Spy’s Honour Page 24

  Only she wasn’t either, because Tiessenkai 16 was no longer her home. And getting her new address from the dragon guarding what turned out to be a boarding-house for respectable widows and spinsters called for every ounce of Ranklin’s own respectability, charm – and a few hinted lies about a business connection with Herr Wedel, deceased.

  The Widow had, it seemed, just come into a small inheritance and moved to rooms above the restaurant by the lighthouse where they had met Gunther the day before. And while the rooms there might be bigger, the view better and the restaurant itself respectable, living above any restaurant, next door to strangers, quite likely men, was, Herr Spencer must agree …

  Ranklin agreed with everything but it still took five minutes. After that, however, it was easy. He asked at the restaurant and a waiter pointed immediately to a corner table.

  She looked very much like a pre-Raphaelite painting of The Widow: middle-aged but slim and sitting very upright, with a thin ascetic face and flaxen hair drawn tightly back to a bun. She also seemed, like such a painting, very detailed in the modest lacework of her blouse, the metal brooch at her throat, the fine pattern of her pleated skirt. The respectability of Tiessenkai 16 certainly hadn’t worn off yet, and Ranklin approached her with caution.

  He was, he said, most apologetic for approaching her so improperly, but he was pressed for time. She had doubtless heard of the unfortunate death of the English Naval officer, a friend of his, and he had been asked by the officer’s father …

  He spun it out, giving her time to react and for him to see her reactions; Corinna, he guessed, would be as insistent as the Commander on a complete report. At first the Widow seemed to tense, but then – almost with no visible sign – relaxed and listened carefully. When he had finished, she asked him to sit down, called for another cup and poured him coffee.

  “It is so much more convenient to come back after work to a home that is also a coffee-house,” she said. “Naturally, I read of the English officer’s death, but knew nothing of him. Have you spoken to the police?”

  “To Hauptmann Lenz and also a Naval officer, Kapitanleutnant Reimers. It was he who mentioned the unfortunate death of your late husband.”

  “Really? I thought the government had forgotten all about that. Why was it mentioned?”

  “Lieutenant Cross had among his papers a bond issued by your husband’s company.”

  “Truly? It would be without value now. I wonder how he got it?”

  “I wondered also. Being so out of date, it would not be easy to find.”

  “Naturally I have several old unissued ones – as ridiculous souvenirs. But I cannot think why anyone else should keep one.”

  Really I’m getting nowhere, Ranklin thought, and even Corinna would have to admit it. Time to stop bothering the Widow.

  “More coffee, Herr Spencer?” she suggested.

  So he stayed just one cup longer. While he was trying to think of fresh but harmless conversation, she asked: “And what was the English lieutenant doing in Kiel?”

  “Oh, I think only for the races.”

  “And you are not also in the Navy?”

  “No. Just a friend.”

  “Not a comrade of his, then.”

  Ranklin said carefully: “No, but we had many interests in common – naturally.”

  “Naturally.” She permitted herself a small prim smile, then glanced over her shoulder at the windows. “It is a charming view, is it not? It is one of the reasons I moved when I got my unexpected inheritance.”

  “Most charming,” Ranklin agreed. “May I express my pleasure at your good fortune? – if it was not outweighed by the loss of a relative.”

  “Oh, I felt no loss. Indeed, that I deserved it.” She put down her cup. “Come, let me show you the view from the terrace.”

  The last yachts were trailing home, heeled gently to port by a dying west wind and dodged by chugging ferries crammed with home-going workmen. “Charming,” she said again. “And even better from my windows. See, those are my rooms up there.”

  A bit surprised, Ranklin turned and looked up. The windows were also fake medieval, divided into several smaller panes of glass by lead strips. Several panes were almost blanked out by coloured decorations on the inside.

  “I like to decorate my windows,” she explained. “To make them more interesting against the morning sun. But I cannot decide how to do it, so I change them often.”

  There were six windows, he counted, and nine panes in each. In each window there were no more than two decorations, each of a different colour.

