by Gavin Lyall
“Quite a bit, I mean?” Ranklin felt he wasn’t handling this well; Streibl looked at him oddly. “I mean, quite a lot?”
“In the mountains, when work goes well, perhaps one hundred kilos a week. It sounds like a war.”
“Gosh,” Ranklin said, trying to sound foolishly impressed to give some point to his question.
Soon afterwards, Streibl retreated to his cabin. Lady Kelso and Ranklin went back upstairs to the saloon for coffee.
“What,” she asked, “was all that about explosives?”
“Er . . . I heard a vague rumour we might be taking dynamite for Miskal Bey – his stronghold, anyway – as a last resort.”
“But if the Railway’s got it by the ton, there’d be no need?” she said crisply. “I certainly hope, with a storm coming, that we aren’t carrying anything like that.”
“Oh, most explosives are very stable.” Then he added hastily: “So I’ve been told. We must be carrying ammunition for those guns on the deck anyway. But so do all warships, if you think about it, and they don’t blow up in storms.”
“I suppose not.” She balanced her cup carefully and took a genteel sip. “But we do know we’re carrying all that gold coin . . . Have you any idea where?”
“Er . . . hadn’t thought about it,” Ranklin lied.
“Just suppose,” she said calmly, almost dreamily, “you could find out where that was kept and pinched some of it, or just threw it overboard, that would rather spoil their little plans, wouldn’t it?” And she gave him a sweet bright smile.
* * *
The morning had passed slowly for O’Gilroy. Inspired by the success of chaining him to the bedstead, they’d now padlocked it around the foot of the cast-iron stove in the first-floor room. That meant Arif didn’t have to watch him the whole time and made it even more humiliating as Theodora dusted the room around him, topped up the paraffin lamps and re-lit the stove. But he had to pretend to be hopeful and cheerful, merely bored.
“It will not be long,” she assured him. “The train from Vienna comes I think at three o’clock.” Then, judging from the sounds on the stairs and below, she went off to the market. He was getting pretty good at knowing where they were – or at least how close – from such sounds.
So when he was re-chained up there after lunch, and reckoned they were all downstairs for the moment, he moved.
From the stove, he had a twelve-foot radius of action plus the length of his arm. He worked quickly and to a plan, holding as much of the chain off the floor as he could to be as silent as possible. First he emptied a brass fruit bowl, then collected all the lamps within reach – four of them – and shook out their paraffin into the bowl. He got well over a pint and wished it were petrol, since paraffin only burned when it was warmed or diffused in something like a wick – or torch. Still, a torch was easy when it wasn’t your own house: he wrenched a leg off the chair, wrapped a lace antimacassar around it and soaked it with paraffin. He put the bowl of the rest on the stove to warm up, took the shade off the last lamp and lit the wick.
Then he thought through what should happen next, and as an afterthought sprinkled more paraffin on a small rug nearby. When he heard feet on the stairs, he lit the torch from the lamp and picked up the bowl.
Arif came in first, Theodora close behind, and the flame had their immediate attention. Theodora gave a yell for Ibrahim.
“Fine; more the merrier,” O’Gilroy said. “’Tis a wooden house, I’m thinking. Had some good fires with houses like this in this town, so I heard. Wouldn’t mind seeing one for meself.”
Ibrahim hurried in. O’Gilroy said: “Right, first thing, Theodora unlocks this damn chain. Ye two, stay where y’are.”
Arif alone might, just might, have been sensible, but not in the presence of Ibrahim. And vice versa. As it was, both drew their knives and came forward. O’Gilroy stooped and brushed the torch across the rug. It flamed up willingly.
They stopped, looking to Theodora for orders. She didn’t say anything. The rug burned merrily and firmly. O’Gilroy splashed paraffin onto the nearest wall-hanging.
Then Theodora spoke in a low, firm voice and the Arabs, reluctantly, sheathed their knives and stepped back. She came forward. “You must let me put out that fire first, or it will—”
For answer, O’Gilroy slopped more paraffin onto the flaming rug.
Looking – to someone better read than O’Gilroy – like Medusa on one of her bad days, Theodora fished the key from her apron pocket and unlocked the neck collar. “M’sieu Lacan will kill you,” she spat. The collar and chain crashed to the floor.
