A Prisoner in Malta

by Phillip DePoy

  A second later a small dark man dressed all in blue tugged at Marlowe’s arm. The man was the marksman who had set the barrels of oil aflame.

  “We go now,” he said. “I am Argi, the Basque.”

  With that he turned and strode away. Marlowe and Lopez followed him to the longboat. The captain stood by, head down.

  “You’ll make it to Malta,” the captain assured them. “You may even be early. Walsingham should like that.”

  “Walsingham,” Lopez said. “I don’t trust him.”

  The captain looked away. “Beware of him, Rodrigo. With that man, nothing is as it seems.”

  “I know,” Lopez answered.

  “Go,” de Ferro said, still not looking at Lopez or Marlowe.

  In the next second Marlowe and Lopez were over the side and the longboat was dropped into the sea. It hit the water before Marlowe turned to look at the other man in their quartet, Gaspar. He was older than Argi, wrapped in a thick brown blanket. His hair was long and disheveled; his eyes displayed a keen intelligence. And he was smiling.

  The waves were high but rounded. Argi took one oar and Gaspar the other. They pulled with their entire bodies, and the longboat flew over the water. Before long they could hear crashing waves: the shore was fast approaching. There was no sign of either ship at sea.

  As the longboat hit the sand, Marlowe jolted forward.

  “Welcome to Spain,” Lopez whispered.

  * * *

  On board the Portuguese ship, Captain de Ferro stood at the rail with the pilot.

  “I’ve had enough of this,” de Ferro said to the pilot in Portuguese. “Let’s go. I did as I was told. I got them off my ship—exactly as Walsingham directed me to do.”

  “Why did he put them on this ship,” the pilot asked, shaking his head, “only to take them off again?”

  The captain could only shrug.

  “What about your friend, the doctor?” the pilot asked.

  “I gave him Gaspar and the Basque,” de Ferro shot back defensively, “what more do you expect? Now take the wheel, come full about, hug the coast, and put as much water between us and these damned English spies as you can before sunset.”

  The pilot nodded once. “The Basque will get them through, and you’ll see your friend soon enough.”

  “Take the wheel!”

  The pilot stood for a moment, staring at the captain, then moved up the stairs to the aftcastle and turned the wheel gently but steadily until the ship was headed north.

  Captain de Ferro felt the wind shift. He glanced once toward shore, where the longboat might have landed. Then he turned his face into the wind, and his mind toward other matters.

  SEVEN

  PORT OF VALLETTA, MALTA

  The merchant ship Ascension, belonging to the English gentleman Mr. Cordal, moored at the port of Valletta early on October 9, a Sunday. Men were already throwing bags of grain at a pallet on the dock by the time the ship was tied up.

  The plank was lowered, and five Jewish men of business descended slowly, with a cold air of great dignity. All were dressed in black save for a white prayer shawl around the neck tucked into a buttoned cloak. Their heads were covered and the shawls obscured their faces. Their hands were out of sight, their eyes stern and cold. They moved as one, close together, and caught the eye of the Customs and Revenue Officer of the Knights of Malta almost instantly. He was a tall man, almost skeletal, dressed in a red tunic emblazoned with the white cross of the Knights.

  He approached them with two armed men at his side, but the businessmen did not stop, nor did they even acknowledge the officer’s presence when he began to speak.

  “Gentlemen,” he announced sternly, “there is a matter of—gentlemen. Every ship in from Marseilles must pay the extra—stop!”

  Only one man stopped. The rest kept moving. The man who had stopped handed the officer a heavy leather pouch, opened it, and glared at the officer. Without waiting for another word, the man turned and rejoined his companions.

  The officer was left staring down into the pouch. He had never seen so many gold coins. By the time he finally looked up, the Jews were gone.

  * * *

  Ten minutes later, in a lovely courtyard a mile or so from the dock, Marlowe took off his black cloak, grinning. The courtyard, twenty feet square, was filled with golden light, and planted with a stunning variety of flowers and Mediterranean spices. They filled the senses, creating an air of peace.