  “This building has not changed,” she said, “from how it is in the engraving my late husband put on the bond certificate.”

  “Most interesting,” Ranklin said very, very calmly. “And what work is it you do for the government?”

  “Very dull. Every day at the locks office I must prepare for the invoicing department a complete list of all ships which have passed through the Canal in the past twenty-four hours …”

  Coming away from the restaurant, Ranklin wanted to tell everyone of his triumph and simultaneously thought everyone was staring straight into the guilty knowledge in his head. He hesitated at the roadside. He had solved it! – well, Corinna had sent him up to the Widow Wedel, but he’d surely have visited her sooner or later anyway. And he deserved a cab back to town: if he waited, he must catch one setting down dinner guests at the restaurant. But if he wanted to cover his tracks, best to go back on the anonymous ferry, there must be one soon.

  As he hesitated, an elderly but very well-kept town car drew up beside him and the chauffeur leant out to say he was heading back to Kiel empty, would the gentleman like a ride – for a consideration? A taxi! An unofficial one, but chauffeurs did it all the time. And the curtained rear windows suggested more luxury than the average motor taxi. He deserved this. He agreed and opened the rear door –

  – and a hand yanked him all the way in. A pistol glinted dully in the curtained light, and at the other end of it was Anya’s mournful watchdog of last night. Sherlock Holmes would never have got caught like this, Ranklin thought.

  35

  Corinna might have waited dinner for Ranklin, but her father wasn’t used to waiting for anyone. They were into the fish course when Jake appeared at her shoulder and murmured: “A man – I wouldn’t say a gentleman – wants to speak with you, ma’am. Urgently, about Mr Spencer.”

  “Police?”

  “I wouldn’t say police, ma’am. More the opposite.”

  Mr Sherring hadn’t heard all of this (he hadn’t been supposed to hear any of it) but asked: “Are your guests bringing us trouble with the authorities, Corinna?”

  “Nothing like that, Pop. I’ll handle it.”

  As they went out onto the deck, Jake said gravely: “I have a pistol in my pocket, ma’am.”

  “Oh? That much not a gentleman, is he?” She thought for a moment. “Give it to O’ – to Gorman, and send him up.”

  The man had been leaning on the rail watching the sun prepare to set behind the Bellevue Hotel, but turned as they came up. One glance at the sad dark eyes and mournful moustache would have braced Corinna in other circumstances for an equally sad, long and untrue story of Slavic misfortune, price 1,000 marks or near offer. But now the face was trying to look cheerful, even triumphant.

  “We have Mr Spencer as prisoner.”

  O’Gilroy had expected that, Corinna hadn’t quite brought herself to. She said: “We haven’t met before, have we?”

  “My name does not matter.”

  “Nothing about you matters, but you must have a name.”

  The man shrugged. “Caspar.”

  “Okay, Caspar, what’s the deal?”

  Caspar seemed uncertain which of them to address. “You give us Dragan, we give you Mr Spencer. It is simple.”

  If somebody had asked Ranklin what he most disliked about being a spy and he had answered with the sort of honesty he was, as a spy, trying to discard, he would have said that it
was the prospect of being tortured by Anya and her crew. His objections to his new trade as ungentlemanly and even dishonourable paled as she explained how much he would suffer if O’Gilroy didn’t produce Dragan and she had to torture his whereabouts out of Ranklin. She hadn’t been specific, just said she would use methods perfected by the Czars’ secret police over many decades and which she believed were reliable. Ranklin had been told something of these methods and agreed completely.

  And there was no hope of them believing the truth – that he knew nothing of Dragan, since he had threatened them with him last night. So he might well set a record for resisting under torture, even discredit those secret police methods … The thought was appalling.

  He tried thinking about what they might believe about Dragan, where Dragan might actually be. He didn’t know what Dragan looked like – nobody did. Nobody claimed to have met him, except possibly Cross, who had used him as a diversion. And that letter signed by Dragan, saying he had come in the name of liberty from tyranny. Which hadn’t told Cross anything new and was a weird thing to be carrying on a night when he had chosen what to carry so carefully …

  Then he came to a very simple explanation. It was obvious. It was also literally painful that Anya wouldn’t believe a word of it.

