The Information Officer by Mark Mills Page B

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, livedeverywhere, 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. More than once he had been seen leaving the offices of the mysterious Y Service and the even more secretive Special Liaison Unit, although, as Tommy said, for much of the time he seemed to just drift about, observing and absorbing.
    But Max hadn’t come to speculate about Elliott; he’d made the journey in search of information. With that mission in mind, he nudged the conversation back to the here and now.
    “How are the Lazarene swine bearing up?”
    “Surprisingly well, if a little jumpy.”
    No one begrudged the submariners their foibles—the dark and inhuman universe they inhabited while on patrol earned them the right to act pretty much as they wished when on terra firma—but their quasi-religious devotion to the herd of pigs they’d been rearing still raised a chuckle or two.
    “What’s going to happen to them?” Max inquired.
    “Happen to them?”
    “The pigs. When you’ve gone.”
    “Aaaahhh,” drawled Tommy knowingly. “And I thought you’dcome here to see how your old chum was getting on, but really it’s bacon you’re after.”
    Max smiled. “It’s true, then.”
    Tommy leaned across the desk and stubbed out his cigarette in the aluminum casing of a spent German flare that now served as an ashtray.
    “When?” Max asked.
    Tommy looked up. “P34 left a few days ago. The others over the next week or so.”
    “That’s all that’s left?”
    As the information officer, he might have felt stupid asking the question, but he knew the hard truth: that he was regarded as little more than a journalist, that privileged information was fed to him only when it was deemed expedient.
    “Best not to shout it from the parapets.”
    “Of course not.”
    “Don’t think for a moment we’re happy about pulling out. We know how it’ll look, what message it’ll send to the Maltese.”
    “No one’s going to blame you, Tommy. Everyone knows