Flight From Honour by Gavin Lyall Page B

up to one passable spy.”
    Despite himself, Dagner smiled faintly at that concept. “Hm. Being, as it were, Siamese twins among our agents could be seen as rather inflexible, I fear.”
    But we’re what you’ve got, Ranklin thought grimly. Us and the four new boys and an unknown, uncontactable number of agents abroad. What else do you expect in a Bureau so new and with SO many powerful enemies among its friends?
    However, he said nothing because Dagner was what
he’d
got, and was very glad of it. For a grim week, it had seemed that he himself, with experience as an adjutant and a willingness to make himself unpopular by organising people, might be deputising for the Commander. And while it was one thing to take over a battery or even a brigade that had the impetus of regulations and traditions to keep it rolling along, even with a nincompoop in charge, it was quite another to take over the Bureau from the man who had invented it only three years ago.
    No, Ranklin was very glad that Dagner was here.
    *        *        *
    The little triangle of Clerkenwell enclosed by Rosebery Avenue and the Clerkenwell and Farringdon Roads was an odd patch of short steep hills in an otherwise generally flat area. Perhaps because of that, the recent tide of rebuilding had flowed around it, leaving it as it had been for the past half-century, London’s Little Italy.
    There was nothing Italianate about the architecture; in fact, there wasn’t much architecture about Eyre Street Hill, Back Hill, Little Bath Street and the rest. But dingy houses, cracked paving and uneven cobbles are international, and the shop signs, the bright headscarves, the cooking smells and the chatter around the shopfronts were comfortingly Italian.
    Relaxing as the familiar sounds and smells were, the scene wasn’t exactly the Corso Umberto Primo. Bozan said nothing, but his expression said it all, and Silvio nodded. “Naples without the weather.”
    “Why didn’t we stay with Janko?” Bozan whined. “I’m sure
he’s
at a proper hotel.” Tiredness made him fractious, and it had been a long, complicated day.
    “Because we don’t want to be seen together. This way, we’ll be with our own people. And perhaps they’ll be more help than he was.”
    “You should have let me kill the Senator in the street at . . . where was it?”
    “Brussels. I agree, but we had to let Jankovic try his clever bit first.
Now
we’ll do it our way.”
    He stopped by an old man sitting on a doorstep smoking a reed pipe and asked politely for directions to an address in Back Hill Street.
    The old man’s eyes wrinkled warily; it was obvious that he knew the address, and just as obvious that he knew it wasn’t an address to be doled out to strangers. But strangers to what? These two, with their expensive Italian shoes, could well belong to what the Back Hill Street house belonged to, and it was politic to help such men. And then forget all about it.
    Anyway, no names had been mentioned, and an address is just an address; they’d find it in the end anyway. He directed them, and when they had gone, knocked out his pipe and faded back into the tenement building.
    Ten minutes later they were sitting in a surprisingly and floridly luxurious first-floor room with tiny cups of real Italian coffee by their chairs. Their host, whom Silvio tactfully addressed as just “Padrone”, was dressed in severe black like a village elder from the South, with a white moustache and olive skin. But the face, while heavily lined and thin, was still blunt, not sharp. He might never have worked in the stony fields, but it took generations to breed out the farm.
    He was being elaborately welcoming, but also probing. “And if there is anything I can help with . . .”
    “We need to find a man, a senator from Turin, who is visiting London . . .”
    “That may be difficult for strangers in a big city. He is rich, this . . . ?”
    “Giancarlo Falcone. Yes, he is rich. In