Gavin Lyall - Flight From Honour

Everyone was briefly still and silent. Then they all began at once. Ranklin leant over to whisper to O’Gilroy and get a reply.

He overrode the hubbub. “O’Gilroy says he’d been told to drop the leaflets over the old town, around the Castle. So the Lewis guns’ll be on the battlements there, manned by the Castle guard, not the coming-and-going garrison.”

Dagner said: “Captain Ranklin, these are fantasies. But they come very close to that sabotage you spoke of.”

“No, Major, I know this. First I thought those guns must be for the aeroplane, really they’re for shooting it down. Falcone sent them to the Count who presented them to the Austrian Commander.”

Falcone waved the idea away. “Ridiculous! Quite impossible! Would I arrange for such a popular patriot as Gabriele d’Annunzio to be-”

“That’s just what makes him a good sacrifice. And I was in jail with the Count yesterday. I heard all about him sucking up to the Austrians so they’d think the gift of the guns was just part of that, not its purpose. But when he thought of being in their hands when they realised they’d been tricked into publicly slaughtering a great Italian, he was going berserk, and he talked . . .” He delicately left the sentence open.

“Hold hard,” O’Gilroy said. “Ye say the aeroplane was going to be shot down by machine-guns?” He turned on Falcone. “ And what about the pilot? ”

Falcone licked his lips but said nothing, watching Dagner. Very deliberately, O’Gilroy took a pistol from his pocket and laid it beside his cup. “Seems like a feller needs some protection around here.”

Corinna suddenly caught on, but turned her fury on Dagner. “D’you mean it would have been Andrew? ”

She pitched her coffee at his waistcoat, and at that moment d’Annunzio, freshly lavendered and in an uncreased cream linen suit, came onto the terrace. He stopped and spread his arms delightedly. “Ah, such drama! And so early! Are these-” he gestured at Ranklin and Dagner; “-yet more English secret agents?”

“Yes they are,” Corinna snapped, “and since the plot was to get you bumped off, you’d better sit down and listen.”

Ranklin reassured her: “I’m afraid Major Dagner didn’t know, or he wouldn’t have volunteered to go. He – all of us – were being used by Falcone and the Count.”

Perhaps Dagner winced at that. Corinna switched her glare to Falcone, and asked O’Gilroy: “Are you thinking of shooting him?”

“Oh, I’m thinking of it, all right,” he said softly, and picked up the pistol – though perhaps to stop her grabbing it.

Falcone still didn’t say anything. And unless we shoot him, Ranklin thought, there’s really nothing we can do to him. Except leave him here with the wreckage. And bodies.

D’Annunzio had been enjoying himself without in the least understanding. “Now please, someone explain to me.”

Ranklin stood up. “They planned to have you killed over Trieste, made a martyr like Oberdan, that’s all. Don’t fret about it.” He patted d’Annunzio’s shoulder, leaving a smudge of powder-smoke and oil on the fresh suit. “Come on, let’s get away from here. Major?”

Corinna pushed back her chair so firmly that it fell over. Dagner got to his feet slowly, dreamily, making no move to mop the coffee off his front. “Then he was using me . . . I let him use the whole service . . .”

Ranklin gripped his arm and he let himself be led away from the table. “In Europe things are . . . well, perhaps different.”

“I thought we had a chance to . . . Was I really so wrong, Captain? Was my whole vision wrong?”

“No, no, of course not,” Ranklin reassured him desperately. “Let’s just get away. ”

A spark of life seemed to re-enter Dagner. He smiled wryly. “And then what? Do you leave me alone in the library with a pistol on the desk?”

“For God’s sake!” Ranklin felt everything was sliding out of control.

Then Corinna said gently: “Why don’t you just get back home to your wife, Major Dagner?”

He smiled with relief at the thought. “Yes. Yes, of course. She’ll understand. . .” And he seemed to relax.

Corinna must have packed like an impatient burglar; less than ten minutes later, servants were carrying her bags downstairs and out into the garden, where threads of smoke were rising from the steam-launch.

Signora Falcone met them in the hall still wearing last night’s evening dress. But although it looked as limp as yesterday’s bouquet, she herself was very poised, even imperious. “I have told Matteo not to load your bags. I have learned what you were saying, but I said you must not leave before noon and that still holds good.” Matteo stepped out behind her, squat and solid, sort-of-casually holding a shotgun.

“Oh no ,” Ranklin said wearily. “It’s all over. Go and ask your husband.”

“He’s a sick man, easily depressed. But we still have the aeroplane-”

“Ye don’t, ye know,” O’Gilroy said. “On account I smashed it up, landing in the dark. Only the wheels and propeller and a strut and the cowling, but a week’s work, mebbe.”

Corinna and Signora Falcone spoke at once; the consensus was: “You mean all this time . . . ?”

“The Captain said to keep quiet, he wanted to hear the rest of the plan out. And we was dashing to yer rescue.”

For the first time, they saw Signora Falcone lose her elegance. She sagged, hunched as if she suddenly wore a rucksack of rocks, staring at the floor. Then in a tired, soft voice she spoke to Matteo and he laid the shotgun aside.

O’Gilroy took his hand out of his pocket.

“And now,” Signora Falcone whimpered, “you’re leaving me with all . . . this.” A gesture scooped in the whole night’s happenings.

“I’m sure you’ll manage,” Corinna said crisply. “And I shall watch your husband’s political career with great interest.”

Then slapped her hard enough to spin her round.

The baggage was already loaded into the launch. Ranklin peered under the canvas canopy. “Where’s Major Dagner?”

O’Gilroy shrugged and indicated his own small bag. “I was packing. Thought he came down ahead of us.”

Corinna turned her exam Italian on the servants. After a bit of gesticulation, she reported: “They saw him going down the garden ten minutes ago. Towards the river.”

The three of them instinctively looked down into the slow, placid, deep Brenta.

Ranklin said: “Oh Christ.”

O’Gilroy said: “He’s an expert. If he don’t want to he found . . .” He shrugged.

Corinna said softly: “Maybe he did go home to his wife.”

The Commander still had the curled moustache he had grown for his curtailed Bavarian holiday, and a new mannerism of stroking it every few seconds – either from pride or to make sure it hadn’t escaped.

“Why the devil have you written all this down?” he grumbled, waving Ranklin’s report. “Did you expect me to leave this lurking in the files?”

“No, sir. I expect you’ll burn it. But it helped clarify my thoughts, getting it all onto paper.”

“And at the end of it all – making the Bureau a legend and a Great Power and believing his wife was still alive and storming a police station – you don’t conclude the man was mad ?”

“No, sir. I think perhaps he’d been a sp- an agent too long. Living in a make-believe world . . . And he talked about us having a mission-”

“Dangerous,” the Commander grunted.

“-and the loneliness of the job . . . Perhaps pretending to himself his wife was still alive made it less lonely.” It sounded pretentious as he said it, so he added a shrug to water it down.