The Spider of Sarajevo

by Robert Wilton

  Uncomfortably, the role of the Varujans – and by extension Ani – worried at him. Muhtar had been a competitor of theirs and a nuisance, and now he was gone; and where did that leave their relationship with Cade? Cade realized that he badly wanted there to be no complication, nothing sordid, in his relationship with Ani Charkassian. Vulnerability. Damnit, though, couldn’t a man…

  Second, and more uncomfortably, he found himself dependent on others. Ali’s silence would be cheaply bought. He was loyal, and had more to gain from staying so; and in any case perhaps few would believe a hysterical story of something he might claim to have seen. But Riza, now. Riza had been increasingly dependent upon Cade’s protection of his indiscretions; the balance had shifted back a little. Not completely: Riza had genuinely been indiscreet; Cade had genuinely not killed Muhtar. But the relationship had just got more complicated. And then there was the mysterious man to whom Riza had entrusted the problem. A man named Silvas. What did he know, and what would that mean?

  Thomson’s knock on the old man’s door was exact to time.

  ‘Ah, Thomson; good man.’ The eyes, the voice, seemed to come out of the years.

  Thomson sat as bidden, and waited patiently. The old man liked his manner. He studied Thomson, still considering his decision. Eventually, resolution; palms flat on the desk. ‘A little suggestion from me, if I may.’

  Thomson just nodded.

  ‘We were talking yesterday of the German network in this country. This is something quite different. A different element, reporting to a different man, with different ends.’

  Still Thomson waited.

  ‘I recommend a bit of digging. I have the strong suspicion that somewhere in our official records administration there is a spy.’

  Thomson’s eyes opened in faint interest, as if told that it might be about to rain.

  James Cade’s day was a dream, familiar things lurching with strangeness. The memory of Muhtar’s body lurked on the edge of his world, while he wrote at his desk, while he talked with his clerks; as if the corpse had only been pushed to the corner of the room, as if, now and then, it smiled at him.

  Jozef Radek reported that he had sent the messages as instructed, and that his suggestion of fresh copies of strategic documents had not provoked suspicion. A Greek shipping agent visited to offer, after reconsideration, a lower price if Cade would commit to a certain number of shipments. Even though the image of the man, looking pleased with himself in the visitor’s chair, kept blurring into the image of the body on the same spot on the carpet, these fragments of his normal life began to make him think that the morning’s upset was somehow less real. Strange place anyway, Constantinople; always somehow distorted, always the suggestion of the mysterious. He had been the victim of a rather distasteful, unsettling accident – and now it had passed and he had recovered and the city’s version of normality had resumed.

  Ali had identified the place that Knox had asked after – and told Cade only grudgingly, urging him not to go. ‘Not place for English gentleman.’ Cade trusted Ali, but he didn’t want to seem ineffective in front of Knox, not today. So at nine that night the two men met in the Muslim city, at an entrance to the Grand Bazaar, small against the Nurosmaniye Mosque; and from there they set off, away from the public buildings and the classical façades, through the back streets into the old city. They were shadows in the gloom, between the grimy plaster walls, the shambling wooden frontages.

  Then the derelict… church? surely it had been something since – striped brickwork, pink and white, crumbling at the edges; it looked like a half-sucked boiled sweet. Beside it there was an alley as promised, and after a mutual raising of eyebrows they followed it. Then there was an ornate wooden door, and a man opening it who did not blink; ‘Welcome, dear gentlemen’ – immediately spotted as foreigners – ‘to the Garden of the Rosy Hours.’ And they were in.

  There was the suggestion of lights through veils, lights among leaves, and everywhere a sweet smoke. They were ushered to a booth in the garden, offered cigarettes, brought drinks. From somewhere there came music, the thump of drums and tambourines and the squeezed whine of some stringed instrument, and a voice that wailed.

  The two men settled against cushions, inhaled the smoke, heard the wailing, and – quite independently – thought momentarily of their mothers.

  Cade said, ‘Very charming. Why are we here?’

