by Gavin Lyall
The only risk, he reckoned, was that the Vienna Embassy would have an unreadable telegram, would complain to the Foreign Office, who would suspect the Bureau and scream that their diplomatic virginity was being threatened. But that was just too bad: if the Commander didn’t want trouble with the Foreign Office, he shouldn’t send accountants to insult his agents’ financial probity.
He picked up a short list of questions. “You said you wanted the money in cash, either pounds or francs?”
“Yes.”
“And that we were leaving next week and you wanted it prompter?”
O’Gilroy nodded.
“That if they didn’t pay, somebody else might?”
“Ah, they gave me a lecture on how it would ruin the value of the code if word of it got about, and I took a long time to understand what they meant by that.” Ranklin’s sympathy was entirely with the Austrian Attaché; O’Gilroy being stupid was a top-of-the-bill performance.
“But ye’re still sure,” O’Gilroy added, “ye don’t want me to try it on the Germans as well?”
“No need to take the risk. The Austrians are the ones. After the Redl affair they want, they need, an Intelligence success – just for their own self-esteem. And,” he ticked off the last question, “did they try to follow you?”
“Oh yes. But the Rue de Varenne’s a straight long street and they daren’t keep close, and I lost them in that tangle around the Rue du Bac and the Boulevard.”
If O’Gilroy said the followers had been lost, they were lost. But what now impressed Ranklin more was the way O’Gilroy had picked up the geography of Paris; he mispronounced the street names wildly but walked them confidently. And he could sense the mood of a district the way a gnarled old countryman could smell a change in the weather. The man was just a natural townee, which wasn’t much of a compliment in Ranklin’s old circle, but now …
He rolled the list of questions into a spill, lit it and lit his pipe from it. “Well, in a few days,” he puffed contentedly, “solvency should stare us in the face. And you need never put that foul stuff on your hair again.”
“And me thinking to lend ye half a pint of it the next time ye was stepping out with Mrs Finn.”
Ranklin shut his eyes and shuddered delicately.
There was nothing new or brash about the office of the House of Sherring in the Boulevard des Capucines. It had the quiet solid look of an institution that had been there a long time, as, in terms of the financial world, it had. Sherring’s father had been of that generation of American financiers who had learnt the business in Europe, steering the old money into the railroads and iron mines of America, long before they reversed the flow to finance Europe’s wars.
Puzzled why he had been summoned there, Ranklin was further surprised to find Temple, from the American Embassy, already drinking coffee in the dark-panelled private office. He wore a fawn summer suit and bright necktie, but his thin bespectacled face looked diplomatically sombre enough.
Sherring shook hands, offered coffee, and got straight down to business. “I got a telegram from Corinna. I won’t bother showing it to you, you wouldn’t either of you understand it, but translated and reading between the lines and so on, she’s worried about Professor Hornbeam. Seems like he’s getting the à la carte treatment, belle of the ball, and Corinna thinks they’re up to something.”
“Excuse me, sir,” Temple said, “but who is ‘they’?”
Ranklin was also thinking of the many levels of “they” in Vienna.
Sherring flipped through the telegram – several pages long – and frowned. “Doesn’t rightly say, just big names in the court and government. And the Professor is always getting asked for legal opinions, and she’s suspicious of the motives.”
“It could be just flattery,” Temple suggested. “Viennese society usually says more than it means.”
“Sure, but Corinna’s no damn fool. If she says there’s something to worry about, I’d back her.”
Nobody knew what to say next. Ranklin was watching Sherring and wondering why he looked American. In fact, of course, he didn’t: he looked like the bosun of a tramp steamer dressed in banker’s clothing. Perhaps it was that in Europe such a man could never have become an international banker, never been accepted by financial families, well-bred (in their own way, his county blood added) through generations of handling and mishandling big money. They would never have shed their jackets on the wannest of days, nor sat lounging back with thumbs jammed in their waistcoat pockets.
“Well?” Sherring said.
