Flight From Honour

by Gavin Lyall

  Flight From Honour

  Gavin Lyall

  © Gavin Lyall 1996 *

  * Indicates the year of first publication.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  1

  The little fishing boat didn’t take shape in the dawn mist until long after the creak of its oars and the irregular slap of water had reached the shore. Then it gradually grew detail and colour as it scraped its way past bigger boats into Muggia’s inner harbour. Any watcher might have wondered why it was back so much later than other boats in the local fleet. However, nobody was bothering to watch, since everyone in the village knew it had paused to take on a Mysterious Stranger from an Italian ship in the Gulf. But the Stranger himself was city-bred and still believed he was on a Secret Mission as he stepped on to the fish-scaled and slippery quayside.

  Although he was shivering with cold and damp, he still saw the huddled village as having the charm of a stage set. And indeed, if anybody had written an opera about fishermen of the North Adriatic, he could have taken the whole inner harbour, with its boats and cluttered quays, and fitted it onto the stage of La Scala. Only the tiny castle in the background and the narrow alleys leading off in all directions, and already beflagged with damp washing, would have needed to be painted on the backdrop.

  One of the two fishermen led him through an arch and into a raucous café in the comer of the town hall. Five centuries of Austrian rule hadn’t much changed the Venetian buildings – there was still a carved Lion of St Mark set into the stonework above the café – nor the straight-nosed faces and brown hair of the inhabitants.

  The Stranger was small, with dark lank hair, a thin sharp face and spectacles which he had continually to wipe clear in the steamy indoors warmth. Being Parisian, he asked for a large coffee and a cognac, which surprised the fisherman. On the other hand, the brandy he was given surprised the Stranger. Then everybody else politely didn’t notice as he surreptiously paid the fisherman for the voyage and was taken out to the road that ran around the bay and the shipbuilding yards into Trieste.

  The Café San Marco was far larger but, in contrast with the deliberate Italian dignity of other big cafés in Trieste, had a comfortable Mittel-Europa sprawl. It could have been in any one of a dozen cities of the Austrian empire: Prague, Budapest, Salzburg or Sarajevo. Indeed, in that summer of 1913, many would have said that the rule of the Viennese café was stronger than that of the aged Emperor in Vienna. And they would have said it in just such a place, with its darkened gilt frescoes, marble and mirrors, among the old men playing chess, students doing their homework, writers writing, artists arguing and journalists reading themselves in the newspapers on cane frames handed round by the waiters. And two men who might have called themselves middle-aged doing nothing but talk as quietly as they could in a busy café at mid-morning.

  The one with the bony, ascetic face and deep-set eyes was a count, a Venetian title equal to a marquis from anywhere else, or so Venetian counts said. He was dressed with dignified raffishness in a wide hat, floppy maroon bow-tie and a short light cape, whilst his delicate fingers with their jewelled rings constantly fondled a silver-topped cane.

  Senator Giancarlo Falcone – who was using neither his rank nor his real name in Trieste – was shorter but strong and bulky in comparison with the Count’s apparent fragility. He had a large and hooked but very thin nose that could have looked sinister if it hadn’t been set in a reassuringly meaty face with prominent dark eyes and an easy smile. His crinkled hair was now white and thinning out, and while you would remember him as well dressed and groomed, you wouldn’t remember just how because it seemed impersonal. In the same way, he looked successful but not at anything that touched him deeply.

  He looked at his wristwatch but all he said was: “I heard that they invented these for Santos-Dumont, the aviator.”

  “Is that why you wear one?” The Count’s Italian was Triestine, Falcone’s Piedmontese, but they had no problem understanding each other.

  “No.” Falcone gestured at his jacket, buttoned so high that it showed only a brief triangle of shirt behind his necktie. “How can I reach a proper watch under this?”

  “You are a slave of fashion,” the Count observed.

  “Perhaps,” Falcone said comfortably.

  The Count sipped at the tiny coffee cup. Small delicate things seemed right for him; you couldn’t imagine him lifting a pint of beer. “I regret the passing of frock coats. Does anybody wear them nowadays?”

  “In Italy, only royalty, diplomatists and the more corrupt of my colleagues. I regret them, too. But they need skilled cutting to hang properly at the back and should not be worn by anyone who hurries. Of course, in London you still see many.”

  “Are you going there?”

  Falcone nodded slowly. “Probably. Brussels first, but most likely I will find what we need in London. I could be there about the middle of September – do you yet know the date of the relief?”

  “October the second.”

  Falcone nodded. “Time enough. And your new friends – they will accept such gifts from you without suspicion?”

  “I was talking only the other day with the Commandante, preparing the ground, arousing his interest . . . Ah, I believe this is the lad now.”

  Falcone didn’t turn, he just watched the Count’s eyes watching over his shoulder. “He looks young,” the Count said. “Now he has seen Aldo’s magazine and carnation. He is going across . . . he introduces himself . . . he sits down . . . Aldo is summoning a waiter; how imperiously he does it. Servants are much better at grandeur than we poor aristocrats.”

  “Is anybody following him?”

  “As I said, they needn’t follow him in here: the waiters are all spies for the police or somebody.”

