Spy’s Honour

by Gavin Lyall

  Within moments of the mâitre d’hotel passing on his request the room was an uproar of debate about where Hazay was last seen or might now be; within minutes Ranklin was speaking to him (where, he never knew) by telephone.

  “I know of the place you must go,” Hazay assured him. “The Panna Tavern.”

  “Splendid; would you care to join us?” Ranklin was eager to share the load of entertaining Lucy. “With Mr Sherring paying, of course.”

  “I begin to like your millionaire. Thank you, it is most kind. The Tavern is on Castle Hill, you go past …”

  Ranklin and O’Gilroy got back to Margaret Island by a steam ferry that zigzagged from bank to bank just as the Kiel harbour ferries had done. Despite the river’s width, they were butting against a fierce current – five knots, O’Gilroy estimated – and Ranklin noticed that the few rowing boats crept along in the shelter of the banks and jetties. How on earth had they managed in the days of sail?

  The ferry put them down on a jetty only a brief walk through the trees from the hotel. There Ranklin announced they were back, in case anybody wanted them, then went outside again and flopped at a café table, already exhausted by the sun and the prospect of the evening.

  O’Gilroy had managed to order lemon tea and cream cakes. “Lot of old folk around,” he commented.

  “Probably taking the cure.” Ranklin nodded towards the upstream tip of the island: “The building over there is a hot springs bath-house; Budapest’s full of them. And the villas on the other side are probably mostly nursing homes.”

  “What does it cure?” O’Gilroy asked uneasily, having a primitive fear of illness.

  “Your cash surplus.” Ranklin’s prejudices were more modern.

  O’Gilroy smiled and relaxed. Hornbeam and the Baroness Schramm came out of the hotel, chattering like old friends, and sat at a nearby table.

  “Good afternoon,” Hornbeam called cheerily, at peace with the world. “Are you finding any time for sight-seeing?”

  “Fitting it into the cracks, sir,” Ranklin the diligent businessman called back, and smiled at the Baroness. But whoever she was at peace with, it wasn’t him.

  “Old biddy,” O’Gilroy muttered. He sipped his tea. “So what’ve we learnt to keep Uncle Charlie happy?”

  “Not much,” Ranklin admitted. “The Redl case is still making news, people are hoarding gold; I wonder if the price of horses has gone up? – that’s the other sign of a belief in war. No, it’s the Consulate’s job to report things like that. Perhaps you’ll turn up something interesting in Hornbeam’s papers tonight.” Although privately he doubted it. “Perhaps we should be taking the business side and the Sherring link more seriously; such people have already got the international links and quick communications that the Bureau needs. Big money carves deep and secret rivers.”

  “I’m thinking ye mean ‘canals’, but ‘rivers’ is more of poetry.” O’Gilroy was secretly amused at seeing the reluctant spy getting involved in how the Bureau was run.

  “You know what I mean.” Ranklin was annoyed at himself for the flowery phrase. “My God, if we had the spy service people like the Rothschilds must have …”

  The hotel wasn’t really of millionaire standard and had probably been surprised at having such distinguished Americans thrust upon it. But the result was one that not even millionaires can count on buying: it tried. It had clearly stripped its unused rooms to cram their suites and the public rooms with the best furniture, polished its silver and bribed its staff until one shone and the other tried to.

  In the evening, the guests naturally gathered in the lobby with its verandah and the cool, if not quite sanitary, wind that filtered through the trees from the river.

  “For Heaven’s sake,” Ranklin was imploring Corinna, “don’t let Lucy overdress. It won’t be that sort of place. I’m going in a lounge suit.”

  “Is this the end of the empire? I thought Englishmen dressed for dinner in the jungle.”

  “If we were only going to meet monkeys, I wouldn’t be bothered.”

  O’Gilroy wandered out onto the verandah to join them, a waiter at his heels like an eager dog. Ranklin took the opportunity to order another whisky.

  “You’d better take my automobile,” Corinna said disapprovingly. “You won’t be fit to do much walking.”

  “Car?” Then Ranklin wished he hadn’t asked: where Corinna went, could a hired car be far behind?

