Spy’s Honour Read online

  “And he wouldn’t have laid a secret cablewire, neither.”

  “No – but,” Ranklin remembered the cablegrams, “the public cable from Denmark would still be working in a war. From Korsör, just five or six hours by ship.”

  O’Gilroy’s eyes widened, then narrowed as a wide shadow fell across the table.

  “Is frei?” Gunther Arnold asked, but sat down anyway.

  25

  Ranklin’s heart stopped, but his mind raced frantically down a list of possible next moves. O’Gilroy’s mind chose one: in a blink of thought the terrace became fighting ground, he mapped the chairs and tables as obstacles, hunted for weapons, assessed escape routes.

  Then, as Gunther’s moustache-topped smile widened, the same realisation seeped into both of them: if Gunther was here on business, they could betray him just as he could them.

  “Since you do not ask, I am very well, thank you,” Gunther said, smiling. “Or not so well, thank you to Mr O’Gilroy. It was a mistake to trust so much in information from those royalist dreamers. They are not so great a loss.”

  He was wearing white: flannel suit, shirt, shoes, grass homburg hat, together with lime-green spectacles. Given his size, all that whiteness brought an unreal lightness, like a huge empty egg. He turned to the hovering waiter and ordered a round of Pils.

  “Are you driving an old green car?” Ranklin asked as calmly as his now over-compensating heart allowed.

  “You have shaved your moustache. I prefer it. So you saw me behind you?”

  “I assumed it was the police.”

  Gunther winced. “To be seen following is not good, but to be mistaken for the police is an insult – No! I do not pick any more duels.”

  “The police are probably following us – perhaps here already or at least going to check on who we talked to.” If they weren’t going to betray each other on purpose, Ranklin didn’t want it to happen by accident. If Gunther was known in Kiel, it wouldn’t help their own shaky pretence.

  But he was unworried. “I am a simple merchant from Munich, as many there will testify. It is not my fault if I loyally come to see the All-Highest sail his magnificent yacht (probably built by funds borrowed from the Guelph treasure) to victory and happen to meet two disguised British agents.”

  Odd, Ranklin thought: even among ourselves he says “agents” and not “spies”. But so had Cross. Odd. The waiter brought the beer, Ranklin lit his pipe, and O’Gilroy glowered. He was annoyed that Ranklin had spotted the car and he had not, and he liked enemies to stay enemies: the cool, confident Gunther provoked him.

  Unnoticing or uncaring, Gunther swallowed half his Pils, grunted contentedly and wiped froth off his moustache. “I trust you come from the proper Bureau, and not those Naval or Military departments? Please to give my respects to your Chief. And when we have more time, you must explain to me the organisation of the Bureau, it can only be my fault it seems most muddled in my mind. And you are not offended by my unkind remarks about British agents when we met at the General’s Château? Good. A businessman does not speak well of his competitors; I am sure you are both most excellent agents. Now, you wish to know who killed Lieutenant Cross, and you want only the most reliable information. So, I am at your service.”

  Ranklin gave him a boyish smile. The hail-spy-well-met act was, he fancied, because he was a New Boy. But it was attractive, in the way that army officers feel a kinship with their enemies who have suffered the same danger, mud and imbecile superiors.

  He didn’t think Gunther knew, or cared, who had killed Cross: it was barely marketable information. But he might well be interested in what Cross had been doing to get himself killed – in effect, buying whilst pretending to be selling.

  “I hear Dragan el Vipero is in town,” he said casually, and was ready to swear that Gunther hadn’t known that. “But I’m still not convinced he killed the King of Greece.”

  “Do you believe it was Apis?” Gunther asked, just as casually. “Apis” – the sacred bull of ancient Egypt – was Colonel Dimitrijevic, head of Serbian Intelligence and perhaps scalier organisations.

  “I believe anything of Apis,” Ranklin said, “except that he pulls the trigger himself nowadays. But Reimers …”

  “Steinhauer,” Gunther corrected him gently. “Strutting about in a Kapitanleutnant’s uniform.”

