The Spider of Sarajevo

by Robert Wilton

  The Austrian count, too late, said, ‘The Austrian Empire has always been such a fragile balance.’

  ‘Sir, Austria has been too balanced. Too tolerant.’

  ‘But really, are these little peasant pretensions not better indul—’

  ‘Indulgence can become too easily weakness.’

  ‘And – your pardon, sir’ – Immelmann – ‘not all in Vienna share your tolerance.’ Another glance at Otto Auerstein. ‘Serbia is the mouse that will come to steal the cheese one time too many.’

  Flora Hathaway watched it angry. They will not notice me even to moderate their bombast.

  And watched in particular the major. I did not take you for a braggart. So what is it that you really know?

  At one end of the table, Frau Auerstein – solid and spectacled – watched the discussion with uncomprehending satisfaction. At the other, old Auerstein watched it as from a great height, distant but not disapproving.

  The following morning Hathaway was in the library, skimming a set of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century chronicles, when the door opened and Immelmann and Otto Auerstein entered, in conversation.

  ‘Ah, we violate the Temple of Vesta,’ Auerstein said, a flick of red hair.

  Immelmann, somehow startled, was pushing a paper back into a leather document case.

  He recovered. ‘Good morning, Fräulein.’

  ‘Good morning.’

  Stalemate. They watched each other.

  She glanced at Immelmann’s document case – light brown, a zip in dull brass, his fingers clenched on the skin – and up.

  He said, ‘You seek some light reading?’

  She smiled, a little pleased. ‘It depends how light you find the Albrechtschronik.’

  It hit, and he had the grace – and the insufferable suavity – to bow in acknowledgement. His eyes wandered over her face and upper body. ‘Not many women…’ he began; ‘that is to say – most impressive.’

  She contrived a little bow of her own, and he watched her a moment longer and followed Otto Auerstein out.

  She looked at the door. With one breath he condemns me and my nation to defeat; with the next he’s getting hot and bothered because I read worthy books. A rationality about women as well as war? Or a kind of pornography: his thrill at watching a foreign woman doing something he would forbid a German wife because she should be keeping house? Oh, my poor Gerta.

  The platform at Belgrade station was fifty metres long, and Heinz-Peter Belcredi walked it half a dozen times in increasing unhappiness.

  Eventually, after another glance through every window, he walked to the end of the platform, gave up his ticket to the collector who’d been watching him with increasing curiosity, wandered onto the concourse and hesitated.

  ‘Sehr geehrter Herr Belcredi? Do not turn.’ Belcredi stiffened. ‘Go to the newspaper stand, and again do not look for me.’

  Licking his lips, Belcredi did as told. ‘I am Kopp,’ the voice, German accent, said through newspapers; ‘we were told to expect—’

  ‘The Englishman has disappeared! I had him—’

  ‘He is in the café, watching, Mein Herr. He was off the train before it stopped, I think by the wrong side. Is it possible that he became aware of you, Mein Herr?’

  ‘I – it’s – I have been most discreet.’

  ‘Of course. Now the Englishman thinks he has reversed the position. We will reverse it again. Proceed as you would normally; go where you choose. This Ballentyne will track you, and we will track him.’

  ‘And what—’

  ‘These are Herr Hildebrandt’s instructions. We will all follow his instructions, Mein Herr.’

  Belcredi’s head flickered in a nod, and he set off across the concourse. ‘We have the Englishman, Herr Krug. Belcredi has Ballentyne watched, and Ballentyne thinks he is watching Belcredi, so they are most comfortable. But one takes one’s shot when one has it.’

  Krug only raised his eyebrows. ‘What news of the Margaretenhof?’

  ‘Nothing yet. Colonel Nicolai has sent one of his officers to join the party, to observe this Englishwoman.’

  ‘One of his officers?’

  ‘Another colonel.’

  ‘What an extraordinary disguise.’

  Hildebrandt smiled. ‘He will at least send more data on the Englishwoman. Nicolai is passionate about data.’

  ‘Mm. The passion that will carry your army to Paris and St Petersburg, no doubt. Fortunately, I too have a man at the Margaretenhof.’

