The Spider of Sarajevo

by Robert Wilton

  On the desk behind him, another small token of those currencies: the representatives of Berlin and London had initialled an agreement on the 15th of June resolving their differences over the extension of the German railway into Mesopotamia; a perfectly obvious compromise setting a limit to the line and giving the British the reassurances about local control and tariffs that they always craved. A fractional easing of the tension between Britain and Germany; but the other side of the coin could be an increase in the insecurity and volatility of France and Russia, should a man choose to spend it thus.

  Alexandria was hot – a dry heat, somehow crisp on one’s skin, edged with a sandy breeze coming out of the desert and rustling down the boulevards. To Knox, it felt like a place of work, and the heat accordingly a reassurance of duty. The harbour was thick with ships: grey beasts belching smoke and things of wood and cloth that nipped among them, like butterflies around elephants. Amid the mayhem of the waterfront there were plenty of British uniforms. Mostly he was just glad to be on land again, if only temporarily: march where he wanted; dust on his boots.

  The place looked pretty European. The façades could have been Paris or Rome – or Vienna. A lurch of memory. Carriages and European dress, and among them lots of natives in their white get-up – sheets and turbans – as if they’d strayed into the wrong play.

  Façade it was. Five blocks back in any direction the buildings dropped to single-storey, sand-brick affairs. The stench lurched at one, the rotting of vegetable and animal matter, and the houses became shacks, timber and loose brick and packing crates and sheets.

  His instructions took him through a fruit market to another open space, less hemmed in by buildings and less packed with people and noise. The buildings were squat blocks, sand on sand and unembellished with canopies or displays. Half the signs were in Arabic; those in English or French – a flicker of Knox the schoolboy – advertised wholesalers of dry goods, furniture sellers, horse traders. Much quieter.

  In a timber merchant’s at the corner of the square, he found a man with a shrivelled hand. Arab-looking fellow. Linen suit, but with a cummerbund and a fez.

  ‘I had a teacher once,’ Knox said; ‘loved to quote the line… what was it? “Hew me cedar trees out of Lebanon.”’

  The chap looked past him, glanced around instinctively. ‘My servants shall be with thy servants.’

  ‘Unto thee will I give hire.’

  The Arab nodded, and disappeared into the gloom of his warehouse. A minute later he was back with an envelope. Knox took it, and stepped away.

  In the envelope was a paper, and on the paper only an address. A number, a street, and a city: Sarajevo.

  He read the address three times, checked it in his head, pulled a box of matches from his pocket and watched the paper flare and twist in his hand. He ground the remains into the dust of the warehouse floor, nodded formally to the Arab, who nodded back, and left.

  That afternoon a message was received on the troopship Manora, on the headed notepaper of the British Military Ward of the Alexandria Hospital. It stated that KNOX, Major V., had succumbed to a bout of what presented as dysentery but could be something worse. His condition and the possibility of contagion meant that it would be a grave risk for him and for the others on board should he return to the ship. His destination unit in India and his dispatching authority in Britain had been informed of this interruption to his deployment – hopefully only temporary.

  As the days had passed, so the memory of the unease in Vienna had faded in James Cade’s mind.

  He’d made the deal, he hadn’t liked the ground, and so he’d got out. It meant that stepping out of the train in Constantinople felt like coming home, and that had been peculiar. Pleasant, though.

  He was making a life that worked here. Business quietly prospering, private life pleasant. No one seemed to have noticed the disappearance of Muhtar.

  Intermittently, he wondered what Silvas’s people had done with the body.

  Ani and her brother, Varujan, seemed a little more sure of themselves these days. Varujan’s business was flourishing. He’d gladly accepted Cade’s hints of what it would take to worsen the pressure on Muhtar – some over-generous loans; a short-term loss – and now he was getting the medium-term benefits. He and his sister contrived somehow to give the impression that they had helped Cade, rather than the reverse. He was invited to the house as a family friend; honoured, and expected to invest here and there, to contribute. There was murmuring through the tobacco smoke of possible partnerships.

