by Gavin Lyall
“Oh.” Ranklin reckoned this opened a topic a bit too big for casual conversation. But he certainly had no qualms about trying to alter history, at least the details that he could get hold of. Still, he just nodded and said: “And do you think he was trying to manipulate you?”
Annoyingly, she used his own trick of answering with a question: “What do you think?”
“Oh, you know me: I’m a monarchist and a soldier, and all sorts of things you don’t believe in.”
“Are you really a soldier?”
“By profession, yes.”
“Just a slave, then,” she said sympathetically (the damned little trollop). “But you aren’t a big strong man, not like a proper tyrant. You’re really just a tool of the tyrants.”
“Perhaps,” Ranklin said meekly, but on the clear understanding that this entitled him to inherit the earth in due course. “But we were talking about Dr Gorkin and what he’s been doing.”
There was a silence. The slight breeze had faded along with the light and the canal below was unruffled and glassy, reflecting the last light in the sky. Colour was draining away, too, leaving just tones of grey shading to black. Down in the village a cart rumbled along an unpaved road.
Then she said firmly: “Dr Gorkin is a traitor to the Cause.”
“What about the café proprietor, Kaminsky?”
This was obviously more complicated, but she reached a decision in the end. She wasn’t yet of an age not to reach decisions. “He is a tool of Dr Gorkin, he still believes Dr Gorkin is a great thinker. But you would say Kaminsky is just a criminal.”
“Would I? Why?”
“He arranges things. Robberies, but only of banks, for the Cause. Perhaps assassinations.”
“Setting fire to police stations?” Ranklin ventured.
Another long silence. “Perhaps. But he would do it because Dr Gorkin told him to . . . What are you going to do about Dr Gorkin?”
That was a question Ranklin really didn’t want to answer. He wasn’t in the business of justice, only manipulation. If he could prevent Gorkin publishing the King’s-bastard article, or at least prevent him backing it with Mrs Langhorn’s evidence, the rest was up to others.
“The police here regard him as an intellectuel,” he said. “If they can’t touch him . . . well, if we did anything to him, it would just make him a martyr.”
“Then you will not try to kill him?”
“We will not,” Ranklin promised virtuously. And when she said nothing, he went on: “When the barge arrives, will you promise to be quiet?”
“What are you going to do?”
“Rescue Mrs Langhorn, if she’s on board. And if she’s not . . . they can go about their business.”
“I told you: Kaminsky will shoot your silly heads off. He always has plenty of guns.”
“Let us worry about that. Will you promise to stay quiet?”
“She’s a stupid old cow, but if you want to try and rescue her, that’s your problem. Do you want me to swear by God? –I don’t believe in God.”
There was the growl of a big car in low gear from the direction of the village.
“No. Just promise as Berenice Collomb. That’ll do me.”
She may have been surprised at the idea, she may have shrugged, but she said: “I promise, then.”
Its electric headlights blazing, the tourer slid past them and Corinna started to turn it around just past the bridge. This took a lot of to-and-froing and clashing of gears, but she managed it and cut off the headlights before they could shine back down the hill into the village. She parked just past the bridge and got out waving something.
“Got it.” “It” turned out to be twenty-five metres of quarter-inch rope. Berenice climbed back into the motor and wrapped herself in the back-seat rug.
Ranklin gave the rope a quite useless but masculine tug. “Fine. How d’you – I mean, how should I fix it up?”
“Tie one end to a tree on the far side, then sit in a bush holding the other end. Let it droop in the water, and when the barge is on top of it, pull it taut. And remember to let go when you feel it pull back.”
“Splendid. Er – suppose it catches on the rudder instead?”
“The rudder is behind the propeller. Always,” she said patiently. “And if you don’t want to do it here, there’s a side road in the village where you can get the automobile right up to the towpath.”
“That sounds better, but we’ll have to wait for O’Gilroy and young Jay here. And thanks, I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
Corinna could think of several replies to that, but no ladylike ones, so instead she said: “Were you having a nice cosy gossip with Berenice?”
