‘Germany had its allies,’ Stanton protested, feeling very much as if he was in a lecture theatre.
‘Oh come on! The poxy old Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires? They weren’t allies, they were liabilities. The real powers in the world, the ones with a future as well as a past, were Britain, France, Russia, Japan and America on one side and Germany on the other – except it wasn’t even Germany. It was the Kaiser. Him and his Prussian war clique sitting in Potsdam singing hymns to war. The rest of Germany wanted to do business. They were the workshop of the world. If they’d waited another decade they could have bought France and no doubt Britain too in the end. Germany had the biggest social democratic party in the world, the Reichstag wanted peace. But the Kaiser wanted conquest. And he was still the boss. That crazy bastard with a chip on his disabled shoulder the size of the Brandenburg Gate was itching for a fight. That’s why he always wore military uniform. Where is he in all the photographs? Just think of a picture of Kaiser Bill pre-war and where was he?’
Stanton knew the answer McCluskey was angling for and of course she was right.
‘On manoeuvres,’ he said.
‘Exactly! Playing bloody soldiers. It’s all he ever did. He led the most scientifically and industrially advanced nation on earth and all he wanted to do was stand in a field staring at a map with his crippled arm resting on his sword hilt. How did Edward the Seventh spend his time? Boozing, gambling and whoring in Paris. George the Fifth? Bloody stamp collecting. Tsar Nicholas? Pretending to be a minor country landowner and pottering about his garden with his bossy wife, who was clearly infatuated with a whore-mongering peasant lunatic. The French were dancing La Belle Epoque. The Americans wanted to wind up the drawbridge and forget Europe existed. And who was out on manoeuvres? Who wore a helmet with a spike on top to walk the dog? Who was rearming at the kind of rate that would have made Genghis Khan blush?’
‘Kaiser Wilhelm,’ Stanton conceded.
‘Yes, Kaiser Wilhelm,’ McCluskey shouted. ‘The cause of the whole damn catastrophe. So that’s the plan, Hugh. We swap one dead Germanic royal for another. You will go to Sarajevo and prevent the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and then you will go to Berlin and kill the Kaiser.’
‘In 1914?’
‘In 1914.’
Outside the bells of Trinity Chapel chimed midnight. It was Christmas Day.
‘Now, I know what you’re thinking,’ McCluskey continued.
‘I’m thinking we must be out of our minds to be having this conversation.’
‘Yes, but apart from that, you’re thinking if the murder of an archduke caused as much trouble as it did, surely killing an emperor could make things even worse.’
‘Well, that’s certainly a fair point.’
‘But not if the right people get the blame.’
‘The right people?’
‘Absolutely. You see, if the Kaiser is assassinated, the first thing people are going to ask themselves is who did it?’
‘Well, of course.’
‘And nobody is likely to suggest that the culprit was a time traveller who’d leapt across a closed loop within the space– time continuum.’
‘No, I think that’s fair.’
‘The problem with the murder of Franz Ferdinand was that it was committed by a foreigner and hence had the instant potential to precipitate an international crisis. If the Kaiser were killed by a German, or at least if it appeared that way, then the crisis is German and German alone. If it turns out that the killer was also a Socialist, then you have a bun fight that is likely to consume Germany for a considerable time. Germany had the largest and by far the most sophisticated Socialist movement in Europe. As far as the German establishment was concerned, the Left was public enemy number one. If the Left can be shown to have killed the Emperor, there will be a brutal police crackdown and the Left, knowing themselves to be innocent, will fight back. Germany will descend into internal strife. Britain will refocus its attention on the Irish Question, which was tearing it apart at the time, not to mention the Suffragettes. Russia will continue its slow progress towards modern statehood. France will be overjoyed at Germany’s self-imposed agonies, which will most certainly keep it occupied through 1914 and probably for years to come. And whatever the Germany that emerges afterwards, be it left-leaning or right, it will at least no longer be led by a psychopathic warmonger. Besides which, by then the increasing prosperity and economic interdependence of the European powers, coupled with democratic reform, both of which were already well under way across the country, will have made war impossible. No two modern capitalist democracies have ever gone to war. And do you know what is the best part of all about this plan? Those lovely Russian princesses will never be murdered! Do close your mouth, Hugh. It’s gaping open and making you look like a fish.’
10
STANTON TOOK A sip of his beer and ate a pretzel. He was sitting in the Orient Bar of the Hotel Pera Palace on the Grande Rue de Pera on the European side of the Golden Horn. After his near escape at the little cafe outside the mosque he had decided to risk no further encounters and had taken a horse cab straight back to his hotel.
He looked about him at the fashionable pre-lunch crowd and wished he still smoked. Absolutely everybody smoked in 1914. Free cigarettes were offered on the bar; for a few pennies he could have a cigar. There were cigarette adverts framed on the walls. One, for a brand called Moslem, featured a sinister-looking character in a fez, and another depicted a very self-satisfied Sultan figure in a huge turban with an Islamic crescent on it, surrounded by a group of scantily clad dancing girls. Stanton amused himself for a moment trying to imagine which group would be most offended in the twenty-first-century world from which he’d come: health campaigners, feminists or devout Muslims.
The barman had spotted where Stanton’s eye had fallen.
‘Turkish or Virginian, sir?’ He pushed the beautiful inlaid box towards Stanton while simultaneously proffering a light.
They looked so nice, those neat lines of perfect little white sticks. He’d smoked twenty a day until quite recently and enjoyed every one of them; more on active service. Most of the guys did. Who cared if you might die in thirty years when you had every chance of dying tomorrow from a concealed bomb? Smoking had been a kind of two-finger salute to the enemy. We’re not scared of you. Look, we’re killing ourselves anyway.
Stanton almost took one. To smoke a Turkish-blend gasper in the Orient Bar at the Hotel Pera Palace in Old Constantinople when the Ottoman Empire was still tottering was about as romantic a thought as a man like Stanton could have.
‘No thanks,’ he said.
He’d given up after he got Cassie’s letter.
She hadn’t asked him to but he intended it as absolute proof of his commitment to being a better man. Cassie herself had smoked when they’d first been together but had given it up when she got pregnant. Ever since then he’d known she desperately wanted him to give up too. She’d never hassled him about it but of course he’d known. Particularly after Tessa started noticing all those adverts with the rotting lungs and diseased eyeballs.