  Ani had grown comfortable in their relationship, and expecting little gifts. And why in hell not? She was languid and lovely, and Cade’s passion was becoming fondness.

  He and Osman Riza finally made time for one of their lunches. Cade risked a second sherry, and they gossiped a little: Riza about the ministry and Cade about the foibles of the British Embassy. Riza passed some new suggestions that the German Mission was making for Turkish imports; and, under a napkin, a sketch of a plan he’d seen in someone’s document case in a meeting, for defensive arrangements in the event of war. Just the sort of thing to keep London content.

  London content. The old ’un content. Ani content. Constantinople, it seemed, was a grand place, and James Cade was feeling himself very nicely settled.

  The Foreign Office was surprisingly rambling for such a grand exterior, and Hathaway was doubting the directions right up until she reached the door she wanted. Everything was wooden panels; the sun dropping in through net curtains illuminated sleepy swirls of dust. It was the establishment as she’d always imagined it – more so; only now she had the disturbing sense of the power and clarity that could inhabit the maze.

  Even once she’d found the door it didn’t seem quite right. No sound in this extremity of the building; unnatural, as if she’d slipped into a dream. Nor did it seem right that what she was beginning to understand of the organization behind her could exist in such anonymity. She knocked.

  ‘Do come in, please, Miss Hathaway.’

  The old man rose courteously as she came in. He was holding an envelope, apparently closed, and a match.

  ‘How were your parents? Well, I trust.’

  ‘How did you know it was me?’

  ‘Please sit down.’ She did. ‘You are naturally a punctual person; I have very few visitors, and almost none unexpected. Would you forgive me if I finished a few administrative chores?’

  ‘You… had me watched? Followed to Derbyshire?’

  A smile. ‘No, Miss Hathaway, I did not. My resources wouldn’t allow it in any case. No, I just rather assumed… back home, you know – natural to remind oneself what’s what.’ He sat, and focused on envelope and match again.

  Hathaway nodded; then – an old impulse of impertinence – ‘May I ask what that is?’

  The old man lowered both objects to the table. ‘Well, yes; let’s see what you think, Miss Hathaway.’ He raised the envelope slightly. ‘This, I infer from certain marks and certain aspects of the internal addressing, is a report. From a man in Constantinople.’ He paused, professorial.

  ‘And you habitually burn reports from your sources without reading them?’

  ‘A little exercise for your logic, Miss Hathaway. This man – a man of essentially the same status as three others – travelled recently to… a certain European capital. As did the other three.’ Hathaway was working hard to control her face. ‘The other three suffered harassment and, in two cases, death there.’ She saw his lips thin. A pose of coldness; she knew it for a pose. ‘This man came out apparently unharmed. Why might that be, do you suppose?’

  He was watching her, just like in that first meeting: weighing her; calculating her. She waited.

  ‘This man has previously sent reports – credible reports – from a certain source he has cultivated. Rather useful snippets about German influence in Constantinople. He has another promising source as well. Now, after his Vienna trip, he sends us a new report.’

  The old man pushed the env
elope to her side of the desk, and laid the match on top of it.

  ‘Now you have all the information that I do, Miss Hathaway. The envelope too.’ He gestured her to it. ‘No doubt just the sort of thing our politicians and generals would be fascinated to hear of.’

  ‘You doubt this man’s loyalty?’

  ‘I do not.’

  ‘So you worry that he is being manipulated. That he has been recognized as an agent, and left as a channel for false information.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘You could read the contents; evaluate their credibility.’

  ‘The envelope is before you, Miss Hathaway. You are intelligent and politically alert. Evaluate by all means.’

  She reached out for it. Wary, watching his eyes; they were blank again.

