Honourable Intentions (27 page)

The engine beat faster as Kaminsky yanked the lever out of gear and angled the gliding barge towards the landing-place. Liar or not, he knew how to handle the thing, barely grazing the bank as it drifted to a stop. Leon scrambled down, carrying a thick rope and tied it to a mooring post.

And then O’Gilroy jumped down, himself carrying a rope: with Kaminsky around, others did the work. He wrapped it around another post, just behind the barge’s stern, bringing himself within a few yards of Ranklin and Jay.

From the darkness Ranklin hissed: “When you’ve got the bicycle, bugger off!”

O’Gilroy nodded to show he’d heard, and finished his knot.

“Not too tight,” Kaminsky called. “Leon will pass down your bicycle.” Already Leon was climbing back on board.

“Oh,
shit!”
Ranklin groaned. Now neither of the barge crew was ashore.

“Shoot the buggers,” Jay muttered. He had a gun in each hand, O’Gilroy’s in his left.

“Wait.”

O’Gilroy moved forward to take the bicycle, promptly got on it, shouted: “
Bon soir,
M’sieu
,”
and shot off down the little lane.

Kaminsky stepped to the side of the barge, staring and then exploding into language that should have boiled the canal dry. The
Irlandais
was supposed to cast off for them, the ungrateful, lazy, dog-begotten, whore-born . . . and quite forgetting in his anger that Leon could do it just as well, Kaminsky jumped heavily down.

“Get him,” Ranklin ordered.

Kaminsky found O’Gilroy’s idea of a mooring knot and a new fund of language immediately after; you could say this for the man, he wasn’t repetitive. Then he saw the movement beyond and looked up.

“
M’sieu
Kaminsky, je crois
?” Ranklin guessed and then, because they were too far away to grab him and he wasn’t sure
Kaminsky could see the guns pointing at him, fired past him into the canal.

Kaminsky straightened up carefully.

“The other one’s gone to ground,” jay warned. “Still on the boat.”

“Only to be expected.
Venez ici, M’sieu
.”

Kaminsky lumbered towards them, breathing heavily. Ranklin put his revolver against his chest and ran his hand across the man’s pockets, finding only a modestly small pistol. However, doubtless the barge was crammed with bigger, more powerful weapons; a certain breed of anarchist never seemed to leave home without an arsenal. He stepped back out of range of Kaminsky’s breath.

“I think you have to speak some English, but so that I’m sure you understand me, I’ll stick to French. Now, I won’t introduce ourselves, just bear in mind our pistols. I have a simple proposition: we’ll exchange you for Mrs Langhorn. The
real
Mrs Langhorn this time, if it pleases you.”

Kaminsky absorbed this. “Why should I trust you?”

“Why
do
people say things like that?” Ranklin sighed. “I’m sorry, but whether you trust us or not is not important. Only, if we don’t get Mrs Langhorn we’ll all just wait until the
Sûreté
arrive.”

“Why should they come?”

“Hmm. No, probably just one shot is not sufficient. Fire three more, Mr Jay.”

Jay loosed off the automatic into the air.

In the ringing silence, there was a scrabbling in the bushes behind them and O’Gilroy saying: “Hey, that’s my gun yer emptying.”

And he stumbled out on to the tow-path to take the pistol from Jay’s hand. Kaminsky peered through the gloom. “You? You perfidious maggoty turd—”

“Sure, sure,” O’Gilroy said. “But we’re all in plain sight from the barge – or would be saving the dark. Would anybody mind stepping into cover?”

So they retreated a few yards to a stand of trees and got, more
or less, behind them. O’Gilroy explained about the others left on the barge, and then Ranklin suddenly remembered Corinna, waiting in the motor-car with Berenice and wondering what the hell those gunshots meant. And also with nothing and nobody but fifty yards of the lane between them and the barge.

“Jay, double back and tell Mrs Finn we’re all right. And then stand guard there. We’ll be along in a minute.” And when Jay had moved off through the bushes back the way O’Gilroy had come, he changed to French for Kaminsky. “Now, call to your friends on the barge and tell them you’ll be set free when we’ve got the real Mrs Langhorn.”

“No, you will let me go at the same moment they let her go and—”

“Please just say what I said.”

