by Graham Marks
Exactly how he did it Trey wasn’t quite sure, as it was all a blur, but he found himself, gun in hand and the tables well and truly turned. He made a show of pushing the safety catch to “off”.
“I said ‘hands up’, mister.”
Later, when he looked back, Trey found that he didn’t really remember very much. At least not in any kind of order that made much sense. The main thing that came to mind was that his father was there, taking charge (and toting a gun!) and there was a distinct feeling that it was all over.
The next thing, after Gessler and his flunkey had been tied up, it was like a party had started and he was the VIP guest. His father was hugging him like he’d never done before, his back was being patted (more like thudded) and someone was mussing up his hair; he saw faces flash in front of him – Neyla and Evren, Christina and Arthur, and Ahmet, who had a grin so wide it looked like he was going to split his face in half – and he couldn’t ever recollect feeling so alive.
It was hard to believe, but he had done exactly what he’d set out to do when he’d escaped from the hotel: he had found his father! Or quite possibly his father had found him, but who was going to split hairs at a time like this?
EPILOGUE
Trey felt he was trying to do a huge jigsaw puzzle that had no picture on the box to help him put all the pieces in the right place. That, of course, was always the trouble when you were a kid (even one who had somehow managed to escape the clutches of a dastardly German spymaster). Because, no matter what people told you, you always suspected they weren’t telling you everything. And exactly how fair was that?
Not very, in his opinion.
To add to the day’s surprises (from his point of view, mainly his pop looking like he knew how to handle a gat), Arthur’s father and his men had then turned up – with Baba Duan in tow – which was kind of an out-of-the-blue moment. It worked out that they’d actually left Constantinople before Ahmet, but there’d apparently been a puncture and changing the tyre had developed into “a bit of a job”, according to the grease-and-dirt-covered, not-very-happy driver.
They’d eventually arrived to find the situation pretty much under control (Gessler and his blond-haired sidekick were trussed up like Thanksgiving turkeys, as was the Russian in the back of Ahmet’s car – a guy Trey thought he recognized as one of the men who’d been following his father). He assumed Arthur’s dad would be pleased that the job was done and dusted, so he was a tad taken aback when Mr. Stanhope-Leigh appeared to be less than best pleased with his father. But then he discovered that his father had not only “disobeyed instructions of the utmost clarity”, to quote, but also taken Arthur and Christina with him when he left the house. And let them get “unneccessarily involved in his mercifully successful dealings with the Russians”. Also to quote.
Considering what a twerp he’d thought Arthur was when they’d first been introduced, Trey now judged him to be one of the most stand-up joes he’d ever met – and not simply for beaning the blond, machine gun-carrying German. He’d also tried to take all the heat, and get his sister and Trey’s dad off the hook, by insisting it was all his idea that he take them with him. The guy was definitely the bee’s knees!
Baba Duan had also been more than a little ticked off with Evren, but only because he’d forgotten to take his camera with him and thereby lost “the opportunistic moment of a lifetime”, as he put it, to snap some possibly very historic pictures – which would no doubt have been quite profitable as well.
And while he was kind of interested in the ins and outs of what the Gessler character had been up to (apart from noticing that he was wearing a pretty slick false beard, he’d been too busy telling the others what had happened to him since they’d last all been together to pay much attention) what he really wanted to know was how come his father looked EXACTLY like the German spy guy? What was that all about, “Pater”?
But his father had so far been too busy (surprise, surprise) to explain anything to him. And so here he was, kicking his heels in the lounge of their suite, waiting to go down to the hotel’s restaurant for dinner. Which was, he had to say, something of an anticlimax after all he’d recently been through.
“Trey, could you come in here a moment?”
Trey looked up from the issue of Black Ace that he wasn’t really reading and saw his father at the study door; he dropped the magazine on the chesterfield. “Sure, Pops.”
His father ushered him into the room. “Sit down, son.”
Trey lowered himself into a chair, feeling, the way things seemed to be going, as if he was about to be given a serious talking-to, but for the life of him unable to think of what he might’ve done to deserve it. And then there was his father, sort of casually perched on the edge of the desk, which didn’t quite fit the picture either...
“I think I, um...I think I owe you an explanation, Trey.”
Trey looked up from examining his toecaps. “You do?”
“I know this holiday was supposed to be time that we would spend together, and I’m afraid it really hasn’t turned out that way, has it?” Trey shrugged and shook his head. “Before we go downstairs, I’d just like to explain a couple of things about circumstances which weren’t entirely under my control.”
“Like what? I mean I know you’ve had to do the business stuff and all...”
“Well, I admit there has been a lot of business, but, since Paris, most of it was not of the kind I normally do. You recall that rather grand place we stayed in just outside Inverness, up in Scotland?”
Trey nodded; “rather grand” hardly described it, the place was a castle and staying there had been something of a high point in an otherwise dull-so-far trip. I mean, the joint had swords on the walls, a couple of suits of armour and battlements!
“Something happened while we were there.”
“What?”
“Someone I’d never met before thought they recognized me.”
“You never told me that.” Trey sat up straighter. “Who was it?”
