Taking this as a rhetorical question, and being numb and speech-less anyway, I let it pass without remark. Willem rubbed his hands.
"Now for the fun. Franz-Josef is all for the simple life. He sleeps on a soldier’s bedstead in a plain little room overlookin' the garden, with a single orderly on a pallet outside the door and his aides snug in their rooms down the corridor, everyone snorin' their heads off as they’ve done this thirty years past, and why not? What’s to fear? A single sentry under the window, probably half asleep, all quiet in the garden and surrounding woods, God’s in his heaven, and all’s well, until …" he dropped his voice to a hollow whisper "… out of those woods the Holnup come skulkin' in the half-light before dawn … perhaps a single bravo, more likely two, but certainly not more than three. Say three, two to look out and cover, one to do the dirty deed … all creepin' unawares into our ambush." There was a glitter in his eye that took me straight back to the Jotunberg dungeons. "We’ll take ’em either in the house or outside, as chance dictates. And we kill ’em. Stone dead. Every one. Follow?"
I let that pass, too, taking the advice of his Irishman and being as aisy as I could, while he lighted himself a nonchalant cigarette.
"It’ll be a noisy business, of course, and there’ll be a fine how-de-do when the sleepers awake to find three dead assassins and the two gallant visitors whose vigilance has saved the day. But once they’ve grasped what’s happened, you can bet your last tizzy they’ll want to keep it quiet." He grinned, pleased as Punch, tapping my knee. "There’ll be no inconvenient inquiry which might result in the unhappy discovery that this was a Hungarian plot. Why? Because whatever folly Franz-Josef might have committed if he’d learned of the Holnup attempt beforehand, he’ll not raise Cain when it’s all past and no harm done. There’ll be nothin' to show that the corpses are Hungarians—they may even be foreign hirelings—and whatever he may suspect, the less the public hear of it, the better. No monarch likes it to be known that he’s been a target, not if it can be kept dark, and his aides won’t care to have their incompetence noised abroad. So ’twill all be discreetly damped down, everyone sworn to secrecy, eternal gratitude to the two gallant saviours, perhaps even a pound out of the royal poor-box—why, if failin' to save poor old Max earned you the Maria Theresa, we ought to get a couple of Iron Crowns at least!"
"And Europe will remain at peace," says Kralta quietly.
"Aye, and we’ll all live happy ever after." Willem blew a smoke-ring. "So there you have it—all of it. Now you understand what all this to-do, which you’ve found so puzzlin' and inconvenient, has been about … and why Bismarck chose you, ’cos you’re the only man he could put into Franz-Josef’s house and no questions asked. And you’re … qualified for the work." He paused, contemplating his cigarette. "Well, there it is. What d’you say … Harry?"
The honest answer to that would have been to tell him he was stark raving mad, and if he hadn’t been Rudi Starnberg’s son, with a gun in his armpit and the means to railroad me on to the Bavarian rock-pile for life, I might well have given it. Since my present need was to temporise, and give the impression that I might be talked into their ghastly scheme, I played it as they would expect from the redoubtable Flashy, indignation forgotten, narrow-eyed and considering, asking shrewd questions: How could they be sure Franz-Josef would offer us bed and board? What other agents would Bismarck have at Ischl? What if our ambush went wrong? What if it couldn’t be hushed up? What if, by some unforeseen twist of fate, Willem and I should find ourselves facing charges of murder?
Entirely academic questions from my point of view, but they elicited prompt answers—none of them, incidentally, concerned with the morality of butchering the would-be assassins. Willem, being a chip off the Starnberg block, wouldn’t think twice, but I was interested that Kralta too apparently took bloodshed for granted—and both, you’ll notice, assumed that it was all in the night’s work for me. Flattering, if you like.
Willem dealt confidently with my doubts. "It’s Bismarck’s scheme, and he don’t make mistakes. Franz-Josef is bound to take us in, but if he didn’t we’d just picket his lodge and deal with the Holnup in the grounds. There’ll be half a dozen stout lads in Ischl at my orders, but they won’t know what’s afoot and I shan’t call on them unless I must. If word of the fracas gets out—well, that’s Bismarck’s biznai, and he’ll see to it that we’re kept clear of embarrassment. Murder? What, when we’ve saved the Emperor of Austria? Don’t be soft. Well, satisfied?"
I wasn’t, but I chewed my lip, looking grim, while they watched me with mounting hope and encouraged me with occasional reminders of what a fine crusading enterprise it was, and no other way to ensure the peace of Europe and the welfare of its deserving peasantry. Kralta was particularly moving on the score of the juvenile population, I remember, while Willem appealed to what he supposed was my sense of adventure, poor fool; plainly he regarded a hand-to-hand death-struggle in the dark as no end of a lark. I responded with few words, and at last said I would sleep on it when we reached Linz. They seemed to take that as a sign that I was halfway to agreement, for Willem nodded thoughtfully and refilled my glass, while Kralta astonished me by kissing me quickly on the cheek and leaving the compartment. Willem laughed softly.
"Sentimental little thing, ain’t she? Gad, what a week you’ll have in Vienna when it’s all over! But I," says he, fixing me with a merry eye, "ain’t sentimental at all, and in case—just in case, mind you—you’re as foxy as my old guv’nor made out, and have some misguided notion that you’ll be able to slip away once we’re on Austrian soil … well, don’t try it, that’s all. Those stout lads I spoke of will be on hand, and they can have you back in Bavaria before you can say knife." He patted his pocket. "If I haven’t shot you first."
I reminded him coldly that I’d be no use to him dead, and he grinned. "You’d be even less use to yourself. But we won’t dwell on that, eh? You’re a practical man, and I’ve a notion that you’ll fall in with us. Just so long as you understand that you’re going to stand up with me against the Holnup, one way or t’other, what?"
So I hadn’t fooled him above half, and must just wait and hope. One thing only I was sure of: he wasn’t getting me within a mile of Franz-Josef and the blasted Holnup—supposing they existed, and the tale I’d been spun wasn’t some huge Machiavellian hoax conceived by Bismarck for diabolic purposes that I couldn’t even guess at.
That was possible … but d’you know, I was inclined to believe they’d told me the truth. Not all of it, perhaps, but true so far as it went. It was wild, but no wilder than some intrigues I’d known—the Strackenz marriage for one, John Brown’s raid for another. That Hungarian fanatics should be after Franz-Josef’s blood was all too credible; what boggled the mind was the scheme Bismarck had designed to stop them … until you studied it and saw that nothing else would have answered. The threat of explosion in Europe had arisen suddenly, like a genie from a bottle, worse than ’48 or Crimea or San Stefano, and faced with the apparently impossible task of ensuring the Emperor’s safety while keeping him in the dark, that ice-cold brain had seen that unlikely old Flashy was the vital cog, having the entrée to Franz-Josef and being eminently blackmailable. And he’d gone calmly and swiftly to work to bring me where I now was, by the most outlandish means, using Kralta and Willem (and Blowitz?) and above all his knowledge of me. His planning had been meticulous … so far. As for what lay ahead, it remained to be seen whether the web which his perverted genius had spun over Ischl would be proof against my frantic efforts to break loose, and the hell with Franz-Josef and the peace of Europe both. Well, he’d spun a similar web over Strackenz, and I’d diddled the bastard then, hadn’t I?