Spy’s Honour

48

“You know the Baroness Schramm,” Corinna said, “but I don’t think you’ve met Major Stanzer. Her cousin.” They didn’t know Corinna well, so Ranklin hoped they hadn’t caught the disbelief in her tone. He bowed to the Major across the table and sat down.

“Have you come to hear Professor Hornbeam speak tonight?” he asked to keep the conversation going while he looked Stanzer over. A man of action was the first impression: muscular and restless. A handsome face with a quick smile and a fair moustache that was as well tended as any Englishman’s lawn. He wore a hairy country suit that showed his opinion of Budapest.

“That is so,” he said. “I have heard him in Paris, but now I understand more about international law, so perhaps I ask him a question, no?”

Ah, Ranklin thought, is that how Hornbeam’s announcement is going to be triggered? He said: “I hope he knows the answer.”

“I am sure the Herr Professor knows all answers,” and Stanzer gave his quick smile that didn’t seem to mean much.

“Is Conall lunching?” Corinna asked Ranklin.

“He’s still working on the tariff figures. I asked for something to be sent up to him.”

While Corinna was being baffled by this return of her own fiction, the Baroness muttered to Stanzer: “Herr Ranklin und Herr Gilroy sind Kaufleute.” She didn’t need to emphasise that “businessmen”: Stanzer’s smile showed he forgave Ranklin for having crawled from under his rock before nightfall.

But Corinna’s hearing and German were just as good. “Major Stanzer,” she beamed, “makes his living by riding horses. Isn’t that clever of him?”

Ranklin cringed inside; we should ask the waiters, when they come, to save us trouble by throwing the food for us. And he was quite content to be despised by the cavalry officer: you aren’t suspicious of those you despise.

Well, well, he thought; my attitudes really are changing.

“We believe there are great business opportunities in Hungary,” he announced. “Primarily it’s a matter of increasing efficiency in the fledgling industries you already have. Take pig iron production, for example. Here you produce only sixty pounds a year per worker, while in Germany the figure is over five hundred and in the USA …”

By the time the first course arrived he had lowered the emotional temperature to near zero. And nobody could fail to despise his devotion to business.

They were halfway through the main courses – stuffed pepper, for Ranklin – when a young man came round the corner of the building, paused to look around the tables, then hurried over to Stanzer. From his deference and stiffness of pose, Ranklin reckoned he was another Army officer.

Stanzer stood up, bowed to them all, and said: “I am most sorry, please excuse … It is urgent …” He murmured something to the Baroness that Ranklin couldn’t catch, and hurried off.

“Dear me,” Corinna said brightly. “I do hope his horse isn’t feeling unwell.”

The Baroness gave her a look that was pure paprika – but she was worried. After picking at her lunch for a minute or two, she threw down her napkin and walked back into the hotel.

“Any more of this,” Corinna said, “and the chef’s going to have a nervous collapse. Have you any idea what that was about?”

Ranklin shook his head. “I think it may be time for what your original countrymen would call a pow-wow.”

Corinna nodded. “Cousin, my ass.”

“Meeting of the British Secret Service, House of Sherring branch, will come to order,” Corinna announced brightly.

“For God’s sake …” Ranklin winced.

She grinned, then called: “Conall, are you with us?”

O’Gilroy was standing at one of the windows of the billiard room, staring up at the tops of the thunderclouds moving in from the north-west. He was always fascinated by their detail, by the exquisite fineness of every last curl, that existed simply to cloak a drifting inferno. Perhaps it gave perspective to his thoughts – only the thoughts swilling around him were pretty big and awesome already.

“I’m with ye.” He turned back to the room.

“And we all know what Dr Klapka said, what Matt deduced and what he’s done and been told?” She sat in a high wing chair against the wall by the marker board, occasionally and impatiently swatting the soggy air with her fan. The room was low-ceilinged, dark and smelt of dust. From the cafe by the baths a military band was marching the late lunchers through their pudding and coffee.

