“Vienna must no longer be content with drifting along ‘occupying’ us as it has since 1878, bringing us the blessings of Austrian progress—railroads, prostitution, horrible furniture—”
“Jesuit operatives everywhere trying to turn us all Catholic.”
“—yet till now it was all delusion, a sort of gentle madness, for we remained a part of Turkey, as we have always been.”
“And now Austria’s harmless phantasy has become acute suicidal mania. This ‘annexation’ is a Habsburg death-warrant.”
“Perhaps one for Europe as well. . . .”
And so on. Silence, however welcome, would have betrayed the unspoken Law of the Café, which was that jabbering, regardless of topic, never pause. Voices enough, this autumnal crescendo of danger, were blowing along the river valleys, following the trains and mountain diligences, hounding, begging, unquiet—breezing in to remind native and tourist alike of how quaint, excitable, and precipitous was the national character . . . calling out, beware, beware the lover up all night with a girl he desires, and who will not yield to him. Beware the Black Hand and the Macedonian hotheads, beware even the Tarot cards the Gypsies set out for money or idle divertissement, beware the shadowed recesses at the Militär-Kasino, and the whispers therewithin.
And presently, from somewhere in the city, perhaps up on one of the hillsides, where the Mahommedans lived, or from around windings of the river, there would come an explosion. Never too close—almost exotic, almost an utterance in a language one never had to bother to learn till now. . . .
Though wearing a Turkish fez whenever the situation demanded—in Bosnia the fez was like the veil, an emblem of submission, and wearing it one of the costs of doing business—Danilo Ashkil was descended from Sephardic Jews who had fled the Spanish Inquisition three and a half centuries earlier, eventually settling in Salonica, which even then, despite being Turkish, was already recognized as a welcoming environment for Jews on the run. Danilo had grown up in a fairly respectable Ma’min household but was soon down by the waterfront hanging around with “dervishes,” gamblers, and hasheesh smokers, getting into the usual trouble but finally proving too much of a social liability for his parents, who sent him here to Sarajevo to live with a Bosniak branch of the family, some of whose devotion to work and piety they hoped might rub off. True to his destiny, however, he was soon out on the street, having learned early in childhood to mock the confusion of tongues he was obliged by the day to move among, having come, in this way, by adolescence, not only to master Italian, Turkish, Bulgarian, Greek, Armenian, Arabic, Serbo-Croatian, and Romany as well as the peculiar Jewish Spanish known as Judezmo, but also when necessary to be taken for a native speaker of one or another tongue without in every case wishing to correct the impression. Well before the Austrian annexation, his skill with languages and gifts of permeability among all elements of the population had brought him to the attention of the Evidenzbüro. For traveling operatives of all the Powers, he had become the one indispensable man in the Balkans to drop by and visit. But now he was in danger, and it had fallen to Cyprian and Bevis to see him to safety.
Danilo, having arranged to meet Cyprian at a café just below the Castle, found a pale and sybaritic youth, the clogged certainties of whose university English bore overlays of Vienna and the Adriatic coasts. He also noted a defective sense of history, common among field operatives, given their need to be immersed in the moment. So it was history—Time’s pathology—that he must first address.
“I know it is difficult for an Englishman, but try for a moment to imagine that, except in the most limited and trivial ways, history does not take place north of the forty-fifth parallel. What North Europe thinks of as its history is actually quite provincial and of limited interest. Different sorts of Christian killing each other, and that’s about it. The Northern powers are more like administrators, who manipulate other people’s history but produce none of their own. They are the stock-jobbers of history, lives are their units of exchange. Lives as they are lived, deaths as they are died, all that is made of flesh, blood, semen, bone, fire, pain, shit, madness, intoxication, visions, everything that has been passing down here forever, is real history.
