The waltz ended and Reimers escorted Corinna back.
“Guess what?” she chirped. “The Captain knows America well; he was at their Washington Embassy.”
“Really?”
Reimers smiled but changed the subject. “And how is your investigation progressing, Mr Spencer?”
Ranklin shrugged hopelessly. “Oh, that. I’ve talked to everybody you suggested – and nothing. I’ll write a long letter to Cross, then …”
“But what about the strange bearer bond he was bearing?”
“The Landentwhatsit?” Ranklin remembered he didn’t know German that well. “We asked at the bank about it this afternoon – ” was Reimers surprised that Corinna had been included in that? “ – and just learned that the company failed long ago. There was a legal problem, the government got the land and the promoter killed himself.”
“I’ve got it!” Corinna lit up. “All these years, the promoter’s son broods on how his father was treated, ruined, killed. It gets to his mind. Then one night he meets your Lieutenant Cross and decides he’s one of the officials ruined his father, lures him to the lock and pushes him in. And leaves the bond as a sort of teaser clue.”
“For heaven’s sake,” Ranklin said. But Reimers was laughing aloud.
“I did say he was crazy,” Corinna defended.
“Wonderful!” Reimers was still laughing. “You drive Sherlock Holmes out of business. But – I hate to bring bad news – he had no son. Only a widow, to whom the government most kindly gave a job later. And the bank was also being kind, or maybe they forgot the real story, but it was a plain share swindle. A fraud. The guy found the Government was buying the land quietly, didn’t want it announced, so he cashed in on that by claiming he had the right to buy, and sold shares on that claim. The legal problem was if he hadn’t killed himself, he’d be in the hoosegow.”
“I think you’ve spoiled it,” Corinna pouted. “That’s dull. I prefer my version.”
“And so do I, dear lady, so do I. But my poor brain can take no more. Will you excuse me?” He bowed and retreated, still chuckling.
Corinna’s face did one of its lantern-slide changes. “Washington Embassy, my ass. He knows the States, but he didn’t pick up that lingo at diplomatic parties. How long’s he been a Navy officer?”
“To reach that rank, twenty years.”
“Horse shit. Navy officers – any country’s – have better manners.”
“You mean their language in mixed company?”
“They’re diplomats, much more than Army ones. Don’t look stuffy: they’re trained for it. They spend half their time in foreign ports at receptions and parties and dances. Whatever he was doing in the States it wasn’t Navy officering.” She glanced at Ranklin. “You don’t seem too surprised.”
“I’m pretty sure he’s counter-intelligence.” Gunther had said something about Reimers being “Steinhauer strutting in Naval uniform”, hadn’t he? Which meant that, whoever Reimers was, he was important enough for their Navy to let him play at being a fairly senior officer.
“Ah,” Corinna said. “He was trying to get me to talk about you. Don’t worry: I said we’d met in Paris. You haven’t congratulated me on my detective stories.”
“I’m supposed to be taking Cross’s death seriously. Well, at least we found out that the late company promoter wasn’t quite the poor innocent he seemed.”
She cocked her head on one side and gave him an odd little smile. “Did we? I thought we heard a government man say the Government did nothing wrong – in fact, even gave a job to the widow of a con man to keep her from starving. It couldn’t be to keep her from talking, now could it? Shall we circulate among the guests?”
Half an hour later, Ranklin was pushing scraps of meat around his plate in the supper room – it was too soon after dinner to be eating again – and half listening to the wife of a director of the Norddeutscher-Lloyd shipping line. Corinna was listening, apparently wholeheartedly, to the Herr Direktor himself. Words like “Hapag”, “Immco”, “Cunard” and “Morgan Trust” seeped across the table.
The Frau Direktor had the latest gossip on the maiden voyage of Hamburg-Amerika’s new Imperator. “One doesn’t like to say it whilst supping on board one of Dr Ballin’s own vessels, but surely it is a scandal that the biggest ship in the world, named for the All-Highest, should roll like that in June weather. Just think of the poor passengers in winter,” she gloated.
“Dreadful,” Ranklin murmured, listening to Corinna saying: “Naturally, Herr Direktor, I understand none of this, but I’m sure my father …”
“If only I could speak to him privately …”
“But he’s doing nothing right now. Why don’t I take you over to the Kachina to have a nice quiet chat with him? I’m sure he’d be delighted. It would be no problem at all.”
Nor was it. Don Byrd appeared and vanished after one quick order, the Frau Direktor was handed over to the care of the other directors and their wives – and that left Ranklin.
“You’ll manage, won’t you James? If the launch isn’t at the gangway, they’ll signal for it.”
“Naturally, I understand none of this …”
“But we all have our little secrets, don’t we?” With just a hint of a tomahawk in her smile.
And a few minutes ago, he thought ruefully, I believed I was at the centre of any intrigue going on here. Back to the kindergarten.
In fact, he found himself in the restfully dim smoking-room with a weak whisky-and-soda in one hand, tapping an empty pipe against his teeth with the other. And exhausted. Part of it was the day, part Corinna. She was … well, he hadn’t known a girl, a woman, like her before. Their joking had a depth to it, unlike the flirtatious banter he played as mechanically as polite tennis with the Englishwomen of his circle. Sorry, his late circle. Perhaps because it was born of that dangerous night at the Chateau. A battle was the time for joking; nobody wanted to make it more serious.
But there was more to it than that. It was the way she thought, the things she thought and knew, that opened his mind’s eye wider than he found comfortable. And he felt it wasn’t just her being American; it would be easy to accept, and dismiss, that. It was her; she was … different.
And that was a cowardly backing-off thought. But, he pleaded to himself, it’s been a long hard day.
So then Don Byrd had to appear beside him, smiling and offering a light for his cigarette – he had pocketed his pipe, not feeling settled enough to enjoy it.
“The guy who laid evidence against Gorman: he gave his name as Heinie Glass, address at a guest-house in the Old Town. But somebody went in this afternoon and paid the account, and Herr Glass hasn’t been seen again. In fact, he paid the account for two others as well, who’d gotten themselves hurt last night, maybe in a fight. It could be they’ve all three left town.”
“Thank you. And the man who paid their bills?”
“It’s my guess that he paid more than just the account, because nobody can recall how he looked at all.”
“I see.”
“My pleasure.” Byrd had a sharp face, bright dark eyes and sleeked-back hair, the face of an eagle except with a ready smile. But he didn’t smile as he went on: “There’s a certain lady wants to meet with you – she knows your name – the Grafin von Szillert. I’ve asked around and it seems she isn’t noble herself, in fact she was a trapeze artiste in a circus when she met up with the Graf. He’s dead now. However …”
“Is her Christian name Anya?”
“That’s right. However,” and Byrd gave him an intense stare, “you don’t have to meet with her if you don’t feel that a guest of Mr Sherring and Mrs Finn should meet with her.”
Either Byrd was being polite rudely, or rude politely, probably he’d had a university education. Ranklin considered. “How does she come to be invited here?”