The game was just the posturing of cock birds, flaunting feathers of secret-knowledge, but an essential preliminary (they had learnt in Brussels) to an exchange of real information.
“Maybe,” O’Gilroy chipped in, “he’s worried about the King of Italy going the same way as him of Greece. A left and a right, ye might say.”
That suddenly struck Ranklin as a very likely worry, though perhaps for Lenz rather than Reimers.
“You forget there are one hundred and fifty Schutz des Konigs also in town,” Gunther reproved. “With such a bodyguard the All-Highest can surely spare some protection for that poor midget of Italy.”
So the Kaiser had brought a bodyguard of a hundred and fifty men. Ranklin wondered what was left for Lenz to do – if he was supposed to be ensuring the Kaiser’s safety that week.
The yacht watchers began to bustle about and pay for their drinks. The race had gone out of sight behind some headland and now they were going to jump into their cars and rush off to the next cafe with a view. It seemed to Ranklin a very civilised approach to yacht racing.
“You have not asked me,” Gunther said softly, “who set the dogs upon Mr O’Gilroy last night?”
O’Gilroy froze, but his eyes glittered.
“All right,” Ranklin said evenly. “We’re asking.”
“Four hundred marks.”
“Trade prices, please. Two hundred.”
“Three hundred? Very good: Anya die Ringfrau. Her circus is in town for the Week.”
Ranklin and O’Gilroy swapped glances, but neither of them could evaluate the information – except that there had been a woman in charge.
“All right,” Ranklin said again. “Do I owe you? I mean …” he gestured at the little crowd around them.
Gunther smiled and turned to a tall yachtsy-looking gentleman. “Bitte, mein Herr …” What, he asked, was the original American name of the yacht Hamburg II, one of those in the race?
“Westward, naturlich.” He was surprised anyone didn’t know.
Gunther thanked him and turned triumphantly back to Ranklin. “You hear? I was right. You owe me three hundred marks.”
The race watchers smiled sympathetically as they streamed past. Whatever you might say about the English, they paid up promptly on a bet.
They sat, alone now, over the dregs of the Pils and the coffee.
“Anya – what-was-it?” O’Gilroy asked.
“Die Ringfrau. I suppose it could translate as ‘Ringmistress’ as in ‘Ringmaster’. Did he mean a real circus?”
O’Gilroy shrugged; from what he’d seen, anything could be in Kiel that week. “But what’s she want?”
“I should have asked more,” Ranklin confessed. He had been trying to appear a more experienced spy than he was, trying to uphold the reputation of the Bureau. But so much of their job was bluff that it was difficult to know just when to stop. “We’re assuming she wanted the postcard of the warships. She – I mean one of her men – saw the man who sold it to you. Did they recognise him? You said a sailor: German?”
“Not English, anyhow. Younger’n me, fair-haired …”
The waiter was hovering again: did they want more beer, or coffee? – something to eat? No – or rather yes, another round of Pils and see that their cabman got one, too, as Ranklin decided to be expansive. And did the waiter ever see an Englishman in here, aged about …
He ended up talking to the manager in the cool dark restaurant behind the terrace, having carefully explained that he was there by kind permission of Hauptmann Lenz. Fiftyish and surprisingly lean for a man who spent his life around German food, the manager obviously wanted as little as possible to do with the police and sudden death. But if brisk, his answers seemed honest.
And he didn’t remember Cross. Certainly he might have been in, but half their diners were visitors up from Kiel, by car or cab or the frequent ferryboat. Fifty and more a day, in the season, and others just for coffee or a drink, like himself.
As for the death itself, all the fuss had been in the new locks, half a kilometre away, and he had known nothing about it until the Sunday morning.
His mind wandering to how one would go about counting the ships through the Canal, Ranklin asked if they had any rooms to let.
That wasn’t so certain: there were rooms, but usually let for long terms, unless he needed them for his staff, who might give them up to visitors in Kiel Week … anyway, there was nothing free now.
Hardly disappointed, since he had hoped only for luck, Ranklin went back to the terrace. And, on impulse, asked the waiter when the next ferry for Kiel was due. In about ten minutes, it seemed.
“Cross must have been thinking about Kiel from the sea aspect,” he explained to the devoutly anti-ship O’Gilroy. “So we ought to, as well. We’ll take the ferry, go and pay off the cabman.”
The ferry, wide, blunt and very un-shipshape, waddled away from the jetty burbling smoke ahead of itself, since the wind was now going faster. Looking back from the top deck, Ranklin was reminded of how little one could see from a ship. He was lower now than on the terrace of the restaurant, whose row of top windows stared out well above his head – and stared, he noted, at the sea and passing ships, not at the Canal at all. So if those were the rooms to let, they weren’t good places from which to count Canal shipping anyway.
He passed this thought to O’Gilroy, who nodded and said: “And what was ye saying about sending cablegrams from Denmark? Where’s that, now?”
“I thought you’d been studying a map of Europe? It’s a country – and a collection of islands – just to the north. All this area was part of Denmark less than sixty years ago.”
“Would it not be in a war?”
“I doubt it. It’s too small and hasn’t got anything to gain from getting involved. So you’d be able to send cablegrams to Britain even in a war.”
“Ye think that was what the Lieutenant was practising?”
“Well, probably not himself. From the dates, he’d have had to spend most of last week there, or coming and going.”
“There’s a steamship service there, then?”
“Bound to be. Daily, I’d imagine.” Wasn’t Korsor the end of a railway line from Copenhagen? So a steamship from here and then a train would be the fastest link between Germany and the Danish capital – and important enough to keep going in wartime, when Germany would need all the foreign links it could get that were safe from the Royal Navy’s blockade.
“Mebbe somebody on the boat was sending the cablegrams for him, then?”
“Ye-es.” Ranklin nodded thoughtfully. “Crew, it would have to be one of the crew, to make it a regular series of cables. And you say it was a sailor who gave you the postcard last night?” He fumbled for the postcard of warships. “And the number on the back?”
“There was numbers in the cablegrams. Ye said a dozen in each.”
Excited now, Ranklin snatched the cable forms from his pocket and held them fluttering in the breeze. Ideas whirled and danced like gnats above a river bank; his mind tried to photograph them, stop them in flight so as to study their pattern, their links – numbers, figures, twelve in each cablegram, six on the postcard: 030110.
O’Gilroy took it and frowned at the smoke-wreathed ships. The Bureau had given Ranklin a lecture on warship recognition and a copy of Jane’s Fighting Ships to study, but O’Gilroy had spent half his life watching the Royal Navy steam in and out of Irish ports.
“He was wanting to say something about ships like these, is that what we’re thinking? I make them three old battleships, one armoured cruiser and one light cruiser. Three, one and one – is that it, then?”
030110. “That,” Ranklin said, “has to be right. He chose six rough classes of warships: the first must be new battleships, the dreadnoughts. Then old battleships, pre-dreadnoughts. Then probably battle-cruisers. Then armoured cruisers, then light cruisers – what about the last? Destroyers? Torpedo boats? Submarines?”