Together Princip and Ilia combed Sarajevo newspapers for the Archduke's specific whereabouts during his forthcoming visit. The big Jesuit-controlled daily Hrvatski Dnevnik spoke the loyalist sympathies of Catholic Bosnia (as opposed to the much more Belgrade-minded Greek Orthodox element). Hrvatski Dnevnik looked forward to the Archduke with headlines like HAIL, OUR HOPE! but with no information interesting to people who wanted to get that hope into their gunsights. The German-language Die Bosnische Post was more helpful. In Princip's band only Ilia fully had mastered the oppressors' tongue, and on June 18 he found in Die Bosnische Post the Archduke's exact itinerary through the city. He mapped it out for Princip long before it appeared on posters calling on the populace to line their Crown Prince's path with cheers.
Every day before the Archduke's arrival, fear and doubt flickered through Ilk. Every day he helped Princip inch closer to the thing he feared and doubted. After a while Princip ran out of the money handed him by the Black Hand in Belgrade. Ilk gave him "a loan" of twenty kronen. When that ran out, Princip ordered Ilia to procure gainful employment for himself and Cabrinovic. Ilk found Princip office work at a welfare society. He got Cabrinovic a job at a printing plant.
Ilk also acted as navigator, evading police patrols, when the band visited Graben who lived with a girl friend in the village of Pale, 15 miles southeast of Sarajevo. As the band strolled through Pale's remote meadows, Princip would pull out his gun to practice his marksmanship on starlings and finches, then order the others to follow suit.
In Sarajevo itself, Princip drew on Ilic's expertise in devising a surface of innocuous urban adolescence. Princip was a celibate, nonsmoking, nondrinking, murder-intoxicated teenager. He and his friends spent their evenings as normal youths who chased pleasure through the lovely summer nights. They hung about a wine shop popular with the lads and lasses in the street just renamed for Franz Ferdinand. Princip pretended to flirt with girls. For the first and last time in his life he drank Zilavka.
Prirrcip had the plot poised, primed, and camouflagedwhen it was threatened once more, again by Ilia. Very early one morning he knocked on Princip's door. The assassination, he breathed, must be postponed-word from the Black Hand in Belgrade, whose emissary he had just met in the nearby town of Bled. Princip said that he, as mission leader, had heard nothing. He demanded proof. Ilia said that written orders were too great a risk, but here was printed evidence of the reason behind the decision-and waved a Bosnian newspaper with reports of turmoil in Serbia between militants of the Black Hand stripe and supporters of the more moderate Prime Minister. Princip read the reports. He dropped the paper and said, "All the more reason to go forward with the plot." The plot went forward.
Two days later Ilia waved newspapers with the bulletin that King Petar of Serbia had retired from active rule; his son Alexander was the Prince Regent. This, Ilia said, might change everything, including their business in Sarajevo. Princip answered that no order about any change had reached him; pistol practice as usual in Grabez's meadow.
These words he said aloud. Silently he determined that when the time came, Ilk should not be entrusted with a weapon.
The time came. On the late afternoon of June 27, that rainy day before the Archduke's visit, the bombs and pistols were distributed to all conspirators except Ilia. Princip instructed his team to hide the arms. They were to fool and josh the evening away at the usual wine shop-after all, it was Saturday night. But before sleep they were to spend some minutesalways singly, one by one, never together-at the grave of a Black Hand martyr in Kosovo Cemetery. Here they were to meditate; to dedicate and to consecrate themselves for the grim service they would render to Serbia tomorrow.
And at the Kosovo Cemetery they all did just that-one by one, in the misty late-night hours of June 27, 1914.
At 8:15 the next morning, while the archduke and his wife prepared to entrain for Sarajevo, Princip summoned his band for the last time. They met in the back room of the Vlajnic Pastry Shop, near the scene of the day's action. Suddenly it was Cabrinovic-not Ilia-who created a last-minute difficulty.
Since his return to Sarajevo, Cabrinovic had lived in his parents' house, telling them he'd come home to leave behind his life as a hobo radical. He'd behaved himself accordingly, working in his father's cafe, acting "nicely"-until now; until the imminence of the climax became too much. That morning the elder Cabrinovic decided to hoist the Imperial colors from his establishment. He was a Habsburg loyalist and wished to show respect for the Crown Prince. Suddenly his son broke into protests against "the odious flag." An argument erupted. The father told the boy to leave the house if he didn't like its banner. The boy stalked off, shouting that soon the Austrian Crown Prince would be a joke-the Serbian King would rule Bosnia!
When Cabrinovic joined the other confederates in the pastry shop, he was still shaking with an anger all the angrier for its admixture of fear. He came into the back room spouting about his father. Princip restricted him to a whisper. Hissing furiously, Cabrinovic not only reported his fight at home but announced yet another indiscretion. He would have himself photographed right now; if he should die for Serbia this morning, at least a picture of him would survive-the world would have a photograph of him just before his sacrifice-a memento for his father!
Princip remained calm. One must be calm at the brink. Coming down hard on Cabrinovic now would only have upset the fellow still more. The thing to do was to factor Cabrinovic's instability into his, Princip's, final dispositions.
He told Cabrinovic to post himself at 9 A.M. sharp with the unarmed Ilia and the three armed auxiliaries near the corner of Cumunja Bridge and Appel Quay. Princip's own station as well as Grabez's would be some three hundred yards farther down the Archduke's route along Appel Quay, closer to City Hall.
With this deployment, the unreliables (Cabrinovic, Ilic, the auxiliaries) would be tested first because they would see the target first. If they failed, the serious core of the squad, namely Princip backed by Grabei, could still bring the enterprise to the desired end.
Still calm, Princip dismissed his group. They bade each other farewell since they might never see each other alive again. Princip told them to leave the pastry shop one by one and to arrive at their respective posts a few minutes apart along different paths. Cabrinovic was allowed to go to a photographer's studio on condition that he appear at the exact spot at the exact time, as ordered.
Cabrinovic swore to his leader that he would. During that brief huddle in the back room, Princip had managed to invest Cabrinovic with some of his own self-control. Cabrinovic proved that a few minutes later in the street. He stumbled on an old crony (with whom he presently had his picture taken), and then on two girls of their acquaintance. Crony and girls wore their Sunday clothes; they were on the town for the gala morning that featured an Archduke's visit. Crony and girls joked with Cabrinovic. None of them noticed anything amiss.
Neither did Maxim Svara, son of the Attorney General of Sarajevo and a former schoolmate of Princip's. Princip happened to run into him on the way to what no one must know was his battle station. Princip casually small-talked with Maxim, pistol and bomb arranged so as not to bulge his jacket even slightly. For six blocks they strolled together on Appel Quay. All along they watched flags being run up on poles and people assembling to watch the Habsburg prince ride by. Then the two youths wished each other good day. Maxim turned left to the Cathedral where the bishop was offering High Mass in honor of the dynasty. Princip continued walking along the Quay until he reached Latin Bridge.