The Information Officer Read Online Free PDF Page A

law.”
    “Sure I do. You don’t want to screw with an institution that can send an innocent man to the electric chair.” Elliott turned to Max before Freddie’s frustration could shape itself into a response. “You want to hear it?”
    “Fire away.”
    “It’s very simple. You’re a wing commander taking a break from it all up at the pilots’ rest camp on Saint Paul’s Bay. You know it? Sure you do, from when Ralph was wounded.”
    “I do.”
    “Then you can picture it. It’s late and, okay, you’re a bit tight. But, hey, who wouldn’t be, after all you’ve been through these past months? Anyway, you’re feeling good and you’re looking for your room. And you find your room. Only it isn’t your room. It’s someone else’s room. And that someone else is in what you think is your bed with someone else.”
    “You’re losing me.”
    “Stay lost,” was Freddie’s advice.
    “There are two guys in the bed, okay? And they’re, well, I don’t know how to put it….”
    “I think I get your meaning.”
    “Of course you do. You went to an English boarding school.”
    “As did you,” said Freddie, “in case you’d forgotten.”
    “And a sorry dump it was too. Anyway, they’re good men, officers, both of them. One’s in your squadron. The other’s not, but you know him. And he’s a first-class pilot, reliable, what you Brits would call a ‘press-on’ type.” Elliott paused. “What do you do?”
    “What do I do?”
    “What do you do?”
    “Well, I order them to desist at once.”
    Elliott laughed. “I think you can assume they desisted the moment you opened the goddamn door. Do you report them?”
    “Report them?”
    “To the air officer commanding. It’s not a question of morality, or the law, or even of taste. I mean, I’ve never felt the need to place my penis in another man’s dung—”
    “Oh Christ,” Freddie blurted into his gin.
    “But it doesn’t stop me from being able to make a judgment on the situation.”
    Max thought on it. “I don’t report them.”
    “Why not?”
    “Morale. A squadron’s like a family.”
    “You’re ready to lie to your family?”
    “No. Yes. I suppose. If the situation calls for it.”
    “Go on,” said Elliott. “What else, aside from morale?”
    “Well, the two individuals in question, of course. They’d be packed off home, and everyone would know why. It would leak out.”
    “An unfortunate turn of phrase, under the circumstances.”
    “Oh, for God’s sake, Elliott!” exclaimed Freddie.
    Elliott ignored him. “Interesting,” he said. “Three differing views. Freddie said he’d report them, you’re a no, and I’m for reporting them.”
    “I thought you said three.”
    “There’s a difference between me and Freddie. He’s a moralist. Me, I’m a pragmatist. I’d report them, but only cos if I didn’t and word got out that I hadn’t, then it’d be my head on the block.”
    “So what does that make me?” asked Max.
    “That makes you a sentimentalist,” was the American’s surefooted response.
    “Oh, come on—”
    “Relax. There are worse things to be than a sentimentalist.”
    “Yeah,” said Freddie, “you should try being a moralist.”
    It was good to hear Freddie crack a joke. He had seemed strangely withdrawn, somehow not himself. Max was in a position to judge. They had been firm friends, the best of friends, for almost two years now, and in that time he’d learned to read Freddie’s rare downmoods: the faint clouding in the cobalt-blue eyes, the slight tightening of the impish grin. He still looked that way now, even after the laughter had died away and the conversation had turned to Ralph, the missing member of their gang. Ralph was a pilot with 249 Squadron at Ta’ Qali, a burly and garrulous character who had taken the squadron’s motto to heart one too many times: Pugnis et calcibus— “With Fists and Heels.” Elliott had come late to the party, materializing as if from nowhere around