A Dead Man in Malta

by Michael Pearce

  ‘Like sitting ducks.’ Umberto had said.

  ‘Ducks with guns.’ her grandfather had said scornfully. ‘Balloons would be useless if it came to a fight.’

  ‘They wouldn’t be used for that.’ Uncle Paolo had said. ‘They would be used to bring an army here, land them inland, over by the Victoria Lines, say, and the Navy’s guns would be useless.’

  ‘An invasion is it, now?’ her grandfather had said. ‘Christ, boys, we’d better look out. The Arabs are coming!’

  ‘It’s not the Arabs you’ve got to worry about.’ Uncle Paolo had said. ‘It’s the British. And they’re already here.’

  It was about then, Sophia remembered, that the balloon had started to come down.

  ‘My God!’ said Grandfather. ‘The invasion’s already started!’

  They had watched the balloon descend lower and lower. At first they had thought it was intentional but then they had seen that it was going to come down into the sea.

  ‘You’d better get back to the hospital where you’re supposed to be,’ Grandfather had said to Umberto. ‘You could be needed.’

  Umberto had scuttled off and they had watched the balloon settle down on to the water. A bit like an elephant sitting down, Sophia had thought.

  Grandfather had had a programme and he had checked the number on the balloon to see whose it was.

  ‘It’s German.’ he had said.

  ‘Then they’d better get their act together at the hospital,’ Uncle Paolo had said. ‘The Germans won’t like it if things go wrong.’

  But they hadn’t gone wrong, thought Sophia. The balloon had settled down quite gently on the water and in a moment the dghajsas had been racing over to it. The basket beneath the balloon had given a jump when it had hit the water and the man standing inside it had disappeared from view. But then he had stood up again and begun shouting at the dghajsas as they closed in.

  ‘I don’t know what he’s shouting about.’ Grandfather had said. ‘He’s got off very lightly.’

  ‘The Germans are like that.’ Uncle Paolo had said. They do make a fuss.’ What he’d said seemed suddenly to strike him, because he had said it again. ‘Yes.’ he had said, as if to himself, ‘they do make a fuss.’ And he had suddenly seemed very pleased with himself. ‘Yes, that’s it!’ he had said, and smiled. Sophia couldn’t see what he was so pleased about because it didn’t seem that brilliant a remark.

  ‘Uncle Paolo was quite pleased when the balloon came down,’ she said to Seymour, ‘because he thought the Germans would make a fuss. Grandfather was cross with him. “Was that what he wanted?” he asked. “Was that what it was all about as far as he was concerned?” And Uncle Paolo said: “Yes.” And Grandfather called him a twisted son of a bitch. And Uncle Paolo stormed off, and Mum was very angry with Grandfather and she stormed off, and that’s why I remember it,’ said Sophia.

  A dghajsa had just pulled in below them and the passengers were disembarking. Among them was a group of sailors.

  ‘Hello, sir!’ said a voice which Seymour recognized. ‘Going to the match this evening?’

  It was Cooper, and along with him, as usual, were Corke and Price.

  ‘I might,’ he said, remembering that Chantale had said something about being on duty that evening with the St John Ambulance at a football match. ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Birgu,’ said Cooper. ‘Not far from the hospital.’

  ‘Who is it between?’

  ‘A Navy side and a local team.’

  ‘A return match?’

  ‘No, no, they haven’t played before. They are from the Bormla end. About halfway up the table so not bad. I reckon, though, that our lads are better. Amethyst is in and we’ve a strong team out tonight.’

  ‘I may well be there.’

  ‘We’ll look out for you, sir. And see that you get home all right,’ said Cooper, with another semi-insolent grin.

  Seymour had been over to the hospital that morning to check on a few things.

  ‘A fractured knee-cap.’ said Macfarlane. That’s what he was admitted with. It normally clears up on its own but this time the bone had been splintered and they thought that some of the splinters might have to be extracted so we kept him in.’

  ‘It sounds a bit serious.’

  ‘Not that serious. But, yes, on the heavy side as football injuries go.’