“A dinner guest...it’s quite possible you never even saw him. And it wasn’t until we went down to London that I found out; as a matter of fact, it was the day you went to the zoo with the Hunter family.”
“And you were supposed to turn up later, and didn’t.” Trey couldn’t hide the disappointment in his voice; this had been an outing his father had promised to come on and then, kind of typically, at the last moment he’d not been available.
“I know, but there was a good reason, Trey.”
“What?”
“I got some visitors, including the man who thought he knew who I was. He asked, very politely, if ‘I would mind terribly accompanying these gentlemen’.” T. Drummond MacIntyre II, to his son’s great delight, pulled off a not half bad English accent.
“Which gentlemen?”
“The plainclothes policemen he’d arrived with.”
“You were arrested! What for?”
“They had an idea I was a German spy.”
The sentence hung in the air for a couple of seconds while important bits of the jigsaw puzzle clicked into place in Trey’s head.
“Oh I get it! Wait a second...no I don’t...if they thought you were Gessler, who is German, why did we end up in Constantinople?”
“I was the cat they wanted to set among the pigeons.”
“You were?”
“Sure, especially as I had been supplied with a list of places that it would be very suspicious for a German spy to be seen in.”
“So you weren’t doing business?”
“I was not, no...”
Trey left the fact that his father had been pulling the wool over his eyes and ploughed on to the main question. “So who the heck is this Gessler, Pops, and how come he looks like you, for crying out loud?”
“That’s a whole other story, Trey.” T. Drummond MacIntyre II consulted his watch. “Shall we go and eat? I’ve booked a table at a restaurant and Ahmet’s going to drive us, I’ll explain everything in the car
...”
It turned out to be a one-of-a-kind journey.
After Trey’s father had told Ahmet which restaurant he’d wanted to go to, he sat back, took a cigarette out of his silver case and tapped the cork-tipped end on it. “There’s something we’ve never told you...” He took his time lighting the cigarette, then put the case and lighter away. “I’m adopted.”
Trey almost fell off the seat. “Adopted?” His father nodded. “But...”
“Your mother and I didn’t think it was something we needed bother you with, just yet...it’s not like you were the one who was adopted. And we didn’t want you thinking anything about Gramps and Gramma, like they weren’t your real grandparents.”
“I wouldn’t...” Trey didn’t know what to think about anything, truth be told; and then the final piece of the picture came into focus. “Okay, right...so this is how come you get to look like Gessler, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is. My mother was German, from Hamburg.”
“So you’re German?”
His father shook his head. “I was born in Chicago, where my mother and father had emigrated to a couple of years before; she died when I was only a few weeks old. I have always known this part of the story, but what I didn’t know, until we arrived in London, was that I was one of identical twins.”
“You mean that stinker Gessler’s your brother?”
Trey’s father nodded.
“I got stuffed in a trunk and had a gun jammed in my ear by my uncle?”
“Indeed you did. His – my father...my real father, for some reason I don’t know, put one of us up for adoption and went back to Hamburg with the other; Gramps and Gramma Cecilia couldn’t have children of their own, so I was the lucky guy they got instead. And they were never told I had a twin brother.”
“But how...?” Trey felt a huge and quite inexplicable lump in his throat.
“How did I find out the truth?”
“Yeah...” He blinked and swallowed hard.
The car slowed and pulled up by the pavement.
“We’re here, I’ll tell you more when we get inside.”
Ahmet got out and came round to open the passenger door, saluting smartly as they left the car.
Even though he’d already had a very large lunch (just as he’d promised himself he would), Trey still felt – even after what he’d just learned – that he could do justice to everything the menu had to offer tonight. He walked into the restaurant, taking note of what was on people’s plates for inspiration. Which was why he failed to spot where they were going, and got the surprise of his life when he went through the door the maitre d’ was holding open and into a private room. Everyone was there, waiting for them: Arthur and Christina with their parents; Baba Duan and Hatijeh, Evren and Neyla (so smart they were almost unrecognizable), but...
Trey stopped in his tracks. “Why didn’t you invite Ahmet in? You can’t make him wait outside!”
“I haven’t, Trey,” his father looked over his shoulder, “he’s just parking the car.”
Trey turned round to see Ahmet, hat in hand and smoothing his hair down, stepping rather shyly into the restaurant as a waiter opened the door for him. “You are the best, Pops!”
It wasn’t long before the conversation came back round to the whys and wherefores, the who-did-this and who-did-thats of the previous few days, and it was after the waiters had taken the orders that Trey set the question ball rolling again.
“So who was this guy up in Scotland who thought he’d spotted a German spy, Pops?”
“He works for MI6, the British secret service, Trey; good man.” George Stanhope-Leigh dabbed his mouth with his napkin. “He knew of Gessler – we have a file an inch thick on the man – and when he saw your father that night at dinner his first thought was that he’d stumbled onto some German espionage plot. You were under pretty close surveillance from that moment on.”
“So how long did it take for you to convince them you weren’t a spy, Mr. MacIntyre?” asked Arthur.