  “He’ll be here at seven; I’ll have Lucy ready by then. Conall, try and keep him sober.”

  In fact, Ranklin was manipulating himself, trying to believe the evening would be so boring that it was bound to be better than he feared. And that he would be cheerful and talkative as a result. The whisky was insurance.

  “About this secret document,” he said. “You’re sure there’s no other way of getting a look at it?”

  Corinna made a face. “Lucy says he keeps it in that briefcase – ” And Ranklin could remember Hornbeam clutching it on the train; “ – I guess we could hire some highwaymen to rob him when he goes …”

  “All right, all right. You can burgle his room – if O’Gilroy thinks it’s safe. He’s in charge. And if he says No, then No it stays.”

  She began to pout.

  “If you get caught,” Ranklin said quickly, “and there’s a rumpus, with you they’ll say ‘Girls will be girls’ and assume it was O’Gilroy leading you astray. And even if Hornbeam doesn’t get legal with us, from then on O’Gilroy, and I, will be under suspicion. The hotel may tell the police, they may become interested in us … we’d be better off on the next train back to Paris.”

  If you could persuade Corinna that she was wrong, that was an end to it. She wasted no time on grudges or regrets: that idea’s dead, let’s get on with the next. “You’re right, of course. Okay, Conall, I’ll take my time from you.”

  O’Gilroy smiled – partly from relief, Ranklin thought. He must have seen the risks himself, but just didn’t know how to say so to someone like Corinna.

  43

  To find the roots of a continental city, look for the easily defended: the high ground, or the river-as-moat. Or in Buda, both. The rambling flat-topped ridge of Castle Hill rose only a few hundred feet above the river, but it rose sharply, stiffened by thick walls that by now seemed to grow out of the rock. The wide river hurried past less than a quarter of a mile away below, and from the ramparts a single field gun would dominate the whole area of Pest on the far side.

  Behind the walls was a city in miniature, complete in grandeur and squalor. The Royal Palace with its eight hundred and sixty recently refurbished rooms waited for the Emperor to recall that he was also Hungary’s King and drop in for a night, the Coronation Church (where he had dropped in long enough to be crowned, over sixty years ago) studded with needle spires like a startled hedgehog, a host of ministries, barracks, town houses originally built by Turkish merchants and alleyways that once housed the Danube fishermen.

  And the Panna Tavern.

  Hazay had met Ranklin’s request perfectly. They entered from a crooked alleyway through a door in an ironbound gate, already plodding against a frothing tide of violin music. And there ahead of them, at the end of a small courtyard crammed with tables, was a vine-roofed bandstand with a gypsy band sawing and strumming for dear life. Or cash.

  A waiter, obviously familiar with, and primed by, Hazay weaved them through the crowd to a side table with chairs for six. Seeing Ranklin’s surprise, Hazay explained: “I thought Miss Hornbeam would like to meet some of my friends – poets, writers – who might come by. If not,” he shrugged and smiled, “they will go away.”

  “Why, I’d just love to meet your friends,” Lucy smiled back, and Ranklin relaxed. Unless somebody found a cat bone in their chicken, the evening looked like being a success. He raised his wineglass and silently wished equal success to Hornbeam’s lecture – and the burglary of his room.

  “Of course they are all real gypsies,” Hazay was telling Lucy. “Who will pretend
to be a … an outcast, a wanderer, a thief? Myself,” he added wickedly, “I do not believe the stories in the country villages that they are also blood-sucking – vampires – and cannibals.”

  Lucy was listening, wide-eyed, and Hazay was enjoying himself: gypsies were a journalist’s dream people since whatever you said about them somebody had said – and believed – before, so you were only reporting, not inventing. The music swirled about them, alternately wild tavern dances and slow melancholy tunes that the locals seemed to soak up and appreciate without for one moment stopping their eating and arguing.

