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 in accounts had been busy during the past couple of weeks, juggling the books and padding out certain costs so that the Information Office had something to concede on the big day—but Max thought it best to reacquaint himself with the finer details. He just had time to brief Pemberton on the Bofors gun crew and dictate two quite pointless letters—one to the postmaster general, the other to the provost marshal—before heading next door for his meeting.
The Vincenzo Bugeja Conservatory had started life as an orphanage for girls, and judging from its palatial proportions, it had not lacked for wealthy benefactors in those early days. Set some distance back from the road beyond iron railings and an imposing stone gateway, the building soared majestically around a vast open courtyard. There was another courtyard, out of sight beyond the domed chapel, that stood at the center of the complex.
Saint Joseph’s Institute felt like a poor cousin in comparison, cramped and huddled in the conservatory’s shadow. But what Saint Joseph’s lacked in stature it more than made up for with rough-and-ready charm. At least its corridors thronged with bright-eyed and mischievous orphan boys, not puffed-up paper-pushers who seemed to have become infected by the grandiosity of their new home.
Max had had cause to visit the lieutenant governor’s office only once since they’d all been relocated from Valetta, and now he lost his way in the labyrinth of corridors.
“Second floor, then ask again.”
This curt response was delivered in passing by a tall rake of a man hurrying along a hallway with a bunch of files under his arm. He didn’t even deign to glance at Max as he carried on by.
He did, though, when Max called after him, “Your shirt’s hanging out.”
The man groped behind him with his free hand, discovering only that he’d been duped.
“My mistake,” said Max.
It was a juvenile triumph, but strangely satisfying, and he was still smiling when he entered the suite of rooms occupied by the lieutenant governor and his team.
Hodges, the department’s bespectacled gatekeeper, was seated at his desk, poring over a pile of papers.
“Ah, Major Chadwick.”
Hodges checked his wristwatch, clearly disappointed that he couldn’t berate Max for being late. It was eleven o’clock on the dot.
“I know how much it means to you,” said Max. “That’s why I make the effort.”
Hodges was a remarkable character, a dour, taciturn little man, always scrubbed and pristine. He was utterly without a sense of humor, which somehow compelled one to take up humor as a weapon against him.
“Please,” said Hodges, gesturing to the corner. “Take a seat.”
It was the one corner of the room Max had not surveyed on entering, and it was a moment before he registered that the man on the low divan was Freddie.
“What are you doing here?” asked Max, settling down beside him.
