The Spider of Sarajevo

by Robert Wilton

  ‘So who is he then?’

  The old man’s mouth twisted; his voice dwindled. ‘I believe him to be one of three men. A Swiss-French financier named Morgenthal. An Austrian businessman named Krug. A German scholar and collector named Hermes.’

  ‘And you’re trying to find out which.’

  ‘And I have been for more than a decade. For now, he is the Spider.’

  This time it was a more calculated act, and Hathaway felt correspondingly more uneasy.

  But if Flora Hathaway is to succeed, it should surely be by a coldly considered deed.

  Instinctively, she sought solitude and strength in the library. It was lit by table lamps only, and the upper tiers of books were only suggestions in the gloom. The leather of chairs and tabletops glowed warm.

  On one table she saw a document case, like a grail.

  Surely it wasn’t…

  It wasn’t. Re-checking that she was alone, she pulled it open. A notebook, blank. A ‘gentleman’s’ magazine, with a picture of a ‘lady’ on the cover. A train timetable. A pack of cigarettes. A stern-looking official pass. This wasn’t Immelmann’s case, but the colonel’s.

  She closed the case, smiled at it. I am better than this colonel. Surely I can be better than the major.

  She went at it like a quadrilateral equation: sure but unhurrying, weighing the factors but driving through them to a solution.

  She considered the size of her shawl. She left her clutch-bag beside a table leg in the library. She took the back stairs. She had an excuse in mind for each geographical stage of the journey – hall, servants’ corridor, stairs, guest wing. Nagging at her, the certainty that it would be a trivial victory merely to look inside the case.

  The corridor of the male guests was empty, its residents at cards or billiards or other games. She must not think of Gerta.

  Should she think of Gerta as an ally? Concentrate. Move. The world will not wait for you, girl. Still the corridor empty. Immelmann two doors away, one door away, and then the long letters of the name card in front of her. She knocked. Nothing. A breath, a thrill of tremendous power, now I will be… and she unlocked the door and slipped in.

  Immelmann was not there; his document case was.

  Seconds later, another breath, opening the door and slipping out into the corridor, the door closed, locked, and turned, and Frau Auerstein was standing at the junction of the corridors, staring at her.

  She took in the Englishwoman’s flushed face, the shoulder of her dress awry, a bootlace trailing, the shawl clutched to her breasts.

  Hathaway gazed back at her. Her glance flicked to the door she’d just closed, down in apparent discomfort, then up defiant. ‘Some things even an Englishwoman may appreciate,’ she said. And she strode past and away.

  The spy moved through the shadows of the shipyard.

  A key to a side-gate had been stolen, temporarily, by a riveter and copied; and now the spy would make regular night-time calls to monitor the progress of the new British ships.

  He’d been given basic instructions: what to look for; the different types of ship. But the shipyard was an alien landscape, its shapes unfamiliar and distorted. Sheds of all sizes, brick and wood and metal corners that caught at his shoulders. Traction engines and cranes and gantries lurking and reaching over him. At his feet, railway tracks snaked through cobbles and glistened under the moon.

  He turned a corner, and gaped; gaped upwards, and shrank.

  The hull of a ship, and it was immense. It roared over him, an inconceivable size, impossible. It was bigger than the biggest house, he knew, because there was a house under the prow and it was tiny, a silly doll’s house against the monster over it. A century ago they had built wooden ships here, and the house had been an engineer’s or a yard director’s and appropriate against the elegant vessels being built nearby. Now that world had shrivelled, and the iron giants ruled.

  Just the hull. The superstructure had not been started. Its height would grow further – it might even double… He forced himself to note the state of progress. He would have to report every detail back to the contact in London. And then he allowed himself to contemplate the size again – as a man; a German man.

  Usually his instructions arrived by letter – once there had been a visit, a man nervous yet somehow inspiring, somehow frightening – innocuous suggestions or words in a code that had been sent separately and sometimes changed – and how many letters could the police check, anyway? Once an envelope had contained a newspaper cutting: July 1913, a speech by the British First Lord of the Admiralty.

