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 fortunes to be made from paper. The Berkshire mills manufactured the paper from which United States currency was made, and this near enough amounted to a license to print their own money.
It was paper that carried the family to England when Elliott was a teenager, his father taking up a post with Wiggins Teape in Basing-stoke.
“Do you know Basingstoke?”
“Only to pass through.”
“That’s the best way to know it. It’s like Hawthorne said of Liverpool: ‘a most convenient and admirable point to get away from.’”
Max laughed. Elliott placed the fish on the grille over the glowing embers and continued with his account.
He hadn’t enjoyed his time in England, although his few years at Charterhouse School had been pleasant enough. His Calvinist boarding school back in the Berkshires had prepared him well for the vagaries of life in a prewar English public school: several hundred young men paying fearful homage to a handful of slightly older young men while a bunch of rather bewildered old men looked on.
Being a foreigner with a funny accent, he’d found himself the subject of ridicule, which had taught him a valuable lesson: to keep his mouth shut. Also, to bide his time; opportunities for revenge would present themselves sooner or later.
“I was the ‘lanky Yankee,’ a figure of fun.” He smiled as a thought came into his head. “Which is pretty much how people look at me here.”
“And are you plotting your revenge on us?”
Elliott’s voice took on a sinister edge. “Don’t worry.
Max smiled. “Why are you here, Elliott?”
“Because we’re allies.”
“I mean, why are you really here?”
“Because we’re allies.”
“You promised me some answers.”
“It’s an honest answer. We’re allies, and allies don’t always see eye to eye.”
“That’s a half answer.”
“We’ve been watching things over here for a good long while. It gives us a different perspective, and of course we’re going to take a view on what we see.”
“What’s the view?”
“The only one there is: that the two-bit upstart with the smudge on his upper lip has taken the first few rounds
