Flashman and the Tiger: And Other Extracts from the Flashman Papers. George Fraser MacDonald
this!’ cries she, kicking her fettered foot and fetching herself a crack on the shin with the chain. ‘Ah, merde, it will not come off – and I shall never be clean again! Oh, but it is not only this disgusting confiture, this … this ordure collant, but his loathsome touch, his foul body and vile breath, his hideous tongue upon me … ugh! Muscovite ape! Oh, do not look at me – I cannot bear to be seen!’ In fact she looked adorable, if you can imagine an Alma Tadema beauty striking passionate poses while picking feathers off her bottom.
I soothed her by undoing the ankle-chain, lifting her into the bath, and lovingly soaping her from head to foot while murmuring endearments. I’m a dab hand at this, having trained under Queen Ranavalona, so to speak, and after a while her plaintive cursing gave way to little sighs and whimpers, her eyes closed and her mouth trembled, and when I suggested I could do with a sluicing myself she responded with an enthusiasm that would have done credit to those poor little Kashmiri sluts who bathed me so devotedly at Lahore, the night the ceiling fell in.fn5 Aye, I’ve wallowed in some odd spots in my time, but nowhere more happily than Berlin, with that delightful mermaid performing as though Shovel-off had never existed, and the floor ankle-deep in suds. Heaven knows what the charwoman had to say in the morning.
It cheered Caprice up no end, and by the time we’d dried off and drowsed a little and made an early breakfast of coffee and rolls, she was her vivacious self again, even making fun of Shovel-off’s amorous peculiarities. Her first report for Blowitz was a brief one, the Galloping Cossack having been too intent on his muttons for much conversation, but having taken his measure she was sure she could make him sing in due course. ‘A shallow fool, mais pompeux, and his brain is in his –’ was her charming verdict. ‘Also he is jealous of his leader, the Prince Gorchakov.’ She lowered an eyelid. ‘Let me touch that key, and he will boast everything he knows!’
And I guess he did. Having sampled her myself, and marked her A1 at Flashy’s, I’d still wondered if she could keep Shuvalov in thrall for the whole Congress – it lasted a month, you know – but damme if she didn’t. Not that he saddled her up every night, you understand, but more often than not, and whether she was ringing the changes, Pride o’ the Harem one night, Gretchen the Governess the next, or was tempting him with different flavours of jam, I didn’t inquire. She kept him happy, I had my ration of her, and for the rest, Blowitz’s arrangements went like clockwork: there he was every day, browsing at the Kaiserhof while I lunched at t’other side of the room, never a glance between us, and each picking up the other’s tile when we left.
We had one scare, when an idiot diner by mistake went off with my hat containing Caprice’s report. My first thought was, oh lor’, we’re rumbled, and I was ready to make for the long grass till I saw that Blowitz was on the q.v., but instead of leaping up with screams of ‘Ah, voleur! Rendez le chapeau!’ as you’d expect from a Bohemian Frog, he quietly despatched a waiter in pursuit, the apologetic diner replaced my roof on its peg – and no attention had been drawn to Blowitz or to me. My opinion of little fat Stefan went up another rung; he was a cool hand – and even, it seemed to me, sometimes a reckless one.
It was about half way through the Congress, when the other correspondents were all in a frenzy at the absolute lack of news from the secret sessions, that he broke cover with an item that was plainly from the horse’s mouth. Gorchakov had made some speech in camera, and there was the gist of it in The Times two days later. Diplomatic Berlin was in uproar at once; who could have leaked the news? It was after this that Bismarck, who took the breach as a personal affront, looked under the table to see if Blowitz was roosting there. His fury was even greater soon after, when The Times had the news that D’Israeli had threatened to leave Berlin over some wrangle that had arisen, and then decided to stay after all.
Of course the blabberer in both cases had been Shuvalov, as I learned from Caprice, who had passed the glad tidings on to Blowitz via my tile. I was fearful that Shovel-off might twig he was being milked, but she ‘Pouf!’-ed it away; he was too dull and besotted to know what he was saying after she’d put him over the jumps, and depend upon it, says she, Stefan knew what he was about.
She was right, too. The little fox had been angling, like every other scribbler, for an interview with Bismarck – and after the column about Dizzy appeared, hanged if he didn’t get one! Otto, you see, was so piqued and mystified that his precious Congress was being blown upon, that he invited Blowitz to dinner, no doubt hoping to learn what his source had been. Fat chance. Blowitz came away with a five-hour interview, leaving the Iron Chancellor none the wiser and fit to be tied, The Times triumphed yet again, and the rest of the press gang could only gnash their teeth.
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 tomorrow –’
‘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