by Gavin Lyall
She finally sat down. Untypically, she made quite a procedure of it, propping up her dainty umbrella and carefully placing a large piece of hand baggage that she insisted was just a “purse”. “Oh, business, more or less.”
She was keeping something back, but Ranklin knew enough just to nod. Perhaps she realised the impression she’d given, so started to drown it in explanation. “The Turks are looking for a big long-term loan – again. Their Finance Minister’s been running around Europe all winter trying to raise one. The City here won’t touch the idea, the Germans aren’t lending money to anyone at the moment, so the French are his best bet, they’ve lent so much in the past they’re riding a tiger. And their people are out there talking right now.
“We’ve got a new Ambassador in Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau. A Democrat.” She considered, then perhaps remembered the poor man might have been born that way, and went on: “He used to be a Wall Street lawyer. And the Turks apparently asked him Could America help out? It seems the answer was mostly No, but there’s one guy, Cornelius Billings from Chicago, who’s been a pretty good client of ours over the years, and he got interested and went out there in his yacht—”
“In this weather?” The Eastern Mediterranean wasn’t the Bay of Biscay, but Ranklin had imagined American millionaires as strictly summer sailors.
She got a little austere. “It isn’t a bath-tub toy. It’s over a thousand gross tons, three turbines and does sixteen—” She caught his expression of polite uninterest. “Anyhow, it’s bigger than ours. So: he went to Constantinople, he listened to them, and cabled Pop saying he was getting interested. Pop’s pretty wary of the Turkish market but doesn’t like to say No to an old client, so he’s sending me, so I can take the blame if Billings starts saying we’ve let him down. It won’t be the first time.” She sounded philosophical about it, then added: “And Billings may be right and there’s some good business to be picked up there. The Turks certainly need the money. According to Billings, the Balkan wars literally ran them out of cash so the Government can’t pay its wage bill. I mean, think of that: you do a week’s work but don’t get paid at the end of it.”
Scandalised by the thought, she stood up and strode to frown out of the window. Ranklin was less moved. He didn’t pretend to know Turkey, but he had met Eastern fatalism. And there, if you hadn’t been paid, well, “It is written.” Anyway, most of your income wouldn’t be from your salary but bribes – baksheesh. And what could you do about it? Certainly not take a stand on principle. Sometimes he thought that her world, with its vastly complex deals measured in eighths of one per cent, only worked because of its simplicity: you kept your word or you were an outcast, and probably a bankrupt. He knew about that side of it.
But he also knew a little of the world where making a promise was infringing the prerogative of God.
“And?” he prompted.
“The French are making a foreign treaty out of this loan, all sorts of concessions and rights, and it’s taking time. As Americans we aren’t interested in that, so there might be room for a simple cash-down deal to tide the Turks over. That’s what banks like us can still do. We’ll never have the capital the big joint-stock banks have nowadays. But we don’t have their dozens of directors and thousands of small depositors, either. We can travel light and fast.”
“That sounds most noble. What’s the problem?”
“Is anything likely to happen in Turkey to make them default on our loan? Another war, anything like that. Just in the next – say – six months.”
“Ah.”
“I don’t expect you to know, just find out.” Simple: the British Secret Service Bureau should dig and delve for an American private bank. But, as the Commander had guessed, this was one of the strata of their relationship.
Ranklin took it calmly. “I think a European war’ll happen because something somewhere takes us by surprise – and Turkey’s such an obvious place, with all the Great Powers wanting part of their Empire, that it won’t be the place. If that’s any help.”
“You don’t get a fire at the firemen’s ball, huh? It’s a good argument – but I’d like a little more.”
“And what do we get out of it?”
Her smile suggested she was about to make a naughty joke out of that, but then didn’t. “It’s no secret that Britain’s looking for a reliable, controllable source of oil – right?” Then she told him about Lajos Göttlich.
When the resident “expert” poked his head up to top-step level, he saw them both leaning propped against the window-sill, staring at the floor a few yards away. They made a puzzling pair. He was used to elegant women accompanied by short, fat men whose wallets were tall and handsome, but knowing who Corinna was made Ranklin a conundrum.
