“You used me.”
“We were watching your back.”
“He wasn’t after me. He was after Lilian.”
Elliott glanced down at the notebook. “Read the book. You’ll find you’re wrong. You were part of the big plan too. He just never got a chance to see it through.”
“You were playing with our lives.”
“Look, I didn’t come here for forgiveness. I came here to tell you how it was. I did what I thought was right at the time, and with limited resources. You can’t legislate for everything in those kinds of operations. Like Busuttil. Smart fellow. That’s why we had to remove him. We were trying to contain the situation, and he was running around town making too many waves. Hasn’t held him back, by the way. I heard he made chief inspector.”
“I know. We’re still in touch. I even went to his wedding.”
They were interrupted by the waiter, looking to take their order. They hadn’t given their menus a second thought, so Max picked a couple of the restaurant’s signature dishes for them.
For all their talk, they seemed to have skirted the central issue: that Freddie, their friend, had been a traitor and a murderer. Elliott had obviously come to terms with that fact, but Max needed to talk about it. He was still haunted by images of that ruined church wreathed in smoke, of Freddie standing amidst the rubble of the fallen roof, arms spread wide, an almost Christlike figure. Neither his eyes nor his voice had been those of the person Max had known, almost as if he’d been possessed.
“Did you ever suspect it was Freddie?” Max asked.
“It crossed my mind, but no, I didn’t read the signs.”
“So what were you doing at the church?”
“I got a call from Mitzi. You’d just been at their flat. She was worried about you.”
“Why call you?”
“Because I’d asked her to. We’d lost track of you at that point. She said you’d been asking after Freddie, so I called the hospital at Bighi, found out where he was, figured you had too by then.” He paused. “Dear, beautiful Mitzi, God rest her soul.”
She had never made it to Alexandria. The seaplane she’d been traveling on had strayed too close to Crete and been shot down by 109s. It was something Max thought about a lot but never talked about. Now was no different.
“I sometimes wonder what would have happened if she hadn’t called me.”
“You would never have got to shoot me in the head, for starters.”
“A little to one side, I think you’ll find.”
“Close enough to leave a scar.”
Elliott shrugged. “A small price to pay for Lilian’s life. It was done for her.”
Max gave an incredulous laugh.
“It’s true. He said it himself—he was never going to reveal where he was holding her. My only chance was to persuade him I was on the same team and hope to get it from him that way.” Elliott crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray. “Which I did, I might add.”
“Tacitus …”
“His German contact. He had to fall for it. He didn’t know we’d broken the codes. The idea was inconceivable to him.”
Max could see it now. He was no longer squinting at the picture, struggling to make sense of it.
“If what you say is true, then the moment you mentioned Tacitus to him, it was all over.”
“Over?”
“For you and your double agent. I can’t see you using a man who knew the codes had been broken.”
“That would have been … imprudent.”
“Which means you threw it all away, right at the end, everything you’d been working for.”
Elliott spread his hands. “Turns out you’re not the only sentimentalist in the world.”
When their food arrived, they talked about Elliott’s line of work. He didn’t reveal much, only that he still drew a government salary and had spent a lot of time in Moscow in the intervening years.
“Twenty million Soviets died fighting for the same cause as us, and now they’re the enemy. Go figure that.”
His bleak prognosis was that things were going to get a whole lot worse between the USSR and the West before they got any better.
Assisted by the excellent food and another bottle of wine, they relaxed and talked of happier things, of places they had traveled to and others they hoped to visit, of their new families and old friends.
Ralph, Max informed Elliott, was now a commercial pilot with BOAC, flying Stratocruisers on the long-haul routes.
“Still moaning about ‘the machine’?”
