Flight From Honour

by Gavin Lyall

  He was still trying when the buzzer from the Commander’s room rang. It was a rather peremptory arrangement, but inevitable once the sound-proof door had been fitted. He tucked the paper into an inside pocket – another newly acquired habit – and went in.

  Dagner had several Naval log-books, presumably the ones the Commander seemed to use as his personal records system, spread across the table. Desks were rare in Army life; they suggested bankers, civil servants, a permanent commitment to shuffling papers.

  “Firstly, do you know anything about this Sir Caspar Alerion who’s coming to give us a talk next Monday? – should I have heard of him?”

  “I think he’s just some crony of the Commander’s. He’s a retired dip. I mean diplomatist,” Ranklin added quickly, “not dipsomaniac. At least, I think it means that in his case. From what the Commander said, his career was a bit . . . well, it lasted as long as it did because he comes of a good family. They didn’t mind the drink and women so much, but he dabbled in espionage and that upset his ambassadors. His last posting was Rome, then he exchanged to the Foreign Office in London, and resigned six or eight years ago.”

  “It sounds as if he could be interesting, then. If there’s any arrangements needed, could you . . .? Thank you. Now—” he glanced down at the log-books again; “—just remind me of how many agents the Bureau actually has, will you?”

  Ranklin stood there, nodding gently. “Ah. He didn’t tell you, either.”

  By now, Ranklin had begun to recognise degrees and variations in Dagner’s lack of expression. This time, he might – just might – be struggling to retain control. And, of course, winning. After a time, he pushed his chair back and said quietly: “Then that’s one secret we can’t give away. D’you think it’s written down anywhere?” He looked around the cluttered office – but the clutter all seemed to be telephones, models of futuristic warships, naval gadgetry and the Commander’s collection of pistols.

  “Not unless it’s in those log-books,” Ranklin said. “Frankly, I think he keeps it all in his head.”

  “Which, by tonight, will be in Germany.” Dagner stared at the table-top for a few moments more, then reached for his uniform jacket. “I’ve breathed all the air in here a dozen times already. I’m going for a walk. And you’re coming with me.”

  * * *

  They crossed the endless belt of honking traffic in Whitehall, went through the arch of the Horse Guards and on to the parade ground itself. This was the very heart of the Empire’s military and naval bureaucracy and Dagner’s uniform meant he was saluting in all directions, majors being mere groundlings in this theatre.

  The uniforms thinned out as they reached the edge of St James’s Park, its trees still green but now dulled with dust and rustling dryly as they waited for the collapse of autumn.

  “How many agents,” Dagner said abruptly, “do you know we have abroad at this moment?”

  Ranklin sorted his experience. “From the reports I’ve seen, we have one, I think permanently, in St Petersburg. And somebody in Cairo, and I think Germany, but I don’t know where.”

  “And that’s all?”

  “All I know of.” He felt he ought to say more. “Actually getting people on to our establishment, like O’Gilroy and myself and now the new boys, seems to be quite recent. Until now, I think what happened was that the Commander ran into a chap who’s interested in Intelligence and had some money of his own, gave him dinner at one of his clubs – and sent him off somewhere to look at something. He wasn’t paid or reimbursed from our funds, we didn’t see him in the office, we may see his report – if he doesn’t wind up in jail somewhere. Is he one of ours or not?”

  “I see. And that’s how the world-famous British Secret Service works.” Ranklin wasn’t imagining the bitterness any more than Dagner was hiding it. “Did it surprise you, too, when you joined?”

  “It did, rather.”

  Dagner stopped and looked back through the trees at the jumbled skyline of the Horse Guards and Whitehall. “There must be a dozen departments in those buildings, all with budgets and staffs bigger than us, and all doing damn-all but churn out paperwork for each other to file in the wrong place. And I learn that K at MO5 only got his majority last month – forgive me, Captain.” But Ranklin was just as gloomy that the head of the nation’s spy-catching service, currently codenamed MO5, was only one recent rank above himself.