There was a pause filled with more heavy breathing. Perhaps Mrs Langhorn was Kaminsky’s ace, his one hope of salving something from what, for him, was becoming a costly mess. Or perhaps she was just an insurance, a bargaining counter. Either way, he wouldn’t have guessed what she might be used to bargain for: himself, his own freedom, possibly his life. So in the end, Ranklin was pretty sure he would do what he’d been told; it was the sensible thing. But his pride required this pause, and Ranklin was willing to allow him that. Wipe your feet on a man’s pride and he might do something not sensible at all.

Then Kaminsky pulled himself up straight and shouted in French, just what Ranklin had told him. After a moment, a voice shouted back in another language – it sounded Slavic, but Ranklin didn’t know it – and Kaminsky began to reply in the same before Ranklin rammed his pistol against the man’s back. “Speak French!”

“Go on,” Kaminsky called. “Send her out.”

There was a muffled shout from the barge about Mrs Langhorn needing to get some clothes on. So they’d have to wait.

Kaminsky asked: “Can I smoke?”

“Sorry but no lights, please.” And then, mainly to get
Kaminsky thinking about something other than trickery, he asked: “How did a man like you get mixed up with Gorkin’s schemes? You aren’t an anarchist, are you?” He had had to stop himself saying something like “You’re an honest, straightforward criminal, aren’t you?”

Kaminsky snorted. “Anarchism, anarchism – it’s an affair for dreamers who’ve got nothing. Or everything. For those who’ve got time to dream. What I am, the good God knows – if He exists. On Sundays I’m a late sleeper, that’s all.”

“Are you saying this was all Dr Gorkin’s plot?”

Kaminsky paused, probably wondering how much Ranklin knew. Then: “Him. If Gorkin doesn’t believe in God, it’s because he doesn’t need to: he thinks he is God. A Messiah for himself. Do what I tell you of your own free will – that sort of anarchist. I just wanted to put some sense into their schemes, stop them plotting themselves up their own arse-holes.” His bitterness sounded sincere, perhaps because it also sounded fresh. He could hardly have felt that way about Gorkin when the scheme was hatched.

Or had he joined in because he liked to think of the thugs who sat around his café as
his
followers, and Gorkin the Messiah looked like walking off with them?

“But a man like you must have seen a profit in it.”

He had the feeling that, in the darkness, Kaminsky was staring at him as if he were the dunce of the class. “Well
of course
I saw a profit it in. A woman who knows the King’s darkest secret – there must be a few jewelled goblets in that, mustn’t there? Or hefty payments from the Paris newspapers, the world’s newspapers. What do
you
want her for?”

“Not for profit,” Ranklin said instinctively. But then he thought of his own standing within the Bureau, and of the Bureau’s standing with the Palace in its perennial battle with the Foreign Office . . . But not profit. You couldn’t call it profit.

Kaminsky gave a disbelieving snort. Then there was a shout from the barge: “She’s coming.”

Ranklin leant out from behind his tree and peered. The barge was just a black shape against the blackness of the trees beyond,
centred on the dim oil-lamp in the steering shelter. Movement interrupted the lamp, there was a thump and a shape on the slightly lighter background of the tow-path. And another. Then one shape seemed to be moving towards them.

“Are you going to do the honourable thing?” Kaminsky asked. So he had learnt, or guessed, a certain something about Ranklin.

“When I’m sure it’s Mrs Langhorn.” He added: “And then we won’t stop you unhitching the barge and moving on.” In fact, we’d be very happy if you’d lead the
Sûreté
away from here and us.

“Run the engine up to full power a few moments to clear the plugs first,” O’Gilroy advised.

Reminded, Kaminsky began: “And you, you puppy of diseased bollocks—”

“Shut up.” Ranklin stepped forward to meet the approaching figure which moved cautiously along the uneven dark tow-path. They stopped and looked into each other’s faces, just a few inches apart. She was, he realised, barely shorter than he, but was certainly the woman he’d met at the Portsmouth hotel.

“I remember you,” she said. Her voice sounded slow and thick, as if she’d just been woken. “You work for Mr Quinton.”

For a moment Ranklin was baffled, the London lawyer seemed so far away, then he remembered. “In a way, yes. Have we rescued you or did you come just because you were told to?”

“I . . . I don’t know. Have you?”

“Let’s assume that we have.” He took her arm and steered her back behind Kaminsky. “All right, you can go.”

Without another word, Kaminsky strode off towards the barge.

“By my reckoning, they’re jest about all—” O’Gilroy began.

