Flight From Honour

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.”