All Honourable Men (31 page)

This didn't surprise Ranklin with his military background. He was convinced that an army could camp on the driest part of the Sahara or an Arctic ice-floe, and within hours the place would be trampled mud. It was obviously a law of nature that touched armies of workmen too.

He had taken Lady Kelso's arm as she carefully placed her button-booted feet. “Would you mind frightfully,” she asked, “if I said ‘bloody hell'?”

“Please do.”

“Bloody hell.”

Then they were ushered up wooden steps – all the huts were placed well above the mud – and into what must be the German mess hall. It was bright and functional, with some small tables and chairs, some long tables and benches, a couple of stoves and, at the far end, a half-hearted attempt to create a lounge area of padded chairs, carpets and brassware.

Streibl had undergone an odd snowball effect, gradually becoming a small crowd of men in similar hats, shirts and
leather coats who hurried up to clasp his hand; in his own world, he was obviously a grand panjandrum. Now the little crowd split, pulling out chairs for Lady Kelso and Ranklin, fetching them coffee, and introducing themselves. Streibl himself had vanished.

“Is this,” their self-appointed German host asked, “how you expected it to be?”

“I don't expect things,” she said pleasantly. And that, Ranklin thought, is probably true: her self-sufficiency lies in her talent to go from place to place, person to person, hoping for nothing but courtesy.

“We have for sleeping,” the host went on, “the huts and the new tents. Do you choose . . .?”

“You say the tents are new? – so the insects may not have moved in yet? I'll take that.”

He smiled at her foresight and, when Ranklin had also chosen a tent, went off to arrange it. The mess hut was gradually filling up – it must be nearing dinnertime – with German railwaymen, most dressed in Streibl's style. For a formal people, they really let themselves rip in the back of beyond – or perhaps they were copying pictures of American railway pioneers. Masculine groups were more susceptible to that than they admitted.

Then an exception was striding towards them in a long dark coat and a semi-official-looking black lambskin cap. He looked vaguely familiar, but Ranklin would surely have remembered that long ragged scar on the left jawline.

The man smiled and said: “Good evening, Lady Kelso, Mr Snaipe.” It was Zurga without his beard.

He sat down. “In Germany I got tired of always telling how I got this.” He tapped the scar. “So I grew the beard.”

Ranklin nodded. “Quite . . . er, how did you get it?”

Zurga smiled thinly and, now that Ranklin was noticing, slightly lopsidedly. “A shell fragment when I was too near the battle for Constantinople fifteen months ago.” So he was still pretending that he wasn't an army officer and hadn't been part of that battle.

Lady Kelso said firmly: “You look much more handsome without the beard – and quite dashing, with that scar. How did you get here?”

“I have been here since two days. I came by the Railway to the far side of the mountains and by horseback from there. You go to see the bandit Miskal tomorrow?”

“I believe that we're going to see Miskal
Bey
– as you are, of course? If I fail, that is.”

Zurga nodded, a quick and then prolonged affair, as if he'd forgotten he'd started his head moving. Then he said: “Do you truly think I can persuade him if you cannot?”

She barely hesitated. “Not if you regard him as a bandit, no. Nor by appealing to any Ottoman patriotism. If you want to try arguing Islam with him . . .”

Zurga smiled. “He may not see me as a True Believer . . .”

Wasn't this just what she'd said to Ranklin on the train? But she could go no further with Zurga; women had no place arguing Muslim doctrine.

He nodded again, or perhaps he'd never quite stopped. “You think so also?. . . So perhaps, to save time, it is best I do not go, we just send the ransom –
if
you should fail. I must tell Dr Streibl . . .”

When he'd gone, Lady Kelso asked: “Were you expecting him to drop out?”

“More or less. We never really believed in his mission, did we? But he's here for some purpose, and that could make it more dangerous for you.” He was in trouble here; the ransom had, through no doing of his, been sabotaged. But that might no longer be enough to keep Miskal delaying the Railway, not if Zurga was plotting something dire. He wanted to meet Miskal, see the situation . . . only perhaps that meant shoving Lady Kelso's neck into the noose . . .

