The Spider of Sarajevo

by Robert Wilton

  The door rumbled and slammed open, and she looked up into the face of a policeman. ‘’Ten tag. Papiere bitte.’ He saw that the compartment was all female and saluted, forefinger to cap. The strange caps, of course, with the crushed peak. She unfolded the sheet of paper and handed it up.

  The little girl opposite was staring up at the policeman. Eventually she spun back to her mother. ‘Mutti, was macht er?’

  ‘He’s a policeman, dearest. We’re back in Germany now. He is keeping us safe.’ The girl spun back to reconsider the policeman in this light, and Hathaway replayed the German to herself, noting the accusative, remembering the idioms.

  The policeman was methodically copying details from her passport sheet into a little book. He is keeping you safe from me.

  The sheet was passed back to her, a nod from the policeman and her over-pale photograph thrust towards its original. A glance at the mother’s papers, another salute and he was gone, rumble and slam.

  His presence lingered between them. After a moment, the mother said ‘He is… very formal, I think.’ Pretty woman; about her own age.

  ‘Oh. Very – efficient. Highly impressive.’ A moment of private pleasure at remembering the adjectives. She wished she could tell what part of Germany the woman’s accent represented.

  The mother and daughter were her only companions in the compartment. Somewhere around Rheims she’d had a stilted conversation with the child. Then the mother had commented on her copy of Schiller, lying on top of the Baedeker and getting equally little attention. A souvenir of her first visit, carried this time in theory as a refresher for her language, in practice as some kind of memento of self. Her German wasn’t good enough for Schiller at the best of times, and he was damned tedious going even when she could make him out.

  ‘You have visited your brother, I think you said.’

  ‘Yes. In Paris; he works in the German Embassy.’

  ‘He is a diplomat?’

  ‘No – no, he is a soldier.’ There was discomfort in the answer. Was she not supposed to say? It could hardly be a secret.

  ‘Has he a very smart uniform? Such an impressive life, I’m sure.’

  ‘Oh yes! We are very proud, yes.’

  ‘That’s nice. We must hope that… that there is no fighting.’

  Shock, the suspicion that Hathaway was privy to some terrible secret of war. ‘Oh no! No, we must hope. Karl is not…’ She looked to where the policeman had been. ‘That is not who we are. Who he is.’

  Poor girl; trapped on one of mankind’s frontiers.

  ‘Your husband could not be with you?’

  ‘His work.’ A shrug. ‘And sometimes, I think: husbands and brothers, they are not always the best friends, perhaps.’ Hathaway smiled, and tried to recapture an occasion when Ralph and Tim had been together. ‘You – have you family?’

  ‘Parents. One brother.’

  ‘Not a husband yet?’

  ‘No.’ Matter-of-fact smile, well worn. ‘No; it was planned. But he died.’

  ‘Oh!’ An instinctive glance at her daughter, cheerfully occupied with one of the curtains. ‘I am very sorry.’

  The shrug, likewise well worn. ‘Who knows? The paths of life. Is Karl happy in Paris?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, really. So beautiful a city; we have nothing to compare.’ She hesitated, and Hathaway stopped herself interrupting. ‘I think Karl is… is uncomfortable. He tries to be gay, but there are always suspicions and tensions with the French people. And his superiors. Always talk of war. “When the war comes.” Like that.’

  ‘Oh, but everyone talks like that, I’m sure. In London, too. Perhaps the French Embassy in Berlin is the same.’

  The young woman looked at her sadly. ‘But always… with us…’

  ‘You think that they want a war, these superiors of Karl?’

  ‘No.’ A shrug. ‘No, I’m sure…’ She retreated into the seat.

  Hathaway nodded, tried a sympathetic smile. Then she looked out onto the river and the trees. Is this what I have come for? Family anxieties and public speculations. Everyone really did talk like that. Am I supposed to report on such things? ‘Belligerent attitudes in the German Embassy in Paris’? The speculations of worried humans.

  The confidences of women. Which I do not, anyway, wish to share.

  The clanking of machinery, the quickening drumbeat of the steam as the train began to move and gather momentum, and they were across the border and into Germany proper.