“I think she’s getting the idea that Gorkin isn’t on the side of the ang—What do anarchists say instead of ‘angels’?”
“No idea. What’s she going to do about it?”
“That may be the problem; I was trying to persuade her not to do anything. She may think she’s an anarchist, but she’s young and still believes in justice.”
“And you’re too old and worldly-wise for such nonsense, are you? Everybody believes in justice. Or revenge. It comes to the same thing.”
“Now who’s being worldly-wise?”
“At least you didn’t say ‘old’. When are we going to bed together again?” Corinna tended to say such things – originally because it shocked Ranklin, now more or less out of habit. Of course, she also tended to mean them.
“Don’t distract my thinking. I’m still wondering what we’ll do with Mrs Langhorn – if we get her. Offer to take her back to London with us and meet Grover out of jail, perhaps. I can’t see him wanting to come to France, and at least in London she’ll be out of reach of the Paris Press.”
“Ah yes: you were asking me what you can do to stop the story getting into the papers, weren’t you?”
“Yes.” Despite the petty successes of getting organised and out here, Ranklin had to remember they were still tilting into overall failure. Gloomily, he leant against the parapet again and stared at the still water. “Can you think of anything?”
“Can this Dr Gorkin get anything he likes published?”
“He’s connected with some anarchist rag, the Temps Nouveaux de Paris, so I assume they’ll print anything he wants. That must only have a tiny circulation, but I imagine the other Paris papers will—”
“They will, that’s normal. And what you fear is he’ll publish the whole thing about Grover being the King’s bastard son and all your attempts to hush it up.”
“Yes. All slanted and twisted and—”
“Yes, yes, I’m sure. Still, with a story like this any reputable paper would want to do some checking of its own . . . But if Gorkin can produce the boy’s mother–Oh, I see: you want to grab her before she can back him up, is that it?”
“Something like that. And if she’ll listen, tell her the whole tale about how Grover was set up and she was manipulated and impersonated. That’s where I rather hope Berenice might come in. But I just don’t know if Mrs Langhorn’s on their side still or if she’s being held prisoner on that barge.”
“You aren’t even sure she’s aboard the barge, are you?”
“Well, no, but if they’re running out, surely they’d take her along.”
“Hmm. But you’ve got an awful lot of unknowns even before you start hoping she’ll contradict the whole thing. And why should she? Even if she turns against Gorkin and all his works, she still stands to gain from telling about the King.”
Ranklin nodded glumly. “The Palace is preparing a denial, but . . .”
“Nobody remembers denials. Your one hope would be to get your own story out first.”
Ranklin stood up straight and peered at her, horrified. “You want us to announce this scandal about the King?”
“Oh no. No, no, no. It isn’t a story about the King, it’s about a conspiracy against the King. Then you go into the details of what they did: falsifying evidence, murder, kidnapping
– the works. Get the Press seeing it from that angle and your intentions automatically become honourable, never mind your misdeeds. But only if you get in first.”
“The only stable explosive is one that’s exploded already,” Ranklin suddenly remembered.
“Hey?”
“It was something I said to Gorkin. Actually we were talking about a post-revolutionary society, but I suppose it applies to a good scandal as well.”
“Like don’t trust a volcano until after it’s erupted? Yes, I guess that’s about it.”
But Ranklin was thinking of the obvious snag: that journalists, like intelligence officers, must surely ask first: Who says so? “But if I tell the Press all this, it’s just gossip. And if I tell them I’m working for our government, then I’m obviously partisan.”
She looked at him critically but sympathetically. “Yes, it’s a great play, but you’re not the right leading man . . . Couldn’t you blackmail Gorkin to confess?”
“To perverting the course of justice, accessory to murder and kidnapping? What’s left to blackmail him with?”
“Ah,” she said thoughtfully, “we do have a bit of a problem there.”
