He tried to console himself with the alternatives. He would be the mysterious gentleman watching the Colts’ football match against the rival school, stifling his cheers as his son broke free in the dying seconds of the game to score the winning goal. That didn’t work. Lionel barged his way into the fantasy, sidling toward him along the touchline.
“Hello, old boy. What brings you here?”
“Oh, nothing much. That fine figure of a young man you have always assumed to be your son is in fact the product of a brief but passionate affair I conducted with your dear lady wife during our time on Malta.”
“Well, I say. I didn’t see that one coming.”
“Doubtless, dear fellow, but who can blame you? We were very discreet.”
Somehow all the scenarios he came up with collapsed into absurdity, leaving him lost and floundering in a future world of his own creation.
The past and present offered more of a refuge. He found himself drawing a strange kind of strength from the prospect of fatherhood. Just as his own father was the touchstone by which he tested himself, so it now fell to him to set an example, to light the path for the next generation—a mawkish sentiment, he knew, but at least it gave some small degree of comfort.
It had just passed five o’clock when he heard the knock. His first thought was of Mitzi, but she didn’t have a key to the downstairs door. His second thought was of his neighbor, the young sculptor on the floor below, the one who used to teach at the art school on Old Bakery Street and who now made a living running off devotional plaster models of the Virgin (much in demand), the neighbor who was always cadging a scrap of bread or a smear of jam. Then he remembered that the sculptor was long gone, off to stay with relatives near Zejtun, where the bombs didn’t rain down with such deadly persistence.
He dragged on his shorts and shuffled to the front door.
“Who is it?” he called.
“Busuttil.”
The name meant nothing to him until the low grumble of a voice added, “From Lilian.”
He slipped the latch and opened the door. In the darkness it was hard to make out much of Mr. Busuttil other than that he was short, was rounded in the shoulder, and appeared to have something odd on his head.
It was a straw hat, but only just. Stained and crumpled, it looked like it had been pulled from the rubble of a bombed building. This became clear once they were in the kitchen and Max had lit a candle.
Busuttil glanced around the bare room. It was hard to guess his age, hard to say whether the hat concealed a bald pate or a thick head of hair. His face had a lean hangdog look to it, as if someone had let the air out of it. His eyes, in contrast, were bright, alert, and restless.
“She said no phone, so I come instead.”
“You’re a friend of Lilian’s?” Somehow Max couldn’t see it.
“I know the brother of the cousin of her uncle.”
“And you’re a policeman?”
Max had been very clear about that with Lilian: it had to be someone who knew the ropes, someone with authority. The man in front of him didn’t appear to score highly in either department. He could hardly be held to blame for the large carbuncle on his neck, but there was something essentially disheveled about the fellow that didn’t scream “dependable upholder of the law.”
Busuttil pulled back his dusty jacket and flashed the pistol at his waist. “CID. Inspector for five years.”
Max tried to look suitably impressed.
“Do you have tea?”
“It’s the only thing I do have.”
This wasn’t entirely true. He also had a three-penny bar of chocolate he’d been holding back for a special occasion. He wasn’t sure that this qualified but produced it nonetheless. Busuttil eagerly devoured it all before the water had even come to a boil.
Max had his own contacts within the police department, men with whom he communicated every day over casualty figures, and he was beginning to wish he’d taken the risk and gone with one of them. He started to feel more comfortable only when the tea had brewed and they were sitting at the table.
“I see your eyes,” said Busuttil. “I see you are not happy. So before I ask questions, I tell you about Busuttil.” He paused to take a sip of tea. “I was born 1901 in a small house near Siggiewi. My father, he was a farmer of corn. There were also goats, six goats …”
Without warning, Busuttil erupted in laughter, gripping Max’s forearm as he did so. The laughter accounted for the long furrows flanking his mouth.
“Your face!” Busuttil gasped. Once he’d recovered enough to risk another sip of tea, he added, “It is good for my work that people see me like you see me.”
His work, it turned out, was pretty eye-popping stuff. It was hardly surprising that in a garrison of twenty-six thousand British servicemen there were a few bad apples, but Max was taken aback by the true extent of the rot. Busuttil wasn’t talking about men banged up in the guardroom for “conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline”; he was talking about the genuine article: racketeers, extortionists, rapists, and murderers. He claimed to have cracked a ring of NAAFI men responsible for the theft of five hundred cases of whisky from a convoy back in September. He had also arrested a corporal in the West Kents who’d slit the throat of another soldier in a quarrel over a girl. He reeled off a grim catalogue of other crimes perpetrated by British servicemen that he’d investigated, though not always with success.
On the one hand, Max felt ridiculously naive, a victim of the sort of propaganda he peddled; on the other, he
