by Gavin Lyall
“Mrs Finn is going to love this,” Jay said in English. “Why are we going to see her, by the way?”
“It may be the quickest way to get hold of a motoring map, perhaps a motor-car, and she may know where we can hire or buy a couple of bicycles.”
“Bicycles? Why bicycles?”
“I don’t imagine you and O’Gilroy want to run along the tow-path searching for that barge.”
At that time of day, the Paris streets were full of growling, hooting, rattling traffic. But inside the taxi there seemed to be a deathly hush.
17
Corinna had brought forward her visit to Paris after finding that Ranklin had gone there already, but that didn’t mean she wanted to see him right then. What she wanted to do was spread out the evening dresses she had packed hastily in London, compare them with those she had left in the Paris apartment, decide she had nothing suitable for a royal night at l’Opéra, and make an appointment with Paul Poiret on Monday.
But here he was, smiling apologetically, and behind him Conall O’Gilroy, of course, and that Lieutenant Jay who looked too handsome to be trusted and – dear God, not again! – Berenice Collomb. She instinctively looked at Berenice’s hands: no absinthe bottle.
She summoned up a welcoming grimace. “Come in, come in, make yourselves at home. Jules will bring you some coffee. Or drinks?”
“No time for that, I’m afraid,” Ranklin said. “D’you know where we can hire a motor-car?”
“I could lend . . . How long for?”
“Until tomorrow, say.”
“Then you’d best rent one. Jules, telephone the garage and tell them to bring round a tourer of some sort.”
“Your garage doesn’t do bicycles, does it?”
“Bicycles? I don’t know anything about bicycles.”
“Never mind, O’Gilroy thinks he remembers a place. And d’you have a motoring map showing the roads outside Paris?”
“There’s probably one in Pop’s study.”
Ranklin followed her in there and, at her gesture, closed the door. She tossed a handful of folded and worn maps on the table, then let rip. “She isn’t a little lost dog you have to bring back whenever you find her! I thought I was done with her for life when she went off back to La Villette.”
“I know, I know. But she was some help and then I didn’t want her telling anyone what we’re up to.”
“What are you up to?”
“Looking for Mrs Langhorn. We think they’ve taken her outside Paris . . . Tell me, did Berenice say anything about young Grover? She seems to have gone off him.”
This time, Corinna’s grin was real. “Oh yes, she’s through with him.”
“But he’ll probably have all the charges dropped and be free in a couple of days.”
Her grin widened. “That’s the point. She’s realised he’s innocent. It seems that night she wasn’t – well, she put it rather crudely –”
“Yes, she used some New Woman expressions with me, too.”
“– but she assumed he really had been a big bold anarchist, setting fire to that police station-house. To prove his love for her, probably. So when she realised he’d been tucked up with a good book instead, naturally she dropped him.”
“Naturally,” Ranklin agreed dazedly. “Then it was nothing to do with his performance as a lover?”
“She got graphic with you, too, did she? Oh no. That’s just kicking him in the balls – metaphorically – after the event.”
“I see . . . And did she say anything about Gorkin?”
“She may be cooling on him, too. I guess she’s been figuring who wanted her bumped off, and it obviously wasn’t those hoodlums who were going to do it. She was pretty quiet on the train and boat over – thank God. I think she was thinking.”
Ranklin chose one of the maps. “If I can borrow this?”
“Sure. What are you going to do? – and what d’you want bicycles for?”
He hesitated, then decided it didn’t matter, so told her.
“And what are you going to do with Berenice?”
“Well, unless you feel like—”
“No. Absolutely no. Pop’d have a fit and disinherit me if he came back and found her here. I truly am not going to do it.”
“Quite, quite. You’ve done more than your share already. Actually, it may not be a bad idea to take her with us. Keep her from talking to anyone, and if she’s really gone sour on Gorkin she may help persuade Mrs Langhorn to feel the same way.”
