The Spider of Sarajevo

by Robert Wilton

  Believe me, Sir, most respectfully yours,

  Müller

  P.S. You are always emphasizing your interest in the most trivial, and I know how you like to cultivate the rarer fruits. I mention, accordingly, an Englishwoman visiting Germany on some errand of mediaeval scholarship. We dined together at Niemann’s. Miss Flora Hathaway is, I judge, highly intelligent – with the suggestion of a coldness of rationality unusual in the English – and indeed most charming. I offered to recommend her to Bartels and Wundt.

  P.P.S. Remembering that you were kind enough to suggest that they had offered you some amenity, I take the liberty of enclosing a box of your usual prescription.

  They’d sailed north-west from Durrës. After an hour, they brought down the mainsail and anchored, and the contessa had a proper look at Ballentyne’s arm. She declared it not serious – which was easy for her to say – too wide for a stitch – which he was grateful for – and she covered it in a foul-smelling salve, bandaged it up tight again, and improvised a sling.

  ‘You didn’t ask what happened. Thank you.’

  She shrugged. ‘Men. Guns. ’ot day.’ She leaned forwards and adjusted the sling on his shoulder. ‘And in the Balkans, too. Fight over a girl, or a game?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ This amused her. ‘I mean to say: neither of those, certainly. I’m working… I’m helping – I’m an anthropologist, originally.’

  ‘Anthro–?’

  ‘I study different human societies; tribes. Their customs, their cultures.’

  ‘And sometimes these ’umans don’t like this?’

  ‘It seems not.’ He looked into her eyes. ‘I’ve been… helping my government.’

  ‘Oh, you are spy.’ She said it without emotion, and fetched the brandy bottle and two glasses.

  ‘You sound unexcited.’

  She sat beside him on the banquette that ran the length of the cabin, and smiled. ‘I should scream a little, maybe. Faint? I’m a woman, Mr Ballentyne. An Italian woman; a married woman. Of all the things that men do and do to each other, spying is the least surprising, and perhaps the least ’armful.’ She handed him a glass. ‘Just don’t get my boat shot up.’

  He considered this. ‘I’m a bit embarrassed about the whole thing, to be honest.’

  ‘Why? Anyone in your position would be doing it. I’ve carried messages across the Adriatic myself. If I meet government friends in Bari or Pescara they ask what is ’appening across the sea and I tell them. Anyway, isn’t it supposed to be your… patriotic duty?’

  He settled back against a cushion in the corner of the cabin, and tried to shift his shoulder. ‘Honestly? I spend my life trying to get people to trust me, to be open with me about themselves. Now I’m doing the same thing, except it’s the mirror opposite; like – like saying the Lord’s Prayer backwards.’ He took a shot of brandy, felt it washing through him.

  ‘And now you start to worry that you ’ave always been un’oly.’

  He nodded. ‘And people keep trying to kill me. That’s the second time. I don’t like it.’

  She smiled sadly. ‘Pride, and doubt. Ah, so ’ard to be a man.’ She watched him take another mouthful of brandy. ‘You should change.’

  ‘I dried well enough in the sun. Anyway…’ He glanced at her blouse, at the tight slacks. ‘I’m not sure we’re the, er, same size.’

  ‘There are some of my ’usband’s clothes ’ere.’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ Ballentyne examined his brandy glass. ‘There’s a… a Count di Lascara, presumably.’

  ‘Presumably. ’e is no longer a concern of mine. Nor I am of ’is.’ She poured them both more brandy. ‘’e continues the same amusements ’e always did.’

  ‘Ah.’

  She shrugged. ‘I ’ave compensations. And now I travel the sea, like a… like a lonely witch. But I am free ’ere at least.’

  ‘Surely you can—’

  ‘You are not an Italian, Mr Ballentyne. And you are not a woman.’ She smiled without warmth. ‘In love as in war, men do what men must do, and the lives of women change accordingly.’

