Ranklin said nothing. Their real job was being spies for the Bureau, and she couldn’t think they were for private hire. But they had accepted Sherring hospitality – did that limit their scope, the risks they could take with involving the Sherring name? He began to feel awkward.
She sensed that and said reassuringly: “I’m sure you’ll behave like perfect gentlemen. Now I’m going to change out of this finery before we arrive.”
O’Gilroy quickly grabbed her small travelling bag, kneading it briefly in his hands before passing it to her.
She smiled. “Yes, I still carry it on journeys like this. I believe virtue is its own reward, but a Colt’s Navy Model also helps.”
41
It was another bright day when Ranklin and O’Gilroy came down to breakfast on the hotel terrace, or at least a well-trampled area of dust surrounded by trees. They were led to a large table in the centre under a spreading plane tree: obviously for the Hornbeam party, although so far there were just two men there, both unfamiliar, both drinking coffee, reading the same copy of the morning paper and arguing good-naturedly about it. They got hastily to their feet and introduced themselves.
The squat dark one in a dark suit was Dr Johann Klapka, the thinner, younger fair one in a rumpled light suit was Stefan Hazay.
“You,” Klapka suggested, “are the Englishmen?”
“Yes and no. No for Conall O’Gilroy, he’s Irish, yes for me, I’m Matthew Ranklin.” Everybody bowed and shook hands, then sat down again and Klapka issued orders for, Ranklin hoped, breakfast.
“And I believe you work for Mr Reynard Sherring? Very interesting. Are you looking for investments? – perhaps I can help you.” Klapka was quite exceptionally ugly, despite having a third of his face hidden by a black moustache, but his cheerful quick expression and movements – followed, reluctantly and out of step, by his sober suit – made it unimportant.
Ranklin smiled but said firmly: “That’s up to Mrs Finn. We await her orders.”
“Then do not let Stefan hear your orders, or all will be published in his newspaper.” He waved the morning paper. “But he will get it wrong, as ever, so it will not matter.”
Ranklin felt smug that, mainly from the piece of bordello curtain the young man wore as a necktie, he had identified Hazay as either a poet or a journalist – which in Budapest, he recalled, were often the same thing.
O’Gilroy said: “And what d’ye do yourself, Doctor?”
“Of course, I am a Doctor of Law. I am to help, to guide, Professor Hornbeam. Have you met Professor Hornbeam before?”
O’Gilroy shook his head. “Only on the train last night. But Matt heard him speak in Paris.”
Hazay asked diffidently: “Do you know if his lectures in Vienna were the same as in Paris?” His English was better than Klapka’s, and Ranklin suspected the puzzled diffidence was purely professional.
“I think Paris was a rehearsal, so I imagine it was much the same. Are you here to interview him?”
“If he’ll talk to me. I only want some facts about his career.”
Just then the coffee arrived and Ranklin grabbed his cup. “I don’t know more than I read in the Paris papers, and can’t recall much of that.”
“Do you think he believes he has a message for us? – or for Europe?” Hazay had a way of putting a question that suggested it was already there, needing to be answered, none of his making.
But all Ranklin said was: “Ask him.” Then added: “Or his daughter Lucy – here they all come.” Corinna leading and looking very vivid with her black hair, wide smile and dark red skirt, Lucy, Hornbeam and a tall woman in her thirties who held herself with the buxom stiffness of a ship’s figurehead.
She might have been at the station last night, but so had half Budapest. Now she was introduced as the Baroness Schramm, Hornbeam’s interpreter and secretary, who had come on from Vienna by an earlier train. By the time the introductions had been made and they had sat down again, Ranklin and O’Gilroy had got themselves reasonably isolated.
“What’re we doing, then?” O’Gilroy asked between mouthfuls.
“Having a look round the town, I suppose, but after that …”
“Not much to see of it from here.” From either side came the hoot of ferries and tugs on the Danube, but there was no glimpse of them nor the twin cities of Buda and Pest on the banks beyond. Their view was a choice of the hotel – or trees. It was indeed isolated, and by more than just trees: they were almost the length of the island, about a mile, from the bridge that led to both the Buda and Pest sides. Ranklin wondered if somebody had planned for Hornbeam to be so much out of touch.
Corinna, smiling brightly and enjoying the bustle of organisation, sat down beside them. “Orders for the day – is that what you say? Anyhow, Hornbeam’s staying here to talk to Dr Klapka about Hungarian law. Lucy and I are going shopping. Hornbeam’s lunching with the American Consul General at some club, Lucy and I will be at a new cafe called the New York, remember Hornbeam goes to a lawyers’ dinner tonight, none of us invited, maybe we’ll go to the opera – okay, Conall, you don’t have to – then his big lecture at the Palace tomorrow – ” she raised her voice suddenly: “So you see Miklos at the bank, and if he’s got any queries let him telegraph Pop in Paris. Have you met Mr Hazay?”
The journalist was standing beside them, looking diffident again. “I have a fiacre waiting to take me back to Pest, if you gentlemen care to …”
“Why not?” Corinna said. “A penny saved – Lucy and I aren’t ready yet. See you at the New York if you’ve anything to report.”
Being bossed about by a woman, and an American at that, was a near-perfect disguise for British spies, Ranklin decided – and then wondered if he was deciding that just to salve his dignity. But it was true anyway.
A fiacre was just a two-horse four-wheeler like a British victoria, except that both the horses and the driver thought they were in the Hungarian cavalry. By the time they were slowed by the toll-house on the Margaret bridge, even O’Gilroy, with his Irish love of fast horses, was wishing he’d staked his money and not his life on this pair.
That was where the city really began, sweeping away downstream with the gentle curve of the wide and busy Danube. On the right were the short steep hills of Buda: Castle Hill with the palace and old town, with the true fortress of the Citadel lowering from the crest beyond. Opposite, behind the wharves and jetties of the left bank, was the neo-Gothic Parliament, far more impressive than anything its politicians were allowed to decide. And behind that, the flat city of Pest with its houses, factories, shops – and banks.
“Which bank do you wish to visit?” Hazay called above the clatter of hooves on cobbles.
Ranklin had been silently cursing Corinna for her glib “Miklos at the bank”: an improvised lie is a petard lurking to explode later underfoot. But he hoped he had solved it: Sherring had given him a letter of credit on the Hungarian Commercial Bank in Ferencz-Jozsef Square, so he could draw some korona there, hand in the wad of notes to be cabled to their Versailles account – and all that should take as long as an imaginary interview with the imaginary “Miklos”.
“If you leave us in the square,” he said, “you can take the cab on to your office.”
“There is no hurry – for me. Perhaps I can show you some of our city? But we walk, no?”
Perhaps to Hazay’s surprise, and certainly to O’Gilroy’s, Ranklin agreed, and they waited for him at a nearby cafe. But if they were there to pick up information, Ranklin reasoned, where better to start than a bright and talkative journalist? He must know things he couldn’t print but might like to gossip away.
Hazay’s idea of sightseeing was remarkably relaxing. He stood in the square and pointed out the beloved Chain Bridge, which led off it and across to a tunnel under the Palace to the South Station (in the west, since, as he explained, the West Station was in the north). He then named the statues in the square – von Eotvos, Deak and Szechenyi – nodded at the Academy of Sciences and police headquarters as they passed them for a quick tour of the Museum of Commerce, then back through the square and along the river on the Ferencz-Jozsef Quay.