  Dagner went on: “I grew up on legends of the British Secret. Invincible, all-pervasive . . . Well, I’ve learnt not to trust legends like that, but to find the whole thing was a myth until three years ago . . . In India we’ve been organised for decades. What happened before the Bureau was founded?”

  “The Army and Navy had – and still have – their own specialised Intelligence departments. The Navy looks at harbours and fleets, the Army at other armies. And the Foreign Office decides who are heroes and villains. I think,” Ranklin said tentatively, “the idea was that we needed a more catholic approach, someone to look at potential enemies’ industry and economy and financial strength, as well as just counting uniformed heads.”

  “That sounds sensible enough.”

  “Yes, only that’s where we come into direct conflict with the Foreign Office.”

  They had reached the Mall, wide and serene with no motor-buses and only a few of the more elegant cars among the horse-drawn cabs and carriages. Perhaps the view overlayed memories of the Foreign Office, because Dagner smiled and said: “Ah, this is more the London I remember . . . Wouldn’t it be more sensible if we came directly under the Prime Minister or Cabinet?”

  Ranklin wagged his head vaguely. “They probably think spying belongs in a cheap novel – as the FO does. After all, they could have started the Bureau ages ago if they’d wanted to.”

  Dagner’s frown was as brief as his smiles. “Yet in India, the Game was well respected – accepted as a part of policy. Our civil servants were as petty-minded as any, of course, but nobody denied our value.”

  “But you were only spying on natives. We spy on gentlemen.”

  Dagner stopped dead in the middle of the pavement. “Is that a serious remark, Captain?‘”

  A bit surprised, Ranklin said: “Certainly it is. At the top levels, all European society’s intertwined. It isn’t just royalty marrying royalty, the aristocracy does it, too.”

  “Yes, I know all that. So—?” Dagner started walking again.

  “But also our politicians and diplomatists and top civil servants mostly spent a year at Heidelberg or the Sorbonne, and their top dogs were at Oxford or Cambridge for a while, and even if they don’t intermarry, they’re still in and out of each others’ houses for holidays and shooting-parties and the like. And they don’t like us spying on their cousins and old college chums.”

  He realised Dagner was giving him a steady and thorough stare. “And do you share that viewpoint, Captain?” he asked gently.

  Ranklin sighed. “It bothered me to start with. But as a Gunner I’m prepared to kill those people. Why should I jib at spying on them?”

  Perhaps that didn’t sound quite enthusiastic enough, because Dagner said gently: “I believe we belong to an honourable profession, Captain.”

  “We belong to a necessary one. I don’t know that honour comes into it.”

  Dagner might have been about to say more, but didn’t. Instead: “ I had a chat with O’Gilroy . . . It seems that this Italian senator wants to meet someone from the Bureau. What’s your feeling?”

  “I’d say Yes, he sounds intriguing. Would you like me to . . . ?”

  Dagner shook his head slowly. “No, I think I’ll call on him myself – he’s staying at the Ritz, I think? It’ll do me good to start meeting people in European politics . . . shan’t belong to the Bureau, of course, just be a civil servant in touch with them . . . D’you think a rumpled, tweedy academic sort? – no, an Italian probably wouldn’t get the point. Old-fashioned, frock-coat and topper? No, that wouldn’t be right for an Italian industrialist either. I t
hink he’d talk most freely to someone brisk in a business suit. D’you agree?”

  Ranklin just mumbled, taken aback by the confident way Dagner had run through the parts he might play. It was a reminder that the man was a true professional, and that his ‘attitude’ might span both creeping up the Khyber Pass in a turban and calling at the Ritz in a business suit.

  With that decided, Dagner’s mind took a new turn. “About O’Gilroy . . . clearly you have no problem relying on a man with his . . . ah, background and connections.”

  Ranklin took a deep breath. “If you’re asking about his attitude, he believes in a free Ireland and isn’t going to stop. But the House of Commons believes that, too. It’s the Lords that’s blocking Home Rule. I’m not pretending O’Gilroy hasn’t done anything illegal in the past; I know damn well he has. But I’d guess it was mostly for the fun of it – and that’s really why he’s working for us now. And my only worry about his old friends, Fenians or whatever, is that they’ll kill him on sight. That’s why I’d rather we were sent to Europe again as soon as possible.”

