The Spider of Sarajevo

by Robert Wilton

  Across the square, at a corner: ‘He comes: you see, Sergeant? The grey suit – near the Neptunbrunnen – putting his hand in the water now.’

  ‘I see him.’

  The water was cold, electric, and Duval splashed some on his face. Somehow it produced a shouting, and he turned.

  If my will is unrestricted, Hathaway thought, the outcome is predictable. If my will meets another will, the outcome is predictable competition. If three wills meet, the outcome is chaos.

  They had kept pace with the march and then, when by some unknown inclination it had paused, they’d entered the square slightly ahead. An impression of faces, some enthusiastic, some blank. Banners drooping between poles. Then the policemen marching forwards to intercept them, long coats and squashed caps, and the first jovial and scornful exchanges between the front lines. Glancing to her side, Hathaway saw Gerta’s wide eyes, the open lips.

  ‘Gerta, you’re enjoying yourself.’

  Gerta looked naughty. ‘We can’t hide in the forests for ever.’ She looked across at the waiting crowd. ‘This is our century. The power of people together. The collective unconsc—’

  ‘Where did you read that? Crowds are unintelligent.’ I never felt as stupid; I never felt as excited.

  ‘It’s rather exci—’ Then a new shout, and a reply from one of the policemen, and then the shouting was general and the line between marchers and policemen was swallowed and the line of confrontation was all arms and fists and hats falling, a policeman was trying to hold two men back using his rifle as a barrier and something was thrown, and they heard a whistle, whistles, and then a shot.

  They picked up their hems and began to hurry away across the square. As they went, there were hooves rattling on the cobbles somewhere behind them. ‘There – the café!’ Gerta called between gasps, and they altered direction. Hathaway was aware of her ankle boots slapping on the ground, of the jolting in her legs, of the foolishness of skirts, and of people around her: scattered figures hurrying away like them, some still oblivious, one man crossing the square in front of them.

  ‘He’s coming!’

  ‘Sergeant! Look!’ Across the Schloßplatz a crowd had become a mob and the mob had become a riot, and then a shout high above the rest and a whistle and a squad of mounted policemen was cantering over the cobbles like hailstones.

  ‘Your orders—’

  ‘I know my orders, mate. Arrest him we shall.’

  ‘Sergeant, shouldn’t we help—’

  ‘He’s still coming.’

  ‘I can see him well enough.’

  Duval was still coming, wary glances towards the crowd, a sense that he must not be where there was trouble, a perverse Englishness telling him to avoid a scene. Two women came towards him, and he stopped. Ears dulled to noise, eyes sharpened to beauty, he watched them come. Hell of a pair they made: one dark and slender, one blonde and curves, clothes smart but not showy, moving quickly but smooth. Just a little dérangées, hearts a little faster; Neptune’s nymphs come to life. They passed within ten feet of him – a glance from the darker one; handsome she was, and the blonde was a beauty. On an instinct, legs leading before the head could ask any damnfool questions, Duval changed direction and followed them into a café.

  Not a healthy sign: ogling a couple of girls; voyeur. Duval drank a coffee, and then a brandy, a steady and unthinking rhythm of hand to mouth. He considered the two women aesthetically, and then wondered about them. Found the ideal job for transience, hadn’t he? For never settling.

  For a quarter-hour the sound of the crowd reached into the café, a chaos of shouting and whistles and sporadic gunshots. And the customers in the café kept glancing towards the front of the building, flinching and guessing at the bursts of noise, waiting for the riot to swallow them. The waiters were tight-lipped; saucers rattled and sloshed. The gentility of the place – the costumes of the customers, the filigree ironwork, the delicate spoons, the forced politenesses – had become ridiculous, and a trap.

  Eventually the noise dwindled. The waiters recovered their poise, and the customers leaned back in their chairs and the volume inside the café grew. Duval ordered another brandy, and savoured it this time. As he left, he made a point of walking past the table where the two women sat.

  Each glanced up as he passed: the darker, handsome woman watchful, the blonde interested, and he had to stifle the urge to twirl his moustache. The suggestion of giggling from behind; that’s right, ladies, you’re never as controlled as you think.

