Flight From Honour (37 page)

“But where do the Lewis guns fit in?” Ranklin persisted. “The Count—”

“You mentioned him before. What Count?”

“Falcone’s crony in Trieste, he was in jail with me.”

“Why should he know anything about them?”

Ranklin stopped, wondering why he hadn’t asked that question himself. If the guns weren’t going on the aeroplane, why had the Count heard of them? – let alone be so worried that Ranklin had? And, come to that, why should that paper-pushing Austrian Captain Knebel know of such guns?

And then he knew the answer.

Dagner had waited briefly to see if Ranklin had more to say, then turned and strode back to the breakfast table to ask O’Gilroy: “Is the aeroplane ready?”

O’Gilroy glanced past him at Ranklin, coming slowly and thoughtfully up behind, and said carefully: “’Tis in the field, far side of the road. How about Mr d’Annunzio?”

Corinna suddenly appeared and sat down. “I don’t think he likes working for the British Secret Service.”

Dagner looked at her sternly. “Madam, I’d be grateful if you could exercise a little more discretion—”

“That went out the window when you tried to recruit my brother. We’re all family now. Go right ahead.” She smiled decorously at Ranklin, seeming quite composed again. She now wore a plain white dress with an apple-green bolero jacket and a wide straw hat. And with both elbows planted firmly on the table, looked very permanent. Catching O’Gilroy’s eye, she said: “So I was right, wasn’t I? – despite being a weak and feeble woman.”

“Never said ye was wrong. Jest that ye wasn’t . . . sure.”

A bit reluctantly, in front of Corinna, Dagner went on: “Senator, will you have a word with Signore d’Annunzio? But if that doesn’t work, anybody can pretend to be him, throwing out the leaflets.”

“Would you do it?” Ranklin asked quickly.

“Certainly I’ll go. Perhaps better me than you.”

“Ah.” That seemed to mean something to Ranklin. “But just suppose—” he looked from Dagner to Falcone; “—it fails? – the Austrians laugh it off as a silly prank?”

There was something about Ranklin’s tone that made both Corinna and O’Gilroy glance sharply at him, then each other. Dagner, not knowing him so well, just looked impatient, but let Falcone answer. “I know Triestine Italians, Captain Ranklin. The sight of the great patriot flying over – as they will believe – and reading his trumpet words, it will stir them as you do not believe possible.”

“Umm . . .” Ranklin looked thoughtful. “I wonder if you believed that, to start with. And then decided it would be even better if they saw the Austrians blow d’Annunzio out of the sky, martyr him with those Lewis guns you sent them. Sorry, Major,” he said to Dagner, “but we’ve all been working for the Senator’s vision of Europe.”

Everyone was briefly still and silent. Then they all began at once. Ranklin leant over to whisper to O’Gilroy and get a reply.

He overrode the hubbub. “O’Gilroy says he’d been told to drop the leaflets over the old town, around the Castle. So the Lewis guns’ll be on the battlements there, manned by the Castle guard, not the coming-and-going garrison.”

Dagner said: “Captain Ranklin, these are fantasies. But they come very close to that
sabotage
you spoke of.”

“No, Major, I
know
this. First I thought those guns must be for the aeroplane, really they’re for shooting it down. Falcone sent them to the Count who presented them to the Austrian Commander.”

Falcone waved the idea away. “Ridiculous! Quite impossible! Would I arrange for such a popular patriot as Gabriele d’Annunzio to be—”

“That’s just what makes him a good sacrifice. And I was in jail with the Count yesterday. I heard all about him sucking up to the Austrians so they’d think the gift of the guns was just part of that, not its purpose. But when he thought of being in their hands when they realised they’d been tricked into publicly slaughtering a great Italian, he was going berserk, and he talked . . .” He delicately left the sentence open.

“Hold hard,” O’Gilroy said. “Ye say the aeroplane was going to be shot down by machine-guns?” He turned on Falcone. “
And what about the pilot?
”

Falcone licked his lips but said nothing, watching Dagner. Very deliberately, O’Gilroy took a pistol from his pocket and laid it beside his cup. “Seems like a feller needs some protection around here.”

Corinna suddenly caught on, but turned her fury on Dagner. “D’you mean it would have been
Andrew?
”

She pitched her coffee at his waistcoat, and at that moment d’Annunzio, freshly lavendered and in an uncreased cream linen suit, came onto the terrace. He stopped and spread his arms delightedly. “Ah, such drama! And so early! Are these—” he gestured at Ranklin and Dagner; “—yet more English secret agents?”