  Dagner pondered this. “You don’t make his commitment to our cause sound very deep-rooted.”

  Ranklin shrugged. “If you asked O’Gilroy to stand up for the King and Empire I think he’d more likely fall off his chair laughing.” Dagner almost lost control of his expression; his face froze for a moment. Ranklin went on: “On the other hand, if I wanted somebody to guard my back in a dark alley I’d choose O’Gilroy any time. He’s. . . I’d say he’s loyal to the day,” he summed up. “Probably, by your standards, we’re both pretty incompetent. He doesn’t know foreign countries or languages, I don’t know how to survive in dark alleys. Together we may add up to one passable spy.”

  Despite himself, Dagner smiled faintly at that concept. “Hm. Being, as it were, Siamese twins among our agents could be seen as rather inflexible, I fear.”

  But we’re what you’ve got, Ranklin thought grimly. Us and the four new boys and an unknown, uncontactable number of agents abroad. What else do you expect in a Bureau so new and with SO many powerful enemies among its friends?

  However, he said nothing because Dagner was what he’d got, and was very glad of it. For a grim week, it had seemed that he himself, with experience as an adjutant and a willingness to make himself unpopular by organising people, might be deputising for the Commander. And while it was one thing to take over a battery or even a brigade that had the impetus of regulations and traditions to keep it rolling along, even with a nincompoop in charge, it was quite another to take over the Bureau from the man who had invented it only three years ago.

  No, Ranklin was very glad that Dagner was here.

  * * *

  The little triangle of Clerkenwell enclosed by Rosebery Avenue and the Clerkenwell and Farringdon Roads was an odd patch of short steep hills in an otherwise generally flat area. Perhaps because of that, the recent tide of rebuilding had flowed around it, leaving it as it had been for the past half-century, London’s Little Italy.

  There was nothing Italianate about the architecture; in fact, there wasn’t much architecture about Eyre Street Hill, Back Hill, Little Bath Street and the rest. But dingy houses, cracked paving and uneven cobbles are international, and the shop signs, the bright headscarves, the cooking smells and the chatter around the shopfronts were comfortingly Italian.

  Relaxing as the familiar sounds and smells were, the scene wasn’t exactly the Corso Umberto Primo. Bozan said nothing, but his expression said it all, and Silvio nodded. “Naples without the weather.”

  “Why didn’t we stay with Janko?” Bozan whined. “I’m sure he’s at a proper hotel.” Tiredness made him fractious, and it had been a long, complicated day.

  “Because we don’t want to be seen together. This way, we’ll be with our own people. And perhaps they’ll be more help than he was.”

  “You should have let me kill the Senator in the street at . . . where was it?”

  “Brussels. I agree, but we had to let Jankovic try his clever bit first. Now we’ll do it our way.”

  He stopped by an old man sitting on a doorstep smoking a reed pipe and asked politely for directions to an address in Back Hill Street.

  The old man’s eyes wrinkled warily; it was obvious that he knew the address, and just as obvious that he knew it wasn’t an address to be doled out to strangers. But strangers to what? These two, with their expensive Italian shoes, could well belong to what the Back Hill Street house belonged to, and it was politic to help such men. And then forget all about it.

  Anyway, no names had been mentioned, and an address is just an address; they’d find it in the end anyway. He directed them, and when they had gone, knocked out his pipe and faded back into the tenement building.

  Ten minutes later they were sitting in a surprisingly and floridly luxurious first-floor room with tiny cups of real Italian coffee by their chairs. Their host, whom Silvio tactfully addressed as just “Padrone”, was dressed in severe black like a village elder from the South, with a white moustache and olive skin. But the face, while heavily lined and thin, was still blunt, not sharp. He might never have worked in the stony fields, but it took generations to breed out the farm.

  He was being elaborately welcoming, but also probing. “And if there is anything I can help with . . .”

  “We need to find a man, a senator from Turin, who is visiting London . . .”

