“There’ll be one wherever the Railroad’s reached on either side.”
“Sure . . . But guns alone won’t do it,” O’Gilroy said. “Never mind what the Captain would say. If’n that monastery’s like I’d think it is, thick stone, those little mountain popguns won’t knock it down. Not in a month. Not in a year. The bandit fellers’ll hide in the cellars – I never yet heard of a monastery didn’t have cellars – all snug and sound.”
“Then-”
“-only they can’t do that if there’s troops likely to come charging in the front door. So they’ve got to stick their heads up and start getting them blowed off. That’s when ye get the difference between a monastery and a fort: a fort’s built to be shooting back when it’s being shot at.”
Corinna nodded. “So there’ll have to be troops as well. How many?”
“Dunno. Haven’t seen the place. But not less’n a hundred, a half-company, anyways.”
“A hundred soldiers . . . There’s probably garrisons in the towns around there, Mersina and Adana.” She assembled the thoughts in her mind. “And how much of this d’you think Beirut Bertie knows?”
“I reckon he started the whole kidnap-ransom end of it. . . He didn’t know ’bout Zurga, not before he left, but the woman keeps his house in Constantinople, she worked it out and was going to telegraph him. Now I wouldn’t be knowing how much she can say in a telegram, with the Turks reading it-”
Corinna shook her head, dismissing the problem. “If she can go through the French Embassy they can legally use code to their vice-consulate in Mersina. They might even get direct to the ship he’s on if it’s a French one, and it could be. One way or another, I think we assume he knows what she knows. Did that include the artillery?”
O’Gilroy swayed his head uncertainly. “Dunno . . . I don’t think she knew Zurga was a gunner, jest an officer. And anyways she’d have to guess about them boxes being mountain guns, like I did, but – begging yer pardon – it doesn’t seem a thing a woman would guess at.”
Normally Corinna bristled at remarks like that, but in all honesty she couldn’t this time. She herself wouldn’t have guessed it in a month of Sundays. “Then what d’you think Bertie will do?”
“If he’s going there, it’s surely to see Miskal. Now he can warn him they’re setting Zurga on him, but not about the guns.”
Corinna nodded. “Then – I hate to say this – doesn’t that make Bertie at least temporarily a good guy and if we meet, you’re going to have to postpone hitting him with an axe?”
O’Gilroy nodded – grudgingly, since Bertie’s attitude to him wouldn’t have changed.
“And what,” she went on, “are you going to do?”
“Get to the Railway camp and warn the Captain – if’n he hasn’t gone to see Miskal already.”
She considered this. “But if he has gone, our Turkish chums could start bombarding the place when they’re still there?”
“Like I say, I’m not thinking it’s likely-”
“How do you know? You only have to make one wrong guess and she’ll be blown to bits.”
“Now jest hold on.” O’Gilroy felt he had been pushed, not fallen, into a trap. “The way I see it, the whole idea’s they get their own fellers away from there, that’s what the ransom’s for, before they start shooting. And getting them away means getting her’n the Captain away, too.”
Corinna was silent for a while. Then she said, more gently: “I spend my life helping people put together deals – agreements. Because that’s what they are, they want to agree because it’ll be good for both of them. And these are honourable people I’m talking about, doing business in a familiar way, wanting everything clear and above-board. And have you any idea how much sweat and fine print we have to go through and then how often it goes wrong in some particular?
“Now, here we have a rather different situation, on account it starts with a kidnapping and shooting, which is not a normal basis for agreement. But on top of that, there’s you and Matt trying to foul it up, and Bertie trying to foul it up, and now this Tornado character bringing in artillery and troops to foul it up de luxe and -” she threw her hands in the air “- just don’t tell me this is all somehow going to go right. This could be a catastrophe to make Noah think he just stepped in a puddle!”
But O’Gilroy didn’t seem as impressed as she’d intended him to be, and she realised how pointless it was to talk to him of agreements and above-board deals. His life simply hadn’t been like that.
“All right,” she said. “But can we agree there’s things we can’t know or guess at?”
O’Gilroy shrugged and then nodded.
“Still,” she conceded, “I do know the ransom is real. So I dare say we can count on them getting that to Miskal.”
“And probly getting it back again,” O’Gilroy suggested. “Shells don’t kill gold.”
No, she thought, this is not my world of gentlemen’s agreements.
* * *
Even with the Captain and First Officer joining them at dinner they were still a small camp-fire group eating in the wide desert of a dining-saloon that could have seated twenty easily. Watching Lady Kelso as she smiled, listened, and commented in good German, Ranklin tried to imagine her at a real camp-fire in a real desert. He couldn’t, though he was sure she would have been equally at home. The calm weather, presumably why the officers were there, had also been good for the cooking and German white wine didn’t suffer from storms anyway.
Streibl was nervous and self-contained throughout the meal. Ranklin left him to the First Officer opposite, who tried hard but didn’t get much beyond With Survey and Shovel Through East Africa. They went up to the saloon proper for coffee, one cigarette and one glass of cognac, then the officers clicked their heels and left. Almost immediately Streibl decided he had some papers to read, and went to his cabin.
“Yes, I don’t think he does want us cross-questioning him,” Lady Kelso said. “What on earth does a man like that read himself to sleep with?”
“Der Kinderbuch von five-eighths hexagonal nuts and bolts?”
She laughed. “Of course.” She looked around the big, officially comfortable, saloon. It was arranged like a club-room, for a large party that might want to split into smaller conversational groups; unfocussed. “Can’t we make this place look a bit more cheerful?” She turned on the only light that wasn’t on already, a standing lamp bolted to the floor near a long leather sofa. Ranklin found a panel of switches and played around with them until he had the sofa isolated in light and just a few small wall lamps glowing between the portholes.
“Well done,” she pronounced, and sat at one end of the sofa. She didn’t sprawl as Corinna would have done, just relaxed her neat little body. “So we’ll be at the Railway camp by this time tomorrow-”
“That’s the plan. And until then, we wait and see.” He sat down at the other end of the sofa.
“Then let’s forget it for tonight. Tell me about yourself, Patrick.”
Of course, most men would jump at such an opening. But for Ranklin it meant dredging up a lot of fiction about Patrick Snaipe and being alert for errors. And Ranklin didn’t want to be alert; he just wanted to slump, conscious of her as a woman just a few feet away.
You do remember she’s twenty years your senior, don’t you? said some small inner voice. So what? – as Corinna would say. Ah, I’m glad you mentioned Corinna – Corinna is going to marry this French banker, we’ve said our good-byes, I’ll probably never see her again.
“Are you married?” she prompted.
“Me? No. I-” He was going to say something about Army officers marrying late, which was true, before he remembered he wasn’t an Army officer now. “I . . . just never . . .”
“Not every marriage is the right shape for the people in it. . . Did you meet that Mrs Finn at the British Embassy?”