Spy’s Honour

A POSTCARD FROM KIEL
19

Ranklin was gazing courteously rather than studiously at a large canvas of Admiral Tromp trouncing the British fleet in 1653 when an English voice beside him said: “I must say I prefer flower paintings myself.”

So would any true-blooded Briton, of course, but all Ranklin said was: “It’s odd that they never show any seagulls in such pictures. Probably assume the cannon-fire would scare them off.”

A mention of flowers had been answered with a mention of birds, so they wandered on together, and soon out of the Rijks-museum.

The new man was some years younger than Ranklin and seemed some years brisker, with curly fair hair and a fresh open smile. He wore a hairy brown tweed travelling suit that looked far too warm for the day.

“You know,” he said thoughtfully, “those pictures give quite the wrong impression. The Navy didn’t do at all badly in that year. The Dutch outnumbered us in most of those battles.”

“Unsporting,” Ranklin agreed, steering them back into the city in the general direction of, but not getting too close to, the Rembrandts Plein. Then he led the way into a small smoky cafe where the tables were covered in strips of patterned carpet – the patterns by now being mostly foodstains and tobacco burns.

“I thought there were two of you?”

“He’ll be along,” Ranklin said, and ordered three beers.

“I’m Dickie Cross – sort of ex-RN.” Ranklin had already guessed the Naval connection.

“Ranklin,” he said, then added: “And O’Gilroy,” as he appeared and sat beside him with a little shake of his head that Cross intercepted with a smile.

“So nobody was following us? Jolly good.” He pushed across a folded copy of The Times. “I don’t know if you’d like to see what you missed at Ascot …” Ranklin moved the paper to one side, feeling the bulk of the packages inside. So despite looking like an overgrown schoolboy, Cross actually knew something about their trade. Probably a lot more than he did himself.

Cross insisted on ordering Ertwensoep, which they had eaten themselves the night before as part of Ranklin’s plan to force-feed O’Gilroy with typical dishes wherever they went. But a thick pea soup crammed with leeks, sausage and pigs’ feet wasn’t his idea of lunch on a warm June day, so they chose bread, ham and cheese.

When the waiter had vanished into the chattering gloom – a journey of about three feet – Cross said: “You’re going on to Brussels, I believe?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want to interfere, but have you had much of a brief?”

“Hardly anything,” Ranklin confessed.

“Pushing you in the deep end. Well, it is the deep end in our trade – along with Vienna. A lot of information for sale and not all of it twenty-four carat. So unless you want trouble with your expenses … Among others, you might run across somebody calling himself van der Brock.”

Ranklin let a small puzzled frown show on his face, then turned deliberately to O’Gilroy to see if he could help.

“I might know the man,” O’Gilroy seemed to recall. “Would he be fat and dark and wearing glasses?”

“Well, one of them is,” Cross smiled. “It’s a name they pass around a little group. If you challenged one of them, he’d say: ‘Oh, you must have met my brother; he’s in the firm, too.’ Cigars is their shop front. That’s quite real: they’ve got a place here, in Amsterdam.”

They knew that already, having looked up the address and strolled past it, but not risked doing anything more.

“The one you met,” Cross said, “actually he hasn’t been around for some time. Been ill, I heard.”

“Has he, now?” O’Gilroy was politely uninterested.

“So they say. What I was going to say was, they’re the upper end of the market. Purveyors of secrets to the crowned heads of Europe, you might say. So if they offer to sell you anything, it’ll probably be genuine, just as somebody else’s probably won’t be. But I can’t help much more than that. The best way to judge information is to have most of it already as I’m sure you know.”

Their lunch loomed out of the atmosphere and kept them busy for a time. Then Cross, who had been frowning and hesitating for a time, suddenly said: “I’m going on to Kiel.”

Knowing at least that unnecessary questions and volunteering unnecessary information was Not Done, Ranklin was a little surprised.

“For Kiel Week?” He must remember to explain to O’Gilroy that this yachting regatta was Germany’s answer to Cowes Week, but held in a harbour that was also German Naval HQ, had several warship-building yards and one end of the now-being-enlarged Kiel Canal.

“I’ve been going for years,” Cross said. “My club’s got an arrangement with the Kaiser Yacht Club, so they’re quite used to me by now.”

“I hope it won’t be too warm for you there,” Ranklin said politely. Kiel had to be a sensitive place at the moment, and particularly for anybody with a British Naval background.

Cross acknowledged the comment with a brief smile. “Yes – but, you know, it isn’t a crime to be an agent. Only to be caught doing some – well, agenting. They may suspect, but if they can’t prove anything …”

O’Gilroy smiled sourly at the idea that the police would never touch you on mere suspicion, but said nothing.

“Anyway,” Cross went on, “I’ve got some unfinished business there – and it’s the Russians that worry me as much as anything.”

