The Hansa Protocol (5 page)

Seligmann listened to the young man’s purposeful delivery, and thought to himself: this smart Foreign Office courier is too enamoured of carrying out orders to the letter, too addicted to formulas and formalities. It is the curse of a man without imagination …. He stands there stiffly, and rather impatiently, as though he’s simply called in for a moment on the way to somewhere else. Perhaps he has.

Dr Seligmann unlocked a drawer in his desk, and removed a stout linen envelope, to which three red wax seals had been attached. He handed it to Fenlake.

‘I cannot over-emphasize, Lieutenant Fenlake,’ he said, ‘the necessity of this memorandum being placed into the hands of Baron von Dessau before the thirteenth of this month—’

‘With respect, sir,’ Fenlake interrupted, ‘I am not authorized to talk about the document, only to verify and receive it.’

The courier glanced at the packet, nodded in satisfaction, and then placed it in an inside pocket of his greatcoat. He brought himself quietly to attention for a moment, and then moved towards the door.

‘I will take my leave of you immediately, sir,’ he said, ‘as my mission here is accomplished. This memorandum will be with my superiors within the hour.’

Dr Seligmann smiled, and opened the heavy iron door of the Belvedere, wincing yet again at the deep cold of the January night.

‘Thank you, Mr Fenlake,’ he said. ‘You have relieved me of a crushing burden. I bid you good night!’

Seligmann resumed his place at the desk. He was hugely relieved to know that the sealed memorandum was finally safe out of his house. He wondered in what way Stefan Oliver had been unsuccessful, and what had happened to him. For some reason he had shied away from asking Fenlake directly. Perhaps it was just as well not to know.

Whom did he suspect, and of what? Ottilie was a dear girl, clearly bored with life in Chelsea, and longing for the glittering salons of Berlin. She seemed to spend a disproportionately large part of her days locked in combat with Mrs Poniatowski, who was a good housekeeper, but a sour, forbidding woman, impatient of young people and their desire for novelty.

Count Czerny, his Austrian associate, was involved so intrinsically in his work for harmony among the nations of Europe that it was simply foolish to suspect him of … of what? His fears were ill-formed,
intangible
. Czerny had lived in his house for over five years. In political terms they thought as one man. If anything were to happen to him, Czerny would carry on his mission to frustrate the ambitions of the war party in Berlin.

The war party …. Three years earlier, the old Iron Chancellor of Germany, Prince von Bismarck, had been dismissed. ‘Dropping the pilot’ they’d called it here in England. There were people in Berlin, in the very heart of the German Reich, who were bent on a trial of strength with Great Britain. Baron von Dessau was such a man. A member of the Reichstag, he held minor office in the German Foreign Service, but his strength lay with the brotherhoods and their fevered dreams of
expansion
. It mattered nothing to von Dessau that the Emperor William II was Queen Victoria’s grandson. Well, he, Otto Seligmann, was doing all in his power to avert the possibility of such a war.

Seligmann listened to the settling of coals in the grate, and the loud ticking of the clock. That young fellow Colin McColl was clearly a trained philologist. Odd, that an expert firm like Quaritch’s should seek out an obscure German scholar to verify those pages, when there were infinitely better informed people at London University to do it for them!

Friday, the thirteenth …. A wicked, perverse choice of date. They would all meet in Berlin, to encourage each other in rash adventures. There was no language like German for stirring the emotions of the mob. But von Dessau was essentially prudent, and would be first stunned, then sobered, by the information contained in that
memorandum
. Pray God it reached him before the thirteenth!

Seligmann looked round the serried rows of shelves rising above him, and smiled. Then he became aware again of the small agate clock on the mantelpiece. Surely that clock had never ticked as loudly before? He glanced across the room to the iron staircase, where McColl’s stout briefcase still reposed on top of the unopened crate of books from Bonn. That had been an unexpected present. Odd, that it had arrived on the very day that—

Too late, he saw the meaning of the sealed crate, the closed briefcase, and the loud ticking. Otto Seligmann sprang up frantically from his chair.

