The Spider of Sarajevo

by Robert Wilton

  ‘Yes, Major. It did.’

  Knox watched him; it seemed that each time the old man opened his mouth Knox had to re-evaluate him and everything he himself thought he understood.

  He grunted. ‘I gave Miss Hathaway a speech about the ruthlessness of the men in London: wouldn’t mind if she didn’t come back, long as they’d got good use out of her.’ Something like a chuckle in the throat.

  ‘That’s the spirit.’

  ‘The Comptrollerate-General? That was the name, sir?’ The old man nodded, looked the question. Knox grunted. ‘Just that it proves your point about the leaks in our system. Shows they were definitely onto poor Ballentyne, from the start.’

  ‘Interesting. In his case I told two men he was en route for Albania for me: a chap in Belgrade, and the secretary of the British ambassador in Rome.’

  ‘No, before that. When he was in the field a couple of months back. Some German agent grabbed him, gave him a bit of a going-over; this German had twigged that you’d recruited Ballentyne, wanted to find out more.’

  The old man stopped. ‘But that’s im—’ He caught himself. ‘Pardon me. Neither you nor Ballentyne is – was – a fantasist; so it is not impossible.’ He shook his head. ‘But certainly improbable. Dates. Exact dates.’

  ‘You’d have to check with the legation in Albania when he was there, and presumably with the Ports Office about when he came back. I only had this from him in passing.’

  ‘Mayhew said that Ballentyne had been complaining that people were always suspecting him of spying.’

  ‘No, sir, it was more specific than that.’

  ‘Exact words. Precision please, Major.’

  ‘This German named the – the Comptrollerate-General.’

  ‘The exact name?’

  ‘Sir.’

  The old man hissed his frustration. ‘This detail should have been reported. That’s the kind of casual, Wednesday afternoon sports approach to…’ He subsided.

  ‘With respect, sir’ – Knox grunted uncomfortably – ‘you’re conducting business at a seaside boarding house.’

  And the old man actually chuckled, grim. ‘Touché, Major. Perhaps I should just retire here.’

  ‘And neither Colonel Mayhew nor myself had heard of the Comptrollerate-General. Didn’t know the significance. Just another bureaucratic what-not.’

  ‘That is the general idea, Major. On this occasion it has not served us. But if they knew then…’

  ‘Can’t expect the Hun to be dumb brutes all the time, I suppose.’

  ‘This wasn’t the Germans. Not their style, either. No, this was the Spider.’ He began to stride forwards again, with new energy. To himself: ‘And in London…’

  Knox didn’t follow; he knew he was being left behind now in more ways than one. ‘And me, sir? Now?’

  The old man stopped, turned to him. ‘You wait, Knox. Here.’

  Knox nodded; deep breath. ‘Thank you for coming, sir. Before you go: thank you for taking the trouble.’

  The old man took a step closer, and they faced each other across the shingle. ‘Knox, I didn’t come all this damned way to tell war stories and pat you soothingly on the shoulder.’ The voice dropped, but it still carried, and it was cold. ‘The man who learns what you have just learned is either a man exceptionally trusted, a man in whose future I interest myself. Or he is a man who knows too much. A man with no future at all.’

  Knox nodded, hesitant. ‘Even with this operation finished – even though it failed—’

  ‘The operation has not failed, and it has certainly not finished. I set my bait – those four individuals, so intriguing to him – and he took a bite and he got away.’

  The ruthlessness left Knox alone again, in a world empty of warmth, empty of landmarks. ‘And now?’

  ‘We are on the brink of war. And our Intelligence apparatus is more vulnerable than it has ever been. We’re gambling with the empire now, Knox. Against the greatest of the spies; and he will take the greatest bait. The only bait we have left, now, is the Comptrollerate-General itself.’

  ‘Hildebrandt, I must spend a week or two in Sarajevo. My office there relapses into its former Ottoman habits too quickly, if it does not feel my hand upon it.’

  ‘And no doubt a convenient place from which to monitor both Constantinople and Belgrade.’

  A smile. ‘Quite so. And indeed Vienna.’ Krug sat back. ‘We have a message from your friend Belcredi, I think. I have not read it yet.’

