Spy’s Honour

22

There can hardly be such a thing as a “feeling” that you are being followed – except for nervous people, who are usually wrong. For O’Gilroy it was an awareness, tuned by experience, that close behind him in the babbling patchily lit streets there were footsteps and a shadow that copied his own. He shrugged mentally, knowing he would pinpoint the follower eventually, and strolled on whistling ‘The Wearin’ of the Green’.

The old town was a tangle of short narrow streets overhung by decrepit old houses, and to prowl it O’Gilroy had changed his “pepper-and-salt” valet suit for his oldest clothes, with an untied handkerchief in place of collar and tie. In such streets, he wanted no slip-knots round his neck.

He had turned perhaps half a dozen corners at random when the whistled tune worked as bait. A soft, slightly blurred voice asked: “Are yez lookin’ for comp’ny or jest a fight wid an Englishman?”

“Me stomach’s empty and me pocket’s full and not a word of the lingo to change one for t’other.”

“Ah, ye’ve come to the right man.” He had the short squat build of a seaman, a rolling gait due more to an evening in town than a life at sea, with dark smelly clothes and a knitted cap – unlike everybody else on the streets, who seemed to be wearing peaked sailor’s caps no matter what their trades. “Is it yer first voyage to Kiel?”

“Me first time anywheres in Germany,” O’Gilroy said, letting him lead the way. “And I’m no sailor.”

“I t’ought the clothes was wrong, but ye might be, a nancy-boy of’n Lord Arsehole’s yacht.”

“I might throw ye in the harbour,” O’Gilroy said pleasantly, “but it looked too clean to be fouled wid Galway men.”

The tavern or cafe or whatever – just a single room with a bar and furniture too heavy to break easily – was kept by a Wicklow man named; at least professionally, Paddy, and his German wife. O’Gilroy introduced himself as Terence Gorman.

Paddy nodded and started drawing two Pils. The Galway man said: “I knew a Gorman oncest,” to begin the ritual of swapping names until they found one they both knew or had heard of.

“So did me mother,” O’Gilroy said, stopping the ritual dead. Then to Paddy: “Me passin’ acquaintance here sez ye can feed me.”

“Me wife can.”

“And a fine job she makes of it,” O’Gilroy said with true respect. Indeed, he had never seen a fatter Irishman. That apart, Paddy was about sixty, with thin white hair and a barman’s way of asking inoffensive questions that you could answer or ignore according to mood.

Such as: “Are yez in town for Kiel Week?”

“He’s a nancy boy off’n a yacht,” Galway said.

“Shut yer mouth or buy yer own. I’m valet to an English gent – ”

“Jayzus! Ye are a nancy boy!”

O’Gilroy ignored him. “And we was touring about and heard of a man – we’d seen him just a week gone in Holland – was killed in an accident here. Did ye hear of it?”

Paddy nodded, his eyes looking over O’Gilroy’s shoulder at someone who had just come in. “Up in one of the new locks. Bin in the Royal Navy, they said.”

“He’d be a spy, then,” Galway said firmly. “And who’s yer gent? – a detective?”

“Does he ever,” O’Gilroy asked Paddy, “spread the story that somebody’s normal, or would that be too wild at all?”

Paddy said and expressed nothing, just picked up a tin tray and bar-rag and went over to the new customer. Casually, O’Gilroy turned to watch. The man was youngish, heavyish, in rough longshoreman’s clothes and well-kept boots. He had brought a newspaper along so that he could look self-contained and unaware; they usually did.

Paddy came back and started drawing a mug of beer. “’T’would seem yer good for me trade.”

Galway looked puzzled, O’Gilroy just shook his head sadly. “Ah, sounds like me gent’s bin asking questions. And him taking the dead boy’s room at the Club to pack his things, and shoving me in a stinking guest-house.”

“Ye prefer the Adlon or the Ritz, do ye?” Paddy wore a wisp of a smile as he poured spilt beer from the tray into the mug.

“I’ve slept hard in me time, but I prefer soft and someone else doing the paying. And ye can spread that wild story about me,” he told Galway.

“Ye should try sleepin’ in a wet bunk in a North Sea gale wid a cargo o’ timber creakin’ in yer ear,” Galway said sullenly.

“Yer a secret recruiting sergeant for the Merchant Navy. I knowed it all the time.”

Before packing Cross’s clothes, Ranklin pretended he was Cross himself, getting up in the morning and going through the day, to see if there was anything missing. He was sure that, on one excuse or another, Lenz or Reimers had searched the room: had they taken anything? But apart from clothes and shoes that Cross had died in, or that he now wore in the coffin, nothing was obviously lacking.