  If Cade had had one sherbet punch fewer, he might have been able to avoid the incident, or have reacted less impetuously.

  After the reception: as he strolled down one of the cobbled streets towards his house, jacket slung over his shoulder, the warmth in head and spirit had him gazing around at the lanterns and the glistening cobbles and the beautiful wooden verandas and the decay, and not at the shadows and how they moved.

  A voice hissing at his elbow, English with an accent: ‘Into the alley, now!’ And a hand coming towards him and a knife, forcing him to the side of the street and a black opening.

  Affront and economy and the vague calculation that an alley could be even worse than the street and Cade’s jacket came down smothering and deflecting the knife and he lashed out with his other hand, and sent the attacker staggering back. He was shaping for a proper punch when his collar was grabbed and he was wrenched backwards, feet scrabbling for purchase on the stones and stumbling as the alley swallowed him. The stumble surprised the man at his collar too, and Cade used the momentum to push him off, and he pulled himself up and set himself for the brawl, then his head was stunned and he collapsed.

  Dimly, a roaring and throbbing instead of his head and, somewhere far away, hands scuffling through his jacket.

  Then alone, a broken animal lying in the mud of an alley, on the farthest edge of the Continent from his home, unhuman and utterly abandoned.

  He lurched to his feet, steadied himself against the wall, nauseous and slumped. Then staggering into the street, weaving home, hammering on the door and the steward Abdullah’s face shocked and being helped up the stairs and collapsing onto his bed. The sheets were cool. Moisture against his head, where he’d been hit, and he brushed Abdullah away and, clutching like a trophy the watch that still hung from his waistcoat, he slept.

  Cade woke to a dockyard hammering away in his head. He ate as much as he could keep down, some vestige of maternal wisdom to rebuild his strength, and headed for the office where he planned to prove a point to the day by turning up, and then sleep as much as he could. But Abdullah had been urging him to go to the police, and Ali at the office took one look at the bruise purpling his head and babbled the same, and then somehow Burley had heard about the incident and come from the embassy to insist that he went to report it.

  They were an hour on chairs in a humid waiting room, which improved neither Cade’s head nor his willingness. Burley piped up intermittently with fretting at Cade’s recklessness in being out in the streets at night, indistinctly affronted at the offence to British dignity and wondering if it was his fault. A series of increasingly elaborate uniforms led the way to a fat man in shirtsleeves and an enormous moustache who insisted on meticulousness and smiled enthusiastically at every detail, and eventually signed off his work with a slow flourish, before discovering that he was missing the necessary stamp and refusing to let them go before it was found. He gave his guests coffee while they waited.

  The whole performance had taken nearly two hours, and Cade emerged into the warmth of the morning feeling groggy, faintly foolish and very cross. Burley was saying, ‘Of course, the chances are it really was, after all, just a robbery.’

  Cade stopped. ‘As opposed to?’

  Burley looked grave, and leaned in. ‘Well, one doesn’t like—’

  ‘They took money – a few greasy banknotes – but they didn’t take a watch worth twenty times as much.’

  Burley licked his lips. ‘Quite. It doesn’t necessarily… But there have been incidents – Sometimes j
ust to check the papers a man’s carrying, see if he is who he claims to be. Sometimes to rattle you. Push you a bit.’

  ‘They may consider me pushed.’

  Cade strode on into the babbling of the Constantinople morning.

  Ali was sitting on the steps to the office, looking worried, when he arrived. Taking advantage of Cade’s prolonged absence, an official and another man – a foreigner, Ali claimed, wiping his cheek to mime a paler face – had visited and, waving some legal paper, insisted on searching the office.

  The Sub-Committee of the Committee for Imperial Defence: The echoes of Whitehall from somewhere beyond the panelling – corridor footsteps and, faintly, a military band.

  ‘You actually saw Hearne take the wicket?’

  ‘Own eyes. These very ones. What a summer.’

  ‘Ain’t it? Reminds a fellow what life is for.’

  ‘Quite. I must say, I find some of the talk about the Belfast incident a bit melodramatic.’

  ‘A boatload of guns is melodramatic enough.’

