Honourable Intentions (25 page)

Sound carries well over water; perhaps it bounces like a
skimmed stone, but O’Gilroy had no grounding in physics, just an empirical understanding of technology.

“It’s an engine,” Jay said unnecessarily.

“Missing on one cylinder, sometimes two of’em. Running it up out of gear; ye’d never get them revs if it was turning a propeller.”

He started off again, slowly, and after a minute the gentle curve of the canal showed lights moving slowly over a dark shape against the bank ahead.

Jay asked: “Is it them?”

“Can’t tell. But probly. I’d best see if I can help get ’em moving again.”

“What?
You can’t!”

“Why not? We don’t want ’em stuck here until the
flics
find ’em. And I don’t see us jumping ’em or getting Mrs Langhorn when ye can’t get the motor within half a mile. No, ye jest go on ’n find the Captain.”

Looked at tactically, Jay agreed that his stretch wasn’t ideal for an ambush. It was too open, giving those on the barge as much a view as the darkness allowed. O’Gilroy handed over his pistol and spare magazines – he was sure enough about the other things in his pockets, but he didn’t want a gun clonking around when he abandoned his jacket to get at the engine – and then started off again. Aware that his face might seem familiar from this morning’s carryings-on, Jay followed in O’Gilroy’s shadow.

When they reached the barge, one man was adjusting the bow mooring rope, while a second was waving an electric torch at the water near the stern, obviously hoping for some un-technical solution like finding a playful mermaid hanging on to the rudder. The engine was idling erratically.

The man swung the torch across the two cyclists. Jay kept going, screwing up his face apparently against the light, really to avoid recognition. O’Gilroy stopped. “
Vous avez un problème?”

“Je crois que c’est le moteur
. . .”

“On dirait qu’un cylindre ne fonction pas. Deux, peut-être.”

“Vous êtes Anglais?”

“Irlandais!”
O’Gilroy corrected sharply.

In the reflected glow of the torch, the man’s face creased into a smile. He eased himself up off the deck with slow, strong movements and apologised, then again for speaking only French. “You know about engines, then?”

“Something. I’ve been a chauffeur. What type is it?”

But the man didn’t even know that. “American, I think. It has just been put into the boat and this is the first time we have tried it on a long journey.”

“Ford, probably. Could be your sparking plugs. Does the engine go fast when you move?”

“It goes very slowly.”

Even unladen as it was, the barge would be quite a weight for a motor-car engine to push along. Now it sat high in the water, putting the deck at about chest height and, just below that, were two lit but misted-Over portholes. O’Gilroy could hear a mutter of conversation from inside, but couldn’t identify a woman’s voice. There were at least two people inside, along with the two men outside.

From along the towpath, beyond reach of the torchlight, Jay called: “Are you coming?”

“Jest a minute. Ye go on.” He switched back to French and asked the man how far to the next village with a café, then called: “Jest a coupla kilometres to Trilbardou. I’ll see ye in the café there.”

Jay waved and pedalled off.

“A friend of yours?” the man asked.

“We work at the same place in Paris.” The man waited for more, but O’Gilroy knew not to offer any: the innocent don’t explain themselves. “Do you want me to take a look at this engine?”

The man stretched an arm and gave O’Gilroy a powerful heave up. There was an oil lamp hung on the little three-sided structure which would have been a wheel-house if it had had a wheel, but was just to keep the rain off the man waggling the long tiller arm behind him and the engine lever sticking up
from the floor. On one wall of the shelter there was a switch, like an ordinary light switch, and small levers that presumably controlled the throttle and spark advance/retard. That was all.

O’Gilroy grunted and looked at the man, who was studying him closely. He had a wrestler’s build, squat and strong, with a heavy moustache above full lips and deep pouches under his eyes; the rest of his face was pitted with little smallpox craters. He didn’t look very French, but La Villette couldn’t afford patriotic snobbery. If you asked if this was a man who could handle café customers from that area, the answer was Yes, so this was presumably Kaminsky.

“All right, let’s have a look then.” O’Gilroy reached for the switch. “Does this turn it off?”

“You have to crank it to start it again.”
You
have to; this was a man who told others what to do.

