All Honourable Men

by Gavin Lyall

  “Good morning. No, please go on smoking, I don’t mind.” And as Ranklin reached to twitch aside the window curtains: “I think we’ve got to Munich. And here, I imagine, we stay until the Orient Express comes through at about midday.”

  The view from the window was, in its way, familiar. “Get to travel on the Kaiser’s train and see the marshalling yards of South Germany.” He turned back. “I was looking for something to drink – just bottled water. Can I try and find you anything?”

  “Go ahead and ring the bell,” she said firmly. “I’ve spent too much of my life not getting what I want because it’ll inconvenience the servants or the horses. Camels,” she reflected, “are just perfect. They hate you so much already, you don’t mind making them do some work.”

  What they got was one of the waiters, already half-dressed so he must have been on duty but hadn’t expected to do any. Ranklin asked for Mineralwasser, and Lady Kelso suddenly decided she’d have a cognac – “Maybe that’ll help me sleep.”

  While they waited, he asked casually: “Have you been in Constantinople recently?”

  “Not for over ten years, since before the Young Turks (I’m supposed to call them The Committee, aren’t I?) took over.” She sighed. “I expect I’ll find it changed . . . The old Sultan’s court was as corrupt as buzzard meat, but they were gentlemen. Now, I suppose it’s all run by people like Zurga Bey.”

  “I got the impression that you and he don’t see eye to eye on everything.”

  “That’s very perceptive of you, Mr Snaipe.” It was said with a straight face.

  “Do you think he feels you’re . . . sort of. . . associated with the past, the old Sultan’s regime?”

  Now she let her smile show. “If so, he certainly isn’t very perceptive. No, it’s my past that troubles him. He thinks I’m no better than a whore. Nothing shocks a Turk more than the idea of a woman choosing her own life and not coming to a bad end. And probably worse than that, it’s who my past was with: the Arabs. I bet Zurga Bey’s one of those Turks who names his dog ‘Arab’. A lot of them do, you know.”

  The waiter brought in a tray with their drinks. Lady Kelso took a sip of her brandy, then loaded the glass up with water.

  Ranklin said: “Zurga seemed . . . sincere enough. About reform, and the Railway . . .”

  “I’m sure he is. And the old Sultan was quite as sincere about the Railway and for the same reason: to keep the Arabs under his thumb. The story going the rounds was that he’d talked the Kaiser into building it during the visit of. . . it must have been ’98. As much as one emperor needs to talk another into any daft grand dream. So now Dr Dahlmann and his Bank have to scurry about to make the dream come true.”

  “Daft?” Ranklin queried.

  “Well, of course. It may be sensible within Turkey itself, linking the north to the south, but then going on down to Mosul and Baghdad, that’s ridiculous. It’s desert. For all the trade they do, they only need a few camel caravans such as they’ve had for thousands of years. I suppose it might help a few pilgrims part way to Mecca, but for the rest . . .”

  Then she cocked her head at Ranklin and waved the lorgnette; it didn’t work quite as well as the fan. “Mind you, I have read articles that say the Railway’s a bad idea for Britain, that it’s a threat to India and our oil-field in Persia . . . Do you hear talk like that in the Foreign Office?”

  “The Foreign Secretary himself asked you to come and help get the Railway building going again, didn’t he?”

  She frowned delicately – as all her expressions with her small features had to be. “Well. . . No. What I was actually asked to do was appeal to Miskal to let those two engineers go, just out of common decency. Now I find that thousands of workmen are standing idle waiting for me to wave my fairy wand and start up the whole thing again, all its bridges and tunnels and trains and things . . . It’s . . . it’s terrifying.”

  “I don’t think anyone expects you to work miracles,” Ranklin soothed. “It’s just the way they see it. I don’t suppose they’d give a hoot about the lives of two engineers if it wasn’t holding up the Railway.”

  “Then if they don’t care, why do they let it hold up the Railway?”

  Ranklin found his mind bare of answers. “Ah . . . perhaps because it’s been reported in the papers . . . the chaps’ families . . . the other engineers . . .” He was having no trouble at all in sounding like Snaipe.

  So now it was her turn to sound soothing. “Never mind. Perhaps we’ll find out as we go along.” She sipped her brandy-and-water. Then, casually: “What do they say of me in England these days?”

