All Honourable Men

by Gavin Lyall

  He also realised that the most comfortable position would be lying flat, with all the weight of the chain off his neck. So he did that on a heap of fancy cushions and watched the twilight thicken the shadows and dull the brassware around him.

  Theodora came in and lit the paraffin lamps, then stood staring down at him. She radiated strong-mindedness and her favourite pose was feet well apart and hands – fists – on hips, as now. “So we have become a pasha? Ha. Do not think I am going to feed you there.”

  * * *

  For a long time, Ranklin just sat in his cabin – a good, large one, much bigger than the train sleeper – watching the banks of the Bosphorus go past. It went past at quite a lick, given that these were busy, narrow waters. The Captain had obviously been told not to dawdle.

  He had unpacked, but that hadn’t taken long since he had brought the minimum along with what he planned to wear in the mountains. So he had nothing to do save watch – and worry. He was fairly sure that O’Gilroy wasn’t dead – though that might just be his own lack of imagination – and so must be locked up somewhere. But convincing himself of that didn’t really help, because although he could guess at why almost anybody here – except maybe Corinna and the British Embassy – might have waylaid O’Gilroy, it was just guessing. There was too much that he didn’t know.

  There came a knock on the cabin door and he let Lady Kelso in. “I was coming to ask if you’d be changing for dinner,” she said, looking at his “travelling” tweed suit.

  “My collar. That’s about all I can do.”

  “Me too. I mean, the same sort of thing.” She was wearing a plain wool skirt in dark blue and a high-necked white blouse. He was about to suggest she sat down, but was a little too late. She asked: “Have you brought everything you’ll need?”

  “I think so. I’m not completely helpless without a servant.”

  She smiled quickly. “I didn’t mean to imply . . . Are you worried about him? – Gorman?”

  “I am, yes. He’s quite bright, you know, but he doesn’t know Constantinople, not at all.”

  “Ah, I forgot that you do.” There was a coolness in that comment that Snaipe wouldn’t have recognised but Ranklin did. But he couldn’t explain which aspect of Constantinople he was talking about.

  She went on: “Are you afraid he’s gone off the rails with drink or drugs, something like—?”

  “Oh, no, not him.”

  “Then you fear he’s in deep trouble? – you don’t think he might even be dead?”

  “In trouble, yes . . .” How could he say O’Gilroy was a hard man to kill? Still, it all helped bring him out in worried frowns, and her in sympathy. It occurred to him that she might be here on a mothering mission: after all, he’d overplayed how much he relied on a manservant just to explain why he’d brought one.

  And with O’Gilroy out of the running, he might need an ally. And they were supposed to be a team, after all.

  She asked: “Do you know if Zurga Bey’s on board?”

  “I understand not. I expect he went on by train last night. Are we going upstairs?”

  They found Streibl already in the main-deck saloon, and perhaps his enthusiastic re-welcome was the only sort he knew. “I hope you did not mind that we are so secret about coming by this boat? It is so complicated. Railways and politics should not mix; in Africa it was much more easy . . . I am sorry, do you wish a drink? Or coffee, tea?” He waved at a steward in a high-collared white mess jacket.

  “I’d like coffee, please,” Lady Kelso said. “We seem to be going at quite a speed already.”

  “Yes. We must go fast, naturally. The delay to the Railway . . .”

  “Has Miskal Bey given you any time limit? Has he threatened the hostages?”

  “Ah . . . no. No. But it is most worrying for the Railway.”

  “And the railwaymen’s families,” Lady Kelso reminded him tartly.

  “Of course, yes.”

  It occurred to Ranklin that here were two people whose outlooks on life were about as opposite as the North and South poles. Lady Kelso, with her courtesy, could pretend an interest in anything, but really cared only for people. For Streibl, unless you could wind it up or stoke it, he wasn’t interested. Without the company, stops and incidents of the train, this could be a long voyage.

  He said: “Of course, I don’t know anything about ransoms and hostages, but if I knew there was five hundred thou in gold francs heading my way then I probably wouldn’t be too impatient – what? I suppose he does know it’s coming?”

