Flight From Honour

29

The distant bugle call that began the day came as a relief. Night in jail was not fun. When there was light, you could think of the reasons why you would soon be out, but the darkness crushed all reason and hope. They had won, had forgotten you, and were sleeping peacefully. And you were alone with dozing thoughts, not even the exotic terrors of nightmares, just coldly logical and gloomy. Ranklin loved that bugle call.

He sat up and realised he must at least have lain still a long time, since he was horribly stiff. The Count, a good twenty years older, must feel like a corpse.

Perhaps he was a corpse, Ranklin thought in a sudden panic. Died before I’ve found out what’s really going on. But when he leaned over to peer through the gloom, the old man was blinking and mumbling under the thin blankets. Only then did it occur to Ranklin that it had been a rather selfish thought. So he got all the way up, shook his shoes to make sure nothing had crawled into them, then went to piss in the enamel bucket and splatter his face with dusty water.

Pero sat up quickly, his smile as bright as ever, and made pantomime gestures of how the Count must feel. It was intended as sympathy, but the Count caught a glimpse and husked: “Please do me a favour and kill that damned Slovene.”

O’Gilroy was woken by a manservant with a tray of coffee. He lay for a minute or two wondering where he was before remembering he didn’t know. The ride in the dark last night had shown him very little, and the conversation had been either in Italian or about more important things.

At least he had no problems about what to wear: it was still the tweed suit he had left Brooklands in, the cleaner of two shirts and (he hoped) a fresh collar. He’d meant to buy more in Paris or Turin, but there hadn’t been time. He got shaved and dressed and found his way downstairs.

The house was grand but, he discovered, a simple square block. Bedrooms and bathrooms led off a wooden gallery that formed a hollow square, while below was a large living space surrounded by dining-rooms, drawing-rooms and God-knows-what rooms. Kitchens and staff quarters must be below that, half buried in a semi-basement.

Corinna didn’t wake for another hour, but had a better idea of where she was: in Senator Falcone’s villa. If it wasn’t by Palladio himself – and he couldn’t have designed every one of the hundreds of such villas in the Veneto region – it was in his style: symmetrical and classical. Her window, once she’d pushed open the shutters, looked out past a colonnaded portico to the formal garden, maybe a quarter of a mile of it before the River Brenta. A steam-launch was just chugging off from a landing-stage and heading downstream, probably to the lagoon and Venice, which she reckoned was a dozen miles away.

Downstairs, she was served coffee, toast (of leavened bread, thank goodness or Signora Falcone’s Irish background) and even offered a boiled egg. Then she began asking questions, and learnt that the Signora and O’Gilroy had already gone to the Lido in the launch, she to make sure the aeroplane was repaired, him to fly it, while Matteo would again get her to the hospital when she was ready. And – this from the major-domo, who had rather more power over the household than the grandest of English butlers – would she inform them if she wished to move to a hotel in Venice so as to be nearer her brother? She was, of course, welcome to stay, but the Signora would quite understand if . . .

Corinna said she’d decide when she’d seen how Andrew was. Did the telephone work?

But of course the telephone worked. Probably.

Ranklin had eaten far worse breakfasts than the Castello dungeons provided, and paid good money for some of them, too. It wasn’t elaborate: coffee, bread and a few slices of spicy sausage, but it was all fresh. And come to think of it, it might be more trouble to store things until they’d gone stale than just send down a helping of whatever the Castello guard was getting – particularly since they might well be the only prisoners. He didn’t believe Novak about the dungeons being crowded. The way the lamp-smoke had stained the wall showed this one hadn’t been used since it was whitewashed, and that was weeks ago. You couldn’t be in the Army and not be an expert on whitewash.

“Tell me,” the Count said, “that I only dreamt we had smoked our last cigarettes.”

“No dream, I’m afraid.” Ranklin displayed his empty case.

“Ah me,” the Count sighed. “How can we continue the fine old tradition of bribing prison guards if we do not meet them? Never mind. Soon my friends will know where I am, and then . . . I will send in cigarettes to you if they allow it. English ones may not be possible, but . . .”

“Have you really got friends in high places?” Ranklin asked innocently.