  ‘In the Albanian highlands, when all of the men in a family die, sometimes a woman chooses to take on the role of man. The clothes, the status in the family and the village. So that the family has a head. They call themselves sworn – pardon me – sworn virgins.’

  He could see her imagining it. ‘They take control. They have the status. I like that.’

  ‘It’s terrifying. A renunciation. A loss of… of femininity, of self.’

  She was almost pitying. ‘Femininity ’as its limitations. Especially for a woman who ’as failed to ’old her ’usband.’ She sat forwards on the cushion. ‘But this is becoming tiresome for us both. I’ll get you those clothes. Where are you supposed to be going, anyway?’

  ‘I’m reluctant to risk land immediately, to be honest. I wanted to go to Split.’

  ‘If you want to, you can still. We can stop at the island on the way.’

  ‘You have an island?’

  ‘Not all. A house; estate a little. You don’t think I could have an island?’

  ‘Why not? I’m pulled miraculously from the sea by a beautiful woman who turns out to be a countess. I’d be disappointed if you didn’t have an island.’

  Burim Balaj, the unlucky man with the surprisingly beautiful wife, began to realize with frustration that her beauty had not changed his luck, but that his luck seemed over the weeks to have tarnished her beauty.

  The other men, when they spoke to him, would only speak of her, and how beautiful she was. Sly look and prod him in the arm. They still would not seek business with poor Burim. Obviously, they were saying that she was too good for him. Good enough for them to leer at, he could see that. But too good for him. Probably he should suspect her of adulteries.

  And his brother now. Just stare at her. Agron was simple, of course, but even so.

  To Burim, her silence was complaint and accusation. Her passive, open-eyed acceptance of him when he rolled on top of her in the darkness was a statement of his inferiority. He wanted to hear her moan. Hear her scream.

  Sometimes he hit her. That made her moan a bit. But she still didn’t scream, not even then.

  He noticed her imperfections. The dark spot on her upper lip. The nose, too straight for a girl. Sometimes, her animal smell.

  Probably he had been unlucky in his wife too, after all. Somehow he could have done better. His father had said that his mother had been lovely once. His father had done better.

  Every week, Burim would walk for three hours down the valley to the next village, to sell the tools he made or repaired. They didn’t know him as well there. Normally he went on his own. He didn’t want Besa’s eyes following him. He didn’t want more men staring at her. This time he had to take her with him. The flooding river had blocked him the previous week, and he felt he deserved to sell twice as much this time. Also, a man there was offering to sell him a goat at a good price. So he might be bringing that back too. He’d have taken Agron, but Agron had twisted his ankle and still walked with difficulty.

  He told Besa that morning, and saw her eyes light with interest. That’s right, my heart, bit more concern for your husband would do no harm. So they set off together in the dawn, unlucky Burim and his surprisingly beautiful wife, down the track beside the ravine.

  Three hours later Besa came running back into the village, wailing about Burim’s accident. The curiosity; the slip; the fall. They pulled him out of the ravine on a rope, his head smashed and disfigured by the impact of rocks.

  Burim Balaj, who had betrayed his wife’s brother to death, was dead.

  Another Adriatic port: they were blending into one now, these harbours, on the Italian coast or the Balkan. Whitewashed houses rising into the hills behind. The landscape beyond them arid. In the foreground, most of the quays were ancient: limestone or sandstone, blended with the sun and the dust and the drowsy whisper of a slower age. A few touches of elegance left behind by the Venetians. Wooden
boats alongside, colours, fruit, fish, archaic rigging. The little pottering trade of millennia.

  But today the peasants, whether Italian or Albanian or Slav, would hurry out of their stupors and gape at the sea. Today the infinite pearly distance had gone dark; the glistening light had turned grey; the softness of sea and scrub and sky had become steel: 22,000 tons of it, between 1 and 14 inches thick, propelled by turbines producing more than 50,000 horsepower. Sliding across the horizon, or perhaps discovered in the morning like some awful monolith over the town, was the imperial battlecruiser S.M.S. Goeben.

