The Spider of Sarajevo

by Robert Wilton

  ‘But…?’

  ‘But I hadn’t taken breakfast.’

  ‘Spotted you coming through Trieste, perhaps, or at one of the Italian borders before that. Passed the word on. Or just a shilling to the hotel boy.’

  ‘But why? If it even was that way. Why is Ballentyne’s arrival news?’

  Knox nodded at him, somehow combining gravity and mischief. ‘Why indeed?’

  The house of Ani Charkassian’s late aunt was high in the old city, in the warren of elegant and crumbling wooden buildings crammed between the mosques, the palace and the sea. The directions to it had been based not on street names but on features – a cobbler’s, a sudden view of the Asian side down a vertiginous side street, a cripple on a blanket selling mint leaves – and Cade reached it through veils of transience: dust, rubble, glimpses of faces that stared at him then disappeared. A woman opened the door to him, unspeaking, pointed him up a flight of stairs, then disappeared again into the shadows. He climbed through a gloom of sackcloth, of timbers that creaked and slumped beside him, of rooms that had lost all but the faintest of their memories – a portrait mildewed and cracked and askew; a chair.

  Into a breeze. The top floor of the building was light, and airy, and discreetly furnished. A net curtain billowed in from a terrace, ghostly-luminous and teasing. He brushed it, and it danced away from his fingers.

  She was sitting on a divan, upright, back against the wall – where she would be shaded, he realized, and less visible; more curtains protected the side of the terrace. She stood to greet him. ‘It is my pleasure that you see this place, who are so interested in the secrets of our culture.’

  ‘You’ve come to know me fast.’

  ‘As a man of affairs you are efficient and dispassionate, it is clear. But you have an enthusiasm for the world wherever you are. An… appetite.’ She gestured inside. ‘There will be tea.’

  ‘I didn’t see—’

  But there was tea. In the moments since he had walked through the room, a spindly table had appeared on the rug, a teapot as gaunt and unlikely as the house, glasses and crystals of sugar.

  Cade jerked his thumb towards the stairs. ‘She is…’

  ‘Trusted. Her family has served my family many generations. We have forgotten who depends on whom.’

  Ani Charkassian served the tea herself, carried it out onto the terrace. It made her seem more of a physical being, more real.

  ‘For a man of this duality,’ she said when they were sitting, she back on the divan and he in a wicker chair that he shared with too many cushions, ‘Constantinople is the ideal place.’

  ‘Two worlds. I was thinking it when I looked at those two beauties up the hill.’ He waved a finger over his shoulder. ‘The old Christian church – before it was a mosque, anyway; great barn of a thing, ain’t it? – and the newer mosque opposite. Sort of looking at each other. Different styles. Different approaches to life. Where Europe and Asia meet, that’s what I’m supposed to say, no?’ She went on watching him; he wondered if she was listening. ‘Me, I’m half and half myself. The old ’un came out of the docks. The mam from the croft – you know, a rural, peasant life.’

  She described her genealogy with an exactness of which her brother would no doubt have approved. Cade described what his family knew of theirs, with the suspicion that he had lapsed into myth more quickly than she.

  The terrace looked out over other houses in the same style, fine but decaying, different floors built by different generations, many topped by the same veiled summer rooms. In front of them the houses dropped away down the hillside, and beyond them was the sea: did they call it marble for the colour, or for the trade?

  ‘Aye, it’s a grand place,’ he said. ‘Endless possibilities. A place to be going places.’

  She watched him; frowned. ‘This is Constantinople, Mr Cade. It is not a matter of where one is going but how one lives.’

  ‘Is it getting time that I asked you to start calling me James?’

  ‘No.’ Gracious; pleasant.

  ‘Righto. Life is what you make it, Mrs Charkassian. My family were peasants and scoundrels. What we are is what we’ve done.’

  ‘And what you’ve done must be most impressive.’ Long look at him, languid eyes. Oh, damn this slantendicular spooning. ‘But more than one emperor has come to this place, knowing himself the most powerful man on earth and determined to shape Constantinople to his purpose, and all have been swallowed.’

