Spy’s Honour Page 6

  The steamer, built narrow for speed rather than stability, was trying to roll even alongside the dock. “I’ve no plans for seasickness,” O’Gilroy announced, “but I’m thinking it has plans for me.” Ranklin knew better than to argue: once a man believes that, he can be sick walking through a puddle. So he found their tiny day cabin and left O’Gilroy with their travelling bags and a flask of brandy to take care of each other.

  Once the steamer had lurched off in a cloud of smoke and seagulls, Ranklin joined the crowd in the first-class saloon which, less defeatist than O’Gilroy, was already ordering the first round of cognac-and-sodas. Ranklin found a corner table, lit his pipe and opened the Army Quarterly. As he turned each page or paused to stoke his pipe, he glanced up through the fast-developing fug – a true smoker knows that smoking is a cure, not a cause – for prospective code-copiers.

  But what would such people took like? Dark-eyed enchantresses? (there were no women at all in the saloon). Humourless, bristle-headed Prussians? Oily Levantines? There seemed to be none of them, either; most people in the saloon looked like just people.

  Why on earth hadn’t they been given more training? O’Gilroy had been particularly scathing about how much the Bureau knew, or was ready to impart, about its own job. And Ranklin found himself loyally defending his superiors, as a good officer should, whilst privately agreeing. The Commander’s attitude seemed to be that spying was just another game that any officer-and-gentleman would take to naturally – which was exactly the opposite of Ranklin’s view. In the Guns they didn’t expect a troop officer to invent his own orders for loading, laying and firing, so why the devil …?

  His mood made the gale outside seem a timid amateur.

  “May I sit here, please?” The voice was a low, slow Teutonic growl; the speaker a fat, slightly younger man with a big dark moustache and spectacles.

  “Of course.” Ranklin’s manner snapped back into perfect politeness. The man hovered in a stooped position, trying to time his descent with the roll of the ship. He didn’t quite make it; his well-upholstered backside hit the chair with a thump. He grunted and took a swallow of his beer.

  “Not the best of days for the Channel,” Ranklin said. “Do you mind my pipe?”

  “No. Please.” The man stuffed a cigarette in under his moustache and waved a match after it. Ranklin held his breath: the moustache looked very vulnerable. But the cigarette caught first, and the man held out a fat firm hand.

  “Gunther Arnold,” he announced. “I am going to France.”

  Unless I’m on the wrong boat, so are we all, Ranklin thought. “Captain Ranklin,” he said. “I’m off to Paris.”

  “Just you alone?”

  “No, I’m with a friend. He’s got a touch of mal-de-mer.”

  “You are going for just fun?”

  “To see some friends. And …?”

  “There is a new hotel,” Gunther said, cutting off Ranklin’s polite question. “The Crillon. You know it?”

  “No, I …”

  “It is very – ” he waved a hand in a slow encompassing circle, “ – very much. But not as much as the Ritz, I think. You know the Ritz?”

  Ranklin had eaten lunch at the Ritz once. “I’ve just …”

  “It is very much.” Bavarian, Ranklin guessed, and full to the gunwales with beer, a familiar Bavarian custom. Gunther spotted the Army Quarterly. “You are a soldier? An officer?”

  “Yes.” He had been told to play himself on this trip. So close to home, there was too much chance of meeting people who knew him. And the Army Quarterly had itself been bait, though he’d hoped for a better fish.

  “I was a soldier. Not an officer. If there is a war they will make me a soldier again. I think perhaps two soldiers.” He chuckled and patted his stomach.

  Ranklin smiled politely and wished the man would turn into an empty chair. “Are you going …?”

  “I know: you are on a secret mission,” Gunther chuckled. Ranklin froze inside. How the devil did he answer that? Shrug it off, laughing? Get indignant? Go along with the joke? How would Captain Matthew Ranklin RGA take it? He had learnt in a flash that the hardest part in the world to play is yourself. Only those who have deliberately invented a self can do it easily.

