Strange that a chance encounter in an air-raid shelter could challenge his weary resignation. He smiled at the memory of her words, playfully defiant:
The wooden counter ran the full width of the shop, and on the felt panels covering the wall behind it were pinned a dizzying array of caps, berets, badges, and buttons. The cabinets lining the side walls had lost their glass and now stood empty. Behind the counter a dapper-looking man with a goatee beard and pince-nez spectacles was berating a shopgirl for something or other to do with a reel of gold braid. He schooled his features into an unconvincing smile as Josef approached.
“May I help you?”
Josef produced his badge and demanded to see the shop ledger. The manager grudgingly handed it over.
There was no record of a sale of a submariner’s shoulder tab in the past ten days, not since Carmela Cassar had been found dead in the street with the remnants of one in her hand. In fact, the ledger recorded barely any sales since the beginning of the month. This wasn’t so surprising; the soldiers, sailors, and airmen on the island had better things to think about right then than the trim of their battle dress. Ken, assuming that was his name, assuming that he had killed Mary Farrugia before going on to murder two more girls, assuming that he existed at all and that mother hen hadn’t been trying to pull a fast one for the sake of her nephew—
“Have you finished?” demanded the manager.
Josef silenced him with a look, irritated by the distraction, irritated by the number of assumptions driving the case. Facts and evidence were what counted.
He flicked back through the ledger—April, March, February, January …
“Do you have a ruler?” asked Josef.
“A ruler?”
Unprompted, the shopgirl pulled one from a drawer and handed it over.
“Thanks,” said Josef with a smile, taking it from her and using it to tear off the relevant pages of the ledger.
The manager looked stunned by this act of desecration.
“Don’t worry. You’ll get them back.”
TACITUS CONTACTED HIM AT THE USUAL TIME.
He had made a point over the past days of neither broad casting nor receiving, choosing instead to leave the machine tucked well away in its wooden box. He could imagine Tacitus’s frustration, but he couldn’t picture the man behind the code name. He vacillated between an unassuming character, easily underestimated, and a more obvious type in the Lutz Kettelmann mold: tall, officious, blandly handsome. His tastes ran naturally to the former. He liked a dark horse, being something of one himself.
The message brought a smile to his lips. It was the first time that Tacitus had addressed him in English.
He punched his reply into the machine, noting down the enciphered text before transmitting it.
It was a satisfying riposte: a play on the same proverb while at the same time implying that they would have to pay dearly for any more information. He was over his little sulk, now that his plans were back on track, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t punish them for throwing those plans into disarray in the first place.
It was a while before he heard back from them, time to read a couple of chapters of his book. Their request, when it finally came through, was predictable enough. They wanted to know everything he’d learned about the reinforcement flight of Spitfires heading for the island. Did he have an exact date? An idea of the numbers involved? What preparations were under way at the airfields? How did they plan to disperse the aircraft? In short, had they learned from their mistakes last time round, and if so, what new measures were they adopting?
He thought about lying; the idea amused him. One hundred and twenty Mark V Spitfires due at first light tomorrow morning. That would certainly have had Tacitus tearing his hair out, or what was left of it. His preferred incarnation of Tacitus was thin on top.
In the end, he was a good boy, and answered the questions as precisely as possible. He even threw in a bonus, advising that it would be worth keeping an eye on the seaplane base in Kalafrana Bay that evening. A well-timed raid might just kill two birds with one stone—the outgoing governor
When he was done, he packed the machine away and wandered through to the living room. He poured himself a large whisky and wound up the gramophone. Sitting there with a glass in one hand, a cigarette in the other, his thoughts turned to Max—handsome, hopeless Max, torn between two such different women.
Was he even aware of the true scale of the cliche? It was a corny conundrum straight from the pages
Max had proved himself a far more capable dissimulator with Mitzi. Even when observing the dumb play of their moving lips across a crowded room, when they’d thought they were alone, he’d been able to detect little of their private history. Almost nothing in their behavior betrayed them. You really had to know what had been going on in order to see it.
He poured himself another whisky and recovered his notebook from its hiding place. If he were any different, he might have been able to sustain his natural sympathy for Max. A part of him even wished it were possible. It wasn’t, though. That became evident as soon as he began to write.