  ‘The threat has been overstated. The motives have been misrepresented. The activities of these loyalists stabilize the situation.’

  ‘The reverse. They anger; they provoke.’

  ‘You’ll pardon me, gentlemen.’ The old man, a voice from the margins. ‘It will not serve us to reconstitute the divisions in Ulster around this table.’ Uncomfortable shifting in chairs. ‘Should we not ask who else benefits from our discord? Should we not seek the hand that puts weight on our fault-lines?’

  ‘German spies again? Surely that’s a bit melod—’

  ‘M.O.5’s information is clear; you’ve seen our assessment, gentl—’

  ‘But if I could remind you of the information that Special Branch is starting to acquire on the Continent—’

  ‘Within the limits, I trust, established by the Secret Intelligence Bureau.’

  The old man observed the routine; discreetly, a sigh.

  James Cade sat at his desk, back to the window, glaring at the photograph of his parents.

  Neither the interests of Cade & Cade, nor the interests of the British government, had been well served in the preceding eighteen hours. And he had taken a knock on the head to be reminded of the point. He reviewed the events of the evening and morning. His ease, his unfocused drifting at the reception. The attack. The morning’s tiresome bureaucracy. He couldn’t, of course, be sure that there was any co-ordination behind the attack and the search of his office. And yet they had happened; all of it had happened, and he liked none of it. He felt naive, clumsy, taken advantage of, and very angry.

  Ali sat on a stool in the corner of the room, watching Cade’s grim face and the coffee going cold, and not daring to speak or move.

  Cade took a long breath – wincing as his head moved involuntarily – and a decision. The old ’un: if you fall, pick something up. Five minutes later Ali was trotting through the city with two invitations in his hand. To Mr Osman Riza, of the Ministry of Finance, for lunch. To Mr Ruben Varujan, of the Imperial Ottoman Bank, for tea; also invited to the latter were a Dutch lady ethnographer – and of course Mr Varujan’s sister, Mrs Ani Charkassian.

  Paris was everything that David Duval had been led to expect, and had grown to dream of. A circus of grand buildings touched with unnecessary beauties, of cafés where it was expected that one might pass an hour or a day over a drink, of women who dressed as women first of all and would look a man in the eye.

  There’d been a previous visit, of course, and that had been lovely in its way: romantic – erotic, even – and pleasantly sordid. The earthiness of a back-street pension, of a café room, and of a woman’s body. But nicer to do the thing in style, and on someone else’s account.

  Like this now. Arranged meetings with a couple of big names tomorrow. Decent hotel, all the facilities, deferential flunkies, good food, a view from his window that he wanted immediately to sketch and then couldn’t sketch because he wanted immediately to enter it. And Angelique Lapierre downstairs in the bar – a woman, alone in a bar – waiting for a man who never came; which meant, of course, just the opposite.

  David Duval tended not to unpack his suitcase – perhaps the next day’s shirt on the back of a chair – because… well, because you never knew; bit of a hurry sometimes. So when he returned briefly to his room to spruce himself up for the evening out, he was quicker than he might have been to reach the unlikely conclusion that his belongings had been discreetly searched. He’d left his sketchbook on top of the clothes in the case – more an admonition to himself to work – distinctly remembered how one corner of it had been caught between the two halves of the case, and he’d left it so deliberately: fixity of resolution.

  Except now it was lying in the middle – on top of the clothes, but away from the edge of the case. A chambermaid? Except the case was still in exactly the same spot, askew near the window.

  David Duval tended to leave a few banknotes between the pages of a book at the bottom of his bag, because you never knew; bit of a jam sometimes. So when he found them still in place, he was quicker than he might have been to doubt that it had been a thief who had been interested in him.

  Cade had insisted that Osman Riza choose the venue for their lunch. The Ministry of Finance man seemed nervous when Cade arrived. ‘I took you at your word, Mr Cade, when you said you wanted a restaurant that was not too international.’

  It was international. Cade’s vision – some vague confection of Roman couches and Egyptian belly dancers and clouds of sweet smoke – faded before the reality of dark wood booths and white tablecloths and waiters in the penguin outfits he could have seen at the Old Waverley. ‘I’m sure it’s ideal.’

