Spy’s Honour

31

The four-funnelled Victoria Luise had started life, Ranklin learned, as the Deutschland and fastest ship across the Atlantic, albeit shaking her passengers’ teeth loose with vibration. So she had been refitted with slower and smoother engines, fewer and less urgent passengers, renamed after the Kaiser’s favourite daughter, and sent cruising. And acting as host ship during Kiel Week.

Corinna dragged Ranklin straight onto the dance floor – perhaps, he thought, just to check up on his range of social graces. He was quite an adequate dancer, of course, certainly not a good one – that was for gigolos and, in their own barbaric way, Scotsmen. But he felt they must make a grotesque pair, with her towering over him, and was happy when she was ready to retire to the inevitable fruit punch.

It was odd to be in a ship so big and in water so still that it was only when the band and dancers paused and he could feel the rumble of the generators that he remembered they were afloat. Most of the uniforms were Navy – as Ranklin expected, the Prussian officer class had stayed away – and the women, while expensively dressed … well, it wasn’t Paris. I wonder if the Kaiser himself will drop in, he thought, then realised that the same half-exciting, half-sobering thought dominated the ballroom.

“Not the most lively crowd,” Corinna commented. She was using her height and a very simple ballgown of dark red to look stately – perhaps flying the American flag. Then she spoiled it by whispering: “How much d’you think it would take to bribe the band-leader to play a tango?”

“I don’t know just what the tango is …”

“It was invented in an Argentinian bordello.”

“What a remarkable depth of knowledge you do have. But I do know the Kaiser’s forbidden his officers to dance it.”

“I know. The Pope doesn’t like it, either.”

“You surprise me. But since we’re probably within earshot of the Kaiser, I’d suggest a bribe of not less than a lifetime job for the band aboard the Kachina. And pensions.”

“Nope,” she decided. “They aren’t good enough. Maybe they know a hootchie-kootchie though.”

“My ignorance of the world’s vulgarities is positively embarrassing. Where was that invented?”

“In some US bordello, I guess. Just ‘hootch’ means home-made liquor, from some Alaskan Indian tribe who were good at it.”

“You seem very knowledgeable about Red Indians. Were they your favourite subject at school?”

“Matter of fact, yes – kind of. It was in Switzerland and all the other girls were always telling me about how old their countries and families were, so I got hold of some books on pre-Columbian America to balance things up.”

So now he knew where her accented German came from: a Swiss finishing school. “You didn’t offer to demonstrate scalping on them?”

“I came close. Good evening,” she abruptly swung round to face a German Naval officer who had been not quite eavesdropping; it was Reimers, of course. “I saw you outside the police station.”

Reimers would far rather not have been seen on that occasion, but clicked his heels and bowed over her hand. “Mrs Finn – and Mr Spencer. Kapitanleutnant Reimers, at your service.”

“Delighted to meet you, Captain. I see you know James.”

“Indeed. But he had not told me you and he were buddies.”

Reimers’ Americanisms still startled Ranklin, who believed all foreigners should learn the King’s, not the President’s, English; Corinna seemed not to notice.

“Why, James,” she said, “haven’t you been boasting of our acquaintance?”

“Mea culpa. Somehow, we got stuck on less important matters.”

“And Mr Finn?” Reimers continued. “Is he in Kiel?”

Mr Finn was somebody Ranklin had wanted to ask about himself, but Corinna had never given him an opening.

“No, he’s back home in the States.”

Ranklin hoped Reimers would press for more information, but he just bowed and said: “May I ask you for this dance?”

Corinna turned pointedly to Ranklin, who should have been asked for his permission first. “If Mrs Finn isn’t too tired,” he said with automatic tact, then added: “and if she doesn’t mind anything so old-fashioned as a waltz.”

Corinna made a graceful scalping gesture with her fan as Reimers led her away. Watching her go, Ranklin glanced past her and seemed to catch the eyes of a squat middle-aged woman in a green gown. But she looked away immediately.

He left his unfinished punch – he mistrusted mixed drinks – and intercepted a passing glass of champagne, then looked round for conversation. He agreed with an Austrian that the champagne was fine and the international situation poor, and with an Italian Naval officer that both weather and champagne were fine – but all the time had the idea that the woman in green was watching him. Probably, he thought, she’s just interested in who Corinna’s with tonight.

The waltz ended and Reimers escorted Corinna back.

“Guess what?” she chirped. “The Captain knows America well; he was at their Washington Embassy.”

“Really?”