The Count seemed pained. “I have friends everywhere; you must not think I am blinded by my noble birth. But, as I am sure you already know, the title of a Venetian count is quite equivalent to marquis from anywhere else. And I admit that I find my best friends are those who understand that simple fact. So yes, indeed I have friends in what you call ‘high places’.” He glanced at Pero, apparently asleep on his cot, but by now seemed to have accepted him at face value. Still, he lowered his voice. “I may also tell you, in the greatest confidence, that I have taken trouble to impress those friends with my loyalty to the Emperor. I even applied for Austrian nationality. Probably they will not grant it, no matter what they say their policy is, but that is of no consequence. What greater proof of loyalty can they ask?”

Ranklin grunted. He couldn’t see the point of such a move. But at least he had the Count talking in confidence. The trick now was not to rush, let the man take his time. He suggested: “Possibly they assumed it was only to cause them embarrassment.”

“Perhaps – but they could not help being flattered that a man of my birth should ask to become an Austrian citizen. I mean,” he added quickly, “not a citizen in the French meaning. I would, of course, retain my title. It has a most splendid history. My great-grandfather . . .” And Ranklin had to smile and nod his way through a personalised Almanac de Gotha. But, he told himself, there’s still time. One thing you weren’t short of in jail was time.

Signora Falcone’s crisp instructions and the chink of gold coin got a new set of wheels – they hadn’t a suitable tyre, or so they said once they smelled the gold – on the Oriole by lunchtime. That left the afternoon for O’Gilroy to get in an hour’s practice, refuel, and fly the aeroplane over to the pasture across the road from the villa. Signora Falcone was very insistent that the demonstration flight should start from there. It all seemed a bit odd – or foreign – and O’Gilroy’s suspicions were showing healthy growth. But his mind was a pretty suspicious place at any time, and he concentrated on learning the Oriole.

He had been left a picnic of bread, cheese and something called ‘salami’, since the nearest restaurant on the Lido was nearly a mile away and probably thought more of its reputation than of his suit. Then the local mechanics helped him start up the Oriole, turn her into wind – and he was on his own.

After half an hour of weaving and banking at three thousand feet he felt confident enough to start practising landings. With its high wing, there was little tendency to “float” – scoot along just above the ground with the far wall getting closer. She just sat down firmly and stayed down. But coming in for the last one, he felt a flood of stickiness over his left foot, saw there was no drip showing in the oil-feed glass, and just scraped over the near wall with a dead engine.

They pushed the aeroplane into the half-shade of a shed and he smoked a cigarette while waiting for the engine to cool. There was no doubt about the problem – his shoe squelched with castor oil (the oil tank was just above the rudder bar) – only the solution. The mechanics were fascinated by the short length of fractured pipe, once he had got it unscrewed; they just didn’t have any ideas about mending or replacing it.

The dungeon lunch confirmed Ranklin’s view that they were getting straight soldiers’ fare: some sort of stew with rice and a plate of figs, with a flask of wine. And again not stale; the wine tasted only a few days old. He and the Count exchanged horrified glances at the first sip, then watched Pero lap it up, and flop back on his cot snoring.

But by now, the Count was getting agitated. He consulted his watch every ten minutes – Ranklin had given up on that, lapsing back to timing himself by the bugle calls – and muttered: “But my friends, one of my friends, must have asked where I am by now? Come, I must walk.”

So they paced solemnly around the perimeter of the cell, just as if it were the Piazza Grande except for a detour past the latrine bucket.

“What does that peasant of a police captain achieve in keeping us here?” the Count fretted.

“Last night, you said it could be until the Oberdan ‘season’ is over – another six weeks or so.”

“For you, yes. But why me? And he does not even question me. Why not? If I am arrested I have a right to be questioned, to explain. Not, of course, that I have to explain myself to that uniformed monkey.”

“Maybe he’s afraid of you.”

That brought a spring to the Count’s slow pace. “Yes, yes. Well may he be afraid of me. And soon he will have even better reason.”

Ranklin seized the opportunity and put on a carefully worried voice. “Perhaps it’s this place that’s getting me down, but I can’t help worrying about the aeroplane, whether it’s truly capable of the job . . .”

The Count glanced at him sharply. “Giancarlo has seen it, he has flown in it. And he is an expert. Why should it not be capable?”

“Oh, I don’t know . . . I know very little about aeroplanes, but flying all the way from Turin . . .”

“Not from Turin. They take it to Giancarlo’s house by Venice. They did not tell you?”

“Oh good, they did decide on Venice,” Ranklin said hastily. He gave a satisfied nod as if a minor detail had been cleared up and they strolled on, round and round.

But now he was beginning to fret, too. He’d thought of having plenty of time, but it was passing. And perhaps he’d subconsciously been thinking that as he’d been first in, he must be first out – and that was nonsense. At any moment, one of the Count’s friends might whisk him away, ending any revelations.

