Honourable Intentions

by Gavin Lyall

  Pleased at ending the conversation on a winning note, Quinton smiled and said: “We’d better be getting back. Wish me luck.”

  “Hals und Beinbruch,” Ranklin murmured, and if Quinton really had broken his neck and legs at that moment, he wouldn’t have minded at all.

  There was a public telephone in the ante-chamber to the courts – probably for journalists – and Ranklin caught it at a free time. He called the office and made some arrangements. Then he had at least twenty minutes before the court restarted. He should have lunch, but there was hardly time enough, so he went outside again to light a pipe.

  By the doorway was the man in the check suit, and by now a foreign-looking hat, who had been taking so many notes. He was a little taller than Ranklin, a little older, wore a neat grey-flecked black beard and was smoking a small cigar.

  They looked at each other, smiled tentatively and then it became impossible not to speak.

  “Are you a reporter?” Ranklin asked politely.

  “Of a sort.”

  “For whom?”

  “Les Temps Nouveaux of Paris.” The man had an unidentifiable Continental accent. But that wasn’t rare: Continental frontiers were porous and cross-border marriages common. “And yourself?”

  “Oh, I’m keeping a watching brief for the American fund defending this lad. Sorry, I should introduce myself: James Spencer.”

  “Feodor Gorkin.” They shook hands, and Gorkin consulted his watch. “The court does not reconvene for half an hour. Do you like a drink?”

  “Happy to.”

  In Covent Garden you’re never more than a few steps from a public house, but Ranklin let Gorkin choose which. As they walked the few steps he was trying to dredge up what he knew of Les Temps.

  “I say, Les Temps Nouveaux – isn’t that the anarchist . . .” he searched quickly for an alternative to “rag”; “. . . er, – publication?”

  “It is. I think that is why I am not permitted to sit with the other journalists.”

  “Ah.” Ranklin put on an innocently puzzled expression – easy for him. “I can’t make this lad Langhorn out. A waiter in an anarchist café, but no mention of him being an anarchist himself.”

  “What does Mr Quinton say?”

  “Yes, I was talking to him –” since Gorkin had obviously seen that already “– but he wouldn’t say much. You know lawyers, I dare say. Some stuff about if you’re an anarchist you can’t claim you committed a political crime. I’m not sure I follow that, but I don’t follow most of what lawyers say . . .” They were at the bar now. “What would you like?”

  They sat down, Gorkin with a brandy-and-soda, Ranklin with a whisky, and nodded to each other and drank. Gorkin might be ten years older – it was difficult to tell with people of different backgrounds – with a face that was very calm and dark eyes that were quietly watchful. Ranklin said: “Is this affaire causing much interest in France, then?”

  “But yes. The burning of a police station, the Préfecture takes that most seriously. I think they will do anything to get a conviction.”

  “Ye-es, I suppose it strikes at the whole edifice of law and order . . . But that’s what anarchism’s about, isn’t it?”

  “Striking at law, yes. Laws are not needed, and every law breeds another law until, you say yourself, you cannot understand what lawyers talk about. But order, people will make their own order, without leaders, after government has collapsed.”

  “Government collapsing? What makes you think . . . ? But then you’d have . . .”

  “Anarchism, not anarchy.”

  “Oh.” Ranklin hadn’t planned on getting into a political argument; he was just, suddenly, there. “But I thought you wanted a revolution?”

  “That is one way to make a government collapse, yes.”

  “But do you really think a revolution is likely?”

  “Unless government collapses of its own weight, it is inevitable. Do you know how much your factory workers and farm labourers are now paid?”

  “Pretty damn little, I imagine,” Ranklin admitted. “But people get killed in revolutions.”

  “People are killed in wars between nations now. But never the generals and politicians who decide to have a war, just the workers who can gain nothing even if they win.”

  Ranklin had his puzzled frown working overtime. “Well, I suppose so . . . But you can’t mean in Britain. We haven’t had a war for a hundred years.”