  And from an office in Rome, or Trieste, or Sarajevo, another message would go to London announcing a visit by the Goeben. And in London, another mark would be added to a map, and certain calculations would be repeated. The size of the German Navy. The projected size of the German Navy. Plus of course the Austrian Navy. Even if the French could be relied upon in the Mediterranean. Again and again the arithmetic and, on the other side of the equals sign, doubts and fears and angry headlines.

  Kiel Opera House was like an overgrown Board School. Duval was forcing himself to spend an hour sketching it, but gave up after forty minutes. Muddle of conflicting styles, none of them understood; every borrowed detail swollen with the self-importance of the whole; bloody great mountain of brick.

  In Kiel they seemed very proud of it. A policeman at the station, a waiter, and an old lady who stopped as he sat there all told him it was what he should be sketching. He smiled politely, chewed on lumps of dry sausage as he worked, mentally reworking the building as he felt it should have been designed.

  On his way to the opera he’d found the Niedermayer to whom the telegram had been sent from Berlin. A toy manufacturer; a message commenting on a product and changing an appointment was credible.

  A week of Knox’s schoolboy errands around Berlin. A conversation here and there; some clearly in his role as architecture connoisseur, some more obviously hole-and-corner ferreting. Reports dutifully passed through the embassy, for what they were worth. Dresden, and back again.

  Feeling a bit seedy. And the women on the stout side and damned unfriendly.

  A letter of recommendation from Berlin had won him the hospitality of Professor Markus for the evening, most of which the professor spent sorrowfully offering advice about the shortcomings of the British Navy, in eccentric pop-gun English. Assertions of doctrine – ‘Your boys need less Nelson, more engineer training’; ‘big guns and oil engines, Rule Britannia, but ship design is lazy’ – were interspersed with exhortations to have more stew.

  Duval had generally spent his time denying other people’s impressions of him. Never thought much about being British, anyway. But Germany was beginning to twist him. The game he was playing was surely all about being not what you were, quite; he could do that. And it was easy enough to agree with the professor – wasn’t like he knew or cared about the navy, was it? – polite repetition of whatever had been said, comment about class system; distancing himself from what was being criticized came easily to him. But intermittently, something stubborn would flare in him; that is me, and that is mine – and he would offer a question instead of acceptance.

  He walked, drank a brandy in a dead café, walked on, needing air. The street lamps glowed weak on the cobbles. He was feeling hungry already; he needed a girl.

  Hot meal when you could get it, and keep moving. For now that meant Knox and his superiors, damnfool games and no expense spared. Well enough.

  He’d impressed Knox; could see that. He wanted to move on. Never did to linger.

  Ahead a checkpoint: uniforms with guns, lamps, a striped barrier. He reconsidered his surroundings, saw big faceless buildings, tasted salt. Kiel’s dock district was supposed to be vast. He walked on, into the shadow of a wall, ten or fifteen feet high, endless and featureless; presumably part of the perimeter.

  Twenty feet ahead of him the wall broke open and two figures stepped into the street, laughing about something and slamming a door closed behind them. Duval hesitated, as if he was the unexpected one, feeling his foreignness and his mission. The two figures, uniforms of some kind, strolled off in the other direction. Slowly, Duval began to walk again.

  The door, he saw when he reached it, was wood, iron-studded, with no external handle.

  The door had not closed properly.

  Possibility; a scheme; defiance… And Duval was checking the street around him and the emptiness was his friend and his fingertips pulled at the door and he was in, closing it properly behind him. This is me, Mr suave bloody Knox, and I may surprise you some.

  After the second shed he started to note the signs over the doorways. Vorarbeiter; Administration; Sicherheit. Voices somewhere, and he pressed himself into the brickwork of a wall, feeling its rasp under his palms. He couldn’t place the voices among the maze of buildings, until two shadows launched themselves at him down the gap between sheds and two black figures crossed from the end of his to the next.

  On the scrounge at school. A woman and her brother trying to find him in a fairground: Polly Atterbury; Lord, what a fiasco that was. Somewhere, a dog barked.