  “I . . . ah . . .” Nobody Ranklin knew said anything of her. But Snaipe, as a minor aristocrat, should know more. “I haven’t heard anyone say anything unkind . . .”

  “Not even when they knew you were going to be my escort?”

  “I wouldn’t discuss Foreign Office matters even with my family,” Ranklin said, finding inspiration in false virtue.

  “Of course not.” But she sounded a little disappointed. “Do you think that if I bring this off, Sir Edward will invite me back to London? – if only to say thank you?”

  Thus giving her an entrée to English society? It seemed highly unlikely. As far as Ranklin could tell, Sir Edward cared as little for society as he could get away with; his passion was angling, which was hardly sociable.

  “Things have changed a bit with the new King. He seems to be rather more a family man . . . Of course, King Edward’s friends are still around, but not so much at Court. It’s a more . . . ah, a quieter place now, I believe . . .” For God’s sake, read between my lines, woman: blatant adultery is just Not On these days.

  “If I were still just Harriet Mayhew, or even Mrs Fenby –” (that had been her first, diplomatist, husband) “– I could just go back and brazen it out, find my own level. But being Lady Kelso now, it . . . it isn’t so easy. I’ve rather trapped myself. I seem to have swapped my old self for a passport that’s valid only so long as I never try to use it. It’s really so silly: I was never particularly happy in England, but it’s where I was born, and I would like to die there.”

  * * *

  Breakfast had been under way for some time before Ranklin got there; luckily the chef de train was feeling indulgent, and there was still a good spread of cold meats and cheeses, bread and jam, with eggs to order.

  Daylight hadn’t improved the view of the marshalling yards, and although there was plenty of blue sky, it had a temporary, windswept look. Just as Ranklin was thinking of taking his last coffee into the saloon, Dahlmann bustled through from the outside world. He was well wrapped up, so it was probably as cold as it looked.

  “Dr Streibl’s train is here soon,” he said over his shoulder, bustling on.

  Ranklin followed. “That completes our merry band then, what? Next stop Constantinople and all that.” He sat down in the saloon; Zurga and Lady Kelso were already there. “And then to the mountains . . . I say, what are we going to do when we get there? I mean, what’s the actual jolly old plan?”

  There was a sudden pause, but no rush to tell him. Zurga looked at Dahlmann, who had stopped at the door to the corridor. “What do you mean, Mr Snaipe?”

  “Well, we go to Miskal’s mountain stronghold – d’you know the place, Lady Kelso?”

  She shook her head. “When I knew Miskal he was in the Army, in Syria. But I’ve been through that part of Turkey, the old caravan route up across the Cilician Gates.”

  “Yes, well. . . But I mean, what then? Do you and I roll up at his front door and ask politely that he lets his prisoners go? Or what?”

  Dahlmann said nothing, but he took off his overcoat and hat and laid them carefully over a chair.

  Lady Kelso looked at him, then Ranklin. “Obviously you want me to approach the dear man first, but really, Mr Snaipe, I don’t think there’s any need for you to come along. It makes the whole thing rather official, don’t you feel?”

  She was letting him down lightly. He fro
wned. “Ah. Yes. But the whole point. . . What the Foreign Office sent me for . . . Well, I mean, I’m supposed to look after you and you don’t really need that until we get to . . . wherever . . .” Her expression, as pretty, polite and just as inflexible as a china figurine’s, told him he would get nowhere. Not now, anyway. He changed tack somewhat: “But what’s this chap doing in the mountains anyway, if he’s an Arab? I thought deserts, tents. . .”

  “His people were Syrian mountain Arabs – I think,” Lady Kelso said. “I’ve no idea how he got to these mountains.”

  “He was exiled to there,” Zurga explained. “The Committee did not want him to be a leader among his own people, to make trouble like so many Arabs, so they gave him an Armenian village that had become . . . empty.” Ranklin held onto a bland expression, though he guessed just how an Armenian village in Turkey could suddenly become “empty”. From Lady Kelso’s fixed smile, she guessed, too – perhaps in more detail.

  “Of course,” Zurga went on, “his family was permitted to go with him, and I think more than his family . . . I think many of his people went also. He became, not officially, the kaimakam of the village.” He seemed to debate with himself, but in the end added: “I think it was not a good idea.”