  “Whichever you prefer,” Ranklin said, thinking quickly. So Reimers also called himself Steinhauer. “He prefers Reimers. But whichever, he seemed worried about Dragan.”

  The game was just the posturing of cock birds, flaunting feathers of secret-knowledge, but an essential preliminary (they had learnt in Brussels) to an exchange of real information.

  “Maybe,” O’Gilroy chipped in, “he’s worried about the King of Italy going the same way as him of Greece. A left and a right, ye might say.”

  That suddenly struck Ranklin as a very likely worry, though perhaps for Lenz rather than Reimers.

  “You forget there are one hundred and fifty Schutz des Königs also in town,” Gunther reproved. “With such a bodyguard the All-Highest can surely spare some protection for that poor midget of Italy.”

  So the Kaiser had brought a bodyguard of a hundred and fifty men. Ranklin wondered what was left for Lenz to do – if he was supposed to be ensuring the Kaiser’s safety that week.

  The yacht watchers began to bustle about and pay for their drinks. The race had gone out of sight behind some headland and now they were going to jump into their cars and rush off to the next café with a view. It seemed to Ranklin a very civilised approach to yacht racing.

  “You have not asked me,” Gunther said softly, “who set the dogs upon Mr O’Gilroy last night?”

  O’Gilroy froze, but his eyes glittered.

  “All right,” Ranklin said evenly. “We’re asking.”

  “Four hundred marks.”

  “Trade prices, please. Two hundred.”

  “Three hundred? Very good: Anya die Ringfrau. Her circus is in town for the Week.”

  Ranklin and O’Gilroy swapped glances, but neither of them could evaluate the information – except that there had been a woman in charge.

  “All right,” Ranklin said again. “Do I owe you? I mean …” he gestured at the little crowd around them.

  Gunther smiled and turned to a tall yachtsy-looking gentleman. “Bitte, mein Herr …” What, he asked, was the original American name of the yacht Hamburg II, one of those in the race?

  “Westward, natürlich.” He was surprised anyone didn’t know.

  Gunther thanked him and turned triumphantly back to Ranklin. “You hear? I was right. You owe me three hundred marks.”

  The race watchers smiled sympathetically as they streamed past. Whatever you might say about the English, they paid up promptly on a bet.

  They sat, alone now, over the dregs of the Pils and the coffee.

  “Anya – what-was-it?” O’Gilroy asked.

  “Die Ringfrau. I suppose it could translate as ‘Ringmistress’ as in ‘Ringmaster’. Did he mean a real circus?”

  O’Gilroy shrugged; from what he’d seen, anything could be in Kiel that week. “But what’s she want?”

  “I should have asked more,” Ranklin confessed. He had been trying to appear a more experienced spy than he was, trying to uphold the reputation of the Bureau. But so much of their job was bluff that it was difficult to know just when to stop. “We’re assuming she wanted the postcard of the warships. She – I mean one of her men – saw the man who sold it to you. Did they recognise him? You said a sailor: German?”

  “Not English, anyhow. Younger’n me, fair-haired …”

  The waiter was hovering again: did they want more beer, or coffee? – something to eat? No – or rather yes, another round of Pils and see that their cabman got one, too, as Ranklin decided to be expansive. And did the waiter ever see an Englishman in here, aged about …

  He ended up talking to the manager in the cool dark restaurant behind the terrace, having carefully expl
ained that he was there by kind permission of Hauptmann Lenz. Fiftyish and surprisingly lean for a man who spent his life around German food, the manager obviously wanted as little as possible to do with the police and sudden death. But if brisk, his answers seemed honest.

  And he didn’t remember Cross. Certainly he might have been in, but half their diners were visitors up from Kiel, by car or cab or the frequent ferryboat. Fifty and more a day, in the season, and others just for coffee or a drink, like himself.

  As for the death itself, all the fuss had been in the new locks, half a kilometre away, and he had known nothing about it until the Sunday morning.

  His mind wandering to how one would go about counting the ships through the Canal, Ranklin asked if they had any rooms to let.

  That wasn’t so certain: there were rooms, but usually let for long terms, unless he needed them for his staff, who might give them up to visitors in Kiel Week … anyway, there was nothing free now.