Reimers smiled but changed the subject. “And how is your investigation progressing, Mr Spencer?”

Ranklin shrugged hopelessly. “Oh, that. I’ve talked to everybody you suggested – and nothing. I’ll write a long letter to Cross, then …”

“But what about the strange bearer bond he was bearing?”

“The Landentwhatsit?” Ranklin remembered he didn’t know German that well. “We asked at the bank about it this afternoon – ” was Reimers surprised that Corinna had been included in that? “ – and just learned that the company failed long ago. There was a legal problem, the government got the land and the promoter killed himself.”

“I’ve got it!” Corinna lit up. “All these years, the promoter’s son broods on how his father was treated, ruined, killed. It gets to his mind. Then one night he meets your Lieutenant Cross and decides he’s one of the officials ruined his father, lures him to the lock and pushes him in. And leaves the bond as a sort of teaser clue.”

“For heaven’s sake,” Ranklin said. But Reimers was laughing aloud.

“I did say he was crazy,” Corinna defended.

“Wonderful!” Reimers was still laughing. “You drive Sherlock Holmes out of business. But – I hate to bring bad news – he had no son. Only a widow, to whom the government most kindly gave a job later. And the bank was also being kind, or maybe they forgot the real story, but it was a plain share swindle. A fraud. The guy found the Government was buying the land quietly, didn’t want it announced, so he cashed in on that by claiming he had the right to buy, and sold shares on that claim. The legal problem was if he hadn’t killed himself, he’d be in the hoosegow.”

“I think you’ve spoiled it,” Corinna pouted. “That’s dull. I prefer my version.”

“And so do I, dear lady, so do I. But my poor brain can take no more. Will you excuse me?” He bowed and retreated, still chuckling.

Corinna’s face did one of its lantern-slide changes. “Washington Embassy, my ass. He knows the States, but he didn’t pick up that lingo at diplomatic parties. How long’s he been a Navy officer?”

“To reach that rank, twenty years.”

“Horse shit. Navy officers – any country’s – have better manners.”

“You mean their language in mixed company?”

“They’re diplomats, much more than Army ones. Don’t look stuffy: they’re trained for it. They spend half their time in foreign ports at receptions and parties and dances. Whatever he was doing in the States it wasn’t Navy officering.” She glanced at Ranklin. “You don’t seem too surprised.”

“I’m pretty sure he’s counter-intelligence.” Gunther had said something about Reimers being “Steinhauer strutting in Naval uniform”, hadn’t he? Which meant that, whoever Reimers was, he was important enough for their Navy to let him play at being a fairly senior officer.

“Ah,” Corinna said. “He was trying to get me to talk about you. Don’t worry: I said we’d met in Paris. You haven’t congratulated me on my detective stories.”

“I’m supposed to be taking Cross’s death seriously. Well, at least we found out that the late company promoter wasn’t quite the poor innocent he seemed.”

She cocked her head on one side and gave him an odd little smile. “Did we? I thought we heard a government man say the Government did nothing wrong – in fact, even gave a job to the widow of a con man to keep her from starving. It couldn’t be to keep her from talking, now could it? Shall we circulate among the guests?”

Half an hour later, Ranklin was pushing scraps of meat around his plate in the supper room – it was too soon after dinner to be eating again – and half listening to the wife of a director of the Norddeutscher-Lloyd shipping line. Corinna was listening, apparently wholeheartedly, to the Herr Direktor himself. Words like “Hapag”, “Immco”, “Cunard” and “Morgan Trust” seeped across the table.

The Frau Direktor had the latest gossip on the maiden voyage of Hamburg-Amerika’s new Imperator. “One doesn’t like to say it whilst supping on board one of Dr Ballin’s own vessels, but surely it is a scandal that the biggest ship in the world, named for the All-Highest, should roll like that in June weather. Just think of the poor passengers in winter,” she gloated.

“Dreadful,” Ranklin murmured, listening to Corinna saying: “Naturally, Herr Direktor, I understand none of this, but I’m sure my father …”

“If only I could speak to him privately …”

“But he’s doing nothing right now. Why don’t I take you over to the Kachina to have a nice quiet chat with him? I’m sure he’d be delighted. It would be no problem at all.”

Nor was it. Don Byrd appeared and vanished after one quick order, the Frau Direktor was handed over to the care of the other directors and their wives – and that left Ranklin.

“You’ll manage, won’t you James? If the launch isn’t at the gangway, they’ll signal for it.”

