O’Gilroy smiled faintly and began to dress. “And what was that about downstairs with His Majesty stuff, then? – and me thinking France didn’t have kings at all.”
“She doesn’t, but in the last century she’s had an emperor, a king, president-turned-emperor and president again. With passing help from the Paris mob and the Army. The General’s obviously a monarchist, believes in having a king again. Quite a lot of the officer corps feels the same way.”
There were some things O’Gilroy didn’t know.
“So he wants the code for plotting agin the government?”
“That’s what bothers me. He might want to overthrow this government, but why should a general turn traitor?”
O’Gilroy’s look said plainly what he thought of the idea that Military Gentlemen just did not do Certain Things. And Ranklin read it clearly. “No, just consider: he must have spent at least forty years working to become a general. I just don’t believe any man can spend that time pretending. Life’s far easier if you believe in what you’re doing.”
Ranklin probably knew what he was talking about there, O’Gilroy reflected. “Money, mebbe?”
“D’you really think so?”
O’Gilroy considered: the Chateau might be run down, but it was still a chateau, still with land around it, with servants and the big motorcar. Perhaps it was the car that convinced him. “Mebbe not,” he conceded. “But ye said he was agin the government.”
“For patriotic reasons. Not to betray his own Army to the Germans.”
“Do we know that fat German’s working for Germany, ’cept him being German?”
Come to think of it, Ranklin didn’t.
“Or mebbe,” O’Gilroy finished tying his necktie and paused to gloat at himself in the mirror, “the whole shebang’s German spies and acting at General and servants, with the big house and motorcar all hired.” He wasn’t being very serious; to O’Gilroy an enemy was an enemy and he didn’t trouble overmuch with asking why.
“Now,” he went on, “would that ‘repas’ he was talking about have anything to do with food? Me stomach’s asking if me mouth’s emigrated.”
Ranklin, who had never learnt to dress as fast as a private soldier must, was still working at his own tie. “Now we know they’re going to photograph the code we can afford to seem in more of a hurry. But see if you can’t make it easier for them. Can you undo the package a bit, without it seeming obvious?”
Nobody had done anything to make the parcel obviously tamper-proof: that hadn’t been the objective. O’Gilroy picked apart the knots on the string and the brown paper fell loose. Inside was a plain manilla envelope with a criss-cross of government red tape (actually pink) held in place with a blob of sealing wax. Perhaps somebody in the War Office thought that was secure; O’Gilroy took just two seconds to bend a corner of the envelope and slip a loop of the tape free of the lightly gummed flap.
Then, since Ranklin still wasn’t ready, he peeled the flap open with his penknife. It wasn’t a clean job, but the enemy wouldn’t be looking for signs that the envelope had already been opened.
“Captain,” he said, “there’s a mite of a problem here.”
Ranklin turned from the mirror to see O’Gilroy handling three thin red pocketbooks, just like Army field manuals, each wrapped in a strand of pink tape. “Yes?”
“We was bringing over code ‘X’, wasn’t it?”
“That’s right.”
O’Gilroy looked at the front of one book. “Code X.” He dropped it on the bed and looked at the next. “Code Y.” He picked up the third. “Code W.”
There comes a time when it is your knees and not your will that decide you should sit down.
After a time Ranklin heard himself saying tonelessly: “I can see how it happened, of course. Some clerk at the War House was told to make up three parcels from nine books. But he wasn’t told what it was about, that would be too secret for him.” He read from the cover of the nearest book: “‘Most Secret’, in fact. So he used his common sense: obviously three addresses in France were to get one copy of each code. Oh, I understand it.”
“And if ye understand how England ever got itself an Empire without somebody having dropped it in the street, mebbe ye’ll tell me that, too. Along with what we do next.”
Ranklin sat very still, shoulders hunched and thinking hard. Then he said: “We try leaving one code, one of the false ones, and hope they don’t know there should be three copies.” But they seemed to know so much else about this job that he wasn’t too hopeful. “Wrap up the Y code, would you? See if you can make it seem it was never more than one.” He stood up, pocketing the X and W codes. They were slim enough that they barely bulged in the big pockets of his travelling tweeds.
O’Gilroy started work. “But ye said yeself, if we know they’ve got hold of even the right one, all it needs doing is to change it.”
After the French had had a hearty laugh at the bungling of the Bureau and the War Office and their wrath had been passed on to those junior enough to be thought worthy of blame.
“That isn’t the point any longer. If they even suspect we can denounce them as spies … well, it means Devil’s Island for the General. That’s where they sent Dreyfus for the same thing, and he wasn’t even guilty. Have you heard of Devil’s Island?”
“I have that,” O’Gilroy said grimly. “And I get yer meaning, Captain. I’d kill us rather than wind up there.”
A freshly lit wood fire was crackling and popping in the drawing room, with the General dozing in front of it. A cosy, old-fashioned scene of the old soldier home from the wars, and Ranklin looked appraisingly at the trophies of those wars around the walls. He could handle a sword, and anybody could use a stabbing spear, but he was sure he’d be up against modern revolvers. For the moment he settled for a whisky and soda, offered in a whisper by the watchful butler.
O’Gilroy took the same and they stared silently out of the windows. It wasn’t raining at the moment, but the overlong grass was rippling in the wind and the whole afternoon had been one long twilight.
The General woke with a whuffling grunt, saw them and said: “Ah, pardon, messieurs …” and the butler hurried over with a glass of something pink.
“I wonder,” Ranklin said, “if I might place a telephone call to Paris? I was given a message at Dieppe but was unable to contact the person.”
He reckoned he was running no risk: he wasn’t supposed to know the message had been false. And he wanted to see how the General would handle it.
“But naturally. Gaston will obtain the number.”
“Colonel Yarde-Buller at the British Embassy, please.”
He was not surprised when Gaston returned to report his desolation that the apparatus did not function. So Gaston was in on the act, too (only later did he wonder why he’d assumed the telephone must really be working; his own experience of telephones was that half the time they didn’t).
“I never trust these barbarous machines meself,” O’Gilroy chipped in. “Begging yer pardon, General, it being yer own machine.”
“But no, M’sieu, it is the company’s. I agree: they are barbarisms. And now the Army is to employ them for – how do you say?”
“Field telephones?” Ranklin suggested.
“Exactly. And for how long will they function? It demands just one horse to put just one foot on the wire, that is how long … And you, M’sieu Gilroy, you have not served with the Army?”
“Alas no, General. I fancied the drum and the glory when I was a lad, but me poor father died early and the family and the land …”
Ranklin listened only faintly to O’Gilroy’s fantasies. Perhaps at this moment somebody – Gunther, possibly: he was sure Gunther would be somewhere backstage – was sorting through their bags, coming up with the single code book. And being satisfied? Or realising their plot had been detected and there was only one thing to do …
Would they get any warning? Or would the door open and …?