“Not long. They were able to use the new transatlantic cable service and telephone the New York office to verify I was who I said I was. Then, a couple of days later, they came to me with a proposition.”
“A proposition?” Trey leaned forward.
“They’d done some digging and found out more about my adoption, and, as they said, it’s not often you get handed the identical twin of a German spy on a plate. They wondered, in their slightly roundabout, but charming English way –” Trey’s father smiled across the table at Arthur and Christina’s parents – “if I might be able to help them out.”
“I find it is astonishing what people will do, if you ask nicely,” Mrs. Stanhope-Leigh said, taking a sip of white wine.
“Very true, ma’am...”
“But how could you help, Pops?”
“All I had to do was go about my business, as normal, but add the trip to Constantinople.”
“But why Constantinople, Mr. MacIntyre?” Arthur queried. “Why not somewhere in Germany?”
“Like Berlin?” added Christina, just to annoy her brother.
“They said they’d been keeping tabs on my twin, now a Colonel in the Abwehr, the German secret service; they knew he was up to something down here that had to do with the Russians, and they wanted to try and put a spanner in the works.”
“Which explains the places you have the inestimable Mr. Ahmet drive you here –” Baba Duan gestured with a small bread roll – “and there to!”
“You know about that?” T. Drummond II looked surprised.
“My baba know about many things...” Evren translated for Neyla and his mother and they both nodded enthusiastically in agreement.
“That he does!” George Stanhope-Leigh laughed.
As the starters were delivered Trey’s father explained that, after talking things over with the US Ambassador in London, he’d agreed to help, but only if he was promised complete protection, and that neither he nor Trey would be put in any danger. Everything, he said, seemed to go perfectly, his appearance in Constantinople ruffling all the right feathers, especially the Russians.
“That man with the gun who you threw out of the—” Trey couldn’t stop himself from butting in, realizing too late that this was something he wasn’t supposed to know anything about. “I came home early and heard the shouting... I was, um, hiding behind the chesterfield, Pops, but I wasn’t spying, honest!”
“Really?” Trey’s father raised his eyebrows, but then smiled and decided not to pursue the matter. “As soon as I told George –” he glanced at Mr. Stanhope-Leigh – “about Mr. Paklov’s visit, we knew things were coming to a boil. The man was clearly not satisfied by my story – true though it was – of me being merely an American businessman, and he sent people back to get me...the ones who I gather nearly caught you, son.”
“I had also just heard from one of our agents in Nuremberg that Gessler – who had gone back to Germany only a few weeks ago – had left the city, when he should have been keeping an eye on some National Socialist Party rally that was being held there.” Mr. Stanhope-Leigh sat back in his chair. “We thought it wise to assume he’d heard that he had been seen in Constantinople and needed to find out what was going on down here. All of which was our signal to get you two out.”
“That’s when our ‘best laid plans’ got bent out of shape, Trey, because you weren’t here when George’s men came to pick us up...”
“Very sorry, effendi...” Ahmet shrugged in a what-could-I-do? way.
“Not in any way your fault, Ahmet,” said T. Drummond II. “Miss Renyard had told Simpson, the butler, she was taking Trey and Arthur to one place, then changed her mind; so the men sent to get Trey couldn’t find him. They then went to the hotel, but, to compound matters, you were late getting back, Trey. The men assumed this meant you’d been taken straight to the house with Arthur, and so they managed to miss you again.”
“But what about the blood, Pops...I found blood on the floor in the hotel, and a
chair tipped over. It looked like there’d been a fight!”
“No mystery, I’m afraid.” T. Drummond II held up his left hand, pointing to his thumb, which had a Band-Aid on it that Trey hadn’t noticed before. “Knife slipped when I was sharpening a pencil...quite a deep cut, too. And they had me out of the suite so fast I knocked the chair over grabbing my jacket.”
As the table was cleared and reset for the next course, Trey, Arthur and Evren (with occasional prompting from Neyla) cajoled more information out of their parents, finding out that Reinhardt Gessler had been setting up a network of double agents within the Russian secret service, and that Levedski, the man Trey’s father had had a showdown with, was one of them. The big idea had been to make it look as if Gessler himself was a double agent, at the same time as putting the wind up the Russians. As many twists and turns as a Black Ace story, to Trey’s way of thinking – not to mention that the last couple of days had often been rather too close to a Trent Gripp novelette for comfort.
“Lucky for me you left your money clip behind, right, Pops? Otherwise I’d never have met Baba Duan and who knows what would’ve happened.”
“Kismet!” beamed Baba Duan. “Without the help of Chance and Fate, we never all would have met and have such tales to tell!”
“I should say Chance and Fate had little to do with you somehow managing to unearth the information about the house in Rumeli, Mr. Hendek. But, however you did it, I will remain for ever in your debt for looking after my boy.” T. Drummond II stood up and raised his wine glass. “A toast to you all, and with it my thanks for achieving a successful outcome!”
Trey stood up next to his father. “More by luck than judgement, as Gramps would say.”
“And so he would!”
As Trey sat back down, a thought occurred to him about luck and judgement. “One thing, Pops, what about the Giovedis?”
