For a moment McCluskey’s outrage exhausted her. She reached into the pocket of her greatcoat and pulled out a golf-ball-sized wodge of tobacco. She then spent a moment trying to wrestle it into a cigarette paper before realizing that she was too drunk to manage it. She opted instead for the easier option of grabbing her pipe, which she kept stuck in the visor of a medieval helmet, and stuffing the tobacco into that.
‘Don’t forget the dodgy gear change,’ Stanton reminded her.
He was enjoying her frustration; it reminded him of long past student afternoons. McCluskey had always been good value when properly outraged. They used to try to provoke her. On this occasion she needed no assistance.
‘Oh, don’t talk to me about the dodgy gear change. The bloody driver not only doesn’t know where he’s going, which I accept is not the silly arse’s fault, but he can’t handle a simple double declutch. History is holding its breath while yet another incompetent to add to the already crowded cast tries to put the royal car into reverse and stalls it. Stalls it! He is a professional chauffeur and he cannot reverse his car!’ Her face was bright red now and the veins were standing out on her neck and forehead. ‘At which point Princip walks out of the deli, lunch in hand, and finds himself one and a half metres from the very bloke he’s supposed to kill. I mean, it’s just unbelievable. The very man he and his hapless colleagues have spent all day trying to kill is sitting in front of him in a stalled motor in a confined street. What are the chances of that? It is just insane.’
Having been almost dancing with frustration on the carpet, McCluskey sank down into an armchair, exhausted. She took a swig of wine and a couple of big sucks on her pipe to restore herself but unfortunately managed to put the pipe back into her mouth upside down, thus depositing a great plug of burning tobacco into her lap. When she’d brushed that on to the rug and stamped on it she finally seemed calm.
‘Haven’t I always said history turns on individual folly and ineptitude!’ she said. ‘Come on, be honest, haven’t I always said it?’
‘Yes, you have, professor,’ Stanton said, reaching for a bit of chocolate. ‘History is made by people.’
‘And the majority of people are arseholes.’
‘Which is I suppose why the majority of history has been so disastrous.’
‘But not this time!’ McCluskey said, draining her glass and punching the air. ‘Not this time! This time there’s going to be another guy in town. And he won’t be an incompetent idiot. He’ll be a highly competent and highly trained British officer and he will save the world. Think of it, Hugh. You’re going to save the world!’ She reached for the decanter and took a chug direct from the flask. ‘Happy Easter!’
22
STANTON HAD MADE his way down to the warren of streets by the Miljacka river and located Schiller’s Delicatessen. However, since it was too early to enter he had carried on past, walking down on to the Latin Bridge.
Thinking about McCluskey and her Easter toast.
Waiting to save the world.
A flower seller approached him. A young woman of perhaps seventeen or eighteen with a basket of primroses in her hands. He didn’t understand the words she was saying but their meaning was clear: she was hungry and she wanted him to buy a flower.
The girl was painfully thin. The evidence of want in her face and the hunger in her look gave her a slightly other-worldly quality, as if she were part spirit. Her cheekbones and her enormous eyes made her look like one of those Japanese cartoons of girl-women that had become so popular in the century from which he’d come.
For a moment Stanton was so struck by her that he merely stared. The girl turned away without a word, clearly having no time for men who wanted to stare at her but didn’t buy a flower.
‘Please. Wait …’ Stanton called after her. He spoke in English but again the meaning was clear. The girl turned back to him, a question on her strangely ghostly face. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, then, ‘Es tut mir leid,’ in German.
The girl just smiled and held out her basket.
The smile was as enchanting as the face that framed it. Her teeth were not good but somehow that added to her ghostly beauty. Her skin was pale but when Stanton smiled at her she blushed a little and her cheeks turned pink.
Stanton felt drawn to the girl, perhaps because she was all alone, like him. An outsider struggling in a cold and indifferent world.
He took out his wallet. He had nothing smaller than a two-krone note, which he knew was far too much, enough to have bought a dozen of her flowers at least. The girl reached into the purse at her belt and produced a handful of coins and began counting them out to see if she had sufficient change. Stanton smiled and waved a hand to make it clear that he didn’t need any and that she could have the whole amount. Delighted, the girl took the money, gave him a flower and walked on.
Stanton watched her leave. He was glad he’d given her too much. The money had been supplied by the bastards who killed his family; why not make a hungry, delicate creature a little happier in a hard world?
He put the primrose in the buttonhole of his Norfolk jacket and turned once more to stare at the river. The Schiller Delicatessen was only around the corner and there were still a few minutes before the time would be right for him to enter it.
He looked over the railing of the Latin Bridge into the Miljacka river, thinking about the murky waters of the Bosphorus and that first morning, a month earlier. He no longer considered the possibility of jumping in. He believed absolutely in the importance of his mission. Besides which, he was learning to appreciate life again. Meeting the flower girl was a little part of that. Cassie was gone but there was still beauty in the world. Not for him perhaps, that part of his life was over. But it was beauty nonetheless and beauty was a wonderful thing.
Stanton checked his wristwatch. It was nearly time.
The watch had come with him from his old life. Quartz battery-powered and with more computing power than would exist anywhere else in the world for at least fifty years, and even when such technological power did come to pass again it would take a machine the size of a small house to create it rather than that of a milk bottle top. Staring at his watch, Stanton wondered if perhaps after what he was about to do it would take longer than fifty years for the first proper computers to develop. After all, the majority of the great technological leaps of the twentieth century had been the result of military research. Perhaps, if he was able to bequeath the century a more peaceful beginning, those computers might never be developed. It occurred to him that this was another good reason for preventing the Great War. A few decades’ delay in the development of smart phones and video games consoles would probably be a good thing.
Stanton watched from the bridge as a small, sad-eyed youth scarcely older than the flower girl and almost as hungry-looking approached, walking along the bank of the river and turning up the little street on which Schiller’s Delicatessen was located. With a slight chill and a quickening of his pulse Stanton recognized that this was Gavrilo Princip. A young man whom he had travelled across space and time to meet. A man who was no longer about to make history.