by Gavin Lyall
Ranklin, who was prepared to be modest but not to welcome any help at it, clenched his teeth. “I just wonder if you could run through that evening for me?”
“Of course. We started off with a few jars at the Club here, then we said we’d like to try the dinner at the Ratsweinkeller, and Cross said he’d change and meet us there only he didn’t. Change, I mean. It seemed the laundry hadn’t brought back his dress shirts, so he was still wearing the Leander blazer. I must say it made him stand out rather, and the head waiter got a bit stuffy about it being an insult to the Kaiser – who wasn’t even in Kiel that night, as Cross told him – and wouldn’t have gone to that sort of place anyway; it had some jolly weird pictures on the walls. It was all a bit of a laugh. Anyway, we had a jolly good dinner and then – it was about eleven o’clock – Cross went off to the lavatory and didn’t come back. That was all, really.”
“Did you look for him?”
“Oh, yes. We thought he might have gone dizzy from the grape-juice so we went looking, but not a sign. So we toddled off, too, and next day we heard he’d been found dead, poor chap, so we steamed round to the Polizei and told them – well, what I’ve just told you.”
“Who did you speak to there?”
“A chappie called Lenz. Looks a bit of a bruiser, but almost a gentleman. I’ve seen him around the Club a couple of times.”
Lenz was getting very favourable reviews that evening. “Did Cross say anything about what else he might do that night? Mention anybody, anywhere?”
“Well – ” Kay hesitated. “I don’t know if we should have said this to the Polizei, but with Cross dead and it might not be an accident, you know, we told Lenz about a chap Cross had talked about at dinner. Dragan the Viper.”
Ranklin opened and then closed his mouth, and then said: “El Vipero?”
“That’s the chap. Sounds frightfully wicked, doesn’t he?”
“Did Cross say he’d met him?”
“Er, no, I don’t think so. Only that he was around, I think.”
“Did he tell you anything about this Dragan?”
“Just that he was all sorts of a bad hat. An assassin and so on.”
What the devil had Cross been up to? “And how did the police react?”
“Oh, absolutely fascinated. Lenz wrote down everything we said.”
Not in the report Ranklin had seen, he hadn’t. But perhaps it’s wiser not to mention villains you haven’t managed to catch.
“Did he mention the name Anya die Ringfrau as well?”
To Ranklin’s astonishment, Kay went a deep red. “No, no, I don’t suppose he knew anything about her. No reason at all.”
“Well, hold on, I don’t know anything, either – except the name.”
“Neither do I. I wouldn’t … it’s not … It was just something I heard.”
“What?”
Kay went on looking as if he were trapped in a steam bath. “She runs a house,” he muttered.
“A house? … Oh, of ill-fame. A brothel.”
“In Hamburg. Usually. A chap said.”
“She brings the circus to town for Kiel Week?” How very logical. Of course Kiel’s resident girls couldn’t cope with the influx of young yachtsmen and their healthy appetites. Whores from Hamburg were as inevitable as champagne salesmen from Reims. Indeed, interdependent.
“High-class girls?” he asked.
Kay barely nodded, being deeply fascinated by his own shoelaces. Ranklin tried to keep his round face straight. It was rare to find a young man embarrassed about visits to such houses; for subalterns in Army messes, it was just part of a night on the town. But Kay had the faintest trace of a Cornish accent; perhaps they were stricter – or less well provided for – down there. He changed the subject: “Did you mention Dragan to anybody else?”
Kay brightened. “I think so. I mean, he sounds a bit of a card, doesn’t he?”
After Kay had gone, Ranklin just sat. Homing yachtsmen clumped past him in seaboots, carrying bundies of clothing and picnic baskets and chattering loudly, but he just sat, drained. It wasn’t the effort of talking, he reckoned; he could make conversation all day and night. But then you didn’t care if you were listening to a liar, even a murderer, as long as the conversation flowed. It was the effort of weighing every word, even the feather-light ones of young Kay, for Real Truth, that wore you down. How on earth did Great Detectives keep it up? By keeping it fictional, he supposed sourly, and leaving fact to the Lenzes who could find all the Real Truth they wanted with one swift kick in the kidneys.
