The Spider of Sarajevo

by Robert Wilton

  ‘I hope that the British – some of the British – aren’t all that—’

  ‘Oh, Mr Cade’ – the hand, little, moved towards his wrist – ‘do not let me be unfair. Your government is protecting your interests like any other, but you at least are trying to protect and stabilize my country, and I believe that your great parliament believes truly in the moral rights of my people.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t over—’

  ‘But… Well, this very week we are drafting the plan for our finances for the next year, like any good businessman’ – shared smile – ‘and I have to tolerate a most unattractive gentleman handing to me without a word a copy of my draft which he has annotated as if I were a schoolboy who has done inadequate homework. Really, Mr Cade, these people…’ A little shake of the head, soured lips. ‘An additional three hundred thousand tons of steel, that is what we are to import. What are we supposed to do: armour-plate every fig warehouse from here to Izmir?’

  ‘I wish there was some way in which I could help…’

  ‘But you may, Mr Cade! Forgive me if I sound a little emotional, but in this situation true friendship and true business dealing, without regard for national interest, are the best that Turkey can hope for.’ A smile, faintly embarrassed. ‘I have been doing some reading. I understand that the Scottish people have always been known for sound businessmen.’

  ‘Oh, we’ve been beggars and brigands since the year dot. When the market dropped out of cattle-stealing, we found that honesty was all that was left to us. Plain-dealing; nothing more, nothing less.’

  ‘Mr Cade, I will drink to that. Could we even tempt ourselves to a second glass of sherry, do you think?’

  Paris, 13. May 1914

  Sir,

  as requested, I today gave lunch and a little tour to M. David DUVAL.

  My impressions: Duval is in his way a charming man – to the ladies no doubt, but also to anyone with whom he conducts a conversation that interests him. A certain insolence – no doubt arising from the obvious psychological factors and from his cultivated persona of the rogue – was succeeded by sincerity, politeness, and even deference when we became immersed in the cultural matters. His interest, I must say, in architecture and art more widely is quite genuine. He has adequate knowledge, real perspicacity and the eye of an artist. I am less certain of his academic credentials; he seemed ignorant of some of the faculty of the South Kensington Schools.

  You wished, in addition, to hear anything of his encounters or acquaintances here. Your concerns, if such they be, would appear not without some justification. One of my interlocutors had noted him yesterday evening in the company of Angelique Lapierre, also known as Angelique Ritter, Angelique Rizzi, L’Ange, or, I fear, whatever name a gentleman of means might desire. Her affiliations are as uncertain as her name, but she is known for a highly intelligent and resourceful woman habitually used by the Service de Surveillance du Territoire and the Deuxième Bureau. I may hazard no speculation as to whether your Duval might be target or associate.

  Separately, M. Duval remarked that Edouard Massenard had sent his card round to arrange a meeting. You know Massenard and his links well enough, I think, for any comment or speculation from me to be unnecessary.

  I hope that I may have been some service to you. Please allow me the opportunity to repeat my gratitude for your observations on the activities of certain officials in the ‘goose’s nest’ and your insights on the incident in Kildare County.

  I remain, sir, yours faithfully,

  P.

  (by hand, care of Embassy of Switzerland)

  [SS G/1/893/7]

  Cade was feeling breezy as his tea party neared. Osman’s titbit about the steel was a little something to offer London, and there might be more to come there. Cades didn’t get kicked twice; he was getting back on top of the market.

  The sight of the tea table – prepared with all the proper fuss by Abdullah the steward, who had acquired from somewhere an encyclopaedic concern for the strictures of what he insisted on calling English decorum – sparked flickers of nerves.

  A moment’s examination of his attitude to Mrs Ani Charkassian. Then the sense of his mother at his shoulder again, a force for teatime decorum more powerful than anything Abdullah could contemplate.

