Spy’s Honour

27

Sherring was a large, broad-shouldered and rather ugly man with a big man’s precision of movement and a confident man’s disdain for “correct” dress when it didn’t matter. He had good reasons for owning a steam yacht, and that was enough: unlike some emperors and kings, he didn’t think that meant he had to dress like an operetta sailor. Today he wore a plain linen jacket such as his clerks might be allowed in hot weather, a collar-attached “polo” shirt and a bright silk choker.

He shook Ranklin’s hand and waved him to sit down on Corinna’s left. On her right was a short, stout middle-aged man who made his dark blue blazer seem formal enough to meet the Kaiser in – which he had probably done, since he was Albert Ballin, head of the Hamburg-Amerika shipping line, the biggest in the world. This didn’t stop his rather flabby face looking distinctly sombre.

“Bulgaria doesn’t seem to be doing too well,” Sherring announced. “The Serbs are definitely counter-attacking.”

“Good news for the Czar,” Ballin said gloomily. “But not so good for the Emperor in Vienna. He must have hoped – ah, but this is boring and troublesome for you, Mrs Finn,” he added with heavy gallantry.

“Not at all,” Corinna chirped. “What d’you think, James?”

Ranklin agreed with Ballin (on Vienna’s reaction) but James Spencer probably wouldn’t know enough to care. “After ten years in India, the Balkans seem a bit distant to me. Every time I get home on leave, there’s another new country popped up there. It all gets confusing.”

Sherring, who wore his eyes half-closed anyway, narrowed them further and started pulling a bread roll apart. Ballin looked reproving of such colonial flippancy.

“In India you are more concerned about Russia, no?”

“Oh, that old myth. No, we’ve stopped worrying about that.”

“That’s official, is it?” Sherring asked.

“I don’t know about official, sir, but I do know that somebody finally went and looked at just how Russia could invade India. It turned out they’d have to travel Lord-knows-how far on a single-track railway, and then hike it over the Hindu Kush for another two hundred miles. That’s good country for mountain goats but not so good for artillery.”

Sherring smiled privately into his soup spoon, but Ballin was unwilling to let go the idea that Britain could never ally herself with Russia just because of the Indian question: “But can you really trust the natives to fight for England?”

Ranklin shrugged. “We’re devils they know.”

After that, they finished the soup as quietly as it allowed. The dining saloon, two decks down from the one they had been sitting out on, could hardly be furnished too lightly – good food needed some richness of setting – but Corinna had chosen a plain dull gold for the carpet, ivory painted wood panelling and faded rose silk for the curtains and upholstery, leaving the richness to small exquisite bits of wood carving. It gave the comfortable feeling that the room had been crafted, not just decorated.

Whoever had chosen the menu – again probably Corinna – had remembered that Germans like to eat well at lunch. There was a choice of cold lobster and salad or a hot chicken dish – or both, as Ballin decided. With equal tact, the wines were German, and Ballin forgot his troubles for a moment when he was poured an ’86 hock from the Prussian Royal Domain. Ranklin thought he saw a tiny nod of approval from Sherring to Corinna.

Trying to keep the mood going, Ranklin said: “Tell me, we have the most frightful trouble with wines in India; how do you keep them aboard ship?”

“Ah,” Ballin put down his knife and fork carefully before he answered. “We have an advantage in our liners: German wines travel better than French. If passengers on Cunard, White Star, CGT, American, if they ask for a good claret in the middle of a storm – ha, they will travel by Hamburg-Amerika next time.”

“You can’t rock claret and Burgundy in the cradle of the deep,” Corinna said firmly. “I don’t let Pop even try. We have it waiting at any port we’re likely to call.”

“So drink only German wines in India, Mr Spencer,” Ballin summed up.

“And maybe you should stock up,” Sherring said, provocatively, “in case export gets to be, let’s say, difficult.”

Corinna gave him a furious look, but it bounced off. Ballin sagged and made a helpless gesture with one pudgy hand. “Yes, we cannot escape today. Perhaps Vienna will do nothing, the Czar will do nothing … it will be peace this year. Despite your diplomats and spies,” and he looked sorrowfully at Ranklin.

“I say, old boy,” he protested, “they’re hardly my diplomats and certainly not my spies.”

“What have the Britishers been doing now?” Sherring seemed amused.

“Ach, always talking that we will invade them and sending spies to see if this is true. And that permits our generals and admirals to talk war to his Imperial Majesty. But you cannot understand what war in Europe will be in these times. You think the siege of Paris – and Metz – were bad things, but Dr. Krupp tells me now he has a land gun to fire a shell of 350 kilos more than ten kilometres. To destroy a house with one shell is now easy.”

“Would they shoot at a house?” Corinna demanded, truly shocked.

Ballin smiled sadly. “In a siege it will happen. Enemy soldiers will be in that house or at ten kilometres they cannot see what they shoot at, they just shoot. It will happen. It is happening now, today, in the Balkans. Do you understand that?” And he looked squarely at Ranklin.

Ranklin had had the Krupp guns firing at him, both in South Africa and Macedonia, which was more than Krupp himself had experienced. And he had seen the results of the little 7-kilo shells fired by his own guns: men turned into bloodstains on walls and scattered boots you picked up carefully because there might still be a foot inside. But James Spencer would know nothing of that. “Doesn’t everyone say a war will be over very quickly? Nobody can afford a long war, that’s what I thought.”