  So now, Ranklin assumed, instead of a village full of troublesome Armenians without repeating rifles, the Committee had created a village full of troublesome Arabs with same.

  Lady Kelso murmured: “Perhaps the Committee hoped the climate would kill them off quietly. They don’t know the weather in the Syrian mountains.”

  Last night, Zurga would have had an indignant answer. This morning, perhaps he had realised they had a long journey still ahead, because he just gave a brief smile and shrug.

  Ranklin asked: “And the jolly old monastery, is that part of the village?”

  Zurga glanced at Dahlmann, but got no help. “I do not know the country there, but I think the village is in the mountains and the monastery – it is a ruin – is more near to the Railway. Where the Railway must go.”

  “Ah.” Ranklin nodded, as if all were explained. “And what are you going to be doing?”

  Lady Kelso seemed interested in knowing that, too. Zurga said: “I am asked – if Lady Kelso does not succeed – to speak to him as once a soldier of the Ottoman Empire. And perhaps to warn that the Committee will become . . .”

  He didn’t want to specify, and was saved by Dahlmann being hasty and apologetic: “Forgive me, Lady Kelso, but we must allow for the possibility that you will fail. So we must be ready with other things.”

  Ranklin was watching, and her polite smile was Dresden china again. Then she looked at him. “Does that answer all your questions, Mr Snaipe?”

  No, of course it didn’t. But Snaipe probably wouldn’t have persisted. “Oh yes . . . Well, mostly . . . Plenty of time, though . . .”

  “Splendid.” And one sweep of her lorgnette closed the conversation. Dahlmann, relieved, gathered up his coat and headed for his compartment. Zurga lingered a while longer, then picked up his coffee cup and went in the opposite direction, into the dining-saloon.

  Lady Kelso put down her lorgnette and magazine and said briskly: “Balderdash.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “What Zurga says he’s going to say to Miskal. He must know that’s absurd. A man like Miskal won’t take any lectures from a jumped-up Stambouli who’s sold his soul to us infidels – and that’s how Miskal will see him. He’ll have captured those two because they’re foreigners wanting to carve up his land, so he’s being defender of the Faith – and that’s what matters to the Arabs, not being patriotic to some Ottoman Turk idea of Empire.”

  Ranklin frowned. Put like that, Zurga’s task did look pretty hopeless. “Then why d’you think he’s here?”

  “Heaven knows if you don’t.” She cocked her face to give him a cool look. “I do think the Foreign Office might have given you a better brief.” She might not be a lady who always knew what she wanted – considering what she’d got, one certainly hoped not – but Ranklin couldn’t see her as a hapless plaything either.

  However, that wasn’t what bothered him most. Granted that they’d prefer her to talk the prisoners free and save themselves £20,000, what happened if Miskal Bey said “Nice to see you again, old girl – but where’s my ransom money?” – and she knew nothing about it? They must surely tell her before she met him. Perhaps they were sizing her up first, guessing how she’d take it.

  Wanting a little peace and quiet to think things over, he patted his pockets, muttered: “Seem to have left my cigarettes . . .” and went along to his own sleeper.

  He got his first sight of Dr Streibl from the window of that compartment. A tall man, his half-unbuttoned overcoat flapping in the wind, was marching across the tracks of the yard towards them. He carried a wide-brimmed hat in his hand, showing a sun-tanned bald head with long grey strands of hair fluttering around his ears, and the sure-footed way he matched his stride to the tracks without looking down marked him as a true railwayman. Outdistanced behind him came a single porter with – by the standards of the rest of them – a meagre load of luggage.

  Ranklin heard him come aboard and decided it was safe to re-appear. He came into the saloon at the tail-end of Dahlmann’s introductions: “Ah, and here is the Honourable Patrick Snaipe of the English Diplomatic Service. Herr Doktor Martin Streibl of Phillip Holzmann Gesellschaft from Frankfurt.”

  “Rumpled” was the word for Streibl: his clothes, his hair and even his face, with ears and bulbous nose exaggerated like a cartoon drawing. His tie was askew and too much bulged his pockets. Nor could he keep his attention on Ranklin or any of them: just on the carriage itself. After a hearty handshake, he went back to peering at the paintings on the ceiling, tapping the walls, poking the carpet with his rather unshiny boot.