  “Czermak, he was a nobleman who took his violin and joined the gypsies,” Hazay was saying, “and Czinka Panna – this café is named for her – she was most rare, a woman violinist, that was nearly two centuries ago, and the great Bihari … who knows who was the best? Their music was never written down, nobody alive has heard them play, now it is only memories of memories …”

  The band-leader violinist had worked his way towards them, playing a tune for each table that asked. He was authentically dark and swarthy, but short and tubby, too; Ranklin recognised his own unromantic shape. But when Hazay tore a banknote in two, licked one half (you’re a braver man than I am, Ranklin thought) and stuck it to the leader’s forehead and he began to play, he seemed to grow in dignity and even height. The music flowed out of him like a familiar tale from a natural storyteller. That was all it was, a simple retelling of simple musical emotions, and if the magic was in the ear of the behearer – and in the wine in the behearer, too – then Lucy seemed ready to settle for that.

  The band-leader finished, got the second half of the banknote, and moved on with a deep bow to Lucy. Then they realised that two of the spare chairs were occupied, a new bottle of wine was on the table, and Hazay did the introductions. Miro was small, dark, with a thin face and jerky expressions, as if afraid he would be late with the appropriate one. Tibor was large, slow, bear-like, with what seemed like a fringe of fur rather than beard on his face. Both appeared to be that vague age of old students and young poets; Mitteleuropa café philosophers, Ranklin thought unkindly, not welcoming the effort of new acquaintances this late.

  They greeted Lucy with great warmth, quickly establishing that she (a) thought Budapest was wonderful, and (b) didn’t know Tibor’s cousin in Brooklyn. But their real interest seemed to be in Hazay.

  “Miro’s worried about the peace talks in Bucharest,” Tibor explained, as Miro and Hazay chattered quickly in Magyar. “Stefan knows all the latest news, and Miro is writing a poem.”

  “A poem?” Lucy couldn’t see the connection; Tibor looked surprised at her surprise.

  Ranklin intervened: “If he’d said a speech or an article, you wouldn’t have thought it odd. Well, here a poem does the same thing.”

  Tibor beamed at Ranklin. “Yes, you understand. Why not a poem?”

  “Why not?” Lucy agreed, smiling.

  “He blames the warmongers in Vienna for urging Bulgaria into starting the war she has just lost …”

  Miro broke off from Hazay to explain, found his English wasn’t quick enough for his thoughts and switched into German, with Tibor interpreting: “No, he blames Russia – I am sorry, he blames both. Both wanted the war … Vienna wanted Bulgaria to win, Russia wanted her to lose, why? … I understand, so Turkey would grab back Adrianople herself but it will cause less trouble to take it from Turkey, who has no friends – ”

  “Except the Kaiser,” Hazay suggested.

  “ – than from Bulgaria.” Miro muttered something, Hazay laughed and Tibor tried to translate: “He says to … to do something rude to the Kaiser. That will not be in his poem, I think.”

  Miro said more.

  “… so the Habsburgs and the Romanovs act in one royal conspiracy for opposite reasons … the sufferer is the ordinary soldier who has no illusions, who knows he will die on the battlefield … Pigshit!” Tibor bellowed. “The one illusion a soldier has is that we will live through anything! If he thinks he is going to die, he runs away!”

  Nobody seemed to notice the shout except Lucy, and Ranklin who was thinking: so Tibor’s been a soldier. But with conscription, so had every man in the café except the gypsy band and, it seemed, Miro. Now he sat silent and frowning, presumably recasting a verse.

  Ranklin took advantage of the lull to ask Hazay: “What is the news of the peace conference?”

  Hazay put on his diffident smile. “The Great Powers want a part in the final decision …”

  “Ha! Let them stay out,” Tibor grunted. “They were six months in London to make new frontiers and how long did they last? – six days. And if Miro is right, already two of your Great Powers worked to destroy the treaty before it is signed even.”

  “Count Berchtold says …”

  “Tbe Foreign Minister in Vienna,” Ranklin whispered to Lucy.

  “I know,” Lucy didn’t whisper back.

  “… he says that any agreement reached without Austria-Hungary can only be provisional.”

  “Let the Balkans settle their own frontiers,” Tibor growled.

  “That was what this last war was for, no?” Hazay said.

  Ranklin felt he ought to say something; just sitting and listening could arouse suspicion. But he was pretty sure that anything he said would be wrong.