  But Gunther ploughed ponderously on. “You are to study the French fortifications – of the Moulin Rouge, Maxim’s, the Rat Mort.” He rumbled and shook with laughter. “Then you will have all the secrets of France.” He coughed smoke and a fine spray of beer over Ranklin. “I wish you much luck.” He heaved to his feet, mistiming the roll again so that he nearly sprawled over the table, and stumped away into the crowd at the bar.

  Ranklin’s relief was soured by his own clumsy reaction to that “secret mission” nonsense. Lucky that he had failed only in front of a Bavarian beer-barrel.

  Towards lunchtime, he went to see if O’Gilroy wanted any. He found the man and the brandy flask empty and the cabin reeking.

  “If ye say ‘food’ to me,” O’Gilroy moaned, “ye’d best say the Last Rites besides.”

  “At least take a turn on deck,” Ranklin urged. “The smell in here …”

  “Do me a favour, Captain. Jest one.”

  “What?”

  “Fall overboard.”

  So Ranklin had a table to himself in the uncrowded dining saloon. After coffee, he walked – or staggered – for a few minutes on the lee deck. Then, with perhaps half an hour to go before they reached Dieppe, he went back to the saloon.

  Gunther was no longer there, but to his surprise, O’Gilroy was. He looked pale and haggard but, Ranklin had to admit, lean and handsome in a romantic-poetic way with his long dark hair falling over his eyes and talking expansively to an American at the bar. Ranklin’s stomach clenched with apprehension. O’Gilroy must already be slightly drunk – that flask of brandy on a stomach that was unquestionably empty – and now with another glass in his hand … But damn it, this was the part of the trade O’Gilroy was supposed to be teaching him: how to lead a secret life unsuspected. If the man usually babbled when he had a drop taken, Ranklin reassured himself, we’d have had him in jail ourselves long since.

  “I’m not a travelled man meself,” O’Gilroy was saying, “not hardly at all. My little place in the Old Country keeps me tied down. But Captain Ranklin, now – here; Matthew – he’s been the world over and backwards besides.” He was a little touched by brandy, Ranklin thought, but it seemed to do no more than roughen his accent and colour his imagination. “This gentleman’s wanting to know about getting off at – at France.”

  Ranklin shook hands with Mr Clayburn of Detroit. “If you’re going to Paris and your baggage is registered through … It is? then you just get on the train at the dock. The delay comes at the Gare St Lazare, the station in Paris. You have to wait about twenty minutes while they organise your baggage and then you clear it through customs and the octroi – all they’re really worried about is tobacco and matches and food. The octroi’s for taxing any food brought into Paris or any French city.”

  Mr Clayburn bought them both a drink and withdrew to find his Dear Wife. They moved to a corner table.

  “How are you feeling?” Ranklin asked.

  “Just don’t mention it, and it won’t mention itself. I’m not thinking Mr Clayburn’s one of them – did ye have any luck yerself?”

  “All I got was a fat German – you might have seen him, big moustache, glasses? That was before lunch. He was loaded and primed with beer. But that’s all. I wonder if this whole …” But it wouldn’t do to express his doubts in front of O’Gilroy. “There’s still the train to Paris.”

  They went on deck to enjoy the suddenness, like waking from a nightmare, as the steamer finished a roll and, seemingly surprised herself, stayed upright as she slid between the jetties, and into the channel and harbour of Dieppe. Ranklin always enjoyed the sight of a non-British port. For a country that relied so much on its sea trade and Navy, British ports were remarkably surly-looking places. Here, even in the
gusting rain, the defiant bright awnings of the café-lined quay, the tall houses above them, the arcade at the beginning of the Quai Duquesne, all suggested an interest in the comings and goings of the cosy little harbour. Perhaps “trade” was the key: English ports were tradesmen’s entrances, mere necessities.

  The Paris train was puffing impatiently on the dockside, late because they were late themselves in that weather. They got their travelling bags – Ranklin suddenly remembered they had been left unguarded in the cabin, albeit locked – handed the cabin key to the purser, and joined the crowd stumbling across the gangplank.

  “Capitaine Ranklin! M’sieur le Capitaine Ranklin!” A uniform waving an envelope.

  Ranklin was startled, then embarrassed, perhaps more as an Englishman having to unmask himself in front of a crowd than for his mission. He showed his passport, grabbed the envelope and tore it open.

