Flight From Honour (7 page)

Relaxing as the familiar sounds and smells were, the scene wasn’t exactly the Corso Umberto Primo. Bozan said nothing, but his expression said it all, and Silvio nodded. “Naples without the weather.”

“Why didn’t we stay with Janko?” Bozan whined. “I’m sure
he’s
at a proper hotel.” Tiredness made him fractious, and it had been a long, complicated day.

“Because we don’t want to be seen together. This way, we’ll be with our own people. And perhaps they’ll be more help than he was.”

“You should have let me kill the Senator in the street at . . . where was it?”

“Brussels. I agree, but we had to let Jankovic try his clever bit first.
Now
we’ll do it our way.”

He stopped by an old man sitting on a doorstep smoking a reed pipe and asked politely for directions to an address in Back Hill Street.

The old man’s eyes wrinkled warily; it was obvious that he knew the address, and just as obvious that he knew it wasn’t an address to be doled out to strangers. But strangers to what? These two, with their expensive Italian shoes, could well belong to what the Back Hill Street house belonged to, and it was politic to help such men. And then forget all about it.

Anyway, no names had been mentioned, and an address is just an address; they’d find it in the end anyway. He directed them, and when they had gone, knocked out his pipe and faded back into the tenement building.

Ten minutes later they were sitting in a surprisingly and floridly luxurious first-floor room with tiny cups of real Italian coffee by their chairs. Their host, whom Silvio tactfully addressed as just “Padrone”, was dressed in severe black like a village elder from the South, with a white moustache and olive skin. But the face, while heavily lined and thin, was still blunt, not sharp. He might never have worked in the stony fields, but it took generations to breed out the farm.

He was being elaborately welcoming, but also probing. “And if there is anything I can help with . . .”

“We need to find a man, a senator from Turin, who is visiting London . . .”

“That may be difficult for strangers in a big city. He is rich, this . . . ?”

“Giancarlo Falcone. Yes, he is rich. In Brussels he stayed at the Palace Hotel . . .”

Bozan said: “You should have let me kill him there.”

It was a swipe with a club to the delicate cobweb of unfinished sentences and non-commitment. Silvio smiled wanly. “Bozan is somewhat impetuous.”

The Padrone nodded gently, his own dark eyes quite as blank in their way as the innocent ones of the young assassin. “I understand. It is no matter. If the senator likes the best hotels, it becomes easier, but London still has many such places. And this is a private matter . . . ?”

“Only a small matter of business, you understand . . .”

“Then anything you wish, you have only to ask.” In other words, the Padrone would have been wary of interfering in a feud, but from a business killing he felt free to grab as much profit as he could reach.

“You are most kind. But even in business there is still a question of honour.” Or: we’ll pay for help, but we promised to do the job and it’s ours.

“That is understood. But first, you wish a place to stay, safe and comfortable?”

“We would be most grateful for your advice.”

The old man stared at the far wall. “There is the house of my son, but he has many children . . . perhaps that of my brother-in-law, only my sister is sick . . . I think the house of my daughter’s husband . . .”

Silvio smiled outside gritted teeth. They would end up where they were put; the recital had been a warning that the Padrone’s family was all around them. He waited.

Bored with the silence, or perhaps because he’d forgotten he’d said it before, Bozan asked: “Why didn’t you let me kill him there?”

The Padrone was listening anyway, so Silvio explained: “We had another man, some Slav, with fancy ideas about arranging an aeroplane to crash, and we had to let him try his way first.”

“And the aeroplane did not crash?”

“Oh yes, it crashed and the driver died – but the Senator was not in it. So clever. And the Senator ran to here and now he has, perhaps, a bravo with him.”

“I can kill them both,” Bozan said indifferently.

Silvio wasn’t too sure of that. What he said was: “Perhaps now he is in England he will feel safe . . .”

The Padrone asked: “He has bravoes, this Senator?”

“In Brussels, there was a man . . .” Silvio was inwardly furious at Bozan for betraying more of their problems. But oddly, it didn’t quite work that way.

The Padrone had been thinking. “London is a city made of many villages . . . This is . . .
our
village.” He had almost said ‘mine’. “If an important Italian is killed, and it seems it is done by other Italians . . . the police may come first to look here . . .”

