by Gavin Lyall
The Frau Direktor had the latest gossip on the maiden voyage of Hamburg-Amerika’s new Imperator. “One doesn’t like to say it whilst supping on board one of Dr Ballin’s own vessels, but surely it is a scandal that the biggest ship in the world, named for the All-Highest, should roll like that in June weather. Just think of the poor passengers in winter,” she gloated.
“Dreadful,” Ranklin murmured, listening to Corinna saying: “Naturally, Herr Direktor, I understand none of this, but I’m sure my father …”
“If only I could speak to him privately …”
“But he’s doing nothing right now. Why don’t I take you over to the Kachina to have a nice quiet chat with him? I’m sure he’d be delighted. It would be no problem at all.”
Nor was it. Don Byrd appeared and vanished after one quick order, the Frau Direktor was handed over to the care of the other directors and their wives – and that left Ranklin.
“You’ll manage, won’t you James? If the launch isn’t at the gangway, they’ll signal for it.”
“Naturally, I understand none of this …”
“But we all have our little secrets, don’t we?” With just a hint of a tomahawk in her smile.
And a few minutes ago, he thought ruefully, I believed I was at the centre of any intrigue going on here. Back to the kindergarten.
In fact, he found himself in the restfully dim smoking-room with a weak whisky-and-soda in one hand, tapping an empty pipe against his teeth with the other. And exhausted. Part of it was the day, part Corinna. She was … well, he hadn’t known a girl, a woman, like her before. Their joking had a depth to it, unlike the flirtatious banter he played as mechanically as polite tennis with the Englishwomen of his circle. Sorry, his late circle. Perhaps because it was born of that dangerous night at the Château. A battle was the time for joking; nobody wanted to make it more serious.
But there was more to it than that. It was the way she thought, the things she thought and knew, that opened his mind’s eye wider than he found comfortable. And he felt it wasn’t just her being American; it would be easy to accept, and dismiss, that. It was her; she was … different.
And that was a cowardly backing-off thought. But, he pleaded to himself, it’s been a long hard day.
So then Don Byrd had to appear beside him, smiling and offering a light for his cigarette – he had pocketed his pipe, not feeling settled enough to enjoy it.
“The guy who laid evidence against Gorman: he gave his name as Heinie Glass, address at a guest-house in the Old Town. But somebody went in this afternoon and paid the account, and Herr Glass hasn’t been seen again. In fact, he paid the account for two others as well, who’d gotten themselves hurt last night, maybe in a fight. It could be they’ve all three left town.”
“Thank you. And the man who paid their bills?”
“It’s my guess that he paid more than just the account, because nobody can recall how he looked at all.”
“I see.”
“My pleasure.” Byrd had a sharp face, bright dark eyes and sleeked-back hair, the face of an eagle except with a ready smile. But he didn’t smile as he went on: “There’s a certain lady wants to meet with you – she knows your name – the Gräfin von Szillert. I’ve asked around and it seems she isn’t noble herself, in fact she was a trapeze artiste in a circus when she met up with the Graf. He’s dead now. However …”
“Is her Christian name Anya?”
“That’s right. However,” and Byrd gave him an intense stare, “you don’t have to meet with her if you don’t feel that a guest of Mr Sherring and Mrs Finn should meet with her.”
Either Byrd was being polite rudely, or rude politely, probably he’d had a university education. Ranklin considered. “How does she come to be invited here?”
“She knows a lot of influential men in Hamburg, one way or another.”
“What’s the other way?”
“I don’t know,” Byrd said grimly.
“Well, I don’t really think I’ll do Mrs Finn or Mr Sherring too much harm just by saying Good Evening to the lady.”
Byrd didn’t agree, but looking like an eagle looking stoical, he led the way.
By now Ranklin wasn’t surprised to find that Anya was the squat woman in green. She sat, a tasselled black shawl thrown round her heavy shoulders, at a small table in the corner of the cards room, playing patience and watched by a bulky young man with a mournful moustache in rather too elegant evening dress. Her watchdog, Ranklin assumed.
Byrd introduced Ranklin, who took her white-gloved hand, bowed over it and murmured: “Gräfin.” The hand inside the glove was wide and firm.
“Sit down,” she growled, nodding dismissively to Byrd. “James Spencer,” she said, but to herself, tasting the name. Then: “D’you want another drink?” Her voice was deep, her accent perhaps Slav.
“No, thank you.” Ranklin put his half-empty glass on the table and waited. The other tables in the room were busy with whist or bridge, and a round table in the middle was even busier with a poker school. It seemed as if many guests were behaving just as if they were on a voyage – but that was what the ship was equipped for; if they didn’t go ashore, what else could they do?
“How do you know the daughter of Reynard Sherring?” Anya asked finally.
“We met.”
When he didn’t say any more, she glanced up from her cards for a moment. Her face was as squat and muscular as her body, with pronounced cheekbones and dark, still eyes. Not quite a peasant race and even further from being a stupid one. She looked back at her cards and growled: “Where’s Dragan?”
“Oh, Lord – I don’t know.”
