“No need to take the risk. The Austrians are the ones. After the Redl affair they want, they need, an Intelligence success – just for their own self-esteem. And,” he ticked off the last question, “did they try to follow you?”
“Oh yes. But the Rue de Varenne’s a straight long street and they daren’t keep close, and I lost them in that tangle around the Rue du Bac and the Boulevard.”
If O’Gilroy said the followers had been lost, they were lost. But what now impressed Ranklin more was the way O’Gilroy had picked up the geography of Paris; he mispronounced the street names wildly but walked them confidently. And he could sense the mood of a district the way a gnarled old countryman could smell a change in the weather. The man was just a natural townee, which wasn’t much of a compliment in Ranklin’s old circle, but now …
He rolled the list of questions into a spill, lit it and lit his pipe from it. “Well, in a few days,” he puffed contentedly, “solvency should stare us in the face. And you need never put that foul stuff on your hair again.”
“And me thinking to lend ye half a pint of it the next time ye was stepping out with Mrs Finn.”
Ranklin shut his eyes and shuddered delicately.
There was nothing new or brash about the office of the House of Sherring in the Boulevard des Capucines. It had the quiet solid look of an institution that had been there a long time, as, in terms of the financial world, it had. Sherring’s father had been of that generation of American financiers who had learnt the business in Europe, steering the old money into the railroads and iron mines of America, long before they reversed the flow to finance Europe’s wars.
Puzzled why he had been summoned there, Ranklin was further surprised to find Temple, from the American Embassy, already drinking coffee in the dark-panelled private office. He wore a fawn summer suit and bright necktie, but his thin bespectacled face looked diplomatically sombre enough.
Sherring shook hands, offered coffee, and got straight down to business. “I got a telegram from Corinna. I won’t bother showing it to you, you wouldn’t either of you understand it, but translated and reading between the lines and so on, she’s worried about Professor Hornbeam. Seems like he’s getting the a la carte treatment, belle of the ball, and Corinna thinks they’re up to something.”
“Excuse me, sir,” Temple said, “but who is ‘they’?”
Ranklin was also thinking of the many levels of “they” in Vienna.
Sherring flipped through the telegram – several pages long – and frowned. “Doesn’t rightly say, just big names in the court and government. And the Professor is always getting asked for legal opinions, and she’s suspicious of the motives.”
“It could be just flattery,” Temple suggested. “Viennese society usually says more than it means.”
“Sure, but Corinna’s no damn fool. If she says there’s something to worry about, I’d back her.”
Nobody knew what to say next. Ranklin was watching Sherring and wondering why he looked American. In fact, of course, he didn’t: he looked like the bosun of a tramp steamer dressed in banker’s clothing. Perhaps it was that in Europe such a man could never have become an international banker, never been accepted by financial families, well-bred (in their own way, his county blood added) through generations of handling and mishandling big money. They would never have shed their jackets on the wannest of days, nor sat lounging back with thumbs jammed in their waistcoat pockets.
“Well?” Sherring said.
Temple coughed and said carefully: “If she feels an American citizen is being tempted to make statements that could embarrass us, then our Embassy in Vienna could …”
“She says our Embassy is …” Sherring reached for the telegram again to get the exact words, then decided they were too exact. “She isn’t so impressed,” he concluded.
Temple smiled lopsidedly. “If this is about possible Austrian intervention in Serbia – as I believe Mr Ranklin feared when we met at Hornbeam’s talk here – I don’t really believe Austria is going to start a war just because an American lawyer says it’s okay to do so.”
“No,” Sherring admitted, “but …”
Temple went on: “If they do go to war, sure they’ll use every justification they can get a hold of. Nations always do. But I’m just as sure that no American Foreign Service officer is going to try and deprive Hornbeam of his First Amendment right to speak his mind. And I’d guess that Hornbeam, as a lawyer and Republican both, knows that also.”
Sherring looked at him expressionlessly, which meant his face was just normally craggy and serious. “Okay, son. D’you want to be excused school?”
Temple stood up. “I think I’d better be, sir, if this conversation is going to continue.”
When he had ushered Temple out, Sherring walked carefully back towards Ranklin. Like many tall, heavy men he had a delicate, almost tiptoe, walk.
“D’you still think like you did at Kiel?” he asked. “About what would happen if Austria charged into Serbia?”
“Yes.”
“Would you go there to help Corinna figure out what’s going on?”
Ranklin swallowed. “I – I’d like to. Tell me, though: what’s your interest in this?”
“Finding out what’s going to happen before anybody else,” Sherring said promptly. “And keeping it to myself as long as I can. We might be in the same line of business.” He allowed himself a little bleak smile. “Corinna wants you to meet them in Budapest – they’ll have moved on from Vienna by the time you could get there. Seems he’s giving the same lecture in both places.”
Vienna tried – at least in unimportant matters – to treat the capital of Hungary as an equal.
“We’ll pay all your expenses,” Sherring went on, “both you and your Irish whatever-he-is. Okay? And would you like a drink?”
“It’s rather early for me,” Ranklin said. “But yes, I would.”
He had expected a servant with a silver tray. Instead, Sherring simply opened a mahogany cabinet and started pouring; perhaps he valued his time and unbroken privacy more than any display of stature.
When they were settled again, Sherring said: “It’s still the war season, by the reckoning you used in Kiel. D’you think it’ll happen this time around?”
“You don’t need me to tell you that Europe’s littered with heaps of loose gunpowder and dry tinder, the Balkans particularly, even with a peace conference starting in Bucharest. But whether somebody’s going to drop a lighted match, accidentally or on purpose …” He shrugged. “Perhaps I’ll have a better idea after Budapest, but only perhaps.”
“Uh-huh. If it happens, d’you figure it for a long war?”
Everybody who talked about war talked of a short one, but perhaps those who thought otherwise kept their pessimism quiet. And militarily, Ranklin had no idea: a war on the scale he foresaw hadn’t happened in Europe since the days of the Brown Bess musket and wooden men-o’-war. He shook his head helplessly.
“If you get yourselves a war,” Sherring said slowly, “it’s going to be different. I don’t just mean your new dreadnoughts and big guns. I mean it won’t just be about shifting frontiers: it’s going to be about shifting ideas, too. We had ourselves a war about ideas just fifty years back – like in most things, we’re ahead of you here in Europe.” He smiled thinly. “I was still just a boy when it was over, and my father took me on a trip through the South, to see what business was left. There wasn’t much of anything left. Except hating, and that’s still there.
“You get yourselves into a war like that and Europe’s going to end up different. How different, I don’t know, but …” He looked at Ranklin in an odd, reflective way. “But maybe you’ll be lucky and not live to see it, not in your job. Whatever,” he added politely, “that is.”
Ranklin took great care with his cablegram to the Bureau, and it took them twenty-four hours to reply:
APPROVE INVESTIGATE BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES BUDAPEST STOP LETTER OF CREDIT AWAITS AT BANK STOP DO NOT REPEAT NOT TRAVEL ORIENT EXPRESS OR STAY EXPENSIVE HOTEL ENDS UNCLE CHARLIE.