  “Not in South Africa? And other parts of Africa? And all the time in India?”

  “Oh well, those are just . . .”

  “Just imperialist wars?”

  “Oh, dammit all . . .” But he didn’t want to get embroiled in arguing a defence of empire: Gorkin must have had such discussions so many times before that he always had the answer ready, soft, polite and smiling. It was like playing chess against a master.

  So he switched tack. “But whoever we were fighting, they all seemed to have leaders. Don’t revolutions throw up leaders, too?”

  Gorkin nodded and sighed perfunctorily, as if he always did when about to make this point. “It happens, and it is always a mistake. When a revolution creates leaders, even elects them, the revolution is finished. Anarchists know that people are truly sociable, that if they are left alone they will work at what they do best for themselves and for others. You do not believe this.”

  “I think people need a framework.”

  “But then the framework, as you call it, becomes a shell like a . . . a lobster and holds everyone in, makes them slaves to that shell. Is it not so in England? With your King and your ministers and Parliament and law, your judges and generals, all this becomes your nation that you worship and cannot ever say is wrong. And yet –” he smiled sadly “– it began so harmlessly as just a framework to make life more efficient.”

  The King can do no wrong, Ranklin recalled. Did that still hold good? Certainly Parliament could do no wrong: it was the final arbiter of such matters. On earth, anyway. “I imagine,” he said, “that you don’t believe in God?”

  “I think that does not matter so much.” Gorkin finished his brandy and checked his watch again. “Just look about and ask: does God believe in us?”

  As they walked back towards the court, Ranklin’s thoughtful frown wasn’t all acting and he asked: “But thinkers, intellectuals perhaps like yourself, aren’t you leaders?”

  “There will be no laws to make people do as we suggest.”

  Ranklin nodded.

  Gorkin said: “I should enjoy to continue this discussion. Perhaps if you care to call while I am in London . . . ?” He took out a card and wrote an address on the back. Glancing at it, Ranklin noted that Gorkin was a “Dr”, but of course that didn’t necessarily make him medical; on the Continent, it only meant a university education. He handed over a James Spencer card of his own, with the address as just Whitehall Court.

  Raymond Guillet, meat porter aged twenty-five with an address in the rue Petit, looked the part: blunt and hefty, with cropped fair hair and a tiny patch of moustache, dressed in his Sunday suit of shiny black. Above all, he looked genuine: a proper workman, worlds away from what Ranklin imagined anarchist café society to be.

  Even through an interpreter and with the need to write everything down, it didn’t take long to extract Guillet’s story. At about half-past eleven he had been returning home when he passed Langhorn, the waiter from the Deux Chevaliers. He knew him because he was the only American he had ever met; everybody around there knew him. That night, Langhorn had been carrying a green petrol tin in the direction of the police station.

  When the story was finished, Quinton stood up slowly and said: “Half-past eleven at night.”

  Guillet agreed.

  “How did you know the time?”

  “I have a watch.” There was a silvery – though probably nickel – chain across Guillet’s waistcoat.

  “Good. Will you show us how it works?”

  Ranklin looked on, puzzled, as Guillet fumbled the time
-piece from his waistcoat pocket and offered it.

  “No, show us yourself. Just open it and re-set the time to an hour ahead.”

  Then Quinton’s tactic became clear. Guillet took two tries to open the case and was quite unable to set the hands.

  The lawyer watched with a slight, patient smile. When Guillet’s struggle had got almost unbearably painful, he asked: “Is that your own watch?”

  The relief on Guillet’s face was obvious. “No. I borrowed it. My own is broken. Since two days ago.”

  “And is this one very different?”

  “Yes, quite different.”

  “Perhaps now you would show it to his worship.”

  The usher passed it up to the magistrate, who fiddled with it for a few seconds then handed it back impassively. It was quite obviously a standard watch.

  But Quinton didn’t labour the point any further. “What time do you start work?”

  “At four in the morning. Usually.”

  “Yet on that evening, little more than four hours before you were due to start work, you were still out on the street?”