  Hildebrandt smiled. ‘Not urgent. It confirms that he bolted in shock at Ballentyne’s death – he doesn’t put it that way. He’s gone back to Serbia, to carry on his work there.’

  ‘Ah, the plan of that extraordinary von Einem woman, for the Muslims. It intrigues me.’

  ‘Only a test, he says. A test in the Balkans; the real game will be ensuring Turkish stability; the prize will be the Muslims of the British Empire.’

  ‘There’s a kind of grandeur to the idea… I should like to meet your Belcredi some time.’

  ‘He will continue to send reports to your International Cultural Exchange address in Sarajevo. I hope that’s not inconvenient, if you are there.’ Krug shook his head. ‘It’s simpler when he is in the region.’ A smile. ‘He doesn’t like having to report on intelligence channels. I think it upsets his academic ideals.’

  Krug snorted. ‘A man must stand out in the field if he is to look at the stars.’

  Hildebrandt considered Krug’s contentment. ‘You are satisfied with our work here?’

  ‘The Comptroller-General sent a team of agents against me, and I have smashed it. Smashed, Hildebrandt!’ Krug settled back in his chair again, a man replete at the end of a feast. ‘Such a coup is rare.’

  ‘You still do not know who is this “Comptroller-General”?’

  ‘But I will. I have shaken his foundations, and now he will show his face at a window. Through the Scottish gentleman, I will turn London which way I choose.’

  The street lamps had come on, and they glowed fuzzily through the net curtains. Still the old man sat at the desk. In front of him he had dozens of sheets of paper, reports dating back a year, five years – in one case twenty years. Under his hands they circled, orbited, until they found a proper relation to each other. He was drawing the lines between them. The web.

  In St Petersburg, Mayhew’s man Lisson had got the Okhrana to pull Frosch the shipping agent in for questioning. Frosch had been relieved not to be asked about his recent trades in the Baltic and North Sea, or about certain other activities and contacts in Russia, and happy to repeat elements of his conversation with a rogue Englishman named Duval. Valfierno. Valfierno’s woman. The Conservatoire.

  Hathaway confirmed the Conservatoire.

  The old man took a sip of water.

  Cade had been encouraged to report his business trip to Vienna. His description of the man who had interviewed him was similar to Knox’s description of the man searching Ballentyne’s body. Apparently a senior and trusted lieutenant of the Spider.

  Ballentyne had been hunted, in Albania and in Serbia, by a German named Hildebrandt. There had been a Count Paul Hildebrandt in Bosnia in 1908 and 1909, assumed to be working with German Intelligence. In 1910 a Count Hildebrandt had been obliged to resign from his regiment: debts; brutality; a man to whom he was said to owe money had died. In a photograph of the Kaiser and the German general staff observing manoeuvres in 1906, there had been a young officer in the background identified as a Hildebrandt – right age, right social profile. Knox could be shown the photograph.

  Ballentyne had been following a crank anthropologist called Belcredi, a man with a purpose, a man with influential patrons in German society, a man who reported his movements via an office in Sarajevo called the International Cultural Exchange. In Belgrade, Hildebrandt and Belcredi had been confederates.

  On the surface there was nothing to link Belcredi and Hildebrandt with Valfierno, the suspected tool of the Spider. But it was inconceivable that two unrelated en
trapments of British agents, centred on Vienna, should happen simultaneously. Valfierno and Hildebrandt and Belcredi, and the Spider.

  The old man took another sip of water.

  Cade had had a meeting at the Adriatic Trading Union. Records from the Bank of England, and relevant offices in Rome and Constantinople, showed that the Adriatic Trading Union – and its president, named Silvas – did a certain amount of legitimate business; but not enough to make it other than a front.

  In 1910 the Adriatic Trading Union had purchased a shipment of rifles, notionally for Portugal; it was thought that they had ended up in Mexico. The guarantor for the purchase had been the Amalgamated Alpine Bank of Zurich.

  Two men: Krug and Morgenthal. The banking, the Zurich front, suggested Morgenthal.

  Vienna suggested Krug. Morgenthal had financial interests in Austria, and money enough usually to get what he wanted. But the operation in Vienna suggested a level of official linkage that sounded more like Krug. Krug the confidant of great men; Krug the influence-peddler. And Sarajevo? Krug, whose life until the early 1900s was a mystery, but whose mother had reputedly been Bosnian.

