fall, almost willing it—just punishment for the lies he’d told.
Maybe she read something of this in his face, but she lowered the cane and let him pass.
The ride to Saint Joseph’s from Paola passed in a daze, Max’s brain struggling to process the encounter, the open display of hostility. In all his time on Malta, he’d experienced nothing even approaching it.
His secretary, Maria, was already at her desk, sifting through the mail. A few years older than Max, she was an attractively bookish woman who had worked in the Education Department before the war. Her contacts on the island were invaluable, her cheery disposition a daily tonic. She greeted him with one of her ready smiles and the news that the lieutenant governor had just called in person. He wished to see Max in his office at eleven o’clock sharp.
“Did he say why?”
“He didn’t sound happy.”
That meant nothing; he was a solemn soul at the best of times. The calling in person was worrying, though. The lieutenant governor rarely soiled his own hands with matters relating to the Information Office, not when he had a whole team of cronies to do the dirty work for him. It had to be something important, and top of the agenda right then was the dread prospect of the estimates.
In a week’s time they would all be up in front of the council of the Malta government with their begging bowls, justifying the expenditures of their various departments. It was irritating enough that the Maltese held the purse strings on funds that came straight from the pockets of British taxpayers; it was downright absurd that they should have to haggle over money while being bombed and starved to the brink of extinction.
That was the way of it, though. If anything, the bureaucratic behemoth that ruled their lives had actually prospered since the beginning of the year, as if feeding off the downpour of bombs, bogging them down in pointless paperwork and futile committee meetings. There were clearly some who sought comfort from the trials of war in the machinery of administration, but Max didn’t number himself among them.
They would get their money—they always did—but they would have to rehearse their performances first, which meant sitting down with the lieutenant governor. Hence the summons.
Max knew his lines pretty well already—Vincent Falzon