Ah-
hah
, Silvio thought: you’re worried that the police will come and shake your pisspot little kingdom until it spills on your shoes.
I
understand.

“You can be sure we will do nothing to cause you difficulties,” he said, to show he now knew they could.

The Padrone smiled and inclined his head graciously. “Good. Now, the matter of finding the Senator . . .”

And some people thought killing a man was simple.

7

Apart from the Bureau, Whitehall Court was mainly expensive service flats and small exclusive clubs, ideal neighbours for not poking their noses into each other’s affairs. One of the flats had been leased by the Bureau after the tenant had died suddenly, possibly from a surfeit of William Morris floral wallpaper. It was intended for agents ‘passing through’, but now used by Ranklin and O’Gilroy, who were normally abroad but in any case couldn’t afford anywhere of their own. They also acted as informal night-watchmen to the office upstairs, fielding out-of-hours telephone calls and cablegrams, without making any fetish of staying in to wait for them. The Bureau was serious, but not oppressively so.

O’Gilroy was still out on the shadowing exercise, so Ranklin made a pot of tea – which just about exhausted his cooking skills but was all the flat was equipped to do anyway – and sat down with an evening paper to read about the peace conference between Turkey and Bulgaria that had just begun in Constantinople. So that, he reflected, was probably the War Season over for the year. Nobody wanted another winter campaign, while the memory of last year was still strong. But come next summer, in 1914, when the roads had dried out for artillery and supply wagons, and the sun brought delusions of immortality and everybody knew that
this
time it would be quick and almost bloodless . . .

O’Gilroy came in, took one look at his expression and said: “Jayzus, ye’ve been reading the newspapers again.” He reached for the decanters on a side table. “Whyn’t ye try dying of drink? – might even be slower.”

Sipping his sherry, Ranklin gloomily agreed that solitary newspaper reading was indeed a destructive vice. You needed someone with O’Gilroy’s buoyant cynicism to put things in perspective. “So, how did our new boys do at shadowing?”

“An omnibus’d do it more invisible. But mebbe I got something into their heads. They get the idea of it quick enough – keeping a pocket of change for buses and cabs, and paying for yer tea when ye get it so yer away fast, stuff like that, but are they thinking ahead on what a man might be doing next? The devil they are, and them close up when they should be far back and t’other way besides.”

“We all have to learn,” Ranklin said complacently, remembering that a year ago he wouldn’t have known what O’Gilroy was talking about.

O’Gilroy gave him a look sharp enough to puncture even a Gunner’s condescension, but said only: “Other ways, though, they’re sharp fellers – for officers.”

“Well, if they volunteered for the Bureau, they’re hardly likely to be average regimental types.” And certainly not above-average, he added silently. Intelligence work was reckoned, correctly, to be a promotional dead end.

O’Gilroy looked at him curiously, but asked: “And where’ll we be eating? I hear there’s some good places around London.”

There were indeed, and in happier times he’d have enjoyed taking O’Gilroy out to rediscover some old haunts, particularly if the Bureau would foot the bill. But London’s big Irish population made any unnecessary venture out of doors an extra risk for O’Gilroy – the key word being unnecessary. Ranklin drew a clear distinction between risk in the line of duty, like that shadowing exercise, and risk just in finding a meal.

He sighed; why the devil couldn’t they be posted back to Paris, where there was no problem and they were perhaps a day closer to any European trouble that might brew up? And where you could actually make money on your subsistence allowance because the pettifogging accountants didn’t know how cheaply you could eat well in the little bistros, even in the tourist season. Then he stopped, a bit ashamed of his own thoughts.

“We can eat downstairs,” he said gruffly, “or have something sent up. We’d better not be far from the office. The Commander might telephone or cable just to see if anybody’s minding the shop.”

O’Gilroy, who knew perfectly well the true reason, shrugged.
“Things go on like this, whyn’t we buy a cooking book?” But that
was a joke: the idea of men knowing how to cook (except badly, over a camp-fire) was as alien to Irish back streets as it was to English drawing-rooms. “All right, have ’em send it up – but ye don’t read newspapers over yer food. Ye can tell me something about Italian affairs instead.”

