“Well, thank you. That isn’t the way I’m usually greeted in these circumstances. Get up, we’re going burgling.”
“Are we? What time is – ”
“It’s one o’clock. Just get up – all right, I’ll turn my back – and get Conall.”
He reached for his worn old woollen dressing-gown, and a few minutes later they were in Corinna’s sitting room, plotting in whispers.
“Is he not there now?” O’Gilroy asked. “What’s he doing?”
“A lady doesn’t speculate, but he’s doing it in the Baroness’s room, so …”
“How do ye know?”
“I was half expecting this, so I stayed awake, listening – and I spilt some face powder. Look.” She led them proudly back to the door and showed a faint dusting of powder – and the footprints in it – by both Hornbeam’s and the Baroness’s doors. “How’s about that for evidence?” She closed the door again.
Ranklin said: “Most ingenious, but it doesn’t tell us how long he’ll be there.”
“Being a lawyer I expect he’ll spin things out as long as possible, but that doesn’t mean we have to. Conall, you can …” but then she remembered their talk before dinner and turned it into a question: “Do you think it’s safe to hop over that railing thing between our balconies? He’s sure to have left a window open.”
Ranklin and O’Gilroy looked at each other, then O’Gilroy nodded. He was more shy about taking off his dressing-gown in front of Corinna than getting caught in the burglary. But in a couple of minutes he was back, laying the brief-case under the lamplight and grabbing for his gown. “’Twas easier to bring it right back, seeing it was setting by his bed.”
“Not even locked?” Corinna was surprised.
“Oh sure, but he hadn’t taken his keys a-courting.”
It was, Ranklin reflected, a new twist on the classic espionage ploy outlined by the Bureau: pinching the Secret Documents while the bearer is being seduced. Only here the seducer was their rival, not accomplice, and the documents they were lifting from the case probably belonged to her.
The top one was amateurishly typed in German, with many corrections, and laid out in numbered paragraphs and sub-paragraphs. Ranklin frowned, tasting the leaden legalisms: Gehinderungsfalle, it said; Vermachtnisnehmer. He turned back to the first page.
Corinna had picked up three pages of handwritten notes on the paper of the Hotel Imperial, Vienna. “This seems to be about some law case: ‘could be argued that’ … ‘query constructive duress’ … What have you got?”
Ranklin’s whisper had become reverent. “I rather think I’ve got a copy of the Habsburg Family Law. Which I shouldn’t have. And I’m damned sure Hornbeam shouldn’t have, either.” He put the document down as carefully as he would a suspect artillery cartridge. “May I see some of those notes?”
Corinna passed him a page and he read down it quickly, trying to find a train of thought. But couldn’t. There were, however, several references to “Art 1” He turned a page of the Family Law and tried to decipher Article 1. It seemed to be about the composition of the family itself, perhaps a definition of who belonged. It certainly included a long list of titled families. But beyond that …
“This is hopeless,” he said. “And we haven’t got the time. Let’s just copy out his notes. How many pencils have you got?”
“Let me just look at the Law.” She read for half a minute, then said: “I’ll round up some pencils.”
Doing one page each, it took them about five minutes which seemed much longer to Ranklin. Then they had to remember in what order the papers had been arranged in the case – the Bureau had been crisp on that very matter – and hustle a de-dressing-gowned O’Gilroy out of the window again. But Ranklin’s heart didn’t slow down until O’Gilroy was back.
“Now then,” Corinna said, “you seem to have something I don’t …”
“If we’re going to talk this over, may I invite you, this time, to my room? Assuming you don’t want yours smelling of tobacco smoke and whatever I hope and trust O’Gilroy’s got in his travelling flask.”
So there was another scene of silent tiptoeing across the dim corridor, which so much reminded Corinna of the Comedie Francaise that she nearly broke down in giggles halfway. But finally they were settled in Ranklin’s bedroom.
“When you take up a life of crime,” he mused, “I imagine it’s very important to know just what crimes you’ve taken up. We might get away with no more than a Hungarian version of trespass, but Hornbeam could be vulnerable for something like treason.”
“Just for having that Family Law?” Corinna asked.
O’Gilroy added: “And what is it, anyways?”
“Remember, I haven’t come across it until just now, but I’ve heard of it before. And it’s what it says: the law of the Habsburgs. A rich, powerful, big – seventy archdukes or so – family that needs laws to decide who ranks after who, inheritance and succession.”
Corinna made a face. “What’s wrong with the ordinary law?”
“The Habsburgs don’t see themselves as part of the Monarchy, the Empire: they see that as part of themselves. They’ve been one of the most important royal families in Europe for seven hundred years, far longer than most nations have lasted. They’d say they’re the trunk of history: nations, frontiers, common laws are just leaves that have their season. So they need their own private law.”
Corinna frowned into her well-watered brandy. Sure, she knew families, younger and brasher, and called Morgan and Rockefeller and Carnegie – and Sherring, come to that – who preferred their own codes to the laws of the common herd. And she had learnt plenty about the Habsburgs as characters in a play written by “history”. But Ranklin, with his European perspective, was seeing the Habsburgs more as they saw themselves; chosen and burdened to lead. Not stripping off the beards and greasepaint when the curtain fell, because the curtain never did. And the blood on the Habsburg stage was not stage blood.
She nodded. “And is the Family Law really that secret?”
“In practice, it just can’t be. All those archdukes and their lawyers. But it certainly isn’t something you can buy in a legal bookshop. A badly typewritten copy is probably the best you could lay hands on, so I don’t think Hornbeam went looking for it out of professional curiosity. I think it must have come to him, and for a purpose. It’s that purpose I don’t like thinking about.”
“The Baroness’s purpose, we assume, don’t we? And what d’you figure it is?”
“I don’t. Just the fact that he’s looking at the Law and making notes about it suggest he’s trying to interfere with it. And he shouldn’t even be looking.”
“Interfere how?”
“I don’t know.” He picked up the copied notes. “These don’t tell us. We really need a lawyer.”
“Dr Klapka?”
“Ummm. If there were any hint of treason, he might go straight to the police – just to protect himself.”
“A lawyer doesn’t discuss his clients’ affairs. So, I shall hire him.”
There must, Ranklin thought, be some problems that couldn’t be solved by saying “I’ll hire a car, a couple of spies, a lawyer …” But he had to admit it simplified life a great deal.
“As long as we’re sure Klapka himself isn’t involved.”
“He doesn’t like the Baroness one bit. He was spitting blood about her getting between him and Hornbeam this afternoon, thinks she’s an interfering busybody. And now I can tell him just how busy her body’s been.”
O’Gilroy was sitting on the bed, elbows on knees with a tooth-mug of brandy in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and mostly just listening and nodding. Now he asked quietly: “And how will ye be explaining ye know he’s got a copy of the Law?”
“Oh – he left his case around, and I saw a paper nearby that I thought must’ve fallen out, so I – I found the case was unlocked – so I opened it to put the paper back …” She was clearly making it up as she went along, and Ranklin shuddered.
O’Gilroy said: “And it being a dull afternoon, like, ye jest happened to copy out three pages of his notes. Ye think he’ll believe it?”