by Gavin Lyall
“I quite understand, mon Capitaine. By then Sergeant Clement will have prepared the car to join the express at Rouen.”
Resigned, Ranklin let the butler lead the way upstairs.
In a first-floor bedroom, with the same view over the lawn, their small travelling bags had already been half-unpacked. Ranklin waited until the door was closed behind them, then let fly: “What the devil were you up to getting us stuck out here? Didn’t you realise that fat German was just the man we were supposed to watch out for, get caught by? So now we’ve lost …”
“Ah, calm down, Captain, dear.” O’Gilroy was quite unruffled. “Could ye not see they’re all in it together?”
Ranklin gaped.
“Sure, the fat German was to spot ye on the boat – and did – pretending to be drunk on beer before noon. And him the size of a garrison sergeant that could drink beer the day round without it touching him. And getting word of yer name ahead … Now, that I can’t tell how he did at all …”
“Wireless,” Ranklin said reluctantly.
“Ah, sure, I was too bothered with me stomach to see the boat had an aerial on it. And using yer name in a message so we miss the train, then him coming round being pushy on the dockside so when a nice general turns up with a nice motorcar, if ye’d been the officer with the real code, wouldn’t ye think him, another army man, was an angel sent from Heaven?”
Ranklin wasn’t about to agree that O’Gilroy was right. Lucky, perhaps, but … but at least he seemed to have guessed how a real courier might think. Or, perhaps more importantly, how their opponents assumed a real courier would think. He shivered to recall how instinctively he had been drawn to the General.
And if they were still in the trap they had sprung, he could relax and look around as he undressed. It was a high-windowed room with white-painted panelling edged with gold, a pink and green oriental carpet and a couple of elegant pre-Empire chairs beside the beds. But the whole had the dullness of old varnish on a painting, at the brink of becoming shabby and grimy.
Putting on his dressing gown and picking up a bath towel, he peeked at the parcel in his bag. “They surely can’t be planning to copy the code while we’re in the bath?”
“Not even while I’m in me bath.” Constant hot baths were the high point of O’Gilroy’s new life, and no nonsense about leaving them half-finished.
Ranklin’s natural pessimism caught up with him and he was back in the bedroom sooner than he’d intended, leaving O’Gilroy sluicing in suds and folk song. The bathrooms had all been built in a clump around the recently installed main drainage, which made sense but gave a rather barracks-block effect.
He dressed slowly, putting on a fresh collar, puzzling over the odd combination of French general and German spy and very conscious of his own failure to think imaginatively earlier that afternoon. At last O’Gilroy drifted in, shining pink around a small, private smile.
“Captain, did ye notice a funny smell about the bathrooms?”
Ranklin might have done, but expected foreign bathrooms to smell funny.
“Chemicals,” O’Gilroy said, watching him.
“Well, that’s a step in the right direction. What bothers me – ”
“So I took a shufti around the other bedrooms …”
“You didn’t!”
“Is that not in our code of conduct, then? And I found one being used, with them big brown bottles of chemicals a fella I worked for in Ireland had for his photography, and a wooden case with a big camera in it …”
“They’re going to photograph the code!”
“I thought ye might be interested,” O’Gilroy said dryly.
That made the whole thing more feasible. They could photograph two pages of the book at a time just as fast as they could change plates. It also meant that O’Gilroy was right yet again. By way of congratulation and apology, Ranklin said: “Um.”
O’Gilroy smiled faintly and began to dress. “And what was that about downstairs with His Majesty stuff, then? – and me thinking France didn’t have kings at all.”
“She doesn’t, but in the last century she’s had an emperor, a king, president-turned-emperor and president again. With passing help from the Paris mob and the Army. The General’s obviously a monarchist, believes in having a king again. Quite a lot of the officer corps feels the same way.”
There were some things O’Gilroy didn’t know.
“So he wants the code for plotting agin the government?”
“That’s what bothers me. He might want to overthrow this government, but why should a general turn traitor?”