  Like the lunch, it went as well as he could have hoped. Ruben Varujan was clearly pleased to have had the invitation – ‘this is your first “at-home”, we understand’: a new sense for Cade of the way news travelled, of how a man might be watched – and relaxed into pomposity about the history of his people. This enthralled the Dutch lady ethnographer, who overlooked what Cade suspected was the occasional folk myth masquerading as fact in her delight at having the chance to talk to a real Armenian.

  This left his equally real sister to Cade.

  Ani Charkassian had on a long frock, tight-bodiced, and full in the skirt. Cade, mostly ignorant of such things, guessed it more formal than would have been usual, or perhaps older in style; but then Varujan was affecting a large blue cravat and he himself a rather natty waistcoat. She was careful, and watchful; mostly she was careful and watchful of James Cade. Her brother’s flow of insight and passion – ‘it is of course acknowledged, dear lady, that Nuh himself, Noah, was essentially Armenian, and by “essentially” I mean also and deliberately in his essence’ – allowed her to slip fondly into the background of conversation, where her host was waiting. Occasional glances of shared amusement at the main conversation; attentivenesses of manners. She treated the tea – the institution, and its corporeal manifestation in fine if not entirely matching china – with the respect she would have afforded a foreign religion. She took cup and saucer as if accepting communion and, when the atmosphere had relaxed later on and she ventured to pour tea herself, she reached for the teapot like a grail.

  She was… sensuous. A woman tasting and touching the world around her, a woman to be appreciated by every sense. But also a reserve; a calculation. Not one of her movements, so poised, so graceful, so flowing, was not considered and controlled. Cade, conscious enough still to be able to look at himself a little askance, was entranced.

  The cabriolet swung round and bounced through a gate into a driveway and Hathaway thought: Alice in Wonderland. Bushes flanked the drive, spaced at exact intervals and pruned to spheres. Even the darkness of their leaves, uniform against the paler green of the lawn, seemed unnatural. An illustration from a picture-book Alice. The drive was too short for its breadth and grandeur, the house at the end – stripes of brick and stripes of stone, white in red and all crowned with a truncated dome – too small for the pretensions of its design. Unnatural; the fantasy of a suburban villa-dweller on opium.

  She had the letter of introduction ready in a pocket, but surely it wouldn’t be necessary. Explaining herself would be a challenge, otherwise. I am a passing Englishwoman, curious to meet August Niemann, who foretold the destruction of my country. The invitation, the carriage at the station, suggested he was as curious as she – or polite, at least.

  Her host in Frankfurt: Theoretically, of course, it is impossible to understand Germany’s concerns today unless you understand Niemann. His wife, as immediately shocked as if he’d broken wind or lunged at the maid; a hurrying of crockery and twitters.

  Her own voice: Niemann? Who wrote the book on the conquest of England?

  He. Except in the original – there was a certainty about her host, and she liked it more than all his previous courtesies and generosities – it was called German Dream. And he had smiled, challenging her.

  Silence in the room for a moment; the wife the other side of a closed door and a crossed line.

  I should like to meet him.

  And so an exchange of letters, an invitation, a carriage at the station with a uniformed driver and a horse with a plume that wouldn’t stay upright, the picture-book house and now she was walking up the steps and following a black coat and a beckoning hand, over a mosaic floor and between potted palm trees that framed a doorway,
rosewood gleaming everywhere, a knock and Flora Hathaway was left to enter yet another male sanctum.

  In 1904 a minor actor and author of pseudonymous novels had published a romance describing the combined victory of Germany, Russia and France over Britain, and the division of her empire between them, resulting in the greater happiness of all concerned.

  The dark wood overwhelming her on every side, and the scent of lilies. Behind a desk, a thatch of white hair bent over a paper, the point of a beard following the motions of the pen. Hathaway put up with this performance for ten seconds, and then turned and began to skim the bookshelves.

  After sixty-five years and nearly fifty books, August Niemann had at last made himself famous. And rich enough to build the gingerbread house of his dreams. She’d seen the book, surely; skimmed it, at least. The English translation had been notorious, but more mentioned than read.