  A promise to deliver one torpedo boat to the Royal Navy every week; one light cruiser every thirty days; one super-Dreadnought every forty-five days. Nothing else in the envelope; it did not need to be repeated that Germany could not match this.

  Hathaway had thought thirty minutes would be ample to see what was in Major Immelmann’s document case and then arrange its reappearance. A child’s game; a stubborn dare.

  First, a return down the back stairs, flitting through the shadows to the dining room, visualizing the table and dinner and dropping the key under Immelmann’s chair, the tablecloth starch-stiff and scratching at her face. And up to her room again, unseen.

  In her room, the door locked behind her, the document case on her dressing table. She let her hand stroke the leather once, saw the gilt initials – Shakespeare’s pun: oh guilt indeed – K.-H. I.; then she unzipped it.

  When she saw the number of documents in the case – a dozen sheets, records of meetings? neat hand, Immelmann writes like a schoolboy – she decided she could risk forty-five minutes to skim them and note any essential points.

  An adult game of hide-and-seek. How long would he dally in the moonlight with Gerta?

  Then she started looking at the titles, saw the density of the information on the first page. ‘Visit of Italian General Staff; summary of their proposed contribution’; ‘Summary of the Emperor’s remarks to Chief of Staff after his 26.5 meeting with the Arch-Duke Franz Ferdinand of Austria’.

  Sixty minutes would hardly make a difference. Then back down to the library, realized I left my bag somewhere, and Immelmann’s case left where Colonel Bauer’s had been.

  ‘Chief of Staff audience with the Emperor: the strategic situation’.

  Even assuming Immelmann did come back to his room before she’d finished, how likely was it that he’d look at his document case?

  So: ninety minutes. Oh, be charming, my Gerta.

  What could actually happen if they did catch her?

  Belgrade was as Ballentyne remembered it: the women with their strained beauty; the men too keen to demonstrate their manliness; a place eager to forget the Ottoman flavours in its past, but picking uncomfortably from the Austrian. It seemed excitable; the headlines and the hotel lobbies were full of fear and outrage and defiance against Vienna. But the same was probably true of London, and the other capitals. He met up with a couple of acquaintances from the small Albanian community, in the unnamed cafés where he knew they’d be found, and they were worried. A belligerent Serbia was an uncomfortable place for those who were not Serbs.

  He didn’t quite know what he was supposed to be doing. He could gather the mood of the place well enough, if perhaps not as deeply as he had in Albania. But what to do with Belcredi? That first afternoon he’d followed the Austrian to his hotel, and felt rather pleased with himself for doing so. But then what? Was he supposed to lurk there permanently until Belcredi came out again? Turn up every morning? And what did it achieve, beyond at best a list of places the man visited?

  In any case, it all rather came down to Belcredi’s game. It was neither surprising nor objectionable if an anthropologist went travelling in the Balkans, however much of a crank he was. Had he some additional motive that took him into the Albanian villages – Ballentyne felt a vague proprietorial jealousy – and now north? So what if he did? And how different is this from me?

  Most of all, was it only coincidence that had put
him in Durrës just before Ballentyne, and then on the same train at Split?

  Ballentyne had decided that he wasn’t going to be hiding in the shrubbery for the night. Belcredi would be staying at least until morning, and so Ballentyne got himself settled and had supper with an acquaintance from Belgrade University.

  The next morning he followed Belcredi to the Austrian Embassy, and then to a private address which he noted. By lunchtime he’d had enough. It was a pretty shoddy sort of activity, and it didn’t seem to be achieving anything. In a moment of inspiration he stopped at an hotel and got the concierge to telephone to Belcredi’s hotel to find how long he was staying; the fact he had reserved for a week was reassuring, but didn’t help with what to do with him.

  The British Embassy? Mayhew in London had been cagey about embassies; at your service but use with discretion, whatever that meant. Ballentyne himself had never had much time for diplomats, but they might be able to check, or help, or get guidance. Frankly, Belcredi seemed like a waste of time he’d like to be rid of.

  Contact any serving military officer on the embassy staff. It wasn’t clear whether this was because of their inherently greater trustworthiness or efficiency, in Mayhew’s world. Ballentyne sat and waited to see Major Bruce.

