‘Mole?’
‘It means double agent. Did you ever read about the Alfred Redl scandal?’
Stanton had come across this catastrophe for Austrian intelligence during his preparatory research. The previous year, Redl, Austria’s Chief of Military Intelligence, had been discovered selling his own country’s entire battle plan to the Russians because he needed money to support his lover, who was a fellow officer.
‘Yes. I read about it,’ Bernadette admitted, ‘pretty fruity stuff.’
‘Well, because of Redl the Austrians have been fed misinformation by the Russians on a continuous basis since 1903, so they would very likely view information supplied by a Russian ally as deliberate misinformation.’
‘It’s a dark game, isn’t it?’ Bernadette admitted.
‘You haven’t heard the half of it. Consider this for dark. It’s perfectly possible that even if the Austrians had believed a British warning about the Sarajevo plot, they might have let it go ahead anyway.’
‘Go ahead? Let anarchists murder their own Crown Prince?’
‘Think about it. This is a crown prince who married for love. Against the Emperor’s violent objections. So violent, in fact, that he instructed the Austrian court to ostracize the woman and officially disinherited any children she had with Franz Ferdinand. Add to that the fact that most of the Austrian elite have been itching for an excuse to put Serbia in its place. In fact, Franz Ferdinand was one of the few doves; the Emperor was a hawk.’
Bernadette leant forward and squeezed his hand.
‘Doves and hawks? God, I love the way you talk, Hugh.’
‘So you believe me then?’
‘Yes, yes, I blooming well do! But do you really think the old Emperor might actually have wanted his nephew dead? Because his wife wasn’t posh enough?’
‘Power is a dirty game, Bernie. A very dirty game.’
Stanton would have liked to show her how true this was. To tell her that in the previous history of the world, on hearing of his nephew’s death the Emperor had actually expressed relief about it. That he was recorded as having said, ‘A higher power has re-established the order which alas I could not preserve.’ That would have given her something to get wide-eyed about. The old man had thought God himself shot Franz Ferdinand to preserve the integrity of the Habsburg dynasty.
‘So you see,’ he went on, ‘the only way to be absolutely sure the plot would fail was to prevent it ourselves. I was recruited to do the job by a group centred around Trinity College Cambridge, dedicated to preserving international peace. They call themselves the Companions of Chronos.’
‘The God of Time?’
‘Yes … because time was … running out to stop Europe from destroying itself.’
Bernadette was silent for a moment.
‘Well, it certainly makes more sense than you being a Pan-Serbian nationalist,’ she said. ‘Well done, by the way. I mean, on pulling it off.’
‘I’d hoped to do it without having to kill Princip and particularly that poor girl he was with but he was in the act of pulling his gun when I arrived.’
‘You had no choice.’
‘No, I don’t think I did.’
‘Amazing that you were there at all. The papers said it was a mix-up and the car took the wrong turn. It’s almost as if you knew.’
‘One develops a nose for these things in my game.’
‘A sort of sixth sense?’
‘Something like that, yes.’
‘Well, you did really really well.’
‘Thanks.’
There was another pause during which Stanton took the opportunity to shut and stow his photographic ‘light box’.
‘Enough to make a girl swoon,’ Bernadette went on.
‘I find I often have that effect.’
‘Are all spies as devilishly attractive as you?’
‘Good God no. I’m far and away the sexiest.’
‘Sexiest? Another rather splendid word. Where do you get them from?’
‘It’s a gift.’
Bernadette got up from the table and began once more to remove her slip.
28
THE FOLLOWING MORNING Bernadette and Stanton parted company and he continued his journey to Berlin, Imperial capital of the Second Reich and the place where he knew he must kill the Emperor.
Berlin was two cities.
That was the conclusion Stanton came to as he ate a dish of ice cream on the terrace of the Kranzler patisserie on Unter Den Linden.
One was nineteenth century and the other twentieth century.
The nineteenth-century one was about as nineteenth century a city as you could find, steeped in the Imperialist mind-set of the time. A fiercely militaristic town, capital of the garrison state of Prussia. No people since the Spartans had so gloried in martial ardour. No nation of the modern world, with the possible exception of the Zulus, ever idolized its army so completely. The army was far and away the most important and the most visible institution in the city after the monarchy, with which it was inextricably linked. The military were everywhere. Marching bands in every park. Grand parades on every Sunday (and any other day on the tiniest excuse). Officers strutting in the boulevards and lounging in the cafes in ornate dress uniforms which would have been entirely impractical for any other activity than raising a glass or bowing to a lady. Columns of troops marched about wherever there was space to march about. And there were sentries everywhere. Stanton had had no idea of the number of soldiers on the streets of pre-war Imperial Berlin. It was frankly a bit weird. No other city felt the need to place uniformed sentries outside every public building. Museums were guarded, national monuments, railway stations, public toilets. Anywhere that crown or municipal authority was extended there was a spike-headed soldier with rifle at his shoulder marching about, usually with the ubiquitous black-and-white sentry box behind him. To a military man like Stanton it was all quite fun; he enjoyed the sight of their impeccable turnout, their faultless drill and the shine on every boot. The Germans did military ceremony almost as well as the British and they did a lot more of it. The sort of show the Horse Guards put on outside Buckingham Palace once a day, the Reichsheer would mount at a sewage pumping station on the hour.
And where there could be no soldiers, then there were people trying to look like soldiers. Half the population of Berlin was in uniform, three-quarters if you counted waiters and hotel doormen. Every institution in the city seemed to have been moulded in the image of the military. Everyone from policemen to postmen to students to hotel concierges dressed like soldiers. Teachers wore uniforms.
And yet strangely Stanton found the overall effect was neither warlike nor threatening. Rather, it gave a slightly comical impression of benign and self-satisfied permanence. The postmen that looked like captains and the water board officials that looked like generals and the telegram delivery boys that looked like field marshals were just part of a happy pantomime. As if the whole city was the set of some Ruritanian comic opera and the people its chorus and principals.
Germany hadn’t fought a real war since Bismarck had unified the country forty years before, and for all the martial music and stamping about, Stanton sensed no desire among the people of its capital city to fight one now.
A cake trolley passed by Stanton’s table. They really liked their cakes, the Germans. Or, perhaps more to the point, they liked their cream. For as far as Stanton could see, cakes were really no more than whipped cream delivery systems, thin layers of sponge set between inch-thick layers of dairy fat. Kaffee und Kuchen, that was what they liked in Berlin. Stanton liked it too.
The whole place just felt so contented.