“Now, imagine a history referred not to London, Paris, Berlin or St. Petersburg but to Constantinople. The war between Turkey and Russia becomes the crucial war of the nineteenth century. It produces the Treaty of Berlin, which leads to this present crisis and who knows what deeper tragedies awaiting us. Ever since that war, Austria has dreamed of how it would be if the Turks were their friends. Germans come down here on tours and marvel at how Oriental everything is. ‘Look! Serbs and Croats, wearing fezzes over their blond hair! Blue eyes, regarding us from behind the Muslim veil! Amazing!’ But as you have probably seen by now, the Ballhausplatz are desperately afraid. They come to town, these men so practical and full of daylit certainties, and all the while you can look at them and see how they have spent the night, they have felt something stir in the darkness, shapes and masses, as ancient nightmares resume, and once again the Muslim hordes move westward, unappeasable, to gather, again, before the gates of Vienna—never mind that it’s been unfortified for centuries, the old glacis built over with public offices and bourgeois housing, the suburbs penetrated easily as any Austrian whore—it cannot be true, God would not permit—but here is their hour at hand, and in their panic, what is the first thing they think to do? they turn and swallow Bosnia. Yes, that will fix everything! Leaving us all now to wait, here in the winter twilight, for the first thunder of spring.”
Cyprian listened patiently. Bevis arrived, threw himself into a chair, and sat brooding, no doubt about his Anglo-Slavic ingenue. When Danilo paused to drink his raki, Cyprian nodded and said, “We’re supposed to bring you out.”
“And Vienna . . .”
“They won’t know right away.”
“Soon enough.”
“By then we’ll be out.”
“Or dead.”
“We’ll take the narrow-gauge to Bosna-Brod, change there, return by way of Zagreb to Trieste.”
“Rather obvious crossing-point, isn’t it?”
“Just so. The last one they’ll expect.”
“And . . . how many of these deliverances have you achieved?”
“Thousands,” Bevis assured him. Cyprian with difficulty did not flash him quite the look he wished to—smiled instead at Danilo with one side of his mouth, rolling his eyes briefly Bevis’s way and back again.
“I shall need a weapon,” Danilo said, in a tone which suggested that next he would be discussing money.
“The Black Hand are the people to see,” abruptly advised Bevis Moistleigh, with a shrug of the brow meant to be read as, Isn’t that obvious? The silence this released upon them was almost felt, like a drumbeat. What was a lower-level crypto like Bevis expected even to know about that widely-feared Serbian organization? It occurred to Cyprian not exactly for the first time that Bevis might have been set to spy on him, perhaps by Derrick Theign, perhaps by one of the many elements spying in turn on Theign.
IT WAS A COMMONPLACE among Balkan hands that if one was keeping an eye on liberation movements, and looking for members to turn double-agent and betray their own, the South Slavic population would provide slim pickings, if any at all. Nationalists and revolutionaries here actually believed in what they were doing. “Only now and then might there be a Bulgarian, or a Russian pretending to be a local person. A Russian will shop his mother for a glass of vodka.”
And wouldn’t you know it, who should Cyprian run into that evening, acting just about that desperate, but his onetime antagonists Misha and Grisha. It was across the river near the Careva Ulica, in Der Lila Stern, a former Austrian military brothel converted to more equivocal uses. Cyprian and Bevis drank Žilavka with seltzer water. A small cabaret band played behind a striking young vocalist and dancer in harem-inspired costume, though the veils were meant more to be seen through than to protect. “I say,” Bevis remarked, “she�
�s smashing!”
“Yes,” said Cyprian, “and do you see those two Russians heading for our table, I think they may want to settle an old score with me, so if you wouldn’t mind pretending to be a sort of armed bodyguard, perhaps a bit on the impulsive side, there’s a good chap . . .” nervously fingering the Webley in his inside jacket pocket.
“Kiprskni!” they cried, “imagined you were dead!” and other pleasantries. Far from bitter over the Colonel Khäutsch business, the two, as if delighted to see an old familiar face, were not slow to inform him that they’d left their Prater ways far behind.
“Shoot you?” cried Misha. “No! Why should we want to? Who would pay money for that?”
“Even if somebody did, it wouldn’t be worth our while,” added Grisha. “True, you have lost some weight, but tchistka would still take too long.”
