Time and Time Again

23

STANTON RAN. NOT back towards the river, which was where the police and soldiers were coming from, but up the lane towards Franz-Josef-Strasse, one of Sarajevo’s main thoroughfares.

He had the advantage of the confusion behind him and only heard the first cry to halt as he reached the street. Fortunately it was busy, much easier to hide in a crowd than open country. He presumed he was being pursued but he didn’t look back.

He’d killed the girl.

He’d caused her to change the course that fate had planned for her and when she crossed his path a second time he’d shot her.

He’d had to do it. He knew that. The mission counted more. The mission would save millions of innocent girls. The flower girl was just another unit of ‘collateral damage’. Collateral that had got damaged because of him.

Because he was a stupid bastard.

What part of leave no trace did he not understand?

How did over-tipping hungry girls near crucial cafes only seconds before zero hour fit into it?

There was a tram ahead, stopped to take on passengers. He leapt on board and only when it pulled away did he allow himself to look back. There they were. The figures from the photographs, the ones who had been present in the immediate aftermath of the assassination. Stanton had their pictures in his computer. Pictures that had never been taken of an event that had never happened. Soldiers and police, some in Turkish uniform with pantaloons and fez, others Austrian-style with peaked cap and cutaway jacket. They were no longer leading away a teenage assassin, whitegloved hands clutching at the hilts of their swords to stop themselves tripping over them in their haste. Scurrying along in those famous images that had been flashed around a world that never was on a morning that had never been.

Now those officers would be captured in different images, some standing over the corpses of Princip and the girl, others ushering the shocked but relieved Archduke and Duchess into an alternative car. And others still, standing in the middle of Franz-Josef-Strasse staring angrily after a disappearing tram.

Stanton knew they wouldn’t stare for long.

Soon they would be telephoning his description around the city. They hadn’t seen his face but they knew his build and his height and what he was wearing.

And then there was the big question.

Did they know he was English?

If they did, their search was narrowed instantly by a factor of tens of thousands. Had anyone heard him speak?

Why had he spoken? It had been a stupid, stupid thing to do.

Three words. ‘I’m so sorry.’ Whispered to a girl whom he was a tenth of a second away from murdering.

Why? Why had he said it? What good could it do? None.

He’d said it to assuage his own conscience as he committed a terrible act. That poor girl had been a victim of nothing but his self-indulgence. He had been showing off when he gave her that two-krone note, getting a tiny thrill out of making a pretty girl smile. And now she was dead and he had potentially compromised his mission by placing a six-foot-tall gunman into the equation. A gunman whom the police must assume was a seventh conspirator. A gunman who fired bullets that no police forensics department would recognize. A gunman they might know was English.

Could he have made a bigger mess of things?

Because he still had the tougher part of his mission to perform. He had saved the Archduke and so prevented the immediate cause of the Great War. But the underlying cause, the entrenched militarism of the Prussian elite and in particular the personality of the Emperor of Germany, remained. He still had to assassinate the Kaiser and he would be unable to do that if he was being questioned in a Sarajevo police cell as a suspected member of the Black Hand.

Looking out of the window of the tram he noted that he was heading east on Franz-Josef. His hotel was quite close.

The Europa was a first-class hotel, built by the Austrians. It was hardly the place the police would look first for a Serbian nationalist insurgent.

Unless they knew he was English.

Romantic English idealists were always getting involved in foreign nationalist causes. Lord Byron had started the trend a century before and such a man would likely be staying at a top-class hotel.

Everything hinged on whether they knew his nationality.

Had anyone heard him speak?

The Duchess had been closest to him when he fired his Glock. She was a cultured and educated aristocrat. If anyone in the group in and around the royal car would be capable of recognizing the English language over three whispered words, it was her.

He paid his fare to the conductor and got off the tram. There were two uniformed policemen in the street opposite but this was long before personal radios. They would not have his description yet. He calculated that he probably had another half hour before every policeman in the city would know to look out for a tall man in a tweed Norfolk jacket.

Five minutes later he was back at the Europa hotel.

Once in his room, Stanton tore off the clothes he was wearing and delved in his bag for as different an outfit as he could find. He’d bought a selection of things on his way back through London and he pulled out a pair of white cricket bags and a blue blazer with brass buttons. Hideous in Stanton’s view, but a definite contrast to the sober, practical clothes he’d been wearing. Then, having changed his clothes, he took up the tweed outfit, stuffed it into a pillow case and buried it deep in his bag for disposal later.

