Gavin Lyall - Flight From Honour

“That sounds sensible enough.”

“Yes, only that’s where we come into direct conflict with the Foreign Office.”

They had reached the Mall, wide and serene with no motor-buses and only a few of the more elegant cars among the horse-drawn cabs and carriages. Perhaps the view overlayed memories of the Foreign Office, because Dagner smiled and said: “Ah, this is more the London I remember . . . Wouldn’t it be more sensible if we came directly under the Prime Minister or Cabinet?”

Ranklin wagged his head vaguely. “They probably think spying belongs in a cheap novel – as the FO does. After all, they could have started the Bureau ages ago if they’d wanted to.”

Dagner’s frown was as brief as his smiles. “Yet in India, the Game was well respected – accepted as a part of policy. Our civil servants were as petty-minded as any, of course, but nobody denied our value.”

“But you were only spying on natives. We spy on gentlemen.”

Dagner stopped dead in the middle of the pavement. “Is that a serious remark, Captain?‘”

A bit surprised, Ranklin said: “Certainly it is. At the top levels, all European society’s intertwined. It isn’t just royalty marrying royalty, the aristocracy does it, too.”

“Yes, I know all that. So-?” Dagner started walking again.

“But also our politicians and diplomatists and top civil servants mostly spent a year at Heidelberg or the Sorbonne, and their top dogs were at Oxford or Cambridge for a while, and even if they don’t intermarry, they’re still in and out of each others’ houses for holidays and shooting-parties and the like. And they don’t like us spying on their cousins and old college chums.”

He realised Dagner was giving him a steady and thorough stare. “And do you share that viewpoint, Captain?” he asked gently.

Ranklin sighed. “It bothered me to start with. But as a Gunner I’m prepared to kill those people. Why should I jib at spying on them?”

Perhaps that didn’t sound quite enthusiastic enough, because Dagner said gently: “I believe we belong to an honourable profession, Captain.”

“We belong to a necessary one. I don’t know that honour comes into it.”

Dagner might have been about to say more, but didn’t. Instead: “ I had a chat with O’Gilroy . . . It seems that this Italian senator wants to meet someone from the Bureau. What’s your feeling?”

“I’d say Yes, he sounds intriguing. Would you like me to . . . ?”

Dagner shook his head slowly. “No, I think I’ll call on him myself – he’s staying at the Ritz, I think? It’ll do me good to start meeting people in European politics . . . shan’t belong to the Bureau, of course, just be a civil servant in touch with them . . . D’you think a rumpled, tweedy academic sort? – no, an Italian probably wouldn’t get the point. Old-fashioned, frock-coat and topper? No, that wouldn’t be right for an Italian industrialist either. I think he’d talk most freely to someone brisk in a business suit. D’you agree?”

Ranklin just mumbled, taken aback by the confident way Dagner had run through the parts he might play. It was a reminder that the man was a true professional, and that his ‘attitude’ might span both creeping up the Khyber Pass in a turban and calling at the Ritz in a business suit.

With that decided, Dagner’s mind took a new turn. “About O’Gilroy . . . clearly you have no problem relying on a man with his . . . ah, background and connections.”

Ranklin took a deep breath. “If you’re asking about his attitude, he believes in a free Ireland and isn’t going to stop. But the House of Commons believes that, too. It’s the Lords that’s blocking Home Rule. I’m not pretending O’Gilroy hasn’t done anything illegal in the past; I know damn well he has. But I’d guess it was mostly for the fun of it – and that’s really why he’s working for us now. And my only worry about his old friends, Fenians or whatever, is that they’ll kill him on sight. That’s why I’d rather we were sent to Europe again as soon as possible.”

Dagner pondered this. “You don’t make his commitment to our cause sound very deep-rooted.”

Ranklin shrugged. “If you asked O’Gilroy to stand up for the King and Empire I think he’d more likely fall off his chair laughing.” Dagner almost lost control of his expression; his face froze for a moment. Ranklin went on: “On the other hand, if I wanted somebody to guard my back in a dark alley I’d choose O’Gilroy any time. He’s. . . I’d say he’s loyal to the day,” he summed up. “Probably, by your standards, we’re both pretty incompetent. He doesn’t know foreign countries or languages, I don’t know how to survive in dark alleys. Together we may add up to one passable spy.”

Despite himself, Dagner smiled faintly at that concept. “Hm. Being, as it were, Siamese twins among our agents could be seen as rather inflexible, I fear.”

But we’re what you’ve got, Ranklin thought grimly. Us and the four new boys and an unknown, uncontactable number of agents abroad. What else do you expect in a Bureau so new and with SO many powerful enemies among its friends?

However, he said nothing because Dagner was what he’d got, and was very glad of it. For a grim week, it had seemed that he himself, with experience as an adjutant and a willingness to make himself unpopular by organising people, might be deputising for the Commander. And while it was one thing to take over a battery or even a brigade that had the impetus of regulations and traditions to keep it rolling along, even with a nincompoop in charge, it was quite another to take over the Bureau from the man who had invented it only three years ago.

No, Ranklin was very glad that Dagner was here.

The little triangle of Clerkenwell enclosed by Rosebery Avenue and the Clerkenwell and Farringdon Roads was an odd patch of short steep hills in an otherwise generally flat area. Perhaps because of that, the recent tide of rebuilding had flowed around it, leaving it as it had been for the past half-century, London’s Little Italy.

There was nothing Italianate about the architecture; in fact, there wasn’t much architecture about Eyre Street Hill, Back Hill, Little Bath Street and the rest. But dingy houses, cracked paving and uneven cobbles are international, and the shop signs, the bright headscarves, the cooking smells and the chatter around the shopfronts were comfortingly Italian.

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.