  ‘It’s the triers who give it its life, maybe. Few succeed, but their drive is what makes the place. Vitality, you know? Otherwise, everyone would be like those fellows down at the station, and the dockside: just idle beggars slumped on blankets hoping someone’ll throw them a penny.’

  ‘Or perhaps they were the men with the biggest dreams, the most handsome, who have fallen farthest, and whose despair is greatest.’

  There was no rousing her; always the same even, pleasant, melodious voice, somehow both earnest and faintly mocking. ‘There’s a new wind going to blow,’ he said. ‘The British already run the navy; the Germans have the army and the railways. Might shake things up a bit here.’ He grinned. ‘Good thing, maybe.’

  ‘A new wind, perhaps. But perhaps not the one you think.’

  ‘Have you had a look at Europe lately? Warships; and empires. It’s a new century; a new world.’

  ‘Oh, Europe has always been warships and empires. Shall I ring for some more hot water?’

  On the 21st of May, rebellion flared nearer Durrës. When Ballentyne woke he could hear louder voices, more movement, outside in the corridor.

  Knox was waiting for him in what passed for the hotel’s restaurant. ‘The boy looked rattled,’ Knox said without preamble; ‘no hot water; signs of a couple of hasty departures. What’s the ruckus?’

  Ballentyne gestured for coffees. ‘I’ve heard three different versions in as many minutes. Unrest. In Kavaja – on the road south, say five miles out – the locals have chucked out the gendarmerie and declared for Turkey.’

  ‘Declared for Turkey? Thought they’d only just got independence from Turkey.’

  ‘I said they were unhappy; didn’t say they were coherent.’

  Knox studied him. ‘Prudence is our watchword, yes, old chap? We’re not here to be heroes. Discreet observation, right?’

  Ballentyne hadn’t been feeling imprudent or indiscreet. ‘Right.’

  Knox was a looser man out of uniform. Open shirt, kerchief around neck, a coat that had travelled far: it made him seem fitter, more flexible, more willing to have a go at what life was offering, whether an uprising or a cup of coffee. ‘Danger to us here?’ he said mildly. A liveliness in him that Ballentyne hadn’t seen before.

  ‘None. Not today. By tomorrow it could have—’

  ‘And what danger if we have a little wander out to the front line?’

  The town was bustling. A handful of houses and shops – mostly those owned by non-Albanians – were being closed up. But much of the activity was what Knox referred to as ‘unco-ordinated civilian scampering’. On the road south they passed an unhappy-looking squad of royal gendarmes and, shortly afterwards, a pair of rebel sentries willing to let two friendly Englishmen pass without even bothering to stand up from the roadside dust. In the village beyond they found a café, and in it an ageing idiot ready to swear loyalty to Allah, to Turkey, and to the king, in as many sentences.

  The only threat to them came on the return journey, a motor car – rarity in the region – that coughed and shuddered up behind them at speed, lost in its own dust and sending their horses wheeling and bucking into the scrub by the road. They both peered hard at the inhabitants of the vehicle as it passed, Knox with the instinct to be able to recognize his enemies for the future, Ballentyne because the pair of moustaches fluttering in the back seat was familiar.

  ‘This is a tourist war,’ Knox said as they resumed their ride. ‘A picnic, some inoffensive shellfire and home for cocktails.’

  Ballentyne watched the cl
oud of dust shrinking ahead of them. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘Rather reinforces a suspicion.’

  He described Rossi’s phantom Austrian, and his own visit to the rebels a few days earlier, and the moustaches that had been busy in a house that was not to be entered, and that had reappeared on the balcony of the senior Italian in Albania, and now in a car in a rebel town.

  ‘Stirring it up a bit, you’d say?’ Ballentyne shrugged. ‘Or reporting back to the Italians on what the rebels are up to. With the rivalry, I presume they and the Austrians would both of them be keeping a close eye on things.’

  Ballentyne looked round. ‘Which is what we’re doing too, surely.’ Knox glanced at him, thought for a moment, and grunted agreement. ‘Except the British government doesn’t run to a motor car.’

