Time and Time Again

43

STANTON DETERMINED THAT he would book a ticket on the following morning’s train to Berlin.

It would be risky. Clearly the police would still be hunting him and they had photographs, from his ID papers and also from the confrontation outside the SDP headquarters. And no doubt a detailed description from Bernadette.

On the other hand, he wasn’t entirely sure how much the German authorities wanted to catch him. He’d noted that there had been absolutely no mention of beautiful Irish girls or lone British assassins in the papers, so clearly the police were keeping this part of their investigation secret. In the meantime, the ongoing repression of the German Liberals, Socialists and Trade Unionists continued unabated. The police and the army were clearly still using the pretext of an investigation to settle old scores, and the emergence of an actual culprit, particularly a lone foreigner, would spoil all the fun. Stanton calculated that even if the police did find him they would keep quiet about it.

But he didn’t intend that they would find him. He had a pretty decent cover identity; he’d travelled incognito in tougher circumstances than this. At least in Berlin he wouldn’t have to worry about racial profiling as he had in the mountains between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

He’d been in the clothes he’d stolen from the hotel since leaving Berlin and so he spent the day in Constantinople buying a suitable wardrobe for his Ludwig Drechsler identity. Civilian but in military style, blazers and tight cavalry-cut trousers. He also bought a clear glass monocle, which for some reason were highly fashionable among German officers at the time. He calculated that even were he to bump into the British officers he’d encountered on his first morning in 1914, they’d be unlikely to recognize him behind his Prussian façade. He took care to speak only German.

That evening he sat once again in the Orient Bar of the Hotel Pera Palace. On this occasion he drank schnapps and accepted the cigarettes the barman offered him. If the man noticed any resemblance between this chain-smoking German Junker and the ex-British officer who had sat in the same seat two months earlier, he didn’t say.

The following morning Stanton journeyed once more to the Sirkeci terminal and took a train for Berlin.

For a moment, as the train pulled away from the station, he wondered whether he actually missed McCluskey. She’d been so full of glee when they’d made this trip together, sorting through the various sweets and cigarettes she’d bought, looking forward to the greatest adventure of hers or any life. But no. He didn’t miss her. He wished she’d left him alone in his happiness and let him disappear from time with Cassie, Tessa and Bill. If she had been with him now, he’d chuck her out of the train all over again.

The journey dragged.

He was restless and disturbed. He no longer marvelled at the strangeness of it all, the smell and the noise and shaking of steam transport, the pantomime costumes that at first had made him feel as if he was an extra in some elaborate historical movie. It was all becoming ordinary and familiar. He’d finally lost the habit of checking constantly in his pocket for a mobile phone, which he had at last accepted would never ring again. He knew now to remember to buy books and papers at the station as there would most certainly be no other form of distraction available on the train …

Unless of course you got talking to a fascinating woman who would end up breaking your heart.

The thought of Bernadette was intensely painful, particularly since his journey took him through Vienna. But strangely, Stanton found comfort in the pain. It was proof to him that his heart could be broken again. That contrary to what he had presumed after Cassie’s death, he still had a living soul. He was capable of love. And he still loved Bernadette.

On his arrival in Berlin, Stanton decided to stay in a hotel rather than rent another apartment. His policy was, as ever, to hide in plain sight, and so he took rooms at the Kempinski, one of the finest and most frequented hotels in the city, playing the part of the rich and arrogant German colonel, home with his fortune and happy to let the world know it.

‘I am Kapitan Ludwig Drechsler, ex of the Imperial African Schutztruppe,’ he barked out as he marched up to reception, his tone and swagger exhibiting the impenetrable self-confidence of a white man used to lording it over native troops. The receptionist began to murmur obsequious words of welcome but Stanton slapped his German army papers and leather gloves down on the desk with a loud smack and barged rudely on. ‘I require a two-bedroom suite with a bath and water closet. The very best rooms in your establishment, mind. If you don’t have rooms to fit my specifications and of the highest possible standard, please direct me to somewhere that does.’