  ‘Chap we’ve a possible interest in was mentioned in connection with this place. Thought I’d come and see what sort of shop it is.’

  ‘A pretty seedy one, by the looks. What are we supposed to do now?’

  Knox couldn’t bring himself to recline properly against the cushions. ‘Nothing. Get a feel of the place. Make a judgement if possible about his activities. Find out anything more about it, if you get an opportunity in the future.’

  ‘And until then?’

  ‘Enjoy yourself, I suggest.’ The music wailed louder, the singing with it, apparently coming nearer among the trees and veils. Still the pungency of spices burning in the evening.

  ‘Right-o.’

  Their drinks came, thick with herbs. ‘You seem to be toddling along all right, Cade.’

  Cade waited. Through one of the veils, there was the suggestion of a woman’s body dancing.

  ‘Confess I wasn’t sure how you’d fit in. Man of business. Tendency to… well, look to the profits.’

  ‘Oh, I do that. But perhaps I calculate profit differently to you.’

  Knox seemed to be considering this, but gave no sign that he’d understood it. ‘You said earlier that I’d make a good merchant because I try to understand the… the deal. That’s all there is to this business, too. Understand the other chap’s needs and wants. That’s all you do, isn’t it? Offer him enough – but no more. Recognize the possibility of the unexpected, and have contingencies.’

  ‘That’s about it.’

  ‘Seems to make for a good contact man: focused on the result; thinking about what makes the other fellow tick.’

  Cade nodded; reputation intact.

  From nearby, there was the rattle of dice and the click of backgammon pieces. They finished their drinks; ordered more. Smoked a cigarette each. To Cade, the world – so distorted in this place of scents and glimpses – was starting to find a new equilibrium; one that accommodated the strangeness.

  Ani was right. Constantinople was a place between worlds, and he was becoming used to it. And what was a borderland, but a place of exchange – a place of trade?

  Ballentyne’s train journey from Split to Belgrade was a sour one. Duty was hurrying him from a city that might have been worth exploring, a city that had known half a dozen civilizations, to one he had never warmed to. The railway crawled through the Dalmatian hinterland, winding and feeling its way through impossible gorges and doubling back around mountain ranges; the Balkan determination to prove its resistance to the most modern engineering. Guilt was nagging at him, for almost a week of idleness; and something else, less familiar, left him out of sorts and snappish.

  A station in the foothills. Ballentyne hadn’t caught the name, if there was one. If there was a station there was presumably a town; but it couldn’t be seen from the railway. He tried to picture the map.

  Air. Leg-stretch. The train was still clanking and jolting to a stop as he stood in the open doorway and filled his lungs. The sky was vivid, a blue that shone, and the mountains cut up into it like diamonds. A forest of firs between him and the mountainside.

  The station building was a shack, tucked against the front line of firs. He walked away from it, around the end of the train, and already a gaggle of half a dozen gypsy children was flocking to the carriages. He pushed through them – their pleas were lacklustre, unhopeful; he wondered if they slept out here, looked for signs of habitation in the first gloom of the trees ahead – and immediately the ground was rising.

  Another great breath, and the fresh air burned his throat – touched with the reek of unwashed human. He lit his
pipe, enjoyed the lengthening of his stride; within seconds he was among scattered trees, the train only a suggestion of voices and steam at the back of his mind.

  The world did not reach this place. The train brought traces of it: a few coins, perhaps some scavenged food, whatever waste was left behind on the tracks. Shadows, echoes, of the wealth and power and energy of the Europe somewhere outside. These people past whom the trains rushed would be counted unfortunate, but the idea of an escape from the posturing and the insecurity, the belligerent headlines and the games that caught men up and thrust them into the machine, was seductive.

  But it was not possible. Ballentyne had found himself with a duty; knew that the steep and rugged pathway had to be trod.

  It wasn’t about belonging; Isabella had been wrong. He followed where his intellectual curiosity led. Right now there was responsibility, too. All over Europe, men were recognizing that.

  He was back at the train a few minutes later. As he walked down beside it towards his compartment, he caught a glimpse of the other side between the tender and the first carriage, a glimpse of a man, a face, looking around but not seeing him.