Corinna glanced his way, fired off a grin and called: “We’re still talking it over. Thank you.”
Roused from his thoughts, Ranklin looked at the picture of Constantinople and said carefully: “I know you have problems with men in the City who aren’t used to talking finance with a woman, but in Turkey . . . they prefer women seldom seen and never heard. Are you going all by yourself?”
“No-o. . .” She swivelled slightly to look out of the window. “No, but I’ve got a connection with the French financial delegation there. Edouard D’Erlon, of D’Erlon Frères, one of the Paris private banks. We’ve done business with them. He’s the son of the firm. He’s also a director of the Imperial Ottoman Bank. That’s the biggest bank in Turkey. Now French-controlled.”
The staccato sentences were like the vibrations of an imminent earthquake. He had barely time to brace himself before it struck.
She stood and faced him. “Pop wants me to marry him, and I think I’m going to have to.”
All Ranklin’s experience as a spy clicked into play. From his expression, she could have been telling him about this wonderful little dressmaker she’d found.
Then, from being clipped and hesitant, she suddenly became voluble. “Ethan, he’s Pop’s main New York partner, had a heart attack last month. He’s got a new young wife (so it serves the old goat right) and he’s talking of retiring to breed horses. That’s got Pop thinking of mortality and dynasty and what happens to the House of Sherring. He’s given up on hoping Andrew will join the bank, so he wants to breed an heir from me. And he reckons Edouard’s the right stallion, good banking blood on both sides, see? And later, maybe some sort of merger. That sort of thing’s coming anyway. It’s the only way the private banks can survive. The world’s getting too rich.” She smiled wanly. “Hadn’t you noticed?
“If I was a man I could walk out on Pop and with my experience any bank would take me on, maybe offer me a partnership straight off, let me owe them for it. But as a woman, people only deal with me because I’m Pop’s daughter. So I need him, I need the House of Sherring, if I’m going to stay in the game.
“So it’s the money, in a silly kind of way. I’ll always have enough for myself, unless Pop goes completely bust, but when I marry Edouard, Pop’ll settle enough on me so I can buy my own partnership, properly, carry on as I am. Better than I am. That’s the deal. It’s unfair and Pop knows it and he’s got me over a barrel.”
During all this, Ranklin had more or less got his feelings formed up and ready for inspection. He had, he told himself, always known it couldn’t last. Only he’d thought it would end tomorrow, never today. “What’s this chap Edouard like?”
“Oh, perfectly civilised, pleasant company, lousy taste in objets d’art but that’s French bankers for you, a bit younger than you, a bit taller—”
“Sounds like a bargain. We always knew we weren’t permanent. I mean – what future have you got with a captain of . . . whatever I’m a captain of, these days?”
Deceived by the quietness of their tone, the “expert” reappeared, smiling and salesmanlike. Neither of them noticed.
“You’re being noble,” Corinna said accusingly. “You’re being self-sacrificing.”
“I’m being sensible and rat
ional.”
“God, how I hate self-sacrificing, sensible men. They’re so righteous, so unfair!”
“I’m just facing up to things,” Ranklin protested. “There really isn’t any way we could make a proper marriage—”
“And that’s another thing! You never even asked me to marry you! Oh no, you were quite happy just using me whenever it took you fancy. Well, let me tell you—”
The “expert” almost fell down the stairs before a stray thunderbolt hit him.
“For God’s sake, using you? What d’you mean? As I recall—”
“I wouldn’t marry you if the alternative was the Spanish Inquisition.”
“Isn’t that just what I was saying? It would be—”
“I’m going to marry Edouard. And I had a plan, but I’m not so sure I’ll bother with it, now.”
“That’s fine. I think you should marry Edouard. It’s the sensible thing.”
“Don’t you even want to hear my plan?”
“Only if you want to tell me.” Ranklin was being so upright that you could have moored the British Empire to him.