  “Then why are we meeting here – like café conspirators?”

  “Because the waiters in every other respectable café are spies, too. You can’t expect a good waiter to live on the sort of tips I give. And I am known to have been conspiring in here for twenty years: it would seem most suspicious if I were seen conspiring elsewhere.” He leant back and blew a delicate cloud of smoke that was immediately swirled away by the passing rush of a waiter. “Believe me, this is the only way; you’ve forgotten just what a small world Trieste is. But I’m not being flippant about the dangers. Not only from the Austrians, but now the Slovenes.”

  “Slovenes? Those farmers from the Carso?”

  “A little more, in these days. Now the Slovenes are given money to develop what they call their ‘folk arts’, and are favoured in recruiting for the police. So they hope to keep us Italians in our place and the Slovenes too busy to concoct their own plots. The Austrians can find a lazy way of doing anything, even govern an empire. But sometimes it works, so I beg you, take great care, particularly when you leave Trieste.”

  “I shall be leaving this af
ternoon for Venice,” Falcone muttered, his unease back in full spate. “Now, can we get this settled . . . ?”

  “You can look round now. He’s busy talking to Aldo.”

  Falcone turned as if searching for a waiter and gave the Parisian a swift raking stare. “His clothes are a disgrace. Just looking at him, you’d know he crept ashore in a basket of fish.”

  “You judge men too much by their clothes.”

  “But the police judge men by the way they enter a country.”

  “The boy knows nothing of our proposals, he’s merely to tell us if, and when, the Poet will be . . . available. And dealing with the Poet one has to accept a little flamboyant secrecy.” The Count lit a cigarette and fitted it into a long amber holder. “Did you hear the charade of his fleeing Paris, the first time he went to Arcachon? All midnight meetings and smuggling his trunks from hotel to hotel. It’s a wonder all Paris didn’t turn out to watch.”

  Still looking irritated, Falcone asked: “From whom was he fleeing that time? – debtors or a woman?”

  “Both, I imagine. He doesn’t do things by halves. Which is what we’re counting on, are we not? We need his name, his reputation.”

  “Yes, yes of course.” Falcone spoke abstractedly. He was staring down at the table-top, at the empty cups, the coffee stains and cigarette ash on the cloth, then he glanced slowly around at the scurrying, weaving waiters and heard the continual clatter of crockery and conversation. He shook his head.

  The Count did a good job of reading his thoughts and said dryly but sympathetically: “Yes, life all seems so mundane and unalterable. And sometimes one looks at a woman and knows what she’s expecting and wonders how in the world one can ever . . . But you rise to the occasion when the time comes. I imagine it’s much the same for soldiers in battle. But perhaps some men, like the Poet, don’t suffer such doubts. They live on a grander scale. And set us an example so that, occasionally, we can achieve grandeur, too. We Italians are particularly susceptible to that. And that’s also what we’re counting on, is it not? Now, I told you nobody would follow the messenger in here, so should I signal Aldo to bring him over?”

  Despite his anxiety, Falcone smiled wryly. “Your cynicism doesn’t lack grandeur, old friend.”

  “Cynicism is my daily bread,” the Count said simply. “I do not live for bread; it enables me to live. Now, shall we hear the news from Arcachon?”

  2

  The room was damp. It had been damp in high summer and would go on being damp the year round until the whole tenement around it fell down, probably because of the damp. But the stones would survive, as they had outlived being part of the Roman amphitheatre buried below, then in the walls of a Venetian warehouse, and would probably outlive whatever was built next. Yet still the damp would come trickling down from the Castello on the hill behind and rise up through them like sap through a tree – although it would help if the cats were fewer and with better manners. Less than a hundred yards from the city’s Chamber of Commerce and its fanciest shopping street, Triestines would go on living in such tenements.

  But not the two men sitting at a scarred table in a ground-floor room; they only rented it by the hour for irregular meetings. And for the elder of them, a slight, bespectacled and grey-bearded man in an academic jumble of clothes, no meeting yet had been more irregular. He was nervously recounting little stacks of gold coins – English sovereigns, Napoleons, German 20-mark and Austrian 20-crown pieces – a deliberately random collection. They had just finished an anxious argument about how it was to be spent.

  “Fourteen hundred crowns – as near as possible,” he said miserably. “Is that high or low, for a man’s life?”

  “Distinctly high. But it includes the cost of travel, and for Jankovic as well. And these are supposed to be men of skill and experience.” The second man was squat and muscular, with a moustache that was neither too individual nor too humble, but trimmed to place him precisely in the hierarchy of his trade or profession. However, his clothes gave no clue to what that was, since he had taken most of them off and was preparing to put on a long thick black cloak. He wasn’t hurrying, because the room was greasy-warm as well as damp.

  “And I hope you understand that, with all the hurry, most of this had to come from the Governor’s fund to promote our folk arts.” They were both speaking the local Slav dialect.

  “The Governor doesn’t care what we do with the money. He certainly doesn’t give a fart for our arts, he just wants to play us off against the Italians. And that’s fine with me: I’m going to have an important Italian played right off the field.”