  The face.

  Ballentyne was a yard past before it registered, but it registered with bewilderment and unease. He knew it. Surely, he knew it, vaguely, but what area and period of his life? And why did it so lurch at him?

  Where had they met? Nothing. They hadn’t met; he was remembering a photograph. But why should a photograph – now—

  Belcredi.

  Belcredi, the eccentric Austrian anthropologist, the theorist of natural links between Germans and Muslims. Belcredi, who according to Knox’s hotel register had been in Durrës a couple of weeks back.

  Now Belcredi was on the same train as him.

  An inconspicuous townhouse in Berlin: solid, grey, in good repair, but with a front garden only dirt and one under-developed tree. The garden seemed to distance the house from the summer evening city beyond. Distinctions: a brass plaque on one of the porch columns, and a flag hanging above – but limp, so that only a few stars and one stripe showed, as if the Republic were shrivelling in winter rather than blossoming.

  In the drawing room, two whiskey glasses clinked. ‘Thank you, Ambassador.’ A courtly condescending drawl to a younger man. ‘Kind of your man to wait up for me.’

  ‘That’s our pleasure, Colonel.’ They called him ‘Colonel’ in Texas, and they called him ‘Colonel’ in the White House; so ‘Colonel’ he had to be in Berlin. ‘Wire get off alright?’

  ‘And not sugar-coated, either. That’s how I am, sir, and that’s how the President likes it. “Militarism run stark mad.” That’s what I said. What do you think?’

  ‘That’s what it is, Colonel. Nice if Washington listen for once.’

  A New York machine politician, this ambassador, with New York lawyer punch behind the eye-glasses. ‘They listen to me, sir.’ The ‘sir’ imposing rather than respectful.

  ‘The Kaiser is quite a fellow in the face-to-face, ain’t he?’

  ‘I never saw such a deal of tinware on a chest. The gentleman looks like a Georgia sideboard. And do you know what, Mr Ambassador? Do you know the thing that scares me most?’ A theatrical pause; a sip of whiskey. The ambassador waited obediently. ‘He’s the sharpest of the lot.’ Now the interest became more than polite. ‘His wits; the clarity of his thinking. He sees the thing cold and he sees it clear. Clever men in London, of course, all prosing in Latin and Greek and so forth, but their thinking’s stuck with old Julius Caesar too. Trying to prove to me the logical impossibility of war, all the statistics and fancy tags a man could want, and outside the window that old navy of theirs just getting bigger and bigger. The French are cut up every which way: some want a war and some don’t and no one’s paying attention. They know that if it comes there’s only one country they’re going to be fighting. But I had to go back twice in the one day to check the same fellow was still prime minister.’ Another sip of whiskey. ‘Som-nam-bulism. That’s the dandy phrase, isn’t it?’

  ‘Something you learned in London, Colonel?’ Grim smile from the colonel, satisfied that the previous witticism had registered. ‘Sleepwalking to war, you would say? And the Kaiser isn’t sharp enough to stop it?’

  ‘The damnedest fellow you ever saw. And high-strung like a debutante at her first dance. His pride’s bigger than his brain, and he’s using his brain to convince himself he’s justified.’

  The ambassador moved to a table by the window to fetch the whiskey decanter. The curtains were still open; the street was drowsy with strolls and goings-home.

  ‘They’re all justified, by their own lights. Each one’s only got to look over the fence. Britain’s ship programme is perfectly justified if you look at Germany. Germany’s programme is perfectly justified by Britain’s. France is justifiably worried by Germany and Russia’s justifiably worried by the whole twentieth century, including Germany, and they’ve both got troop programmes that’ll give a gun to everyone from grandpa to the kid who shines your shoe. And that’s before you start trying to work out their cockeyed calculations about the Austrian Empire and the Turkish Empire. Every offensive weapon makes someone else feel angry. Every defensive treaty makes someone else feel threatened.’