He sat down and stared at the meagre paperwork – particularly the bond certificate. The Wik Landentwicklungsgesellschaft had issued it in 1905 promising to pay four per cent on a scheme to develop the land on the south side of the new locks in the district of Wik (Holtenau was a village on the other side of the Canal, beside the existing locks). The plan was shown in an elaborate and imaginative engraving – doubly imaginative, since it was from a bird’s or balloon’s viewpoint some distance up in the air, and showed the new locks and attendant buildings finished and ships busily shunting to and fro – which wouldn’t happen until some time next year. In the lower foreground was a small lighthouse and a building fronting onto the long inlet of the harbour.

All very picturesque, but why should Cross want four per cent per annum of 200 marks-worth of it – an income of just eight shillings?

Baffled, he rustled the papers and magazines and came up with the list of visiting yachts and their owners. That at least made one thing clear: that a hurricane in Kiel that night would leave Lloyd’s of London sleeping on a park bench wrapped in newspaper. Looking up, he realised that what he saw through the window was a city of floating palaces, belonging to kings, emperors, princes as well as mere Kaufleute such as Krupp von Bohlen, Pulitzer, Armour, Sharing … What name? But there it was: SY (for steam yacht, presumably) Kachina, registered at Newport, owner Reynard Sherring.

Instinctively, he leant to peer harder at the harbour, but had no idea what the Kachina looked like even by day. Well, well. There was a good chance that Mrs Finn would be on board, unless Pop left her to mind the bank whilst he went boating. He wondered if, and how, he could approach her as James Spencer. It would do no harm for Lenz and Reimers to know he had a powerful friend at hand – and he could use her financial knowledge in the matter of that baffling bond.

O’Gilroy had chosen the one hot dish that Frau Paddy had to offer. “Now what d’ye call that again?” he asked, helpfully bringing his empty plate back to the bar. The Galway man had drifted off when he found he wasn’t being offered a free meal.

“Labskaus,” Paddy went on rinsing beer mugs in what looked like harbour water. “Pickled meat and pickled herring and beetroot and fried egg.”

“Sure, I recognised the egg. Very nourishing. What would I drink to keep it down?”

Irish whiskey turned out to be far too expensive for Terence Gorman’s pocket, so he tried the local Korn. And left his mouth open to cool.

Paddy asked softly: “Your gent: does he have any ideas about that accident?”

“I wouldn’t be knowing. But he’s got the time to waste.”

“Now, if the police have the idea he’s having ideas …” Paddy’s eyes flicked to the follower; “… ye’ve already got them trailing ye. So let them and let them be. And never in this world hit a one of them.”

“Ye mean they wouldn’t take it for a joke, like in the Old Country?” O’Gilroy’s smile was mostly a sneer.

Paddy looked down at the slopped beer he was rearranging on the bar with a soaked rag. “Ye can find out for yeself, like some I’ve known. They’d pick on six, mebbe eight, poor defenceless policemen in their own cells, just for the fun of it. Sure and ye could hear them laughing right up to the Canal where yer friend had his accident. Now, he wouldn’t have been a man that liked a joke, would he?”

“I wouldn’t be knowing. He wasn’t my friend.”

Paddy looked at O’Gilroy carefully, then said: “Another thing: near midnight Saturday, the police was in here – and every place, I heard – askin’ about a man could be yer friend: English, with a pink boating jacket and straw hat. Sudden keen to find him, they was. Mind ye,” he added, “I’ve said nothing.”

“Never a word,” O’Gilroy agreed, and walked out thoughtfully and slowly enough to save his follower from hurry.

Ranklin had just finished packing Cross’s luggage when a servant knocked and asked if the Club could offer him anything? Ranklin said that was very civilised of them, and asked for a Pils and a sandwich – no, of course, this was Germany – well, just something to nibble on. So why had the Kaiser, in his youthful passion for things British, imported such useless ideas as a navy and a yacht club but ignored the vital concept of the sandwich?

When the beer and a plate of cold ham, sausage and black bread arrived, he asked about communicating with the yachts. It turned out to be very simple: the Club acted as poste restante for them all, and owners sent boats ashore to pick up the day’s post. As to finding out who was on any one yacht, that was in its own way just as simple: impossible. People came and went and didn’t always want their comings and goings noticed.