No one would suspect this gauche ex-Africa man trying to impress hotel staff in the big smoke of being an English imposter on the run for murdering the Emperor.

Having deposited his bags in his room, Stanton returned to the ground floor and set about his business right away. It had been almost a month since his rooftop firefight with his fellow time traveller and the trail was going cold.

He took a cab straight from the Kempinski to the central city library where he intended to begin his search by scouring the previous month’s newspapers for news of the wounded gunman. Old school research; eight weeks earlier he’d have been cursing the lack of internet, but he no longer even noted its absence. He was an early-twentieth-century man now. He ought to be used to it. It was his second time round.

The library archive was well run and well indexed and he soon got on the trail of his target, finding various small articles mentioning the mystery figure who had been found on the roof of Wertheim’s and been shot in the course of an apparent attempt to save the Kaiser. There wasn’t a great deal of information in the articles beyond the fact that the person had not been a guard of any sort, which he’d already guessed, of course. He did learn one thing, however, which he hadn’t been expecting at all. The reporter who had filed the original report had made the presumption that the wounded figure was a man. Subsequent reports revealed that she was in fact a woman. This other generation of Companions had chosen to send a female agent back to the past. Why should he be surprised? Back in Stanton’s own twenty-first century he’d known plenty of highly capable women in the military. Yet he’d just presumed the other footprints had been left by a guy with small feet. Perhaps he’d already become so steeped in the post-Edwardian mind-set that the idea of a female Special Forces operative hadn’t even occurred to him.

Bernadette would have been thrilled at the very thought of such a thing.

She kept dropping into his mind unbidden.

He missed her horribly. He didn’t resent her for having betrayed him. He knew she had had no choice. How could she possibly have believed his story? How could he have been so stupid as to tell her? Drunk and in love was how, of course, a combination calculated to cloud any man’s judgement. But he really should have known better. Nobody on earth could believe his story.

Except that now there was one person who would. Another woman.

The newspapers reported that the police believed the woman to be unbalanced and possibly a member of some sort of strange cult, although it didn’t explain why. Apart from that, Stanton gleaned that she had survived his attempt to kill her, had been wounded and that she remained very ill.

After that, the story dropped out of the papers altogether.

The last mention of the woman had been in the Berliner Tageblatt. Stanton jotted down the by-line of the journalist who had written the article and enquired at the library reception for the address of the newspaper.

‘I can give you the address,’ the librarian told him, ‘but there’s nobody there. The police have closed it.’

She gave the information brusquely as if she didn’t want to discuss it further. Stanton understood. The Tageblatt was a Liberal-leaning paper; he recalled Bernadette saying it was the only mainstream publication that was even halfway principled. Clearly it had now fallen victim to the current army purge. The librarian was a classic ‘new woman’, as they were known. Hair in a severe bun, tortoiseshell glasses, neat blouse fastened with a neck tie, a Suffragette for sure and probably a reader of the Tageblatt. In Stanton’s current disguise she would certainly take him for a reactionary German militarist and no doubt blame him personally for the loss of her newspaper.

‘That’s a shame,’ he replied. ‘I very much wish to speak to one of their writers. Could you show me to the telephone directories, please.’

The woman gave a perfunctory nod towards a table on which several copies of the Berlin phone book were lying. These were the days when libraries were the repositories not just of literature but of all civic information.

Stanton leafed through the Fs, looking for Anton Fiedler, the author of the Tageblatt article. He was hoping that a journalist sufficiently senior to justify his own billing would be on the phone, and he was in luck. Herr Fiedler himself answered the phone and was happy to provide his address. Stanton thanked the librarian and grabbed a cab.

Stanton didn’t explain to Fiedler why he wanted to find the woman who had been shot on the roof, and Fiedler didn’t ask. The man was out of work, one of the many thousands of victims of the increasingly violent and vindictive post-assassination crackdown. All Fiedler wanted in exchange for information was money, and Stanton made it clear that he was prepared to pay.

