“Here,” she said, “take it, take the lot.” And, with both hands still inside, she thrust the bag out towards Clement. He reached with his free hand and the bag boomed smoke in his face.
He was whirled back into his seat by shock, blinded by smoke, and a moment later had O’Gilroy’s elbow rammed in his face, the pistol wrenched from his hand, lifted above his head.
“Stop!” Ranklin roared, and O’Gilroy paused. The heavy revolver would have burst Clement’s head open. Panting more in anger than breathlessness, O’Gilroy settled the gun in his hand and clicked back the hammer. “Say something interesting, Sergeant. Like how ye file bayonets in half.”
Corinna sat with her eyes shut and holding the bag, which was still pouring smoke, in her lap. “Did I kill him?”
“No, ma’am, jest his hand.” Clement’s left hand was dripping blood and his eyes streaming tears. A hit on the hand always does that, as Ranklin had learnt in school long before he saw it again on the battlefield.
O’Gilroy said: “Ah, Jayzus,” passed the revolver to Ranklin and began wrapping a handkerchief around the hand. Ranklin picked up the bag and emptied out its smouldering papers, gloves, handkerchief, more money – and an elderly brass-inlaid pocket revolver with the unmistakable Colt butt.
“Less than Government calibre,” he said, peering into the muzzle. “And black powder besides.”
“Ye hear that, Sergeant? – ye wasn’t more’n tickled. Proper gun like ye had yerself’d tore yer hand right off. Hold yer arm up, me darling; ye can hurt or bleed, it’s yer own choice.”
Ranklin passed over his own handkerchief to add to the bandaging, then went on standing, swaying slightly, with a pistol in each hand.
“You look like Buffalo Bill in a dime novel,” Corinna said with a shaky smile, then: “I think I’m going to throw up.”
“Don’t,” Ranklin ordered. “There’s enough mess in here already.”
She gave him a look of pure hate, but wasn’t sick. The train slowed and rocked around a curve; peering across the inside of it, Ranklin could see the lights of a station ahead, and took a quick decision.
“You get out here,” he told Clement. He dropped Corinna’s pistol back into her bag and picked up a smoke-stained 500-franc note. “Here – I don’t know how far this’ll get you, but just stay out of our sight for evermore. Unless you want to discuss filed bayonets with O’Gilroy.”
A village station would hardly have enough staff, especially at night, to man both platforms, so they let Clement down onto the track on the empty side.
As the train pulled out again, Corinna began repacking her bag, which had a charred hole the size of a penny at one end.
Ranklin said: “I see now why you don’t mind driving on French roads at night.”
She stared at her pistol as if seeing it for the first time. “I’ve carried this around for years, but never …”
“Why didn’t you give it to one of us earlier?” Ranklin asked gently.
She frowned. “I guess … I thought … God damn it, I don’t know you! Except you go starting and fighting duels and stuff. Maybe I thought if I gave you the gun, you’d shoot somebody and there’d been quite enough …” She lifted her head with her eyes closed and shuddered. “When I got the thing cocked, I thought: maybe I’m going to kill this guy. And I thought: so? he’s going to kill me. Me. And I shot as straight as I could.”
She put the gun in the bag and snapped it shut. “Is that what happens? What you feel?”
Ranklin and O’Gilroy looked at each other, then nodded.
“Mind, why a couple of spies, of all people, don’t carry their own guns and need so much help from me, I’ll never understand.”
“I keep telling you …” Ranklin began.
“I know you do. Aren’t you going to put away your secret codes before someone else walks off with them?”
Ranklin began stuffing the three books into the pockets that didn’t already hold Clement’s revolver.
Corinna watched. “And why three of them – all different?”
Ranklin hesitated, then said: “Two of them are false.” There was no need to explain it hadn’t been planned just that way.
“And the one you gave me, X, is the real one?” O’Gilroy’s eyebrows lifted for a moment, but he said nothing. “Because,” she went on, “it had damn well better be. I didn’t fancy being a messenger, but if I thought I’d just been a decoy duck …”
Ranklin nodded. “X is the real one.”
At Rouen, they saw Corinna into a taxi and had time to buy a different brand of cigarette, since O’Gilroy believed an entire nation couldn’t tolerate the things he had tried at the Chateau. Ranklin, who still had some English tobacco for his pipe, said nothing.
When they were settled, alone, in a rather more first-class compartment than the small train’s, O’Gilroy lit a cigarette, scowled, and said: “So ye did send her off as a decoy duck for them to be chasing after.”
“It might have come to that, if I thought it could gain us more time. But they’d never have caught her.”
“’Cept they would, with her turning round like that to come back and blast ye.”
“Damn fool woman.”
“Yer a hard man, Captain.”
“All right, what code am I supposed to be keeping to? Did I get a foul stain on my honour as a spy?” Ranklin knew his face looked childish in anger, but no longer cared.
“It’s ‘spies’ we are now, is it?”
“Of course it is. All that bloody nonsense about ‘agents’ – we’re spies and that’s all there is to it. And not much bloody good at it, not me, anyway. Nearly getting you killed in a duel.”
“Nearly killed, was I now?” O’Gilroy changed gear into high indignation. “I could’ve bested six of him with one hand tied behind me back – and I did have one hand tied, nearabouts, and turned out there was two of them. If’n ye want me killed, try a regiment of cavalry next time, and a few machine-guns besides.”
“Sorry.”
“Save yer sorrow for the times we lose. We beat them bastards, Captain, and yer own War Office besides. Only – I’m wondering why ye volunteered for such work at all.”
“Don’t worry,” Ranklin muttered. “I’ll stick with the job.”
“I’m not worried, Captain. Knowing yer a man of honour.”
17
The next afternoon they took tea with Mrs Winslow Finn at the Ritz. Ranklin had expected O’Gilroy to be overawed, but he just strolled in, smiling appreciatively. Perhaps, Ranklin reflected, it was like telling a man you’re going to give him a bucketful of gin: he’s never seen such a thing before, but when he gets it, it’s exactly what he expected. O’Gilroy would simply have been disappointed if there had not been a high decorated ceiling, twinkling chandeliers, potted palms and soft music.
Obviously of her own choice, Corinna was tucked away at a quiet corner table talking to a young man in a dark suit who was taking notes. She wore a peg-top dress in ultramarine silk – most of the women around the room were in pastel shades – with a short white jacket and flowerpot hat. The young man got up and melted away as the Maitre brought them across.
“One of Pop’s assistants,” she introduced the retreating back view. “You boys have been shopping.”
Ranklin smiled painfully; she could only be referring to a rather erroneous tie O’Gilroy had insisted on buying in the Avenue de l’Opera.
“Yes, we had to replace quite a lot of kit that we’d left at the Chateau.”
“And did you deliver your precious code?”
Ranklin nodded. Last night he had handed over the W code to a professionally gloomy Colonel Huguet who was on the brink of giving it up as compromised – and still needed a lot of persuading that it had never left Ranklin’s person. But he had listened, puzzled, intrigued and finally outraged, then launched Ranklin into a long night of interviews with officers of the Service de Renseignments, who knew something of “van der Brock” already, and an artist who drew Clement’s face from Ranklin’s description.