The arrival of the first editions of the evening papers put the matter beyond doubt. Stanton was in the clear. He found a German language journal, which he read discreetly in a stall in the men’s room. The article seemed well sourced and made sense. Describing the second attempt on the Archduke, the paper reported that there had been two would-be assassins, an unidentified man in a tweed jacket, and Gavrilo Princip, a nineteen-year-old Serb. It seemed that the unidentified man had tried to kill the Archduke but had missed and instead fatally wounded his own comrade, who was on the other side of the car in the act of drawing his own weapon. Tragically there had been a young flower girl standing between the two assassins who had died in the crossfire, macabrely killed by the same bullet that killed Princip. The article mentioned that Duchess Sophie, who was quite close to the man who fired the bullet, stated that he had whispered something before he fired, which she thought had been in Serbian, possibly ‘God bless Serbia’.
Stanton made his excuses and left the bar. Once more his luck had held and he was in the clear. But he knew that the big grey eyes of the little flower seller would haunt him for ever.
24
STANTON LEFT SARAJEVO the following morning, departing from the same railway station at which he’d watched the arrival of the archducal party twenty-four hours earlier.
He bought a couple of newspapers at the station book stall, a local German one and The New York Herald. The date on the Herald’s masthead was Monday 29 June.
He had seen that Herald masthead before, with just that date displayed. In fact he had it with him, in digital form, scanned into the memory of his computer. The headline had been long and specific; they did things properly in 1914.
ARCHDUKE FRANCIS FERDINAND AND HIS CONSORT, THE DUCHESS OF HOHENBERG ARE ASSASSINATED WHILE DRIVING THROUGH STREETS OF SARAJEVO, BOSNIA.
The Herald had devoted its entire front page to the story, apart from a tiny paragraph in the bottom right-hand corner about a shipping accident. All the European papers had given the story similar prominence. Even in isolationist America, The New York Times had devoted a full half of its front page. Anyone with any sense of history at all had been able to see that nothing but terrible trouble could come from the murder of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. Although few, if any, imagined how much.
And yet here he was with his bundle of newspapers in his hand, that fateful date upon them, and there was nothing of much significance at all. The headline beneath the Herald masthead was THE CALIFORNIA GOES ASHORE NEAR TORY ISLAND with the sub headline, Bow of Anchor Liner Is Injured and Two Holds Are Full of Water. This was the story that had been squeezed into a tiny corner of the edition locked in the hard drive of Stanton’s computer. No one had been killed or even injured, the seas were calm, the accident had occurred quite close to Ireland, six British destroyers were attending the scene and it was reported that should an evacuation be thought necessary it was predicted that this could be effected easily and without any danger to crew or passengers.
That was the main story the morning after Archduke Ferdinand visited Sarajevo. A maritime accident with not a single loss of life. In this new twentieth century that Stanton had caused to come into being, Monday 29 June 1914 had been a spectacularly bad day for news.
It was surely only the still resonating loss of the Titanic two years before that made the story front-page news at all. That earth-shaking maritime disaster had been without doubt the biggest story of the century thus far. Even in Stanton’s own century the Titanic story had resonated down the decades. Despite war and genocide without parallel, people had still felt the distant aftershocks of that strangely compelling disaster. Now, because of Stanton, there was every possibility that the story of that icy night and the loss of those fifteen hundred lives would remain the biggest story of the century. A benchmark for drama and tragedy that the remaining nine decades of the century would fail to match.
Because of him.
He was the reason that the journalists of the world were drumming their fingers on their desks that morning instead of struggling to report the scope of a killing that would cripple a century.
He felt proud of himself.
The death of the girl still cut him deeply but he knew in truth that it wasn’t his fault. The simple fact was that he had been there and that he had not been there before. Tipping the girl or not tipping her, both would have caused some kind of an effect that had not occurred in the last version of the century. Whatever he did would have consequences he could never second-guess.
He had to move on.
And at least now he was relieved of the awful anxiety of the butterfly effect. History had taken a new course and he was as much in the dark about the future as anyone else.
He made his way along the train to the dining car and ordered coffee. He would have wine with lunch, Austrian wine. He wanted to celebrate. He wanted to tell someone. He wanted to shout out to the entire train, ‘Yesterday I saved the world!’
Although, of course, he hadn’t saved the world yet. There was the second part of his mission. The tough part. Assassinating the Kaiser. But there was nothing he could do about that for the moment. Not till he got to Berlin. All he could do was sit back, relax and watch the beautiful rugged countryside of Bosnia Herzegovina roll past the window.
The dining car was three seats wide with four-person tables on one side of the corridor and tables for two on the other. Stanton had chosen a single seat but the train wasn’t full and there was nobody at the larger table opposite. He almost had the carriage to himself, until he heard from behind him the rustle of satin and caught a whiff of scent. A moment later a woman took a seat by the opposite window.
‘Thank you,’ she said to the accompanying porter in English. ‘This’ll be just grand.’
An Irish accent. Cork, he thought, though perhaps accents had changed so much since the future that he couldn’t be sure.
‘I’ll take a cup of coffee certainly,’ the woman went on, ‘but nothing to eat for the time being, thanks all the same.’
Oi’l take a cup o’ coffee.
T’anks all the same.
It was a nice voice. Some accents just sound friendly, always have, always will, it didn’t matter what century you heard them in.
Stanton pretended to concentrate on his newspaper but stole a glance nonetheless. He was certain he could risk it unnoticed. He was, after all, trained in surveillance. If he could stake out fundamentalist insurgents he reckoned he could sneak a look at a pretty woman.
She had a book to read. In fact, she had several, plus notepads and pencils. She had pushed away the cutlery in order to make space for them.
Stanton wanted to talk to her.
For the first time since arriving in the twentieth century, in fact, for the first time since the death of his wife and family, he craved company. Female company. Perhaps it was the relief of having performed successfully the first half of his mission.
Or just possibly it was because she was rather beautiful.
Or if not beautiful, highly striking. Pretty would perhaps be a better word than beautiful. The hair was pale strawberry beneath her hat and she had classic Irish eyes, green with that tiniest downward turn at the outer edge. Smiling eyes they called them, although the same turn on a mouth would make a frown. There was a hint of freckles too. Her mouth was small, it certainly wouldn’t have been considered a beautiful mouth in the decade Stanton had come from, a decade where for some reason women had taken to pumping up their lips to look like shapeless inner tubes. The teeth weren’t quite perfect either, but then nobody’s were in 1914. He liked it, it lent character.