  In 1913 the Amalgamated Alpine Bank of Zurich had failed. There was little attention or impact, so insubstantial was it. Its few assets were noted as having passed to its main creditor, Kärntner A.G.. In 1912 Kärntner A.G. had been bought by Iris S.A. A newspaper clipping reported the donation by Iris S.A. of three minor Corot landscapes, part of the residue of Amalgamated Alpine, to something called the Hüpfebrunnen Foundation.

  Iris S.A. was Krug’s public front.

  It was circumstantial. It wasn’t enough.

  Another sip of water.

  The Cäcilien Conservatoire was a small concern. Limited assets, occasional events, a few students tutored by men of solid repute. It had been founded in 1909; the Marquis of Valfierno had been put in as president of the trustees in the same year. The organizing force behind the establishment of the Conservatoire was unknown. The costs of renovating the property and buying the necessary instruments had come from a handful of men of profile and worth; there was a list… and one of the men was Morgenthal.

  ‘No.’

  The old man said it aloud, to the empty room.

  That is it, surely.

  Inconceivable that the Spider would associate himself publicly with an organization that he then used for such a dramatic operation as had transpired in Vienna. Inconceivable that the Spider would associate himself publicly with Valfierno. The old man’s hands continued to feel their way around the papers on the desk, running his fingers along the connections.

  Among the papers, there was a list of the two dozen concerts and events that the Conservatoire had hosted in the last few years. All small-scale, all low-profile; the place couldn’t accommodate an orchestra. The list swirled round into the centre of the evolving web.

  Among them was a performance of duets by Dussek, to mark the arrival of a new harp. This had been funded by a gift from the Hüpfebrunnen Foundation.

  The Hüpfebrunnen Foundation, which had received money thanks to Krug.

  The web sprawled over the desk. He could see its strands more clearly now: the strands that had led to Vienna, to the Spider.

  A moment of fancy. The office was dark now, the pages and his hands the only things to be seen, stark in the pool of light from the desk lamp. He felt the four agents around him: their faces, their voices, their attitudes.

  Flora Hathaway and James Cade. And Ronald Ballentyne and David Duval. The agents he had sent into Europe, to their fates, against his enemy.

  During his interview in Vienna, James Cade had had a telephone conversation with some mysterious other, some senior partner. Had the Scotsman actually spoken to the Spider?

  Hüpfebrunnen. An odd name, somehow unnatural. In English hop – or jump… jumping fountain.

  But there was something else…

  Not German, not English; Dutch. Cape Dutch. Hüpfebrunnen was a German rendering of Springfontein.

  Springfontein.

  Again the memory from more than a decade before: the dust, the sweat, the chaos far out in the African wilderness, and the knowledge of defeat. The nausea as he realized how completely he had been tricked. The understanding that the game had become real. The beginning of a long journey, and the first knowledge of the true capacity of his enemy.

  Krug?

  Sir, [Admiral BEATTY] was invited to luncheon by [the TSAR] today 15 June [CRONSTADT]. [The TSAR] nervous at current European situation. Persistent questions about reliability capability and intentions of [FRANCE]. Recognized [RUSSIA] had failed to support [FRANCE] in [MOROCCO] 1905 and latter had reciprocated over [BOSNIA–HERCEGOVINA] 1908. Urged [BRITAIN] to give lead. [Admiral BEATTY] raised frankly the subject of [RUSSIA]n quote consuls unquote and other activities in [PERSIA] using information provided on this channel. [The TSAR] uncomfortable. Not clear if discomfort at discussion or at his own lack of control over diplomatic military activities. Quote [RUSSIA] must protect own defensive interests unquote. Atmosphere around visit of First [BATTLE CRUISER] Squadron subdued but satisfactory.

  [SS R/1/227 (DECYPHER)]

  The British India Line and the Bibby Line were bringing in a new class of troopships, but the Manora was not one of them. Only twenty years old, apparently, but when years are spent steaming from Southampton to Calcutta and back again, crammed with British soldiers and – with a little more space – British horses, twenty is a lot of them. The hull, once white, was a sickly cream streaked with brown. Any exposed metal surface was tarnished and corroding. They were scrubbing at it incessantly, but couldn’t remove or cover the smell of mammals that inhabited all the interior spaces and drifted out of the vents.