  “That was absolutely remarkable,” he said to no one in particular, “the way you bypassed the authorities. Brilliant.”

  Marlowe glanced around at his companions. They had kept to themselves on the voyage from Marseilles, and Marlowe had been a bit unwell in the rough seas. Lopez explained that these men were wealthy Jewish merchants from Malta, in league with the grander plan, and that had been enough for Marlowe at the time, seasick as he was.

  A young man said something in a language Marlowe didn’t recognize.

  Lopez nodded. “My friend says that money is a universal language, and one they’ve spoken to the harbor master many times.”

  “Yes, I see that. Pardon my asking, but what language was he speaking just now, your friend? It’s like nothing I’ve ever heard before.”

  “Not surprising,” Lopez told him. “It’s Judeo-Portuguese, better than any code. It’s at least five hundred years old, and yet only we speak it.”

  An older man with a gray beard and deep-set eyes threw the cowl of his cloak back from his face and scowled at Marlowe.

  “We have no time for idle discussion,” he rumbled in English. “If you are found here with us, we’ll all be killed. Get your business concluded today. My son has the plan.”

  The old man turned to leave.

  “Today?” Marlowe shot back before thinking. “No. We need more time. Much more. We’ve been tossed off a Portuguese ship, smuggled through Spain and the Basque territories under barrels, jostled in carts around France until our bones are loose. If it hadn’t been for our friend Argi we’d already be dead—five times over. And may I remind you that I was sick for half the sail from Marseilles to here on that burnt cork of a ship. I don’t think I could conclude my bowels today, let alone an impossible rescue operation. Lopez. Tell them.”

  “He needs food and drink, and a few hours of sleep,” Lopez explained reasonably. “He’ll be ready then. Why don’t we all reconvene at, say, the second hour after midday?”

  Marlowe cried out a wordless objection. The old man closed his eyes and said something that sounded very much like a curse in the arcane language.

  Lopez turned to Marlowe, smiling. “He says he’ll bring you a nice breakfast.”

  “That’s not what he said,” Marlowe disagreed, “but I could murder a nice breakfast.”

  Lopez nodded. “And then a pleasant nap here in this courtyard.”

  The old man looked up to the sky for a moment, as if asking a question, then, reluctantly, gave orders. Moments later a large meal, a cask of wine, and several blankets were proffered. Everyone save Lopez and Marlowe went inside. Marlowe sat on a wide wooden bench, admiring the garden that surrounded the courtyard. Lopez stood.

  “They don’t want me in the house,” Marlowe concluded. “I’m unclean.”

  “Yes.” Lopez avoided looking at his friend.

  Marlowe gnawed on a dried date. “I notice they don’t use names. They won’t tell us their names.”

  “Better that way,” Lopez said, still not catching Marlowe’s eye. “Safer.”

  “Yet you seem to trust these men. Why?”

  Lopez glanced toward the house. “Because we have to, so it’s really pointless to debate. But the Jews on this island have good reason to hate the Knights of Malta.”

  “I’ve heard stories,” Marlowe acknowledged, “and I understand. A mutual hatred makes good allies, you said.”

  “It does, if these men are who they say they are.”

  Marlowe tore off a joint of chicken. “I suppose we’ll see soon en
ough.”

  Marlowe was asleep on the bench, under a blanket, within the next five minutes.

  * * *

  Afternoon sunlight slanted into the courtyard before Marlowe awoke. Momentarily blinded, he heard voices close by, murmuring.

  “Ah,” Lopez said, “he’s awake.”

  Marlowe sat up.

  “You know,” he said to Lopez sleepily, “I’ve had a thought. Is it possible that Pygott was killed by those same men who attacked us on the road to London, do you think? Several of my classmates saw those men on the campus—Boyle and—the other one—Carier. I was with them when I—”

  “Not now,” Lopez interrupted impatiently.

  Lopez and another man were standing over a table that had not been in evidence before Marlowe had fallen asleep.

  “Come,” the man said to Marlowe. “Look.”

  Marlowe stretched, cracked his neck, and stumbled over to the table. He couldn’t be certain, but it appeared that the other man at the table was among the cloaked companions from the ship. The table was completely covered by a map.

