Gavin Lyall - Honourable Intentions

“Look: we know they’ll be armed and after this morning, they could be jumpy, there’s no saying what could happen.”

“I’m saying it. She don’t get killed. That’s all, and all there is to it.”

Now Jay had become watchful.

“I’m only trying to give us all freedom of action,” Ranklin said patiently. “If we tackle this with divided aims, then-”

“Ye can explain all ye want and talk fairy rings round me, but ’less ye give me yer word the woman don’t get killed, ye do it without me.”

There was a pause, then Ranklin asked: “Why?”

O’Gilroy said doggedly: “I know what we’re in don’t have rules nor laws. But mebbe that means we have to make our own. Sometimes, anyways.”

“So you’re making a rule that-”

“And sometimes it means we should do more thinking than anyone asked us to do when we was soldiers.”

There was silence between them. Not in the cafe: that was filling up as people, all men, drifted in for the French equivalent of afternoon tea. A man who looked like a lawyer was standing at the bar next to one who looked like a house-painter, the current job involving blue paint. The lawyer wasn’t standing too close, but it was still an example of the cafe’s fraternite.

And in their private corner, Jay was finding himself bridging a split in a team that moments ago he had thought legendary. He suggested tentatively: “Could we perhaps redefine the mission as going to rescue her? I mean, we should have an objective – shouldn’t we?”

“And then what have we got?” Ranklin demanded. “A woman whose claim started all this, free to speak out whenever and whatever she likes.”

There was another pause, then Jay said: “You do want her dead, don’t you?”

“What do you want?” Ranklin flared. “ You tell me how else we’re going to kill off this conspiracy?”

Jay searched his mind for an argument that would get through to Ranklin, and hoping he’d found one, began cautiously: “Should we look at it this way? – suppose we killed off Gorkin’s chief witness, couldn’t he make something of that? I mean that whatever he then said she would have said, wouldn’t it have the ring of a deathbed statement?” And when this had come out sounding like good sense, he was emboldened to go on: “And then there’s the Paris police to think about. A shooting match on the barge is going to stir things up a bit. They may not mind a few dead anarchists, but when they establish who she is, I think we’d have some real explaining to do – and that’s just what we don’t want. Isn’t it?”

And that, he thought, is a pretty well-reasoned argument – and to his chagrin, O’Gilroy brushed it a side. “Sure, sure, that’s good thinking, but it’s not what I’m saying. I’m jest asking what’s she done to get killed for? Nobody says she ever killed anyone herself, nor ever like to. Ye said yeself she’s no part of this plot, she’s jest trying to get her boy out of jail, and probly a prisoner herself now. All she’s done is spread talk about yer King, and ye don’t know every word of that isn’t God’s own truth. And is that the reason she deserves killing?”

After a while, Ranklin said quietly: “All right. We rescue her. Where’s the toilette in this place?”

When he had gone, Jay looked queryingly at O’Gilroy. “What’s happened to him?”

“Never ye mind. ‘Tis all right now. Ye heard him, din’t ye? -we rescue the lady. Have ye still got that damn great pistol with ye?”

They had the taxi unload them at the corner of the Avenue d’Allemagne and the Rue de la Moselle, which led down to the bassin quayside. The narrow street ran between big warehouses and was in deep shadow.

“Have we all got pistols close to hand?” Ranklin asked calmly. “And fully loaded?”

Jay nodded. O’Gilroy said: “Got a spare magazine and can have it changed in three seconds. Tell us how long it takes with yer own little popgun.”

Ranklin took his “popgun”, actually a short Bulldog revolver, from his pocket and folded a newspaper over his hand. The simple professionalism of the move did a lot to restore Jay’s faith in the near future. Then they came out into bright sunlight of the quayside itself.

O’Gilroy nodded along it. “ ’Bout a coupla hundred yards down on yer left. Tied up on the far side of one called the Juliette.”

Ranklin set the pace, neither skulking nor hurrying, just businessmen going about their business. They stepped over mooring lines and around piled sacks of cargo until . . .

“She’s gone,” O’Gilroy said. “Moved, anyways.”

“You’re sure?”

“There’s the Juliette.”

“Keep walking. And keep an eye out for her.”

Jay suggested: “We could ask at that cafe.”

But Ranklin had already summed up the cafe and its clientele; this one did not look fraternal. “No. Someone there might tip them off.”

They kept on walking for another quarter of a mile, to the end of the bassin where the quayside merged with the Avenue d’Allemagne, and paused among the more cosmopolitan crowd there. Without jay noticing, Ranklin had pocketed his pistol again.

“We could search the whole bassin, but I don’t see why they’d move at all unless they’re going somewhere else. I think they got scared off by this morning’s events.”

O’Gilroy lit a cigarette. “So now d’ye want to charge into their cafe instead?”

“No, I damned well don’t.” He’d need three times as many men to rush the Deux Chevaliers, and probably wouldn’t do it even then; if anyone was left there, they could be expecting that. “But we may as well look at the place while we’re down here. If you remember where it is, see if you can find a taxi who’ll drive us past it.”

It took O’Gilroy a few minutes, but he came back with a taxi and said: “He’ll do it, but says the excitement’s probly all over now. I asked him what excitement and he don’t really know, but thinks it was police business.”

“Does he mean the shooting this morning?”

“Doubt it. Not in the same street and more’n a quarter-mile away.”

The taxi turned off the Avenue and chugged uphill into the tawdry streets jay had walked that morning. From inside a taxi was a far better way to see them; he’d remember that walk for an awfully long time.

Then they were in a street with railway arches on one side, most filled in with rickety doors and occasional small businesses like a stone-mason’s or jobbing builder’s. On the other side a couple of identical touring cars were parked, and an inner group of arguing men, some in police uniform, surrounded by a ring of gawping locals.

“Apparently not all over,” Ranklin observed.

“There’s my chap from the Surete!” jay exclaimed. “Should we stop?”

“Fine.”

“Police raid,” O’Gilroy said dourly, having an ingrained dislike of police raids.

While Jay chatted to the Surete officer, Ranklin stood in the street, lit his pipe, and looked genially around. O’Gilroy, unwilling to show his face unnecessarily, stayed in the taxi where the depth of the hood put the back seat in permanent shadow. The cafe was in the middle of a jumbled row of houses, was no wider than them, and had its windows – one cracked – mostly blanked out by dirty lace curtains and sports posters. Policemen went in and out, but not with any sense of purpose. To Ranklin, it looked like make-work, as if the raid had found nothing.

Then he became aware of sullen dark eyes watching him from among the spectators, looked again, and recognised Berenice Collomb. The hat was gone, and the coat replaced with a shawl, but it was the same faded green dress and dead-fish pout. He smiled, walked over and raised his hat.