It was time to stir things up. “And I hope,” he said, “there’s enough ammunition for the Lewis guns?”

The Count stopped dead. “The Lewis guns?” He sounded surprised but, significantly, didn’t need to ask what they were.

“The two Falcone got from Britain.”

“He told you?” The surprise in the Count’s voice was almost horror.

“Oh-” Ranklin waved his hand and smiled; “-we, my people, are in the business of knowing things.”

“Yes . . . yes . . .” The Count was obviously thinking quickly. “He has many interests, the Senator. I believe he bought the machine-guns for the Italian Army. To test, to see if they will buy them.”

“Really? That wasn’t what I heard.”

“Then you heard wrong! Now, I have had my exercise, I must rest.” And he laid himself, limb by aged limb, on his cot.

Rather than just stand there, Ranklin sat down himself, turned so that nobody could see his face. I wrecked it, he thought. I ran it into a wall.

But perhaps the wall had always been there. So much he was expected to know, but other things he wasn’t. And the Lewis guns were on the far side of the wall. He had expected a touch of flamboyance in this plot; now he smelt a Borgian twist as well.

But just what plot? Nobody had said it was actually impossible to mount a Lewis gun on Andrew’s aeroplane. What did seem impossible was getting Andrew himself to pilot a flight intended to spray a city with machine-gun fire. But if Falcone had another pilot standing by, and the firing wasn’t supposed to be accurate but just a dramatic gesture, the whole thing became possible. Insane, but possible.

Damn it, it would be an act of war! And put Italy so far in the wrong that they’d hang Falcone for it, no matter what happened next. The Count might dream up such a plot, but Falcone was a practising politician . . .

I’m missing something, he thought. And just how much is Dagner missing? – or rather, how much does he know?

At five o’clock the Falcone launch arrived at the northernmost of the Lido’s jetties with Corinna already on board, a loose white dress fluttering in the breeze, clutching on a wide straw hat. “Hi. Signora Falcone’s having the vapours about where you’d got to and thinking you’d broken your neck. You haven’t broken your neck, have you?”

“Jest this.” O’Gilroy gloomily held up a few inches of oily copper pipe. “Oil feed. And seems nobody on the island can braze it, or don’t know what the devil I’m talking about.”

“Poor you,” she soothed. “D’ you want me to try my Italian?”

But by now the launch helmsman had taken a look. He said something to Corinna, who asked him to repeat more slowly, then she grinned at O’Gilroy. “Seems one of the chauffeurs back home can do it in a trice. Always doing something like it to the automobiles, he says. You’d better bring it aboard.”

O’Gilroy hesitated, then stepped into the boat. “They’ll have to bring me back to fix it and I want to do a plug change while I’m at it . . . Won’t be getting the Oriole across today, I’m thinking.”

“Then it’ll have to be tomorrow. How is it, flying it from the proper side?”

O’Gilroy’s gloom vanished. “Ah, it’s like . . . like I don’t know the words for it. Riding a winner at the Curragh, mebbe.”

She grinned back. “Little brother knows his stuff, then?”

“Surely – and how’s he doing?”

“Not so bad at all. Mostly bored, with the bandages still on and not able to read. I talked myself hoarse until I found a priest who speaks English and accepts donations to the Church. Then this boat arrived and I learned you’d gone missing – why didn’t you telephone them?”

“In Italian, and not knowing the number besides?” And also, though he wouldn’t admit it, because he wasn’t yet used to the world of telephones and simply hadn’t thought of it.

Once clear of the gondola routes and little islets, the helmsman started showing off like any chauffeur when the owner isn’t on board: they streaked across the lagoon like a torpedo boat. Corinna thought of telling him to behave, decided it would be improper and simply threw her hat on to the bottom boards and let her black hair stream in the wind; perhaps the Signora would lend her a maid to untangle it.

“Have you learnt any more about tomorrow’s demonstration?” she called.

“Never a word.”

She tried again: “Well, whatever it is, Andrew’s out of it.”

“Sounds like that’s what ye wanted.”

“Let’s say I’ve got my doubts.”

O’Gilroy considered. “Like what?”

She’d rather have said this with quiet significance, not bellowed it against the wind and rumble of the engine, but: “That it won’t be a demonstration but dropping inflammatory leaflets written by d’Annunzio over Trieste.”

He stared at her. “Where d’ye get that from?”

