He had to sign for his bill and don his new bowler before they exited, crossing Piccadilly to the park, with Lanchester resuming where he had left off, as they sauntered down paths filled with office workers out enjoying the sunshine, with the odd tourist admiring Buckingham Palace or the bas-reliefs on Decimus Burton’s Hyde Park Corner arch.
‘If we can get stuff in to augment the local weaponry, and they can kill enough Blackshirts, it might cause him big trouble at home. Bringing him down is probably asking for the moon, but if we can remind the Eyeties of the cost of conflict that can only be to the good. If it keeps them out of Hitler’s embrace, then-’
‘They will fall out over Austria when Hitler invades, which he will do if they don’t agree to a political union, especially when the Osis become part of the Greater German Reich and demand the Trentino region back.’
Lanchester sighed. ‘They know not what they did at Versailles, do they, slicing up and parcelling out bits of the old German and Austrian empires?’
‘I think they knew, Peter, but I don’t think they had much choice.’
‘If we have to fight the Hun again, I will personally shoot the first bugger to mention an armistice or peace terms. So, how do we feel about the job, which comes, by the way, and I have not mentioned it, with a very healthy stipend?’
With a private income, money was only of concern to Jardine because it was a bad idea to work for nothing; even in Hamburg he had taken a small amount in pay. ‘I’ll look at the salary when I’ve looked at everything else. What paperwork do you have, order of battle and that sort of stuff?’
‘Quite a lot.’
‘Maps too — what about arms?’
‘That’s your bailiwick, old boy. The only thing I will say for certain is they cannot be bought or shipped from these shores.’
‘Then I need to see some people before I commit to anything, here and overseas.’
‘Fair enough. How long?’
‘Couple of weeks, Peter, but be warned, I might turn you down flat.’ The look Lanchester gave him then was discomfiting, being too knowing: he knew his one-time fellow officer could not resist an underdog or a cause. ‘I mean it, Peter.’
‘Of course you do, Cal, old boy. Now where are you staying?’
‘Across the park at The Goring.’
‘Not with the ex-wife?’
‘Hardly.’
‘Still not forgiven you?’
Jardine shook his head fiercely, making it obvious that was not a subject he wanted to reprise and the forgiveness bit was a dig: who was to forgive whom? He had come back from the war to find his wife’s lover in bed with her. Still carrying his service revolver he had immediately shot the fellow dead. It had been quite a cause celebre at the time, especially when, at the subsequent Old Bailey trial, the jury had acquitted him of murder. Lizzie Jardine was one reason to stay out of London. With his wife, it was a case of make up for a bit then fall out again, and with her being a Catholic, even if she was not in the least bit moral, divorce was out of the question.
‘Talk to you anon, then?’ Lanchester said, tipping his bowler as he walked away, his brolly ferrule beating out a tattoo. ‘I’ll put in a decent cheque to cover your expenses.’
Jardine’s first task was to order a new passport — his old one had some too-revealing stamps — and that required a visit to a photographer and an hour in the Victoria offices where they were issued, his excuse for a replacement that he had lost his previous one. Back at The Goring he wrote to ask for an appointment with Geoffrey Amherst, and his next task was to book a train and ferry crossing back to the Continent, his destination Monaco.
Lanchester’s papers, including a cheque for a hundred pounds, arrived before he ate dinner and he did not look at them till afterwards, thankful he had eaten little given his appreciation of the situation was likely to induce indigestion.
The Abyssinian invasion force was reported to consist of nearly seven hundred thousand men, two-thirds of them Italian, the rest made up of Somali and Eritrean levies, as well as units from Libya. But it was the equipment levels more than the numbers of bodies that were sobering. Six hundred tanks, two thousand pieces of artillery and close to four hundred aircraft were either in the region or on the way, and given they were not all yet in theatre, Jardine concluded Lanchester, or someone like him, had very good access to what should have been secret Italian information.
Some of the units could be discounted, like the so-called Arditi, Mussolini’s Blackshirts, who would be made up of ex-street thugs and Fascist arrivistes, more boastful than brave. But as Lanchester had pointed out, there were units like the Alpini; in a mountainous country like Ethiopia they would be invaluable. Just as deadly would be the local askaris, troops able to fight in the terrain and climate because they were accustomed to both and, if they were anything like the ones the Germans had used in Tanganyika in the Great War, the most dangerous force of all, given they would take casualties in a way he doubted would apply to the regular Italian army. Worst of all for the Abyssinians was Italian air power: three hundred modern bombers and fighters against which the defenders could muster only some twenty-five old biplanes.
Studying the maps, it was clear the Italians would have to come from the lowlands of Eritrea and Somalia and ascend into the high country around Addis Ababa, their capital being the hub of resistance and the place the Ethiopians would be determined to defend. He let some tactics run through his mind but decided to let his notions lie fallow until he had talked to Amherst, who was, as a military strategist, very much his superior. Even then, the ringing of the bedside phone broke his train of thought.
‘Mr Jardine, you have a visitor downstairs.’
‘I do?’ he replied, looking at his watch: ten o’clock was a late hour for anyone to call. ‘I’ll come down; ask them to wait.’
In a life of much risk, and even being in London, Callum Jardine never allowed himself to take a chance. If it was a habit that others might sneer at — a sort of showing off — it was one he stood by because you only got the chance to be wrong once. So when he went down to meet this visitor he did so by using the service stairs to the basement, past piles of fresh and dirty laundry and all the paraphernalia that hotel guests never see in the mass. There was a fire exit and he hit the bar, emerging into the street at the hotel rear.
Coming round to the main entrance his first look was at the cars parked nearby, to see if any of them had passengers or some sign, like a trail of smoke coming from a cigarette, to show someone waiting. Sure they were all unoccupied, he made his way to the well-lit doorway, eyes cast right and left to pick up anyone immobile in the shadows, then he had a long look through the glass of the revolving door before he pushed his way into the lobby.
He spotted who had come to see him immediately. If the clothes were different, a dark-blue suit instead of grey, she was as well dressed and groomed as she had been the last time he had seen her clearly; the back of a car and dressed like a stevedore did not count.
‘Fraulein Ephraim?’ he said, softly.
She had been facing the lift and staircase, sat on the edge of a couch, and his surreptitious approach startled her so much she spun around in alarm, making him wonder if, in her mind, she was suddenly back in her own country worrying about a visit from the Gestapo. That faded quickly as she composed her features and stood up.
‘Please Elsa call me,’ she replied, in accented English.
‘I didn’t know you spoke our language.’
‘I do not well, Herr Jardine.’ The grin with which he responded was only partly to dismiss such a comment; the other part was a genuine feeling that he was with a very attractive girl. ‘I ask Herr Lanchester to telephone me when you arrive in London, if you arrive in London, zhat is.’