  Feeling responsible and perhaps a little vexed, Dahlmann said unnecessarily: “Perhaps you have not seen this train before?”

  “Hm? Nein, nie . . . bemerkenswert . . . I am sorry.” But he couldn’t keep his eyes on mere humans, murmuring: “Auβerordentlich . . . erstaunlich. . .”

  Lady Kelso had her mouth pursed to stop herself laughing aloud, and went on being chirrupy when more coffee had been brought around and Dahlmann had led Streibl away for a private chat. “So now all we’re waiting for is the Orient Express, and Eastward Ho! I don’t suppose we’ll have any international problems, not in these carriages.”

  Ranklin was glad someone had brought that up. After Budapest the line ran through Serbia and then Bulgaria, both of which had been at war with Turkey a year ago. And Serbia’s recent past – turbulent or murderous, depending on how close you stood – had given them a rare mistrust of any foreigners.

  Zurga gave a fatalistic little shrug. “We hope not.”

  When they were rolling through Munich’s stolid surburbs, Dahlmann appeared back in the saloon. “Lady Kelso, gentlemen: we are now attached to the Orient Express but it is most strictly agreed that we must remain separate. There is no connecting door, and I must ask you not to board their carriages when we stop at stations. Thank you. Now, Dr Streibl has brought me some important news that has come from Turkey. If you will please . . .”

  So they trooped in to join Streibl in the dining compartment and sit, conference-like, around the bare table. A subdued Lady Kelso caught Ranklin’s eye and made a little moue of mock apprehension.

  Dahlmann hunched himself as chairman at the head of the table; at least he didn’t stand up. “This is an unfortunate development.” He looked around to make sure they were well braced. “The railway camp in the south has had a message from Miskal Bey. He demands, as payment to release our officials, a ransom in gold coin of 400,000 marks.”

  Dear me, what a wicked deceitful old banker you are: you knew that all along, Ranklin thought. But it was a relief to stop pretending not to know it – for both of them, probably. He adjusted Snaipe’s expression to a baffled frown.

  But if Lady Kelso hadn’t
naturally been sitting bolt upright, she would have done so now. “That doesn’t sound like Miskal. He’s a gentleman, not a bandit.”

  Dahlmann’s voice had a hint of satisfaction. “I am afraid – unless the message is quite misunderstood – that he has done this.”

  “I could understand him shooting your people, for trespassing. Or putting out their eyes and sending them back as a warning. But not holding them to ransom – that’s just not him.”

  “Perhaps you understood him wrongly,” Dahlmann suggested rashly.

  She stared at him as if he were a new and unnecessary discovery in the insect world. “And just how well do you know him?”

  Dahlmann mumbled that he hadn’t met Miskal.

  “I knew him rather well.”

  Dahlmann looked for support and didn’t get it. Zurga avoided his eye, Streibl seemed honestly devoted to the painted ceiling. “Perhaps . . . we may hope when we arrive, it is all a mistake. But please, at this moment, may we pretend it is true? And my Bank must decide if paying it is advisable.” His confidence crept back with the sound of his own voice. “My thought now is to hope that you, Madam, can persuade the Bey to release the men without payment. But if you do not succeed, and Zurga Bey cannot also persuade him, then I think I must recommend payment.

  “But naturally, I welcome all your opinions . . . Lady Kelso, do you have any more . . .?”

  Her voice was gentle but distinctly cool. “You already know my opinion, Dr Dahlmann . . . But if you want me to pretend Miskal has made a ransom demand, I’m not sure there’s any point in my going there at all. If what he wants is 400,000 marks, he’s not going to settle for me fluttering my eyelashes at him.”

  Oh Lord. Ranklin saw the whole scheme collapsing gently around him. Because if she decided to get off at the next stop and go home, he had no choice but to go too.

  But Dahlmann was just as taken aback. “Oh, no, Madam, I beg you to do as Sir Edward Grey himself has asked you to. As you agreed.”

  “To save you 400,000 marks?”

  “Naturally, the gold is important. But it is not everything—” He was floundering. Yet, though he couldn’t admit it, he’d had plenty of time to foresee such an obvious snag. Poor staff work, Ranklin disapproved.