“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 He had seemed strangely withdrawn, somehow not himself.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?”
“The airfields, probably Ta’ Qali.”
“The dockyards are due a dose.”
It was a strange time, this lull before the inevitable storm, the seven or so minutes it took the enemy aircraft to make the trip from Sicily. All over the island people would be hurrying for the underground shelters they had hewn from the limestone rock, the same rock with which they had built their homes, soft enough for saws and planes when quarried, but which soon hardened in the Mediterranean sun.
Had Malta been blanketed with forests, had the Maltese chosen to build their homes of wood, then the island would surely have capitulated by now. Stone buildings might crumble and pulverize beneath bombs, but they didn’t catch fire. And it was fire that did the real damage, spreading like quicksilver through densely populated districts, of which there were many on Malta. The island was small—seventeen miles from top to toe, and only nine at its widest point—but its teeming population numbered more