  She picked up the envelope, by one corner, and held it loose. ‘I have… some idea of the sophistication of these people. The report will be credible regardless.’ He said nothing; the eyes said nothing. ‘If the report makes one assertion, one must suspect it. Having suspected it, one must suspect that one’s opponent wants one to do just that, and that the assertion might after all be true.’ Nothing. ‘Two outcomes are likely: either one’s unconscious preferences – one’s existing assessment, one’s preconception – will influence the evaluation; or all evaluation will be paralysed.’

  Two sets of eyes gazed cold at each other. Hathaway struck the match, and waited for the flame to take before dropping the envelope into the wastepaper bin.

  Now something flickered on the face. ‘Thank you, Miss Hathaway.’ The eyes dropped to the desk, and he began to read a document.

  There was a newspaper framed precisely by the corner of the desk; Hathaway began to read it.

  On the morning of the 22nd of June, a steamer edged her way close to the wharf of the Romanian port of Constanta. It was an embarrassed approach, made with coughs of smoke and much shuffling of the water. The steamer was black, a battered beetle squirming and belching her way along the wharf. Seen against the white walls of the houses, against the mosques and the cathedral with its lively stripes in the stone, she was a foul thing.

  Shyly she found her berth, and the crew began to moor. Before the first rope was tied, a man had stepped from the deck onto the dockside, a small rucksack on his back and a stride hungry for land.

  Major Valentine Knox had come back to Europe.

  ‘Miss Hathaway.’

  Hathaway focused. ‘I beg your pardon. Just something in the newspaper. It’s— Would you object if I took this page?’ He shook his head. She pulled out the page and began to fold it carefully. ‘A woman called Bertha von Suttner has died; yesterday. She was…’

  ‘The Austrian. She won the Swedish prize for peace.’

  ‘I met her.’

  ‘Yes. I recall. She made an impression, I think.’ Hathaway hesitated, and then nodded with something like defiance. ‘And her death must seem a kind of symbol.’

  ‘Symbolic, perhaps, that one of the most remarkable people of the age is given only a note at the bottom of the seventh page.’

  The conservatory. The woman in the chair, her crown of hair, her bulk, her implacability, her sharpness. Staring out into the darkness.

  The old man watched her.

  ‘I didn’t expect you to love the idea of war, Miss Hathaway. Leave that to the arms dealers and the poets. But, given the likelihood of war, I hoped you would make a rational analysis of which outcome would best guard what you care about: your family, the possibility of the realization of certain ideals; then I expected you to apply your mind to securing that outcome.’

  ‘Pretty speech, sir, and as shrewd as ever. But the logic is uneven. Your actions may give us advantage in war, or mitigate its effects, but they increase its likelihood nonetheless.’ She looked at him bleak. ‘Even I. My jaunt through Germany, my little games of adventure. I was a message to Germany; a confirmation of her prejudices and fears, and in response there will have been some countervailing action, some countervailing actress, to confirm our prejudices and fears and further increase the likelihood of war.’

  She shook her head; a flash of Gerta in her mind. ‘It should be possible for two people to reinforce sympathy, not fear.’

  He nodded, very slowly. Then: ‘It falls to very few that they may change the world. Some have the character and the opportunity to change their place in it. After sixty years, the number and variety of men – better men – that I might have been is large indeed. But I find myself in this room. In this Europe.’

  ‘As do I. That’s your implication presumably.’

  ‘I don’t ask your motives in being here. Nor do I tell you what your motives should be for what you do next. If they lead you to assist me, I may know that it would be of benefit to me, but I could make no assertion about its effect on you. You are alone.’

  Knox hadn’t been to Belgrade before. Gloomy sort of place. Good-looking women.

  He was on the edge of the battlefield now. The old man had been clear on the point. Serbia’s interests were close to Britain’s, but that went for nothing in this part of the world. Vienna worried about Belgrade, and Vienna was correspondingly active in Belgrade. Within the Spider’s web. Ballentyne had been in Belgrade, and it had been from Belgrade that they’d lured him.

  In enemy country, you must take it for granted that you will encounter the enemy. Do not look for the observers, because it only makes you more easily observed. Be alive and stay alive.