18

From the bridge uphill from Trilbardou village, Ranklin could see perhaps three hundred yards of the canal, though he only knew it was that distance because of the view when it was lighter. Now the trees on either side were near-black shapes and the water fuzzed with evening mist or rising dew, if they were different things. He puffed on his pipe and only when he heard someone move beside him and he whipped around did he realise he was far less calm than he was trying to look.

Rut it was Berenice Collomb. He thought she’d gone to the village with Corinna she’d become so much a silent fixture in that motor-car.

“Hello,” he said awkwardly. She didn’t belong in these proceedings; he wished they’d managed to dump her somewhere. It was a pity human beings couldn’t be switched off, like machines. “This is a bit prettier than la Villette. You come from . . . from Cherbourg, don’t you? Is it anything like the countryside around—?”

“Was Dr Gorkin really trying to have me killed?” She wasn’t interested in scenery.

Suddenly cautious, Ranklin said: “How can I know? The men who kept you prisoner, do you think they were doing it for themselves?”

“I thought you knew everything.” Truculently.

“Well, I don’t. I only know what people tell me, and half the time that’s lies. I just have to think what’s most likely to be true.”

There was a pause while she did this – or, more likely, realised
that was just what she had been doing. “I think Dr Gorkin was making a plot . . . A true anarchist should not make a plot. Killing a king, or a president, that is honest. That is just helping history. History is on our side,” she assured him. “So one should not try to alter it, to manipulate people . . . one should not make plots. That is as bad as democracy.”

“Oh.” Ranklin reckoned this opened a topic a bit too big for casual conversation. But he certainly had no qualms about trying to alter history, at least the details that he could get hold of. Still, he just nodded and said: “And do you think he was trying to manipulate you?”

Annoyingly, she used his own trick of answering with a question: “What do you think?”

“Oh, you know me: I’m a monarchist and a soldier, and all sorts of things you don’t believe in.”

“Are you really a soldier?”

“By profession, yes.”

“Just a slave, then,” she said sympathetically (the damned little trollop). “But you aren’t a big strong man, not like a proper tyrant. You’re really just a tool of the tyrants.”

“Perhaps,” Ranklin said meekly, but on the clear understanding that this entitled him to inherit the earth in due course. “But we were talking about Dr Gorkin and what he’s been doing.”

There was a silence. The slight breeze had faded along with the light and the canal below was unruffled and glassy, reflecting the last light in the sky. Colour was draining away, too, leaving just tones of grey shading to black. Down in the village a cart rumbled along an unpaved road.

Then she said firmly: “Dr Gorkin is a traitor to the Cause.”

“What about the café proprietor, Kaminsky?”

This was obviously more complicated, but she reached a decision in the end. She wasn’t yet of an age not to reach decisions. “He is a tool of Dr Gorkin, he still believes Dr Gorkin is a great thinker. But you would say Kaminsky is just a criminal.”

“Would I? Why?”

“He arranges things. Robberies, but only of banks, for the Cause. Perhaps assassinations.”

“Setting fire to police stations?” Ranklin ventured.

Another long silence. “Perhaps. But he would do it because Dr Gorkin told him to . . . What are you going to do about Dr Gorkin?”

That was a question Ranklin really didn’t want to answer. He wasn’t in the business of justice, only manipulation. If he could prevent Gorkin publishing the King’s-bastard article, or at least prevent him backing it with Mrs Langhorn’s evidence, the rest was up to others.

“The police here regard him as an
intellectuel,”
he said. “If they can’t touch him . . . well, if we did anything to him, it would just make him a martyr.”

“Then you will not try to kill him?”

“We will not,” Ranklin promised virtuously. And when she said nothing, he went on: “When the barge arrives, will you promise to be quiet?”

“What are you going to do?”

“Rescue Mrs Langhorn, if she’s on board. And if she’s not . . . they can go about their business.”

“I told you: Kaminsky will shoot your silly heads off. He always has plenty of guns.”

“Let us worry about that. Will you promise to stay quiet?”

“She’s a stupid old cow, but if you want to try and rescue her, that’s your problem. Do you want me to swear by God? –I don’t believe in God.”

There was the growl of a big car in low gear from the direction of the village.

“No. Just promise as Berenice Collomb. That’ll do me.”