  “Sometimes I stay up late.”

  “Where had you been that night?”

  “In a big café in the Rue Manin.”

  “Whereabouts in the Rue Manin?”

  “Towards the Rue de Crimée.”

  Quinton pushed his glasses up onto his forehead and peered short-sightedly at a guide-book map. “Ah yes. And to reach your lodging you turned down the Rue du Rhin . . . Do you then turn left or right into the Rue Petit?”

  “Right.”

  “And coming up the Rue du Rhin, you saw Mr Langhorn carrying a tin of petrol – is that what you said?”

  “Yes.”

  “But obviously you could not see the petrol, could you? How do you know it was not an empty tin?”

  “He was leaning with the weight of it.”

  Quinton appeared foxed by this. He frowned, play-acted himself carrying something heavy, then seemed to get the point. Guillet smiled and relaxed.

  “What was the weather like?”

  “It was clear. It had rained earlier in the day but not for several hours. Now the streets were mostly dry,” Guillet replied confidently, as if that had been an expected question.

  “Why did you say he was going towards the police station rather than anywhere else? Was he on that side of the road?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you were hurrying home to bed, weren’t you?”

  “Not hurrying, no.”

  “But you didn’t pass close to him, did you?”

  “Yes. Very close.”

  “Very close? How close?”

  “Less than a metre.”

  Quinton nodded. “Why did you cross the road?”

  Guillet was baffled and suddenly suspicious. “I did not say I crossed the road.”

  “You turned right into the Rue du Rhin, you were going to turn right out of it. Why did you cross to the other side, the police station side, where you said Mr Langhorn was?”

  Quinton’s opposite number, the prosecutor whose name Ranklin hadn’t caught, stood up and said mildly: “Your worship, I feel that Mr Quinton is hectoring the witness.”

  The magistrate nodded but spoke to Quinton: “May I see your map for a moment?”

  Quinton passed it to the usher, pointing out the locality, and it went up to the magistrate. He peered closely for a time, then looked up. “Well, Monsieur Guillet?”

  “I made a mistake. Langhorn was on my side of the road. But still going up the hill towards the police station.”

  “A mistake,” Quinton said, and after waiting a moment, the interpreter said: “Une erreur.”

  Quinton selected one of his papers and glanced at it, then: “The street lighting in the Rue du Rhin is turned off at eleven o’clock, is it not?”

  “I do not know . . . No, it can’t have been.”

  Quinton frowned and consulted the paper again. “You say it was on?”

  “I think so.” Even at that distance, Ranklin could tell Guillet was sweating.

  “Now you only think so?”

  When Guillet didn’t answer, the magistrate said: “What authority do you have for suggesting that the street was no longer lit at that time, Mr Quinton?”

  “None whatsoever, your worship,” Quinton said blithely. “I had hoped to get an official answer to my query to the relevant authorities by this time but, perhaps owing to the Easter holidays . . .”

  The magistrate frowned down at his papers, thinking. Finally he said: “So far, I cannot say that this witness has made an entirely favourable impression . . . This seems to me to be one point of fact which we should have cleared up . . . Do you think you would have an answer by tomorrow?”

  “I would hope so, your worship, but I am quite prepared—”

  “No, I’d like to see this sorted out before we proceed any further. I’ll adjourn the hearing until ten tomorrow morning.”

  Quinton bowed perfunctorily, but as he turned away from the bench, his face was a black scowl. He’d had Guillet on the run, and now the witness had time to get his second wind and some intensive coaching. Ranklin sympathised, but had no time to commiserate.

  4

  Outside the court, a Miss Teal from the Bureau’s outer office was waiting. She was a spinster of a certain age and impeccable background – indeed, the whole Bureau came of good backgrounds; it was the foregrounds of its agents which had become a little muddy.

  Ranklin took her arm and whispered urgently: “I’m James Spencer and we’re hired by the American consulate to safeguard Langhorn’s interests. That’s the girl over there, her name’s Mademoiselle Collomb. Offer her a taxi-ride to her lodgings, a cup of tea, any help we can give.”