  She turned back just as he looked up. Pale, rheumy eyes, the skin hanging loose beneath them; a moustache that appeared to have been hung on top of the beard. He stood, and bowed his head suddenly in greeting. Then he was round the desk, waddling on legs that did not seem to bend, and clutching her fingers briefly.

  ‘Fräulein…’

  ‘Hatha—’

  ‘It is my honour to bid you hearty welcome.’ He dropped her fingers. ‘Tonight, at house Niemann, we are speaking English.’

  For a moment she thought she was going to curtsey. ‘It’s my honour to be here, sir,’ she said in German. ‘I should be practising my German, but I’m sure your English is better.’ My German is better.

  ‘Well, for your practice then.’ German. The eyes looked at her but seemed not to see. He turned, tottered away, then swung round. ‘So! You are come to see the monster of Gotha in his lair. To see what they are all afraid of. The man who dared to challenge the hegemony of Britain. A geographic hegemony’ – the last syllable came out longer in the German – ‘and a hegemony in the preoccupations of the other nations.’

  How to engage with such a man? ‘Well, I had heard a lot about you, Herr—’

  ‘I’m sure you did!’ The chest filled up and the shoulders went back, supporting sagging arms. ‘Your politicians raged against me, I’m sure; and your nurse would scare you with the threat of the evil Niemann, is it not so?’

  He was so wildly wrong about British intellectual culture, as well as the domestic circumstances of the Hathaways, that it was hard to know where to begin. ‘I would hope that, if we could strive to understand each other better—’

  ‘Understand? Ah yes, we must understand!’ His voice was shrill generally, and the last word was stretched out into a squeak. He began to wave one finger at her, a frenzy of scolding. ‘Always the British ask us to understand. Why it is necessary for you to dominate the seas, to restrain our trade, to bottle us up between the mountains and the marshes.’ He came up on tiptoes, peered up into the thatch of hair, trying to remember the line. ‘To understand why you make alliances to encircle us, why you incite these allies – these tools, these puppets of a strong-armed and vindictive master – to serve your ends, as you incited the Japanese against Russia.’ The voice had lost a lot of its energy; it sounded as if he were reading from notes.

  ‘Russia is lucky to face no comparable threat from her western neighbours.’

  ‘Dinner is at eight. You are most welcome.’ He began to usher her towards the door; he was slightly shorter than she. ‘I’m an artist, yes. But also a philosopher. To the intellectual mind, every opinion is stimulation, however little or muddle-headed. I have correspondents in every country of note in Europe. Tonight you will meet some of them. I hold no prejudice for country or belief. Of all people, it satisfies me that I should have an Englishwoman in my house.’ The door open, a hand on her elbow, the door closed, and Flora Hathaway was out in the hall again, enveloped in palm fronds.

  Golly.

  Another lunch, Osman Riza quick to reciprocate Cade’s hospitality. Small talk: Cade had met a pair of Egyptians representing a consortium that wanted to import cotton. Perhaps it would be appropriate to introduce Mr Riza to them; no doubt they’d need to get square with the ministry, and perhaps Mr Riza would be interested to cast an eye over them. Mr Riza nodded; he would certainly be interested.

  No doubt it would do Riza no harm to be seen as intermediary for this kind of affair, and that was why he’d mentioned it. Cade wondered how corrupt he was. On the surface a most moral man; but they said everyone in authority here was more or less treacly. Perhaps one of those fellows who accept a commission here and there and see it as standard administrative procedure; then find the nearest Scotchman to complain to about how terrible it all was. But Riza was sharper than that: a worrier, too, and somehow truly sad about the state of his world. A bruised pride, but also a bruised sense of propriety.

  Cade was starting sincerely to like the fellow. There was a prudence to him, a restraint and – ironically, given Cade’s interest – a discretion. They’d not have made bad partners. A whimsy: pulling Riza out of the ministry and setting him up as Cade & Cade’s man in the Ottoman Empire when Cade went back.

