But there lay the problem: he enjoyed it because it had only just come to him, and constantly forgot to waste it: to leave drinks, meals and cigarettes half-finished, the change from a sovereign uncounted. Oh well, Ranklin shrugged mentally, perhaps the French would simply think O’Gilroy was untravelled. He hunched down in his seat and stared unseeing at the damp April landscape rattling past the misted windows; he had been thinking too much of O’Gilroy and not enough of the job ahead.
And after a time, he said: “I’ve been a bit slow: they aren’t going to steal this code from us. If we knew it had been stolen, we’d change it. A damned nuisance, but nothing worse than that, not in peacetime.”
“Ah-hah? I’ve had no dealing with codes, but what ye say makes sense. So what would they do? Try to get a look at it and copy it without us knowing?”
“It’d have to be something like that. But again, how …”
“I’d think we watched who tried to make friends with us, then.” He held up his cigarette to make sure it was precisely half-smoked, and ground it out. Ranklin pretended not to see.
10
Newhaven was a bad photograph of itself, colourless, grimy and blurred by steam and smoke. Despite the spatter of rain and a wind that creaked the lines holding the Channel steamer to the dock, Ranklin waited to see Spiers safely on board and then acted the worried traveller by watching their luggage – registered through to Paris – unloaded from the guard’s van. If they were bait, he reasoned, they should be visible.
The steamer, built narrow for speed rather than stability, was trying to roll even alongside the dock. “I’ve no plans for seasickness,” O’Gilroy announced, “but I’m thinking it has plans for me.” Ranklin knew better than to argue: once a man believes that, he can be sick walking through a puddle. So he found their tiny day cabin and left O’Gilroy with their travelling bags and a flask of brandy to take care of each other.
Once the steamer had lurched off in a cloud of smoke and seagulls, Ranklin joined the crowd in the first-class saloon which, less defeatist than O’Gilroy, was already ordering the first round of cognac-and-sodas. Ranklin found a corner table, lit his pipe and opened the Army Quarterly. As he turned each page or paused to stoke his pipe, he glanced up through the fast-developing fug – a true smoker knows that smoking is a cure, not a cause – for prospective code-copiers.
But what would such people took like? Dark-eyed enchantresses? (there were no women at all in the saloon). Humourless, bristle-headed Prussians? Oily Levantines? There seemed to be none of them, either; most people in the saloon looked like just people.
Why on earth hadn’t they been given more training? O’Gilroy had been particularly scathing about how much the Bureau knew, or was ready to impart, about its own job. And Ranklin found himself loyally defending his superiors, as a good officer should, whilst privately agreeing. The Commander’s attitude seemed to be that spying was just another game that any officer-and-gentleman would take to naturally – which was exactly the opposite of Ranklin’s view. In the Guns they didn’t expect a troop officer to invent his own orders for loading, laying and firing, so why the devil …?
His mood made the gale outside seem a timid amateur.
“May I sit here, please?” The voice was a low, slow Teutonic growl; the speaker a fat, slightly younger man with a big dark moustache and spectacles.
“Of course.” Ranklin’s manner snapped back into perfect politeness. The man hovered in a stooped position, trying to time his descent with the roll of the ship. He didn’t quite make it; his well-upholstered backside hit the chair with a thump. He grunted and took a swallow of his beer.
“Not the best of days for the Channel,” Ranklin said. “Do you mind my pipe?”
“No. Please.” The man stuffed a cigarette in under his moustache and waved a match after it. Ranklin held his breath: the moustache looked very vulnerable. But the cigarette caught first, and the man held out a fat firm hand.
“Gunther Arnold,” he announced. “I am going to France.”
Unless I’m on the wrong boat, so are we all, Ranklin thought. “Captain Ranklin,” he said. “I’m off to Paris.”
“Just you alone?”
“No, I’m with a friend. He’s got a touch of mal-de-mer.”
“You are going for just fun?”
“To see some friends. And …?”
“There is a new hotel,” Gunther said, cutting off Ranklin’s polite question. “The Crillon. You know it?”
“No, I …”
“It is very – ” he waved a hand in a slow encompassing circle, “ – very much. But not as much as the Ritz, I think. You know the Ritz?”
Ranklin had eaten lunch at the Ritz once. “I’ve just …”
“It is very much.” Bavarian, Ranklin guessed, and full to the gunwales with beer, a familiar Bavarian custom. Gunther spotted the Army Quarterly. “You are a soldier? An officer?”
“Yes.” He had been told to play himself on this trip. So close to home, there was too much chance of meeting people who knew him. And the Army Quarterly had itself been bait, though he’d hoped for a better fish.
“I was a soldier. Not an officer. If there is a war they will make me a soldier again. I think perhaps two soldiers.” He chuckled and patted his stomach.
Ranklin smiled politely and wished the man would turn into an empty chair. “Are you going …?”
“I know: you are on a secret mission,” Gunther chuckled. Ranklin froze inside. How the devil did he answer that? Shrug it off, laughing? Get indignant? Go along with the joke? How would Captain Matthew Ranklin RGA take it? He had learnt in a flash that the hardest part in the world to play is yourself. Only those who have deliberately invented a self can do it easily.
But Gunther ploughed ponderously on. “You are to study the French fortifications – of the Moulin Rouge, Maxim’s, the Rat Mort.” He rumbled and shook with laughter. “Then you will have all the secrets of France.” He coughed smoke and a fine spray of beer over Ranklin. “I wish you much luck.” He heaved to his feet, mistiming the roll again so that he nearly sprawled over the table, and stumped away into the crowd at the bar.
Ranklin’s relief was soured by his own clumsy reaction to that “secret mission” nonsense. Lucky that he had failed only in front of a Bavarian beer-barrel.
Towards lunchtime, he went to see if O’Gilroy wanted any. He found the man and the brandy flask empty and the cabin reeking.
“If ye say ‘food’ to me,” O’Gilroy moaned, “ye’d best say the Last Rites besides.”
“At least take a turn on deck,” Ranklin urged. “The smell in here …”
“Do me a favour, Captain. Jest one.”
“What?”
“Fall overboard.”
So Ranklin had a table to himself in the uncrowded dining saloon. After coffee, he walked – or staggered – for a few minutes on the lee deck. Then, with perhaps half an hour to go before they reached Dieppe, he went back to the saloon.
Gunther was no longer there, but to his surprise, O’Gilroy was. He looked pale and haggard but, Ranklin had to admit, lean and handsome in a romantic-poetic way with his long dark hair falling over his eyes and talking expansively to an American at the bar. Ranklin’s stomach clenched with apprehension. O’Gilroy must already be slightly drunk – that flask of brandy on a stomach that was unquestionably empty – and now with another glass in his hand … But damn it, this was the part of the trade O’Gilroy was supposed to be teaching him: how to lead a secret life unsuspected. If the man usually babbled when he had a drop taken, Ranklin reassured himself, we’d have had him in jail ourselves long since.