  “Yes, I am sure he has been told.”

  Lady Kelso frowned. “It’s still putting a price on life . . .”

  Then the coffee tray arrived and she gave up on Streibl and sat down with it. They were in the aftermost of two deckhouses; the forward one, under the funnel and bridge, seemed to be officers’ territory and, with the dining-room and their cabins directly below here, there was an obvious hint that passengers should stay aft and out of the way. The saloon itself was big and had everything to make it comfortable – leather arm-chairs, small tables, ashtrays – but gave the impression of a hotel run by the military so that it was all correct, solid, and of good value but quite without style or homeliness.

  Ranklin asked: “And how fast does this ship go?” He was pretty sure Streibl would know the answer. He knew more.

  “Twenty-two kilometres per hour . . . ah, twelve knots, I think. The engine is of three cylinders, triple expansion, and I understand that with one hundred and eighty thousand kilos of coal it can . . .”

  Ranklin hardly listened. Even if Streibl were worried about the fate of his comrades-in-railway – and, perhaps because they were mere flesh and blood, he didn’t seem all that worried – why should Dahlmann and the Railway management feel the same way? Miskal wasn’t just putting a price on life, he was putting a damned high price, given that men got killed every day building railways; that might sound callous, but it just happened. Moreover, if the worst came to the worst and Miskal murdered the hostages, he’d label himself a villain in the eyes of the world, the Turkish Government would be forced to act – and the ransom money would be saved.

  Perhaps it was just the delay; hundreds or thousands of men standing idle was also a high price. But he couldn’t help wondering if the worst was somehow worse than they’d been told – and how.

  He woke up to hear Streibl saying: “. . . and tomorrow, the Captain thinks maybe there is a storm . . .”

  * * *

  Towards dinnertime O’Gilroy was herded downstairs and along to the kitchen where Theodora was working at a big cast-iron cooking stove. It was a large, warm place full of copper cookpans, a smaller version of the Irish Big House kitchens O’Gilroy had sat and cadged in when he was genuinely in service as a chauffeur. And as in them, here the cook was Queen, ordering Arif and Ibrahim to pass this or do that and getting unquestioned obedience. She spoke French to them; O’Gilroy knew a little, but had decided not to admit to even that.

  “Beg pardon for asking,” he said, “but all of this don’t seem what I’d heard a Turkish house was like.”

  “Turkish?” she exploded. “This is a French house. And did you think I am Turk? I am Greek, you . . . imbecile.”

  “Sorry about that. And these fellers, too?”

  “They’re Bedouin. To you, Arab. Do you think M’sieu Lacan would have Turks in his house?” She despised him with her dark eyes. “English are bad enough.”

  “I’m Irish.”

  Her gesture told him that that wasn’t going to help.

  They ate – a thick vegetable soup, then lamb and something that looked like rice but wasn’t quite – at the big scarred kitchen table. By putting O’Gilroy in a high-backed chair with the chain wrapped around the top bar, they both pinned him down and got most of the weight off his neck, leaving his hands free. But that done, they treated a man in chains as quite unexceptional, not worth comment or glance. That rather depressed him.

  At least Theodora offered him
real coffee with the sticky-sweet bits that ended the meal. The two Arabs got interested only when he lit one of his cigarettes.

  “Tell ’em they can smoke their own, less’n they’re going to let me go buy some more.”

  A quick conversation established that the household was almost out of cigarettes. “Arif,” Theodora said, “will buy some. Give him money.”

  So O’Gilroy gave him a handful of change and Arif went out. Theodora began clearing away.

  “Tell me,” O’Gilroy said, “wasn’t yer people – the Greeks – at war with Turkey jest a year’n so ago?”

  “We took back Salonika that is a Greek city always.”

  “Was ye in Constantinople the while?”

  “Of course – but M’sieu Lacan saw that I was not harmed. He protects his people.”

  “Good for him . . . Did ye ever hear of an Englishman, an officer, was helping yer Greek army with its guns at Salonika?”

  She thought, then asked: “The Englishman they called Sheep?”

  “Eh?”