“Yes they are,” Corinna snapped, “and since the plot was to get you bumped off, you’d better sit down and listen.”

Ranklin reassured her: “I’m afraid Major Dagner didn’t know, or he wouldn’t have volunteered to go. He – all of us – were being used by Falcone and the Count.”

Perhaps Dagner winced at that. Corinna switched her glare to Falcone, and asked O’Gilroy: “Are you thinking of shooting him?”

“Oh, I’m thinking of it, all right,” he said softly, and picked up the pistol – though perhaps to stop her grabbing it.

Falcone still didn’t say anything. And unless we shoot him, Ranklin thought, there’s really nothing we can do to him. Except leave him here with the wreckage. And bodies.

D’Annunzio had been enjoying himself without in the least understanding. “Now please, someone explain to me.”

Ranklin stood up. “They planned to have you killed over Trieste, made a martyr like Oberdan, that’s all. Don’t fret about it.” He patted d’Annunzio’s shoulder, leaving a smudge of powder-smoke and oil on the fresh suit. “Come on, let’s get away from here. Major?”

Corinna pushed back her chair so firmly that it fell over. Dagner got to his feet slowly, dreamily, making no move to mop the coffee off his front. “Then he was
using
me . . . I let him use the whole service . . .”

Ranklin gripped his arm and he let himself be led away from the table. “In Europe things are . . . well, perhaps different.”

“I thought we had a chance to . . . Was I really so wrong, Captain? Was my whole vision wrong?”

“No, no, of course not,” Ranklin reassured him desperately. “Let’s just get
away.
”

A spark of life seemed to re-enter Dagner. He smiled wryly. “And then what? Do you leave me alone in the library with a pistol on the desk?”

“For God’s sake!” Ranklin felt everything was sliding out of control.

Then Corinna said gently: “Why don’t you just get back home to your wife, Major Dagner?”

He smiled with relief at the thought. “Yes. Yes, of course. She’ll understand. . .” And he seemed to relax.

Corinna must have packed like an impatient burglar; less than ten minutes later, servants were carrying her bags downstairs and out into the garden, where threads of smoke were rising from the steam-launch.

Signora Falcone met them in the hall still wearing last night’s evening dress. But although it looked as limp as yesterday’s bouquet, she herself was very poised, even imperious. “I have told Matteo not to load your bags. I have learned what you were saying, but I said you must not leave before noon and that still holds good.” Matteo stepped out behind her, squat and solid, sort-of-casually holding a shotgun.

“Oh
no
,” Ranklin said wearily. “It’s all over. Go and ask your husband.”

“He’s a sick man, easily depressed. But we still have the aeroplane—”

“Ye don’t, ye know,” O’Gilroy said. “On account I smashed it up, landing in the dark. Only the wheels and propeller and a strut and the cowling, but a week’s work, mebbe.”

Corinna and Signora Falcone spoke at once; the consensus was: “You mean all this time . . . ?”

“The Captain said to keep quiet, he wanted to hear the rest of the plan out. And we
was
dashing to yer rescue.”

For the first time, they saw Signora Falcone lose her elegance. She sagged, hunched as if she suddenly wore a rucksack of rocks, staring at the floor. Then in a tired, soft voice she spoke to Matteo and he laid the shotgun aside.

O’Gilroy took his hand out of his pocket.

“And now,” Signora Falcone whimpered, “you’re leaving me with all . . . this.” A gesture scooped in the whole night’s happenings.

“I’m sure you’ll manage,” Corinna said crisply. “And I shall watch your husband’s political career with great interest.”

Then slapped her hard enough to spin her round.

The baggage was already loaded into the launch. Ranklin peered under the canvas canopy. “Where’s Major Dagner?”

O’Gilroy shrugged and indicated his own small bag. “I was packing. Thought he came down ahead of us.”

Corinna turned her exam Italian on the servants. After a bit of gesticulation, she reported: “They saw him going down the garden ten minutes ago. Towards the river.”

The three of them instinctively looked down into the slow, placid, deep Brenta.

Ranklin said: “Oh Christ.”

O’Gilroy said: “He’s an expert. If he don’t want to he found . . .” He shrugged.