“Now don’t be giving me more reason to burn the man’s house down.” He still held the torch and bowl close together as he stretched and swivelled his neck with relief. “Jayzus, that’s better.”
“Now I must stop the fire.”
“Go ahead, take all the help ye need. Jest keep the boyos out of me way, is all.”
Feeling as light as a ballerina, O’Gilroy headed for the door. Ibrahim circled carefully past him to help Theodora, but Arif stood in his way, hand on knife and calculating . . .
“Tell Arif he’ll reach hell burning already,” O’Gilroy warned.
Theodora called an order – but Arif didn’t obey. Being known as “the Terrible” is something you have to live up to.
O’Gilroy tossed half the remaining paraffin onto Arif’s beard and front. He jumped back and hissed with fury, whipped out the knife and – O’Gilroy was holding the torch like a knife of his own, ready to lunge. The paraffin smell stung Arif’s face as it warmed on his chest.
Then he snarled something and stepped aside.
O’Gilroy went smoothly through the door and down the stairs, suddenly realising that his flaming passport to the outside world would expire the moment he stepped beyond the wooden house. He’d be rather conspicuous carrying that torch, too.
He reached the front door, where he was going to have to set down either the bowl or torch; he hadn’t planned this far in detail. Arif watched from the head of the stairs.
After a moment, O’Gilroy put down the bowl, opened the door, picked up and emptied the bowl over the door-latch area on the inside and torched it. Then he slammed the flaming door in Arif’s face as he bounded down the stairs.
Then he ran.
The road outside was no more than a cobbled mule-track, with a choice of uphill or down. O’Gilroy ran down. That way, he should eventually reach a waterfront and find where he was; it was the dark heart of the city that scared him. He looked back at a corner and saw nobody running after him, but turned it anyway, then refound a downhill slope at the next one. This was a broader and busier street, with stalls in it, so he slowed to a brisk walk.
But the moment he did, the crowd seemed to close around him, as alien and threatening as it had seemed in his first minutes in this city. Any one of those well-wrapped dark figures might be about to thrust with a hidden knife, and him unarmed . . . But then he remembered he had been imprisoned, not robbed, and a couple of minutes later was carrying a tourist dagger, bought from a stall, hidden under his own jacket as he moved more confidently through the mob.
Then the street curved and the horizon opened to water and anchored ships that seemed to glow like the hearth of home. A hundred yards later he came out onto the waterfront just along from the Stamboul end of the Galata Bridge.
Twenty minutes after that he was stepping down from a cab at the Pera Palace beside a big car of unfamiliar make. He’d seen almost no cars of any type in Constantinople, and couldn’t resist walking round it (it was a Cadillac) before going inside. A man in chauffeur’s uniform was waiting inside the small lobby, which was heaped with luggage. At the desk his welcome was distinctly cool. The clerk had his own ideas on how to treat a servant who had gone AWOL: tell him his room was taken, hand him Ranklin’s message, and settle down to enjoy O’Gilroy quailing and blenching as he read it.
He was disappointed. The first thing O’Gilroy took from the envelope was
a £5 note which he slapped on the desk. “Gimme gold for this, if ye’d be so kind.” He read the note. “And ye’ve got me bags stored somewheres. I’ll take ’em.”
The clerk was about to grit his teeth and obey when he looked over O’Gilroy’s shoulder and his face broke into a fawning smile. “Mrs Finn! So now you are leaving us, we are quite desolated. We so much hope you have enjoyed—”
“Yes, yes, sure. The Embassy was supposed to be sending an automobile – Good God! – Conall! Where have you been? I got a note from Matt . . . Here, tell me what happened.”
Dazed and pop-eyed, the clerk watched as one of the hotel’s richest clients hauled an errant manservant into a conspiratorial huddle.
“Now tell me.”
“I think the phrase is ‘unavoidably detained’.”
“By what?”
“Mebbe I’d best not say. Jest that if I meet up with Beirut Bertie again, I’m going to carve bits off n him with a blunt axe.”
“Oh. Then he’s not just a smooth diplomatist?”
“He has some rough bits.”