  ‘The exercise is good for you. You know, of course, that we’re hoping to make the Italians our allies?’ Only when he’d said it did he turn to look at Ballentyne.

  ‘I’m sorry, Knox, would you rather I turned a blind eye when your hoped-for friends are up to no good?’

  ‘They’re all foreign, aren’t they, the lot of them? Mean to say, it’s all a cookhouse shambles. But if war comes in Europe it’s likely to be all the various breeds of Hun, including the Austrians, against the rest. Italians on the fence waiting for the sun to come out, and we’re hoping to tempt them into the right camp when the time comes. That, I mean, is what Sir Edward Grey would say.’

  ‘Sir Edward Grey isn’t here.’

  Back in Durrës, they found the car parked within fifty yards of the Italian Legation. Which made it also, as Knox pointed out, within fifty yards of most of the other legations. Knox called in at the British office on the pretext of awaiting a telegram, and Ballentyne found a café nearby, and from these vantage points they watched. The man with the moustaches and the pistol neither entered nor left the Italian Legation; nor did he go near the car.

  But a steady flow of unmoustached, unpistolled people did enter and leave the Italian Legation, and the other legations. And Ballentyne wondered at the international urge to bustle, to know and to control, more energetic than the sleepy feuding that was its focus.

  They had agreed to maintain their watch for an hour, after which they would be drawing attention themselves. Knox waited his hour in the British Legation, and then a further quarter-hour for luck and because working to strict hours was a dangerous habit. He left by a side door and back streets.

  It was a turn in one of these that brought him face to face with a pair of moustaches like those Ballentyne had described. Knox did nothing, looked nowhere, and walked on. At his next turn, a glance showed the man approaching the car – from the opposite direction to the diplomatic offices – and climbing in to the back. Knox walked on, chewing a hunter’s dissatisfaction at a blown stalking, and heard faintly the coughing of the engine as it started.

  Ballentyne smoked a pipe, and waited a further quarter-hour for stubbornness, for frustration that a day of possibility and activity and open fields was dwindling in a café with weak coffee and a fire that wouldn’t take. He left, trying to find pleasure in the stretching of his legs and the prospect of hot water, and saw no one.

  From the window of the German Legation, a pair of field glasses watched him go, trying to measure the man and the mood by the stride.

  ‘Herr Hildebrandt?’ A voice from behind, efficient and eager. ‘Is there anything else you will need?’

  ‘No, thank you,’ Hildebrandt said without turning, and tapped on the window. The tapping was unnecessary, for the man loafing down in the street was waiting for the signal. Hildebrandt jerked his head in the direction Ballentyne had taken, and the man set off. ‘No, that’s excellent.’ He lowered the field glasses, and turned away from the window.

  The tapping – and the immediate movement of the man in the street – had been noticed by other eyes. In a room across the street from the German Legation, in a place of honour beside the stove, was an old villager. His clothes were from a place of tougher routines and no European influence; his face was worn by weather unknown in the lowlands.

  Despite the warmth of the hospitality, the circle of faces around him, the old man was always uneasy in town. Too many walls to see the world properly; too many people to know the world properly. His eyes strayed constantly to the doorway and the window, and they had caught movement in the upper window of the grand building opposite, and they had seen the man in the street move off immediately and with purpose; and they had returned to the face in the upper window, and immediately they had hardened.

  A command, ignoring whoever was speaking, and two young men who had been crouching nearer the door were at his side. The old villager murmured fast.

  ‘In the building opposite is a frengji, with black hair and the eyes of the crow. From this minute, you become his shadows. And you stay with him until you are freed by me, or by death.’

  The two glanced at each other, and back at him, and his ominousness was not felt without apprehension. Two nods, and they left.

  He settled back against the cushion, held his hands closer to the stove, straightened his spine. His host said nothing. ‘Pardon me, my friend,’ the old villager said quietly. ‘It is a matter of blood.’

  The host, and the men nearest who had heard, nodded slightly; and they said nothing.

