The policeman nodded gravely. “Thank you, sir.” But he only moved far enough to stare at the next building.
“Now,” Ranklin said. “Were you going to tell me about a certain Italian senator?”
“Was I?” Viner was looking around for his motor-car, and escape.
“I’m pretty sure you were, but . . .” Ranklin glanced pointedly at the policeman a few yards away.
“No deals have been done at all, just . . . Look, can you assure me that this . . . accident isn’t going to get talked about?”
“I feel on the brink of being sure.”
Viner hesitated for one last moment, then muttered: “God knows how he managed it, but we had Lord Curzon asking if we could help out. The Italian ended up with two of the things, and we’ve only got half a dozen.”
“Lord Curzon?”
“That’s what I said. Ah, there’s my motor.”
“And ammunition?” But that was a silly question; you could pick up British Army ammunition anywhere. Ranklin watched the motor-car drive off, reflecting that Dagner had enlisted a very big gun to get Falcone his small guns. Strictly, Curzon was now just an ex-Viceroy and out-of-office politician, but he wasn’t somebody a government contractor said No to. He might he Prime Minister of the next Unionist administration.
So it was just part of the ‘deal’ they’d done with Falcone. Should he mention to Dagner that he’d uncovered it? Perhaps not: it might seem that he’d been prying. Ranklin suddenly became aware that he was standing on a London street without his jacket on. Only the financial district, of course, but even so . . . He hurried back indoors.
Up in the partners’ room, Corinna was sitting and quite visibly shaking, her face pale even in the yellow lamplight. “I’m sorry . . . suddenly come on . . .” She gulped more brandy. “He could have killed me.”
A dreadful sense of guilt was clouding Ranklin’s judgment, and he almost said: “So could a passing motor-bus” but realised the light touch was wrong. So he put his arms around her and hugged her tightly. It was awkward, with her still sitting, but hardly less awkward than when she was standing, given her height. It was something they did best lying down.
Her shivering vibrated through his own body, then stopped, and he felt her take a deep breath. He said fiercely: “That idiotic bastard. I ought to have him jailed.”
As he’d hoped, she became magnanimous. “No, it was just stupidity. And it ended well enough . . . I’m okay, now. Here, finish this.” She gave him the brandy glass. “He wouldn’t have agreed to split the issue if he wasn’t feeling guilty. The trouble is, I can’t okay anything more than a hundred thousand and I’d like to have taken the lot. But I’ll take five thousand and a bullet-hole.”
“Only five thousand? – isn’t that rather small beer?”
“You’ve been reading the socialist newspapers again. Most of our earnings are from half a per cent here, a quarter there – steady stuff from clients who come back year after year. A big coup is rare, risky – and probably makes enemies, because if you suddenly make a pile, it’s usually because somebody else has suddenly lost it.” She found her purse and took out a small mirror. “Oh Lord, gunfire doesn’t improve one’s looks. Are you going back to your office?”
“Got to, I’m afraid.”
“You’d better get along: this is going to take time. We’re meeting at the Carlton tomorrow, then? And thank you. You’re pretty good under fire.”
Which made Ranklin feel even more guilty . . . Still, he had helped her make ?5,000.
16
The next morning, the weather had changed its mind about it being autumn. The sun rose into a near-cloudless and windless sky and before the dew had dried, O’Gilroy made his first solo flight.
For brief periods over the last five days he had sat beside an instructor as they floated soggily around the aerodrome in a training machine with the honest but unlovely name of ‘Boxkite’. Set alongside the modern Sopwiths, Avros and Andrew Sherring’s Oriole, it looked like the work of a Chinese scaffolding company, but it flew. And the cage of struts and wires protected the novice from his own mistakes or the ground – which amounted to the same thing. In this, he had notched up just over two hours of flight.
That might not seem much, but others had solo’d with less. And the truth, which O’Gilroy wasn’t entirely ready to face, was that there wasn’t much to learn because aeroplanes couldn’t actually do much. They took off, turned, and landed; the rest was engine handling and navigation. It was only now that men like Pegoud were discovering what aeroplanes might really be made to do.
And now O’Gilroy was teetering on the edge of the nest. He could stop there, quit, walk away. But that thought lasted only long enough to remind him that he was here by choice. Then he checked the oil glass, which showed a proper one-drip-per-second, and eased the air lever forward a fraction, followed by the petrol lever. The engine – behind him in a Boxkite – whirred a little more urgently, the revs climbed past 1,100 and the machine ambled forward. There was no speedometer – ‘airspeed indicator’ they called it on more modern types – so he had to guess, to feel, when it wanted to fly. And nothing to tell if he was keeping straight, except an absurd thread of red wool tied to a strut and streaming back in the wind. Did that wind feel fast enough now? It felt quite different from when he had an instructor beside him. Perhaps a second or two more, like . . . now. He pulled gently on the wheel and the Boxkite did nothing. And then flew.
It lasted – intentionally – only seconds, just a straight-line “hop” of maybe three hundred yards from start to stop. But it also lasted an age, in which he had time to think that if he left the engine levers as they were he could climb and fly on beyond sight until his petrol ran out. Time to feel utter loneliness because no way in the world could anyone reach out a hand to help if he forgot what to do next. And time for his perverse mind deliberately to forget, to feel a total stranger in a contraption from another world where there was no grass beneath his feet, no scent of pines in the breeze, nothing familiar at all . . .
And still time for his body to remember before his mind did, so that he had pushed the foot-bar to straighten the thread of wool, eased back the petrol, then air, then pressed the “blip” switch to interrupt the ignition, felt and heard the wheels rumble back onto the ground, his ground, his world. He wondered if he would ever experience a flight so long.
Half an hour and three more hops later, he climbed down and lit a cigarette. His hands shook a little, but they hadn’t when it mattered, and that was as important as his instructor saying: “That was pretty good, you’re getting the hang of it. Next time you can do a couple of turns. Just one or two points to bear in mind . . .”
O’Gilroy looked back at the clumsy, unlikely contrivance that had, nevertheless, flown. No – that he had made fly. There was grass underfoot and a pine scent in the air, but the sky was part of that world, too. His world, now his sky.
* * *
The temperature climbed towards the seventies, promising a bad-tempered day under the attic roof of Whitehall Court. The stenographers went about shaking at the necks of their blouses when they thought nobody was looking, and Lieutenant J turned up late and disguised, he said, as a plumber’s mate. This involved a cool collarless shirt and no jacket. Dagner calmly sent him around the building knocking on doors and asking if they had reported a plumbing problem – then surprised Ranklin by erupting into laughter.
“That’s more like it. I want them trying to put one over on us. If they can do that, perhaps they can do it to others.”
“As long as we don’t get one of them coming in saying he’s disguised as an artist’s model.” But the others hadn’t got J’s flair. He came from a very aristocratic background and in him, that was an advantage. Being totally confident of who he was left him more time than most for studying others, and he had got the humble superiority of a skilled artisan exactly right.