  Hathaway returned to the fifteenth century. She picked at the pages, recognizing it as a kind of refuge, and suspicious accordingly. Would it have been better if the cover for her snooping had been photography? At least she’d have got outdoors more. Music might not have required so many hours of plodding. But she liked cerebral places, where she could be alone, and the old man in London had known that. And once she was in the books, her instinct for analysis overcame doubt. Funny old Flora.

  She walked out into the grounds again before supper. As she came down the steps a motor car was arriving, puttering steadily and swaying round the arc of the drive towards the house.

  Even Auerstein’s car was disproportionately tall. It stopped, and continued to shudder, while the back door opened and Auerstein’s colonel friend, Bauer, got out. He had a leather document case like Immelmann’s under his arm, and stood and waited – courteous or suspicious – for Hathaway to walk past.

  She heard the car coughing away behind her and Colonel Bauer’s boot tips clipping up the steps as she walked on. First an avenue of plane trees along the front of the house, their fat shadows stretching across the gravel and mottling the stone, and then a path that meandered down towards a grove of trees by a lake.

  On the other side of the grove, standing against a stone bench beside the lake, she found Gerta and Major Immelmann.

  Her mind had been drifting across the sweep of the grass and the water; otherwise she might have registered the voices, the suggestion of a giggle and a chuckle. She certainly wasn’t seeking company or intrusion. Mercifully there was no hasty dropping of hands, no flustered rearrangements. The soldier looked like a rock; Gerta looked rather lovely.

  ‘Bother; it’s like a cheap play.’ Genuine irritation in her voice. ‘I do beg your pardon, Major. I seem forever to be interrupting you.’

  ‘Merely that we seem to share the same enthusiasms, Fräulein.’ A bow to them both, and he strode away past Flora and up towards the house.

  They both watched him go, and then Gerta was watching her, trying to maintain poise.

  ‘Flora, you’re not… you’re not cross, are you?’

  ‘Why on earth should I be cross? Lord, you don’t think I interrupted deliberately, do you?’

  ‘You’ve seemed a little—’

  ‘He’s a splendid-looking man, and it’s natural that he’d be attracted to you. If Germany was a lot of Immelmanns and Gertas the rest of us would be in real trouble.’

  ‘Meaning I am your enemy also, now?’

  ‘Is Immelmann my enemy?’

  Gerta’s face didn’t move, didn’t relax. ‘Not “enemy”, perhaps. Object. You have that look when you watch him: as if he were a mathematical problem, or a page in a book.’ Now something changed in the face, something around the eyes, and she was sadder. ‘You wouldn’t have an enemy, and you wouldn’t fight a war, because to have an enemy and a war you must first have a passion. But if you are presented with a puzzle, or a challenge, you will be remorseless. Your brain is stronger than any army, because it does not have muscles to weaken or a heart to soften.’ Her boots shifted on the gravel. ‘If I became a problem for Flora Hathaway, I would be very fearful.’

  ‘He’s my… competitor, perhaps.’ She offered it as a compromise with the too-accurate picture of herself.

  Gerta looked a little pink. ‘It’s nothing serious, Flora. It’s just… well, it’s the done thing. The Waldecks are known as a good family, but it would be awful if we were thought snooty or fuddy-duddy
about – well, especially around men like…’ Hathaway was watching her, a kind of ill fascination. ‘We both know we’re playing.’

  ‘That you should be attracted to a man who is handsome, intelligent and able would be understandable. To be dallying with him because you feel obliged to… that’s grotesque.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t a woman dally as a man might?’

  She winced. Words she had used herself. ‘A proud argument used in a sorry cause.’

  Gerta flushed, and turned to look out into the dusk.

  Hathaway gazed at her a moment longer, and then walked away.

  More than she had in all the weeks of travel, Hathaway felt alone. She tried scolding herself for weakness, for nostalgia. She had been, surely, as emotionally isolated at times in Britain: sometimes in London, a solitary woman in a male world, somehow the subject of suspicion as well as scorn; sometimes even at home, strange Flora whom none of the young men could relax with.

  But not like this. Her fellow humans – intelligent people, impressive people, for once people whose company she should enjoy; one of them a woman of rare insight and sympathy – had made themselves alien to her. The German nation had become a crowd of students on the other side of the lecture hall, sharing a story she alone was not fitted to enjoy.