“I thought the Russians was on yer side?” O’Gilroy said, puzzled, but maintaining Irish independence.

“The Czar may be, but I wouldn’t vouch for his Okhrana – their secret service. Too many of them are playing a double game, making sure whatever happens in the next revolution, they’ll be on the winning side. There’s some pretty entomological specimens involved.”

“Insect-like,” Ranklin interpreted to O’Gilroy.

“Maybe we met one,” O’Gilroy said, looking at Ranklin. “Back in Ireland. But he died before we could be sure.”

“What’s happened to that waiter?” Ranklin asked, not quite loud enough to be heard in St Petersburg.

As they shook hands on the pavement outside, Cross said cheerfully: “Those smoky little dens seem so secret – but I suppose that’s their trouble. People can get too close. I prefer an open-air cafe, wide-spaced tables …”

The galling thing was that O’Gilroy had said exactly that earlier, and Ranklin had overruled him. And O’Gilroy hadn’t forgotten: “Knows the trade, that boy. Good to know he’s one of ours.”

“Well, he isn’t,” Ranklin said ten minutes later, in the security of the hotel room. He was reading a note included in his envelope, which O’Gilroy had checked to make sure it hadn’t been opened. “He’s Naval Intelligence, not the Bureau. Our people had asked if there was anyone coming this way who could act as courier.”

“I see if the Navy’s got a good man they wouldn’t let him go,” O’Gilroy rubbed it in.

“Quite. What did you make of that business about van der Brock? I suppose it means Gunther wasn’t actually a German spy.”

“He didn’t learn his bayonet drill in the Dutch Boy Scouts.”

“No, he could still be German by birth … could have been working for them on that occasion …” He was trying to prepare his thinking to cope with professional spies-for-hire; it sounded as if they might meet more than one in Brussels – indeed, they were being sent there to sample that world. And what, after all, was O’Gilroy? But that was a question Ranklin had long since decided not to ask, nor force O’Gilroy to ask himself.

He hastily emptied the rest of the envelope onto the table by the window and unfolded his new passport. It showed him to be James Spencer, merchant, of Lahore, India, travelling with his servant Terence Gorman.

“Just like I was yer dog,” O’Gilroy commented, realising he had to give up having a passport of his own.

“It would be the same if you were my wife or child.”

“English gentlemen surely love owning people.”

“Look, we talked this over …”

And had agreed to experiment with a master-and-servant act to widen their social coverage. O’Gilroy might now pick up gossip from other servants and go unnoticed where a gentleman would arouse suspicion. And, within limits, they had been free to invent their own new selves.

Ranklin’s had been the trickiest, since a gentleman leaves a well-marked trail of family, schools, university or one of the services, job – if he has one – his clubs and London friends. Now each such footprint he had left in Time had to be considered, then altered or erased.

Spencer had once been real enough, a schoolboy friend who had vanished from Oxford after a scandal that had been called “unspeakable” because, no matter how hard people had spoken of it, nobody could understand its complications. However, if only half those complications were true, it was reasonable to assume that Spencer was long dead, and the only relatives the Bureau could trace were in Canada. Ranklin had simply given him a new life in India where he had served for three years himself – and the Bureau had rounded it off with the proper passport, driving licence, calling cards, letter of credit and tailors’ labels to replace those on his clothes which, of course, bore his real name.

Ranklin now looked at these gloomily. Like his clothes, he was used to an identity that fitted and was his alone, and James Spencer did not really fit. He was second-hand and awkward, and like most short people, Ranklin hated seeming awkward.

But perhaps worst of all, he was quite incompetent with a needle and thread. “Can you sew?” he asked.

“Yez asking a soldier with ten years’ service?”

“Of course! Then would you be so kind?”

O’Gilroy’s new identity had excited him: he liked being secret and unknown. The Bureau had found his problem to be the very opposite of Ranklin’s: to leave his background as vague as he preferred it, would, they thought, itself be suspicious. So they had added longer periods of service with Anglo-Irish (“West British” as they called themselves) families, and a misspelt letter from a sister in America urging him to emigrate after her.

O’Gilroy read this through twice and announced: “She’s convinced me. Anything’s better than sitting here sewing for a black-hearted scoundrel like yeself, Mr Spencer.”

“I observe the sitting but not yet the sewing. I think we agreed you didn’t have to be a good valet, but you had to be seen to be trying.”

Replacing the tailors’ labels apart, all they now had to do was leave a trunk of unsuitable clothes with the hotel, lodge their old passports and papers at the bank and catch a train to give their new identities a trial run in Brussels.

Oh yes – and Ranklin could shave his upper lip for the first time in twenty years. His moustache was the one aspect of his Army background he didn’t mind leaving behind. And the risk of being mistaken for a Naval officer was, he reckoned, very slight.