Damn it, what he wanted was for her to
insist
on going so that it was impossible to stop her, whatever came of it. Please,
please
insist . . .

He said: “There's still time for you to back out, not go. I'll support you, here and in London.”

“That's very sweet of you to say, Patrick – but I did agree and we've come so far . . .”

“If you really want that . . .” But he had said
back out
, hadn't he? – a phrase sure to raise her hackles and make her insist. He back-pedalled: “But I still don't like the idea of Zurga coming down here ahead of us. He's not part of the Railway, so what the devil has he been arranging, the last two days?”

But suddenly the German railwaymen noticed their guests had been left alone and rushed to show hospitality, burying them with friendly small talk. The atmosphere in the hall was cheery, bubbling over into frequent laughter. He had expected them to be gloomier, but perhaps their own arrival had brought hope, an imminent end to a frustrating delay.

* * *

The
Vanadis
churned at near-top speed through the quiet dark sea – though if O'Gilroy knew anything about the sea (he didn't) hurricanes and waterspouts were waiting at the next corner. So he was back at his favourite seat, as near the centre of the ship as possible, at the big saloon table.

Corinna came in and threw a sheaf of telegraph forms on the table. “We've been wirelessing everybody and everything. We should be at Mersina by dawn tomorrow but the Railroad
says
they can't be ready for me until the day after. Sorry and all that, but pressures of work and blah-blah.”

“Day after tomorrow? Reckon to have Miskal all dead and buried by then, do they?”

“It sounds like it. Damn, damn,
damn
. And there's just about nothing I can do about it. Sure, I represent an important potential investor, but they're only saying if I wait twenty-four hours they'll have the red carpet dusted off and rolled out for me.”

“Can ye jest arrive there without an invitation?”

“How can I? The Railroad itself is the only route to the
camp, no road or anything—” Seeing his surprise she said: “That's normal: a railroad becomes its own road. Once you've laid a bit of track, you use it to haul up what you need for the next bit.”

She ignored his affront at her knowing more than he about such a masculine thing as railway building, and laid a small map on the table. It really was small, just a cutting from a German magazine showing the progress of the Baghdad Railway.

O'Gilroy leaned over it and identified a parallel rail and road (or track) joining Mersina to Adana—

“That's about forty miles,” Corinna said. “That bit of railroad was built by a French company some years ago.”

—and before that, a road branching off at Tarsus—

“Tarsus?” he queried.

“Yes. Where St Paul was born, wasn't it?”

—and heading inland over the mountains. And a few miles past Tarsus a rail spur doing the same thing: turning off inland, and ending after a few miles.

“That's where the work-camp is. That spur's about ten miles long and not open to the public. We
could
hire horses in Tarsus and ride up there alongside the railroad, but what would that do except show bad manners? And I'm sorry, but I can't do that to Cornelius Billings or the House of Sherring.”

“But if they're jest keeping us out while they get into a barney with a bandit—”

“Even if I were supposed to know that, what's my complaint? It's not my business how they deal with bandits. More my business if they
couldn't
deal with them and let it delay them unduly.”

O'Gilroy stared gloomily at the sketch map. “We're bug— stuck, then.”

“I'm not so sure about that,” she said thoughtfully. “We'll have all day tomorrow from when we reach Mersina. I assume Matt and Lady K will get on out to the bandit hideout first thing in the morning, so even if we were going to the camp,
we'd miss them . . . Why don't we try to catch them at the hideout ourselves?”

O'Gilroy peered at the little map, but it barely showed the mountains, let alone a monastery tucked in among them. “Pity ye couldn't get a proper map—”

“There's likely no such thing. You're spoiled: Britain's probably the best-mapped place in the world. Down here, sailors have mapped the coast and archaeologists a few sites, but the rest –” she shrugged “– it's travellers' tales.”

“Then any idea where this monastery place is?”

“None at all – except it must be somewhere north of the camp, more into the mountains. And there must be another way to it: a monastery will have been there hundreds of years before the Railway.”

O'Gilroy nodded, then said: “I'm wondering where Bertie is.”

