June 28, 1914
There are no seers in Sarajevo.
The city’s river—the Miljacka—has no houseboat anchored against its currents. Its waters aren’t deep enough for that sort of thing. If you jumped in to escape the crowds gathered along the parade route, you’d only get splashed a bit about the shins. No eels would slide across your ankles. There would be no smoky voice to lure you beneath the darkened arches of the Latin Bridge… to warn you about the destruction that shall soon unfold.
To the casual observer, the 28th of June is a perfect day. The sky is a baby-blue blanket over a cradle of hills. Sarajevo’s red-tiled roofs fill the valley, yielding only to spires, steeples, and roads—which are themselves filled with horses, handcarts, and vendors who have grain sacks slung over their shoulders. Appel Quay is the busiest thoroughfare of all, glutted with people gathered to watch a passing car. More specifically, a Gräf & Stift automobile carrying Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the House of Habsburg. Storefronts and houses sport the black-and-yellow flag of the monarchy, fluttering almost as much as the crowd beneath: men wearing traditional fezzes, women dressed in too many damn petticoats for this sort of weather, children clutching flowers, assassins with FN Model 1910 pistols tucked into their waistbands.
Ah, yes.
That.
That is the first portent. There are seven men walking through the crowd whose shadows tilt all wrong against the morning sun. Three of these assassins have tuberculosis. All of them have nothing to lose—they’ve been chosen by the Black Hand to save Serbia.
The second sign is much harder to miss.
The bomb glances off Franz Ferdinand’s elbow, detonating in the road and scattering harsh fragments. The crowd is shaken. A haze settles across the river. The flags of the Austrian-Hungarian empire are edged with this same smoke, but they keep flying. So do the green feathers of the archduke’s helmet—rippling as the car continues forward to city hall. He must believe, feeling the wind thread past his head this way, that he is invincible. He decides that the worst has already happened.
He decides to keep driving on that day.
A fortune teller might have warned him otherwise, for they would have read the third omen—not in tea leaves or river shit, but on the Gräf & Stift’s front license plate: AIII 118.
These numbers hold no real meaning to anyone in the crowd at Appel Quay. Their significance will not be noted for many years more, after the smoke has finally cleared and the bomb-scarred metal is carried off to a museum. This is the car that drove the entire world into war. Millions upon millions of lives might have been spared, if only the driver had turned left instead of right. If only Gavrilo Princip had not been standing in line for a sandwich. If only the Gräf & Stift hadn’t stalled in front of the nineteen-year-old assassin. If only he hadn’t shot the archduke and his wife. If only Europe’s peace treaties hadn’t collapsed into dust. If only the kings had swallowed their pride and stopped their armies. This whole bloody affair might have ended before the armistice. November 11, 1918. Oh, yes, isn’t that spooky? Quite the coincidence, no?
But that—that is flipping too far ahead—past the final page.
There is no one to read the future in Sarajevo.
And so, the chauffeur turns right.