“From that practice flight you told me about in Paris. And listening to d’Annunzio on the train. And because Pop Sherring didn’t raise his little girl to believe everything she hears from big men with fifty-dollar suits and hundred-dollar smiles. Though,“ she admitted, “he may have slipped up with his little boy.”

“Ye worked that out yeself, then . . .”

“They’ll have to tell you pretty soon.”

O’Gilroy thought a while. “I wish the Captain was here.”

“D’you think Matt knows it and didn’t tell you?”

“Mebbe . . .” Ranklin wasn’t a naturally devious man, but over the past nine months he had been learning. O’Gilroy had helped teach him. “It’s not his way, though, not with me.”

“Perhaps he doesn’t know everything himself.”

O’Gilroy nodded vaguely and went back to his own thoughts. Ranklin trusted her – up to a careful point defined by their relationship, but he himself was right outside that. (To tell the truth, which he didn’t like to do even to himself, he disapproved of the affair. Such behaviour was normal for Ranklin, an Army officer, and he had no illusions about the morals of upper-class British women, not after being in service at a Big House. But he had expected better of an American lady.)

Finally he said: “Ye really wouldn’t want to be letting down the Captain?”

Corinna was about say something witty or withering, then thought again and just called: “No. I really wouldn’t. And,” she added, “ I wish he was here, too.”

“They’re wanting to start a strike in the shipyard there.”

She frowned over this, then: “Just that?”

“How d’ye mean?”

“These things can get out of hand, God knows they do in the States. In Trieste it could set Italians against Austrians. Or maybe that’s what they want . . . Except that Falcone’s a senator; he daren’t get mixed up in . . .” She reflected for a moment. “Only he’s doing a pretty good job of unmixing himself, letting d’Annunzio take the credit, and a foreign airplane flown by a foreign pilot . . .”

The launch slowed suddenly, curving skilfully, or so the helmsman wanted them to think, to avoid the milling boats at the mouth of the Brenta.

Meanwhile, O’Gilroy had become an intellectually rigorous Intelligence agent. “Jest how much of this do ye know, or would it all be guessing?”

Corinna almost pouted, but kept her voice low, now the engine noise had dimmed. “Guessing? It’s logic. Deduction.”

“So where’s d’Annunzio? And the leaflets?”

“I bet he – they – both will be here tonight.” She saw his look and hissed: “Suppose Matt had come up with the same idea, would you have believed him!”

With rash honesty, O’Gilroy said: “More like.”

“Oh would you? Just because he’s a man.”

He seemed surprised. “No. Because he‘s a spy.”

She sat back, stunned by the logic. Yes. Quite. What was the answer to that? “You don’t have to be a spy to figure out other people for crooks,” she growled.

They scurried the first few yards from the landing-stage to escape the cloud of insects, but could then stroll up the long garden. It was designed to frame the house: lines of cypresses and flowerbeds and stone walls all leading to it or at right angles from it. The villa itself, pink in the sunset, stood four-square on a slight rise, its ‘ground’ floor raised further so as to need impressive flights of steps on either side of the portico.

Seeing it without distractions for the first time, O’Gilroy broke the long silence. “Nice enough little place.”

“Needs more gardeners,” Corinna said succinctly. And correctly, because the formality was blurred by overgrowth, moss and crumbled stone. But it hardly mattered, since nobody could make decay as elegant as the Italians. “I must ask if it’s genuine Palladio.” She was quite sure O’Gilroy had never heard of him.

But O’Gilroy didn’t ask. He was noticing other villas, half hidden by trees, a quarter of a mile away on either side. In Ireland and England, such houses would have been miles apart, each the dominating Big House of its area. But here, on a vast scale, they had built a Renaissance garden suburb.

It was like words, he was coming to realise. They didn’t translate exactly, and nor did the patterns of life.

As they came near the house, O’Gilroy pitched his cigarette-butt into the dampest bit of undergrowth he could see and got a sharp look from Corinna. But at the last moment she relented as far as saying: “ I don’t know what orders you’re following, but for what it’s worth, I’ll back you if you want to abandon ship. And I’ll tell Matt that.”

But he just muttered something gruff, and they walked up the cracked, mossy but still elegant steps.

With its thick walls, the dungeon was out of phase with the day. It was late afternoon when it had realised it was a warm day outside, but it took to the idea enthusiastically. Already bad-tempered, Ranklin had sweated on the itchy blankets long enough. He grabbed the water-jug, found it was empty, walked to the door and stab-kicked it several times. He heard the guard come scurrying down the corridor to peer through the Judas window.

