Flight From Honour

31

Novak came with Ranklin in the carriage, first to the hotel, where he threw his baggage together and picked up a cablegram from ‘Finn’, then to the Meridionale station. He didn’t bother to read the cablegram: he didn’t want to remind Novak of the Sherring connection.

“Do you know Venice?” he asked as they rolled along the lamplit waterfront.

“Do you not?”

“I haven’t been there for years and I certainly don’t recall any aerodrome.”

“Ah, yes. They have made one at the north end of the Lido, on the old San Niccolo fort drill ground.”

Ranklin paused to visualise this and the problem of getting there. He would need to find a steam-launch still in business in the early hours. But some were sure to meet any arriving train.

Novak said: “You will go first to the aeroplane, then?”

“Give me thirty seconds with a hammer and all bets for tomorrow are off.”

“Most direct,” Novak approved. He stayed with Ranklin at the station, saw him into his seat and was obviously going to wait until the train left. The uniform made it look as if Ranklin were being deported, but perhaps Novak didn’t mind that.

“Tell me,” Ranklin asked on an impulse, “are you in touch with the other assassin?”

Novak said nothing.

“I mean, if Falcone’s fit enough to go back to Italy, is your bandit likely to turn up, too? He’ll probably remember me.”

Novak examined the glowing end of his cigar carefully. “Do you really think I am close to a man like that? I light his fuse – then I throw him far away. But for me, he is another chance to stop this madness. So if, for some reason I cannot predict, you should fail . . .” He shrugged, and then smiled widely.

When the train was moving, Ranklin took out Corinna’s cablegram. Now thirty-six hours old, it simply said she was going to Venice and gave Falcone’s address there.

The train rolled on at its own . . . well, you couldn’t say “speed”; perhaps “pace”. It was 140 rail miles and a frontier crossing to Venice, but he had time. Surely nobody was fool enough to try to fly in the dark.

* * *

Long after midnight, Corinna still sat in the hall. There was nothing stopping her going to bed, save lack of tiredness and knowing that if she went to her room she’d be locked in. “You can, if you want, jump from the window,” Signora Falcone had pointed out. “It’s over thirty feet down to a stone terrace, and quite frankly, I don’t care if you do.”

Corinna now believed that. “Then what are you going to do with me? – and d’Annunzio?”

“Giancarlo may have other ideas, but as far as I’m concerned, you stay as guests until – say – noon, and then you can go where you will and say what you like.”

“Because by then Trieste should be in flames and it’ll be too late to care why?”

Signora Falcone may have given the faintest shrug.

“But why?” Corinna demanded. “Why rock the whole international boat? You must know-”

“Did you think Gabri’s leaflet was just fine words? Oh no, my dear, he’s a spoilt child, but he speaks with the true voice of Italy. An Italy that deserves to be great again, not living in shame. Not hawking our favours in the streets of Europe, as that pimp of a prime minister Giolitti’s been doing. As he’ll go on doing, if he wins the November election. Giancarlo has been saying this in the Senate for years. Now-” She broke off, shaking her head. “You don’t understand a word I’m saying, do you? No American can understand what Italy’s been through.”

“I understand what a full-blown riot in Trieste could start. But why? – you weren’t born an Italian yourself, come to that.”

“No, my dear, I was born Irish. And watched my parents and their friends jostling to kiss the nearest pure English boot – does that tell you anything?”

Corinna was silent for a while, then tried to rally her old anger. “But you were going to involve my brother Andrew.”

“He’d have known what he was doing.” Signora Falcone dismissed the matter. “He could have refused. Si?” Matteo had come up beside her chair and begun talking quickly and quietly. Signora Falcone glanced at her gold wristwatch, gave a nodding reply, and Matteo headed for the front door.

“It’s early,” she explained, “but we need to make sure they stop the sleeper at Mestre to let Giancarlo off. In his condition, I don’t want him rolling around in boats from Venice.”

Corinna wasn’t really listening. She was thinking about O’Gilroy piloting the flight and Matt being in Trieste – did he know what was going on? Or was he just obeying orders? And would Major Dagner give such orders? From her brief conversation with him, yes, he might well . . .

The doorbell rang, bringing Signora Falcone to her feet in surprise. “Surely not Giancarlo already, he may need help-”

From where she sat, Corinna could see the big front door, and the servant hurrying to open it. And then take several quick paces backwards as two men with guns pushed their way in.

Soon after four o’clock, Ranklin found himself a dark empty mile from where the aerodrome should be. It was a clear, moonless night and Venice itself was a low shape on the horizon sparked with random lights whose reflections wavered in the wakes of an occasional slow-moving ship. A big port never sleeps, just retreats into havens of lamplit privacy.

Getting a place on a steam-launch had been no problem; getting it to drop him at the northern jetty of the Lido, well away from the big hotels, had taken time and money. Maybe he should have got off at the main quay and found a cab . . . but what he was planning must be illegal. No witnesses. He tramped on alone.

He couldn’t even be sure he’d found the aerodrome. What he had was a wall, obviously military, and not much higher than himself. The road led off to the right, but he reckoned that any gate must be locked and it was easier to climb the wall, which was sloped so cannon-balls would bounce off. Getting down the far side, unsloped, took longer.