He knew he faced an immediate choice. Did he stay or did he run?

His first instinct was that he should run. Grab his stuff and get out before the police had time to start searching the hotels for Englishmen. But the fastest way out of town was by rail and by the time he got to the station there’d be police all over it.

He’d previously enquired about the town’s one hire-car facility and knew that they had a machine available. But the paperwork would be complicated. Besides which, there were only two decent metalled roads out of town and the cops were bound to be setting up road blocks even now.

Immediate escape was too risky. He’d just have to sit tight and hope for the best. Hope that the Duchess Sophie’s hearing was not as acute as he feared.

Experience had taught Stanton that if a man had to hide it was usually best to hide in plain sight. It tended to be the skulkers who drew attention to themselves. The best cover was a bold front, and if he was going to brazen it out, the sooner he began the better.

He went straight to the bar and ordered Scotch whisky in his loudest and most commanding English voice.

‘To His Royal Highness the Archduke Ferdinand,’ he said, raising his glass, ‘and the Duchess Sophie. May God bless them both and damn to hell anyone who’d do them harm!’

‘Hear hear, sir!’ came an English voice from across the room, and a number of glasses were raised in agreement.

Stanton remained at the bar for the following two hours. Playing the part of a British tourist, a fervent monarchist, a true blue Imperialist and a complete idiot.

‘Don’t normally allow myself a snort till after luncheon,’ he assured anyone who would listen, ‘but when I heard about the royal couple’s lucky escape I thought, dammit, the least a chap can do is drink their health. Cheers!’

The Archduke’s two lucky escapes had made everybody talkative, and since there were plenty of English and Americans staying at the hotel, Stanton had no trouble in finding people to talk to. He didn’t let on that he spoke German and French. The stupider he looked, the better.

‘Astonishing good fortune.’

‘Outrageous act of blackguardness.’

‘Those Serbs have gone too far this time.’

‘God bless the Archduke and Duchess Sophie!’

Stanton made much of the fact that he had seen action himself and had been often under fire – ‘In Afghanistan mainly. Amongst the hill tribes’ – which was true, of course, although it had occurred in another dimension of space and time.

He mentioned that he had been very close to the first bomb blast, swearing that it was a cowardly act to throw a bomb among innocent civilians.

‘I did what I could, of course,’ he said any number of times. ‘Helped the ladies to their feet, gathered up a few youngsters and found their parents. But some of them were pretty cut up. Couldn’t help much there, I’m not a medical man.’

As the seconds ticked by more information trickled in about the incidents. Mostly rumour and half truth, all of which ran around the chattering bar within a minute. Each story getting more and more embellished with each retelling.

‘Apparently the assassin was in the act of drawing his gun when another man shot him dead.’

‘No, the coward shot himself.’

‘I heard it was a plain-clothes policeman.’

‘Someone said it was soldiers. There was a fearful gun fight.’

‘And a girl was involved too, apparently.’

‘The brute shamelessly used her as a shield.’

‘No, the girl was an assassin as well. These scoundrels are arming women now!’

There was talk of shadowy anarchists with cloaks and beards, sinister Ottomans and veiled femmes fatales. Conspiracy theories were quick to form too, the most popular being that the assassins were actually working for the Austrian Emperor, who was anxious to rid himself of an heir who’d made an impossible marriage. But to Stanton’s huge relief there was no mention of an Englishman.

He was beginning to relax. If the Duchess had recognized the language in which he’d whispered those three foolish words, surely that would be part of the rumour mill by now.

The arrival of the first editions of the evening papers put the matter beyond doubt. Stanton was in the clear. He found a German language journal, which he read discreetly in a stall in the men’s room. The article seemed well sourced and made sense. Describing the second attempt on the Archduke, the paper reported that there had been two would-be assassins, an unidentified man in a tweed jacket, and Gavrilo Princip, a nineteen-year-old Serb. It seemed that the unidentified man had tried to kill the Archduke but had missed and instead fatally wounded his own comrade, who was on the other side of the car in the act of drawing his own weapon. Tragically there had been a young flower girl standing between the two assassins who had died in the crossfire, macabrely killed by the same bullet that killed Princip. The article mentioned that Duchess Sophie, who was quite close to the man who fired the bullet, stated that he had whispered something before he fired, which she thought had been in Serbian, possibly ‘God bless Serbia’.

Stanton made his excuses and left the bar. Once more his luck had held and he was in the clear. But he knew that the big grey eyes of the little flower seller would haunt him for ever.