O’Gilroy’s look said plainly what he thought of the idea that Military Gentlemen just did not do Certain Things. And Ranklin read it clearly. “No, just consider: he must have spent at least forty years working to become a general. I just don’t believe any man can spend that time pretending. Life’s far easier if you believe in what you’re doing.”
Ranklin probably knew what he was talking about there, O’Gilroy reflected. “Money, mebbe?”
“D’you really think so?”
O’Gilroy considered: the Château might be run down, but it was still a château, still with land around it, with servants and the big motorcar. Perhaps it was the car that convinced him. “Mebbe not,” he conceded. “But ye said he was agin the government.”
“For patriotic reasons. Not to betray his own Army to the Germans.”
“Do we know that fat German’s working for Germany, ’cept him being German?”
Come to think of it, Ranklin didn’t.
“Or mebbe,” O’Gilroy finished tying his necktie and paused to gloat at himself in the mirror, “the whole shebang’s German spies and acting at General and servants, with the big house and motorcar all hired.” He wasn’t being very serious; to O’Gilroy an enemy was an enemy and he didn’t trouble overmuch with asking why.
“Now,” he went on, “would that ‘repas’ he was talking about have anything to do with food? Me stomach’s asking if me mouth’s emigrated.”
Ranklin, who had never learnt to dress as fast as a private soldier must, was still working at his own tie. “Now we know they’re going to photograph the code we can afford to seem in more of a hurry. But see if you can’t make it easier for them. Can you undo the package a bit, without it seeming obvious?”
Nobody had done anything to make the parcel obviously tamper-proof: that hadn’t been the objective. O’Gilroy picked apart the knots on the string and the brown paper fell loose. Inside was a plain manilla envelope with a criss-cross of government red tape (actually pink) held in place with a blob of sealing wax. Perhaps somebody in the War Office thought that was secure; O’Gilroy took just two seconds to bend a corner of the envelope and slip a loop of the tape free of the lightly gummed flap.
Then, since Ranklin still wasn’t ready, he peeled the flap open with his penknife. It wasn’t a clean job, but the enemy wouldn’t be looking for signs that the envelope had already been opened.
“Captain,” he said, “there’s a mite of a problem here.”
Ranklin turned from the mirror to see O’Gilroy handling three thin red pocketbooks, just like Army field manuals, each wrapped in a strand of pink tape. “Yes?”
“We was bringing over code ‘X’, wasn’t it?”
“That’s right.”
O’Gilroy looked at the front of one book. “Code X.” He dropped it on the bed and looked at the next. “Code Y.” He picked up the third. “Code W.”
There comes a time when it is your knees and not your will that decide you should sit down.
After a time Ranklin heard himself saying tonelessly: “I can see how it happened, of course. Some clerk at the War House was told to make up three parcels from nine books. But he wasn’t told what it was about, that would be too secret for him.” He read from the cover of the nearest book: “‘Most Secret’, in fact. So he used his common sense: obviously three addresses in France were to get one copy of each code. Oh, I understand it.”
/> “And if ye understand how England ever got itself an Empire without somebody having dropped it in the street, mebbe ye’ll tell me that, too. Along with what we do next.”
Ranklin sat very still, shoulders hunched and thinking hard. Then he said: “We try leaving one code, one of the false ones, and hope they don’t know there should be three copies.” But they seemed to know so much else about this job that he wasn’t too hopeful. “Wrap up the Y code, would you? See if you can make it seem it was never more than one.” He stood up, pocketing the X and W codes. They were slim enough that they barely bulged in the big pockets of his travelling tweeds.
O’Gilroy started work. “But ye said yeself, if we know they’ve got hold of even the right one, all it needs doing is to change it.”
After the French had had a hearty laugh at the bungling of the Bureau and the War Office and their wrath had been passed on to those junior enough to be thought worthy of blame.