“Well, you’re not likely to meet him: he’s off back to Beirut.”
O’Gilroy shook his head. “No. He’s headed for the Railway, where they’re tunnelling and . . . and all.”
“Where Matt and Lady Kelso have gone?”
“Did they get off all right, then?”
“As far as I know, yes.”
“Did I hear yez going down that way yeself in the yacht?”
“I am, starting right now,” Corinna said slowly. “But I am not having our Bank, or Mr Billings’s boat, tangled up in any of your shenanigans.”
“Sure and it’d be a Christian act entirely, jest giving a lift to a poor servant feller that got drunk and missed his train.”
“Yes, if you were a poor servant. You can take today’s train. Or tomorrow’s. You’ll only be a day or two behind.”
O’Gilroy shook his head sombrely. “Then I’d best get into hiding until the train goes . . . and send a telegram to the railway camp, warning the Captain about Bertie – and another problem he don’t know he’s running into. Him and Lady Kelso besides.”
“That’ll be read by both the Turkish telegraph people and the Germans at the camp.”
“Jayzus, and I niver thought of that.”
She clamped her teeth, then opened them to say: “You evil-hearted, blackmailing son of a . . . All right. Get your damned bags together.”
Ten minutes later they were on their way in the Cadillac.
“When we get on board,” Corinna re-asserted herself, “I shall let it be known that I’m giving a ride to a friend who’s been robbed of everything and had to borrow a servant’s suit, out of pure Christian charity—”
“As ye are indeed.”
“Shut up. And because I’m pumping you for British foreign policy information en route.”
O’Gilroy nodded approval; Christian charity wasn’t really a believable motive.
“I am not,” Corinna finished, “having them think I’m having an affaire with you.” And she was satisfied to have shocked his Irish soul, that was so prim in certain ways.
So for several minutes he was quiet as the car wound its way down the hill, obviously heading for the Galata quayside or thereabouts. Then he said: “Have ye got a fixed time to be getting started?”
“No, just when I get on board.”
“Then could ye jest be making a small loop so’s I could get a word with a coupla fellers off’n the three o’clock train from Vienna?”
“What fellows?” she asked suspiciously.
“Ah, jest some fellers . . .” O’Gilroy was being elaborately unconcerned “. . . that me and the Captain had a bit of a run-in with at Friedrichshafen . . . Bertie was going to hand me over to them so’s they could . . . But the Captain’ll want to know how they’re involved with him.”
“A bit of a run-in?”
“Nobody got shot.”
“Yes, but—”
“And nobody’ll be getting shot at the station, with the crowd and all. Anyways, I haven’t got a gun. Being a poor manservant, like.”
“But if they’re armed, they could force you . . . Damn it, if you must, at least take my pistol with you.”
She always carried a Colt Navy Model in one of her handbags, and over-riding O’Gilroy’s feeble protests, now passed it to him. Then leaned forward to give the chauffeur new directions.
Then she sat back, gradually realising that she had let herself be talked not only into giving O’Gilroy a lift in the yacht but detouring for him to confront two hoodlums and insisting he did it with her own pistol.
No wonder Irish-born politicians seemed to be taking over America.
The Vienna train had come in some time before, but passengers were only now seeping through the Customs hall to begin bargaining for cabs and guides. That made it a cosmopolitan crowd and O’Gilroy was conspicuous only by having no overcoat: both his real one and the sheepskin affair were somewhere back at Bertie’s house. He could stand the cold, but Colts must have been thinking of overcoats when they advertised this pistol as a “pocket” weapon.
Then Hunke came out, carrying a small Gladstone bag, and stood irresolutely staring around; he was immediately besieged by touts. O’Gilroy watched, feeling smugly like an old Constantinople hand – but also suddenly doubting why he was here. Had he just wanted to cock a snook at these two? – that was unprofessional. He should be doing some real spying as well, not just the pistol kind.
He strolled up. “Can I be offering ye any assistance at all?”
Hunke’s eyes widened. Then he switched the bag to his left hand, and looked back for the snowman-shaped Dr Zimmer, coming up behind. He also stopped dead at the sight of O’Gilroy.