“And about this Austrian Major Stanzer?” Corinna added.

“He’s part of it,” Ranklin said. “The next link in the chain up from the Baroness, we assume. But we don’t know why he went tearing off in the middle of lunch.”

“There was a couple of fellers in a car come to pick him up.” O’Gilroy had been watching from his bedroom.

“Really?” Ranklin considered this. He had abandoned his jacket and perched himself on the billiard table, rolling a ball off two cushions and back to his hand, over and over.

“D’you want to sum up, Matt?” Corinna offered.

Ranklin hesitated, then began abruptly: “The plot begins at a very high level, perhaps in the Army, certainly the Army’s involved. That’s where Major Stanzer comes in.”

Corinna made a face; Ranklin looked to O’Gilroy: “What would you say of him?”

“He’s more’n the fancy boy he looks,” O’Gilroy admitted, and when Corinna looked puzzled, went on: “I had some dealings with him in Paris; business, ye might say …” His voice trailed off.

Corinna smiled lopsidedly. “So that’s why you were lunching alone.”

Ranklin took over: “I assume he’s Army Intelligence, from the way he can jump from place to place.” He smiled suddenly. “If he is, I wonder if it’s occurred to him that Colonel Redl must have had a say in his selection. And since the Colonel was working for the Russians, he wouldn’t be selecting the best and brainiest … However, if all Stanzer’s here to do is ask a question at the lecture, he should manage that without tripping over his moustache.

“Anyway, I think the idea isn’t so much to stop the Archduke becoming Emperor as to discredit him right now – just temporarily – when the Emperor’s taking advice on whether or not to accept the Bucharest peace treaty. Whether to opt for war or peace, in effect. And I’m told the Emperor thinks highly of the Archduke – and, presumably, his advice – at this moment. And, though I’m less sure about this, I think the Archduke may be advising peace – on purely military grounds.”

“That bastard,” O’Gilroy muttered.

Corinna frowned as she worked through this. “So we’re not just talking about who gets the big part in the next Habsburg play, but a whole European war? – that’s what you believe, isn’t it?”

Ranklin nodded, and she looked at O’Gilroy. “Conall?”

O’Gilroy shrugged. “Whatever the Captain says. I’m way over me head in matters this size.”

She looked back at Ranklin. “Well, last night you thought things would be simpler if it were a nice big plot. Today it seems it is. Only we aren’t quite sure where the Archduke stands; do we need to be?”

“It would be nice to know if this is a plot to start a war or to stop one.”

The room darkened, as abruptly as if a curtain had been pulled, as the clouds overtook the sun.

“But how much,” Corinna asked, “do we really know about the Archduke?”

“That’s the trouble. So much is Vienna society gossip – his mad rages, shooting servants and so on – but Vienna society doesn’t know him. He never goes near them. And if he’s really no more than pig-headed and bad-mannered then he’s no worse than most generals I’ve met. And as a general, he could see it’s lunacy to risk a war with Russia when Redl might have given them the Monarchy’s Plan Three – their war plans.”

O’Gilroy objected: “But ye said the Chief of Staff – and he must be a general – he wants a war.”

“Conrad, yes. But he might feel his career needs one: he’s been in post some years now and never ordered a shot fired. He might even want a war to restore the Army’s morale after the Redl affair. But a war now won’t do the Archduke any good. He’s so close to becoming Emperor – the old boy’s nearly eighty-three – that all he has to do is wait and then he can have all the wars he wants – and total direction of them besides. He’s got far more to gain from keeping the peace now – if we can credit him with the sense to see that.”

There had been no hint, no distant mutter, of thunder. But like a besieging army, it had crept up on them, laid its mines in silence and then detonated them all at once in an enormous explosion that rattled the windows and squeezed their eardrums. Ranklin knew he had jumped, and suspected the other two had as well. For a full minute, as the explosions rolled and echoed on, they just stared at the shuddering windows, with no point in trying to speak.

