“She knows a lot of influential men in Hamburg, one way or another.”
“What’s the other way?”
“I don’t know,” Byrd said grimly.
“Well, I don’t really think I’ll do Mrs Finn or Mr Sherring too much harm just by saying Good Evening to the lady.”
Byrd didn’t agree, but looking like an eagle looking stoical, he led the way.
By now Ranklin wasn’t surprised to find that Anya was the squat woman in green. She sat, a tasselled black shawl thrown round her heavy shoulders, at a small table in the corner of the cards room, playing patience and watched by a bulky young man with a mournful moustache in rather too elegant evening dress. Her watchdog, Ranklin assumed.
Byrd introduced Ranklin, who took her white-gloved hand, bowed over it and murmured: “Grafin.” The hand inside the glove was wide and firm.
“Sit down,” she growled, nodding dismissively to Byrd. “James Spencer,” she said, but to herself, tasting the name. Then: “D’you want another drink?” Her voice was deep, her accent perhaps Slav.
“No, thank you.” Ranklin put his half-empty glass on the table and waited. The other tables in the room were busy with whist or bridge, and a round table in the middle was even busier with a poker school. It seemed as if many guests were behaving just as if they were on a voyage – but that was what the ship was equipped for; if they didn’t go ashore, what else could they do?
“How do you know the daughter of Reynard Sherring?” Anya asked finally.
“We met.”
When he didn’t say any more, she glanced up from her cards for a moment. Her face was as squat and muscular as her body, with pronounced cheekbones and dark, still eyes. Not quite a peasant race and even further from being a stupid one. She looked back at her cards and growled: “Where’s Dragan?”
“Oh, Lord – I don’t know.”
She picked up a glass of ice tinged with the dregs of some green liqueur. Ranklin wondered if she drank it just for the colour, since she wore emerald earrings, too. She cracked a piece of ice loudly between her teeth and said: “I know you, I knew Lieutenant Cross. The good honest sporting country gentlemen,” she spat the word, “playing at the sport of spying. Steinhauer knows you. Even Hauptmann Lenz by now. To save your own neck and Europe’s – where is Dragan the Viper?”
“In the Captain’s cabin playing backgammon with Santa the Claus and Rumpel the Stiltskin.”
She slammed the glass down on the table. “They will put you in prison a thousand years and then shoot you.” Her voice crackled like a loose power wire. “Only I will have you shot first, before you destroy Europe.”
Ranklin nodded, as if this were interesting but irrelevant. “Have you met Dragan?”
“No. But I know him, I know his breed. Better than you do. Why?”
“I’m just collecting people who haven’t met him, that’s all. I feel we have something in common.”
“Do nothing until you hear from your Department,” she said. She moved two of her cards. “Go away.”
Ranklin stayed put. “So far, madam, you have had your men attack my servant and get him imprisoned. The only result is that you’ve had to send three men back to Hamburg, two of them shop-soiled. And got Hauptmann Lenz angry, of course.”
“Lenz does not worry me. But do you think your Reynard Sherring and his skyscraper daughter will protect you when they can prove what you are? Now go away.”
“Why should I need their protection, when you seem to believe I have much better?”
The watchdog stood up, then leant stiffly forward from the hips to whisper mournfully: “The Grafin said to go away.”
Ranklin stood and smiled up at him – he was several inches taller. “And you won’t even recognise Dragan when he catches you.”
The watchdog’s eyes widened suddenly, and Ranklin went away smiling. Whoever and wherever you are, Dragan, you’ve at last done me a bit of good as well as harm, he thought.
Byrd, who had been watching play at the poker table, fell into step beside him.
“I don’t think I disgraced the House of Sherring,” Ranklin said.
“I’m sure you did your best,” Don Byrd said coolly. “Did the lady …?”
“She really just wanted to tell me to go away.”
In that, Byrd was obviously on the Grafin Anya’s side, but he said nothing. Ranklin walked on thoughtfully.
Come on, he thought to the brain that was slumped against the back of his skull with its eyes closed; come on, one last stab at Great Deduction, and I’ll leave you alone until morning.
He was back in the slow-paced half-dark of the smoking room, among groups of elderly men recalling past yachting triumphs – as he could hear – or business adventures, which he could only guess at. He slumped into a horseshoe-back leather chair and tried to think logically.
She had talked of Reimers as ‘Steinhauer’, just as Gunther had, and of the ‘Department’ – presumably our Naval Intelligence: she thinks I belong there, like Cross. So she’s clearly one of us (but Good God! – what company “us” is turning out to be). I’ve heard of traditional links between high-class brothels and espionage – she probably buys official tolerance with gossip her girls have picked up horizontally, and if they suspect (as I do) that she’s working for the Russians, she’s convinced them that she’s working for the Revolution against the Czar.
But why is she so worried about what Dragan could get up to? “Destroying Europe” sounds a pretty big -
“So now you have met Anya die Ringfrau?” Gunther’s slow deep voice gave everything he said an extra importance, as if it were carefully gold-lettered on wood.
“Yes. She wants me to go away.”
“It is good advice. But of course you will not take it. It is your duty to stay. That is most correct. You have been trained to do what you are told to do, report what you are sent to find. I do not criticise that, I admire it. But, as you are finding, the world is not so simple when one does not wear uniform. And when there is not always someone to turn to for orders.”
Obviously Gunther’s soldiering had been largely confined to the parade ground. But Ranklin was learning that an attitude of agreement and ignorance was more useful than trying to seem a know-all. So he asked: “Do you know what Reimers/Steinhauer was doing in America?”
Gunther paused whilst he got his cigar well alight, then: “He was a detective for Pinkerton’s.”
“For …?”
“Their most famous private detectives. President Lincoln hired them to be his secret service in the war of the states.”
That made sense – and explained Reimers’ American vocabulary. And the fact that Gunther hadn’t tried to sell the information told him something, too. He waited.
Gunther took a deep satisfied puff at the cigar. “You find, I know, that not all intelligence is in neat parcels like – shall we say – a code-book. You must dig and throw away many things your Bureau does not want to know, would order you not to waste time in telling them. And you will think: but why throw this away? It does not matter to the Bureau, but it must concern some person. So, I will give it to that person. I will make him my friend. Perhaps he gives me money, perhaps he gives me intelligence that my Bureau wants – perhaps not that day, but one day, because he is now my friend. So by doing this, I am working for the Bureau as it wants.”
“For example?”
“Ah, yes: an example.” Gunther looked critically at the lit end of his cigar. “Let us think of Immco and the Morgan Trust …”
32
With the Norddeutscher-Lloyd director and her father settled over the brandy and cigars, Corinna changed into tennis shoes, threw a wrap around her shoulders and climbed to the open main deck. The harbour around her was a blaze of light and sound, half a dozen gramophones and at least one band ashore competing with the Victoria Luise’s dance music, and all with the hive-like buzz of ships’ generators. But gradually she felt she was at the still, quiet centre of things, unobserved.