  ‘Do you get many football injuries?’

  ‘It’s the next best thing to a war, as far as the Navy is concerned. They come ashore, all full of pent-up testosterone, and football is a good way of discharging it. So, yes, we do have quite a few.’

  ‘Any idea how the injury was incurred?’

  Through a tackle, I understand. But you really need to ask someone else about that. He’ll have told the doctors, or you could try asking your friends.’

  ‘My friends?’

  The famous three. Cooper, Corke and Price.’

  They saw the match?’

  They try to see every match, as far as I can tell. And then they come here and talk it over with their mates in the wards.’

  ‘I know they were friends with Turner. I didn’t know they were visiting Wilson as well.’

  ‘Oh, yes. He was the one that started them coming. But then when Turner was admitted they started going to see him as well. And then it spread. They started visiting all the other sailors in the hospital. It was rather touching. They made a thing of it. Visiting the sick. They were in here two or three times a week. I was rather impressed by the way they stuck at it. Particularly in the case of Wilson, because Vasco was in a bed nearby and made himself unpleasant, as usual. I used to keep an eye on them because I felt it could easily end up with him getting the same treatment as Turner: a broken jaw.’

  ‘He’s not that keen on the English.’

  ‘No, but it was more that he is very keen on football. He and Wilson used to argue about it all the time. The trouble was that Vasco knew more about football, even English football, than Wilson did, and it irritated him. It irritated the others, too, when they were visiting.

  ‘Of course, you expect a bit of banter about football when it’s men but this was different. It had an edge to it. And it happened every time. Every time that they came in. He would always say something about football. Either about the football here - usually the Navy football - or about football in England. And usually it was not just saying, it was taunting.

  ‘It got so bad that I felt I had to stop it, so I moved him to the other end of the ward. But that made it worse. He would shout down the ward and they would shout back. So everyone could hear, and everyone got involved! Of course, I read the riot act and threatened to put Vasco in a cubicle on his own. Things got a little better. But then Wilson died.’

  ‘And they stopped coming?’

  ‘Well, actually, they didn’t. I still used to see them hanging around. Visiting someone else, I suppose. Or maybe they just thought that the hospital was a cool place to go!’

  Standing there in the Upper Barraca Gardens, looking out over the harbour crowded with English warships, and out further to the incredible blue Mediterranean, empty except for just a couple of ships laying a trail of steam across the horizon, Chantale suddenly felt a moment of release.

  It wasn’t so much release from the constraints of being with Mrs Wynne-Gurr’s St John Ambulance party, although it was nice to get away for a moment, as release from a general feeling of tightness that she had been carrying about with her, it seemed, for ages. She knew what it was. The tightness was England. And it wasn’t just the tightness of the crowded East End streets - heavens, the streets of Tangier were crowded enough! - as the way in which the sky closed down on you, shutting you into the closed, tight little horizon of greyness.

  Here, the sky opened up and carried on for ever, merging its blueness with sea which was equally blue, and still, so still. This morning the sky was subtly different from what it had been the day before. Mrs Ferreira waking up that morning had pronounced it colder and had stipulated
that Sophia was to wear her jacket. Grandfather - surely not? - had put on a scarf.

  And, yes, the day had seemed colder when Chantale had stepped out into the street. Of course, these things were relative and later Grandfather would remove his scarf and his jersey and go about shirt-sleeved as before. And Sophia would be racing around in her thin summer dress. But there definitely was a difference in the air.

  Or was it not so much a difference in the feel of things as in the look of things? The sky, that beautiful blue sky, seemed somehow whiter, the sun gently muted.

  Chantale recognized the feel of the day at once. It was one of those mornings that were treasured in Tangier, when the heat was less intense, lifted its burden, and lots of things came alive. Birds, especially, attacking any stretch of water with revived alacrity.

  And, suddenly, Chantale felt a great ache inside her at all the things she missed, all that she had forgone when she had moved to England: the subtle changes of the sun and light.

  No, she would not go back, she knew that. But it was nice occasionally to be reminded of it. And here in Malta she was reminded of it. It was a different way of life, which you knew from the inside.