  When am I going back? Development of the whimsy: sending Riza back for a spell, while he stayed on here. ‘And how are – I think this was how you put it – how are the doctors behaving themselves?’ Take to it rather well, he would. The old ’un would like him; always liked a quiet one.

  ‘The – please?’

  ‘The doctors. The interfering foreigners: all these British and Russians and Germans and what-not kicking the patient when he’s down.’

  ‘Ah yes, ah yes!’ Nodding eagerly now he’d caught up. ‘Yes, very good.’ Then a shake of the head, heavy and sour. ‘Really, it’s…’ He hesitated. An uncomfortable shifting in his seat; uncomfortable smile. ‘You must think me terribly indiscreet, Mr Cade.’

  ‘No. No, not at all.’

  ‘We seem to share a way of looking at the world.’

  ‘Aye. That we do.’

  Riza released a long breath; a release of tension. ‘Really, Mr Cade: it is… well, it is most tiresome. The Germans are intending to increase their presence here substantially – fully 30 per cent; military mostly. And we are to share some of the costs. A new facility in Kadıköy, and a new office over here, both of which we will provide and fit out; as usual, such imports as are needed for construction and supply are to be purchased by us from Germany.’

  ‘The doctor’s prices are pretty steep too, eh?’

  Riza nodded, then looked uncertain again. ‘Perhaps it is natural that – that men of the same quality may be… just a little indiscreet.’

  ‘Indiscreet… Call it: a harmless private revenge – a joke, almost – on those we cannot otherwise harm.’

  And another tea: a quiet street halfway down the hill between the palace and the teeming of the waterfront, a door opening onto a courtyard of individual residences, leaves and shade and old wood. Mrs Charkassian hosted; her brother very much presided. Along with Cade and the Dutch lady, he’d made the mistake of inviting two acquaintances from the Armenian community, who competed to offer their own – sometimes conflicting – versions of their people’s history. Ruben Varujan veered between disdain for these lesser enthusiasts and angry repudiations of their more outrageous errors. It left the Dutch lady bewildered and faintly alarmed, on top of her unease at the unfamiliar sweets she was being offered.

  It left James Cade and Ani Charkassian to murmurs, to polite interest in each other’s doings, to shared silent amusement whenever the anger rose elsewhere, to an easy compatibility in their movements around the table and the conversation. When he left, Cade took her fingers in his, and half bent towards them as if delivering a formal kiss.

  A pair of wives from the British Embassy had expressed wide-eyed interest in visiting one of the markets on the Asian side, and Cade had been the obvious escort: respectable businessman enough to seem appropriate, with just enough of the disreputability of trade and bachelorhood to seem interesting. It was a nat
ural addition – indeed, it enhanced the sense of propriety for everyone – to invite Mrs Charkassian as well.

  The Englishwomen squealed and gasped at the vividness and swollen bounty of aubergines and peppers and tomatoes, at the obscene wounds of figs broken open for their consideration by the stall-boys, at the mountains of bright spices, at the bustling of humanity through the marketplace, and they apparently the only pale faces in the whole of Asia. Cade kept an eye on them, shooing away the most persistent of the beggars and doing the haggling for their trophy purchases; he had discreet conversations with sellers of fabrics and sellers of spices; and he watched Ani Charkassian as she moved through the swarm, a swan in the eddies gliding untouched.

  When they shepherded the Englishwomen ahead of them, she slipped her arm through his. When they all took the ferry – the faces, fat moustaches, blank-faced women, the occasional watchful eye – back from Haydarpaşa to the European side she stood in the prow, figurehead, tragic princess come out of the East and unwilling to look back, glancing sidewards now and then to find Cade watching her. And when he handed her down from the carriage, she suggested that if Mr Cade was so interested in Ottoman culture he must visit the deserted house of her late aunt, which was reckoned typical and most charming.

  ‘I am a man of peace.’

  August Niemann said it as if it were grace. ‘I say that, most particularly, for our young guest here. The most junior in age and achievement perhaps, but perhaps the most significant as a member of the race whose defeat I perceived.’

  The whole table waited for her.