Flashman And The Tiger

That was possible … but d’you know, I was inclined to believe they’d told me the truth. Not all of it, perhaps, but true so far as it went. It was wild, but no wilder than some intrigues I’d known—the Strackenz marriage for one, John Brown’s raid for another. That Hungarian fanatics should be after Franz-Josef’s blood was all too credible; what boggled the mind was the scheme Bismarck had designed to stop them … until you studied it and saw that nothing else would have answered. The threat of explosion in Europe had arisen suddenly, like a genie from a bottle, worse than ’48 or Crimea or San Stefano, and faced with the apparently impossible task of ensuring the Emperor’s safety while keeping him in the dark, that ice-cold brain had seen that unlikely old Flashy was the vital cog, having the entrée to Franz-Josef and being eminently blackmailable. And he’d gone calmly and swiftly to work to bring me where I now was, by the most outlandish means, using Kralta and Willem (and Blowitz?) and above all his knowledge of me. His planning had been meticulous … so far. As for what lay ahead, it remained to be seen whether the web which his perverted genius had spun over Ischl would be proof against my frantic efforts to break loose, and the hell with Franz-Josef and the peace of Europe both. Well, he’d spun a similar web over Strackenz, and I’d diddled the bastard then, hadn’t I?

All very well; my immediate concern was to bolt, and with this son-of-a-bitch Starnberg half-expecting it, I’d have my work cut out. It must be soon; once he’d got me to Ischl, with his gang dogging us, I’d be sunk. Linz, where we were to stop the night, might be my best chance; I’d no doubt he was as restlessly quick on the trigger as his murderous father, but if I yelled for help in the street, or in a hotel, he’d not dare cut loose with his piece … would he? Yes, he would though, and take his chance, and make his excuses to Bismarck later. The local train to Ischl would be no easier to break from than the Orient Express … dear God, had I the nerve to spring at him now, land one solid blow, and leg it for the compartment where Blowitz and the boys would be whiling away the time and I’d be safe even from this bloody young villain … and as the desperate thought flashed across my mind I realised that he was drawing lazily on his cigarette, watching me with that insolent Starnberg smile on his handsome face, and my courage (what there was of it) melted like slush in a gutter.

Since I was supposed to be meditating on whether to join their frightful scheme or not, they let me be for the rest of the journey, Kralta next door and Rudi reading and smoking placidly while I brooded in my corner. Once I made a half-hearted suggestion about bidding farewell to Blowitz, who expected me to get out at Vienna and might wonder where I’d got to; Willem gave me a slantendicular smile and said Kralta would send him a note.

Dusk was falling when we pulled into Linz, but no more rapidly than my spirits when we left the station, Willem close at my elbow and Kralta alongside, and I saw the closed coach by the kerb, with a couple of burly fellows in billycocks and long coats waiting to usher us aboard. One sat by the driver while the other rode inside with us; he was a beef-faced rascal with piggy little pale eyes which never left me, and great mottled hands resting on his knees—strange, I can see them yet, powerful paws with bitten nails, while the rest of that brief coach-ride has faded from memory, possibly because of the shock I received when we reached our destination, and I saw that it wasn’t the expected hotel or inn, but a detached house on what I suppose were the outskirts of Linz, surrounded by a high ivy-covered wall and approached through an arched gateway which was closed behind us by the chap on the box.

That put the final touch to my despair. It wasn’t only that there would plainly be no escape from here, or the sight of another brace of bullies waiting by the open front door under a flickering lantern, or the air of gloom that hung over the house itself, conjuring thoughts of bats and barred windows and Varney the Vampire doing the honours as butler; what chilled my skin was the Bismarckian efficiency of it all, the evidence of careful preparation, the smoothness with which I’d been conveyed from train to prison (for that’s what it was). That was the moment when I began to doubt if there was a way out, and the nightmare sketched out by Willem changed from the frighteningly possible to the unspeakably probable.