“That isn’t the point any longer. If they even suspect we can denounce them as spies … well, it means Devil’s Island for the General. That’s where they sent Dreyfus for the same thing, and he wasn’t even guilty. Have you heard of Devil’s Island?”
“I have that,” O’Gilroy said grimly. “And I get yer meaning, Captain. I’d kill us rather than wind up there.”
A freshly lit wood fire was crackling and popping in the drawing room, with the General dozing in front of it. A cosy, old-fashioned scene of the old soldier home from the wars, and Ranklin looked appraisingly at the trophies of those wars around the walls. He could handle a sword, and anybody could use a stabbing spear, but he was sure he’d be up against modern revolvers. For the moment he settled for a whisky and soda, offered in a whisper by the watchful butler.
O’Gilroy took the same and they stared silently out of the windows. It wasn’t raining at the moment, but the overlong grass was rippling in the wind and the whole afternoon had been one long twilight.
The General woke with a whuffling grunt, saw them and said: “Ah, pardon, messieurs …” and the butler hurried over with a glass of something pink.
“I wonder,” Ranklin said, “if I might place a telephone call to Paris? I was given a message at Dieppe but was unable to contact the person.”
He reckoned he was running no risk: he wasn’t supposed to know the message had been false. And he wanted to see how the General would handle it.
“But naturally. Gaston will obtain the number.”
“Colonel Yarde-Buller at the British Embassy, please.”
He was not surprised when Gaston returned to report his desolation that the apparatus did not function. So Gaston was in on the act, too (only later did he wonder why he’d assumed the telephone must really be working; his own experience of telephones was that half the time they didn’t).
“I never trust these barbarous machines meself,” O’Gilroy chipped in. “Begging yer pardon, General, it being yer own machine.”
“But no, M’sieu, it is the company’s. I agree: they are barbarisms. And now the Army is to employ them for – how do you say?”
“Field telephones?” Ranklin suggested.
“Exactly. And for how long will they function? It demands just one horse to put just one foot on the wire, that is how long … And you, M’sieu Gilroy, you have not served with the Army?”
“Alas no, General. I fancied the drum and the glory when I was a lad, but me poor father died early and the family and the land …”
Ranklin listened only faintly to O’Gilroy’s fantasies. Perhaps at this moment somebody – Gunther, possibly: he was sure Gunther would be somewhere backstage – was sorting through their bags, coming up with the single code book. And being satisfied? Or realising their plot had been detected and there was only one thing to do …
Would they get any warning? Or would the door open and …?
At that moment the door did open, and while Ranklin stood gaping, the General began to lever himself to his feet. “Ah, Madame Finn: permit me to introduce these gentlemen.”
12
American, Ranklin thought, then wondered why he thought it. It was the freshness about her – and the boldness. Not that European women couldn’t manage both, but it seemed more natural with Americans. She was taller than Ranklin, with black hair pinned up under a small straw hat, large dark eyes and a wide smile as she thrust out an ungloved hand. Whoever she is, Ranklin realised, she doesn’t intend to be underestimated.
She was Mrs Winslow Finn, daughter of Reynard Sherring – the General dragged that name in, though Ranklin already knew it. To him, and most people, it simply meant Money, subdivided into cartels, rings, railways – sorry, railroads – or coal or steel or oil or perhaps all of them. It was a world Ranklin had been brought up tacitly to despise and ignore – until about a year before. Now he had learnt that at least he couldn’t ignore it.
“Hi,” she said, “I’m Corinna. Happy to meet you. General – may I use your telephone?”
Ranklin suppressed his smile, but the General coped. “I am desolated, my dear Mrs Finn, but it is not functioning. Captain Ranklin also …”
“Oh bugger the silly thing.” The General didn’t flinch, but O’Gilroy’s eyeballs nearly exploded. He had met enough of the gentry to know that their ladies, particularly in the hunting field, could use language that would scald the fur off a fox, but he hadn’t expected it from this American enchantress. “I think I’ve found just the château for Pop,” Corinna went on. “I wanted to tell him.”