“I wouldn’t bet on her and Mrs Langhorn being best chums. Any mother’s going to think her son can do better than Berenice Collomb.” She led the way out.
Ranklin followed, recalling that Berenice usually referred to Mrs Langhorn as “that old cow”.
In the drawing-room Jules had, after all, found time to provide coffee and drinks. Ranklin gave the map to O’Gilroy and asked him to work out where they should start, then helped himself to coffee and went back to Corinna.
“There’s another thing you might help on. You know journalists and their ways: is there anything we can do to stop the story being published?”
“By Dr Gorkin, you mean? How much does he know?”
“Most. The Grover-being-the-King’s-son bit and a lot about us and the Palace trying to snooker it.”
“A good up-to-date peg to hang it on.”
“That’s rather what I–” But then a voice-pipe whistled in the hallway and after a moment Jules came in to announce that the garagiste was downstairs with a new DSP tourer.
“Never mind,” Ranklin told Corinna. “Later, if there’s time.”
He saw the indecision in her expression and said nothing. O’Gilroy had folded up the map, Jay had put down his cup and was putting on his charming-farewell smile. Berenice was sitting slumped with half a glass of something.
“Oh, bugger it,” Corinna said. “I didn’t come last time, I’m coming this one.”
“Look, I’m not—”
“Shut up. I was in on the first scene, I may as well be in on the last.”
* * *
Half an hour later they had passed through the Porte de Pantin and were speeding up along the Chalons-sur-Marne road, O’Gilroy driving. Ranklin had automatically let him do that, knowing the man believed in mechanical things, but Jay wasn’t so happy. He was prepared to defer to the back-street Irishman on back-street matters, but his family had owned motor-cars since they were invented. He sometimes doubted O’Gilroy’s family had owned so much as a bath.
But he had the sense to say nothing.
The taxi driver had been right: the map showed Meaux to be about forty kilometres by road, but the canal twisted around in the valley of the Marne itself and looked longer. There were locks, too, which should slow things up. They had no fear of the barge already being at Meaux: the question was where they should start looking. As a preliminary strategy they decided to divert and cross the canal wherever there was a bridge that might give a viewpoint.
Rut this wasn’t as good an idea as the map suggested: the canal was lined with trees, and although these were still mainly leafless, they blocked the view past the first bend, which could be no more than a hundred yards away. Anyway, O’Gilroy was the only one, apart from Berenice perhaps, who had seen the barge before, and it certainly wasn’t the only one on the canal. The one thing to set against this was that most of the rest were still horse-towed.
So they soon reverted to Plan A: find a bridge that the barge should have passed already, then unload O’Gilroy and Jay to cycle along the towpath while the motor-car jumped ahead and waited for them at another bridge. They did the unloading just outside Claye-Souilly, and went on about five road miles to a village called Trilbardou. There, the bridge was on a hill just before the village, and Ranklin and Corinna leant on the parapet in the still warmish evening air. Berenice stayed in the tourer, inert as a bundle of old clothes, perhaps thinking deep thoughts or possibly having an emotional overhaul, but in any case silent.
Cor
inna said: “What are you going to do when you find this barge?”
Ranklin took out a pipe and began to fill it carefully. Finally he said: “Pick some place to ambush it.”
“You could fell a tree so that it fell exactly across the canal.”
“With my penknife?” He sucked on the pipe to test its carburation. “If it were horse-drawn, we could shoo—we could hold up the horse.”
“There’s probably a tow-rope in the automobile; we could stretch that across.”
“That wouldn’t stop any of the barges we’ve seen.”
She said impatiently: “No, I mean so that it caught and fouled the propeller.”
“Would it?”
“Ha! If you knew anything about motor-boats you’d know they’re always fouling their own mooring-lines.”
So they routed and found a tow-rope – about twenty feet long. The canal was nearly twice that wide.
“I’ll take the automobile down to the village and see what I can buy,” Corinna announced.
“Will you find anything that thick?”
“It’s better if it isn’t. Clothes-line would do.”