Temple coughed and said carefully: “If she feels an American citizen is being tempted to make statements that could embarrass us, then our Embassy in Vienna could …”
“She says our Embassy is …” Sherring reached for the telegram again to get the exact words, then decided they were too exact. “She isn’t so impressed,” he concluded.
Temple smiled lopsidedly. “If this is about possible Austrian intervention in Serbia – as I believe Mr Ranklin feared when we met at Hornbeam’s talk here – I don’t really believe Austria is going to start a war just because an American lawyer says it’s okay to do so.”
“No,” Sherring admitted, “but …”
Temple went on: “If they do go to war, sure they’ll use every justification they can get a hold of. Nations always do. But I’m just as sure that no American Foreign Service officer is going to try and deprive Hornbeam of his First Amendment right to speak his mind. And I’d guess that Hornbeam, as a lawyer and Republican both, knows that also.”
Sherring looked at him expressionlessly, which meant his face was just normally craggy and serious. “Okay, son. D’you want to be excused school?”
Temple stood up. “I think I’d better be, sir, if this conversation is going to continue.”
When he had ushered Temple out, Sherring walked carefully back towards Ranklin. Like many tall, heavy men he had a delicate, almost tiptoe, walk.
“D’you still think like you did at Kiel?” he asked. “About what would happen if Austria charged into Serbia?”
“Yes.”
“Would you go there to help Corinna figure out what’s going on?”
Ranklin swallowed. “I – I’d like to. Tell me, though: what’s your interest in this?”
“Finding out what’s going to happen before anybody else,” Sherring said promptly. “And keeping it to myself as long as I can. We might be in the same line of business.” He allowed himself a little bleak smile. “Corinna wants you to meet them in Budapest – they’ll have moved on from Vienna by the time you could get there. Seems he’s giving the same lecture in both places.”
Vienna tried – at least in unimportant matters – to treat the capital of Hungary as an equal.
“We’ll pay all your expenses,” Sherring went on, “both you and your Irish whatever-he-is. Okay? And would you like a drink?”
“It’s rather early for me,” Ranklin said. “But yes, I would.”
He had expected a servant with a silver tray. Instead, Sherring simply opened a mahogany cabinet and started pouring; perhaps he valued his time and unbroken privacy more than any display of stature.
When they were settled again, Sherring said: “It’s still the war season, by the reckoning you used in Kiel. D’you think it’ll happen this time around?”
“You don’t need me to tell you that Europe’s littered with heaps of loose gunpowder and dry tinder, the Balkans particularly, even with a peace conference starting in Bucharest. But whether somebody’s going to drop a lighted match, accidentally or on purpose …” He shrugged. “Perhaps I’ll have a better idea after Budapest, but only perhaps.”
“Uh-huh. If it happens, d’you figure it for a long war?”
Everybody who talked about war talked of a short one, but perhaps those who thought otherwise kept their pessimism quiet. And militarily, Ranklin had no idea: a war on the scale he foresaw hadn’t happened in Europe since the days of the Brown Bess musket and wooden men-o’-w
ar. He shook his head helplessly.
“If you get yourselves a war,” Sherring said slowly, “it’s going to be different. I don’t just mean your new dreadnoughts and big guns. I mean it won’t just be about shifting frontiers: it’s going to be about shifting ideas, too. We had ourselves a war about ideas just fifty years back – like in most things, we’re ahead of you here in Europe.” He smiled thinly. “I was still just a boy when it was over, and my father took me on a trip through the South, to see what business was left. There wasn’t much of anything left. Except hating, and that’s still there.
“You get yourselves into a war like that and Europe’s going to end up different. How different, I don’t know, but …” He looked at Ranklin in an odd, reflective way. “But maybe you’ll be lucky and not live to see it, not in your job. Whatever,” he added politely, “that is.”
Ranklin took great care with his cablegram to the Bureau, and it took them twenty-four hours to reply:
APPROVE INVESTIGATE BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES BUDAPEST STOP LETTER OF CREDIT AWAITS AT BANK STOP DO NOT REPEAT NOT TRAVEL ORIENT EXPRESS OR STAY EXPENSIVE HOTEL ENDS UNCLE CHARLIE.