  The colonel held out his glass for the refill. ‘A fellow on the train tried to convince me that all these elaborate alliances meant that war was impossible – a phrase I keep hearing, usually from a man wearing a sword – because no one would go to war without their allies, and it was impossible to conceive of a crisis in which all the allies in the alliances would see their interests threatened enough for war to be justified and the alliance deals to be called in.’

  The ambassador swirled his glass, looking into the eddy. ‘And what would happen, Colonel, with all these fellows running around the powder store with lit matches, if they should happen across a crisis that actually affected no one’s interests?’

  ‘Where did you disappear to, Gerta von Waldeck?’ It was childish, and Hathaway was annoyed she hadn’t been able better to restrain herself.

  Gerta’s face snapped round; the pink was accentuated in her cheeks, the cold blue in her eyes. ‘Don’t be harsh,’ she said. A finger came up and touched Hathaway’s cheek. ‘If you won’t let me have a world, at least let me have a Germany.’

  ‘Must it be this one?’

  ‘We all have our duties.’

  Hathaway nodded.

  Von Waldeck’s castle was three centuries old, and the money was long gone. Auerstein’s Margaretenhof wasn’t more than three decades old, and the money still hung thick. It was a grand statement of wealth and status, imposing in its size and its style, in the frontage that could be seen a mile off, in the fat stones that finished each corner, in the outsized proportions of every doorway.

  The emperor had hunted from the Margaretenhof in ’05 and again in ’06 – one of the critical telegrams in the Moroccan crisis had been sent from here – and the fashion had not yet faded. Auerstein’s son Otto had added intellect and discretion to name, and made himself indispensable in the Foreign Ministry; in a generation the family had bridged heritage and power. And not the quiet power of von Waldeck’s bankers, but the busyness of government.

  Every few days a morning’s shooting or hunting would be proclaimed, and this by some phenomenon of social telegraphy would draw additional guests to the house, and the corridors and dining table would be busier. On Hathaway’s second day another soldier arrived – a smart major called Immelmann – and an Austrian count. The next morning brought a Swiss metal-trader and later, when Hathaway emerged from the library to get some air, there was a face in the hall that she recognized: Eckhardt, the young man at supper with Niemann.

  Eckhardt was aggressively charming to her while they waited to go into dinner; she had a two-minute monopoly of his well-cut face and his intelligent observations on travelling in Europe. He introduced her to Major Immelmann – his height, his leanness, the close-cropped, close-skinned he
ad, would all have said soldier whether he was in uniform or in the bath – and Otto Auerstein, red-headed, and stockier than his father. ‘Eh, Eckhardt, are we surprised that you are already acquainted with the handsomest of the ladies?’ She’d have appreciated the flattery more if Immelmann had given her more than a glance.

  ‘Actually, Fräulein Hathaway and I met at Niemann’s.’

  ‘Oh, Niemann!’ and a laugh, echoed by the others, a shared scorn.

  Again dinner was the orchestra of male opinions, with only the occasional trill of feminine interest or distraction. Hathaway could feel the anger in her own face, despising the men and the women. Despising everyone. I have spent my life spectating on a German dinner party.

  Major Immelmann, erect and emitting certainties: ‘The emperor will have the respect that is due to his seniority in Europe.’ The man opposite Hathaway murmured something to the woman beside him about Major Immelmann being aide to the Chief of General Staff, and the woman gazed at Immelmann, and Hathaway resisted the urge to throw a fork at her. ‘As a German, sir’ – this to the older Auerstein – ‘you would be proud to hear him: wise, just, clear, decisive.’

  ‘They treated him as the schoolboy of Europe; now he dominates.’

  ‘I should say – forgive me if I do not say much – the emperor’s great patience is all that stands between Europe and war.’

  ‘Germany seeks the same freedom to pursue her natural economic interests that all nations have enjoyed. To develop, and not to be threatened.’

  ‘But could we fight alone? The British whale as well as the Russian bear?’

  A glance between Immelmann and Otto Auerstein, a private joke. ‘Do not be sure that it would be necessary.’

  ‘Austria is our eternal ally, of course.’ A glance at the Austrian count.