“And even then, we’d still need Mrs Langhorn to take a vow of silence.” He sighed. “Well, it’s no worse than I’d expected, but thanks for spelling it out.”
“Are you going to be blamed for it all?”
“I’m not big enough to carry that much blame: they’ll crucify the whole Bureau. Get invited to the Foreign Office that night: it’ll be quite a party.”
* * *
The engine was under a hatch behind and to the left of the steering shelter. A short wooden ladder led down into the glitter of thick, oil-black bilge water and an overpowering smell of petrol, oil and hot metal. O’Gilroy went down very carefully, found a place to stand clear of the water, and Kaminsky handed down the torch. O’Gilroy shone it around.
Perhaps the little windowless space had originally been a locker for ropes, paint and so forth. Recently someone with too little time, money or engineering skill had made it the engine room. The engine itself – it looked like a Ford Model T – was bolted to a slightly sloping wooden platform with an extended drive shaft running out through a dripping gland to the canal beyond. A flat metal bar stretched the gear lever through a slot in the roof above, and the cooling water pipe looked like a length of old garden hose. The rest was a child’s scribble of pipes and wires, with items mounted anywhere: the coil box next to the gravity-feed petrol tank on the bulkhead, for instance, which made it a near-evens bet that everything would blow up before it shook itself apart.
There were a dozen things O’Gilroy wanted to check or improve, and he forced himself to remember he only wanted this boat to go less than two more miles. He sighed, tested the heat of the number 1 cylinder – that was the first to give trouble on Model Ts – and began unscrewing the sparking-plugs.
Two minutes later he climbed the ladder with two plugs in his pocket and began rummaging in an oil-soaked hessian bag of tools, bits of wire, nuts and bolts and anything else vaguely mechanical that was the engineering stores.
Kaminsky watched gravely. “Do you know what is wrong?”
O’Gilroy held up a sparking-plug in the lamplight to show the business end oily and crusted black. “That hasn’t sparked for miles. The problem is, the engine’s running too slow. You need a smaller gear-wheel in there.”
“Will it make the boat go faster?”
“A little, perhaps. But more important, it’ll let the engine run at a proper speed.”
As he expected, there were no new sparking-plugs among the tools. He opened his penknife and began delicately scraping the crusted plug clean.
Jay pushed his bicycle up the bank to the bridge parapet, propped it up and reached down to pull off his cycle clips with delicate distaste.
“Well?” Ranklin demanded. “Did you find the barge? And where’s O’Gilroy?”
“We found it, and he’s stayed there to help them repair the engine.”
“Bloody hell!”
“It does make a sort of sense. It’s stopped on an open reach where we couldn’t surprise it.”
When Ranklin thought about it, that did add up.
Jay added: “If he can repair the engine, that is.”
“Oh, he’ll fix it.” Ranklin’s technical training had come just too early to involve petrol engines, so he believed that, for him, they ran or stopped according to how they felt. But O’Gilroy understood such things, so this one would work for him. “But will we know when it’s coming?”
“You can hear it miles off on a night like this and across water. How do you plan to stop it?”
Ranklin told him, and Jay smiled admiringly at Corinna. “Brilliant, if I may say so.”
She curtsied. Ranklin went on: “Did you see Mrs Langhorn – any woman – there?”
“I only saw two men. But I got the impression there’s others on board. I was keeping my distance: they might have recognised me from this morning.”
Corinna asked: “What happened this morning?”
But before Jay could admit to yet another shooting incident, Ranklin started giving orders.
19
The first instinct of any self-respecting Ford T engine is to break the elbow of the man cranking it, but O’Gilroy knew all about that and caught it in the aftermath when it was so surprised that it fired up. It didn’t run exactly smoothly: its condition and the sort of petrol sold in La Villette saw to that, but it ran. After a few moments, O’Gilroy climbed the ladder and, leaving the hatch open, adjusted the timing and throttle levers to the best sound he could find.
“Il marche,” he announced to Kaminsky.
“You are very kind, M’sieu. Would you like us to carry you – and your bicycle – to Trilbardou?”