“Naturally, I understand none of this …”

“But we all have our little secrets, don’t we?” With just a hint of a tomahawk in her smile.

And a few minutes ago, he thought ruefully, I believed I was at the centre of any intrigue going on here. Back to the kindergarten.

In fact, he found himself in the restfully dim smoking-room with a weak whisky-and-soda in one hand, tapping an empty pipe against his teeth with the other. And exhausted. Part of it was the day, part Corinna. She was … well, he hadn’t known a girl, a woman, like her before. Their joking had a depth to it, unlike the flirtatious banter he played as mechanically as polite tennis with the Englishwomen of his circle. Sorry, his late circle. Perhaps because it was born of that dangerous night at the Chateau. A battle was the time for joking; nobody wanted to make it more serious.

But there was more to it than that. It was the way she thought, the things she thought and knew, that opened his mind’s eye wider than he found comfortable. And he felt it wasn’t just her being American; it would be easy to accept, and dismiss, that. It was her; she was … different.

And that was a cowardly backing-off thought. But, he pleaded to himself, it’s been a long hard day.

So then Don Byrd had to appear beside him, smiling and offering a light for his cigarette – he had pocketed his pipe, not feeling settled enough to enjoy it.

“The guy who laid evidence against Gorman: he gave his name as Heinie Glass, address at a guest-house in the Old Town. But somebody went in this afternoon and paid the account, and Herr Glass hasn’t been seen again. In fact, he paid the account for two others as well, who’d gotten themselves hurt last night, maybe in a fight. It could be they’ve all three left town.”

“Thank you. And the man who paid their bills?”

“It’s my guess that he paid more than just the account, because nobody can recall how he looked at all.”

“I see.”

“My pleasure.” Byrd had a sharp face, bright dark eyes and sleeked-back hair, the face of an eagle except with a ready smile. But he didn’t smile as he went on: “There’s a certain lady wants to meet with you – she knows your name – the Grafin von Szillert. I’ve asked around and it seems she isn’t noble herself, in fact she was a trapeze artiste in a circus when she met up with the Graf. He’s dead now. However …”

“Is her Christian name Anya?”

“That’s right. However,” and Byrd gave him an intense stare, “you don’t have to meet with her if you don’t feel that a guest of Mr Sherring and Mrs Finn should meet with her.”

Either Byrd was being polite rudely, or rude politely, probably he’d had a university education. Ranklin considered. “How does she come to be invited here?”

“She knows a lot of influential men in Hamburg, one way or another.”

“What’s the other way?”

“I don’t know,” Byrd said grimly.

“Well, I don’t really think I’ll do Mrs Finn or Mr Sherring too much harm just by saying Good Evening to the lady.”

Byrd didn’t agree, but looking like an eagle looking stoical, he led the way.

By now Ranklin wasn’t surprised to find that Anya was the squat woman in green. She sat, a tasselled black shawl thrown round her heavy shoulders, at a small table in the corner of the cards room, playing patience and watched by a bulky young man with a mournful moustache in rather too elegant evening dress. Her watchdog, Ranklin assumed.

Byrd introduced Ranklin, who took her white-gloved hand, bowed over it and murmured: “Grafin.” The hand inside the glove was wide and firm.

“Sit down,” she growled, nodding dismissively to Byrd. “James Spencer,” she said, but to herself, tasting the name. Then: “D’you want another drink?” Her voice was deep, her accent perhaps Slav.

“No, thank you.” Ranklin put his half-empty glass on the table and waited. The other tables in the room were busy with whist or bridge, and a round table in the middle was even busier with a poker school. It seemed as if many guests were behaving just as if they were on a voyage – but that was what the ship was equipped for; if they didn’t go ashore, what else could they do?

“How do you know the daughter of Reynard Sherring?” Anya asked finally.

“We met.”

When he didn’t say any more, she glanced up from her cards for a moment. Her face was as squat and muscular as her body, with pronounced cheekbones and dark, still eyes. Not quite a peasant race and even further from being a stupid one. She looked back at her cards and growled: “Where’s Dragan?”

“Oh, Lord – I don’t know.”

She picked up a glass of ice tinged with the dregs of some green liqueur. Ranklin wondered if she drank it just for the colour, since she wore emerald earrings, too. She cracked a piece of ice loudly between her teeth and said: “I know you, I knew Lieutenant Cross. The good honest sporting country gentlemen,” she spat the word, “playing at the sport of spying. Steinhauer knows you. Even Hauptmann Lenz by now. To save your own neck and Europe’s – where is Dragan the Viper?”

