“Did ye mention that Mr Sherring was paying for it all anyhow?” O’Gilroy asked.
“In the end, no. I felt it would make my cablegram too expensive if I explained.”
“That accountant would be proud of ye.”
“Still, Uncle Charlie is going to expect a full report, and some new stuff, from all this. But with the Sherring connection, we should meet some interesting people.”
“We play that up, do we?”
“It’s both our disguise and our opportunity; we’re Sherring minions now. Don’t talk of money in less than millions – unless somebody’s trying to cheat you out of a halfpenny.”
But it was the Austro-Hungarian Embassy that nearly caused the real hold-up. Reluctant as any government institution anywhere to hand out money, it didn’t pay for the code – just over ?700 – until the afternoon of the day they were due to leave. That left no time to deposit the cash in the small, obscure bank Ranklin had chosen in Versailles. While he wasn’t too concerned about carrying the money to Budapest, and could telegraph it to the account from there, he would have liked to leave the code-book in a deposit box. He thought of simply destroying it, but that would have to be done very thoroughly and there were no hotel-room fires in July. So rather than try to hide it in their rooms, he simply took it along.
He wouldn’t actually be breaking any law, he reflected in the taxi taking them to the Gare de l’Est, even if the Austro-Hungarian officials found it on him. He would simply be followed every waking minute by twenty men in cheap boots and blank expressions.
40
Until he became a spy, O’Gilroy had never worn evening dress. He now accepted it as just another part of his disguise, but the idea of dressing for dinner on a train, even the Orient Express, struck him as going a bit far. It was Ranklin who insisted; the Wagons-Lits staff could hardly make such a rule when so many of their passengers were Orientals who had their own styles of finery, though they could certainly make anybody in travelling tweeds feel out of place.
But after a few minutes, he had to admit, to himself only, that Ranklin had been right. With the orange glow of the gas lamps deepening the colour of his champagne, it was nice to feel he belonged in such company, that it would have been incomplete without him. And even nicer to feel that the bad-tempered Turk with a voice like a parrot belonged less. But what could you expect? Bloody foreigner.
“Hors-d’oeuvre?” Ranklin was suggesting. “Then I’m having the Chateaubriand with Bearnaise – would you prefer the sole and stay with champagne throughout?”
“Ah, why not?” O’Gilroy said, surprising even himself with the ultimate luxury of not having to choose his luxuries. He finished his glass and waited – not long – for somebody to refill it.
Ranklin smiled, a little enviously and only out of the window at the twilit hills beyond the Marne. For him it had been just lifting the knife at his place setting, the remembered weight of solid silver that had brought back the mess nights at Woolwich and other tables of the Regiment where the lamplight had glinted on the trophies of old campaigns and he had once belonged. At least O’Gilroy knew just what had got him here: money. It had taken Ranklin twenty years to learn that. Never rich, yet never wanting for cash, he hadn’t realised that those mess nights, the cheery outings in London and Ascot, the very comradeship itself, had all been founded on money. And when it went, they went. Nobody had been unkind, but they no longer looked him in the eye, didn’t know what to talk about. It was over.
He woke up to find the waiter asking for their order. He gave it, then pulled his hand away from his pocket where, he realised, he had been clutching and fingering the gold coins.
“It doesn’t last,” he said. But of course that was so obvious to O’Gilroy that he misunderstood.
“Are ye thinking there’ll be a train smash?”
“No, no – though they’ve had a few in the past. And I dare say some close calls when the King of Bulgaria insisted on driving.”
“He didn’t that?”
“Why not? It was going through his country …” And he chattered on with legends about the train as they swayed east towards night and the German frontier. “… and did you know – I should have mentioned this earlier, of course – that if you felt lonely, the conductor could have telegraphed ahead from one station to have a young lady waiting at the next to see you through the night?”
He thought he caught a flash of interest in O’Gilroy’s eyes before he decided to be shocked instead. “Ye never could.”
“Look around you. D’you think some of these gentlemen wouldn’t want such a thing from time to time? Trains like this exist to supply wants. It would cost you something for the, er, ride in both senses, and I’m sure the conductor would expect more than the telegraph costs. Be cheaper if you could find a duchess escaping from her mad husband on their honeymoon trip …”
“Captain!”
“I swear it. I heard it from …”
They awoke in the bright picture-postcard scenery of South Germany, breakfasted, and settled down for a smoke in the armchairs in the salon half of the dining car. Ranklin found a newspaper which had come aboard at an earlier stop and translated the news of the Balkans to O’Gilroy. The fighting had now officially stopped; Bulgaria, which had attacked Greece and Serbia, having lost not only to them but to Romania and Turkey who were happy to rob a man when he’s down. Peace talks were going on in the Romanian capital of Bucharest much to the dismay of Austria-Hungary, which would rather be celebrating a Bulgarian victory and lording it over the peace conference.
He tried to explain, without pretending to understand all the nuances, the “Dual Monarchy”: the frigid marriage of Austria and Hungary, with their forcibly adopted brood of Bohemia, Galicia, Croatia, Bosnia and all the others, with no common bond of race, religion or language.
“What seems to hold them together is the Army – and the Emperor. Don’t refer to him as that in Budapest, by the way: he’s Emperor of Austria but King of Hungary … But now with Serbia – they’re Slavs – winning a string of victories, the Slavs inside the Monarchy are getting restless. There’s a Pan-Slav movement, talk of a Greater Serbia reaching to the Adriatic coast. That’s another thing that worries the Monarchy: finding its fleet bottled up in the ports up the coast. The Army’s been mobilised for months, ready to march into Serbia.”
“Sounds like they’d be swallowing a live snake to stop it biting ’em on the outside.”
“And that’s only the beginning. Russia will probably back Serbia: she’s been egging them on. After that, the whole European house of cards could fall in.”
“In a war, would ye go back to the Gunners?”
“It won’t be my decision but I hope so.” His mind drifted on ahead of the train, south to the shattered railway station outside Salonika. “If it lasts more than a couple of months, it’ll be a gunners’ war, not a spies’ one.”
“Mebbe Mrs Finn was right and it’s our war now.”
But a dark puzzled look had come over Ranklin’s boyish face and O’Gilroy guessed he was trying to see too far into the future. For himself, he was content in the present: a comfortable armchair, the unreeling scenery outside and the promise of a Munich beer when they passed through that city.
*
They finished lunch just as the train pulled out of Salzburg and hurried back to reclaim their armchairs and order coffee. As O’Gilroy was turning to sit down, the door just behind him banged open and a stout solid man in a high-buttoned dark suit marched in and seemed about to march straight on through O’Gilroy. Then a uniformed arm reached past the marcher and pitched O’Gilroy aside among the chairs. Ranklin stepped back, recognising the blunt face, straight hairline and wide-winged moustache, bowed his head and murmured: “Your Royal Highness.” The four men, two in Army uniform, tramped past into the dining area.
O’Gilroy bounced up like a boxer who has been foully tripped. “Jayzus and Mary! I’ll have the guts out of – ”