Time and Time Again

31

STANTON DISMANTLED HIS rifle and stowed it in his bag. He picked up the spent cartridge shell and stowed that also. Next he took a second empty rifle cartridge shell from his pocket. It was for a Mauser Gewehr 98, the German army rifle of the period. He put the empty shell on the ground where his firing position had been.

When the police discovered the shell they would presume they knew the make of the murder weapon. A German gun for a fictitious German killer. His own bullet would have disintegrated.

Now there was just one last element to the Chronos plan to be completed. An element Stanton found almost as distasteful as having been required to shoot an innocent man from a safe distance. This was to give the authorities someone to blame for the killing. Someone German so that the nation would look within itself for revenge and not abroad.

Stanton couldn’t fault the logic. By 1914 Germany had the most developed and the most sophisticated left wing in the world. The pace and sophistication of Germany’s economic revolution had led to a huge new class of educated men and women who were more than aware of their own exploitation. The Red Scare bogeyman was alive and well in pre-war Germany and hysterical reactionaries were ready to believe any slander against organized labour.

Stanton was about to give them a bigger stick to beat them with than they could have ever dreamt of. He didn’t like doing it. Blaming the Left for crimes they hadn’t committed was an age-old establishment sport. But it had to be done.

Better a Germany fighting itself than fighting the rest of the world.

Stanton took one of the leaflets from his bag and placed it under the Mauser shell case. The leaflet was bright blood red in colour. It featured a stern and noble-looking working man who was bringing his mighty fist down on the head of a vicious little devil with the face of the Kaiser. The wording on the leaflet was very simple – The Kaiser is dead! Workers rise up and take control!

That was all, no detail. Nothing more specific.

‘Let ’em sweat over it,’ McCluskey had said. ‘Let ’em obsess over it! Who killed Bill? The whole country will tie itself in knots.’

Having left his false evidence, Stanton put on his jacket ready to leave. He allowed himself one last glance down into Potsdamer Platz where, not surprisingly, absolute pandemonium had broken out. The crowd had surged forward and lines of soldiers, including the entire brass band, were struggling to keep them back while all the top-hatted gentlemen clustered together behind the podium where the ex-Emperor’s body no doubt had landed.

Stanton knew that he was watching the epicentre of a storm. That moment when the pebble hits the pond. Already he could see many figures scurrying not towards the tragedy but away from it. Most of them would be police fanning out in an effort to find the perpetrator, but there would also be reporters, anxious to be the first to file the most astonishing and momentous story of the century. The undisputed ruler of the German Empire, virtual dictator of the most vibrant economy and fearsome military in Europe, had been murdered! Arguably the single most powerful man on earth was dead. Stories simply did not get any bigger.

So far the shock waves had scarcely reached the edge of Potsdamer Platz since they were still being propelled on foot. But let the first man reach a telephone or a telegraph office and the world would tremble at the astonishing news.

Stanton turned away. He had killed the Emperor less than ninety seconds before. The scene in the roof garden cafe would remain undisturbed for perhaps another two or three minutes. He wanted to be there when the news hit, not still out on the roof. He thought for a brief moment about checking on the guard he had shot. Possibly he was still alive and, if he was, there was an outside chance that the man could identify him later. Stanton decided to let it go. One cold-blooded murder was quite enough for one day. Besides, he needed to clear the scene of the crime quickly and distribute his leaflets.

Having sprinted back across the roof, Stanton paused for a moment outside the Verboten door to collect himself, then strode through, as ever looking confident, relaxed and in command. He doubted that anybody noticed him but if they did he was pretty sure the moment would not register. Why would it? The world was still the same as it had been for decades. A charmed, Edwardian world, ever steady and reassuringly unchanging.

That world would last about another minute.

Stanton exited from the roof garden by the same door he had entered it, walking down the flight of stairs to the fifth-floor furniture department. Then he strolled casually across the floor until he came to the top of the grand staircase which descended in gilded magnificence down five floors. Looking down, Stanton could see the top of the head of the female statue. It was also possible from where he was standing to imagine that one was squinting down inside her plaster blouse, a circumstance that had given a generation of schoolboys enormous comical pleasure. As Stanton passed the top banister he took from his jacket another sheaf of a hundred or so of the forged Socialist leaflets. Scarcely breaking his stride he balanced them on the top balustrade as he passed and then began to walk down the stairs.

He knew that they would not balance for long and, sure enough, before he had taken another five steps the pages came fluttering down the great stairwell of the atrium like large pieces of red confetti. Looking down as they fluttered past him Stanton could see that at the bottom of the fifth flight, down on the ground floor, clusters of people were gathering together and gesticulating; one woman had even swooned. Time seemed to slow down for a moment as Stanton watched the intense conversations begin to spread up the stairs as the leaflets descended to meet them.

People were grabbing at the red confetti now and as they did there were cries of anger and horror all around. Stanton kept walking down on to the ground floor where the shop was all of a sudden in complete uproar as everyone began to digest and protest the terrible news.

Stanton pushed his way through the excited throng, through the doors of the shop and out on to Leipziger Strasse.

Although it was a warm day there was a stiff breeze blowing east across the twin Plätze of Leipzig and Potsdam. Stanton turned west and as he did so he plunged his hand into his bag where the rest of his leaflets were hidden. In one confident movement he drew them out and dropped them to the pavement. Then he just kept walking, not looking back even once. He didn’t need to. He knew that behind him the red leaflets would be gusting across the tram lines towards where the Kaiser’s corpse no doubt still lay.

Stanton’s mission was complete.

As the adrenalin rush of the previous hour began to subside, he had leisure to realize that he was finding breathing a little painful. Putting his hand to his chest he felt the rough quality of singed cloth and remembered for the first time since leaving the roof that he had been shot at twice. Glancing down he saw a black burn mark on his tweed jacket right in front of his heart. He knew there would be identical damage on the back of his jacket, again right in front of his heart. That guard had been a bloody good shot. It seemed German police training was as efficient as their army and their industry.

Stanton took off the jacket and folded it over his arm. Better to be out in shirt sleeves than displaying what might be recognized as bullet holes in your clothing.

Stanton probed gently at his chest and back as he walked, wincing when his fingers applied any pressure. He was badly bruised, there was no doubt about that, and would certainly be an ugly colour in the morning, but nothing was broken. So far his luck had held. If it changed now it didn’t matter. He’d already saved the world.