  And still he was alone in this great parade-ground of a city. In the distance he could see debris: hats, items of clothing, loose cobbles, banners straggling in the mud.

  He hesitated on the step; a glimpse of a uniform to his left and he moved briskly right, keep moving, and as a tram hummed past he caught the handrail and hopped on, another man following him a second or two later, and they lurched around a corner and away.

  A uniform appeared in front of him, and his stomach kicked. Will I ever be able to look at brass buttons again? He paid the conductor.

  Surely he wasn’t hunted. Couldn’t be that easy, anyway; big city. He tried to work out which of the faces around him was the one who’d followed him onto the tram.

  Duval the hunted. Duval and the submarines. Penny-dreadfuls; couldn’t say he didn’t enjoy them. The tram whined and swayed, the foreign faces around him shaking their disapproval back and forth. Except his was the foreign face, wasn’t it?

  Back at his hotel he spent three hours with pencil and paper, translating the products of his night’s nerviness into the precise work of a draughtsman. And how many men could do this? The papers went into an envelope, the envelope into the hotel post box, and Duval out into the evening. A club, a steak and half a bottle of wine, and a chat with a couple of the girls, enough of the world in them for a chap to feel swell rather than desperate.

  Precisely as he’d said to Ani, Cade was not a man for melodrama; nor for pushing around. He set to find all there was to be found on the subject of Mr Muhtar and his dealings. Discreet enquiries here and there; a perusal of certain records; casual questions.

  Two days later, Ali did not appear at the office in the morning. He was still absent after lunch and, with an hour to spare, Cade tracked him down by means of the man who sold tea on the corner and various urchins. The trail led only a couple of hundred yards, but down alleys that neither Cade nor the sunlight had ever visited, to a cellar room obviously too close to the waterline.

  There was no light, until Cade struck a match and turned the shadows into shapes. Two boys, vacant and scared, and a mewing woman were watching the twisted figure lying on a tangle of sacks. The place stank. As Cade’s match travelled, it showed Ali’s face bloody and battered with one eye flickering dull in the glare, a bruised body with something wrong with one of the arms, and then an obviously broken leg.

  James Cade went silently berserk. Half an hour later Ali was in the Jewish hospital, over the protests of every official as well as the lad himself. Cade overrode it all, an implacable engine of gold coins and roaring Scottish fury that had doctors backing away and nurses hurrying out of earshot of words they did not understand and clearly should not want to.

  The news of this new Scots eccentricity spread quickly. Ani Charkassian refused to meet him, until he threatened to come into the house and carry her out.

  When she came through the curtain onto the roof terrace it was with obvious trepidation. But she found Cade pacing cheerfully, looking energized but not obviously homicidal. He strode to her, took her face in between his fingertips, and kissed her deeply.

  He stood back, and watched her a moment. Her eyes were cautious, waiting. Her tongue was reviewing the taste of him on her lips.

  He smiled, calmer. ‘Because today this city seems hellish ugly, and so I badly needed to see your face. That’s why. Remind myself there’s something worth caring for.’

  Silent still, she nodded. Then her hands came up and began to undo the buttons on her dr
ess from throat to waist – as they came loose, her body swelled and came free – then the bows on a chemise as wispy as the curtain fluttering behind her, until she was naked to the waist. Her eyes never moved from his.

  Mayhew was through the door with only the suggestion of a knock. The old man looked up, austere.

  Mayhew fought for the words. ‘Duval – Duval, he’s a… a fraud. An impostor. A – an intriguer.’ He stepped forwards, leaned in insistent: ‘What have we done?’

  ‘Sit down, would you, Colonel?’ Mayhew sat, but failed to settle. ‘Could you be more specific?’

