Flashman And The Tiger

The honest answer to that would have been to tell him he was stark raving mad, and if he hadn’t been Rudi Starnberg’s son, with a gun in his armpit and the means to railroad me on to the Bavarian rock-pile for life, I might well have given it. Since my present need was to temporise, and give the impression that I might be talked into their ghastly scheme, I played it as they would expect from the redoubtable Flashy, indignation forgotten, narrow-eyed and considering, asking shrewd questions: How could they be sure Franz-Josef would offer us bed and board? What other agents would Bismarck have at Ischl? What if our ambush went wrong? What if it couldn’t be hushed up? What if, by some unforeseen twist of fate, Willem and I should find ourselves facing charges of murder?

Entirely academic questions from my point of view, but they elicited prompt answers—none of them, incidentally, concerned with the morality of butchering the would-be assassins. Willem, being a chip off the Starnberg block, wouldn’t think twice, but I was interested that Kralta too apparently took bloodshed for granted—and both, you’ll notice, assumed that it was all in the night’s work for me. Flattering, if you like.

Willem dealt confidently with my doubts. "It’s Bismarck’s scheme, and he don’t make mistakes. Franz-Josef is bound to take us in, but if he didn’t we’d just picket his lodge and deal with the Holnup in the grounds. There’ll be half a dozen stout lads in Ischl at my orders, but they won’t know what’s afoot and I shan’t call on them unless I must. If word of the fracas gets out—well, that’s Bismarck’s biznai, and he’ll see to it that we’re kept clear of embarrassment. Murder? What, when we’ve saved the Emperor of Austria? Don’t be soft. Well, satisfied?"

I wasn’t, but I chewed my lip, looking grim, while they watched me with mounting hope and encouraged me with occasional reminders of what a fine crusading enterprise it was, and no other way to ensure the peace of Europe and the welfare of its deserving peasantry. Kralta was particularly moving on the score of the juvenile population, I remember, while Willem appealed to what he supposed was my sense of adventure, poor fool; plainly he regarded a hand-to-hand death-struggle in the dark as no end of a lark. I responded with few words, and at last said I would sleep on it when we reached Linz. They seemed to take that as a sign that I was halfway to agreement, for Willem nodded thoughtfully and refilled my glass, while Kralta astonished me by kissing me quickly on the cheek and leaving the compartment. Willem laughed softly.

"Sentimental little thing, ain’t she? Gad, what a week you’ll have in Vienna when it’s all over! But I," says he, fixing me with a merry eye, "ain’t sentimental at all, and in case—just in case, mind you—you’re as foxy as my old guv’nor made out, and have some misguided notion that you’ll be able to slip away once we’re on Austrian soil … well, don’t try it, that’s all. Those stout lads I spoke of will be on hand, and they can have you back in Bavaria before you can say knife." He patted his pocket. "If I haven’t shot you first."

I reminded him coldly that I’d be no use to him dead, and he grinned. "You’d be even less use to yourself. But we won’t dwell on that, eh? You’re a practical man, and I’ve a notion that you’ll fall in with us. Just so long as you understand that you’re going to stand up with me against the Holnup, one way or t’other, what?"

So I hadn’t fooled him above half, and must just wait and hope. One thing only I was sure of: he wasn’t getting me within a mile of Franz-Josef and the blasted Holnup—supposing they existed, and the tale I’d been spun wasn’t some huge Machiavellian hoax conceived by Bismarck for diabolic purposes that I couldn’t even guess at.