“Oh-” Ranklin waved his hand and smiled; “-we, my people, are in the business of knowing things.”
“Yes . . . yes . . .” The Count was obviously thinking quickly. “He has many interests, the Senator. I believe he bought the machine-guns for the Italian Army. To test, to see if they will buy them.”
“Really? That wasn’t what I heard.”
“Then you heard wrong! Now, I have had my exercise, I must rest.” And he laid himself, limb by aged limb, on his cot.
Rather than just stand there, Ranklin sat down himself, turned so that nobody could see his face. I wrecked it, he thought. I ran it into a wall.
But perhaps the wall had always been there. So much he was expected to know, but other things he wasn’t. And the Lewis guns were on the far side of the wall. He had expected a touch of flamboyance in this plot; now he smelt a Borgian twist as well.
But just what plot? Nobody had said it was actually impossible to mount a Lewis gun on Andrew’s aeroplane. What did seem impossible was getting Andrew himself to pilot a flight intended to spray a city with machine-gun fire. But if Falcone had another pilot standing by, and the firing wasn’t supposed to be accurate but just a dramatic gesture, the whole thing became possible. Insane, but possible.
Damn it, it would be an act of war! And put Italy so far in the wrong that they’d hang Falcone for it, no matter what happened next. The Count might dream up such a plot, but Falcone was a practising politician . . .
I’m missing something, he thought. And just how much is Dagner missing? – or rather, how much does he know?
At five o’clock the Falcone launch arrived at the northernmost of the Lido’s jetties with Corinna already on board, a loose white dress fluttering in the breeze, clutching on a wide straw hat. “Hi. Signora Falcone’s having the vapours about where you’d got to and thinking you’d broken your neck. You haven’t broken your neck, have you?”
“Jest this.” O’Gilroy gloomily held up a few inches of oily copper pipe. “Oil feed. And seems nobody on the island can braze it, or don’t know what the devil I’m talking about.”
“Poor you,” she soothed. “D’ you want me to try my Italian?”
But by now the launch helmsman had taken a look. He said something to Corinna, who asked him to repeat more slowly, then she grinned at O’Gilroy. “Seems one of the chauffeurs back home can do it in a trice. Always doing something like it to the automobiles, he says. You’d better bring it aboard.”
O’Gilroy hesitated, then stepped into the boat. “They’ll have to bring me back to fix it and I want to do a plug change while I’m at it . . . Won’t be getting the Oriole across today, I’m thinking.”
“Then it’ll have to be tomorrow. How is it, flying it from the proper side?”
O’Gilroy’s gloom vanished. “Ah, it’s like . . . like I don’t know the words for it. Riding a winner at the Curragh, mebbe.”
She grinned back. “Little brother knows his stuff, then?”
“Surely – and how’s he doing?”
“Not so bad at all. Mostly bored, with the bandages still on and not able to read. I talked myself hoarse until I found a priest who speaks English and accepts donations to the Church. Then this boat arrived and I learned you’d gone missing – why didn’t you telephone them?”
“In Italian, and not knowing the number besides?” And also, though he wouldn’t admit it, because he wasn’t yet used to the world of telephones and simply hadn’t thought of it.
Once clear of the gondola routes and little islets, the helmsman started showing off like any chauffeur when the owner isn’t on board: they streaked across the lagoon like a torpedo boat. Corinna thought of telling him to behave, decided it would be improper and simply threw her hat on to the bottom boards and let her black hair stream in the wind; perhaps the Signora would lend her a maid to untangle it.
“Have you learnt any more about tomorrow’s demonstration?” she called.
“Never a word.”
She tried again: “Well, whatever it is, Andrew’s out of it.”
“Sounds like that’s what ye wanted.”
“Let’s say I’ve got my doubts.”
O’Gilroy considered. “Like what?”
She’d rather have said this with quiet significance, not bellowed it against the wind and rumble of the engine, but: “That it won’t be a demonstration but dropping inflammatory leaflets written by d’Annunzio over Trieste.”
He stared at her. “Where d’ye get that from?”
“From that practice flight you told me about in Paris. And listening to d’Annunzio on the train. And because Pop Sherring didn’t raise his little girl to believe everything she hears from big men with fifty-dollar suits and hundred-dollar smiles. Though,“ she admitted, “he may have slipped up with his little boy.”
“Ye worked that out yeself, then . . .”
“They’ll have to tell you pretty soon.”
O’Gilroy thought a while. “I wish the Captain was here.”
“D’you think Matt knows it and didn’t tell you?”
“Mebbe . . .” Ranklin wasn’t a naturally devious man, but over the past nine months he had been learning. O’Gilroy had helped teach him. “It’s not his way, though, not with me.”
“Perhaps he doesn’t know everything himself.”
O’Gilroy nodded vaguely and went back to his own thoughts. Ranklin trusted her – up to a careful point defined by their relationship, but he himself was right outside that. (To tell the truth, which he didn’t like to do even to himself, he disapproved of the affair. Such behaviour was normal for Ranklin, an Army officer, and he had no illusions about the morals of upper-class British women, not after being in service at a Big House. But he had expected better of an American lady.)
Finally he said: “Ye really wouldn’t want to be letting down the Captain?”
Corinna was about say something witty or withering, then thought again and just called: “No. I really wouldn’t. And,” she added, “ I wish he was here, too.”
“They’re wanting to start a strike in the shipyard there.”
She frowned over this, then: “Just that?”
“How d’ye mean?”
“These things can get out of hand, God knows they do in the States. In Trieste it could set Italians against Austrians. Or maybe that’s what they want . . . Except that Falcone’s a senator; he daren’t get mixed up in . . .” She reflected for a moment. “Only he’s doing a pretty good job of unmixing himself, letting d’Annunzio take the credit, and a foreign airplane flown by a foreign pilot . . .”
The launch slowed suddenly, curving skilfully, or so the helmsman wanted them to think, to avoid the milling boats at the mouth of the Brenta.
Meanwhile, O’Gilroy had become an intellectually rigorous Intelligence agent. “Jest how much of this do ye know, or would it all be guessing?”
Corinna almost pouted, but kept her voice low, now the engine noise had dimmed. “Guessing? It’s logic. Deduction.”
“So where’s d’Annunzio? And the leaflets?”
“I bet he – they – both will be here tonight.” She saw his look and hissed: “Suppose Matt had come up with the same idea, would you have believed him!”
With rash honesty, O’Gilroy said: “More like.”
“Oh would you? Just because he’s a man.”
He seemed surprised. “No. Because he‘s a spy.”
She sat back, stunned by the logic. Yes. Quite. What was the answer to that? “You don’t have to be a spy to figure out other people for crooks,” she growled.
They scurried the first few yards from the landing-stage to escape the cloud of insects, but could then stroll up the long garden. It was designed to frame the house: lines of cypresses and flowerbeds and stone walls all leading to it or at right angles from it. The villa itself, pink in the sunset, stood four-square on a slight rise, its ‘ground’ floor raised further so as to need impressive flights of steps on either side of the portico.