  They were escorted to a booth; the layout of the restaurant, the high partitions, made it hard to see other diners. ‘I admire your wish to sample the local style,’ Riza said once they’d sat. ‘This is most discreet, and the food is considered excellent.’ There was the implication that this was what distinguished it from international haunts.

  A glimpse of someone with pale skin and a goatee beard passing their booth, accompanied by a German officer. Riza gazed after them, looked down, and then up a little primly.

  ‘Well,’ he said after considering Cade’s face a moment, ‘you could hardly expect me to choose a pilav cart.’ And they both smiled.

  ‘Will you take some wine, Mr Riza? This is all at my invitation, of course.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of letting you pay, Mr Cade; a guest—’

  ‘The invitation was on that basis. I don’t invite myself.’

  ‘But our first—’

  ‘If you wish to honour me as a guest, and if you wish to honour me by making this the first of many pleasant meals together, you can best do so by letting me try to be as courteous as you. Now, will you take some wine?’

  ‘What is your normal habit, Mr Cade?’

  ‘I don’t touch the stuff when I’m working. Glass of water; keep the nut clear. But today, you’d oblige me by sharing something.’

  They settled on a glass of sherry each. Another glimmer of the oriental dream faded.

  ‘I’m afraid, Mr Cade, that there is now nothing so Turkish as a Paris-style restaurant.’

  ‘Long as it’s not Glasgow-style. It would be grotesque of me to expect you all to sit around in turbans, smoking those long pipes.’ A sip of sherry: immediate image of his Aunt Rhoda. ‘Sophisticated city, this, of course. Cosmopolitan.’

  Food was ordered, and arrived.

  ‘Forgive me for asking, Mr Riza – inquisitive sort of fellow, and the old ’un told me never to talk shop over the entree – but you seem… well, sort of uncomfortable with Turkey’s situation with the other powers. All these damned foreigners.’ He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘Including me.’

  Riza dabbed at his mouth with a napkin; its starched folds seemed more substantial than his face behind. ‘Our great sin is thought to be pride. But it is hard to be proud, when we depend on foreigners for everything.�
� A smile. ‘Few of us have had illusions about the reality of our empire, not for a hundred years or more, but…’

  Cade smiled sympathy: ‘Bad taste to remind you of it, eh?’

  ‘If I might draw a distinction, Mr Cade. Please believe that it is not mere flattery. A man who comes here to trade is welcome.’ A nod towards Cade. ‘As you would have been these many centuries. A man who comes as a diplomat, to represent his country here, is likewise our guest and welcome. But it is hard to warm to those who come to tell us what to do.’

  ‘Would they claim they were helping?’

  ‘A physician who comes to cure may be welcomed; a physician who comes merely to diagnose, loudly, a complaint that you know well, and to criticize you for your style of living, is tiresome; a physician who comes to empty your cupboards while you ail is objectionable.’

  ‘Is it so bad?’

  ‘It is a question of motive. Does any of these people care for my people, or my country? The Germans send us generals to run our army, because they want to protect their own communications through south-eastern Europe to Mesopotamia. The Russians police our commerce and complain at our every action because we have set our tent across their front gate and they want the Bosphorus for themselves.’ He looked down, discreetly; the voice dropped. ‘The British tell us what to do with our navy, because it is a cheap way to swing the balance of power in the Mediterranean and protect their routes through Suez to the east.’

  ‘And in the ministries? Telling you what to do?’

  ‘Again, it is that foolish pride, Mr Cade. I – whose ancestors one thousand years ago tended a beacon for the world in medicine, in mathematics, in poetry – may I be excused an occasional unworthy irritation when I am lectured by a man whose ancestors knew nothing but animal furs and attacking the adjacent tribe with clubs?’

  Cade laughed, and Osman smiled ruefully. ‘I am in a weak position to argue, I know it. In less than ten years we have had three – four? – new systems of government; last year with rebellion and murder; constitutions come and go; we have been beaten in war by the tiny nations we used to treat as servants and slaves. Of course you all look at us and know we are obsolete; of course you want to protect your own interests – perhaps exploit the situation.’