  “I never liked the matter of being mixed up with Dragan,” O’Gilroy said as the hired launch puttered up to the Bellevue jetty. “But if I give him to ye, I want to be sure ye keep him. Not coming back for me after he’s painted the walls with yeself.”

  “There will be three of us with pistols. And you will help,” Caspar said. His vivid blue blazer, ornate shoes and tie added up to a music-hall imitation of a yachtsman, and suggested a misplaced self-confidence that O’Gilroy welcomed.

  O’Gilroy nodded, his face still sombre. “All right, then – where d’ye want him?”

  Caspar dipped into his breast pocket and passed over a large calling card. It was a very smooth gesture, and O’Gilroy guessed that passing out the address of Anya’s circus was probably Caspar’s usual line of work.

  This jetty served the rich suburb, and Bellevue hotel itself, well north of the city centre. Now it and the road beyond were almost deserted while Kiel society was at dinner; the only car was a chauffeured limousine with curtained rear windows waiting at the end of the jetty. Mostly used, O’Gilroy guessed, for the circus’s best customers.

  “This place,” he said, flourishing the card and then putting it into his side pocket, “’tis a house, is it? And ye jest want me and Dragan to walk up to the front door?”

  “Ah, no. You go to the gate for servants, yes? Then to the … left, the door by the side. It is open, understand?”

  “Servants’ gate and side door,” O’Gilroy confirmed. “And Mr Spencer’s there.”

  “But sure.”

  O’Gilroy glanced round, as if looking for the tram Caspar expected him to take. There was nobody within clear sight. Without any haste, he took the pistol from his pocket and said: “Fine. So let’s jest take a look at this gate and door, then.”

  Caspar looked not angry but immensely shocked, as if O’Gilroy had made some monstrous social blunder.

  O’Gilroy sympathised. “Yer jest in the wrong job. But I don’t think she’ll be asking ye to do it again.”

  The four-storey house stood at the very north-western edge of town, isolated enough in its own walled garden not to annoy any neighbours. Such establishments are quiet places anyway: just a little piano music, refined laughter, at worst a breaking champagne bottle. And this was Kiel Week, after all.

  Ranklin was in a small ground-floor room that Anya used as her office, dropping in to answer the telephone or file some paperwork. He was roughly tied to an upright chair, but that was just a token: his real captivity was ensured by a large crop-haired man in evening dress who sat and fiddled restlessly with a large revolver. Ranklin hoped he might fiddle enough to shoot himself; he was reduced to hopes like that.

  From the distant sounds, the rest of the house continued business as usual. At sunset Anya came in and lit the gas mantles and drew the curtains.

  “Is your mouth dry?” she asked Ranklin. “It is a good sign – fear. It means you will not last for long. Bravery is no use, and most painful.”

  The door was part open and they heard the clump of heavy feet in the hall. “Caspar is back,” she said. “We must hope for good news.”

  Caspar stumbled – in fact was pushed – through the doorway gabbling, and behind him O’Gilroy with a pistol in each hand and shouting: “Don’t do nothing!” Anya shouted something herself.

  None of the shouts affected the crop-haired man: he jumped up, instead of shooting from where he sat, and levelled the revolver. O’Gilroy fired four times, his face very intent since he mistrusted the killing power of pistols.

  A vase on the mantelpiece shattered, but the bullet had gone through the crop-haired man first; all four had. His knees gave and he crumpled quite gently onto the fragments of vase that had reached the floor already.

  O’Gilroy looked down at him, shaking his head as if he disapproved of something. “Fucking amateur night,” he said.

  It took time to restore the house to the profitable calm of a well-run brothel. But it is fundamental to such a place that neither the staff nor clients want anything dramatic and attention-getting to happen there and so are eager to believe that it hasn’t. Whatever Anya told them – Ranklin suggested a young officer getting drunk and playing cowboy with his pistol – worked. Then they were back in the little office room – along with the chauffeur whom O’Gilroy had beaten near unconscious and left in the car to simplify his entrance – and Anya was glowering savagely at Ranklin.

