Murder is born of love. And love attains the greatest intensity in murder.
—Octave Mirbeau
Sunday, June 28, 1914. Central Sarajevo.
At dawn, an airless and stifling heat blanketed the ancient citadel. The city was ready for the royal visit.6
June the twenty-eight, was St. Vitus Day, a day celebrated by Serb nationalists.
As he left suite number thirty of the Hotel President, Johan noticed a sign hanging on the inside of the door. It read:
DO NOT DISTURB
If only he had read the sign differently and left EVERYONE on the planet alone.
* * *
The child beggars gathered around the fountain in Bascarsija. Out of pride, they would take money but never food.
Down each alley, a coffee dealer buzzed around, shuttling shiny trays of extra-rich kavna (strong coffee) back and forth to his foot soldiers in their rattling bazaars which held enough copper to melt down to arm a huge battalion. These men needed to keep their energy levels up for their days were long. It was easy to nod off at the back of their establishments, hypnotized by the constant whir of the charmers of Arabia. There the chiming trinkets from Gilgamesh and marmites from Babylonia gave way to an array of pipes, able—they say—to raise a hundred snakes to dance. Old men with folded miens leaned over chessboards. The verdegris of every mosque roof seemed greener than ever against the bluest sky.
Crowds had started to line the route along the river early in the morning. For the sake of image, only a meager local police force of one hundred and twenty were scattered along the thoroughfare. The army had been given the day off. Policemen lackadaisically chatted among themselves or sucked on rolled-up cigarettes. A couple of them looked seriously hungover. Some were unshaven. Peaked caps (kepis) were atilt. The men wearing them exuded an air of disinterest and boredom. Early clouds had burned away. Little children held flags of the Hapsburg royal crest, breathing in the pipe-tobacco smoke of uncles and fathers.
Drago and Elena Thoms had already walked the length of the route by the river, the Miljacka. Drago completed the distance in roughly half the number of Elena’s strides, avoiding any large cracks in the pavements. Using his symmetry gland, he noticed the same hacking cough at equidistant intervals along the banks of the river.
It was rare for them both to get to the city these days. They used to love it in the olden days when they were first in love, their stolen evenings at an old spot called Parioli. He would always preorder her favorite bisque for her; “with the lobster on the side,” he would add, knowing she found this adorable.
They were now back, proud that their boy had bailed them out of their temporary crisis, eager to see him in his smart new suit, shiny dress shoes, and Sunday haircut, and in the company of royalty. Along the ceremonial route, two hours before the Archduke was expected, a solitary Packard swept by. In the back, a balding pale-skinned character with bulging green eyes and a mustard-plaid jacket waved his arms extravagantly, with instructions for his steady, angular driver. So angular that Drago almost thought of Pythagoras, but instead simply queried, from his lofty position:
“Who the hell is that idiot?”
“Don’t know, darling. But he looks very familiar.” Elena grimaced. The murmur of the crowd calmed Drago, but Elena still tried to place the Germanic face in the car. She had narrowed it down to a face in a sepia photograph, maybe a decade earlier.
A whiff of ylang-ylang took Drago’s nostrils as a creature of rare, foreign, and wild beauty in white strolled confidently past them. She held a fine copy of The Arabian Nights. Drago could not take his eyes from her as Elena’s elbow met his ribs, followed by a wry, loving, knowing smile. He admired this stranger’s full lips, as plump as Amalfi figs in June, and wondered how her skin would look with goose bumps.
Billy Cartwright, having gained a foothold from a brick outhouse (which he resembled) at the side of the college steps, had climbed a nearby tree outside the Madresa faculty for a better vantage point. He had scaled the wall with a cold drink, a banana, and a giant doorstep of warm bread in his large paw.
The lung-hollowing cough was back. Someone was ill, Drago thought. “Give them a year at best,” he said.
“Kaunitz, Count Kaunitz, of course! Remember the deer? That was him with the popping eyes. The deer! The deer that nearly popped out Johan’s eyes!”
Another cough. Someone close by would be checking his handkerchief.
“They really shouldn’t put others at risk,” Elena pointed out.
“Probably a Serb. Poor bastard.”
Fezzes of swollen-glans mauve and chunky Turkish mustaches mixed in with homogeneous Western dark suits, the clipped and oiled haircuts. This did not help the identification of their boy.
Ylang-ylang walked back in the opposite direction. Drago closed his eyes, enhancing the olfactory pleasure, believing too, that this would dramatically decrease the chances of a second bruised rib. He didn’t know that his son had bought the fragrance and that his own flesh and blood had fallen in love with its wearer.
* * *
Half a mile away, at the train station, the platform clock ticked toward eight. Johan stood on the side steps, elegant and handsome in Schneider’s finest. He was keeping an eye out for his parents, for his belle, resplendent in white, and for his crazy best pal.
He soon met Kaunitz. The Count admired his friend’s latest purchase from the tailor and they embraced.
Johan’s fellow chauffeurs, Leopold Loyka and Franz Urban, eyed them with suspicion. Johan believed he heard the word Upstart! muttered. Was there also a homophobic comment?
The drivers smelled of booze, and had not bothered to shave. Slovenly, they paced the steps of the station. Their old shoes lapped, dusty and unpolished.
Urban was a mustachioed, grubby Prussian, perhaps fifty years old, a mere five feet five. His eyes were way too close together.
Would not trust a marsh hound with eyes so close and so beady! Johan thought.
Loyka was even shorter, and looked like he would snap an ankle if he fell off the curb. His greasy hair was slapped down to the right, the parting more crooked than the Carpathians. He had cabbage in his mustache. Their level of interest in their duties seemed worryingly low.