“Did ye mention that Mr Sherring was paying for it all anyhow?” O’Gilroy asked.
“In the end, no. I felt it would make my cablegram too expensive if I explained.”
“That accountant would be proud of ye.”
“Still, Uncle Charlie is going to expect a full report, and some new stuff, from all this. But with the Sherring connection, we should meet some interesting people.”
“We play that up, do we?”
“It’s both our disguise and our opportunity; we’re Sherring minions now. Don’t talk of money in less than millions – unless somebody’s trying to cheat you out of a halfpenny.”
But it was the Austro-Hungarian Embassy that nearly caused the real hold-up. Reluctant as any government institution anywhere to hand out money, it didn’t pay for the code – just over £700 – until the afternoon of the day they were due to leave. That left no time to deposit the cash in the small, obscure bank Ranklin had chosen in Versailles. While he wasn’t too concerned about carrying the money to Budapest, and could telegraph it to the account from there, he would have liked to leave the code-book in a deposit box. He thought of simply destroying it, but that would have to be done very thoroughly and there were no hotel-room fires in July. So rather than try to hide it in their rooms, he simply took it along.
He wouldn’t actually be breaking any law, he reflected in the taxi taking them to the Gare de l’Est, even if the Austro-Hungarian officials found it on him. He would simply be followed every waking minute by twenty men in cheap boots and blank expressions.
40
Until he became a spy, O’Gilroy had never worn evening dress. He now accepted it as just another part of his disguise, but the idea of dressing for dinner on a train, even the Orient Express, struck him as going a bit far. It was Ranklin who insisted; the Wagons-Lits staff could hardly make such a rule when so many of their passengers were Orientals who had their own styles of finery, though they could certainly make anybody in travelling tweeds feel out of place.
But after a few minutes, he had to admit, to himself only, that Ranklin had been right. With the orange glow of the gas lamps deepening the colour of his champagne, it was nice to feel he belonged in such company, that it would have been incomplete without him. And even nicer to feel that the bad-tempered Turk with a voice like a parrot belonged less. But what could you expect? Bloody foreigner.
“Hors-d’oeuvre?” Ranklin was suggesting. “Then I’m having the Chateaubriand with Béarnaise – would you prefer the sole and stay with champagne throughout?”
“Ah, why not?” O’Gilroy said, surprising even himself with the ultimate luxury of not having to choose his luxuries. He finished his glass and waited – not long – for somebody to refill it.
Ranklin smiled, a little enviously and only out of the window at the twilit hills beyond the Marne. For him it had been just lifting the knife at his place setting, the remembered weight of solid silver that had brought back the mess nights at Woolwich and other tables of the Regiment where the lamplight had glinted on the trophies of old campaigns and he had once belonged. At least O’Gilroy knew just what had got him here: money. It had taken Ranklin twenty years to learn that. Never rich, yet never wanting for cash, he hadn’t realised that those mess nights, the cheery outings in London and Ascot, the very comradeship itself, had all been founded on money. And when it went, they went. Nobody had been unkind, but they no longer looked him in the eye, didn’t know what to talk about. It was over.
He woke up to find the waiter asking for their order. He gave it, then pulled his hand away from his pocket where, he realised, he had been clutching and fingering the gold coins.
“It doesn’t last,” he said. But of course that was so obvious to O’Gilroy that he misunderstood.
“Are ye thinking there’ll be a train smash?”
“No, no – though they’ve had a few in the past. And I dare say some close calls when the King of Bulgaria insisted on driving.”
“He didn’t that?”
“Why not? It was going through his country …” And he chattered on with legends about the train as they swayed east towards night and the German frontier. “… and did you know – I should have mentioned this earlier, of course – that if you felt lonely, the conductor could have telegraphed ahead from one station to have a young lady waiting at the next to see you through the night?”
He thought he caught a flash of interest in O’Gilroy’s eyes before he decided to be shocked instead. “Ye never could.”