  Major Valentine Knox was a solitary spirit on the ship. His rank allowed him some freedom from companionship and inquisitiveness, but the checking and re-checking of each other’s service history and prospects and anecdotes are how soldiers make themselves comfortable in their rootless lives. And a chap can’t be a complete hermit. So he’d been obliged to give some broadly accurate descriptions of his past career – which the other officers on board knew or could have found out – and some vaguer references to his recent and current activities, which they hopefully didn’t and couldn’t.

  The Manora came out of the fresher winds of the Atlantic into the warmth of the Mediterranean – a warmth that seemed to hang about you, like an over-friendly dog – during the third week of June 1914. Probably not halfway through the voyage, and Knox knew he was going mad. Never fancied the sea. Never fancied confinement.

  Companionship. Good thing; part of the appeal. There’s Knox again; never stops marching, does he? A few similar chaps on board; like-minded. Round and round the deck, all bloody day. But the endless card games… God, he loathed card games. Keeps himself to himself, don’t he?

  Knox was on a troopship to India.

  On the morning of the 14th of June, the woman who styled herself the daughter of the Marquis de Valfierno was approached in a hat shop on Vienna’s Graben by a woman a little older than her, and veiled. This woman stated that she was the sister of the man who had been seen with the marquis and his daughter on a train from Florence to Berlin; the man had come to look for the marquis and his daughter in Vienna, and had disappeared; the sister would not rest until she learned what had happened. The marquis’s daughter could say nothing to help, and hurried from the shop. The woman in the veil disappeared.

  That afternoon, an innocuous telegram was sent from the Cäcilien Conservatoire to the address in Geneva that had been in the bundle of messages borrowed by David Duval. The same text was then forwarded from the Geneva address back to Vienna, to the office of the Adriatic Trading Union. From there it went to the office of Iris S.A.

  On the same morning, an article had appeared in that section of Vienna’s Neue Freie Presse devoted to business news. It noted that a magistrate in Switzerland had lodged an enquiry with the office of the state prosecutor in Vienna regarding
the status of the Hüpfebrunnen Foundation, following a complaint by a party in Switzerland whose application for a grant from the foundation had been refused.

  Later that day two messages were sent by Iris S.A. to the same destination. The coding of one message made it impossible to know whether it concerned the daughter of the Marquis de Valfierno and the woman who had accosted her. The coding of the second message was similarly impenetrable, but one name was of necessity transmitted in clear: that of the Swiss magistrate who had lodged the enquiry about the Hüpfebrunnen Foundation.

  In Geneva, and in Vienna, these messages were intercepted. The destination of the last two, sent from Iris S.A., was the International Cultural Exchange in Sarajevo.

  Krug’s office in Sarajevo was a faded version of his office in Vienna. They kept it spotless for him, of course, because they knew him. And the practical aspects – particularly his prized wireless transmitter – were first-rate. But there was something about the city – those centuries of Ottoman lethargy that a few years of Habsburg insistence would not shake; or perhaps it was the dust merely – that made wood tired before its time, plaster paler, stone worn, something that infused the people too. Vienna was bustle; Sarajevo was languor.

  He was fond of the place; acknowledged that he sought excuses to return. After Africa, he had done good work in the Balkans; younger then, of course, running here and there. A playground for espionage! The borders kept changing, and no one acknowledged them anyway. No one was loyal to anything beyond his village, and his worst enemies were usually inside it. Such confusion, and such corruptibility. And Sarajevo was the heart of it: warm sedate life, and cool busy shadows where every kind of business was talked in every kind of language.

  Its rhythms of indolence, tobacco-doped and coffee-thickened, infected even him. He would stand at the window, thumbs in waistcoat like some complacent small-town shopkeeper, looking over the square and watching the mingling of every complexion and costume, pale edgy Teutons and rolling Turks, frock-coats and pantaloons and homburgs and fezes, and wonder: a great marketplace of information and of power.