“I don’t think I’ll do it now, but what I was going to do was, just before I marry – I can time this – you get me pregnant, so there’s a fifty-fifty chance the heir to Sherrings and maybe D’Erlons too will be our son. How about that?”
Ranklin gaped, horrified, appalled. In all his years as a soldier, then as a spy, he had learnt a lot about what men can do to each other. But women. . .
All his training fell away. “You can’t. . . I mean . . . that is unthinkable!”
She grinned, happy that at last she’d shaken him out of his reasonableness. “Nonsense, this isn’t cricket, nothing so serious. It would just be playing their game with our own twist.”
“My God, I need a drink,” Ranklin said weakly.
“Yes, you do look a bit that way. We’d better get you one.”
As they went down the stairs, Ranklin said grimly: “On the North-West Frontier, the Pathan women come out and dispatch wounded British soldiers, slowly. Kipling has a poem about it.”
“No kidding? Usually he gets his women wrong.”
4
Ranklin was sitting in the flat at the end of a gloomy, misty day – but a windless one, more like autumn than March – when the voicepipe shrilled and the hall porter reported that a Mr Tilsey, “a friend of Major Kell’s”, was asking to be shown up. Kell headed their sister, spy-catching, service (and didn’t call himself silly things like “Chief’ or “K”), so Tilsey must be one of his men.
“Ship him up,” he ordered, and went to the decanters on the sideboard to see what he had to offer.
Tilsey turned out to be a thin man of roughly Ranklin’s age, with sandy hair and moustache and generally looking military. Which he was, of course. He would be invisible in a respectable London street or Government building, but little use for keeping watch on foul opium dens in dockland. However, any spy who wanted to frequent foul opium dens was welcome to get on with it unwatched.
They exchanged greetings, Tilsey accepted an Irish whiskey and water, and stood warming himself in front of the fire. “Have you heard of a chap called Gunther van der Brock? He’s—”
“One of the Continental secrets-for-sale boys, otherwise a cigar wholesaler in Amsterdam.”
“That’s the chap.”
“—only it’s a whole firm and I believe they pass that name around, so it may not be our lad.”
“Just under six feet, stout, dark hair, big moustache, spectacles, last seen wearing a light grey town suit and a dark green cloak,” Tilsey recited.
“He’s the one I know. Is he over here?”
“You know him? Good. Yes, he got into town around teatime. He’s staying at the Metropole in Northumberland Avenue, quite openly using his own name. Van der Brock, anyway.”
Good for them picking him up so quickly, Ranklin thought. And presumably following his every footstep – or rather, since Kell was even more understaffed than the Bureau, getting Scotland Yard’s Special Branch to do so. “He’s probably the best of that ilk, deals in only the top-quality secrets. But here, he’d bloody well better be selling, not buying. What’s he been up to?”
Tilsey sighed. “We hoped he might have come to see your people, but obviously not. We lost him in Whitehall.”
“In Whitehall?” They’d managed to lose a large man in a green cloak in one of London’s widest streets, well lit and probably not too busy?
Tilsey put on a lopsided smile. “Perhaps you haven’t looked out of the window recently.”
Ranklin walked over, twitched aside the curtains and stared blankly. He rubbed the glass, then realised it was London that had gone blank. Fog.
There should have been trees, lights, a skyline; there was nothing. Down below should be street lamps: there might be a slight glow, that was all. The building felt it had become an island, and those in the street must feel they had fallen overboard in mid-ocean.
“I see what you mean.” He walked back to the fire with an instinctive shiver.
“We were out of touch for nearly two hours,” Tilsey resumed. “He got back to his hotel just half an hour ago. Of course, he may just have been wandering around, lost, himself. But. . .”
Ranklin shared his doubts. Gunther must know London well enough, he wouldn’t be in Whitehall by accident. And that put him within yards of every important Government department, even the Prime Minister.
They sank into armchairs and thoughtful gloom. Reaching for any hope, Ranklin said: “Of course, he wouldn’t be too likely to be visiting an informant in a Government office, out of hours and dressed that memorably. He’d choose a crowded tea-shop or railway buffet . . . sorry.”