When there was something nearer silence, Corinna said: “Operatic and overdone.”

“Your criticism is minuted,” Ranklin said gravely.

O’Gilroy asked: “So ye think mebbe it’s that General Conrad behind of all this?”

It was a difficult question, and Corinna came in with her answer while Ranklin was still puzzling at it. “It can happen sometimes that an important man’s aides and sidekicks can set something going that they think the boss wants but won’t want to know about. To keep his hands clean. All very self-sacrificing and self-advancing of them, and it can be one hell of a nuisance.”

She said it with quiet fervour and they both knew whom she was talking about. Ranklin summed up: “It’s being run from Vienna by somebody well up the ladder from Stanzer, but there’s no point in guessing who. And nothing, nobody, can take away the cause of war, it’s just there, in the air, in everything that’s going on.”

“But,” Corinna said, “if we can stop Hornbeam being the occasion for it, maybe we’ll stop it for this war season. Maybe something will happen, a miracle, before the next season comes around …” She glared at him. “One thing we can sure do is talk to Hornbeam. If it all depends on what he says tonight and we can stop him saying it – hallelujah!”

Ranklin nodded, but not as enthusiastically as she had expected, and went back to rolling the billiard ball.

Outside, the rain began: at first just a rattle of heavy drops, but in seconds the noise became a roar and the windows waterfalls. Corinna walked to one and pressed her nose against the glass, playing the childhood game of being warm and dry just a fraction of an inch from the streaming flood.

“We’d better try and catch him as soon as we can,” she went on, turning from the window.

“It means tipping our hand somewhat,” Ranklin said.

“Okay, so what else do you want us to do?”

Ranklin frowned down at the tabletop. “The problem is that spies are supposed just to find out, not to do. It tends to make them conspicuous. And there’s another good reason,” he went on quickly. “A spy’s always working with incomplete knowledge, deliberately so. We don’t get sent into the field knowing all our bosses know, what our side’s plans are – for obvious reasons.”

“But you can’t think your bosses want a war.”

He sighed. “No, I don’t think they do, although they wouldn’t tell us anyway.”

They were silent for a while, listening to the steady rain and the now distant soft-edged growls of thunder. O’Gilroy looked tensed, Corinna more perplexed.

“Then,” she said finally, “you don’t really want to speak to Hornbeam, either?”

“No, I’ll come with you on that. But I really don’t see what more we – O’Gilroy and I – can do. We’ve been acting nosy enough to get people wondering about us. If we do anything more blatant, we might give ourselves away completely.”

“Captain – ” O’Gilroy’s voice was low and trembling with, perhaps, reined-in anger; “ – I think we’re here for different reasons. Mebbe yer saving the British Empire, but ye know I’ve no part in that. I’m here because I chose, though – ” he shrugged; “ – the reason for that I wouldn’t say I knew. I do know ye’ve told me often enough ye think spying’s a dirty business – and mebbe it is for the likes of yerself. But I’m telling ye it’s just because we’re spies that we’re knowing this plot and can mebbe do something to stop it. And I recall what ye told me of the war ye saw, and fought, in Greece and what yer guns can do. And I say if ye run from the chancest to stop that happening in the towns and countries ye’ve shown me, then they’ll have to dig a new pit in Hell to make it deep enough to hold ye!”

Corinna turned her head slowly from watching O’Gilroy and her face was troubled and, though she tried to hide it, disappointed. “Matt,” she appealed, “isn’t there anything, just anything, you can …?”

“You just don’t see,” Ranklin said wearily. “Not either of you. It isn’t as easy as sacrificing ourselves. It needs just a hint, just one, that the British Secret Service is opposing them, and the war party’s won hands down.”

After a time, Corinna said in a voice that was subdued but somehow relieved: “Conall, next time let’s remember there’s a good reason why they put this guy in charge.”

“You won’t,” Ranklin growled.