Čabrinović threw his bomb. It bounced off the royal car as Stanton had known it would and exploded as he expected. There was some satisfaction in that at least: the textbook-perfect occurrence of the bombing was proof that nothing of significance had so far changed in history. Stanton turned away from the mayhem; he’d seen too many bodies maimed to want to watch any more, but the fate of Čabrinović was of interest, if only because what happened next was so absurd that Stanton had strongly suspected historians of embellishing the truth.
As the angry crowd moved in on Čabrinović, he pulled something out of his pocket and put it in his mouth. Stanton knew that this was a cyanide pill, which had been supplied to the conspirators on the orders of Apis. However, as with so much of what the Black Hand attempted, it failed. It was too weak. Clutching his stomach, beginning to vomit and being pursued by the crowd, Čabrinović ran puking to the river and jumped in, hoping to drown himself instead. However, it was late June in what was famously one of the most gloriously hot and dry summers in years. The river was only thirteen centimetres deep.
Stanton watched as the police waded in up to their ankles and dragged the vomiting would-be national hero from the shallows. The cops then allowed the angry crowd to savagely beat him up before finally taking him into custody, still vomiting and with his shoes full of water.
The history books hadn’t lied. It really was that stupid. Stanton thought about how thrilled McCluskey would have been to see it. He could imagine her crowing over it. ‘Let’s see the dialectical materialists claim that was a historical inevitability! You couldn’t make it up.’
Stanton drove the memory of McCluskey from his mind. The associations were too painful. He should have torn the bitch’s face off before he chucked her off that train.
Stanton walked away from the angry crowd. He knew that for the time being Čabrinović’s failed attempt would put paid to any further planned efforts by the Black Hand to kill their quarry. The Archduke’s motorcade, its occupants now thoroughly alarmed, increased speed and hurtled past the remaining three conspirators, including Princip, whom the Black Hand had placed along the route. The royal car was now moving too fast for them to do anything, even if they’d had the nerve.
And there but for fate would have ended one of the most spectacularly inept attempts to assassinate a senior royal ever staged. Six agents, all armed with bombs or pistols, or both, and only one of them had even made an attempt at the hit. And he had missed.
But Stanton knew what would happen next. Or what had happened next on the last occasion space and time had passed this way together. Perhaps the most ill-starred encounter in all of history. An entirely accidental, completely coincidental and supremely improbable meeting that had changed the world.
21
‘I MEAN, FOR pity’s sake!’ McCluskey exclaimed in outraged frustration. She was standing as ever in her favourite place in front of the fire. Despite the improvement in the weather, the evenings were still chilly and her fat, red hands were massaging vigorously at her overheated buttocks beneath the long khaki tail of her greatcoat.
‘You could not make it up.’
It was the evening of Easter Sunday 2025. She and Stanton had spent the afternoon in Davies’s Incident Room at the History faculty going over the details of the Sarajevo assassination. Now they were back in the Master’s Lodge having just finished a cold supper and McCluskey was working herself up into a boozefuelled frenzy of frustration over the whole thing.
‘I still can scarcely credit it happened. If it wasn’t true nobody would believe it in a million years. Six assassins!’ she exclaimed, wiping a greasy hand across the bits of Cheddar that were stuck in her moustache. ‘Six armed men! And every one of them was at some point within five metres of the target yet not one of them managed to kill him. So far, so brilliant! The plot’s failed, finito. Done and dusted. Apis and his gang of psychos can bugger off back with their tails between their legs. They’ve spent months smuggling their gang of incompetent saddos into the country. Risked their whole underground railway to do it and all six of them have comprehensively screwed up.’
She splashed herself another glass of claret, depositing as much of the wine on the table as she managed to get into the glass, hacked another big lump of Cheddar from the cheese board, sandwiched it between two water biscuits and stuck it in her mouth beside her cigarette. ‘The Duke’s home and dry. He’s survived the day,’ she went on, spraying bits of cracker into the smoke-filled air in front of her face. ‘Then what happens? The military governor of Bosnia, the man responsible for the Archduke’s security, quite literally causes the assassination. What Apis and all his crazed, lunatic, craptaculously inept teenage zealots couldn’t achieve, the Duke’s own cop does for them. It’s just tonto!’
Stanton could only agree with her. The more he studied the time-line of the Sarajevo killing, the more incredible the coincidences and the incompetence became.
‘You’re right, prof. It wasn’t really Princip that killed the royal couple at all. It was General Oskar Potiorek.’
‘General Oskar Potiorek,’ McCluskey echoed with contempt. ‘A general. He wasn’t qualified to sweep the barrack-room floor. What a truly world-historical arsehole.’
Stanton reached into his file of briefing material and took out a photograph.
‘The man who really started the Great War.’
They both stared at the old picture. If Hollywood had been casting an arrogant, blinkered, pig-headed, supercilious Austrian general of the old school, they could not have done better than used the real thing. Bullet head, shaven on the sides to three inches above the ears, forensically clipped moustache, chest full of medals, head tilted very slightly back, he fixed the camera with a stare of cold contempt, the faintest sneer playing on his lips.
‘What’s he got to sneer about?’ McCluskey shouted, throwing her fag end into the fire and reaching unsteadily for more cheese and booze. ‘I mean, seriously, what has this truly Olympic-class idiot got to sneer about? The man who decided to change the route of the motorcade for security reasons but forgot to tell the royal driver. He makes sure all the other drivers know but not the one driving the Duke! That’s it! In a sentence. The reason the Black Hand got a seventh chance, which amazingly they didn’t screw up, and the Great War started. I mean blimey!’ McCluskey was actually pulling at her own hair in frustration. ‘Princip’s blown it. He knows he’s blown it. In fact, he’s given up assassinating for the day and wandered off for a sandwich. A sandwich! What is this? Laurel and Hardy? He mooches down to, where was it …?’
‘Schiller’s Delicatessen.’
‘That’s it. Schiller’s Delicatessen, sounds like Joe’s Caff. Basically he’s gone for the early-twentieth-century equivalent of a Big Mac and fries, no doubt wondering what he’s going to say to Apis, who we know is the sort of bloke who shoots kings thirty times, dices up the corpses with a sabre then throws them out of the window—’
‘Princip would never have met Apis, nor would he ever meet him,’ Stanton interrupted. ‘The Black Hand operated on a cellular model.’
‘Well, whatever. It doesn’t matter. The silly young bastard’s blown his chance of being a hero of the Serbian people and he’s gone off to take comfort in a cheese and pickle sarnie. Meanwhile, the Archduke’s driver realizes he’s lost the motorcade, because they know where they’re going and he doesn’t, and, in an effort to get back on track, chooses to turn into a street which, of all the flipping streets in Sarajevo, happens to be the one with Schiller’s Deli in it! I mean, can you credit it? Can you sodding credit it? This is the start of the Great War we’re talking about, and it comes down to a wrong turn and a cheese sandwich!’