Gavin Lyall - Flight From Honour

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.

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.