When the door of the Belvedere closed behind him, Lieutenant Fenlake passed through the chill garden and into the rear quarter of the ancient house. The prim little man in the tight coat – he had heard Dr Seligmann address him as Schneider – was waiting to conduct him to the front door, which gave immediately on to Lavender Walk. Fenlake hurried through the warm, panelled hall with its glowing lamps and stepped out purposefully on to the pavement.

He had taken only a few steps when the air was rent asunder by a tremendous explosion. A shock wave crashed through the street and flung him to the ground.

The young officer took only seconds to regain his feet. People were gathering from all sides to jam the narrow street, and to gaze in dumb awe at the scene. The door of the house opened, and Schneider, his clothing singed and smoking, staggered out and down the steps, crying aloud frantically in some foreign tongue. Fenlake plunged back into the smoking interior of the house.

The door to the garden had been blown off its hinges, and lay
shattered
on the floor. Fenlake clambered over it, and emerged into the garden. It was a terrifying scene. The Belvedere was burning like a monstrous firework. Sinuous arms of flame had burst through the windows, and reached as high as the tops of the stunted trees, though
the stout iron door still held. The back of the main house was lit up as though it was day. Most of the windows had been shattered by the force of the explosion. The earlier bitter cold had yielded to a dangerous and stifling heat.

Lieutenant Fenlake was conscious of the presence of others in the garden, and of voices chattering excitedly. It was immediately clear to him that there was nothing that anyone could do: the heat was now so fierce that it was virtually impossible to approach the blazing building. The trees were beginning to catch fire.

Suddenly, Fenlake heard a strong Scots voice calling from the
direction
of the house.

‘Is Dr Seligmann still in there?’

There was a muttered reply, which Fenlake did not catch, and then a man emerged into the burning garden. The man looked swiftly around him, and then picked up what appeared to be a heavy plank that had been lying on a grass verge close to the house. He began to run across the grass, and as he came into the lurid circle of light, Fenlake saw that he was crouched low, his arms crooked around the heavy plank. His pace increased as he neared the Belvedere, and, suddenly realizing what he intended to do, the young officer cried out:

‘Stop it, man! It’s certain death!’

The man paid no attention, and continued his relentless charge straight at the still-closed iron door of the Belvedere. There was a mighty clang as he hit the door squarely with the plank. It crashed open, still on its hinges, and instantly an inferno of fire leapt out at him, and he staggered back, falling to the ground. At the same time, the flames from the doorway seemed to be sucked backward and upward, and then the stone ribs of the roof tore away from their supports, and fell inwards with a screaming roar. A colossal fountain of sparks and fragments of glowing timber shot upwards into the night sky.

With an impatient oath, Lieutenant Fenlake dragged the man by main force away from the blaze, and beat out the deadly little flames that had started to singe his clothing.

‘You’re a brave man, but a foolish one, sir,’ he said. ‘Were you contemplating a rescue? No one could have survived that explosion, or that fire.’

The other young man turned a soot-stained face to his rescuer, and smiled.

‘I did what I felt was necessary under the circumstances. I had just concluded some business with Dr Seligmann before this accident occurred, and was still in the area. A frightful business, this. Gas, I expect.’

The Scotsman’s face seemed to hold some kind of mocking
challenge
, exaggerated by the flickering light from the Belvedere. He was staring fixedly at Fenlake, as though memorizing his features. Or perhaps – yes, surely they had met somewhere before?

‘I, too, had business with Dr Seligmann this evening,’ said Fenlake. ‘Your face is familiar to me. I believe we’ve met before, somewhere.’

‘Very likely, sir. Where three and a half million people are cooped up together in one city, their paths may cross and re-cross. You evidently choose not to tell me your name, but I’ll tell you mine. It’s Colin McColl, and I work for Mr Quaritch, the antiquarian bookseller in Piccadilly. One day, perhaps—’

Colin McColl broke off as the thunder of horses’ hoofs heralded the arrival of the fire engines. The throng of people in the road began to disperse, and the damaged and bereaved house was tacitly returned to its legitimate occupiers. Fenlake saw a young woman in a green evening dress standing in the shattered rear entrance of the house. An older, rather forbidding woman came and stood beside her. Neither said a word. They looked like marble statues, or waxworks posed in a tableau.