  ‘Why, surely it’s Mr Ballentyne!’

  This, surely, was not Major Bruce. Admittedly his idea of majors was dominated by Knox, but none of them could be fifty-somethings with straggling grey hair, and a suit with a stripe and a sack-like quality that suggested Belgrade tailoring rather than wherever British officers had their suits made.

  And who should know he was here?

  ‘Ronald Ballentyne? Oxford, and London – anthropology? Heard you speak at Fitzroy Street once.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I’m he.’ Ballentyne stood. ‘You must forgive—’

  ‘Don’t think we were introduced at the time. Pickford. Charles Pickford.

  I’m sort of senior prefect for the informal British community hereabouts; cultural evenings and picnics.’

  ‘Have I read something of yours, sir? Artistic traditions in Serbia – something like that?’

  ‘If you have you’re a rare man, and I can’t say a wise one.’ The first suggestion of bluster had gone. Pickford’s whole manner was quiet, civilized. A pleasant expatriate with a hobby and an under-exercised brain. ‘Could I invite you to take some tea with me?’

  ‘Well, I’m supposed to be meeting—’

  Pickford came a step closer, his voice lower. ‘Now, Mr Ballentyne? Away from this place?’

  Ballentyne nodded, and followed the older man out of the embassy. ‘You see we’ve quite a group of enthusiasts in the Anglophone community here,’ Pickford was saying more loudly, ‘and I’m secretly hoping I could dragoon you into giving us a little talk.’

  He used the same story to the maître d’ at the Royal Hotel. ‘A discreet table please, Dragan!’ Again it was louder than was natural to him. ‘I am on a vital mission for the society, and I have a valuable victim.’

  They sat; Pickford ordered for them both, with feigned fussiness; Ballentyne waited.

  ‘The busybody enthusiast, Mr Ballentyne.’ The voice was quieter again. ‘Not a bad persona with which to snoop and meet people. One rather fears that it really is one’s persona, and the snooping merely a convenient way one can make oneself useful.’ The eyes were sharper as they looked up. ‘Perhaps you have a similar sensation.’

  Ballentyne nodded at the point, a faint smile. It felt like being in his tutor’s room at Oxford again.

  ‘I was asked to keep an eye out for you. You don’t strike me as an embassy sort of fellow, so I assumed you had some special reason to call there.’

  Their tea arrived. Ballentyne watched the older man for a moment longer, stirring his tea and not looking up until Ballentyne spoke. Ballentyne told him: Belcredi, Durrës, the train, here; he tried to be as concise and precise as possible in his facts and his speculations.

  Pickford tapped his spoon against his cup, slowly, rhythmically. ‘Interesting. You’ll know the cultural possibilities better than I. Serbia doesn’t have all that many Muslims; pockets in the south, and a few more civilized merchants and intellectuals in the city here. But they don’t get much love from the government, and the government would worry they’d be fertile ground for trouble. I can arrange to have some questions asked; about the man himself, if nothing else. I don’t like him popping up on the very same train as you.’

  ‘Quite. Does he need to be followed? Feel it’s a bit of a waste of time.’

  ‘Well, perhaps there are local fellows who could do it more easily. Blend in. Free you up. Sure we can make use of you while you’re here.’

  ‘If I can. I assume the idea of me doing a lecture to your dashed society was part of the pretence.’

  Pickford and his voice went rather stiff. ‘No, Mr Ballentyne. It was not. I’ve been badly let down by my musicologist for tomorrow – Russian; damned high-strung brutes – and you’re just the chap. Seven p.m. sharp at the Miša House. And nothing too… ah, outré, if you please, about highland village life; some of my flock are a little delicate.’

  ‘Your friend Immelmann is quite the tiger, Otto, isn’t he?’

  ‘Mother, what can you – Oh, you mean the lovely Waldeckchen! A handsome couple, no? But they’re both only trifling, I think.’

  ‘I did not mean Fräulein von Waldeck. The English girl was also… paying him a call.’

  ‘Immelmann, you’re a goat and a monster!’