He yawned, then made a last effort and hauled himself across the road to find a motorboat out to Kachina. Already half the people waiting there were in evening dress and diamonds; the yachts were moored but the social race had barely begun.
Ushered into his cabin one deck below the dining room and Sherring’s suite, Ranklin found his bags already unpacked and his clothes hung in the closet. But he gave himself the luxury – and a luxury it was, after the hasty packing in Brussels and the very temporary night at the Club – of rearranging everything just so. He liked a clean, settled room, and could live as long as necessary in a dirty battlefield tent, but it was the in-between half-dirty half-tidy life that unsettled him.
Then he had a bath – in fresh water, he found, an exceptional luxury on a ship – wrapped himself in a dressing gown, rang for a steward and asked for “Gorman” to be sent up.
The steward said: “He’s taken a beating. Can’t you dress yourself for once?”
It was as if a gun had said: “No, thank you, I don’t want to be loaded and fired today.” Ranklin gaped, wondering if this were Bloody Mutiny or just the American way of doing things. He was, after all, on American “territory”.
“I can tie my own necktie,” he said coldly, “but I want to see how he is.”
“That’s okay then,” the steward said cheerfully. “Anything else you want?”
“Yes: two whisky-and-sodas, please.”
“Coming right up.”
O’Gilroy came in walking stiffly and lowered himself carefully into an upright chair. “I had a bath and it brought out all the bruises in me. But the doctor says it’s nothing more.”
Of course Kachina would have a doctor on board. “Did he say you could drink?”
“He’s Irish.” Again, of course, like almost every other ship’s doctor Ranklin had met. And they only prescribed abstinence as a last, baffled resort.
They drank. “Are they treating you well, below – what d’you say on a ship? Below decks?”
“Ah, they’re being new mothers to me, a poor Irish slave to an English milord, not knowing the English gentry for the kind generous folk they really are.”
“How difficult for you,” Ranklin said coolly.
O’Gilroy grinned and started rolling a cigarette. “Mrs Finn was saying ye’d done more than the lawyer fella to get me out. Thank ye.”
“Part of the job. But I think Reimers did more than either of us: he wants us running free to hang ourselves on a bigger charge. Have you any idea who denounced you?”
“I’m thinking it was the boyos from last night again. Had to be somebody knew what had happened to make up he’d seen something that didn’t.”
Ranklin nodded. “I learned a little more about Anya and her circus.”
O’Gilroy listened, smoke trickling from his nose. Then: “Yes, when ye’ve fancy women like that, ye’ve always got hard men to keep them and the customers in line. But what’s she got against us?”
Tired of saying “I just don’t know”. Ranklin shook his head. “It started when you bought those pictures in the pub. Somebody else must have been watching you besides the detective.”
“Seems like we marched into town with a flag and drum saying who we was.”
Ranklin decided it was his duty to do a little morale-building. “Well, we’re safe enough aboard here. Things’ll look better in the morning.”
O’Gilroy’s expression wasn’t convinced. “Did ye think ’twould be like t
his? – the whole job? Like always being on the run and wondering which of yer friends’ll sell ye to the police for the price of a drink?”
“I think I prefer a proper war,” Ranklin admitted.
“At least ye can shoot back.” A dressing gong rumbled in the corridor and O’Gilroy stubbed out the wisp of his cigarette. “Are ye going to the shebang aboard the liner?”
“I think so – if Mrs Finn does. It’s the sort of thing James Spencer would probably do. D’you want me to try and wangle you …?”
“No thank ye; I’ll stay home tonight.” He got up and flexed his shoulders cautiously, then went to peer at the one painting in the cabin. It was of a canoe on a forest stream, and so dark that Ranklin hadn’t at first realised it was a watercolour. “D’ye see how she’s done up the cabin from it? Clever, that.”
Only then did Ranklin see that the painting’s blue-green forest was repeated in the cabin’s curtains and carpet, the glimpse of a sunset sky in the pale gold wallpaper, the paddle blade by the elm furniture.
