if the ball bounced over the edge. Elliott liked to play dirty: “You’re forcing it with your shoulders” … “Stop lifting your head” … “Let the club do the work” … “You’re getting a bit wristy, must be the wine”—irritating observations intended to throw Max off his game.
They were level at a far-from-impressive four points apiece when the contest was brought to a halt by the building roar of an aircraft engine.
“Here,” said Elliott, thrusting a seven iron into Max’s hand. “You’re going to need more loft.”
“What?”
“On my word, okay?”
They both set themselves, ready to swing.
Max saw them now: four fighters coming at them from the west in wide line abreast, hugging the cliff top. They were enemy aircraft, new Me109Fs with their distinctive yellow noses.
“Now!”
They swung their clubs in unison. In his eagerness, Max topped his ball, but Elliott’s sailed high into the air with just the right amount of lead on it. For a moment it seemed that the impossible was about to be achieved, and if the ball had carried another fifty yards or so, it might well have been.
The four fighters thundered past unscathed. It was probably just a trick of the light, but Max could have sworn that he saw one of the pilots wave.
“He waved,” said Max. “One of them waved.”
“That’s because they know me.”
They were regulars, apparently, marauders who often appeared at this hour.
“They turn inland just down from here, coming at Safi and Luqa out of the low sun. Didn’t think they’d show today, though—nothing else has.”
The remote crackle of light antiaircraft fire carried up the coast to their ears.
“There they go. First action of the day.”
It also proved to be the last. By eight o’clock, there was still no sign of any bombers, and the last slither of the sun was sinking into the sea.
The warm orange light suffusing the courtyard gave way by almost imperceptible degrees to the distinctive purples and blues of a Maltese twilight. Elliott had got a fire going in an upturned dustbin lid that served as his barbecue, and a second bottle of Burgundy had appeared from the cellar. He had another white wine in mind for when the fish hit the table.
There were two of them, big and fresh and in need of gutting.
“Pawlu gets them for me.”
“I thought the fishermen had stopped going out.”
There had been a number of fatal strafing attacks on fishing boats in the last month—all part of the new policy of deliberately targeting the locals.
“These two beauties would suggest otherwise,” Elliott said, grinning.
He sat himself down across from Max at the rough lumber table in the courtyard and began to prepare the fish, working the knife with an expert hand.
“You look like you know what you’re doing.”
“Don’t be fooled. Pawlu showed me how.” He glanced up at Max. “It’s not in my blood, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m from mountain stock.”
It was near enough the first information Elliott had ever volunteered about himself, and it didn’t stop there.
He had grown up in the Berkshire Hills in western Massachusetts. Writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville had lived there and waxed lyrical about its stubborn and stony beauty, its soaring peaks and plunging valleys, but such romantic considerations had probably not figured very large in the minds of Elliott’s forebears on his mother’s side when they had chopped their farm out of the wilderness.
Winters there were long and harsh. Elliott could remember milk freezing in a pail left by an open door, and his mother thawing out the buttonholes on his jacket with a hot flatiron. He could also recall his grandfather getting caught in a blizzard and being carried home in the back of a cart, closer to death than life, not long for the world.
Elliott had been twelve at the time, and when it had finally been his turn to say his farewells, he had gone upstairs to the bed where his grandfather lay. Drawing him close by the hand, the old man had whispered weakly into his ear: “It is appointed unto man once to die.”
“I can tell you,” Elliott went on, “I was pretty glum when I woke the next morning. And you know what? The first thing I saw when I went down to breakfast was that hard-shelled old bastard moaning to my grandma that she’d overcooked the bacon again.”
His father’s side of the family was an altogether different story, one of New Yorkers drawn to the forest-clad slopes of the Berkshires by the