“Get her under cover and lead her back to the motor-car. And warn Jay you’re coming,” Ranklin ordered. He himself stayed half in cover of the trees, watching Kaminsky’s retreating back. He heard O’Gilroy and Mrs Langhorn blundering through the undergrowth, then O’Gilroy calling to Jay.

The copse or wood or whatever – anyway, a tangle of trees, bushes and long grass – lay on the corner of the little lane from the village and the tow-path, opposite the dark cottage (which hadn’t come to life at the sound of shooting, so must be empty. Or inhabited by somebody with extraordinary good sense.). Anybody going through the copse cut across the corner and was in complete cover from view, and pretty good cover from fire: you could shoot a machine-gun into that tangle of trees and bushes without being sure you’d hit anybody. Equally, of course, it meant that O’Gilroy couldn’t see or shoot out of it. For the moment, they were down to two guns; two
divided
guns, and Ranklin felt a twang of unease . . .

Kaminsky’s shape blended into the bigger shape beside the barge. Considerably bigger: had O’Gilroy been about to tell him that everybody seemed to be coming ashore? Ranklin was taking an instinctive step forward when the whole shape charged into the lane. In the moment before he was unsighted by the trees, Ranklin fired twice. And he’d been right about the arsenal on the barge: his shots touched off a blizzard of gunfire.

Jay had placed himself on the lane-side between the motor-car, fifty yards down, and the cottage and barge at the canal. He could hear O’Gilroy and Mrs Langhorn crackling through the bushes on his left, the throb and occasional hiccup of the barge’s engine, could see the dark knot of people on the tow-path. A funny thing, darkness: you could see something but couldn’t be sure you could see it until it moved suddenly.

And then it was moving suddenly. Along with the gallop of feet, a shout and then a burst of shots and flashes. Jay knelt and steadied the heavy revolver with both hands, feeling how familiar it all was. Just like all those pictures from his childhood: the young officer facing the charging tribesmen. And now it was him in the picture.

Remember to aim low. He fired once, recocked, fired again. Bullets snapped past. He heard the clatter of the motor’s self-starter and the roar of the engine. How very sensible. He fired and a dark figure tumbled, then he felt a punch in the chest. No
pain, but it had knocked his aim off. He tried to steady the gun but found instead that he was toppling forward. No matter; on the ground I’ll be steadier, I’ll re-aim from there . . . But when he hit the ground he found he couldn’t; it no longer seemed to matter.

20

Rushing – as much as he could rush through those bushes – O’Gilroy began firing before he could see what he was shooting at. Beyond, he saw a muzzle flash so he’d distracted one gun from Jay. Then renewed shouting and scampering, and a last shot overhead.

Cautious as he reached the edge of the lane, O’Gilroy crouched, gun roving for a target. Nothing moved. Gradually his hearing expanded with his vision. From down the lane he heard the motor: good, Mrs Finn was out of it. Forget her. Mrs Langhorn blundering in the bushes behind him. No problem yet. But then he realised there were still occasional shots from up by the canal. So somebody had stayed on the barge to pin Ranklin down.

“Captain! I’m at the road! Can’t see nobody! Jay’s . . .” A figure lay in the middle of the lane up to his left, in that poured stillness that usually meant death. Another, that must be Jay, lay just as unmoving a few yards down to his right. “Mebbe dead,” O’Gilroy finished, more quietly.

“I’m coming!” Ranklin called back.

“Wait! They’re mebbe in these trees!” But then the sound of his voice attracted a couple of shots from the cottage across the lane. At that range you don’t hear a bullet go past: it’s lost in the sound of the shooting. But among trees you hear the patter of twigs – there were few leaves in April – it cuts down, and know that somebody is being personal about you. And in this case, doing it from the safety of the cottage.

Thinking it through, he reckoned that once their charge had been disrupted by his flank fire – and when they saw they
weren’t going to capture the motor-car, since they must have been trying for that – the instinct for brick walls had taken over. They wouldn’t necessarily stay there, but when bullets are flying, walls are hard to give up.

He crept back into the bushes, calling to Mrs Langhorn to lie down and stay still, and then to Ranklin: “It’s all right, Captain. Take yer time and come careful.” Then he crawled off in a half-circle to reach the lane again beside Jay.

A couple of minutes later Ranklin snaked up to Mrs Langhorn, and found her lying as flat as her cottage-loaf figure allowed. “Are you all right?”

“I don’t know. I’m all scratched and torn . . . What’s going on? Where
am
I?”