Flashman And The Tiger

What between helping to spoil Bismarck’s digestion and whiling away the golden afternoons with Caprice (for we’d abandoned our nocturnal meetings, and I was collecting her reports in the mornings) I was in pretty bobbish form, and took to promenading about the town in search of amusement. I didn’t find it on one day at least, when chance took me down the Wilhelmstrasse past the Congress hall, and who should I meet face to face but dear Otto himself; he was with a group of his bag-carriers and other reptiles, coming down the steps to his carriage, and for one blood-freezing instant our eyes met—as they had not done since that day at Tarlenheim thirty years before when he’d launched me unsuspecting into his ghastly Strackenz murder plot. I’d never have recognised him if I hadn’t seen his mug in the papers, for the nasty young Norse God had turned into a jowly sausage-faced old buffer whose head seemed to grow straight out of his collar without benefit of neck. Just for a second he stared, and I thought bigod he remembers me, but there ain’t a thing he can do, so why don’t I exclaim: "Well, Otto, old sport, there you are, then! Drowned any Danish princelings lately?" It’s the kind of momentary madness that sometimes takes me, but thank God I tipped my tile instead, he did likewise, frowning, and a moment later he was clambering aboard and I was legging it in search of a gallon or two of brandy. Quite a turn he’d given me—but then, he always did. Bad medicine, Bismarck; bad man.

I kept clear of the official cantonment thereafter, and by the last week of the Congress was beginning to be infernally bored, even with Caprice; when I found myself knocking at her door in the expectation of having it opened by Elspeth, smiling blonde and beautiful, I realised it was time for the train home. Oddly enough, if I’d cut out then it wouldn’t have mattered, for Blowitz no longer needed her reports, although he continued to change hats with me at the Kaiserhof.

The fact was his stock had risen so high with his three "scoops" that he was being fed information by the bushel, the embassy fawns being anxious to stand well with him; he even put it about, very confidential-like, that Bismarck had promised to give him the treaty before it was published, which wasn’t true, but made them toad-eat him harder than ever. I knew nothing of this, of course, and on the penultimate day of the Congress, a Friday, as I was strolling home enjoying the morning after a strenuous late breakfast with Caprice, I was taken flat aback by Blowitz’s moon face goggling at me from the window of a drosky drawn up near my hotel.

"In! In!" hisses he, whipping down the blind, so I climbed aboard, demanding what the devil was up, and before I was seated he was hammering on the roof and bawling to the coachee to make for the station with all speed.

"We leave on the 12.30 for Cologne!" cries he. "Fear not, your bill is paid and your baggage awaits at the train!"

"The dooce it does! But the Congress don’t end till to-morrow—"

"Let it end when it will! It is imperative that I leave Berlin at once—that I am seen to leave, mortified and en colère!" He was red with excitement—and beaming. "Regardez-moi—do I look sufficiently enraged, then?"

"You sound sufficiently barmy. But what about the treaty—I thought t’wasn’t to be finished until this evening?"

He pulled back the lapel of his coat, chuckling, whipped out a bulky document, waved it at me, and thrust it away again. "A treaty of sixty-four articles—approved, printed, fini! What d’you say to that, my boy? Nothing remains but the preamble and a few extra clauses to be adopted at today’s session." He rubbed his hands, squirming with delight. "It is done, dear friend, it is done! Blowitz triumphs! He is exalted! Ah, and you, my brave one, my accomplice extraordinary, I could embrace you—"

"Keep your dam' distance! Look here, if you’ve got the thing, what are you in such an infernal hurry for?"

He smote his forehead. "Ah, forgive me—in my joy I go too fast. Let me explain." He was licking his lips at his own cleverness. "You remember I told you in Paris how I would persuade some diplomat of eminence to give me an advance copy of the treaty? Eh bien, this morning I received it. I rejoice, knowing that no other journalist will see the treaty until after the signing ceremony tomorrow. But in the meantime a crisis has raised itself. Since my interview with Prince Bismarck the German press has been in jealous agitation, and to pacify them he has let it be known that he will give them the treaty this evening! When I learn this, I am thunderstruck!" He assumed a look of horror. "Of what use to me to have the treaty in my pocket if it is to appear in the Berlin journals tomorrow? Where then is my exclusive account, my priority over my rivals?"

"Down the drain, I’d say. So why are you exalted?"