The layout of the carriage was simple, although Ranklin didn’t take it all in immediately. Starting from that end there were two rooms, each the full width of the carriage – about nine feet – and over a dozen long. Thereafter, it became more normal, with a row of four sizeable sleeping compartments off a side corridor, and a toilet in the vestibule at the far end.
He was led through the first room, lit only enough for him to avoid a long dining table and its chairs, and into the second. It wasn’t warm, but it looked it: shaded gas mantles glowed from the pillars between the dark blue-curtained windows, reflecting off polished and inlaid woodwork, gilt fittings and etched glasswork.
Amid this plum-cake richness, the only occupant came as a relief because he looked like a cut-out photograph, all black and white. The black was the overcoat and its collar, suit, Homburg hat and slight moustache on the white face above a white scarf. Although he had been seated, he was wearing all this in the compartment temperature. “Good evening. I am Dr Dahlmann, a director of Deutsche Bank.” He bowed slightly and held out a hand.
“Nett, Sie kennen zu lernen, Herr Doktor. Mein Name ist Pat Snaipe, sehr untergeordnet Madchen fur alles vom der Foreign Office.” German isn’t a language for self-deprecation, but Dahlmann’s brief smile suggested he appreciated it. Or he was sympathising with the FO for having such a “dogsbody” on its hands, but that suited Ranklin just as well.
Thereafter they spoke German, which betrayed nothing, since even Snaipe’s dilettante education would have covered that. Dahlmann gestured to a chair. “Sit down, please. I suggest you keep your overcoat on: our service carriage with the boiler has been detached. We will find it tomorrow.”
Ranklin sat and couldn’t help just gazing around. The floor was covered with a thick, richly patterned carpet, probably Turkish. The easy chair he was sitting in was one of half a dozen, all upholstered with floral embroidery, and the walls were padded with lilac-coloured buttoned velvet. But the false ceiling was the real glory. It was totally covered with painted panels of figures set among clouds or fairy-tale landscapes, a mixture of Wagner and classical Greece but with a few non-denominational cherubs thrown in. Each panel was framed by thick, gilded rococo swirls.
In a sympathetic surge of fantasy Ranklin saw this as the original parent of all railway carriages, whose descendants had grown weedy, drab and functional.
Dahlmann had been watching with a tight, proud little smile; it wasn’t his carriage, but it was his Kaiser’s. Then he remembered he was the host. “Would you like a drink? – and something to eat?” He looked around, but could only find the brandy decanter he’d been nibbling at himself.
Ranklin saw a sudden opening. “Why don’t we wait until my servant gets here? – he’ll find whatever there is.”
“You have brought a servant?”
“Of course.”
“But if you are going into the mountains of Turkey with Lady Kelso-”
“Even more important, surely,” Ranklin said cheerily. “I mean, the hotel staffs in such places probably aren’t up to much.”
Faced with that, Dahlmann didn’t know where to begin, so didn’t. He was only a little taller than Ranklin, probably in his fifties, with a squarish face, high cheekbones and a thin nose – and the whole held in constant tension. He was literally tight-lipped, and it gave him a prissy look, as if he were disapproving of your tuppenny overdraft. But if the Deutsche knew what it was doing, there must be more to Dr Dahlmann than first impressions showed.
He finished the subject of O’Gilroy with a warning: “I am afraid you will have to share a sleeping compartment tonight with your servant . . .”
“Oh well, rigours of foreign service, eh?” Ranklin said undaunted. Just then a clatter and a sudden draught showed that O’Gilroy, porters and baggage had arrived. Dahlmann directed that the bags went in the last-but-one compartment.
A couple of minutes later, O’Gilroy appeared. Ranklin introduced them – no handshakes, of course – then said: “Now, be a good fellow and scout about and see if you can raise anything to eat and drink. Try any cupboards next door.” In other words, snoop into every cranny you can while you’ve got an excuse, but O’Gilroy didn’t need telling. “There should be a second carriage attached, but it’s gone off somewhere. Does it,” he asked Dahlmann, to hold him in place, “have a kitchen, too?”
“Naturally. And also a boiler and generator -” he nodded at some dead table lamps which Ranklin hadn’t realised were electric “- and baggage space and a cabin for the staff. Your servant must move in there tomorrow.”
“Splendid. And what’s the plan, then?” Snaipe could show that much curiosity.
“Tomorrow, perhaps later tonight – we must find a train to be attached to, or an engine – we go south to Basle, then to Friedrichshafen, to meet the ferry of Lady Kelso who comes from Romanshorn. Then, I do not know for sure yet. The telegraph . . .” He nodded at the outside world, where others must be taking decisions. Nods, brief and sharp, were part of Dahlmann’s vocabulary, gestures were not.
O’Gilroy came back with a stone jar of pickled herring and half a coffee cake. “And there’s drinks of all sorts, sir. I can’t be reading the labels, but from the smell I can do yez a whisky.”
“Whisky would be splendid,” Ranklin murmured, deciding against herring at one in the morning. “Oh, and we’re going to have to share a compartment tonight. I trust you don’t snore.”
“Living single, nobody’s ever told me, sir,” O’Gilroy said mournfully.
O’Gilroy insisted on clearing up all the cups, glasses and so forth and washing them in the toilet hand-basin – which gave him the run of the whole carriage while Ranklin and Dahlmann chatted between long silences. The banker wasn’t probing and Snaipe wasn’t the inquisitive type, so not much got said. Ranklin and O’Gilroy went to bed about half past one.
The walls of sleeping compartments can be deceptively thin – though these seemed more solid than usual – and they kept their voices down.
“Dahlmann’s in the one next to the room ye was in,” O’Gilroy reported, “and some railway feller between this and that, then the last one’s empty. There’s no papers in the dining room ‘cept some railway maps in German, but there’s a small safe. Locked. Ye can’t say easy how big a safe is from the outside, but I wouldn’t be thinking it could hold that much gold. Ye said ’bout a foot square?”
“The India Office did.” They sat on the bottom bunk measuring small cubes in the air like modest anglers talking about the ones that got away.
O’Gilroy shook his head. “Not that big.”
“Maybe it’s in the detached carriage. Or it’ll come aboard later. Has the safe got a combination lock?”
“It has. How much did ye learn about them?”
“Little enough. But if I get a chance, I’ll try my luck.” But even if the gold were there, what could he do about it? He hadn’t got any lead to substitute: he reckoned he’d need at least a tenth of the total weight, which meant explaining away over thirty pounds of lead if his baggage got searched.
Still, it would be progress of a sort to find the gold was actually on the train.
* * *
Some time in the night – call it three in morning since the middle of the night is always three in the morning – Ranklin heard somebody clump down the corridor and start banging around in the next compartment. He had just dozed off again when, at another three in the morning, an engine or train backed into them with a jolt, paused for an interval of shouting, and jerked them – temporarily – into motion.
He lost count of the threes in the morning after that, but at the last one he realised they were rumbling along steadily if not fast. When he next woke they were stopped again, light was seeping past the blind and O’Gilroy was offering him a cup of coffee.
“We’re at somewhere called Basil, sir. I think it’s in Switzerland.”
“Uh? Oh, Basle. Yes, I think it’s in Switzerland, too, but only just. Hold on, I’ll come down.”