“I doubt,” the General said gravely, “there will be much competition with your father if he wishes to buy.”
“When Pop wants to buy there’s always competition,” she said crisply. Then to Gaston: “Café noir s’il vous plaît, pas de sucre.” Her French accent, Ranklin noted, was far better than his own.
The General said: “Then perhaps your father will not mind the deprivation of one residence from – how many?”
“Don’t be an old meanie, General. Everybody likes a few roofs over their heads, don’t they, Captain?”
“They come in handy in the winter.”
She grinned at him. With a thin face, high cheekbones and wide mouth she was immediately attractive rather than stand-back-and-stare beautiful. That afternoon she was wearing a plain high-necked white silk blouse and simple purple-red wool skirt, but the single ruby at her throat would, Ranklin thought sourly, make a down payment on any château in the land.
“You’re staying here while you house-hunt, are you, Mrs Finn?” he asked politely.
“The General’s been kind enough to put up with me for a couple of nights, but I’m through now. I’m heading back to Rouen and Paris.”
“You drove down?”
“No-o. In fact, if you’re talking to Pop, I didn’t drive at all. But I got off the train at Rouen and hired an automobile there. It gives you more freedom, don’t you think?”
Ranklin tried to keep his agreement polite, but his mind was galloping. No, driving …
But she spoiled that thought immediately: “All they could let me have was a little Renault roadster with its radiator in the wrong place. Why do Renaults have their radiators behind the engine, General?”
“My dear, you must ask Sergeant Clement. Of automobiles I understand nothing.”
Corinna grinned again. “I should’ve known better than to ask a technical question of a man. Say, is Cort back yet? I’d like to say goodbye to him.”
The General was momentarily confused. “Ah … no. Pas encore, I went to Dieppe to meet him, but he was not on the boat. The boat you were on, Capitaine. Perhaps he tried to call with the telephone, but …” He shrugged.
“Cort?” Ranklin asked.
“Cort van der Brock, a jolly fat Dutch guy,” Corinna explained. “He deals in cigars.”
“He had to go to England,” the General said quickly. “For business.”
A fat Dutchman, not a fat Bavarian. Ranklin looked at O’Gilroy, who had come out of shock, and got the respon
se he hoped for.
“There was a fat man with a big moustache and spectacles,” O’Gilroy said reflectively.
“That sounds like Cort,” Corinna said. The General screwed up his mouth nervously.
“We was talking to him at the dockside,” O’Gilroy went on. “Ye remember him, Matt? But ye must have seen him yeself, General.”
“He was much like Cort,” the General said huskily. “But he was not Cort.”
“Oh …” but Corinna had noted the effect her language could have on O’Gilroy and checked herself. “I did so want to see his photographs. He’s real keen, uses a big camera, not one of those little Kodaks, and he was doing some pictures of this Château.”
“I will make sure he sends you some pictures at Paris,” the General gabbled.
Corinna looked at her small gold wristwatch. “I’d best be getting on the road if we’re going to be at Rouen before dark.”
“Then we won’t have your company at – at the repas the General has promised us?” It was an impertinence to invite her to another man’s table, but his sadness wasn’t pretended. While the daughter of Reynard Sherring was around, nobody would do anything violent.
“’Fraid not. But I envy you, the General keeps a great table. Are you boys staying long?”
“Unfortunately no. We have to be in Paris tonight.”
“Maybe I’ll see you around there.” She turned to the General: “I took the liberty of asking your boys to load up my automobile.”
“But naturally. I will see you to your automobile which has no radiator – whatever that may be.”
“No, just in the wrong place.”
“But I am sure it would be better if it had none at all.”
Corinna gave an amused but despairing glance that happened to fall on O’Gilroy, who smiled nervously back. He could act the gentleman among other gentlemen, but hadn’t yet found the right pose and voice for ladies. In fact, he was giving a perfect imitation of a sex-shy Irish squire, and Ranklin was quite happy: who would dream of employing anyone so gauche as a spy?