Caspar seemed uncertain which of them to address. “You give us Dragan, we give you Mr Spencer. It is simple.”
If somebody had asked Ranklin what he most disliked about being a spy and he had answered with the sort of honesty he was, as a spy, trying to discard, he would have said that it was the prospect of being tortured by Anya and her crew. His objections to his new trade as ungentlemanly and even dishonourable paled as she explained how much he would suffer if O’Gilroy didn’t produce Dragan and she had to torture his whereabouts out of Ranklin. She hadn’t been specific, just said she would use methods perfected by the Czars’ secret police over many decades and which she believed were reliable. Ranklin had been told something of these methods and agreed completely.
And there was no hope of them believing the truth – that he knew nothing of Dragan, since he had threatened them with him last night. So he might well set a record for resisting under torture, even discredit those secret police methods … The thought was appalling.
He tried thinking about what they might believe about Dragan, where Dragan might actually be. He didn’t know what Dragan looked like – nobody did. Nobody claimed to have met him, except possibly Cross, who had used him as a diversion. And that letter signed by Dragan, saying he had come in the name of liberty from tyranny. Which hadn’t told Cross anything new and was a weird thing to be carrying on a night when he had chosen what to carry so carefully …
Then he came to a very simple explanation. It was obvious. It was also literally painful that Anya wouldn’t believe a word of it.
“I never liked the matter of being mixed up with Dragan,” O’Gilroy said as the hired launch puttered up to the Bellevue jetty. “But if I give him to ye, I want to be sure ye keep him. Not coming back for me after he’s painted the walls with yeself.”
“There will be three of us with pistols. And you will help,” Caspar said. His vivid blue blazer, ornate shoes and tie added up to a music-hall imitation of a yachtsman, and suggested a misplaced self-confidence that O’Gilroy welcomed.
O’Gilroy nodded, his face still sombre. “All right, then – where d’ye want him?”
Caspar dipped into his breast pocket and passed over a large calling card. It was a very smooth gesture, and O’Gilroy guessed that passing out the address of Anya’s circus was probably Caspar’s usual line of work.
This jetty served the rich suburb, and Bellevue hotel itself, well north of the city centre. Now it and the road beyond were almost deserted while Kiel society was at dinner; the only car was a chauffeured limousine with curtained rear windows waiting at the end of the jetty. Mostly used, O’Gilroy guessed, for the circus’s best customers.
“This place,” he said, flourishing the card and then putting it into his side pocket, “’tis a house, is it? And ye jest want me and Dragan to walk up to the front door?”
“Ah, no. You go to the gate for servants, yes? Then to the … left, the door by the side. It is open, understand?”
“Servants’ gate and side door,” O’Gilroy confirmed. “And Mr Spencer’s there.”
“But sure.”
O’Gilroy glanced round, as if looking for the tram Caspar expected him to take. There was nobody within clear sight. Without any haste, he took the pistol from his pocket and said: “Fine. So let’s jest take a look at this gate and door, then.”
Caspar looked not angry but immensely shocked, as if O’Gilroy had made some monstrous social blunder.
O’Gilroy sympathised. “Yer jest in the wrong job. But I don’t think she’ll be asking ye to do it again.”
The four-storey house stood at the very north-western edge of town, isolated enough in its own walled garden not to annoy any neighbours. Such establishments are quiet places anyway: just a little piano music, refined laughter, at worst a breaking champagne bottle. And this was Kiel Week, after all.
Ranklin was in a small ground-floor room that Anya used as her office, dropping in to answer the telephone or file some paperwork. He was roughly tied to an upright chair, but that was just a token: his real captivity was ensured by a large crop-haired man in evening dress who sat and fiddled restlessly with a large revolver. Ranklin hoped he might fiddle enough to shoot himself; he was reduced to hopes like that.
From the distant sounds, the rest of the house continued business as usual. At sunset Anya came in and lit the gas mantles and drew the curtains.
“Is your mouth dry?” she asked Ranklin. “It is a good sign – fear. It means you will not last for long. Bravery is no use, and most painful.”
The door was part open and they heard the clump of heavy feet in the hall. “Caspar is back,” she said. “We must hope for good news.”
Caspar stumbled – in fact was pushed – through the doorway gabbling, and behind him O’Gilroy with a pistol in each hand and shouting: “Don’t do nothing!” Anya shouted something herself.
None of the shouts affected the crop-haired man: he jumped up, instead of shooting from where he sat, and levelled the revolver. O’Gilroy fired four times, his face very intent since he mistrusted the killing power of pistols.
A vase on the mantelpiece shattered, but the bullet had gone through the crop-haired man first; all four had. His knees gave and he crumpled quite gently onto the fragments of vase that had reached the floor already.
O’Gilroy looked down at him, shaking his head as if he disapproved of something. “Fucking amateur night,” he said.
It took time to restore the house to the profitable calm of a well-run brothel. But it is fundamental to such a place that neither the staff nor clients want anything dramatic and attention-getting to happen there and so are eager to believe that it hasn’t. Whatever Anya told them – Ranklin suggested a young officer getting drunk and playing cowboy with his pistol – worked. Then they were back in the little office room – along with the chauffeur whom O’Gilroy had beaten near unconscious and left in the car to simplify his entrance – and Anya was glowering savagely at Ranklin.
“You started this … this circus act,” he pointed out. “Don’t blame us for topping the bill. And we both want the same thing: no assassination attempt on the Kaiser. Well, there won’t be, that was just a rumour spread by Cross to get Lenz and Reimers looking the wrong way. And to give it weight, he invented Dragan. D’you know anybody who’s met Dragan? Had you heard of him a week ago? Cross banked on the fact that we’re all in the business of trading rumours, and it worked.”
After one flash of surprise, O’Gilroy was laughing quietly but delightedly, though not forgetting to keep his pistols vaguely pointed.
“The note from Dragan to Cross,” Ranklin went on, “if you heard of that, makes more sense if you see it as a threatening letter he planned to leave on the viewing stand at the locks that last night. But all this still leaves Lenz believing in Dragan, that he’s going to try an assassination, and that we’re involved.”
“Lenz does not worry me,” Anya said dismissively.
“Stop saying such silly things. Lenz has got a police force behind him and a chief constable above him and he thinks the Kaiser’s in danger. D’you think your influential friends count for anything alongside that?”
“So now you plan to tell Hauptmann Lenz that sorry, there is no real man Dragan?” she sneered.
“Of course not. I’m going to show him how to catch Dragan.”
36
The explosion which woke citizens of Kiel last night was the righteous end of a shocking plan to assassinate His Majesty the Emperor and those good friends of Germany, die King and Queen of Italy. The vile would-be assassin, that notorious anarchist Dragan el Vipero, was justly destroyed by his own bomb, detonated by a vigilant patrol of the Schutz des Konigs returning fire when the cowardly Dragan had shot at them from the darkness near the new Canal locks.
The bomb had been composed of dynamite stolen from a store on die site, and had been intended for use in blasting through die earth banks to flood die locks next month.