Alone again, Ranklin took a sheet of the Club’s writing paper, thought carefully and wrote:

Dear Mrs Finn

,

You may recall our taking tea at the Ritz in Paris after you kindly helped me secure a rare first edition before it came on the market, and solved a travel problem in an admirably practical fashion. It would give me the greatest pleasure if I might call on you to repeat my heartfelt thanks for your beneficence. Many things change but not the deepest gratitude of

James Spencer

PS My man Gorman wishes me to convey his humble respects

.

German drinkers didn’t prop up the bar the way British ones did: they sat down at tables and got on with it. It wasn’t so far to fall, perhaps, but it made making new friends a more deliberate effort. It ran against O’Gilroy’s grain not to conform and try to be inconspicuous, but he was there to make his presence known. So he usually started by asking the barman for the lavatory – to check the back way out, just in case – and then asked what to drink and as much more as he could without seeming too suspicious.

The snag was that the barman usually assumed he was shyly asking for a brothel, and when O’Gilroy refused that, he was offered more expensive and startling alternatives. He had thought himself a man of the world, but realised he wasn’t a man of Baltic seaports.

Then he just sat, drank and smoked. So did his policeman, only he had his newspaper – though by now he must be reading the Lost Dogs column.

At the third tavern, a youngish Nordic-looking seaman came in soon after him and went round the room trying to sell dirty pictures. He got a lot of comment but no takers until he reached O’Gilroy. The women in the photographs were voluptuous and apparently very happy, but when the seller hissed: “This one your master like,” he flashed a postcard of warships firing their guns. And, with his back to the room, turned the card to show a number pencilled on the back.

Without knowing the phrase, O’Gilroy knew all about agents provocateurs, and that this could be evidence being “planted” on him. He decided he’d swear he thought he was buying only “artistic poses” and the seller had cheated him, so paid a few coins for three pictures. The seller tossed a coin on the bar as commission and scuttled out, leaving the other drinkers chuckling contemptuously at O’Gilroy’s naivety.

He brazened it out for a while by studying the pictures happily, but then pocketed them and left.

The streets were emptier but the Old Town wasn’t asleep yet: singing, loud voices and laughter seeped out from ill-fitting shutters and scanty curtains. At one corner he was nearly trampled by a group of, presumably, visiting yachtsmen in evening dress, slumming and drunk, but still sensible enough to stick together as a group. And always, behind him, the copycat tread of his follower.

Then suddenly there were other footsteps, a scuffle, a squawk, and O’Gilroy turned to face two men running at him. Behind, his follower was slumping onto the pavement. He got his back against the wall.

But the nearest man just grabbed at his arm as he rushed past, yelling: “Komm schnell!” As O’Gilroy’s childhood training had been strict on not lingering near beaten-up policemen, he ran too.

They had rounded two corners and he was just thinking of not lingering near the beaters-up of policemen either, when they grabbed him. Looking back, he admired their planning.

One held his upper arms from behind, the other poked a knife against his side, and between them they forced him on round another corner and into a narrow alley. It was a breath of perfume rather than what he could see of the stocky dark figure that told him the person waiting there was a woman. They were crowded close in the alley, the breath from the man behind rasping in O’Gilroy’s ear.

The woman spoke in a low growly voice and the man with the knife passed her something – a box of matches, since she struck one to peer at O’Gilroy.

He shut his eyes to avoid the dazzle, but caught just a glimpse of her wide face and the glitter of green stones at her ears. She said something else and O’Gilroy felt a hand go into his jacket pocket. His eyelids darkened and he opened them just as the knife man took away the photographs.

The man then tried to see what they were in the darkness – a mistake, since O’Gilroy promptly kicked him in the balls. The reaction of the kick threw O’Gilroy backwards, squashing the man holding him against the wall and loosening his grip. O’Gilroy jabbed his elbow back, twisted, and stiff-armed the heel of his hand into the man’s face, slamming his head onto the wall again.

Then he grabbed the photographs and ran.

Five minutes later he walked into Paddy’s and said: “Gimme an Irish whiskey and I’m not asking what it costs.”

Instead, Paddy passed him a bar-rag. “I should get the blood off’n yer hand first. Ye didn’t go and hit that policeman?”

“I did not. But somebody else did.”

“Would he think it’s you?” Paddy poured the whiskey and O’Gilroy gulped it.

“He was still watching me back when they caught him.”

“And what’ll ye be doing now?” Paddy was obviously worried it might involve his premises.

“Go back to me hotel, lock me door and sit with an open knife in me hand. Ye keep a rough town, here.”

Relieved, Paddy nodded absently. “If it means anything, I’ve heard there’s a feller called Dragan el Vipero around.”

“Who?”

“The feller that killed the King of Greece just the other month. So they say. Mind, I’ve said nothing.”