  Hardly disappointed, since he had hoped only for luck, Ranklin went back to the terrace. And, on impulse, asked the waiter when the next ferry for Kiel was due. In about ten minutes, it seemed.

  “Cross must have been thinking about Kiel from the sea aspect,” he explained to the devoutly anti-ship O’Gilroy. “So we ought to, as well. We’ll take the ferry, go and pay off the cabman.”

  The ferry, wide, blunt and very un-shipshape, waddled away from the jetty burbling smoke ahead of itself, since the wind was now going faster. Looking back from the top deck, Ranklin was reminded of how little one could see from a ship. He was lower now than on the terrace of the restaurant, whose row of top windows stared out well above his head – and stared, he noted, at the sea and passing ships, not at the Canal at all. So if those were the rooms to let, they weren’t good places from which to count Canal shipping anyway.

  He passed this thought to O’Gilroy, who nodded and said: “And what was ye saying about sending cablegrams from Denmark? Where’s that, now?”

  “I thought you’d been studying a map of Europe? It’s a country – and a collection of islands – just to the north. All this area was part of Denmark less than sixty years ago.”

  “Would it not be in a war?”

  “I doubt it. It’s too small and hasn’t got anything to gain from getting involved. So you’d be able to send cablegrams to Britain even in a war.”

  “Ye think that was what the Lieutenant was practising?”

  “Well, probably not himself. From the dates, he’d have had to spend most of last week there, or coming and going.”

  “There’s a steamship service there, then?”

  “Bound to be. Daily, I’d imagine.” Wasn’t Korsör the end of a railway line from Copenhagen? So a steamship from here and then a train would be the fastest link between Germany and the Danish capital – and important enough to keep going in wartime, when Germany would need all the foreign links it could get that were safe from the Royal Navy’s blockade.

  “Mebbe somebody on the boat was sending the cablegrams for him, then?”

  “Ye-es.” Ranklin nodded thoughtfully. “Crew, it would have to be one of the crew, to make it a regular series of cables. And you say it was a sailor who gave you the postcard last night?” He fumbled for the postcard of warships. “And the number on the back?”

  “There was numbers in the cablegrams. Ye said a dozen in each.”

  Excited now, Ranklin snatched the cable forms from his pocket and held them fluttering in the breeze. Ideas whirled and danced like gnats above a river bank; his mind tried to photograph them, stop them in flight so as to study their pattern, their links – numbers, figures, twelve in each cablegram, six on the postcard: 030110.

  O’Gilroy took it and frowned at the smoke-wreathed ships. The Bureau had given Ranklin a lecture on warship recognition and a copy of Jane’s Fighting Ships to study, but O’Gilroy had spent half his life watching the Royal Navy steam in and out of Irish ports.

  “He was wanting to say something about ships like these, is that what we’re thinking? I make them three old battleships, one armoured cruiser and one light cruiser. Three, one and one – is that it, then?”

  030110. “That,” Ranklin said, “has to be right. He chose six rough classes of warships: the first must be new battleships, the dreadnoughts. Then old battleships, pre-dreadnoughts. Then probably battle-cruisers. Then armoured cruisers, then light cruisers – what about the last? Destroyers? Torpedo boats? Submarines?”

  O’Gilroy shrugged; that detail hardly mattered. “But what’s he saying about them?”

  “I suppose … that so many ships of each class – he can’t say more than nine in any class, but nine’s a lot of battleships anyway – went through the Canal in the last … well, since the last message, say.”

  “Which way through the Canal?”

  Ranklin missed a heartbeat, then remembered the cablegrams. “But there were twelve figures in each cable. Say, the first six mean westbound, the second six eastbound. Or vice versa.” He pondered. “It may not matter if we don’t understand the system exactly, as long as the people working it understand. Cross was never going to be part of it himself, just setting it up and recruiting the people to run it.”

  “If he’d finished doing that. So we know what the messages will mean and how they’ll reach England, but are we thinking one of those Denmark fellas’ll be sitting by the Canal counting every ship for all of every day and night?”