  ‘What do you mean, Auerstein? Kindly—’

  ‘The women are queueing up to polish your buttons, it seems!’

  ‘Auerstein, this isn’t an idiom that amuses me. Von Waldeck is a charming woman, but she is behaving with at least as much restraint as I.’

  ‘Happily the English girl, die Eisanmut, is not so circumspect.’

  A council of war in a cabin.

  Heinrich Auerstein was surely the host, for it was his cabin, on his estate, for the benefit of him and his guests when hunting. But Colonel Walter Nicolai, Chief of Military Intelligence, was presiding.

  Colonel Bauer: ‘Major Immelmann reported his concerns to me, and based on your earlier direction I judged it appropriate to summon you directly, Herr Colonel.’ Nicolai’s position got him the ‘Herr’, and Immelmann’s family got him the ‘Major’. Auerstein watched the manoeuvring with irritation. Nicolai would be pleased to have someone on Moltke’s staff at disadvantage; he was tense, wondering how to play the fish he’d hooked. And this is my society.

  ‘Quite correct, Colonel.’ Nicolai enjoying himself. ‘Now, Major, it’s not my habit to see mistakes where there are none. In our army, duty and honesty will always be respected.’ Not a bad effort, Auerstein thought, at putting the young man politely in place; but Immelmann was sharp enough to see it and proud enough to resent it, and Nicolai would lose in the end.

  ‘Herr Colonel. Thank you. As I reported to Colonel Bauer, I have only coincidences; but the possibility is grave enough that it was essential to bring them to your attention.’ Immelmann wasn’t talking about mistakes, and quietly starting to shift responsibility onto Military Intelligence. Immelmann described the coincidences: the dropped key, the switched document cases, and the Englishwoman outside his room.

  Nicolai hesitated, the expectation now on him again. ‘What you may not have been told, Major, is that we had prior suspicions of the woman Hathaway. Your conjectures reinforce them, and are reinforced.’

  Auerstein spoke, cool and quiet. ‘Colonel Bauer did inform me. I remain concerned that she has been left free to travel. I remain concerned that business properly of the Military Intelligence Department is conducted in a private house.’

  Immelmann shifted on the bench, perhaps fractionally closer to Auerstein.

  Nicolai said cautiously, ‘Naturally the department is grateful for your support, Mein Herr.’ More assured. ‘Naturally there is no suggestion that her association with the Margaretenhof is anything more than
accident.’

  As if I am nothing more than their porter; as if I am somehow responsible for the foolish games they carry on under my roof.

  Nicolai shifted to his fellow soldiers. Even out of uniform, the three of them had a likeness to one another, an exactness. ‘And the papers she might have seen?’

  Immelmann, after a glance at Bauer: ‘Of the most serious, sir. The diplomatic secrets of the Chief of Staff.’

  ‘If she has seen them, has she been able to pass on her information?’

  Bauer: ‘She has sent no letter since yesterday at least, and has no other means of communicating out.’

  Nicolai spoke after a moment; magisterial thought: ‘Normally we might let her run a little; keep her watched. On this occasion – the knowledge she has – that could be too much of a risk.’ Immelmann nodded.

  Bauer: ‘We can arrest her? Interrogate her?’

  Nicolai shook his head uncertainly. ‘I doubt we have the evidence. Not an attractive measure.’

  The tip of Bauer’s tongue made one circuit of his lips. ‘Then perhaps we must arrange an… accident, for the young woman.’

  Immelmann frowned. Nicolai hesitated, again feeling the expectation, and then started to nod.

  ‘There will be no outrage in this house.’ Auerstein’s voice had altered, and the soldiers turned to consider him. His head came up, sixty years of pride. ‘English spy she may be; she is certainly a guest in this house.’

  Major Immelmann shifted again on the bench, glancing between his host and his superior officers.

  Ballentyne had a solitary supper, stew and beer in a back-street tavern. Pickford had given him a couple of errands for tomorrow – I think you might… as if directing him to some reading on the folk customs of the Berbers – but he felt out of place, as usual. If his mother were still alive she’d be fretting about him not settling down.