Tilsey was nodding politely; he must have thought all that already. “The only other places we know he visited were St Martin’s post office – he picked up a poste restante letter there – and a cigar shop in Trafalgar Square. He was in there about twenty minutes, but perhaps just to give himself a business alibi. Then we lost him near the Admiralty.”
“Perhaps Whitehall was a blind and the cigar shop was what mattered. . .” Ranklin’s imagination raced ahead: important men went to cigar shops, and they didn’t buy in a hurry, they stopped to chat. A cigar shop as an intelligence exchange? – no, a whole raft of them, all such shops in central London, secret messages rolled up inside Havanas. . . It was far better than the popular myth that every German waiter belonged to a great spy ring.
He coughed apologetically. “Daydreaming . . . But how can we help?”
“As I say, we hoped he might have visited you chaps, but. . . However, since you know him, would you care to bump into him ‘accidentally’? – if we can suggest a venue?”
“I’m happy to – but he won’t think it’s an accident,” Ranklin said firmly. “It’d tell him he’s being watched. And he doesn’t let slip information, he sells it.”
“Major Kell will have to decide whether it’s worth that. But if he approves, it may have to be early tomorrow: van der Brock’s only booked in for one night. May I telephone you in, say, half an hour?”
“Of course.” And Tilsey left to search in the fog for the New War Office, luckily only the width of the street away. Ranklin wondered if he should try and locate the Commander and ask for his approval, but decided it was too delicate a matter for the telephone and eavesdropping operators. And dammit, if he was acting deputy, he could authorise himself.
Tilsey rang up after twenty-five minutes. “Would you feel like breakfast at the Metropole tomorrow at eight?”
* * *
After his stay at the Savoy, Ranklin’s hotel standards were high, and the Metropole didn’t match up – except for size. At breakfast time, the vast pillared dining-room had a funereal air. Not the jolly scandal-swap when the deceased has been planted, but the brittle, respectful hush of the gathering beforehand.
Ranklin persuaded a waiter to lead the way to where Gunther – still wearing a distinctive and for
eign-looking light grey suit – was buttering toast and reading the Financial Times. He looked up, spread his arms in welcome and spattered crumbs from under his heavy moustache.
“Captain! A wonderful surprise! Sit down, sit down. Coffee?” The waiter found another cup. “You have not yet eaten?” Ranklin asked for bacon and eggs. “If I had a magic carpet, I would every day breakfast in England. Except, I do not understand porridge.”
“It’s Scottish. A Presbyterian form of the confessional: after eating it, you can behave any way you like.”
Gunther chuckled, adding more crumbs to the atmosphere. “And your Chief is well? Good. And Mr O’Gilroy? I thought of him only this morning. This weather hurts my side,” and he touched his right ribs. That dated from their first meeting when Gunther wanted to kill them and had rashly got into a bayonet duel with O’Gilroy. However, once he had convalesced, they had become . . .
. . . not friends. Yet more than business associates. Looking idly around the room – not full, at this time of year – Ranklin thought smugly They don’t know. Here we sit, two men from the world of international espionage, and nobody here knows. Such thoughts were one of the few compensations of the job; it was like belonging to a secret family: you can’t choose your relatives, but they were still family . . .
The waiter brought Gunther a plate of bacon, eggs and everything else, assuring Ranklin that his would be along in a moment. Then, professionally looking at neither of them, asked: “Are you gentlemen together?”
“On my room bill, of course,” Gunther said expansively. A clue? Since he watched the pennies, had he already concluded a good piece of business? But buying or selling?
He held his knife and fork poised, deciding which part of the crowded plate to clear first, and asked before his mouth got full: “And is this just a sociable meeting?”
“When one hears that a master dealer has set up his stall in town, naturally one hurries to view his stock.” Then Ranklin realised he had to go on, since Gunther’s cheeks were bulging. “We were just a little hurt that you hadn’t let us know you were coming.”