  “It doesn’t seem too likely,” Ranklin agreed. “So we don’t really know if he’d finished his recruiting – or whether we’ll be expected to.”

  The first thing Ranklin did when they reached the Club was to go to the lavatory, burn the warship postcard and the cablegrams, and flush away the ashes. From being puzzling bits of paper they had become ticking bombs. And the two of them had passed that subtle divide between being men with suspect intent to ones holding secret knowledge intended to harm the German Empire – or some such legal phrase. They had begun to tick themselves, and he hoped Lenz and Reimers couldn’t hear.

  They went up to Cross’s room next door where Ranklin intended to pack – or rather, have O’Gilroy do it – and leave his bags for the Club to worry about until he knew where he would be spending the night. Thieving was rare in Germany, near impossible in this Club, and, he thought wryly, inconceivable in his peculiar position. That was one small compensation for being under police suspicion.

  There was a large, shapeless brown paper parcel on the bed and a servant hurrying in behind them to explain. They were the clothes Cross had been found dead in, sent by the police to the laundry or cleaners, now returned to Cross’s Kiel address. Just one of those little wheels that keep turning after death. And one of those little bills to pay.

  Ranklin paid the servant and wondered what to do with the parcel. It was hardly worth sending to England, and he didn’t want to take it with him. In the end, he tore it open just from curiosity. Just underpants, a white shirt without a collar, dark flannel trousers torn at both knees and what looked at first like a dark blue sailing jersey, except made from thin cotton. Even without its rips and splits, it would have been no more protection against sea breezes than a spider’s web.

  It was easy to see how Cross, dead, bloody and dirty, could have been mistaken for a seaman. But there was another aspect to those particular clothes; O’Gilroy put it into words: “Wearing them trousers and jersey he’d be near invisible at night. Cat burglar’s kit.”

  Probably Cross had worn the jersey under his shirt at the restaurant, then changed vice versa when he abandoned his pink blazer. The jersey had a German label, so could have been bought for just that, very suspicious, purpose. And one which the police certainly wouldn’t have overlooked.

  “But all that, prowling the locks at night, the connection with Dragan, suggests sabotage or something violent like that. Nothing to do with observing what warships use the Canal, which sounds much more what I’d expect him to be involved in. I don’t see how the two go togeth
er.”

  26

  By noon, they were waiting on a small wooden jetty that stuck out into the sea just across the road from the Club, among a small crowd that was mostly men in the usual white trousers and blue blazers. Although not vain, Ranklin was horribly conscious of looking wrongly dressed. He was sure his plain dark suit and waistcoat, perfectly cut, left him looking like a debt collector.

  A dark mauve – or light purple – motor launch wallowed up to the steps and a sailor with KACHINA across his chest called up: “Any of youse gennlmen for the Kachina?” and then helped them aboard.

  The boat was powerful, so they ripped across the crowded anchorage in a swerving charge, but not very big, so they rolled and slammed as they crossed the wakes of other boats. From the fittings fore and aft, Ranklin deduced it was carried on the Kachina’s davits: hence the small size.

  Nothing in Ranklin’s background had given him any connection with the sea, but he had an eye for beauty, and those private steam yachts were simply the most lovely powered craft ever built. Indeed, they had no other purpose except to look and feel elegant. Their hulls had the sweeping length and sharp bow of clipper ships, carrying only long low deckhouses, tall raked masts and slim single funnels. Against the column of warships anchored in mid-channel, they looked like debutantes visiting a seedy boxing gym.

  Even O’Gilroy, who could usually find a bad word for how the rich spent their money, was moved to comment: “If they was horses, I’d be wanting to back them all.” And the Irish do not joke about race horses.

  The purple/mauve colour was repeated on Kachina’s funnel, the lettering on her white hull and the Sherring house flag at the mainmast. They managed the tricky stride to the accommodation ladder slung down the ship’s side and were met at the top by a salute from the ship’s Captain. At least, a white naval-cut uniform with four gold stripes and a goatee beard presumably wasn’t Sherring himself, although you could never be sure with rich men playing sailors. Just behind him was Corinna, grinning broadly.