It was time for Fenlake to go, before anyone asked him awkward questions. There was work still to be done. He could feel the weight of Seligmann’s memorandum in his inside pocket.

That man, McColl …. He had seen him somewhere before, not in the daily criss-crossing of London’s teeming millions, but somewhere connected with his own line of business. He’d remember one of these days. Soon, the police would be there. It was time for him to fade discreetly from the scene. He looked around him to see if Mr McColl was still in the garden, but he had disappeared.

Sir Charles Napier drew his heavy astrakhan coat around his shoulders. It was bitterly cold in the untenanted garden lodge where he had been obliged to meet Lieutenant Fenlake. A single-storey building, covered in flaking stucco, and all but overgrown with thickets of bramble, it stood in an obscure corner of the grounds surrounding the Chelsea Royal Hospital. It was, he mused drily, a far cry from the Italianate splendours
and embracing comfort of the Foreign Office.

From where he stood at the grimy rear window, he could see the flames rising high into the air a quarter of a mile away in the direction of the Chelsea Physic Garden. An accident? If one were naïve enough, he thought, one could believe it to have been an accident. No doubt it would provoke an international incident. Dr Otto Seligmann, worker for peace, sacrificed as a burnt-offering to Bellona, the Goddess of War.

Only the previous evening they had shared a platform at a meeting of the Anglo-German Friendship League, both of them unaware that Stefan Oliver had been done to death, and that his murdered body had been thrown down, as it were, at his feet, in a supreme gesture of contempt. One of Kershaw’s shadowy people, a blunt, graceless fellow from the River Police, had placed the water-sodden dummy
memorandum
into his hands, and mumbled some inelegant words of commiseration.

Poor Seligmann! They must have hated him very much to prepare such a death for him. Immolation …. A pagan sacrifice. What was the name of that fellow Seligmann had mentioned? Nietzsche. Germany seemed to thrive on half-crazed fanatics who fancied themselves as geniuses.

He had known Otto Seligmann intimately for twenty years. Their views on the future condition of Europe were ultimately formed by the same humane political ethic. They had toiled together to build the Anglo-German League of Friendship. Seligmann had spent many a weekend at Napier’s country place down in Wiltshire. And to what purpose? It had all been a chimaera. Germany would go wherever Fate was leading her.

Sir Charles Napier turned away from the window, and looked at the young man standing stiffly and patiently near the door of the lodge. He had a photographic memory where his couriers were concerned, and he recalled this young man’s dossier now.

Arthur Ernest Henry Fenlake. Born 8 October, 1862. Lieutenant, 107th Field Battery, Royal Artillery. Seconded to the Foreign Office, January, 1889.

Sir Charles sat down at a dusty table.

‘Good evening, Lieutenant Fenlake,’ he said. ‘So your mission was successful!’

‘It was, sir.’

Lieutenant Fenlake took Dr Seligmann’s memorandum from his pocket and handed it to Sir Charles. Sir Charles ran a hand through his hair, which was still dark, though greying at the temples. He gave a little sigh, and then a short laugh.

‘I don’t relish all this cloak-and-dagger business, Fenlake,’ he said. ‘But it would have been foolish not to have used a secure house for the purpose of this little transaction. As for what has happened in Lavender Walk – well, whatever our private feelings, it’s none of our business. The police will be there by now.’

Sir Charles placed the sealed memorandum carefully in an inside pocket of his greatcoat. He looked with genuine appreciation at the young courier, who had proved a staunch, and refreshingly
unimaginative
agent for the Foreign Office’s special services. He never questioned his instructions, and carried them out to the letter. Perhaps he would employ him to take the memorandum to von Dessau in Berlin when the right moment came to do so. He would wait a little while before making up his mind.

‘Lieutenant Fenlake,’ he said, ‘you never knew your fellow-courier, Stefan Oliver. I feel it’s only right to recall him here at this moment, with that hellish bonfire blazing away in Lavender Walk. He was half Polish, half French, brought to England in early childhood. His parents had fled from one or other of Europe’s vile revolutions. His is a long and complex history. Suffice it to say, that I was proud to know him. May he rest in peace.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Sir Charles Napier smiled to himself. Fenlake was a gem. Nothing ever distracted him from his duty. The only words he seemed to
understand
were words of command.