  Knox walked the side streets on feet that seemed to echo through the world, a world made of porcelain. He heard the stones moving against each other, knew that if he broke his even anonymous tread they would explode around him.

  A bar in Skadarlija; a phrase to the barman.

  Then wait.

  He sat on his own, sipping at a beer, for an hour. He was alert to the room, to the rumble as a finger moved across a table, the creak as a head turned, the thump of a closing eye. But he did not seem to watch it. A man on his own, staring into nothing.

  He knew that the whole room was watching him; the whole world.

  No tricks; no games to pass the time. His whole consciousness, his whole existence, was concentrated in this room; concentrated in muscle and sense; concentrated in the terrible and extraordinary phenomenon of being alive in this body in this moment.

  After an exact hour, half the beer undrunk, he got up and left.

  Neither age nor success takes from a man his insecurities. Indeed, the more years and the more power he acquires, the more he feels he has to lose. A man never loses the instinct to show his neighbour his latest acquisition, in the hope that this time at last he will receive the respect that is his due.

  By the 23rd of June 1914, the Royal Navy’s Second Battle Squadron had gathered in Kiel. At its heart were four dreadnought battleships, the King George V, the Ajax, the Audacious, and the Centurion. They were superlatives. Only buildings had ever been built anything like as big: the dreadnoughts were the cathedrals of the new century, monuments to man’s technical ingenuity and to his aspiration to a power transcending anything else human, a power touching the almighty. In the last week of June 1914, the last week of the last summer of the world, Kiel hosted the most powerful men, and the most powerful weapons, in existence.

  The voice seemed to come at the old man out of the fog, and his stick was up and across his chest ready for defence or attack before he’d absorbed the words. It was still braced there as the voice solidified into the figure of Thomson – solid indeed – stepping forwards onto the path.

  St James’s Park was a cloud of greys: the trees and shrubs, Thomson one of them, were darker shadows in the fog; the lake might not have been there, but for the far-off splash or squawk of a duck. Thomson made one wide circuit of where the two of them stood, before coming in close and speaking.

  ‘We think we have him. A clerk in the Ports and Consulates Office. Name of Palmer.’

  ‘Ports and Consulates…’ A long sigh. ‘I see…’

  �
��It was your tip that did it. The reason why this chap Ballentyne was picked up, and none other. When you asked for the whereabouts of the four, his name went into Ports and Consulates because he was thought likely to be abroad.’

  The old man held up a hand, like a marker post in the fog, straining for clarity. ‘Hathaway. The Spider got onto Hathaway… when we ran a search on Auerstein.’ The hand closed into a fist, and dropped slowly. ‘Ideal place to have a spy. The Spider would know if we were flagging people coming in or out.’

  ‘And the offices are close enough for this chap Palmer to be able to pop across and check the general files. He would also have been able to start the enquiry about your man Duval, or whatever his name was.’

  ‘Can you prove it’s this man Palmer?’

  ‘We’re turning his life upside down. But… no. No, we can’t.’

  The old man swished at the grey with his stick, and the fog swirled around the tip.

  Twenty-four hours later, Knox returned to the same bar, said the same thing to the barman, and sat nursing a glass of the same brand of beer for the same length of time. He knew that the whole room was watching him; the whole world. After an exact hour, a little of the beer undrunk, he got up and left.

  In the street, he heard the whispering of the shadows. Hesitated, then set off on a roundabout route towards the doss-house where he was bedding down.

  As he moved, he had the sense of someone appearing in the doorway of the bar behind him. But no steps followed him. They wouldn’t, not if they were any good. Just a signal, if anything.

  Sure enough, something wavered in the blackness across the street as he walked. Something flickered briefly in the pool of a street lamp and then was gone.

  He walked on.

  Fifty yards further he turned right; the street was narrow – almost an alley – and it was darker and sounds echoed louder. Immediately there were footsteps behind him. Their pace was forced; they were catching him up. Then a shift in the shadow in front of him – they’d got in front of him; that was smart work – and immediately they had him between them.