A bit surprised that Corinna knew what a clothes-line was, Ranklin let her go.
* * *
Neither O’Gilroy nor Jay had ridden bicycles for some years; probably Jay hadn’t touched one since he was a boy. But at least a canal towpath has no hills and no motor traffic. Against this, it can have ruts and muddy patches and a sudden swerve could be literally dampening. When they met a horse towing a barge in the opposite direction, they dismounted and stood well clear in the grass beneath the trees. O’Gilroy lit a cigarette.
Impetuously, Jay said: “Did the Captain really want to kill this woman?”
O’Gilroy looked at him. But perhaps guessing that Jay had kept this bottled up for the past two hours, didn’t brush him off. He picked a shred of tobacco off his lip and said: “Goes back a long way. He was a good Gunner officer. He took me on in Ladysmith – that’s near fifteen years ago now – ’n taught me to be a gun number. Was good at that. Would teach ye something but giving ye a reason for it, then leave ye get on with it. Weren’t so many officers like him.”
He looked again at Jay, who had been – was still – an officer, though not in the Gun s. “Then they took all that away from him.”
“Wasn’t there something about his brother in the City and bankruptcy?”
“Never ye mind ’bout that. Point is, he wants to be a good spy, that’s the job he’s been given and he’s damn well going to do it the best he can, but mebbe he’s got more to forget than some of us. Mebbe we aren’t all honourable, straightforward fellers like hisself. Mebbe we’re more used to doing things sneaky and underhand. Jest sometimes, I mean, jest sometimes. But he reckons that’s the way he’s got to do things now – and it don’t come natural. So, natural enough, sometimes he mebbe goes a bit too far. And that’s where we help out. Jest like we did.”
He said it with a finality that suggested the subject had been explored, explained – and was now closed.
Nevertheless, Jay said: “What actually made him change his mind?”
“Never know, will we?” But O’Gilroy’s tone suggested he really meant: You’ll never know. He flicked the cigarette into the canal and got back on to his bicycle.
It was growing dark now, and when they passed a tiny village there were several barges tied up for the night, cabins glowing with light, stove-pipes whisping smoke and a couple of horses grazing on the edge of the path. After that, they saw nothing for over a mile and then heard the sudden but stuttering roar of an engine. They stopped.
Sound carries well over water; perhaps it bounces like a skimmed stone, but O’Gilroy had no grounding in physics, just an empirical understanding of technology.
“It’s an engine,” Jay said unnecessarily.
“Missing on one cylinder, sometimes two of’em. Running it up out of gear; ye’d never get them revs if it was turning a propeller.”
He started off again, slowly, and after a minute the gentle curve of the canal showed lights moving slowly over a dark shape against the bank ahead.
Jay asked: “Is it them?”
“Can’t tell. But probly. I’d best see if I can help get ’em moving again.”
“What? You can’t!”
“Why not? We don’t want ’em stuck here until the flics find ’em. And I don’t see us jumping ’em or getting Mrs Langhorn when ye can’t get the motor within half a mile. No, ye jest go on ’n find the Captain.”
Looked at tactically, Jay agreed that his stretch wasn’t ideal for an ambush. It was too open, giving those on the barge as much a view as the darkness allowed. O’Gilroy handed over his pistol and spare magazines – he was sure enough about the other things in his pockets, but he didn’t want a gun clonking around when he abandoned his jacket to get at the engine – and then started off again. Aware that his face might seem familiar from this morning’s carryings-on, Jay followed in O’Gilroy’s shadow.
When they reached the barge, one man was adjusting the bow mooring rope, while a second was waving an electric torch at the water near the stern, obviously hoping for some un-technical solution like finding a playful mermaid hanging on to the rudder. The engine was idling erratically.
The man swung the torch across the two cyclists. Jay kept going, screwing up his face apparently against the light, really to avoid recognition. O’Gilroy stopped. “Vous avez un problème?”
“Je crois que c’est le moteur . . .”