  Mayhew took a breath, stared at the ceiling. Suddenly the old man saw the boy Mayhew, trying to collect himself in exams that always seemed just beyond his understanding. ‘I’ve had a flag on the names of our four bods; just in case – long shot – some other department gets interested and risks gumming up the works. Today I get a copy of a routine enquiry being made in police records.’ He didn’t notice it, but the old man’s eyes were a fraction wider. ‘Duval. Except his name’s not Duval – well, it might be… The request was for information on a man named Pinsent, and police records from York showed that Pinsent was a name used by a man who also went by Duval. And it’s clearly our Duval.’ He brandished a slip of paper, and picked out words as it fluttered. ‘Forging cheques. Goods and services on credit, then absconding’ – he looked up a moment – ‘that wasn’t the first hotel bill he’s skipped.’ An uneasy breath. ‘He’s an adulterer, a – a philanderer, a – a seducer.’ He shook his head. ‘God’s sake, he’s—’

  ‘All right, Colonel. May I?’ The old man took the paper, skimmed it only briefly, and laid it on his desk. A flicker from Mayhew at the loss of it. ‘This is critical, Mayhew; I’m sure of it. But—’

  ‘You’re dashed right. We’re employing—’

  ‘Not that!’ Real asperity. ‘Not his character. The fact that a search was being made in police records.’

  ‘With good reason, it seems.’

  ‘Colonel, doesn’t it strike you as rather an extraordinary coincidence that we select a man for an extremely secret job of espionage work, and he is shortly afterwards the subject of a police enquiry?’

  It did not seem to strike Mayhew thus.

  ‘I urge you not to, Colonel, but I’ll wager that if you did try to chase down the origin of this enquiry, you wouldn’t find it. So many copies of so many trivial requests circulating in our systems.’ He shook his head. ‘Lord, in our own police records…’

  Silence. Mayhew, cheated of an appropriate reaction, tried again. ‘You don’t seem… all that worried about this – this revelation.’

  The flicker of a shrug across the shoulders. ‘Candidly, Colonel, I’m not. Not about Duval. I confess I suspected there was a little more to him; one gets a knack for reading between the lines of the files; between the lines of a life.’

  ‘You suspected – and still you chose him?’

  The old man sat back in the chair, looking somewhere over Mayhew’s shoulder. ‘More than a hundred years ago, Colonel, there was a rather remarkable chap called Kinnaird. Sir Keith Kinnaird. A shrewd navigator of the currents of secret intelligence. At one point the holder of… a certain office in this…’ His hand circled to suggest the world between him and Mayhew. ‘A time of great national peril. Napoleon poised ready to invade, unrest at home, and London full of treacheries.’ A wry smile at some private impression. ‘I have thought a great deal of Sir Keith Kinnaird. Taken a certain inspiration from him.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t quite see the point…’ Mayhew: restraint; discipline. Lord, the plodding and the fancies of these old men. ‘Duval is—’

  ‘Duval is not the point, Colonel. The point is the man whose shadow falls on him.’

  ‘This would be…’

  ‘I mentioned him before. A man who is himself shadow, but if I can manage…’ He looked up at Mayhew. ‘He is one of three men, Colonel. Or rather, he inhabits the persona of one of three men.’

  Mayhew was lost. ‘Duval,’ he said, trying to regain solid ground. ‘I realize that – this game – sometimes a rogue has certain – well, aptitudes…’

  ‘That’s true. But in certain quarters it also makes him more likely to attract attention. And that, Colonel, is precisely why I chose him.’

  Berlin mellowed in the evening: lamplight warmed the stone, and the city of shops and offices became a warren of cafés and clubs. The Germans took their business seriously, and it made them dull and forbidding; but they also took their pleasure seriously, and it made them sophisticated and enticing in the twilight. Was he hunted? He didn’t care.

  Duval took a taxi straight to the station. He’d done his duty with that envelope, and now for Russia – the instruction had been received, an envelope under the door on hotel stationery – and whatever came next.

  The station was earnest Berlin again, crowds of suits defined by the clock that followed them around the concourse with its great gothic finger. And at every entrance and platform gate, a uniform or two, rifle barrels prickling the air. They were watching faces, checking papers.

  He drifted through the main entrance in the middle of a knot of people, forcing himself to look at the policemen but not letting them catch his eye. Surely they weren’t looking for him, though? Routines. Germans. He bought his ticket, and sat and had a brandy while he waited. Mostly he watched the sentries at the gates to the platforms.