She picked up a glass of ice tinged with the dregs of some green liqueur. Ranklin wondered if she drank it just for the colour, since she wore emerald earrings, too. She cracked a piece of ice loudly between her teeth and said: “I know you, I knew Lieutenant Cross. The good honest sporting country gentlemen,” she spat the word, “playing at the sport of spying. Steinhauer knows you. Even Hauptmann Lenz by now. To save your own neck and Europe’s – where is Dragan the Viper?”
“In the Captain’s cabin playing backgammon with Santa the Claus and Rumpel the Stiltskin.”
She slammed the glass down on the table. “They will put you in prison a thousand years and then shoot you.” Her voice crackled like a loose power wire. “Only I will have you shot first, before you destroy Europe.”
Ranklin nodded, as if this were interesting but irrelevant. “Have you met Dragan?”
“No. But I know him, I know his breed. Better than you do. Why?”
“I’m just collecting people who haven’t met him, that’s all. I feel we have something in common.”
“Do nothing until you hear from your Department,” she said. She moved two of her cards. “Go away.”
Ranklin stayed put. “So far, madam, you have had your men attack my servant and get him imprisoned. The only result is that you’ve had to send three men back to Hamburg, two of them shop-soiled. And got Hauptmann Lenz angry, of course.”
“Lenz does not worry me. But do you think your Reynard Sherring and his skyscraper daughter will protect you when they can prove what you are? Now go away.”
“Why should I need their protection, when you seem to believe I have much better?”
The watchdog stood up, then leant stiffly forward from the hips to whisper mournfully: “The Gräfin said to go away.”
Ranklin stood and smiled up at him – he was several inches taller. “And you won’t even recognise Dragan when he catches you.”
The watchdog’s eyes widened suddenly, and Ranklin went away smiling. Whoever and wherever you are, Dragan, you’ve at last done me a bit of good as well as harm, he thought.
Byrd, who had been watching play at the poker table, fell into step beside him.
“I don’t think I disgraced the House of Sherring,” Ranklin said.
“I’m sure you did your best,” Don Byrd said coolly. “Did the lady …?”
“She really just wanted to tell me to go away.”
In that, Byrd was obviously on the Gräfin Anya’s side, but he said nothing. Ranklin walked on thoughtfully.
Come on, he thought to the brain that was slumped against the back of his skull with its eyes closed; come on, one last stab at Great Deduction, and I’ll leave you alone until morning.
He was back in the slow-paced half-dark of the smoking room, among groups of elderly men recalling past yachting triumphs – as he could hear – or business adventures, which he could only guess at. He slumped into a horseshoe-back leather chair and tried to think logically.
She had talked of Reimers as ‘Steinhauer’, just as Gunther had, and of the ‘Department’ – presumably our Naval Intelligence: she thinks I belong there, like Cross. So she’s clearly one of us (but Good God! – what company “us” is turning out to be). I’ve heard of traditional links between high-class brothels and espionage – she probably buys official tolerance with gossip her girls have picked up horizontally, and if they suspect (as I do) that she’s working for the Russians, she’s convinced them that she’s working for the Revolution against the Czar.
But why is she so worried about what Dragan could get up to? “Destroying Europe” sounds a pretty big –
“So now you have met Anya die Ringfrau?” Gunther’s slow deep voice gave everything he said an extra importance, as if it were carefully gold-lettered on wood.
“Yes. She wants me to go away.”
“It is good advice. But of course you will not take it. It is your duty to stay. That is most correct. You have been trained to do what you are told to do, report what you are sent to find. I do not criticise that, I admire it. But, as you are finding, the world is not so simple when one does not wear uniform. And when there is not always someone to turn to for orders.”
Obviously Gunther’s soldiering had been largely confined to the parade ground. But Ranklin was learning that an attitude of agreement and ignorance was more useful than trying to seem a know-all. So he asked: “Do you know what Reimers/Steinhauer was doing in America?”
Gunther paused whilst he got his cigar well alight, then: “He was a detective for Pinkerton’s.”
“For …?”
“Their most famous private detectives. President Lincoln hired them to be his secret service in the war of the states.”
That made sense – and explained Reimers’ American vocabulary. And the fact that Gunther hadn’t tried to sell the information told him something, too. He waited.
Gunther took a deep satisfied puff at the cigar. “You find, I know, that not all intelligence is in neat parcels like – shall we say – a code-book. You must dig and throw away many things your Bureau does not want to know, would order you not to waste time in telling them. And you will think: but why throw this away? It does not matter to the Bureau, but it must concern some person. So, I will give it to that person. I will make him my friend. Perhaps he gives me money, perhaps he gives me intelligence that my Bureau wants – perhaps not that day, but one day, because he is now my friend. So by doing this, I am working for the Bureau as it wants.”
“For example?”
“Ah, yes: an example.” Gunther looked critically at the lit end of his cigar. “Let us think of Immco and the Morgan Trust …”
32
With the Norddeutscher-Lloyd director and her father settled over the brandy and cigars, Corinna changed into tennis shoes, threw a wrap around her shoulders and climbed to the open main deck. The harbour around her was a blaze of light and sound, half a dozen gramophones and at least one band ashore competing with the Victoria Luise’s dance music, and all with the hive-like buzz of ships’ generators. But gradually she felt she was at the still, quiet centre of things, unobserved.