  “This,” the man was saying as he pointed, “is the entrance to the prison where they are holding your English spy.”

  Marlowe opened his eyes wider. He hadn’t expected so blunt a description of their prize. He studied the man for a moment. He was still dressed in the black cloak, his face was dark, his beard thick, and his eyes lacked all emotion.

  “Once in,” the man continued, “there is a long corridor that descends to an open room. The open room has three doors. We can’t be certain which door leads to the hole. We’re told it’s the one on the left. Do you understand me?”

  “Right,” Marlowe yawned, “I’m awake. Take the left door and hope for the best.”

  “At the end of that hall,” the man continued, impatiently, “there would be a sharp drop to a stinking hole. The only way into it or out of it is a ladder mounted on the wall beside it, too big for one man to move.”

  “Our man is down there?” Marlowe asked. “In that hole?”

  “As far as we know,” the man answered. “With seven others.”

  “Who are they,” Marlowe asked, “the others?”

  “No idea,” the man answered.

  “Do you mind my asking how you got this intelligence?” Marlowe ventured.

  “I do mind,” the man answered plainly.

  “They have their own man on the inside,” Lopez announced. “That man won’t reveal himself, not even to us when we’re there. He won’t help us. But he’s there.”

  Marlowe thought for a moment.

  “He’s a Jew who’s managed to acquire a position as a guard,” Marlowe concluded. “Brave.”

  “Foolish,” the man at the table snapped.

  “It’s his younger brother,” Lopez explained.

  “No!” the man shouted. “Wrong!”

  “He doesn’t want you to know it because he doesn’t trust you.”

  “Because I’m a Christian or because I’m an Englishman?” Marlowe asked the man.

  The man gritted his teeth and hissed his answer. “Because I’m a Jew who has lived life on the edge of a dagger. I trust no one.”

  “Good philosophy,” Marlowe answered amiably, “but I’m afraid I can’t completely agree with it. I trust Dr. Lopez, for example, and he trusts you. So, by proxy, I trust you. I realize it’s foolish. But I seem to have been born without a fear of death. And once death is removed from your list of fears, almost everything else is … fun.”

  The man’s jaw relaxed and he gaped at Marlowe, uncertain how to respond. At last he murmured a single syllable.

  “Fun?”

  Marlowe smiled. “Yes, but why are we rushing? Why does it have to be today?”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “Partly because our home and our family are in danger,” the man continued at last, “but mostly because today is October 9, the Feast of Saint Denis. There will be fewer guards in the prison. They seem to take any excuse, these Christians here on Malta, to get drunk.”

  “Saint Denis,” Marlowe mumbled. “Patron saint of the possessed, as it happens.”

  “Auspicious,” Lopez answered wryly.

  “How do we get past the first door, into the damned place?” Marlowe asked.

  “We’ll have a letter allowing us to visit my ‘father,’” Lopez interrupted, “who owes a heavy tax to the Knights. I’m visiting to tell him that the money has been raised and he’ll soon be free.”

  “They’ve picked out a man in that situation who occupies a cell in the same building as the hellhole where our man languishes,” Marlowe deduced. “Clever. But who am I in this play?”

  Lopez grinned. “You’re my Christian bodyguard.”

  The man at the table laughed.

  “He’s laughing,” Lopez explained, “because the first thought they had was to put you in a dress and say you were my daughter.”

  “A girl who prepared proper food for her grandfather,” the man at the table explained, smiling with his mouth, but not his eyes.

  “I assured them that you would prove a formidable bodyguard,” Lopez went on, “as long as you weren’t wearing a dress.”

  “This man couldn’t protect his codpiece in a whorehouse,” the man at the table mumbled.

  Marlowe tilted his head. “What an odd thing to say. I don’t wear a codpiece, as you can plainly see, and why would I want to protect it in a whorehouse? Your insult makes no sense. Maybe you’d care to put my abilities to the test.”

  “Oh.” The man lost his smile. “I would like that very much. I would quite enjoy proving to my father that this plan will not work.”

