The Information Officer

same degree, and a surly rating directed Max to Tommy Ravilious’s office. It lay off a sun-drenched loggia on the first floor, where a couple of officers, one of whom Max recognized from the Union Club, were lounging in wicker armchairs, smoking.

“I’m looking for Tommy Ravilious.”

He was thumbed in the general direction. “His day cabin’s three doors down on the left.”

Max had picked up enough naval jargon to know that “day cabins” were offices, just as floors were “decks,” and going out for lunch was “going ashore.” It was the same at Fort Saint Angelo on the Grand Harbour side, a “stone frigate” renamed HMS Saint Angelo by the navy when they’d adopted it as their headquarters. The urge to scream You’re on dry land now, not a bloody ship had never quite deserted Max.

One part of the corridor he picked his way down was open to the heavens, and the door to Tommy’s office was hanging off its top hinge.

Tommy was at his desk, sharpening a pencil with a rusty scalpel.

“Well, well, well …,” he said cheerily when Max entered.

Others at Lazaretto might have lost some of their usual lustre, but Tommy’s trademark brand of Boy’s Own Paper enthusiasm appeared unscathed.

“To what do I owe this pleasure—nay, honor?”

“I was passing.”

“Come now, my dear fellow, we’re too old and too wise for that.”

“So what are we doing here?”

Tommy exploded in laughter, casting a quick look around his dusty empire. “God only knows. Maybe we sinned in a previous life.”

“I hadn’t figured you for a reincarnationist.”

“My grandmother’s to blame. She loved all that nonsense. A committed naturist, too, right up until the day she died. ‘I believe in the two sexes airing their differences,’ she used to say. Drink?”

“What have you got?”

“Gin or gin.”

“Have we earned it?”

“I know I have.”

Max pulled up a chair. “Well, if only to dim the image of your grandmother airing her differences …”

It was Plymouth gin, favored by the navy men; Gordon’s was strictly army.

Max raised his tumbler in a toast. “The fourth of May.”

Tommy frowned, trying to figure the significance of the current day’s date.

“One has to be celebrating something, or else one is simply a common drunk.”

His impression of Hugh’s sonorous bass voice must have been close enough, because Tommy laughed and asked, “How is old Hugh, and the lovely Rosamund?”

Tommy downed his gin as if making up for lost time, which in some respects he was. The enemy’s recent fixation with the submarine base had kept him at his post and away from the clubs and dinners for the past month or more. As a senior member of the headquarters staff, he had barely any time for leisure when the heat was on. Max duly served up as much of the gossip as he could recall.

“Elliott was down here a couple of weeks ago,” said Tommy, topping off their tumblers.

“Elliott? What was he doing?”

“What he does best—snooping. I sometimes get the feeling he thinks we Brits are little more than a bunch of incompetents.”

“Then he’s not as stupid as he looks.”

Tommy smiled. “Apparently not. Speaks a very passable Greek, according to some of our Hellenic friends who were here at the time. One of them thought he recognized him from Crete, just before it fell.”

It seemed unlikely. Crete had fallen to the Germans almost exactly a year before, in May—a good many months before the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor had persuaded the Americans to join the fray. But when it came to Elliott, you could never be quite sure. Despite the bonhomie and robust sense of humor, there was something of the dark horse about him. He seemed to have been everywhere, lived everywhere, including England, where he’d spent several years as a pupil at Charterhouse School in Surrey.

Max could recall one of their early conversations, not long after the tall American had materialized in Malta. While berating the British for their innate lack of hospitality, Elliott had remarked that they could learn a thing or two from the people of Kazakhstan.

“I’m telling you, in Kazakhstan when a stranger turns up at your place and asks for shelter, you house him and feed him, no questions asked—not who he is, where he comes from, or where he’s going, not even how long he plans on staying. Nothing. Not a sausage. After three days, you’re allowed to ask him where he’s going, but that’s it. Anything more is an insult to your guest.”

“You’ve been to Kazakhstan?”

“There’s oil in Kazakhstan,” had been Elliott’s typically elusive response.

Max sometimes sensed that these subtle deflections were designed to tantalize, that Elliott enjoyed the aura of mystery that hung around him. Everyone knew that he had access to the very highest echelons of Malta Command.