  “But how do I explain what’s happened to the money?”

  “You’re the Treasurer, what do you usually say? Claim an Italian embezzled it. The rush isn’t my fault, it’s that unburied corpse of a Count suddenly coming up with a real plot for once.”

  “You aren’t going to do anything to him?” The Treasurer became even more worried.

  “No. For him, I need real proof. He’s too much of an ancient monument.” He sounded regretful, all the same. “And he’s been sucking up to the Governor lately. But he can’t be the ring-leader of whatever they’re plotting, not from a table in the San Marco.”

  “So you’re no closer to finding out what that is?”

  “I haven’t found out, anyway. The French boy was just carrying messages he didn’t understand. I had to pretend to be on their side, and he’d have got suspicious if I’d started stubbing out cigars on his balls.” He squinted at his watch, lying on the table, and began buttoning the black cape.

  The Treasurer took a deep breath and said: “Then we – you – are going to have a man done to death without even knowing what he’s guilty of?”

  “I know he’s guilty of trying to start a war between Austria and Italy. What else? – it’s the only way they can ever own Trieste. They may think they can steal the foundations without the house falling down, that the Austrians won’t fight for their only real port, but . . . whoever wins such a war, it won’t be us.”

  He shook his cape fiercely. “This is too damned hot to get angry in. I’m going to boil inside it.” He shook it again to let more air in. “And if sending an interfering Italian by express train to Hell prevents a war, it’s cheap at the price . . . They’ll be here in a few minutes: Jankovic will show them up. You and the money just stay out of sight until we come down again.”

  * * *

  The small room at the top of the tenement was also damp, but at least the broken shutters leaked in a little air that didn’t smell as if a mule had just belched it. It was lit only by a single candle, its flame wavering in the draught. On the table beside it, spread on a black cloth like religious relics, were an ornate dagger, a little wooden cross, a pistol and a small blue bottle.

  The man in the black cape, now wearing an executioner’s hood as well, said in sonorous Italian: “The bottle contains a deadly poison.”

  The other two men looked at it. Both were dark, wearing tightly buttoned black suits and broad-brimmed, high-crowned hats. It was helpful in that light that one was a head taller than the other; his name was Silvio (he said) and he was the one with some brains; now he was looking at the bottle sceptically. In fact it was filled with tap water – but from a tap in the tiny courtyard behind the building, so the masked man reckoned he might have been telling the truth.

  “You will swear,” he said, still keeping his voice low and ponderous. He indicated the smaller man, Bozan. “You will swear first. Repeat after me: I swear by the sun that warms me . . .”

  “I swear by the sun that warms me.” Bozan had no problem in sounding toneless. He spoke seldom, and usually as if his voice and what it was saying were quite separate from anything he might think or feel – if indeed he did either. The fashionable mind-doctors in Vienna would have a banquet with this one, but it was policemen who knew the type and the only cure: on the next train or under it. Then call the doctor.

  “By the earth that nourishes me . . .”
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  “By the earth that nourishes me.”

  “Before God, by the blood of my ancestors . . . On my honour and on my life . . . That I will from this moment until my death . . . Be faithful to the laws of this society—”

  Silvio suddenly burst out: “We didn’t come here to join any fornicating society and promise a load of pigshit! You hired us to do a job. The only thing we’ll swear is that if you don’t come up with the money we’ll stuff you and your society both up the arsehole of your ancestors! Isn’t that right?”

  “Quite right,” Bozan said, just as solemnly as he’d been swearing selfless loyalty a moment before. I was right about him, the masked man thought. In fact I was right about both. He tried to restrain a satisfied smile, then remembered the hood concealed it anyway.

  “But we must be assured of your true dedication to our cause,” he protested.

  “You show us gold and we’ll show you dedication,” Silvio assured him.

  “But the other Committee members of the Ujedinjenje—”

  “Piss on the other Committee members. If they want a load of oath-swearing, let them pick a couple of students who can’t wipe their own arses or recognise a police detective if they fell over him. We’re professional men.”

  The man with the shovel who walks behind the Emperor’s horse has a more prickly pride than the Emperor himself, the hooded man reflected. But he persisted. “I have the first instalment downstairs. In various gold pieces, as you requested. But I must insist that you remember you are working for the Ujedinjenje ili Smrt.” He was determined to get that name into their heads. Into Silvio’s, anyway. “And the vengeance of the Ujedinjenje ili Smrt has a long arm—”

  “And a black hand at the end of it – if you read the newspapers. Is that why it has to turn to us when it needs a proper job done?”

  “Very well. If you will follow me downstairs . . .” Even for that short time he felt uneasy having them behind him.

  * * *

  The vibrations of the Treasurer’s nerves were almost audible as Silvio counted the coins and moved his lips in currency exchanges. In the grey light his face seemed an unfinished sculpture, all the features too prominent and the skin rough and pocked. At last he seemed satisfied with his own arithmetic and pushed the coins over to Bozan, who began to play with them, stacking, shuffling, mixing them, and tipping them to watch the glints. He seemed happy, inasmuch as he seemed anything; his face was round, smooth and frighteningly innocent and untouched.