“Your Colonel is somewhere out here now,” Misha mentioned casually. “There was quite a scene in Vienna.”
Cyprian had heard the story, which had entered the folklore of the business. When time had run out for the Colonel at last, his fellow officers had left him alone in an office at the War Ministry with a loaded pistol, expecting a well-behaved, traditional suicide. Instead Khäutsch seized the Borchardt-Luger and began shooting at everyone in range, shot his way out of the Ministry, into the Platz am Hof—next door at the Kredit-Anstalt they thought it was a robbery, so they started shooting too, the Hofburg briefly became Dodge City, and then Khäutsch was gone—according to legend, on board the Orient Express, headed east. Never seen after that. “Never officially,” said Misha.
“Blackmail doesn’t work anymore,” Grisha all but in tears. “Preferring your own sex? What is that? If anything, these days, is path to career advancement.”
“They’re not yet that enlightened in H.M. Secret Service, I fear,” said Cyprian.
“Turkey was a paradise,” repined Misha, “those boys with eyes black as figs.”
“Not anymore, of course. Constantinople is wasteland. Nothing young about Young Turks, who are in fact a gang of puritanical old busybodies.”
“Though I must say,” Cyprian said, “they’ve shown admirable restraint about putting the Ottoman lot through the usual bloodbath, except for unregenerate cases like Fehim Pasha, the old head of espionage. . . .”
“Yes, that Brusa job,” beamed Grisha. “Quite stylish, wouldn’t you say?”
Cyprian squinted. “You two weren’t . . . in some way . . . factors in that operation?”
Misha and Grisha looked at each other and giggled. Somewhat horribly. Cyprian felt an intense longing to be somewhere else.
“About the only thing English and Germans have agreed on lately,” said Misha.
“Poor Fehim,” said Grisha, at which point his companion, who was facing the street entrance, began acting oddly.
Cyprian, ungifted in the clairvoyant arts, nevertheless understood who had just walked in. After a bit he risked a tentative look over his shoulder. Khäutsch wore a monocle that many on first glance mistook for an artificial eye, and though he gave Cyprian a swift once-over, he did not seem to recognize him—though that could have been part of whatever his current game was.
“I say but Latewood,” muttered Bevis, tugging urgently at Cyprian’s arm.
“Not now, Moistleigh, I am succumbing to nostalgia.”
All through the descent of darkness, the muezzins had been crying out calls to prayer from their hundred towers, before sunset, after sunset, and again deep in the last turn of the day. In here music of similar modality accompanied the tsifté-télli as if, like praying, it required of the body conveyance beyond the day’s simplicities.
A great many young men in town seemed to know the Colonel, though as many made a point of steering shy as they came up to greet him. Out of curiosity, Cyprian drifted over and joined the group loosely gathered around the Colonel’s table. At closer range he noticed a fatal unevenness in the length of Khäutsch’s mustache, fraying at coat and trouser cuffs, cigarette burns and the depredations of moths as well as more earthbound pests. The Colonel was discoursing on the virtues of the Fifteenth Military District, otherwise known as Bosnia. “In Vienna the general staff always included some Prussian component, which made a life of human pleasure difficult if not impossible. Officers’ honor . . . suicide . . . that sort of thing.” An embarrassed silence had begun to descend. “But out here one finds a more balanced approach to life, and the Prussophiles do less harm.” He plunged in a heavy-drinker sort of way into his own history, a detailed inventory of complaint. Ears did not exactly perk up. It coldly dawned on Cyprian, however, that Khäutsch wasn’t that drunk. The eyes remained purposeful as a serpent’s, recalling unavoidably chastisements Cyprian had undergone at the hands of this droning, seedy pub bore, some of which he had actually found, at the time, erotic. Was the whining recital supposed to be a seduction?
“It’s important!” It was Bevis again, pulling him back to their table.
“Ever so sorry, Moistleigh, what was it then?”
“That belly dancer.” He nodded in her direction, forehead corrugated earnestly.
“Lovely girl, yes, what about her.”
“She’s a bloke!”