“In the Captain’s cabin playing backgammon with Santa the Claus and Rumpel the Stiltskin.”

She slammed the glass down on the table. “They will put you in prison a thousand years and then shoot you.” Her voice crackled like a loose power wire. “Only I will have you shot first, before you destroy Europe.”

Ranklin nodded, as if this were interesting but irrelevant. “Have you met Dragan?”

“No. But I know him, I know his breed. Better than you do. Why?”

“I’m just collecting people who haven’t met him, that’s all. I feel we have something in common.”

“Do nothing until you hear from your Department,” she said. She moved two of her cards. “Go away.”

Ranklin stayed put. “So far, madam, you have had your men attack my servant and get him imprisoned. The only result is that you’ve had to send three men back to Hamburg, two of them shop-soiled. And got Hauptmann Lenz angry, of course.”

“Lenz does not worry me. But do you think your Reynard Sherring and his skyscraper daughter will protect you when they can prove what you are? Now go away.”

“Why should I need their protection, when you seem to believe I have much better?”

The watchdog stood up, then leant stiffly forward from the hips to whisper mournfully: “The Grafin said to go away.”

Ranklin stood and smiled up at him – he was several inches taller. “And you won’t even recognise Dragan when he catches you.”

The watchdog’s eyes widened suddenly, and Ranklin went away smiling. Whoever and wherever you are, Dragan, you’ve at last done me a bit of good as well as harm, he thought.

Byrd, who had been watching play at the poker table, fell into step beside him.

“I don’t think I disgraced the House of Sherring,” Ranklin said.

“I’m sure you did your best,” Don Byrd said coolly. “Did the lady …?”

“She really just wanted to tell me to go away.”

In that, Byrd was obviously on the Grafin Anya’s side, but he said nothing. Ranklin walked on thoughtfully.

Come on, he thought to the brain that was slumped against the back of his skull with its eyes closed; come on, one last stab at Great Deduction, and I’ll leave you alone until morning.

He was back in the slow-paced half-dark of the smoking room, among groups of elderly men recalling past yachting triumphs – as he could hear – or business adventures, which he could only guess at. He slumped into a horseshoe-back leather chair and tried to think logically.

She had talked of Reimers as ‘Steinhauer’, just as Gunther had, and of the ‘Department’ – presumably our Naval Intelligence: she thinks I belong there, like Cross. So she’s clearly one of us (but Good God! – what company “us” is turning out to be). I’ve heard of traditional links between high-class brothels and espionage – she probably buys official tolerance with gossip her girls have picked up horizontally, and if they suspect (as I do) that she’s working for the Russians, she’s convinced them that she’s working for the Revolution against the Czar.

But why is she so worried about what Dragan could get up to? “Destroying Europe” sounds a pretty big -

“So now you have met Anya die Ringfrau?” Gunther’s slow deep voice gave everything he said an extra importance, as if it were carefully gold-lettered on wood.

“Yes. She wants me to go away.”

“It is good advice. But of course you will not take it. It is your duty to stay. That is most correct. You have been trained to do what you are told to do, report what you are sent to find. I do not criticise that, I admire it. But, as you are finding, the world is not so simple when one does not wear uniform. And when there is not always someone to turn to for orders.”

Obviously Gunther’s soldiering had been largely confined to the parade ground. But Ranklin was learning that an attitude of agreement and ignorance was more useful than trying to seem a know-all. So he asked: “Do you know what Reimers/Steinhauer was doing in America?”

Gunther paused whilst he got his cigar well alight, then: “He was a detective for Pinkerton’s.”

“For …?”

“Their most famous private detectives. President Lincoln hired them to be his secret service in the war of the states.”

That made sense – and explained Reimers’ American vocabulary. And the fact that Gunther hadn’t tried to sell the information told him something, too. He waited.

Gunther took a deep satisfied puff at the cigar. “You find, I know, that not all intelligence is in neat parcels like – shall we say – a code-book. You must dig and throw away many things your Bureau does not want to know, would order you not to waste time in telling them. And you will think: but why throw this away? It does not matter to the Bureau, but it must concern some person. So, I will give it to that person. I will make him my friend. Perhaps he gives me money, perhaps he gives me intelligence that my Bureau wants – perhaps not that day, but one day, because he is now my friend. So by doing this, I am working for the Bureau as it wants.”

“For example?”

“Ah, yes: an example.” Gunther looked critically at the lit end of his cigar. “Let us think of Immco and the Morgan Trust …”