He scrambled down the ladder from the top bunk and tweaked aside the blind. They were in another marshalling yard and there was a drizzle with lumps in it that could have been half-hearted snow. He shivered. “Give me my dressing-gown.”
“Ye’d be warmer if ye got dressed properly, sir,” O’Gilroy said censoriously, but passing the gown. “’Tis past nine o’clock.”
“So?” Ranklin felt that Snaipe wouldn’t be an early riser. Anyway, what was the hurry? – they were where they wanted to be, and comfortably helpless. All decisions were out of their hands. He took a swallow of coffee; it wasn’t more than warm, but surprisingly good. “Is there anything to eat?”
“They had some stuff sent in from the station. All cold, supposed to be cold, I mean, sir.” O’Gilroy refused to get used to the Continental idea of starting the day without hot food.
In fact, Ranklin got dressed rather quicker than he’d originally planned, having remembered he’d lose less blood if he shaved while the carriage was stopped. The hot tap wasn’t working, of course, but O’Gilroy conjured a pitcher of luke-warm water from somewhere.
Well before he reached the dining compartment at the far end he could hear a difference of opinion going on. It turned out to be two men in different coloured railway uniforms stabbing forefingers at a map, displaying sheaves of paper and conversing as if they were a hundred yards apart. It so much reminded Ranklin of a tactical discussion between infantry and cavalry that he felt quite at home.
The exchange faded to mere argument at the far end of the table while he helped himself from the jug of coffee, platters of cold meat and cheese and a basket of varicoloured bread at the near end. And looked around, casually, for the safe O’Gilroy had spotted last night.
At last he realised he was standing right by it, a black-and-gold cube whose outside was no more than twelve inches on a side, sitting on the floor under a small vertical bookcase and almost certainly too small for the gold. Probably it was a permanent fixture for when this was part of the Kaiser’s train and there were state documents to lock away. He went back to eat in the saloon and gaze out of the window at what was still a Swiss marshalling yard in the drizzle.
He had never particularly liked Switzerland, being unable to quite shed the English feeling that it was the duty of foreigners to be colourful, lively and unreliable, at all of which the Swiss failed miserably. But they were only here, he assumed, because at this point Swizerland spread across the natural frontier of the Rhine and trapped a few square miles of Germany as North Basle. Not that frontiers meant much in this part of the world anyway; nobody had asked for his passport and probably wouldn’t as long as he stayed aboard.
Perhaps it would have been different if they had been carrying ?20,000 in gold coin; surely Customs would have been mildly interested. But then they’d probably have gone a different route, staying inside Germany.
He had just lit a cigarette when a sudden clattering and clumping heralded a procession of Dahlmann, a tall man with a black-grey beard, and three porters struggling in the narrow doorways with luggage. They went straight through into the corridor. Apparently released by this arrival, the two railway officials appeared outside the window, voices back at full strength and backed by flag-waving and the toot of a guard’s horn. Soon after, they were jerked into motion.
Dahlmann came back and collapsed into a chair. “The motor-car,” he said firmly, “is a wonderful invention. It does not run on rails. It can go when it wants and stop when it wants. And pass other motor-cars in safety.” He gave Ranklin a prim smile before tightening his face up again. “Now we are to be attached to an Eil-Zug that will take us to Singen. It is the best we can do.”
“Wonderful,” Ranklin murmured. Eil-Zug, with the international deceitfulness of all railways, meant “fast train” without telling you there were two faster types and only one slower.
Then the bearded man came back and they stood up for Dahlmann’s introductions. “Zurga, may I introduce the Honourable Patrick Snaipe of His Britannic Majesty’s Diplomatic Service? Zurga Bey, of His Imperial Majesty’s Consular Service.”
They shook hands. Zurga was considerably taller and leaner than them, wearing a thick, tweedy German knickerbocker suit that didn’t make him look in the least German.
“Zurga Bey is coming with us to Constantinople,” Dahlmann explained, “and then to the south with you and Lady Kelso. He knows Miskal Bey, I think?”
“By repute only.”
It was time to plant a first impression of Snaipe on Zurga. So, while Ranklin knew just who Miskal was – though hardly anything about him – he looked hopefully blank.
Dahlmann saw this and said: “The man who kidnapped the railwaymen. The whole reason we are-”
“Oh, the Pasha.”
This genuinely annoyed Dahlmann, but Zurga was only amused. “The newspapers think everyone in Turkey is a pasha. In truth, a pasha is a general or a governor, a bey is a colonel or the vali of a district, after that everyone is effendi.” Such rank-consciousness was perhaps inevitable in such a bureaucratic country.
“Miskal is Bey because he was a colonel, once,” Zurga went on. “Now he has only the authority of kaimakam. Chief of a village. He is an Arab -” that was no compliment “- and supporter of Sultan Abdul Ahmet, so naturally the Committee could not trust him, and made him to retire. There are many like him, just important in one little bit of country.”
Except that little bit of country is the one you need to blast a rail tunnel through.
During this, the carriage had been shunted back and forth, but now it seemed to be picking up speed steadily. The marshalling yard narrowed and vanished, trees replaced houses and glimpses of the Rhine appeared between them. It was about the width of the Thames at London and full with fast brown water flecked with white, like teeth; beyond it, the wooded hills looked pallid in the drizzle.
The Wurttemberg State Railways official came in, dabbing rain from his wide blonde moustache and announced that they were on their way to Friedrichshafen via Singen, on time. Dahlmann offered him coffee, he accepted and sat down in a permanent manner.
This rather put a stopper on the conversation until Zurga switched to English on the quite blatant assumption that the railwayman wouldn’t understand. “Do you come all the way into the mountains?” His English was nowhere as good as his German, which had been fluent, better than Ranklin’s.
“Oh yes. Wherever Lady Kelso goes, I tag along.”
“It will be cold. Still snow, I think. Do you have good clothes?”
“Warm ones? I expect so. I told my man to pack whatever I’d need.”
Ranklin wondered if he’d overdone the casual Snaipeish-ness, since Zurga began to study him carefully. He could only gaze blandly back. Behind the short wiry beard, Zurga had a big sharp nose in a triangular face, rather like an Italian cat and typically Turkish so far. But the face was flatter, the eyes wider spaced, almost Eastern. But despite a reputation for being nasty to minority races, the Turks had more mixed blood than they usually acknowledged, and they had originally come from further east anyway. In Ranklin’s memory the beard was odd, usually worn only by older men and mullahs.
And unlike Ranklin and Dahlmann, who both wore their overcoats firmly buttoned up – they were too few in that big compartment to add anything to the temperature – Zurga seemed happy lounging back in his knickerbocker suit with even the jacket unbuttoned.
“You’re a Consul, are you?” Ranklin asked. “Jolly good. Are you stationed in Basle?”
“No. I am in Frankfurt. But I was travelling in the Black Forest when the message was to meet this train.”
“Ah. Nice country, there.” Their route up the Rhine was skimming the west and southern edges of the Forest.