  Fifteen minutes to go. But they’re not looking for me. Better to saunter because more relaxed? Or better to hurry because more troublesome to stop? They weren’t stopping everyone, anyway. The drift of people on the concourse was funnelling itself into a loose stream moving through the gate to the Petersburg train, and he joined it.

  They were stopping the single men. He was fifteen yards off when he realized. Was the whole of Berlin focused on him? Couples and the elderly were being waved through. Duval stooped, and adjusted his shoelace, glanced around himself.

  And saw her. Coming level, looking around, somehow excited – or at least more lively than the rest. The face was alert; petite features, brown waves pulled back under a neat green hat; not beautiful, but… alive.

  She noticed him as he stood, seemed to consider him, a frown and then interest, eyes widening a fraction – and good evening to you too – the combination repeated as he moved closer.

  ‘May I say,’ he said, a little closer than appropriate – the hell with whether she understands; she’ll get the idea – ‘that that hat suits you very well?’ And he smiled.

  She considered this – the language or the idea. ‘Thank you,’ she said brightly, in accented English. ‘You may.’

  They moved forwards a step, nearer the gate. ‘Looks like we’re going the same way,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It does.’ And she slipped her hand through his elbow.

  Contact Report

  M.G. 14/Ü/5/94, period 2

  Subject: G738 – DUVAL/PINSENT

  Contact with G738 was maintained during this day, consistent with Headquarter Directive 14/Ü/G738.

  Man fitting the description of G738 was observed at the Hamburgerbahnhof arriving on the 1030 Kiel train, by the same post who had observed his departure two days previously. Consistent with procedure he was stopped. He produced papers in name of PINSENT, British (Irish), and was allowed to pass. Clarification was requested from Headquarters, and Headquarter Directive 14/V/5/62(G738) was revalidated (amended) for DUVAL or PINSENT. (Checks with Kiel show that PINSENT spent night of 24.5 in the Baltik Hotel in Kiel and was recorded in a café earlier this morning.) Observation was maintained while preparations were made. G738 visited two cafés.

  By the time that the arrest was readied, G738 was near Schloßplatz. At this time the situation in this district was becoming restive as a result of the political protest. As G738 was coming near the arresting squad he appeared to change direction, and entered Café London. Consistent with procedure, detachment first ensured observation of all exits, bef
ore one officer entered. G738 was observed drinking alone. He was not observed to make contact with any other customer, although of necessity he was not under observation for every minute. It was naturally impossible to verify the identities of all other customers. It was possible to check the papers of one: a Swede, PEHRSSON. Another was an Englishwoman, accompanied by a German woman. Subsequent enquiries showed her to be HATHAWAY, travelling with Fräulein von WALDECK and staying with a WALDECK family member in Berlin. (For Freiherr von WALDECK see also H 3/17/506.)

  By now, other duties arising from the situation in the streets forced the decision not to execute Headquarter Directive 14/V/5/62(G738), and G738 therefore remained at liberty. He moved by tram and on foot for a further one hour, looking at shops but not entering, and meeting no one, to his hotel. He stayed in his hotel three hours. Hotel staff report no visitors before his arrival, and he was observed to meet no one during this time. He had supper at the Club Nachtslilie. He spoke there to two women of the house, who are known. He went directly to the Stettinerbahnhof. Contact was lost here, despite many inspections of likely men. But timing suggests that G738 took the 2300 train to St Petersburg.

  St Petersburg have been informed and will have him under surveillance pending further instructions.

  Berlin, 26. May 1914

  [DEUTSCHE BUNDESARCHIV (AUTHOR TRANSLATION)]

  A gloved hand brushed once over the report, as if reading the lines through the fingertips.

  ‘Merely routine business, Herr Krug; but you observe our procedures.’

  ‘Most efficient, my dear Colonel. Most thorough.’ The suavity was automatic. ‘My networks can offer you choice details, but the effectiveness of your machine…’

  ‘On this occasion, the partnership is stronger than you may know.’ Nicolai was pleased with himself; Krug affected interest. ‘This Pinsent, or Duval, is the name we passed you, and which your contacts researched in London.’