  Dear Uncle Peter,

  perhaps you’ve forgotten your envoy – who has been gone as long as a fifteenth-century Council-goer, with as little to show for it so far; any impatience from your royal court would be excusable.

  Goodness knows I couldn’t – no chance – think of wretched England – the village, its limited minds with no ideals, gloomy, rainy, dormant – and not give you your due: I’m loving it. Duty has excluded the possibility of too much detouring and gallivanting, but I am remembering why I enjoy travel and why I enjoy Germany. The atmosphere is sometimes a little queer: a few things said about the tensions with Britain and an odd sense of inferiority; many more things clearly unsaid. But the country and culture are magnificent, and the hospitality most generous. The Papins in Paris were very kind; the Burkhardts in Frankfurt introduced me to a very interesting lawyer called Lehne, and the historian Messel. Then a rare dinner with August Niemann – Baroness von Sutter, a young official called Eckhardt and a friendly doctor, Müller, who runs a sanatorium.

  I’ve now reached the eighteenth century and Freiherr von Waldeck’s castle. He’s a fine man, his daughter most friendly, and we had a charming supper with friends of his, including a former lawyer named Löwenthal and some bankers named Bierhoff and Kuhn. Even if I was tempted to neglect my duty, the Freiherr will not allow it, and I’ve already been introduced to the library. At first glance I could not immediately see any new records on Constance, but there may be some interesting perspectives from those attending or commenting. The Freiherr says he has some relevant original manuscripts, which I shall aim to copy.

  Once again, my thanks for stirring me out of my torpor. I’ll be sure keep in touch as and when the research bears fruit. Meantime I remain, with fond affection, yours,

  Flora

  [SS G/1/894/13]

  The letter reached the old man quickly, but by strange detours: clerks who did not know its destination, trays whose fillers never saw their emptiers. Only the old man’s secretary, who understood that names are easy-worn garments, knew the desk on which the letter should at last be placed.

  The old man didn’t recognize the handwriting, but noted its neatness and strength. The name on the envelope only confirmed his instinct. He surprised himself with the edge of a smile. In this envelope he would be Uncle Peter, and in it he would find the first clear reckoning of one of the four choices he had made.

  Almost too reflective when they’d met; perhaps too hasty through Paris. Naturally someone who wanted to hurry along? Naturally someone more comfortable in Germany? No set frequency of reporting was required. Flora Hathaway would want to test a system, but not waste effort. The envelope flicked
over between dry stick fingers.

  The wording of the salutation: the indication that the letter contained an encyphered message. He forced himself to read it through first; the encyphering was a restraint – less so for a mind like Hathaway’s, which was partly why she’d been told to use this method – but hints about underlying feelings always showed through. The sentiment about England was formulaic – she was too steady for that much emotion – though some of the language interesting; then… Again the possibility of a smile: Miss Hathaway was genuinely enjoying herself. Then appropriate gossip and reporting. The names in clear – if intercepted, it would only seem the habit of a pedantic diarist – would be checked.

  And so to the encyphered message. Seven letters in the first word; then the first ‘x’; then…

  Well, Miss Hathaway. Let us see what you’re made of.

  Two days after his failure over lunch, Cade was one of a group of businessmen invited to the Ministry of Finance and therefore meeting, among others, Deputy Chief Accountant Osman Riza.

  He hung back as they filed through a secretary’s office, where they were relieved of sticks and coats and a diversity of hats, and in to see Riza himself. He was the last to shake hands and sit, had to force himself to meet Riza’s eyes. They showed nothing, and Riza looked away quickly.

  He’s even more uncomfortable than I am. Again the frustration burned. Almost certainly destroyed a promising business relationship as well as the ridiculous possibility of Riza ever giving him any useful secrets.

  Riza listened politely to the observations of the delegation – or at least their self-appointed spokesman, the representative of a German engineering firm – regarding tariffs and customs procedures, and then delivered a description of ministry procedures. He was more than bored by it, Cade saw. Distracted somehow; nervous. Damnit. A wonder he hadn’t had the police waiting for Cade when he arrived.