Except by Jake the chief steward. “Is there anything I can bring you, Mrs Finn?”
“No, thanks, Jake – yes: send up Gorman with a white wine and seltzer. And his own drink if he’s got one.” And that’ll add to the gossip down below, she thought. But when you took on servants, you gave up privacy; she had known no other adult life.
O’Gilroy appeared beside her with both hands full. “Sorry, ma’am, I spilt some of it, not being used to climbing around things that roll about.”
“Rolling?” she said indignantly. “You wouldn’t know you were on a ship.”
O’Gilroy muttered something.
She grinned. “You just don’t like ships. Have you ever done any long voyages?”
“Only to the War. South Africa,” he added, since most foreigners didn’t seem to know where the war had been.
She sipped at her glass, leaning on the rail while he stood stiffly beside her. “Relax. Light a cigarette if you want to. Was Matt – Captain Ranklin – in that war?”
“Where I met him.” Out of deference to her he lit a ready-made cigarette – “tailor-made” as the crew called them – rather than his hand-rolled version. “I was wounded and left behind by my reg’ment – lucky, it turned out, with them most soon dead or captured – and his section picked me up, and when I was mended and without a reg’ment, he recruited me as temp’ry gunner. Shut up in Ladysmith we was by then.”
“Was he a good officer? – honestly?”
O’Gilroy reflected, draped on the rail like an abandoned piece of rope. “He was younger then, o’course, but I’d say yes. Explained something and left ye to get on with it. The Gunners was more like that – and ’twas the first chancst I’d had to work with machinery. Tried to transfer after the war, but I didn’t have the trade qualification.”
“But you do have the qualification to be a secret agent.”
O’Gilroy made a complicated but wordless noise.
“I hadn’t known you’d been down in the Balkans last winter, observing on that war. He was giving Pop – ”
“We wasn’t.”
“Oh?” She was surprised at her own disappointment; her image of Ranklin, pale and disjointed though it was, hadn’t included heroising himself. She had felt an odd sort of bond with him, oblique to the normal planes of friendship, in knowing almost from the start a vital secret of his life, almost before she knew anything of his public self. In fact, the public self seemed mostly to be “James Spencer” facades. But why pretend to her?
“I wasn’t there and he wasn’t observing,” O’Gilroy went on. “He was fighting for the Greek Army, second-in-command of an artillery brigade. Helped capture some city there.”
“Salonika?”
“Sounds like it.”
“And this was all part of your games?”
“No, no, ’twas before he got into all this. He was still in the British Army, only he wasn’t then, if ye get my meaning.”
“If you weren’t Irish I’d say that was very Irish. No, I don’t get you.”
O’Gilroy considered, pitching his cigarette end over the side and then watching it burst in sparks on the hull below.
Corinna said: “And you haven’t the qualifications to be a sailor, either. Throw things over the lee side. What did you mean?”
“He’d resigned the Army. They hauled him back and made him …”, he shrugged, “… a spy”
“Made him? I thought that was one thing you had to volunteer for.”
In the man-made starlight of the harbour she could see only one half of O’Gilroy’s cynical smile at the Army meaning of “volunteer”.
“But it sounds,” she persisted, “well, adventurous, exciting …”
“And work for a gentleman? He’d choose his big guns any day.”
“Then why did he take it on?”
“I wouldn’t be knowing, ma’am, but …” He felt he was being disloyal to Ranklin, yet at the same time defending him. “I can tell ye one thing: he’s broke.”
“Broke? Busted? Bankrupt?”
“Call it what ye like. Just no money, not like he used to have.”
She stared down at the twinkling water, then asked quietly: “Did he tell you this?”
Now she could see why buying the blazer and new shoes hadn’t been the cheerful spree she had planned. She had never thought of Ranklin being rich, not by her own family’s terms, just as one of those English gentlemen whose long-owned land always gave them enough for their own ideas of comfort, their depressingly limited ambitions, their boringly formal pleasures – and the right clothes. She had no quarrel with the Englishman’s sense of dress, nor with Ranklin’s.
“It can only be recent, then,” she mused. “D’you know what happened?”
“No … but there was talk of his older brother doing some fool things with shares and stocks – and then shooting himself cleaning a gun. In a family that would be learning guns in the cradle.”
“Oh Lord, how conventional the English are. Why didn’t he go farm sheep in Australia? I suppose sheep cost more than cartridges. But how did this make Matt a secret agent?”
“Spy. He says we’re spies and be damned to it.”
She grinned. Ranklin was determined to wear his secret crown of thorns with style. “D’you get paid more as a spy, then?”
“I wouldn’t be knowing – but the Army doesn’t like officers to be broke.”
If that meant bankrupt, she could understand it: an officer should be beholden only to his job, not to his creditors. Her father was creditor to too many politicians for her not to know what influence that could give.
“And how did you come to team up with Matt again? By chance, or did he recruit you?”
“That’s right. He recruited me – by chance.”
“Clear as an Irish bog. Why did you let yourself be recruited?”