He finished his dressing bemused both by Corinna’s imaginative decorative touch and O’Gilroy’s ability to spot it. What else am I missing, he wondered uneasily? Oh well, I’m a better artillery commander than either of them. Only I’m not even allowed to be that, now.
31
The four-funnelled Victoria Luise had started life, Ranklin learned, as the Deutschland and fastest ship across the Atlantic, albeit shaking her passengers’ teeth loose with vibration. So she had been refitted with slower and smoother engines, fewer and less urgent passengers, renamed after the Kaiser’s favourite daughter, and sent cruising. And acting as host ship during Kiel Week.
Corinna dragged Ranklin straight onto the dance floor – perhaps, he thought, just to check up on his range of social graces. He was quite an adequate dancer, of course, certainly not a good one – that was for gigolos and, in their own barbaric way, Scotsmen. But he felt they must make a grotesque pair, with her towering over him, and was happy when she was ready to retire to the inevitable fruit punch.
It was odd to be in a ship so big and in water so still that it was only when the band and dancers paused and he could feel the rumble of the generators that he remembered they were afloat. Most of the uniforms were Navy – as Ranklin expected, the Prussian officer class had stayed away – and the women, while expensively dressed … well, it wasn’t Paris. I wonder if the Kaiser himself will drop in, he thought, then realised that the same half-exciting, half-sobering thought dominated the ballroom.
“Not the most lively crowd,” Corinna commented. She was using her height and a very simple ballgown of dark red to look stately – perhaps flying the American flag. Then she spoiled it by whispering: “How much d’you think it would take to bribe the band-leader to play a tango?”
“I don’t know just what the tango is …”
“It was invented in an Argentinian bordello.”
“What a remarkable depth of knowledge you do have. But I do know the Kaiser’s forbidden his officers to dance it.”
“I know. The Pope doesn’t like it, either.”
“You surprise me. But since we’re probably within earshot of the Kaiser, I’d suggest a bribe of not less than a lifetime job for the band aboard the Kachina. And pensions.”
“Nope,” she decided. “They aren’t good enough. Maybe they know a hootchie-kootchie though.”
“My ignorance of the world’s vulgarities is positively embarrassing. Where was that invented?”
“In some US bordello, I guess. Just ‘hootch’ means home-made liquor, from some Alaskan Indian tribe who were good at it.”
“You seem very knowledgeable about Red Indians. Were they your favourite subject at school?”
“Matter of fact, yes – kind of. It was in Switzerland and all the other girls were always telling me about how old their countries and families were, so I got hold of some books on pre-Columbian America to balance things up.”
So now he knew where her accented German came from: a Swiss finishing school. “You didn’t offer to demonstrate scalping on them?”
“I came close. Good evening,” she abruptly swung round to face a German Naval officer who had been not quite eavesdropping; it was Reimers, of course. “I saw you outside the police station.”
Reimers would far rather not have been seen on that occasion, but clicked his heels and bowed over her hand. “Mrs Finn – and Mr Spencer. Kapitanleutnant Reimers, at your service.”
“Delighted to meet you, Captain. I see you know James.”
“Indeed. But he had not told me you and he were buddies.”
Reimers’ Americanisms still startled Ranklin, who believed all foreigners should learn the King’s, not the President’s, English; Corinna seemed not to notice.
“Why, James,” she said, “haven’t you been boasting of our acquaintance?”
“Mea culpa. Somehow, we got stuck on less important matters.”
“And Mr Finn?” Reimers continued. “Is he in Kiel?”
Mr Finn was somebody Ranklin had wanted to ask about himself, but Corinna had never given him an opening.
“No, he’s back home in the States.”
Ranklin hoped Reimers would press for more information, but he just bowed and said: “May I ask you for this dance?”
Corinna turned pointedly to Ranklin, who should have been asked for his permission first. “If Mrs Finn isn’t too tired,” he said with automatic tact, then added: “and if she doesn’t mind anything so old-fashioned as a waltz.”
Corinna made a graceful scalping gesture with her fan as Reimers led her away. Watching her go, Ranklin glanced past her and seemed to catch the eyes of a squat middle-aged woman in a green gown. But she looked away immediately.