  As usual, it made her first vulnerable-sick, and she felt the tremor of a sob from childhood, expanding like a bubble in her chest. And then, as usual, it made her angry. First she felt desperate at being Flora Hathaway. And then she felt determined to be Flora Hathaway.

  She walked faster, harder, towards the house. It glowed out of the evening with the promise of dinner and society. As she came past the ante-hall, many of the guests were already gathered for drinks. She saw Immelmann tall among them, immaculate, and for once without his damned document case.

  That would be upstairs in his room, presumably.

  She took the staircase one step, one heartbeat, at a time. The top of the stairs, and on towards the guest wings, the carpet stretching out ahead of her towards the moment of decision.

  The junction: the female guest rooms, including hers, to the right; the male guest rooms, including Immelmann’s, to the left.

  All my life I have braved the world of men.

  Thoughtfully, every room had a card on the door naming the guest in long scratched handwriting. Another glance around her. As soon as she’d turned she was transgressing. As soon as I was born I was transgressing.

  Immelmann’s door was the second along on the right. The ‘I’ and the ‘l’ were particularly stretched on the name card. Her hand reached for the handle, the handle was turning under it, and then nothing.

  ‘Flora!’

  Her heart staggered, and she spun round. Only a hiss, but it had roared down the corridor.

  Gerta was standing half a dozen paces off, face showing the same shock that her voice had. ‘What were you—’

  Hathaway took a deep breath, collected her breathing, and strode towards her. ‘Locked,’ she said as she came level, and stopped a moment; ‘your German purity is safe.’ And she walked on.

  When Hathaway came down for dinner five minutes later, Gerta was among the other guests chattering in the ante-hall. A neutral glance at Hathaway as she appeared, and nothing more. Immelmann, too, looked at her without unusual concern. Within a minute they were all invited in to eat, and by some great mercy Hathaway found herself between a deaf old neighbour and a doctor whose views on Strauss were actually interesting.

  After dinner, the guests drifted apart and regathered in new groups and pairs, permutations of the same conversations. Hathaway’s companion was determined to display an enthusiasm for Offenbach equal to that for Strauss, and she pleaded a headache and went and sat in one of the drawing rooms. Two or three other women appeared on the edge of her awareness; there was talk of music, and cards.

  Another arrival, alone and standing still a moment; Hathaway glanced round. It was Frau Auerstein, who looked at her, hesitated, and then walked towards her and sat in an armchair opposite.

  Hathaway said something polite about the meal, as if Frau Auerstein had had something to do with it.

  Frau Auerstein removed her spectacles, blinked at Hathaway a few times, and replaced them. ‘I do so admire you, Fräulein. Leaving your own home, your family, your people, and travelling over here, and living among strangers.’

  It was so unlikely, and so precisely phrased, that Hathaway knew it to be the exact opposite of the truth. For a moment she felt rather sorry for her hostess, faced with a guest and a woman who did not fit. ‘I’m afraid I have not always found it easy to settle, Frau Auerstein. My mother worries, I know.’ Frau Auerstein nodded. ‘But I’ve been very lucky in Germany. Everyone is very polite; very hospitable.’

  ‘But of course. This is only correct.’ It wasn’t the warmest of endorsements, but again Hathaway felt for her, wondering if she actually enjoyed anything. It was her duty to be gracious to an English guest, just as it was the duty of her son and his friends to plot England’s destruction.

  ‘I must say that I admire you for running such a large house so efficiently.’

  ‘Thank you.’ No more than her due. ‘Will you play some cards?’

  ‘Perhaps I could watch.’

  And she did, for a couple of hands; some variation on whist. Inconsequential twittering, and polite compliments. Eventually she drifted back to her armchair, and flicked at an illustrated magazine on the table beside her.

  Some minutes later, the article on the tribes of south-west Africa went dim. Hathaway glanced up, to find a dress immediately in front of her. She followed it up, over a waist and a full and tight-wrapped bust, to a collar that frothed around a slender throat and led the way to Gerta von Waldeck.

  Gerta looked down at her, some passion hardly restrained. Then she coughed, brought a handkerchief to her mouth to stifle another, and rested her hand on the table a moment.