  Duval continued to chart the sheds in his pocket sketchbook. Finally, the last shed in the row: Kran-Betreiber. Then away round the end of it.

  It was monstrous and it roared up over him and he gasped.

  Duval had never seen a battleship, not outside the newspapers, and hadn’t begun to appreciate their size. Ships, yes: ferries, the boat-train to France, a father telling his son how big the funnel was and how many minutes it took to walk a circuit of the deck. Never really thought about it; never seen anything more than a gangplank, a bit of a deck, a view, a bar. Nothing like this; and this was just one slender end of it – the bow, would it be? – an elegant line swooping up over him. An Olympian axe-blade, mighty out of the night.

  This… this was… St Paul’s Cathedral; looking up at the dome of St Paul’s, wondering at its beauty and wondering at the mighty engineering that held it up.

  Again, a dog barking somewhere. Another moment gazing up. Then he retreated from the shed to the wall, and followed its shadows as it turned sharply. It was wood now, vertical slats twice his height dividing off a separate part of the docks. Brick and wood; primitive materials in the shadow of the steel titan.

  The dog appeared first around the shed, then behind it a man pulling at the leash. They wandered towards the timber wall, and the sentry was reaching for a ring of keys at his waist when the dog began lurching and straining and the man was only holding it with difficulty.

  The dog was straining for Duval. He shrank away, panicked at the possibility of protrusion beyond the line of shadow, tried to retreat into the wall. The dog was a screaming sinewy outline; the sentry was swearing at it and pulling at the leash two-handed, but the dog wasn’t having it and continued to heave the man on towards Duval’s shadows. Snapping and snarling and lunging, the sentry shouting, shifting a rifle slung over his shoulder as he tried to wrestle the dog, and still the noise and teeth straining forwards.

  Can’t distract scent. His jacket snagged up against the wall and the teeth lunged out and in a moment of clarity he remembered the uneaten sausage in his pocket and fumbled it out and dropped it and continued to back away in the darkness. The dog went madder, heaving and whining in the leash and the sentry was yelling and straining at it and a second later man and beast were at the wall and the dog was tearing and shaking at the meat in its wrapper. At last the sentry saw what the dog had got and kicked its rump and managed to drag it away. The dog went with a swagger, gulping at the fragment of sausage, wrapper hanging from its teeth, and Duval let out one silent breath.

  His blood was up now, and when the sentry took his keys again and opened a gate in the timbers and pulled the dog through, he didn’t even think; seconds later he was at the gate, listening to the dwindling sound of the dog and the sentry cursing at it. He pushed tentatively at the gate, it swung, and he slipped through into the next part of the dockyard.
>
  Buildings – the end of the dock – off to his right. In front… the suggestion of water, the sound of its clucking against the dockside, flickering suggestions of the surface, patches of blackness; the smell of oil thick in his nostrils.

  Gradually he worked out the other side of the dock, a hundred yards or more away, another wall. Nothing showed on the water in between.

  The sentry and the dog had gone to the right; he moved left. For the first time, Duval was aware of the coldness of the night. He buttoned his jacket, envied the dog for the last of the sausage.

  Part of the darkness on the water didn’t move as it should.

  He stopped; took a step back, and then forwards again. He’d got a sense of the water, its grey, the faint sheen. Now some section of it stayed matt, stayed black, gave no suggestion of depth or life. There was something there, in the water. Low, dark, and up against the dock. He moved closer, and it caught a trace of light and gleamed metallic, and the shapes reordered themselves in his mind and he understood the curves.

  This is how David Duval saw his first submarine.

  A townhouse in Prague; among the soot-black, lantern-yellow mediaeval alleys, a drawing room of taste and gentility. The city was, Krug thought, a most unlikely place in which to find Colonel Walter Nicolai; its refinements too elegant, its history of superstition and revolt too unsettling, for his stolid Germanic person. Whereas he himself fitted in rather nicely. A moment’s intellectual fancy: himself as Rabbi Loew, his network the rabbi’s Golem, loose in the shadows of Europe.