  The English had come to Malta, just as the French had come to Tangier, and imposed their way of life. On the surface, they had won out. But, underneath, was a buried life which had continued for centuries and would go on regardless.

  They might call it the Grand Harbour but Chantale had seen the other name which was on all the maps: il-Port-il-Kebir.

  Perhaps it was the slight change in the weather that had prompted it but Mrs Ferreira had announced that morning that she was going shopping with Uncle Paolo to see that he was properly ‘fitted out’ for his return to the big ships. Chantale had soon grasped that this was the tradition when a member of your family put to sea, and even Grandfather did not demur. Nor, surprisingly, did Uncle Paolo, except for a token demurral that he was now old enough etc. But Mrs Ferreira was firm.

  ‘Debra can’t do it, so I must!’ she said, and Uncle Paolo bowed his head in acquiescence and arrived shortly after breakfast.

  Mrs Ferreira had prepared a list. But she didn’t need to, really, since she had proposed similar lists before, for her father, brothers, and even for Paolo himself. In any case, a list was hardly necessary when everyone knew what you needed when you put to sea. But making a list was clearly part of it and Mrs Ferreira got a great deal of pleasure from making one. It helped to bind the family together, she told Chantale, to remind the family that it was one.

  This was particularly necessary in the case of Uncle Paolo, she explained. Because of the unfortunate start to his life and his subsequent moving around, not just from family to family but from country to country, he had never properly put down roots. Mrs Ferreira was inclined to attribute to this cause the fact that he had never married. If he had married, she said, it would have settled him.

  For, at the age of forty, he was still in her view unsettled. ‘He doesn’t know where he belongs. Of course, he belongs here, but he doesn’t seem able to recognize it.’ If he had recognized it, she said tartly, he wouldn’t be playing in the Birgu band but for ‘our band’. To Mrs Ferreira this was a kind of betrayal: but Chantale thought it was perhaps a case of kicking against the pricks of family as far as, in Malta, you could decently go. Paolo obviously had a strong attachment to his family. Whenever it gathered, he gathered, too. But Chantale sensed an uneasiness there, a kind of tension, as if he felt that because of his mother’s marriage he could never be fully accepted into it.

  Chantale wasn’t sure whether that was true. Certainly there seemed to be some special tension between Paolo and Mrs Ferreira’s father; but Mrs Ferreira seemed determined that if there was any such tension she would personally do her best to overcome it.

  The normally genial Lucca was plainly disheartened.

  ‘He’s still at it,’ he said.

  ‘At ...?’

  ‘Questions,’ he said. ‘All yesterday and then all this morning. Well, I don’t mind answering questions. It’s his job, after all. But within reason. I mean, I’ve got a job, too, and this is only part of it. When am I going to get the rest done? Every time I look into my office I see a bigger pile of paper on my desk. I soon won’t be able to see the desk at all. Forms! Please to fill in this one, Herr Lucca, my Government requires it. And this one. And that one. “But this one is not right, Herr Lucca. It has not been correctly filled in!” “Where has it not been correctly filled in?” “Here and here!” “Where was I standing at 3 p.m on Saturday, June the 3rd? Christ, I don’t know. I stand in all sorts of places.” “But this is a vital moment, Herr Lucca. This is when the balloon started to come down!” “Ah, then. Well, at that point I was watching to see if any other balloons came down.” “Ah, you had suspicions, then?” “No, I was just watching in case any of the balloons came down.” “But you were watching? Where, then, were you standing?”

  ‘In the end I told him I was standing by the Old Customs House. Well, it was as good a place as any. The fact is, I moved around. I had to. There were other things to see to as well as balloons. A fight between dghajsas, for example. Where the Governor was to stand. But his wife couldn’t see! Could she move - ? Yes, but if she did then I would have to move - and so on. Not to mention the drunks coming out of the bars. And so on.

  Then he wanted to know about security arrangements.