“Wasser, bitte, und schnell!” Ranklin bawled, waving the jug at the guard’s startled eyes. Looking back, he was a bit surprised the guard hadn’t told him where to stuff the jug, but instead called a mate to stand guard while he hurried away to fill it.

The Count watched and said cynically: “The word of an Englishman – when shouted loudly enough.”

So Ranklin tried again when the guard returned, demanding the window be opened. That, however, was definitely verboten.

“Perhaps,” the Count observed, “you did not shout loudly enough that time.”

Ranklin finished washing his hands and face and left them to dry by evaporation. “And perhaps,” he said nastily, “you haven’t as many friends in high places as you thought. Looks like you’re spending another night here.”

The Count sat up. “That is impossible. I cannot be here tomorrow.”

“Hard luck,” Ranklin said callously. Then that “tomorrow” echoed in his mind. “Why tomorrow? – because you don’t want to be here, in the Castello, in their hands, when they realise just what you’ve been plotting? Is it happening tomorrow?” He grabbed the Count by his coat and hauled him up, shaking him like the frail old man he was, and Pero leaping up to intervene . . . But the Count’s frightened nod had got through to Ranklin and he let go.

They all just stood for a moment, the Count trembling, Pero tensed to jump, Ranklin panting – but thinking. And deciding to play the cards he had; it was too late to hope for more. He looked at Pero. “Right: go and tell Novak I want to make a full confession. Go on, man, can’t you see it’s over? Get on with it.”

Pero hesitated a moment longer, then smiled. “Almost I thank you, it was so very tiring.” He went to the door, thumped on it, and called out in fluent German.

The Count had caught up with events and now his trembling was rage. “You, sir, are an English hound of extreme obscenity! You are . . . without honour!”

Ranklin considered this briefly, then nodded. “Yes, I do seem to be growing out of that.”

Signora Falcone was having first-night nerves but the house servants must be used to it, because they tiptoed around her as they would around sweating dynamite.

“Just plain bad British workmanship!” she flared at the oil-feed pipe.

“Happens all the time,” O’Gilroy said stolidly. “And mebbe I shook it up on yesterday’s landing, along with the wheel. Thing is to get it brazed.”

Signora Falcone controlled herself and called for Matteo. He took one look, started explaining the problem and its solution, but then saw her expression and vanished to the garage.

She turned to Corinna, smiling professionally. “And you, my dear, perhaps you’d care to bathe before dinner? I want to go over a few details of tomorrow’s demonstration with Mr O’Gilroy.”

There wasn’t much Corinna could do but accept graciously. But she dawdled her way and managed to hear Signora Falcone saying: “Giancarlo – the Senator – will be back on the sleeper early tomorrow morning, so he will tell . . .”

Well, Corinna reflected, now Conall’s finding out whether I, a mere woman, had deduced the truth about tomorrow’s demonstration’. And as she turned along the gallery to her room, she ran into a distinct whiff of lavender water. So d’Annunzio had arrived, she’d been right about that, and walked slower until her nose and the sound of movement identified his room – next to hers. Probably that corner was all guest bedrooms; still, she’d remember to lock her door.

She took her time with bathing, dressing, and sorting out her hair – she now didn’t want a strange maid distracting her – and thinking. With Andrew safely out of any plot, it really wasn’t any longer her business. Conall could look after himself, might even be acting under orders – though he’d seemed genuinely worried – and Ranklin wouldn’t thank her for interfering in British policy, if that were involved. It might be wiser to think of the House of Sherring’s good name, since London had a way of having a quiet word with itself that could leave you suddenly out in the cold. But those schemers downstairs had still, she believed, planned to talk Andrew into something dirty. He’d probably have let them, too. She wasn’t in a hurry to forgive that.

She came out of her bedroom wearing a royal blue evening dress and carrying just a small purse. The scent of lavender was still there, perhaps renewed. She paused, standing back from the balustrade of the gallery, and listened. There was a gentle babble of conversation in Italian from the big hall below. That was the hub of the house, onto which all the ground-floor doors opened and where both staircases began. People naturally gathered there and it had little Italian formality: chairs and small tables scattered in a way that would have been cosy if you couldn’t have thrown a party for a hundred people in the space. D’Annunzio would be down there by now, and if she couldn’t see anybody, nobody could see her. She stayed back by the wall and sidled towards his room, trying to remember just what a New York detective had told her about how a skilled burglar worked.