He left his unfinished punch – he mistrusted mixed drinks – and intercepted a passing glass of champagne, then looked round for conversation. He agreed with an Austrian that the champagne was fine and the international situation poor, and with an Italian Naval officer that both weather and champagne were fine – but all the time had the idea that the woman in green was watching him. Probably, he thought, she’s just interested in who Corinna’s with tonight.
The waltz ended and Reimers escorted Corinna back.
“Guess what?” she chirped. “The Captain knows America well; he was at their Washington Embassy.”
“Really?”
Reimers smiled but changed the subject. “And how is your investigation progressing, Mr Spencer?”
Ranklin shrugged hopelessly. “Oh, that. I’ve talked to everybody you suggested – and nothing. I’ll write a long letter to Cross, then …”
“But what about the strange bearer bond he was bearing?”
“The Landentwhatsit?” Ranklin remembered he didn’t know German that well. “We asked at the bank about it this afternoon – ” was Reimers surprised that Corinna had been included in that? “ – and just learned that the company failed long ago. There was a legal problem, the government got the land and the promoter killed himself.”
“I’ve got it!” Corinna lit up. “All these years, the promoter’s son broods on how his father was treated, ruined, killed. It gets to his mind. Then one night he meets your Lieutenant Cross and decides he’s one of the officials ruined his father, lures him to the lock and pushes him in. And leaves the bond as a sort of teaser clue.”
“For heaven’s sake,” Ranklin said. But Reimers was laughing aloud.
“I did say he was crazy,” Corinna defended.
“Wonderful!” Reimers was still laughing. “You drive Sherlock Holmes out of business. But – I hate to bring bad news – he had no son. Only a widow, to whom the government most kindly gave a job later. And the bank was also being kind, or maybe they forgot the real story, but it was a plain share swindle. A fraud. The guy found the Government was buying the land quietly, didn’t want it announced, so he cashed in on that by claiming he had the right to buy, and sold shares on that claim. The legal problem was if he hadn’t k
illed himself, he’d be in the hoosegow.”
“I think you’ve spoiled it,” Corinna pouted. “That’s dull. I prefer my version.”
“And so do I, dear lady, so do I. But my poor brain can take no more. Will you excuse me?” He bowed and retreated, still chuckling.
Corinna’s face did one of its lantern-slide changes. “Washington Embassy, my ass. He knows the States, but he didn’t pick up that lingo at diplomatic parties. How long’s he been a Navy officer?”
“To reach that rank, twenty years.”
“Horse shit. Navy officers – any country’s – have better manners.”
“You mean their language in mixed company?”
“They’re diplomats, much more than Army ones. Don’t look stuffy: they’re trained for it. They spend half their time in foreign ports at receptions and parties and dances. Whatever he was doing in the States it wasn’t Navy officering.” She glanced at Ranklin. “You don’t seem too surprised.”
“I’m pretty sure he’s counter-intelligence.” Gunther had said something about Reimers being “Steinhauer strutting in Naval uniform”, hadn’t he? Which meant that, whoever Reimers was, he was important enough for their Navy to let him play at being a fairly senior officer.
“Ah,” Corinna said. “He was trying to get me to talk about you. Don’t worry: I said we’d met in Paris. You haven’t congratulated me on my detective stories.”
“I’m supposed to be taking Cross’s death seriously. Well, at least we found out that the late company promoter wasn’t quite the poor innocent he seemed.”
She cocked her head on one side and gave him an odd little smile. “Did we? I thought we heard a government man say the Government did nothing wrong – in fact, even gave a job to the widow of a con man to keep her from starving. It couldn’t be to keep her from talking, now could it? Shall we circulate among the guests?”
Half an hour later, Ranklin was pushing scraps of meat around his plate in the supper room – it was too soon after dinner to be eating again – and half listening to the wife of a director of the Norddeutscher-Lloyd shipping line. Corinna was listening, apparently wholeheartedly, to the Herr Direktor himself. Words like “Hapag”, “Immco”, “Cunard” and “Morgan Trust” seeped across the table.