  “He wore the sheep’s coat, so he was called, I think, Colonel Sheep . . . no, the Soldier Sheep . . . no –” she snapped her fingers impatiently “– you would say, the Warrior Sheep.”

  “The—?” O’Gilroy nearly ruptured himself containing an explosive chuckle; Ranklin had never admitted to that nickname.

  “You also know him?”

  “I work for him. His name’s Ranklin. He’s –” No, he’d better not say Ranklin was in Turkey “– he sent me here to work against the Turks. And Germans.”

  She sat down again and took one of his remaining cigarettes. “He has gone back to the English Army, then? And you are also a soldier – yes?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes.”

  She considered this. “And did you tell M’sieu Lacan?”

  “He didn’t give me much chance, jest out with the opium – and here I am.”

  She nodded approvingly. “He thinks you were a . . . an obstacle.”

  “And is he really going to let me go?”

  “Did he not say so?” Her bold dark eyes challenged him to disbelieve that.

  Reluctantly, O’Gilroy set aside the matter of his future. “Have ye heard of a feller Zurga Bey? Turkish soldier – could be a major.”

  “Colonel, if he is Bey,” she said automatically. “No, I do not know him.”

  “Biggish feller, forty or thereabouts, got a beard—”

  “Turkish officers do not wear beards.”

  O’Gilroy shrugged. “Well . . . he had one. Been in Germany, they had a German passport for him coming through the Balkans, but he’s Turkish, right enough.”

  Despite herself, she was intrigued – by the beard, by the false passport. After all, this was a household apparently devoted to intrigue. “Ottoman names tell so little, just one name often, and it may not be real, a name made by friends –” she snapped her fingers again “– how do you say it?”

  “A nickname?”

  “Yes, yes . . . The Efficient, the . . . Sword . . .”

  “The Terrible?” That got him a dark, sharp glance and he tried to make up ground by recalling the nickname of Ranklin’s opponent in the 1912 war. “The Tornado?”

  “Yes. There is an officer called the Tornado. I think he was named that at the Military Academy. Kazurga.”

  “Huh?”

  “Kazurga, Tornado.” This time she heard her own voice. “You said Zurga. . . Kazurga.” She stood up and ground out her cigarette. “Wait.”

  “Ye think I have a choice?” O’Gilroy muttered.

  A few minutes later she came back with a bulging scrap book, leafing through pages pasted with clippings from newspapers. “There.” She slapped the book down in front of him. “Is that the man?”

  It was a poorish reproduction of a stiff studio portrait, in uniform and, of course, without the beard. O’Gilroy tried mentally pencilling one in. “Could be him . . . nose and eyes seem right . . . What’s it say ’bout him?”

  She didn’t need to refer to the book. “He was the big hero –” a sneer “– who saved Constantinople from the Bulgars. Of course,” she relented, “Bulgars are animals.”

  “Didn’t get wounded, did he?”

  This time she picked up the book and mouthed her way through the cuttings. “Yes . . . yes, he was hurt in the fighting for Salonika. By our Greek Army.” She nodded approvingly, then shut the book with a snap. “So this Colonel Kazurga, Zurga, has been in Germany but came back with the men of the Railway. And he has also gone south?”

  “Haven’t seen him since we got here, but I think that’s the idea.”

  “I must tell M’sieu Lacan.” She instinctively looked around, wondering how to go about it.

  “So Monsieur Lacan’s going down there, is he? Not back to Beirut.”

  “I did not say that!”

  O’Gilroy reassured her: “Ye never said a word.” He had been too clever again. She could have been grateful enough to kiss his hand, fall on his neck, show him the way out . . . Or, of course, she might be a shrewd professional such as a shrewd professional like Bertie would hire and trust.

  She was certainly eyeing him shrewdly now. “And so you think I should say thank you and not care what M’sieu Lacan tells me, that I should let you go free – yes? And you will promise anything, no? Oh, I know men like you.” She took another of his cigarettes and stood looking down at him.

  He said mildly: “Ye said ye were going to let me go, anyways.”