Corinna said softly: “Maybe he did go home to his wife.”

34

The Commander still had the curled moustache he had grown for his curtailed Bavarian holiday, and a new mannerism of stroking it every few seconds – either from pride or to make sure it hadn’t escaped.

“Why the devil have you written all this down?” he grumbled, waving Ranklin’s report. “Did you expect me to leave
this
lurking in the files?”

“No, sir. I expect you’ll burn it. But it helped clarify my thoughts, getting it all onto paper.”

“And at the end of it all – making the Bureau a legend and a Great Power and believing his wife was still alive and storming a police station – you don’t conclude the man was
mad
?”

“No, sir. I think perhaps he’d been a sp— an agent too long. Living in a make-believe world . . . And he talked about us having a mission—”

“Dangerous,” the Commander grunted.

“—and the loneliness of the job . . . Perhaps pretending to himself his wife was still alive made it less lonely.” It sounded pretentious as he said it, so he added a shrug to water it down.

But the Commander had his own thoughts. “I should have been more suspicious when Indian Army Intelligence handed him over so easily. You don’t let your best men go. And I shouldn’t have left him alone so soon. Hoped you and your blasted paperwork would keep him busy.”

“He
was
doing it all for the Bureau.”

“For his idea of the Bureau,” the Commander said sharply. “There’s only one idea of the Bureau that counts, and that’s mine. I suppose he never thought
I
might have an idea of what we might some day become? And how to get there?” Then he calmed down. “Would you have called him a decent upright English gentleman?”

“Yes.” Ranklin was surprised. “Of course.”

The Commander sighed. “Without thinking how difficult it would he to turn decent, upright Englishmen into useful agents? – around Europe, anyway. Goes against everything they’ve ever been taught. Maybe it’s easier on the frontier, dealing with tribesmen, fuzzy-wuzzies, whatever-they-call-’em. Cheating
them
don’t count. But then he comes home, not on the frontier now, but where the real troubles are, and the real crooks. But he sees it as a chance to have world visions, start a crusade . . .”

“I think he trusted Senator Falcone too much, I mean trusted his own idea of what Falcone was up to, and never believed he might risk, even want, a war . . . But he was a good example to the new chaps.”

The Commander gave him a fierce stare and then an explosive grunt. “If any one of those new chaps of ours had stayed where he was a few weeks longer, he’d’ve been drummed out. Or court-martialled. Of course it didn’t show on their reports,” he answered Ranklin’s expression. “If it had got that far they’d have been out of my reach. But each one of ’em had his hand in some shady financial affair or up the skirt of the colonel’s daughter.”

After a few moments of rather stunned re-appraisal, Ranklin ventured: “Then you didn’t tell Major Dagner any of this, sir?”

“Up to him to spot it, if he’d been more open-minded – and less taken with Italian senators. Anyway, not the done thing to talk about, what? We’d given them a fresh start in the Bureau, chance to put it all behind them, forget the past . . . and all that balls. I picked ’em for bounders, even cads, and they’d better stay that way.”

“But you’re telling me . . .”

The Commander smiled sunnily. “Thought you’d have spotted it by now. After all, you’re one of ’em. Two, if you include your bandit chum O’Gilroy. Why did you think I came after you?”

Because you got the wrong end of the stick, Ranklin’s whirling thoughts protested. My bankruptcy was all my brother’s doing, I
am
a decent upright English gentleman . . .

. . . well, of course, I’ve learnt to be a bit suspicious and devious and a little bit unscrupulous, just to survive in this business, but—

“It’s all in your report, you know.” The Commander waved it. “Have another look, if you’ve any doubts about who you really are. Oh, I’m sure you’ve got your self-justifications, we all need ’em, long as we keep ’em quiet and just do the damn job. Have you thought what you did at the end? – when you’d worked our what those Lewis guns were really for? You
could
have tried persuading Major Dagner quietly and privately. I don’t say you’d have succeeded, but you chose instead to humiliate him in front of the others, destroy him.”

There was a long silence. The Commander struck a match, lit the report and dropped it into his big glass ashtray. “Frankly, I’m very glad you did; it got rid of him, and I don’t know how I’d have done it otherwise.” He struck another match, put it to his pipe and said between puffs: “But who knows? – perhaps he was right, and we’re wrong. But then, spying’s wrong, ain’t it? So probably it’s best done by us wrong ’uns.”