“Oh Lord, I'd forgotten . . . Will he go to the camp?”

“Not him,” O'Gilroy said firmly. “If he's conniving with this bandit feller, it's without the Railway knowing. He'll have his own road there.”

“Probably the one we're looking for.” She paused, calculating. “There's an American consul in Mersina, he'll have heard of the House of Sherring . . . I'll see if I can get a telegram to him.”

She saw O'Gilroy's expression and shook her head. “No, not telling him anything except when we expect to get in. You don't give consuls time to think up more reasons why you shouldn't do something.”

* * *

The Railway camp's dinner was good and plentiful, but it had the bland, uncertain taste of food prepared by cooks who weren't born to that cuisine and didn't really know if they were getting it right or wrong. Streibl and the camp
Aufseher
, an elderly white-moustached man in respectable clothes and obviously ex-military, shared their table. The
Aufseher
made
the conversational running, asking about the London weather, music, the comfort of their journey – topics as bland as the food.

Halfway through, a younger engineer came in to apologise and call Streibl away. Lady Kelso and Ranklin avoided catching each other's eyes and both started talking simultaneously.

After coffee, they were escorted to their tents on a side street of grass as yet not quite trampled to mud. Lady Kelso's was guarded by by a Turkish soldier in a long overcoat, a slung rifle and a lambswool cap like Zurga's.

The floor of Ranklin's tent was raised off the ground by duckboards covered in old carpets (the one thing Turkey wasn't short of: in its lifetime a carpet could go from a wall hanging to a stall awning to being cut up for saddlebags). There was also a charcoal brazier – lit – and a washbasin and jug of water. Ranklin took off a minimum of clothing, washed perfunctorily, and was trying to organise his canvas camp bed for maximum warmth when Streibl and Zurga asked permission to come in.

“We have thought about a change to the plan,” Streibl began awkwardly.

“That Zurga isn't going to see Miskal? We heard about that,” Ranklin said, deliberately unhelpful.

“Ah . . . no, not about that. . .” Streibl sat on a camp stool. “But . . . will Lady Kelso herself take to Miskal the ransom?”

Ranklin hadn't expected that. His instinct was to stay as far clear of the ransom as possible. And it seemed reasonable it would be Snaipe's instinct, too. “No. Most certainly not. Surely, her mission and the ransom are alternatives. If you've decided she'll fail, send the ransom up instead.”

“Perhaps, but—”

“I think you are
forgetting
,” Ranklin said firmly, “that Lady Kelso is on a mission for His Majesty's Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. The ransom is nothing to do with that. I must therefore advise her not to link herself with it in any way whatsoever.”

Zurga was standing at the brazier, automatically holding out his hands to it, but so detached that Ranklin sensed he was, by now, in charge. He had abandoned more than the beard: he was now a soldier in soldier's country.

Gloomily, Streibl tried one more throw: “Then would she take a message to Miskal Bey?”

“Provided it is open, and I can read it, then I may advise her—”

“But surely—”

“Lady Kelso is not a courier for the Baghdad Railway Company. She is on a mission for His Majesty's Secretary—”

“Yes, yes. You have said that.” He glanced at Zurga and got heavily to his feet.

Zurga asked: “May I ask where you obtained that coat?” He indicated the sheepskin affair now spread on the camp bed.

“My brother brought it back from India. He's in America at the moment, so . . . It seemed made for this sort of country.”

“Most suitable. I ask because there was an Englishman who fought with the Greeks against us in 1912, an officer of artillery, and we heard that he wore such a coat. They called him the Warrior Sheep.”

“Really? The Warrior Sheep? Most amusing.” Ranklin forced a laugh.
Damn it
! –
to risk your alias with a scruffy old coat
. . . “Was he any good – as a warrior?”

“Perhaps.” He stroked his cheek past the scar. “Or lucky. It is the same thing, for warriors, I think.”

“Well,” Ranklin said, determinedly cheerful, “he wasn't my brother, anyway. Probably some other chap who'd served in India. I think most of our officers do, sooner or later.”