  For a while she didn’t say anything. Then she relented a little: “Tomorrow, I will tell you what must happen. A Dr Zimmer comes to Constantinople—”

  “Zimmer?”

  “Perhaps it is not his real name, but—”

  “Mebbe we met once,” O’Gilroy said thoughtfully, very thoughtfully. “In Friedrichshafen, I’m thinking.”

  “Good, so you know him. Then you go with him, yes?”

  “Monsieur Lacan, he said ye was to send me off with Dr Zimmer?”

  “Yes. That is good for you, no?”

  “That’s jest fine with me,” O’Gilroy lied.

  18

  It was not a good night. Normally O’Gilroy had a certain fatalism where time was concerned and could sleep when there was nothing else to be done, but that was before he took to wearing an iron collar. Time after time he wriggled into a position where he felt That’s it, all I have to do is stay like this. But after a couple of minutes it wasn’t, and he had to start wriggling again.

  Above all, the damn thing was cold. He knew that scientifically it was the same temperature as its surroundings, just a better conductor of heat away from him, was all. Knowing that didn’t stop the bloody thing being cold.

  Being alone to fiddle with the chain and padlocks was no help, either. The locks – brand new, probably bought that day – were simple but hefty and even if he had a pick-lock, it would also need to be hefty, just to exert the sheer leverage needed. And rusted though the chain was, it needed another century or so before its quarter-inch thickness became vulnerable. So he spent too much time imagining Dr Zimmer and Hunke arriving in Constantinople, hurrying round here – wherever here was; he guessed they were still in Stamboul, but the carriage ride had been a fuzzy, disjointed time – and carting him off . . . How? By carriage or car? Certainly at pistol-point. And then . . .

  Then, whatever happened wouldn’t be in Bertie’s house, and would be long after he was known to be aboard a ship going south. Nothing to do with him. Neat, that, without O’Gilroy around to contradict.

  His one pale hope was that Theodora didn’t know he knew what was going to happen. Whether she knew herself didn’t matter. It only mattered that he had convinced her he was looking forward to Zimmer’s arrival and had abandoned thoughts of escape. But lying there in that collar, the other end of the chain padlocked to the iron bedstead, there seemed little to abandon.

  * * *

  After breakfast, Ranklin dressed as for the mountains and went up to walk on de
ck. By now they were through and well south of the Dardanelles, but there was still land like a rough-edged grey cloudbank on the eastern horizon. They’d probably be in sight of land most of the trip, since they were following a coastline which had crumbled into a myriad islands and he hoped the Captain would miss them all.

  Particularly in bad weather, which was supposed to arrive later in the day. The wind had backed westerly and they were getting an extra nudge from it, having set main–and fore-sails and some jib (if he’d got that right). That gave them a cracking pace, a lot of spray and a heel to port. It felt wrong, a steamer leaning steadily like that.

  He walked cautiously along the high side of the deck, breathing deeply and healthily when he thought anyone might be looking, past the forward deckhouse onto the wet foredeck and round to the low, lee side. There, a door in the deckhouse below the bridge was labelled Kapitans Büro – privat, which could only be for the benefit and discouragement of passengers, since the crew would know which cabin was whose. Ranklin felt more benefited than discouraged. Nothing like a healthy stroll on deck after breakfast. If only O’Gilroy were here, or accounted for, he’d feel quite cheerful.

  By lunchtime the wind had become gusty and the sails had been lowered, but instead of putting the Loreley upright this let her roll indiscriminately. Lunch was a very thick stew and pureed vegetables which stuck to the plates no matter what the ship did, which was obviously intended and a bad sign. Nor did any of the officers eat with them, but to Ranklin that was a good sign. The more of them that were busy not bumping into islands, the better.

  Streibl ate very little and Ranklin asked solicitously: “Are you a good sailor?”

  “Hein? I am not a sailor. I am—”

  “I mean, do you get seasick?”

  “I expect so,” Streibl said lugubriously.

  Lady Kelso reprimanded Ranklin with her eyebrows and he changed the subject. “Tell me, do you use quite a bit of explosive in digging tunnels and so forth?”

  “Naturally.”