Cyprian squinted. “I suppose so. Do wish I had hair like that.” When he looked back at the other table, the Colonel, curiously, had vanished.
Somehow they got back to their pension, and next day Cyprian went from one hotel to another, learning eventually that Khäutsch, booked into the Europe under another name, had already checked out, having invoked a standing arrangement, involving either cash or threats of death, that his next address not be divulged.
DANILO, who knew everything, showed up at Cyprian’s room with a warning. “I hesitated to disturb you with this news, Latewood, for you seemed another of these neuræsthenic youths one finds everywhere lately. But you must be told. You have come to Sarajevo on a dummy assignment. All to lure you out here to Bosnia, where it is easier for the Austrians to take you. Your English employers have shopped you to them as a ‘Serbian agent,’ so that neither they nor, in the current climate, even Russians will feel especially inclined to spare you. It seems you owe England nothing anymore. I advise you to go. Save your life.”
“And Colonel Khäutsch’s part in this?”
Danilo’s eyebrows went up, his head to a doubtful angle. “He has too many precautions of his own to take. But you might feel more comfortable out of town.”
“I take it you never meant to come out, then.”
“I assumed by now they’d have resolved the political question.” He looked away, and back. “Even so . . .”
“Do go on, it’s only disposable me.”
“For reasons you may not need to know, I find it more of a problem now to stay.”
“The Crisis deepens, or something.”
Danilo shrugged. “Here. You’d better wear these.” He handed Bevis and Cyprian each a fez. Cyprian’s was so small it had to be forced onto the back of his head with a sort of screwing motion, while Bevis’s kept falling over his eyes and ears. “Wait, then, we’ll switch fezzes.” Most strangely, this did not resolve the difficulty.
“Makes no sense,” Bevis muttered.
“It happens sometimes,” Danilo darkly, “but more in the old tales than in our present day. The head of an infidel betrays him by rejecting the fez. Perhaps you are both quite devout Christians?”
“Not especially,” Cyprian and Bevis protested at the same time.
“The fez knows,” said Danilo. “You cannot fool the fez.”
TWO WEEKS LATER things had desperately deteriorated. Cyprian and Danilo were adrift and mapless in a region of mountains and forest and unexpected deep wooded ravines, into some of which, actually, they had just missed falling. Equally distressing, they had lost Bevis. On the way up to Bosna-Brod, he had simply and unaccountably vanished from the train.
They searched through carriages full of Jewish families traveling to the mineral springs at Kiseljak, engi
neers from the manganese mine at Cevl-janovic, coal and iron miners, wives and children and faithful sweethearts (a category which caused Cyprian vague discomfort), on the way to visit in-mates at the prison in Zenica, all with no success. Fearing mischief, Cyprian, wanting only to go on, had felt obliged to get off and look for Bevis.
Danilo seemed afraid now for his life. “Forget about him.”
“We’re both supposed to bring you out.”
“He can take care of himself, he is no longer your concern.”
“Oh? Did Theign shop him, too?” Cyprian sensed a familiar melancholy oozing ever closer.
“English. You are fools.”
“Nevertheless—” Cyprian reached for the emergency cord, and in the heated discussion with guards and conductors that followed, Cyprian pretended to fall into a sort of hysteria he had often found useful, Danilo looking on as if it were a performance in a park, as remote from his day as puppets hitting one another with clubs.
The last time either of them remembered seeing Bevis aboard was a little before Lašva, the junction for Travnik and Jajce. “There was a connection waiting,” the conductor shrugged. “Your friend might have changed trains and gone up to Jajce.” He agreed to wire the Bosna Line office back in Sarajevo, Cyprian and Danilo got off, and the train went on. They backtracked, searching defiles and streamsides till they lost the daylight, asking fishermen, crossing-guards, peasantry, wanderers, but none had seen a young Englishman in a seaweed-green suit. Not until well after dark did they get to Lašva, where they found an inn and tried to sleep till first light, before catching the morning train up to Jajce. Cyprian gazed out the windows, first one side, then the other. Danilo just as resolutely did not.
“It might even have been his own idea,” he said after a while.
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