  “No frontiers are ever going to be completely just,” he said cautiously. “Or where do you stop before every village, every house, is a nation? The Balkans need to start exporting things they can sell, not just nationalist fervour.”

  Miro glared at him, pale-faced and dark-eyed; he obviously understood English better than he spoke it, and gabbled out an answer.

  Tibor interpreted again: “He asks do you want a life of comfort or a road to travel? Do you want an armchair or a cause?”

  Ranklin felt himself being dragged into the whirlpool. “Europe’s elephant country. If you startle the elephants in Vienna and Berlin and Paris and St Petersburg – ”

  “And London?” Hazay suggested.

  “Yes, and London, too – into a stampede, they won’t watch where they put their feet.”

  Tibor leant his big arms on the table. “So, your fine grey men in London will tell these peoples that nationalism is dangerous, hey? These peoples whose nationalism has liberated them from four hundred years of Turkish rule? Come again in four hundred more years and tell them then – if you can also tell them how to untangle the flags of liberty and nationalism.”

  Yes, Ranklin thought sadly, I was wrong. Oh, I was right, but so in his own way is Tibor – and so, in many ways, are so many others. And suddenly, before he realised why, he felt a terrible fear, as if the courtyard had vanished to leave him alone in a vast cold desert.

  Until that moment, like anyone else thinking about a European war, he had wondered what might start it. But he should have been like the man in the story who, shown Niagara Falls for the first time and told proudly how many millions of gallons of water poured over it, had asked simply: “What’s to stop it?”

  “Perhaps,” he said, looking over their heads, perhaps to reassure himself of the courtyard walls; “we all have this disease of war. Only we’re not showing all the symptoms yet and we haven’t started dying.” He looked at Tibor. “You and I could be enemies tomorrow.”

  Tibor sat back, smiling uneasily. “You would be a soldier?”

  “For my nationalism? Oh yes. As you would for yours.”

  Hazay said: “Each on top of your elephant.”

  They grabbed the silly image gratefully and roared with laughter, then poured more wine and Ranklin offered round his case of English cigarettes and everyone lit one – even Lucy.

  But after one more glass, Miro had to get away to his poem, and Tibor decided to go with him. He shook Ranklin’s hand and then, on an impulse, hugged him. “So,” he said, standing back, “we must meet at Philippi.”

  “Perhaps we’ll neither of us find the way.”

  They took the evening with them. Ranklin paid the b
ill, watching Hazay’s expression to make sure he got the complicated division of the tip right, while Lucy asked: “Will he get his poem published?”

  “Somewhere,” Hazay said. “Perhaps not in Nyugat, but in some magazine. I will help if it is needed. And,” he smiled at Ranklin, “if you wish to write a poem in answer, I will translate it for you.”

  And even when it seemed I was being honest, Ranklin thought, I was just hiding the fact that I am already your enemy. That’s why I’m here.

  “Thank you, but no. Poetry isn’t really my style,” he said.

  44

  The car was waiting for them in the square by the church, but Ranklin led the way past it to a bit of neo-Gothic nonsense called the Fishermen’s Bastion. It was being built when Ranklin was last in Budapest and was nothing more than a lookout point across the river to Pest, but elaborated with steps, parapets, arches and needle spires.

  “Why Fishermen’s?” Lucy asked.

  “They used to live around here, and their Guild had the job of defending this stretch of the city wall against besiegers. I don’t know if they ever did, but that’s the story.”

  “Everything seems to be war: wars in the past, wars just down the road now, war tomorrow …”

  “I’m afraid that’s Europe for you.” It wasn’t an answer. Perhaps he had hoped to see an answer in the peaceful twinkling lights of the city that, at night, could be any city with its ordinary butchers and bakers and candlestick-makers. But the view did the opposite: just emphasised how small and lonely their island of lights was, how endless the dark plain that surrounded it.

  Lucy seemed to pick up the thought. “But why, why start a war in the middle of all this?” She gestured at the lights. “I know the politics are dreadfully complicated, but …”

  “That might be one reason. I think a lot of people, ordinary people, in most European countries, feel that things are getting too complicated: that a simple outright war will clear the air.”