‘It’s a damned good story,’ Fiedler said, having allowed Stanton to take him to a local bar and order drinks. The man lodged in the Wedding district of the city, an area associated with working people and radical politics. ‘But the cops wouldn’t let me run with it even before they closed the paper. What’s wrong with them? It’s crazy. It’s like they think anybody who isn’t actually a Prussian general is a revolutionary. The Tageblatt was about as radical as sausage and potatoes, but they’re acting like we were putting the Communist Manifesto on the front page.’

Stanton steered Fiedler back to the topic in hand.

‘The story,’ he asked, ‘what was so damned good about it?’

‘I’ll tell you what was so damned good,’ he said, leaning in a little closer, wiping the beer foam from his mouth then depositing it in the lock of greasy hair that hung across his forehead. ‘The woman’s a witch, that’s what’s so good. I saw her in her cell before the police had got round to shutting everything down. Almost bald, her head covered in stubble and you could see a number tattooed on it. More tattoos down her arms and legs too. Horrible amateur scribbles, probably done with a knife and ink. Must have hurt like hell. Still, perhaps she likes a bit of pain. I’ve got an informant in the central lock-up who says she’s got scars all over her body. And plenty more tattoos too – on her mushi, for God’s sake. A woman. A white woman with a tattoo on her cunt. Pretty shocking, eh?’

Stanton did find it shocking, although not for the reasons Fiedler imagined. He had known many tattooed women; most of the tougher girls in the army had acquired some ink but they weren’t covered in it. And amateur tatts? Knife and ink jobs? And scars? It seemed to Stanton that those other Companions of Chronos had made a peculiar choice of agent if they were hoping to find someone who could blend easily into the world of 1914.

It made him wonder even more just what sort of world this woman had come from.

Fiedler ordered another beer and filled his shot glass from the bottle that Stanton had put in front of him. His greasy fingertips left prints on the glass. Stanton noted that his shirt collar was quite soiled. This was a man who only a few weeks before had had his own by-line in a major daily and rented a telephone. Now he was clearly skimping on hot water for both his person and his laundry. These were cruel times. Stanton reckoned that Fiedler was about a month away from destitution. He was certainly drinking as if he was.

‘Apparently the woman’s a foreigner of some sort,’ Fiedler went on, anxious to maintain access to the bottle. ‘Probably English, although she spoke German as well. A strange shorthand sort of German, my man told me, with quite a few Russian words in it. All most peculiar.’

‘Do you know where they’re keeping her?’ Stanton enquired.

‘Well, not at the lock-up any more. She was wounded, remember. And I know that she got sick, blood-poisoning I imagine. So often it’s not the actual bullet that does the killing … I suppose I could ask around. But fieldwork is expensive.’

‘The sooner you find out,’ Stanton said, ‘the better I’ll pay. In fact, if you tell me now I’ll give you another hundred marks on the spot.’

Stanton had guessed that Fiedler was holding out on him, trying to drag out another pay day. He’d clearly already pursued the story as far as he could.

Fiedler smiled. ‘You’re a good reader of men, Kapitan Drechsler, you should be a journalist.’

‘Sadly it seems to be a shrinking market.’

‘Yes,’ Fiedler agreed grimly. ‘Pretty soon the only information left in this city will come direct from the Wilhelmstrasse. Anyway, the police have put her in a hospital, hoping she’ll pull through and they might get something more out of her. She’s guarded, though. They won’t let her talk to you.’

Fiedler wrote the address down on a beer mat.

The Berliner Buch. Stanton’s own place of recuperation. Good, he knew it a little already and it was the last place the police would ever expect the Kaiser’s assassin to return to.

Stanton left Fiedler with his money and the bottle and went looking for a cab. If this woman was wounded and still in hospital, then it was almost certain that her wounds were infected. He needed to hurry. She might quite easily already be dead.