Probably Kaminsky wanted him to stay until the engine had proved itself more than he wanted to be rid of a stranger, but anyway, O’Gilroy accepted. He lifted his bicycle on to the foredeck, the second man untied the mooring-ropes and Kaminsky rammed home the gear-lever without the engine stalling. It did indeed run far too slow under load, and O’Gilroy juggled the levers again to make it sound as happy as it could. Then he asked: “Do you have soap and water for my hands?”
Kaminsky hesitated about that, but had to see the obvious need. “Leon will show you where in the cabin. One of the ladies there is a bit sick in the head. Don’t mind her.”
There was a sliding hatch just ahead of the steering shelter and a companion-way – really a ladder, but wider and less steep than the one to the engine – down into a warm yellow fog. Gradually O’Gilroy’s senses subdivided this into lamplight, tobacco smoke, cooking smells and a coke stove. And four people, two men and two women.
One man was the cheap swell who had been tailing the fake Mrs Langhorn that morning; seen front on, he had a thin, mournful face with big eyes. The other might have been one of the toughs he’d brought from the café, but O’Gilroy hadn’t been watching them closely. The fake Mrs Langhorn herself was sitting by the stove watching a small saucepan of something. That meant the other woman, lying on a bunk against the hull, had to be the real article.
She was staring at the underside of the bunk above her and took no notice of O’Gilroy, so all he got was a glance of a perky young face, younger than he’d expected, above a full figure wrapped in a blanket. He made it a slightly frightened but intrigued glance, such as people give to the head-sick.
Was she really the cause of all this? A part of him said Of course she must be: the discarded mistress of a prince, now wrapped in a tattered, dirty blanket and staring meaninglessly at rough boards a few inches above. While all Paris decorates itself to welcome her one-time lover, now King, in the spring sunshine . . .
Then his sense of romantic injustice was quelled by the voice of experience reminding him that life was a damn sight more complicated than that, and he looked around for soap and water.
Jay had been sent along the far bank w
ith the rope to find a suitable tree nearly opposite the little lane up from the village. At this point, the motor-car could be brought up – really up: the canal was higher than the village – to the towpath itself. They didn’t do that, partly because the sight of a big motor sitting on the canal bank would be very suspicious, and partly because of a cottage beside the towpath.
This was probably where goods were landed for the village, though it didn’t look much used now, and the cottage had probably been built for the village harbour-master or whatever. It was silent and unlit, but that didn’t have to mean much: countryfolk were more likely to save lamp-oil than read. Anyway, they weren’t going to bang on the door and ask. They just left the motor-car fifty yards down the lane, facing the village, then whispered and tiptoed their way back along the towpath. As Corinna had pointed out, the barge wouldn’t stop immediately even if the engine did: momentum would drift it on for several yards. During which time (they hoped) the steersman would bring it alongside the landing-place to find out what was wrong.
It was all a bit chancy, but at least it meant they wouldn’t be climbing the bank at the bridge, perhaps dragging a reluctant Mrs Langhorn under fire.
Surprisingly, Jay hadn’t got any cowboy skills when it came to hurling the free end of the rope across the canal, but he finally got it over tied to a piece of branch. By the time Ranklin pulled it in, the rope was soaked, cold and heavy. He tied it loosely to a bush and called in a hoarse whisper: “You get back to the bridge and wait for O’Gilroy, then join us here.”
The dark figure waved and vanished.
“And when O’Gilroy gets here,” Ranklin told Corinna, “you get back to the motor-car and be ready for a quick getaway.”
The engine, or rather the sparking-plugs, held up for most of the two kilometres to Trilbardou bridge, but by then there was an occasional missed beat that O’Gilroy hoped only he himself noticed. The penknife scraping hadn’t made the plugs like new, and Kaminsky would be stranded in the agricultural wilds well before Meaux. But his ears, luckily, were tuned to other troubles.
“What will you and your friend do in Trilbardou?” he asked.