  Would Captain Ranklin urgently and personally telephone Colonel Yarde-Buller at the Embassy in Paris?

  Despite his unlikely name, the Colonel was the perfectly real Military Attaché to the British Embassy, and the message could only originate with the Bureau, since only it knew … But one thing they had been told about their work was not to rely on military attachés who were appointed by the Foreign Office and totally subservient to their ambassadors. And ambassadors regarded spies as being even worse than warm champagne.

  The French official was looking at him with frank curiosity. Damn it, they might as well have laid on a band and flags. He showed the message to O’Gilroy who shrugged and said: “The train’s looking urgent.”

  It wasn’t so much the train as the officials and blue-blousoned porters, all enjoying a loud French panic as they bustled passengers aboard. They had already seen Lieutenant Spiers get in.

  “Ah, M’sieu, est qu’il y a un téléphone?” But, naturellement, all telephones were for official use. However, at the hotel which one could not see because the train was in the way …

  “Wait here,” he told O’Gilroy, and galloped off down the slippery cobblestones.

  The walk back, when he came out of the hotel, was much shorter because the train was no longer in the way.

  “And the Colonel isn’t even in his office this afternoon. What the devil the Bureau’s playing at …”

  O’Gilroy took it calmly. “Would it have to be the Bureau at all? It wouldn’t need a genius to find out the Colonel’s name.”

  “So you think we’ve been spotted?” The thought was both exciting and sinister. “But we have to pretend we don’t know that. And as real couriers we’d want to get to Paris quickly, but safely. But if we were real couriers we’d be pretending to be tourists, so …” And standing between the scurry of replenishing the steamer and the busy cafés of the quayside, he began to feel the loneliness of his new trade.

  “It’s a mite fancy for me too, Captain,” O’Gilroy said dryly. “We’d best remember if it’s them, they’ll play the next card.”

  “But we’re cut off from Spiers: have they diverted us from him, or are we diverting them from him?”

  “You did not go to Paris, then?” The low, slow Gunther Arnold growl, now wrapped in a flapping grey-green cloak that made him look like a fat Christmas tree. Ranklin couldn’t imagine how he had got so close unnoticed.

  “Some silly mix-up made us miss the train,” he said.

  “Then we must have another drink! And your friend also. I have a hotel – it is not the Ritz, but – yes?”

  Ranklin tried not to stare at him. Gunther was, presumably, the first spy he had met. Apart from himself, of course, and other members of the Bureau whom he couldn’t think of as real spies. But Gunther would hardly have been born into a Fine Old Spy Family, would he?

  “That’s very kind,” he said pleasantly. “But we’ll have to find out about the next train, then telegraph to Paris to make sure our luggage …”

  “M’sieu?” This time it was a tall man in grey chauffeur’s uniform, a small gold coronet embroidered on his breast and an unfamiliar badge on his cap. He bowed very slightly. “The General le Comte de St Col presents his compliments and wishes to know if he may be of assistance. He wishes your visit to France to be without problems.”

  “How thoughtful of him.” Ranklin looked around for the General, feeling but resisting the attraction of a fellow soldier – even a General – in-problem times.

  “The General is in the automobile.” It was parked a few yards away, a large white landaulette being gazed at by small and apparently rainproof schoolboys.

  “And a very nice automobile to be waiting in,” O’Gilroy murmured, and Ranklin looked at him sharply. He had resisted the temptation, so O’Gilroy could, too. Their task was to stay in Gunther’s clutches but when he looked, the man had faded away again. Trust any general to pop up at the wrong time and mess things up, he thought angrily, then found himself following O’Gilroy towards the car.

  The General, obviously well past retirement age, leant forward from the shadowed back seat, gloved hands resting on a walking stick. He had a thin face but puffy red cheeks, a long thinned-out white moustache and damp blue eyes. He shook hands as Ranklin was forced to explain a version of their problem.

  “Sergeant Clement will telegraph to St-Lazare for the accommodation of your baggage. It would be an error to take the next trains, they stop everywhere to Rouen. But my house is on the route to there and is at your disposal after such a crossing. Perhaps you would wish to bathe, to take a small repas – and then Sergeant Clement will convey you to a comfortable express from Rouen. There is no problem.”