  “That may be difficult for strangers in a big city. He is rich, this . . . ?”

  “Giancarlo Falcone. Yes, he is rich. In Brussels he stayed at the Palace Hotel . . .”

  Bozan said: “You should have let me kill him there.”

  It was a swipe with a club to the delicate cobweb of unfinished sentences and non-commitment. Silvio smiled wanly. “Bozan is somewhat impetuous.”

  The Padrone nodded gently, his own dark eyes quite as blank in their way as the innocent ones of the young assassin. “I understand. It is no matter. If the senator likes the best hotels, it becomes easier, but London still has many such places. And this is a private matter . . . ?”

  “Only a small matter of business, you understand . . .”

  “Then anything you wish, you have only to ask.” In other words, the Padrone would have been wary of interfering in a feud, but from a business killing he felt free to grab as much profit as he could reach.

  “You are most kind. But even in business there is still a question of honour.” Or: we’ll pay for help, but we promised to do the job and it’s ours.

  “That is understood. But first, you wish a place to stay, safe and comfortable?”

  “We would be most grateful for your advice.”

  The old man stared at the far wall. “There is the house of my son, but he has many children . . . perhaps that of my brother-in-law, only my sister is sick . . . I think the house of my daughter’s husband . . .”

  Silvio smiled outside gritted teeth. They would end up where they were put; the recital had been a warning that the Padrone’s family was all around them. He waited.

  Bored with the silence, or perhaps because he’d forgotten he’d said it before, Bozan asked: “Why didn’t you let me kill him there?”

  The Padrone was listening anyway, so Silvio explained: “We had another man, some Slav, with fancy ideas about arranging an aeroplane to crash, and we had to let him try his way first.”

  “And the aeroplane did not crash?”

  “Oh yes, it crashed and the driver died – but the Senator was not in it. So clever. And the Senator ran to here and now he has, perhaps, a bravo with him.”

  “I can kill them both,” Bozan said indifferently.

  Silvio wasn’t too sure of that. What he said was: “Perhaps now he is in England he will feel safe . . .”

  The Padrone asked: “He has bravoes, this Senator?”

  “In Brussels, there was a man . . .” Silvio was inwardly furious at Bozan for betraying more of their problems. But oddly, it didn’t quite work that way.

  Th
e Padrone had been thinking. “London is a city made of many villages . . . This is . . . our village.” He had almost said ‘mine’. “If an important Italian is killed, and it seems it is done by other Italians . . . the police may come first to look here . . .”

  Ah-hah, Silvio thought: you’re worried that the police will come and shake your pisspot little kingdom until it spills on your shoes. I understand.

  “You can be sure we will do nothing to cause you difficulties,” he said, to show he now knew they could.

  The Padrone smiled and inclined his head graciously. “Good. Now, the matter of finding the Senator . . .”

  And some people thought killing a man was simple.

  7

  Apart from the Bureau, Whitehall Court was mainly expensive service flats and small exclusive clubs, ideal neighbours for not poking their noses into each other’s affairs. One of the flats had been leased by the Bureau after the tenant had died suddenly, possibly from a surfeit of William Morris floral wallpaper. It was intended for agents ‘passing through’, but now used by Ranklin and O’Gilroy, who were normally abroad but in any case couldn’t afford anywhere of their own. They also acted as informal night-watchmen to the office upstairs, fielding out-of-hours telephone calls and cablegrams, without making any fetish of staying in to wait for them. The Bureau was serious, but not oppressively so.

  O’Gilroy was still out on the shadowing exercise, so Ranklin made a pot of tea – which just about exhausted his cooking skills but was all the flat was equipped to do anyway – and sat down with an evening paper to read about the peace conference between Turkey and Bulgaria that had just begun in Constantinople. So that, he reflected, was probably the War Season over for the year. Nobody wanted another winter campaign, while the memory of last year was still strong. But come next summer, in 1914, when the roads had dried out for artillery and supply wagons, and the sun brought delusions of immortality and everybody knew that this time it would be quick and almost bloodless . . .