“Perhaps.” Ballin stared morosely at his plate. “But to believe that is dangerous, it becomes the belief that Europe can afford a war because it will just be great charges of cavalry and clever manoeuvres like those at Tempelhof, flags and trumpets – and the losers will pay for it. But when a war starts can we be sure when it will end? Or that it will not end with the trade of Europe in ruins?”

Corinna leant back in her chair. “I think there’s better reason for avoiding war than trade.”

Ballin looked at her over his pince-nez with dark sad eyes. “Yes, dear lady. There are other and better reasons – such as God, perhaps. But we must find a reason people believe in. They do believe in trade.”

Corinna nodded slowly.

“And what about these British spies?” Sharing was determined to keep the pot simmering.

“When King George of England came to Berlin for the wedding of the Princess Victoria Luise two months ago, His Imperial Majesty set free the English spies who had been caught on the Ostfriesland coast. It was a great and noble gesture by a good man. Great-Admiral Tirpitz was not pleased.”

Shewing looked at Ranklin. “And what did you British do in return?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“They arrested a German dentist,” Ballin said lugubriously, “and convicted him of trying to buy secrets of the English Navy.”

It was true, Ranklin knew, but the ludicrous image it conjured of admirals trying to babble secrets through mouths stuffed with drills and swabs brought stifled laughter all round the table. Ballin retreated into a huff of extravagant praise for the hospitality but soon went off in his launch, having invited them all to visit his ship that evening.

“And which is that?” Ranklin asked, since he couldn’t remember having Ballin’s yacht pointed out.

“The Victoria Luise.” Corinna pointed to a four-funnelled, white-painted liner that Ranklin had assumed was just part of Kiel’s scenery. “He takes it out of service and parks it here as a floating hotel for his pals and whoever the Kaiser wants entertained in the Week. We like to think the Kachina is more exclusive.”

“And serves better brandy,” Sherring said. “Come and have one.” It was an order.

Sherring’s day cabin was clearly outside Corinna’s jurisdiction. Here was dark wood panelling, rows of old books, heavy buttoned-leather chairs and a tiger skin on the floor; here, the time was always just after dinner. Ranklin instinctively put his pipe in his mouth and accepted a brandy from a cut-glass decanter. Corinna, by contrast, faded into a dutiful daughter sitting demurely in one corner.

Sherring stretched his long legs from his chair and puffed alight a long cigar. “Tell me, Mr – Spencer, do you have an opinion on the situation in the Balkans? How likely is it to spark off a European war?”

This is where I sing for my lunch, Ranklin thought. But it was a good lunch. “At this season – yes, it could.”

“This season?”

“Yes. Armies work on a yearly training cycle, aiming for a peak of readiness for their big manoeuvres in August or September, when the weather should be dry for easy movement and the harvest’s in and they can mobilise the farm boys who are reservists. In Southern Europe the harvest comes earlier. This year it was in June, and now they’ve gone to war. In about a month, Northern Europe should be ready, too.”

Sherring glanced across at Corinna with a look of bemused horror, but when he looked again at Ranklin, it was with respect. “I appreciate hard-headed thinking, but I guess I’d expected something more political.”

Ranklin smiled modestly. “You must know far more experienced political advisers than me. But as I see it, they have something of a power vacuum down there, caused by the decay of the Ottoman – now Turkish – empire. Countries like, first, Greece, then Bosnia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Serbia, and last, Albania, bobbing up as the Turkish tide flows back. And now squabbling over their frontiers.”

“And Austria-Hungary?”

Ranklin frowned. “I can only make a military guess. They picked up Bosnia and Herzegovina, but that might be part of an overall defensive strategy. They’re scared of a group of Slav states stretching west as far as the Adriatic, and waking up one morning to find a Russian fleet (they’re more or less Slavs, too) based in a port there and bottling their own up in Trieste further north. So they’re all for Serbia, the Slav ringleader, getting cut down to size.”

“You make it all seem neat and clear,” Sherring observed.

“Then I apologise, because I must have got it horribly wrong. I believe it’s as I said, all right, but all soaked in a broth of local nationalism, religious persecution, trade interests and personal ambitions. And, of course, Italy, Germany, France – and Britain, I suppose – all trying to tune the Balkan piano to their own key.”

“And what happens when they give up trying and throw the piano down the back stairs?”

Ranklin nodded. “That’s the day I’m worried about.”

They sat silent for a little while, then Sherring asked: “And how d’you reckon this new war in the Balkans will go? Will Serbia do well?”

“I think so. The Bulgarian Army’s a poorly disciplined lot.”

Sherring’s eyes narrowed again. “Do you know that part of the world?”

“I was there at the end of last year, when the fighting first started. With the Greeks before Salonika. Just observing,” he added.

Corinna said gravely: “Would that be on your way home from India, Mr Spencer?”

“Of course.” He had completely wrecked the Spencer pretence. But perhaps even a distant acquaintance with Reynard Sherring was worth more.

Anyway, Sherring just smiled lazily. “Maybe it’s that Indian trick of studying your navel rather than the newspapers that brings wisdom. I’ll see you again, Mr – Spencer. Now you kids get off shopping.”