But now what? He was on the edge of what could be a drill-ground-turned-aerodrome, but beyond that all he could see was vague dark shapes against a dark sky. Certainly nothing that looked like an aeroplane. Perhaps it was locked in a shed, that seemed the norm at Brooklands. The only solution seemed to be to walk around the edge of the ground, investigating anywhere that an aeroplane might be pushed off it. He began trudging again.

Ten minutes later he had an extra idea, and lay down to peer from ground level, hoping the distinctive shape would show up against the sky. Still nothing. He started to get up – and a torch flared in his face, dazzling him.

“Try standing up quick and ye’ll go down a sight quicker – Arseholes! What ye doing here, Captain?”

Fright, relief and sheer blindness kept Ranklin where he was. He rolled on his back. “Turn that blasted light off. What are you- Is the aeroplane here?”

“Sure it is, I was working on it ’til past midnight. Now, what was ye doing, sneaking around like . . . like a spy?” He hauled Ranklin to his feet.

“Looking for the damn thing.” In the darkness, he didn’t notice O’Gilroy’s wince at hearing the Oriole called that. “But thank God I found you, too. Look, I’ve learnt in Trieste just what – roughly what – it’s supposed to do today-”

“Sure and I know that. I’m flying it over to the Senator’s house at first light. He’ll be back by then.”

“You’re flying it?”

“Surely. Mr Sherring got himself banged about, we hit a bird . . . Anyways, I’ve been practising and-”

“You’re actually going to fly the thing to Trieste?”

O’Gilroy winced again but said patiently: “That’s the plan, isn’t it? Ye mean ye weren’t knowing about it?”

“Of course I bloody well didn’t. Did you think I’d let you – anybody – go firing machine-guns over the-”

“Hold on, now. Machine-guns? Where are ye getting machine-guns from?”

Ranklin peered at him through the starlit gloom. Was it possible O’Gilroy didn’t know? But if he was doing the piloting . . .

“All right.” Ranklin said, “all right. Let’s get this sorted out, Have you got a real cigarette?”

O’Gilroy lit both of them. Ranklin breathed deeply, got a violent coughing fit, and said in a strangled voice: “Now: just tell me what the plan is.”

“Me and the poet feller, d’Annunzio, we fly ov-”

“D’Annunzio? The poet-playwright chap? – he’s mixed up in this?”

“Surely. He’s written the pamphlets. He throws ’em out over Trieste, then we fly back. Only Mrs Falcone, she didn’t want us to start from here, but a field back near the house.”

“Then where the devil do the machine-guns, the Lewis guns, fit in?”

“Jayzus, don’t be asking me. They’re yer own idea entirely. And anyway,” he added, “ye’d need a mounting on the aeroplane – not that I’d be letting that feller fire a catapult from any aeroplane I’m flying.”

Baffled, Ranklin regrouped himself on a known point. “But any dropping of leaflets is off, too. Have you seen the things?”

“No, and they’ll be in Italian, anyways.”

“Well, I bet they’re urging more than a shipyard strike. They’ve picked a day when the main garrison’s changing over, the best time for a real riot. Nobody seems to think that’ll actually happen, but we don’t want to be involved in either a riot or a fiasco.”

O’Gilroy said nothing. In the sudden glow of his cigarette, Ranklin saw the lean face looking puzzled, undecided.

“Tell me this, then,” he said quietly, “has Major Dagner been in touch, has he ordered you to be part of this?”

“No-o. I’m thinking he doesn’t know ’bout me doing the flying at all.”

“Then I’m ordering you not to.”

He could almost hear the snap as O’Gilroy came to a decision. “Fine. Mind, I’d’ve liked the flight, but . . . whatever ye say. What are we doing now, then?”

Get out of it all, was Ranklin’s thought. “You say you’re expected over there at first light? Say six o’clock . . .” By then, they could be at Venice station instead, maybe leaving the Oriole disabled – but also leaving Corinna behind. The Falcones could hardly do her any harm, but for all that . . . “Can we telephone the house from anywhere here?”

“Surely. In the office yonder, I’ve got a key. I called to say the aeroplane was fixed and all jest a while back.”

O’Gilroy had the number and what to say to the operator written out in careful phonetics, but Ranklin took over. He decided to be somebody from Sherring’s wanting to talk to Corinna.

The telephone was answered remarkably quickly for a household that should have been asleep. A man’s voice said simply: “Si?”

“Do you speak English?”

Then, from the background, a woman’s voice yelling: “Giancarlo! Ne-” The telephone was cut off.

Ranklin looked at O’Gilroy; he had heard the yell. “Mrs Falcone, most like. Something funny, d’ye think?”

Ranklin called the operator to get the number again, waited, then put the instrument down. “He says the telephone’s disconnected. Broken.”

O’Gilroy took it very calmly. “Sounds bad.”

Novak’s second assassin.

“Someone could be waiting for Falcone himself, holding the women as hostages – how quickly can we get there?”

O’Gilroy shrugged and glanced out at the sky. “Twenty minutes. If ye don’t mind a broken neck.”