This surprised Ranklin as much as it pleased him. O’Gilroy’s usual question about a new country – after asking about the food and drink – was whether it was friendly or (potentially) enemy, disregarding subtler shadings. Ranklin had tried to develop his interest in Europe by pinning up a large map – which also hid several square feet of wallpaper – and chattering about foreign news over breakfast. But he hadn’t thought it had taken hold.

“I can try, anyway,” Ranklin agreed. “First let’s order dinner.”

*        *        *

The deceased tenant had left behind a mahogany Victorian dining table so large that if it fell through the floor (which seemed quite possible) it wouldn’t stop before the basement. The size had amused O’Gilroy so much that at first he had insisted they ate at opposite ends and called for each other to walk along and pass the salt. Luckily that had palled and they now sat sensibly around one corner, and O’Gilroy got his amusement from Ranklin putting on a velvet smoking jacket so the waiter wouldn’t think they had gone completely native.

“I don’t know any detail about current Italian politics,” Ranklin began, “but I can give you the general position. The first thing is that although Italy
looks
very much like one country—” he nodded at the map; “—with all that coastline and the Alps sealing off the top, it’s only actually been united as one for fifty years.

“And I’d guess that’s the key to Italian policy. It’s trying a bit of everything because it just isn’t
used
to being one country with a single policy yet. One faction pushed the government into grabbing some bits of Africa off the Turks, and others want Nice and Corsica back from the French, and Trent and Trieste from the Austrians. And your Senator Falcone feels he can go swanning round Europe buying aeroplanes for the Italian Army on his own initiative. Everybody’s pushing their own policies and the Government isn’t used to resisting the pressures yet. It’s unstable and that could be dangerous.”

He paused to disentangle a fishbone from the back of his tongue. No matter how carefully he, or the waiter, filtered a Dover sole or any other fish, Ranklin always got at least one bone. But who was he to question God’s ways?

O’Gilroy watched admiringly. “Ye do that real polite, Matt. Jest what does being a senator mean? Is it like a lord?”

Ranklin trawled his memory. “I think it means a lord-for-life. The King appoints successful public men, industrialists and so on, to the Senate. That sounds like your man, doesn’t it?”

O’Gilroy nodded. “So whose side’s Italy on?”

Ranklin sighed. Why did everyone assume a country had to be on one “side” or another? It was like a form-room feud among eleven-year-olds. Or, he concluded gloomily, like modern Europe. “Theoretically, she’s allied with Germany and Austro-Hungary, but I doubt Italy’s worked out where her self-interest really lies, and meanwhile Austria’s her traditional enemy.”

He got up and tracked his finger down the long Adriatic, in places less than a hundred miles wide, that separated Italy from the Dalmatian coast and the witches’ cauldron of the Balkans behind it. “You can see why Italy has to worry about who owns that coastline. And Austria owns both Pola and Trieste – which is mostly Italian inhabitants, I think – right opposite Venice and only four hours’ steaming time away.”

“An hour by aeroplane.”

“If that matters.” Ranklin was getting fed up with aeroplanes creeping into every conversation. He sat down again.

O’Gilroy went on gazing at the map. “And ye said Italy was into Africa?”

“A couple of years ago they invaded Libya, which was sort-of-Turkish. The Turks pulled out, but the local Arabs went on fighting back. Still are, I believe.”

“Now—” O’Gilroy waved his fork to halt Ranklin whilst he finished a mouthful of his steak-and-kidney pie; “—now was that where they used aeroplanes in war the first time?”

Ranklin was about to declare a total ban on aeronautics, then recalled reading something about that. “Ye-es, I think so. I don’t think they contributed much . . . But,” he admitted, “the desert
would be a good place for aerial scouting
.”

“Falcone was telling about it. Him and other fellers with money got together with some aviators and made up a squadron – called it a ‘flotilla’ – to send to Africa.”

“Very patriotic of him,” Ranklin said, thinking it the sort of romantic but useless gesture Italians did so well.

“They was shooting from the aeroplanes as well as scouting.”

“A great help that must have been,” Ranklin said, imagining aiming a rifle from a moving aeroplane.