“On dirait qu’un cylindre ne fonction pas. Deux, peut-être.”
“Vous êtes Anglais?”
“Irlandais!” O’Gilroy corrected sharply.
In the reflected glow of the torch, the man’s face creased into a smile. He eased himself up off the deck with slow, strong movements and apologised, then again for speaking only French. “You know about engines, then?”
“Something. I’ve been a chauffeur. What type is it?”
But the man didn’t even know that. “American, I think. It has just been put into the boat and this is the first time we have tried it on a long journey.”
“Ford, probably. Could be your sparking plugs. Does the engine go fast when you move?”
“It goes very slowly.”
Even unladen as it was, the barge would be quite a weight for a motor-car engine to push along. Now it sat high in the water, putting the deck at about chest height and, just below that, were two lit but misted-Over portholes. O’Gilroy could hear a mutter of conversation from inside, but couldn’t identify a woman’s voice. There were at least two people inside, along with the two men outside.
From along the towpath, beyond reach of the torchlight, Jay called: “Are you coming?”
“Jest a minute. Ye go on.” He switched back to French and asked the man how far to the next village with a café, then called: “Jest a coupla kilometres to Trilbardou. I’ll see ye in the café there.”
Jay waved and pedalled off.
“A friend of yours?” the man asked.
“We work at the same place in Paris.” The man waited for more, but O’Gilroy knew not to offer any: the innocent don’t explain themselves. “Do you want me to take a look at this engine?”
The man stretched an arm and gave O’Gilroy a powerful heave up. There was an oil lamp hung on the little three-sided structure which would have been a wheel-house if it had had a wheel, but was just to keep the rain off the man waggling the long tiller arm behind him and the engine lever sticking up from the floor. On one wall of the shelter there was a switch, like an ordinary light switch, and small levers that presumably controlled the throttle and spark advance/retard. That was all.
O’Gilroy grunted and looked at the man, who was studying him closely. He had a wrestler’s build, squat and strong, with a heavy moustache above full lips and deep pouches under his eyes; the rest of his face was pitted with little smallpox craters. He didn’t look very French, but La Villette couldn’t afford pa
triotic snobbery. If you asked if this was a man who could handle café customers from that area, the answer was Yes, so this was presumably Kaminsky.
“All right, let’s have a look then.” O’Gilroy reached for the switch. “Does this turn it off?”
“You have to crank it to start it again.” You have to; this was a man who told others what to do.
18
From the bridge uphill from Trilbardou village, Ranklin could see perhaps three hundred yards of the canal, though he only knew it was that distance because of the view when it was lighter. Now the trees on either side were near-black shapes and the water fuzzed with evening mist or rising dew, if they were different things. He puffed on his pipe and only when he heard someone move beside him and he whipped around did he realise he was far less calm than he was trying to look.
Rut it was Berenice Collomb. He thought she’d gone to the village with Corinna she’d become so much a silent fixture in that motor-car.
“Hello,” he said awkwardly. She didn’t belong in these proceedings; he wished they’d managed to dump her somewhere. It was a pity human beings couldn’t be switched off, like machines. “This is a bit prettier than la Villette. You come from . . . from Cherbourg, don’t you? Is it anything like the countryside around—?”
“Was Dr Gorkin really trying to have me killed?” She wasn’t interested in scenery.
Suddenly cautious, Ranklin said: “How can I know? The men who kept you prisoner, do you think they were doing it for themselves?”
“I thought you knew everything.” Truculently.
“Well, I don’t. I only know what people tell me, and half the time that’s lies. I just have to think what’s most likely to be true.”
There was a pause while she did this – or, more likely, realised that was just what she had been doing. “I think Dr Gorkin was making a plot . . . A true anarchist should not make a plot. Killing a king, or a president, that is honest. That is just helping history. History is on our side,” she assured him. “So one should not try to alter it, to manipulate people . . . one should not make plots. That is as bad as democracy.”