Joe Calleja coughed.
Marija blinked in embarrassment; she’d got lost in her thoughts.
Margo Seiffert was smiling as she settled behind her desk.
“Off you two go. Catch up properly.” To hurry them on their way she added: “Shoo!”
Marija led her brother out into the courtyard at the heart of St Catherine’s Hospital for Women. In the summer the space was cool, and in the winter it was sheltered from the south westerly wind that sometimes gusted fitfully for weeks on end. Joe had never actually been inside the Hospital and his brown eyes were wide and curious.
“I didn’t expect this place to be so quiet,” he confessed.
“Sergeant Siddall said they were letting a lot of people out?” She asked, moving to a stone bench and sitting down. Things were slowly spinning around her and she needed to re-establish her equilibrium.
“Jim, you mean,” Joe Calleja teased his sister.
“He’s been very,” Marija struggled to find the right word, suddenly it mattered that she found exactly the right word to describe her association — no her friendship, of a sort — with the Redcap who’d been one of her brother’s jailors. “Proper and thoughtful,” she decided, compromising when it was impossible to find a single word to express what she was feeling.
“Jim?”
“I’ve only ever used his first name twice and today was the first time I have ever kissed him,” Marija retorted, vexed that she felt so defensive about something so transparently innocence. “Besides, he knows all about Peter Christopher.”
“The Sergeant is sweet on you, big sister.”
“I think I like him, but not that way.” Or at least she didn’t think she did. But what did she know? She was a twenty-six year old spinster who’d never had an admirer, boyfriend or suitor. She’d never been held in a man’s arms other than when she’d hugged her father or her brother, and although sometimes she yearned — positively ached — to be touched by a man it had never happened and she’d never invited it. Her adult life had been that of a nun in cloisters when it came to male companionship. Every time she spoke to or met a man of her own age who in other circumstances might have been a candidate for courtship or eventual matrimony; there was the wall of her notoriety and prestige as the heroine of Vittoriosa-Birgu, the broken child from the ruins remade, the bright hopeful symbol of the post-war Malta. After the October War she wasn’t even that because what hope was there for a bright new future in the ruins of a whole world? “Do you think Sergeant Siddall understand that?”
“In his head maybe but not in his heart.” Marija’s brother sat beside her on the bench and they were silent together for perhaps a minute. “What do you think will happen if the British leave?”
“I don’t know.”
“What does your other special friend say about it?”
“Peter doesn’t know anything about it. Or if he does he’s never said anything. Or the censor cuts it out of his letters.”
“Oh.” Joe reached out and held her hand. “I thought I’d never get out of that place on Manoel Island. Either that or they’d hand me back to the Yankee animals at the Empire Stadium.”
Brother and sister squeezed each other’s hand.
“I sometimes think I will never see Peter,” Marija confessed suddenly. “Sometimes I wonder if he really exists. I know he does, but…”
“There are other good men in the world, big sister.”
“I know but I don’t want any man’s pity.”
Chapter 24
Arkady Pavlovich Rykov would have felt sorry for himself if he’d thought it would do him any good. If he could have got to England and recounted his story to the right person things might have been different; there might even have been a happy ending. Or if not happy; then at least less painful. He hoped they wouldn’t be too hard on Clara. She’d believed all along that she was doing her patriotic duty. She’d never known that she was — technically — aiding and abetting an enemy of the state in a time of war. Was this a time of war? That was a fascinating philosophical question — the war had only lasted a few hours, and so far as he knew nobody had actually declared it (war) on anybody else and his country, the Soviet Union didn’t exist anymore — but largely irrelevant to his current dilemma.
It was indeed a funny old world…
Keys rattled loudly in the lock of the rusty iron grill door that delineated his damp, cold cell from the rest of the cave complex. He didn’t know exactly where his cell was in the upper galleries of the Rock’s defences because when Major Denzil Williams had blown his whistle every soldier in the world had jumped on him and commenced to pummel him. Beneath the hammering fists and crushing boots he’d been battered into insensibility within seconds. He’d regained consciousness in his vest and underpants, barefooted and bereft of his beloved American aviator’s chronometer. Without a watch he had no idea how much time had elapsed. The blood had congealed on his head and face, his ribs hurt every time he took a half breath and he’d been sick on himself. No matter, but for the war the KGB would have found an excuse to denounce him and treat him thus. Perversely, given the choice he’d have much rather suffered this indignity at the hands of his former foes that at the hands of his old friends.
“Oh, God! What have they done to you?” Clara exclaimed angrily, kneeling on the floor beside the man.
He’d asked himself why he couldn’t see much of the room; now he realised it was because he was lying on the floor and his left eye was completed shut. Far, far away he heard the key turning in the lock at the woman’s back.
“Forgive me,” he muttered through cracked and swollen lips. “I hoped they’d at least permit me to confess my sins before they…” He coughed, retched. “Then they would have known that you were innocent…”
A harsh light came on in the cell.
A single naked electric bulb over the doorway.
There was a third person in the dank dungeon.
“If you’d be so good as to support his head Miss Pullman we’ll see what we can do to tidy him up,” a weary and distinctly disenchanted male baritone suggested as a shadow fell over Arkady Pavlovich Rykov.
“If you help me I can probably sit up,” the patient offered, his voice a croaking parody.
“Let me give you a look over first,” the man decided brusquely.
Arkady Pavlovich Rykov wasn’t in any condition to argue. He let the man and the woman ease him onto his back with his head resting on Clara Pullman’s lap. The warm, fragrant cushion of his lover’s thigh was blissful after the unyielding, hostile rock floor of the cave.
Firm, gentle hands explored his torso, applying tentative pressure and waiting for a groan or sigh from the patient. Clara stroked Arkady Pavlovich Rykov’s blood-crusted brow. Then something cold and wet was wiping away the blood. The stranger’s hand methodically fingered his jaw, then around his eyes.