“And a very good day to ye, too.” O’Gilroy flapped open his jacket to show the pistol butt, then folded his arms so his right hand rested naturally on it. “Jest thought I’d pop down to let ye know things’ve changed, ’twas all a mistake. Me and Monsieur Lacan, we talked it over and reckoned we was really allies, so . . . Sorry if ye’ve had a wasted journey.”
“M’sieu Lacan is not here?” Zimmer asked, looking around.
“Says he’s sorry.”
“And he let you go?”
“Here I am,” O’Gilroy smiled. “Ye think I escaped? Ye don’t know him so well, do ye?”
“I never—” Then Zimmer clenched his mouth shut.
“Anyways, he had urgent business – ye know? But ’fore that, we reckoned we was really on the same side. We talked over what Gunther had told us—” Zimmer expressed . . . well, it was difficult to say what. The point was that he expressed, and a proper agent wouldn’t have; Zimmer really belonged behind a desk. “So it seems Gunther sold the same information twice, to the both of us.”
“No.” That was more bewildered than definite.
Trying to keep him off balance, O’Gilroy pressed on: “All ’bout the Railroad . . . And Miskal Bey . . . The ransom . . . all what Gunther picked up from the Germans . . .” And at that item on the list Zimmer’s expression relaxed.
“And did M’sieu Lacan send you to here?” Now Zimmer was confident, almost playful. O’Gilroy had shown that he didn’t know something important.
“Must’ve done, else how’d I know? But like I say, I’ll be leaving ye to do a bit of sight-seeing, mebbe. Pity to waste the trip.”
He turned away. Hunke took a step forward and O’Gilroy spun back, his right hand half out from his jacket. For a moment they just stood there, and if the crowd noticed them, God knows what it thought: there could be no missing the death-rays that crackled between them.
Then O’Gilroy said deliberately: “Best start that sightseeing: it improves the mind something wonderful, they do say.”
Zimmer laid a cautious hand on Hunke’s sleeve. O’Gilroy took a couple of steps back, then turned away—
—right into Arif’s path. And if he had been The Terrible before, now the look on his face a
nd the bandages on his hands – he must have tried to open that blazing door – showed the only sight likely to improve his mind was O’Gilroy’s insides.
O’Gilroy didn’t pause. He pulled the pistol out and aimed at Arif’s belly. Then, as the Arab flinched aside, slashed his head with the pistol, barged past both him and Theodora just behind, and ran for the Cadillac.
“If yer ready to leave this town,” he panted, flopping in beside Corinna, “me, too.”
19
Throughout the afternoon the sky had crowded with clouds, the sea became flecked with white and the wind started to make serious sounds in the rigging. By his last sight of the sun, Ranklin reckoned the Captain had turned away from the coast and islands to give himself more room for mistakes; he thoroughly approved.
In the saloon the steward had put away all the bottles and glasses and was making sure the tables and chairs were tied to ring-bolts in the floor. But he had issued Lady Kelso with a wide-based mug of coffee and offered to fetch another. Ranklin said he’d wait until the tying-down was finished and, picking his moment in the ship’s roll, dropped into a chair.
“No sign of Dr Streibl?” he enquired.
“I’m afraid the poor man’s confined himself to quarters.”
“But not you.”
“I’ve got quite a strong stomach. I should have, after twenty years of eating Bedouin food and getting around on camels.” The steward had disappeared towards the galley and she seemed about to say something.
Ranklin beat her to it: “I was a bit surprised you say that Miskal Bey’s a mountain Arab. I mean, I think of Arabs as desert types, you know.”
“ ‘Arab’ is just a race – like English, and at least as varied. You get as many mountain Arabs as desert ones – and most live in towns, anyway: Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut . . . It was the Arabs who founded the Islamic Empire and they don’t forget it. The Ottoman Turks are Johnny-come-latelies who were hired as mercenary soldiers. Then, over time, the wheel turned.” She smiled ruefully.
The steward came back with Ranklin’s mug of coffee. Then, just as Lady Kelso was about to get onto the topic of her choice, one of the ship’s officers came in from the deck, accompanied by a howl from the weather until he slammed the door on it. He saluted quickly and steadied himself on the back of a chair, dripping water from his sou’wester all over it.