  It wasn’t an order, not quite, and Ranklin was about to refuse politely when O’Gilroy simply climbed into the car. Ranklin now had the choice of getting loudly angry or getting in also. He got in, but he also got quietly very angry as well.

  11

  As he’d expected, the house wasn’t exactly on the direct road to Rouen, and nor was it a house but a château. Not a grand one – it got its size from the height of its witch’s-hat turrets rather than its width – but perfectly sited atop a small hill with a steep lawn down to the road in front and now-leafless forests marching up on either flank. Only as they chugged up the drive which curled round to the back could he see that the lawn needed scything, the creeper on the walls should be cut back and the drainpipes in the courtyard where they arrived were dribbling rustily down the stonework. It was nice to know that it wasn’t only the English landed class that had been ravaged by death duties and the agricultural slump.

  A manservant in worn but well-kept livery whisked away their bags – Ranklin should have foreseen that – and the General led the way inside. After a few paces, he halted and Took Off His Hat in a gesture that made Ranklin do the same and glare at O’Gilroy to copy.

  “Gentlemen,” the General said, “His Most Christian Majesty King Philippe of the French.”

  The portrait, hung to dominate the hallway, was of a middle-aged man with a long, full-lipped face and square fringe beard, wearing ducal robes. It was a recent picture but done in the style of the old court painters, with a stylised background showing, in defiance of geography, the Palace of Versailles on one side and Orléans cathedral on the other. Ranklin’s memory fixed on that clue: the current pretender to the throne had taken the title of Duc d’Orléans, not his father’s one of Comte de Paris.

  Please God, don’t let O’Gilroy say one word, but let me say the right ones.

  “We are most honoured to be received in the house of a truly loyal soldier of France,” he intoned hopefully. A sideways glance showed it had been well received.

  An older and stouter servant took their hats and coats, and they followed the General into a drawing room overlooking the terrace and the unmown lawn sloping down to the road. Itching with anger at O’Gilroy, Ranklin took in only a vague impression of the room: strongly masculine and military – a small brass cannon as a paperweight – the walls hung with African trophies, group photographs and decorative but useless maps. If the
re was, or had been, a comtesse, she had had no influence on this room.

  “Would you care for some refreshment?” the General offered, as the stout servant came in with a tray. “Of coffee, tea, or some wine?”

  Ranklin was about to choose tea, then recalled his mistrust of the French version and took coffee. O’Gilroy, he was relieved to see, did the same. The General sat down with a glass of lemon tea and the servant – the butler, Ranklin assumed – arranged a Moroccan shawl around his shoulders.

  For want of anything better to say, Ranklin harked back to the portrait in the hallway. “Are you acquainted with the Duc d’Orléans, sir?”

  “His Majesty is gracious enough to correspond with me. I have not been fortunate enough to wait upon him.”

  O’Gilroy was looking baffled. Let him stew, Ranklin’s anger said.

  “Do you know if he plans any further travels, sir?” And as the General’s thin eyebrows closed at this impertinence, Ranklin added quickly: “I thought his book on Spitzbergen was quite excellent. Most informative.” And for all he knew, it might have been, along with being a daft place to write a book about.

  The General was mollified. “I understand he plans no further travels. He knows his destiny lies in Europe at this time.”

  There was something, but not quite everything, unreal about talking of France accepting a king once more. Ranklin went along with it, partly to explore the General, but just as much to bewilder O’Gilroy. “I am reassured that His Majesty’s leadership will be available in these dark times.”

  There was a tap at the door and the butler trundled over to bring the message up the chain of command: from housemaid to butler to General, who announced: “Mon Capitaine, M’sieu, your baths have been prepared. A small repas will be waiting on your return.”

  “That is most kind, but we do need to get to Paris …” They might already have failed in their task, except in distracting Gunther away from Spiers and the true codes, but there was an interview in London to think about (“And what did you do then, Captain?” “Well, sir, we wallowed in hot baths, had a bite to eat and toddled on our way …”)