  “We don’t have time for a quarrel,” Lopez objected, mostly to the man at the table.

  The man ignored Lopez, planted his feet, and leaned forward onto the table, preparing to lunge.

  “Fine, then, we won’t quarrel,” Marlowe began reasonably. “Let’s just leave it at this.”

  In a blur, Marlowe’s dagger was in his hand and he kicked the table just enough to hit his opponent in the midsection. In the next breath Marlowe leaned forward, thrust his hand into the man’s cloak, and grabbed the dagger hidden there. Then Marlowe stabbed down his blade, hard. It stuck deep in the table between the man’s second and third fingers.

  The man hadn’t had time to draw a single breath.

  “Now,” Marlowe explained softly, showing the man his own dagger, “if you weren’t my friend’s friend, that blade would be in your hand, nailing you to the table, instead of between your fingers. And I’d kill you with your own dagger. If Jewish girls can do that, then put me in a dress. Otherwise, tell me the rest of your plan so I can get off this scab of an island and back to my drinking in England.”

  The man worked hard to control his rage. His chest rose and fell like a bellows, and his eyes were coals.

  “That’s what a bodyguard does, you see,” Lopez explained after a moment. “That sort of thing.”

  The man moved his hand away from Marlowe’s dagger at last. He nodded, calming.

  “Maybe this will work after all,” he said finally. “Maybe.”

  EIGHT

  Once fully explained, the plan was not remotely to Marlowe’s liking.

  After he and Lopez pulled their man out of the hole, they were to dress him as a guard, leave the prison as quickly as possible, and head for the docks where the Ascension would be waiting. Marlowe pointed out the many flaws in the scheme, but had been assured that the strategy was a product of older, wiser heads.

  The same group of men who had been onboard the Ascension escorted Marlowe and Lopez to the prison. Marlowe alone eschewed his previous rabbinical disguise, following the rest of the enclave in his own clothes through the streets and narrow alleys.

  The sun was low in the sky over the port of Valletta, but the stones in the plaza outside the prison complex of the Knights of Malta retained the day’s heat and made everyone sweat.

  A gate opened into an arena with
a tiled floor surrounded by twenty-foot walls. It was a plain, undecorated space, perhaps forty feet square. This complex had always been a prison. There were no guards at the gate, but at least ten were milling around in the arena as Marlowe and the rest made their way across the tiles and arrived at a tall wooden door.

  Four guards stood on either side of that door, all staring at the visitors. A fifth man took the papers Lopez offered. He shook his head, looked at the men, and read the papers once more.

  “Well, I don’t know how you managed this,” he said at last, in a clearly English accent, “but it appears you have the required sum in safekeeping, and permission to visit the prisoner. What I don’t understand is why you lot want inside now? You’ve paid the fees. The old man’s out in a day or two.”

  “As it says there, the old man is my father,” Lopez explained, feigning deference. “I worry about his health. If he knew that he was soon to be released, it would do him a world of good. Please, at least let me speak with him, if only for a moment.”

  The man in charge sighed. “Just you, then.”

  “And my bodyguard,” Lopez added.

  “Bodyguard?” the man boomed.

  Marlowe stepped forward. It was decidedly not a part of the plan.

  “That’s right, mate,” he said in a deliberately vulgar, heavy accent. “He’s got Hebrew superstition: thinks it’s unlucky to go in a Maltese prison without a Christian token. And that’s me.”

  “You’re not a Jew.” The man was clearly surprised.

  “Do I look like a Jew to you?” Marlowe fired back, just at the point of being offended.

  “I don’t know what you look like, mate,” the knight snapped, “but you’re not coming in here.”

  Marlowe took a step back and smiled.

  “I judge you to be a Kettering man, by your speech,” Marlowe said, a bit more confidentially, giving his own rough accent free rein. “Me, I’m from Corby.”

  “Corby?” The knight’s demeanor softened considerably. “What the hell are you doing here playing shield man to this Jew?”

  “I might ask you,” Marlowe answered amiably, “what in God’s name you’re doing on this godforsaken rock. We’ve all got to work, ain’t we?”