She may have been surprised at the idea, she may have shrugged, but she said: “I promise, then.”

Its electric headlights blazing, the tourer slid past them and Corinna started to turn it around just past the bridge. This took a lot of to-and-froing and clashing of gears, but she managed
it and cut off the headlights before they could shine back down the hill into the village. She parked just past the bridge and got out waving something.

“Got it.” “It” turned out to be twenty-five metres of quarter-inch rope. Berenice climbed back into the motor and wrapped herself in the back-seat rug.

Ranklin gave the rope a quite useless but masculine tug. “Fine. How d’you – I mean, how should I fix it up?”

“Tie one end to a tree on the far side, then sit in a bush holding the other end. Let it droop in the water, and when the barge is on top of it, pull it taut. And remember to let go when you feel it pull back.”

“Splendid. Er – suppose it catches on the rudder instead?”

“The rudder is
behind
the propeller. Always,” she said patiently. “And if you don’t want to do it here, there’s a side road in the village where you can get the automobile right up to the towpath.”

“That sounds better, but we’ll have to wait for O’Gilroy and young Jay here. And thanks, I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

Corinna could think of several replies to that, but no ladylike ones, so instead she said: “Were you having a nice cosy gossip with Berenice?”

“I think she’s getting the idea that Gorkin isn’t on the side of the ang—What do anarchists say instead of ‘angels’?”

“No idea. What’s she going to do about it?”

“That may be the problem; I was trying to persuade her not to do anything. She may think she’s an anarchist, but she’s young and still believes in justice.”

“And you’re too old and worldly-wise for such nonsense, are you? Everybody believes in justice. Or revenge. It comes to the same thing.”

“Now who’s being worldly-wise?”

“At least you didn’t say ‘old’. When are we going to bed together again?” Corinna tended to say such things – originally because it shocked Ranklin, now more or less out of habit.
Of course, she also tended to mean them.

“Don’t distract my thinking. I’m still wondering what we’ll do with Mrs Langhorn – if we get her. Offer to take her back to London with us and meet Grover out of jail, perhaps. I can’t see him wanting to come to France, and at least in London she’ll be out of reach of the Paris Press.”

“Ah yes: you were asking me what you can do to stop the story getting into the papers, weren’t you?”

“Yes.” Despite the petty successes of getting organised and out here, Ranklin had to remember they were still tilting into overall failure. Gloomily, he leant against the parapet again and stared at the still water. “Can you think of anything?”

“Can this Dr Gorkin get anything he likes published?”

“He’s connected with some anarchist rag, the
Temps Nouveaux de Paris,
so I assume they’ll print anything he wants. That must only have a tiny circulation, but I imagine the other Paris papers will—”

“They will, that’s normal. And what you fear is he’ll publish the whole thing about Grover being the King’s bastard son and all your attempts to hush it up.”

“Yes. All slanted and twisted and—”

“Yes, yes, I’m sure. Still, with a story like this any reputable paper would want to do some checking of its own . . . But if Gorkin can produce the boy’s mother–Oh, I see: you want to grab her before she can back him up, is that it?”

“Something like that. And if she’ll listen, tell her the whole tale about how Grover was set up and she was manipulated and impersonated. That’s where I rather hope Berenice might come in. But I just don’t know if Mrs Langhorn’s on their side still or if she’s being held prisoner on that barge.”

“You aren’t even sure she’s
aboard
the barge, are you?”

“Well, no, but if they’re running out, surely they’d take her along.”

“Hmm. But you’ve got an awful lot of unknowns even before you start hoping she’ll contradict the whole thing. And why should she? Even if she turns against Gorkin and all his
works, she still stands to gain from telling about the King.”

Ranklin nodded glumly. “The Palace is preparing a denial, but . . .”

“Nobody remembers denials. Your one hope would be to get your own story out first.”

Ranklin stood up straight and peered at her, horrified. “You want us to announce this scandal about the King?”

“Oh no. No, no, no. It isn’t a story about the King, it’s about a conspiracy against the King. Then you go into the details of what they did: falsifying evidence, murder, kidnapping – the works. Get the Press seeing it from that angle and your intentions automatically become honourable, never mind your misdeeds. But only if you get in first.”