  “You started this … this circus act,” he pointed out. “Don’t blame us for topping the bill. And we both want the same thing: no assassination attempt on the Kaiser. Well, there won’t be, that was just a rumour spread by Cross to get Lenz and Reimers looking the wrong way. And to give it weight, he invented Dragan. D’you know anybody who’s met Dragan? Had you heard of him a week ago? Cross banked on the fact that we’re all in the business of trading rumours, and it worked.”

  After one flash of surprise, O’Gilroy was laughing quietly but delightedly, though not forgetting to keep his pistols vaguely pointed.

  “The note from Dragan to Cross,” Ranklin went on, “if you heard of that, makes more sense if you see it as a threatening letter he planned to leave on the viewing stand at the locks that last night. But all this still leaves Lenz believing in Dragan, that he’s going to try an assassination, and that we’re involved.”

  “Lenz does not worry me,” Anya said dismissively.

  “Stop saying such silly things. Lenz has got a police force behind him and a chief constable above him and he thinks the Kaiser’s in danger. D’you think your influential friends count for anything alongside that?”

  “So now you plan to tell Hauptmann Lenz that sorry, there is no real man Dragan?” she sneered.

  “Of course not. I’m going to show him how to catch Dragan.”

  36

  The explosion which woke citizens of Kiel last night was the righteous end of a shocking plan to assassinate His Majesty the Emperor and those good friends of Germany, die King and Queen of Italy. The vile would-be assassin, that notorious anarchist Dragan el Vipero, was justly destroyed by his own bomb, detonated by a vigilant patrol of the Schutz des Königs returning fire when the cowardly Dragan had shot at them from the darkness near the new Canal locks.

  The bomb had been composed of dynamite stolen from a store on die site, and had been intended for use in blasting through die earth banks to flood die locks next month.

  Hauptmann Lenz, our distinguished Captain of Detectives, said that he had anticipated die attempt since coming into possession of an old bond certificate illustrated with a picture of die planned locks. Close scrutiny revealed to him near-invisible pinpricks marking on die picture a route to die place where the Imperial viewing stand is now erected,
under which die dastardly Dragan undoubtedly planned to plant the bomb. Hauptmann Lenz assures us that he always had the matter under complete control and that the Emperor was never in any danger.

  The infamous Dragan, described as a large man with close-cropped hair, may also have been responsible for the death last Sunday of the English Naval Lieutenant who could have encountered Dragan on a midnight reconnaissance of the locks …

  Corinna put down the paper and blinked several times. “Lordy, that Gothic typeface makes your eyes water. But it makes it all look very solemn and true – is any of it?”

  “I shan’t be complaining to the editor,” Ranklin said.

  “Then I guess none of it is – except the explosion. That woke me. And it ties up – maybe I mean blows up – every loose end: lets you boys off the hook, even solves your murder for you.” She sipped her coffee. “Pop’s gotten the idea that you two were in there somewhere, helping to save the Kaiser, maybe preventing a war.”

  O’Gilroy unbent from his rigid stance by the rail to refill her cup. “Is that a good idea, then?”

  “I’d say so. The idea he had before was that you were stirring things up to the point where the cops were likely to raid this ship. He would not have liked that – and neither would you. Better to be unsung heroes.”

  “And who sang the unsung song for us?” Ranklin asked.

  She just smiled. Then: “Oh, in all the excitement, I forgot to ask how you got on with the Widow Wedel.”

  “Ah, yes, that …”

  “Did she tell you anything about her husband and the land company?”

  “Well, she wasn’t all that forthcoming … In an awkward position, employed by the government. But reading between the lines, I’d say she’s pretty bitter. Very loyal to the late Wedel.”

  In fact, once she knew she could trust Ranklin, the Widow had become vitriolic about the authorities who had “murdered” her husband. By now it was probably self-justification for the secret revenge she was taking, but Ranklin had had the sense to agree with every word.