“Look around you. D’you think some of these gentlemen wouldn’t want such a thing from time to time? Trains like this exist to supply wants. It would cost you something for the, er, ride in both senses, and I’m sure the conductor would expect more than the telegraph costs. Be cheaper if you could find a duchess escaping from her mad husband on their honeymoon trip …”
“Captain!”
“I swear it. I heard it from …”
They awoke in the bright picture-postcard scenery of South Germany, breakfasted, and settled down for a smoke in the armchairs in the salon half of the dining car. Ranklin found a newspaper which had come aboard at an earlier stop and translated the news of the Balkans to O’Gilroy. The fighting had now officially stopped; Bulgaria, which had attacked Greece and Serbia, having lost not only to them but to Romania and Turkey who were happy to rob a man when he’s down. Peace talks were going on in the Romanian capital of Bucharest much to the dismay of Austria-Hungary, which would rather be celebrating a Bulgarian victory and lording it over the peace conference.
He tried to explain, without pretending to understand all the nuances, the “Dual Monarchy”: the frigid marriage of Austria and Hungary, with their forcibly adopted brood of Bohemia, Galicia, Croatia, Bosnia and all the others, with no common bond of race, religion or language.
“What seems to hold them together is the Army – and the Emperor. Don’t refer to him as that in Budapest, by the way: he’s Emperor of Austria but King of Hungary … But now with Serbia – they’re Slavs – winning a string of victories, the Slavs inside the Monarchy are getting restless. There’s a Pan-Slav movement, talk of a Greater Serbia reaching to the Adriatic coast. That’s another thing that worries the Monarchy: finding its fleet bottled up in the ports up the coast. The Army’s been mobilised for months, ready to march into Serbia.”
“Sounds like they’d be swallowing a live snake to stop it biting ’em on the outside.”
“And that’s only the beginning. Russia will probably back Serbia: she’s been egging them on. After that, the whole European house of cards could fall in.”
“In a war, would ye go back to the Gunners?”
“It won’t be my decision but I hope so.” His mind drifted on ahead of the train, south to the shattered railway station outside Salonika. “If it lasts more than a couple of months, it’ll be
a gunners’ war, not a spies’ one.”
“Mebbe Mrs Finn was right and it’s our war now.”
But a dark puzzled look had come over Ranklin’s boyish face and O’Gilroy guessed he was trying to see too far into the future. For himself, he was content in the present: a comfortable armchair, the unreeling scenery outside and the promise of a Munich beer when they passed through that city.
*
They finished lunch just as the train pulled out of Salzburg and hurried back to reclaim their armchairs and order coffee. As O’Gilroy was turning to sit down, the door just behind him banged open and a stout solid man in a high-buttoned dark suit marched in and seemed about to march straight on through O’Gilroy. Then a uniformed arm reached past the marcher and pitched O’Gilroy aside among the chairs. Ranklin stepped back, recognising the blunt face, straight hairline and wide-winged moustache, bowed his head and murmured: “Your Royal Highness.” The four men, two in Army uniform, tramped past into the dining area.
O’Gilroy bounced up like a boxer who has been foully tripped. “Jayzus and Mary! I’ll have the guts out of – ”
Ranklin reached up to lay a restraining hand on his chest. “I don’t think you’ve met the Archduke Franz Ferdinand before, have you? Well, you’ve met him now. Sit down and have a cognac.”
O’Gilroy let himself be pushed, more gently this time, into a chair, and sat there fizzing like an unexploded shell. Ranklin filled the time until their coffee and cognacs arrived by lighting, then relighting, his pipe; it was an unfamiliar French tobacco and he had packed it too loosely.
When O’Gilroy had gulped half his brandy and sipped most of the rest, he had calmed down enough to say: “So that fat dogrobber’s the Emperor’s son, ye say?”
“No, his nephew, but still the next Emperor. Franz Josef’s son committed suicide nearly fifteen years ago (you can take your pick of stories about that one). Then the Empress got murdered a year later. When you think of it, the old boy’s had a tough row to hoe. And people respect him: the old-fashioned virtues.”