  “‘Look.’’ I said, “we weren’t bothering too much about security arrangements. I mean, Christ, it was just balloons. And they were up in the air. What we were worried about was what would happen if they ran into each other. I mean, they could, couldn’t they? There were so many of them. Security? No, what concerned us was traffic control.”

  ‘“Traffic control?” he says. “But that would be on a different form.”

  ‘And he ferrets in his briefcase and produces another form. “Please to fill this in,” he says. “By tomorrow morning.”

  “‘Traffic control?” I say. “Are we talking about balloons? Because we don’t reckon to go in for traffic control of balloons much. Or are you talking about dghajsas? Because that was what was likely to cause the trouble in the harbour.”

  ‘“Both,”‘ he says. “Both. But dghajsas are boats, yes? That would be on a different form.”

  ‘Then he says, “But that is not important. What is important is the security on the ground. At the launch site. Can you tell me that, please. The security arrangements there. How did you control access to the balloons? What system of permits did you use? Did the technical staff have identification badges?”

  ‘“Look,” I said, “this was not a Grand Prix event. It was just balloons over the harbour. A spectacle. A bit of fun. For everybody.”

  “‘Ah, no,” he said. “People can get injured. Or even killed. At spectacles. Precautions have to be taken. All I am asking is what they were.”

  ‘Of course, we had made some arrangements, and I tried to tell him what they were. And he grew sniffier and sniffier. I thought his nose was going to rise up right over his head. And all the time he was writing. He wrote everything down.

  ‘Well, later in the morning I got a chance to take a look at some of the things he had written. And it made we mad. “Lack of system,” he had written. “Typically British.” “But we’re not British,” I felt like shouting at him. “We’re Maltese! And we’ve got our own way of doing things, our own systems. They may not be yours but on the whole they work.” But I thought I’d better not because the boss had already been on to me. “This German business is a hot potato, Lucca,” he said. “And it’s getting hotter every minute.’”

  ‘Well, I’m sorry to hear this,’ said Seymour.

  ‘You should be,’ said Lucca. ‘Because your turn is next. He wants to speak to the Englishman in charge.’

  ‘No, no, no,’ said Seymour. ‘I am afraid you are under a misapprehension, Mr Backhaus, I am not in charge. I am merely a detective assigned to the case.’

  ‘A naval d
etective?’

  ‘No, no. I don’t think we have naval detectives. I’m from Scotland Yard.’

  ‘Ah, Scotland Yard? So London thinks this is important, yes?’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t quite say that - ‘

  ‘London is concerned, yes?’

  ‘Well, naturally. Suspected murder is - ’

  ‘And the Navy, the Navy, too, is concerned?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure they are. Two of their men, after all. And on board one of their ships.’

  ‘Ship?’ Backhaus shuffled his papers. ‘It says nothing about ships here.’

  ‘The hospital is a ship to them. It is a naval hospital. In the Navy it counts as a ship.’

  Herr Backhaus was silenced. But only for a moment.

  ‘A ship? Yes, yes, I can see that to them - in terms of responsibility, yes. I can see that. It would, yes.’

  He thought.

  ‘But that would make it even more important to them!’ he said. ‘They would see it as something aimed at the heart of the Navy!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Herr Kiesewetter’s balloon. Would they not see it as a threat?’

  ‘No, no, not much of one. They’re pretty robust.’

  ‘Think, Mr Seymour! Think! You have the whole British Mediterranean fleet before you. Including its very latest vessels. The Type XK 115 - does that not mean anything to you, Mr Seymour? I assure you it does to the British Navy. Would they want foreign observers studying it from the air?’

  ‘But, look, they can study it perfectly well from the land! If you just stand up in the Upper Barraca Gardens - or anywhere along the harbour front - ’

  ‘But study it, Mr Seymour, really study it! Closely. From above. An unimpeded vision. Would they be so happy about that? Might they not be ... concerned, Mr Seymour? Concerned? At least just a little?’

  ‘Well, I can see what you are saying. But aren’t you overdoing it? Anyone could perfectly well observe these ships from the land with a telescope. Why are you making so much of observing them from the air?’