  Miss Teal moved in, radiating respectable purpose – which was why Ranklin had telephoned for her. And once she had had time to establish their bona fides, he followed up.

  “Mademoiselle Collomb? Je suis James Spencer . . .” He took over the fabrication about the consulate and Berenice listened with a subdued, suspicious pout. But at least listened, and perhaps his reasonably colloquial French helped. He finished up: “And do you understand what will happen next?”

  A shrug and a brief shake of her head.

  “I have talked to M’sieu Langhorn’s lawyer. He—”

  “Lawyers.” She spat the word.

  Ranklin smiled deprecatingly. “But in matters of law, we are in their hands. Now—”

  “Then why did he not let me tell the truth? Why did that meat porter tell those lies? You are all the same as the flics: bourgeois liars.”

  Ranklin suddenly saw that their feigned respectability had been a mistake: if Berenice was an anarchist, too, then he and Miss Teal were just more shepherds chivvying the toiling masses to the slaughter-yards – or whatever. Still, he now had to play the hand he had dealt himself.

  “I have no concern with politics, only justice.” And he said it with a pained expression that constituted a third lie. “I can only try to explain what Maître Quinton explained to me. So would you like a cup of t-coffee?”

  She shrugged sullenly but said, “If you want.”

  As they turned towards the Strand, Ranklin saw Gorkin watching them from the court steps. But there was no reason why Mr Spencer shouldn’t be talking to the girl-friend of the accused; he could have been more secretive if need be.

  They weaved through a blue tide of policemen spilling out from the station next door, Berenice scowling and muttering while Ranklin kept up a flow of small talk. “Are your lodgings comfortable?”

  “I am staying with camarades.”

  “And do you know London well? A varied city. Not so beautiful as Paris, of course—”

  “Do you know La Villette?”

  “Ah . . . I have passed through it . . .”

  “Beautiful, hah?”

  “Er, no . . .”

  They found one of the shiny new tea-shops and Ranklin ordered two coffees and a tea for Miss
Teal. Berenice pouted at the hygienically genteel surroundings and the waitresses in their demure little aprons and frilled caps – badges of servitude, to her, no doubt – and demanded: “Do they have any absinthe?”

  Miss Teal’s expression would have done credit to an elder of the Scottish kirk, and Ranklin took the opportunity to side with Berenice. “I fear not; the English do not understand these things. But may I offer you a cigarette? – it is probably just as forbidden, but . . .”

  She puffed hungrily, which might have been affectation, but with fluency, which couldn’t be. Looking at her across the table, Ranklin saw that her coat wasn’t just the colour of an Army blanket but worn to the same near-transparency the Army demanded before changing it. And she had probably dressed in her best clothes to travel to London. He guessed her age at about twenty but knew he could be wrong either way by several years. With such a patchy skin – which might be more the nineteenth arrondissement than adolescence – nothing would make her pretty, but more expression and less pout might dispel the expiring-fish look.

  He lit his own cigarette. “So : may I try to explain?”

  Another sullen nod.

  “Maître Quinton hopes the meat porter will not be believed and Grover set free. But also, if he can show that Grover has not been proved to be an anarchist, the arson may be seen as a political act – and again he will be freed.”

  “But he did not set fire to the police barracks.”

  “Yes, yes, but Maître Quinton will not be admitting that he did. The act itself, whoever did it, should be accepted as political as long as Grover has not been proved to be an anarchist.” Even as he was saying it, he realised that, logically, that was sheer balls. Surely whether an act is political or not must depend on the motive of whoever commits it, and thus on knowing who that person is. Oh well, probably a lawyer could talk his way out of that.

  Berenice wasn’t impressed, either. “Then they will let him go if he is not an anarchist but send him back to Paris if he is? So being an anarchist is against the law?”

  “No, you can be and say what you like here in England – er, within the law, of course.”