  The eyes were empty, and somehow deeply sad. They held Hathaway’s for a moment, and then turned away.

  Gerta had left her handkerchief on the table. Hathaway reached for it and made to call out and then her fingers brushed at it, and saw that something lay underneath it.

  Gerta von Waldeck’s tight-strung hourglass back had reached the door, and left without turning round.

  On the table, she had left the key to Major Immelmann’s room.

  Colonel John Mayhew didn’t like uncertainty. It bred confusion, and indiscipline. Shifting sands. He’d knocked at the old man’s door in that spirit. ‘Think I saw the way your thoughts were going. Earlier, in the Sub-Committee.’ Clear the air. Get things straight. ‘If I may, sir, you seem rather… obsessed with this man.’

  The old man considered this. Then nodded. ‘You’re right. I am. Not healthy, perhaps. King Charles’s head, and so forth. And yet I fear…’ He straightened in the chair. ‘You may have gathered that I did a bit of work in the South African war. When I was more your age and fitness; not this old relic living off past glories.’ Mayhew felt his shoulders straighten; tried to look reassuring. ‘I became aware that there was a man active on the enemy side. Behind the scenes, if you know what I mean. A man to whom men in the field reported, without knowing who he was. A collector of information, and a spreader of misinformation. An investor who could create a scandal or an explosion and capitalize on it. Not a Boer. Perhaps—’

  ‘A German?’

  ‘I don’t know. Possibly. But not a patriot. He was active on that side because it suited his interests.’

  ‘What are his interests, if not country?’

  This got a ghost’s smile from the old man. ‘Information. And thus influence. And thus great power. I believe that he has accumulated wealth, but I suspect that it is less important to him than the sheer joy of control; of manipulation.’ He glanced at Mayhew. ‘As you say, I became a little obsessed with him. We exchanged tactical victories in the Cape, and—’

  ‘We won the war.’

  ‘If you say so,
Colonel. In any case, the Spider – you must excuse the rather childish moniker; over the years it has come to seem so right for him – he emerged from the war with more money, more contacts, more information, more power. In the dozen years since I have felt his pull; fancied I’ve found traces of him. He has built and exploited and continued to build a network of influence across Europe.’ An uncomfortable flicker at the mouth. ‘His web, if you will. I have ideas of the identities of some of these men and women; no more than ideas. Sometimes I see them act, and I sense the controlling hand of the Spider behind them. I doubt he has pulled a trigger in his life, but at the tremble of a finger governments may shake.’

  ‘Pardon me, but that seems – rather—’

  ‘Fanciful? It does seem it, doesn’t it? You will recall that in 1911 two French newspapers published the secret clauses of our 1904 agreement with France and Spain.’ Mayhew nodded. ‘I strongly suspect the identity of the conduit who passed the information and encouraged the publication: a man – Italian-French – I believe to act at the behest of the Spider.’

  ‘He wanted to embarrass us.’

  ‘Yes. And to stoke public anger in Germany against us. And to seem to vindicate Germany’s aggressive posture in north-west Africa at that time. I suspect this was also his way of gaining influence in Berlin. That is the currency he craves. Again, earlier this year, Figaro published the indiscreet letters of the French minister of finance. I am more sure of the identity of the source in this case, because an acquaintance of mine was previously offered the letters for money. Again I feel the tremor of the Spider on his web. The minister resigned – and his wife shot the Figaro’s editor, indeed. Now the new minister is indebted to someone who is indebted to the Spider. France is weakened, and Germany is satisfied. He feeds on the chaos, Mayhew!’ Rare emotion in the voice. ‘You remember the explosion at the Nobel factory in Scotland – February? Thomson and Kell think they know who managed it: a suspected German agent – a Polish doctor from Glasgow. But how did he know his way around the factory, know the critical point? No one knows – except that one of the directors of the firm that built the plant is a man I’ve had my eye on for a while now; visits to a certain sanatorium in southern Germany; a name on some of the paperwork connected with arms dealing between Hamburg and Stockholm and Brussels.’ He spread his hands slowly over the papers on the desk. ‘This is the terrain where we fight, Colonel. These suggestions. These shadows.’