Urban and Loyka expelled sickening guffs of wind in a nauseating tournament. From time to time, one of the shocking creatures would strike a match to extinguish the vile odor.
They would not ordinarily have bothered to get rid of the stench. Müller, however, was on his bent, wonky-eyed prowl, for even a seemingly tolerant gent had his limits.
Repulsed municipal officials, train guards, and cops alike kept their distance from the perpetrators, who meanwhile delighted in their own antics.
Johan had been keen to wish them both a good morning at seven A.M., as agreed in their briefing, but they had been nowhere to be seen. Müller had appeared shortly after and checked out Johan’s immaculate appearance through his nystagmus. When Müller asked if he had seen Urban and Loyka, Johan could only tell the truth, but he attempted to leave things open-ended.
“I have not, sir, but I have not been here that long. And I was reading some of the notes, so they could easily have, you know . . .” And he trailed off.
Müller had shaken his head, resigned to more incompetence from the pair. When eventually the duo had stumbled in, they were followed by a distinct smell of stale urine. The hum was exacerbated by the heat of the morning and the lack of any fresh air in the old stone station.
At seven minutes to nine, Loyka was in the process of cupping his hand to his behind and aiming the offending rancidity toward a giggling Urban like a six-year-old when Müller turned the corner with General Walrus. Whether the General’s presence swayed Müller’s decision is impossible to determine and can only now be a matter of conjecture, but he was left with little choice but to dismiss the two aging scalawags for the day. They were placed on a disciplinary charge on the spot, and, later in that momentous week, were fired for good.
In the background stood Johan, their antithesis. Erect, smart, polished, eyes hinting at intelligence, someone in whom one might almost trust! He was revealed to Müller and Potiorek as the ghastly pair scuttled away. Müller sensed where Herr General was looking as he barked, “Yes, do it . . . Good lad . . . Him . . . Like.”
The General’s telegram-speak was becoming neither more expressive nor more expansive.
General Potiorek headed back into the station, leaving Müller to approach Johan.
“Thoms, my boy. You are now on driving duty. Stand by for further orders. I am counting on you!”
“Yes, sir.” Johan beamed, fully confident that it was not tough to perform better than Urban and Loyka.
Billy, Lorelei, Ma, and Pa were going to be so proud. Whether he was to drive a car for junior officials or simply signal the start of the royal convoy, it really did not matter to Johan. He might even get his picture in the newspaper!
“Imagine THAT! My picture in the paper. I could be famous!” he said.
* * *
Billy Cartwright recognized the fine swagger of a figure in white and smiled to himself. It was Lorelei, of course. He was still up the ash tree. He had heard of Johan’s father’s tendency to climb trees, but seemed to recall that it was related to thunderstorms. He decided to check the trees along the route anyway for Thoms Senior. He picked out only a policeman, who appeared to have dozed off in a sturdy oak by the promenade along the Miljacka.
A shuddering cough broke the soft murmur of the crowd as numbers slowly gathered. Cartwright was spending equal time searching for his best pal, his best pal’s mad father, and pretty girls.
Back at the station, Johan heard the unmistakable chug of a steam engine heading toward the central platforms.
A minor brouhaha surrounded the arrival of the train carrying the royal party from the leafy western suburb of Ilidza, where the couple had overnighted at the Hotel Austria.
Billy was still high in his tree, hair flopping over his tan face, playfully whistling at passing girls or pulling faces at young children. If they did not give this bonobo chimp his rightful fill of attention, he pretended to fall, banana still in hand, half peeled. When there was no one there to wind up or annoy, he yelled, in a friendly tone, at a small Turkish-looking boy passing beneath him, “Hey you. I know you. I never forget a fez!” The boy looked confused and embarrassed. Bill smiled to himself, and moved on to pondering the actual differences between his twin heroes—heresy and blasphemy.
* * *
Among the crowd, Drago and Elena waited, eager and proud.
* * *
Urban and Loyka trundled themselves through the alleys of Bascarsija to a nearby bar, buffered from the searing sun by a cloud of flatulent filth, growling obscenities to each other through manky green and gray teeth.
* * *
Lorelei had just been learning from The Thousand and One Nights how the ruler of the lands, Caliph, had planned to kill his new wife, Scheherazade, as he had slaughtered all his previous wives, after just the one night of passion. Lorelei glanced up from time to time from her comfortable seat at the front of the crowd to try to catch a glimpse of her beau.
Caliph Harun al-Rashid was not able to kill Scheherazade, though. Each night, the clever beauty would tell him another installment of an ancient tale of murder and revenge. The tale captured the Caliph’s imagination. Each night, Scheherazade’s life was spared, for her story was unfinished. By the time one thousand and one Arabian nights had passed, Scheherazade had borne the Caliph five beautiful children, and his love for her was real. They lived happily ever after. (Well, until they died.)
Scheherazade was now embarking on the ancient tale of “The Day Abu Hasan Broke Wind.
* * *
In Arabia of old, as today, the breaking of wind was a much-frowned-upon activity. Abu Hasan was a respected and learned man of many qualities. He prided himself on his etiquette.
However, one day while at lunch with the Sultan, he accidentally farted. Such was his shame around the palace that he banished himself from Baghdad to China. He mounted his camel and rode off in the direction of the Orient.
After many years, he yearned for the city of his youth, so he decided to return. Many months he rode from the end of the world to the ancient city of Baghdad. He reached it late one night. He decided to stop outside the walls of the city, which he would enter at dawn in full daylight. As he tried to fall into a slumber that night beneath the cold stars, he heard the wailings of a young girl next to his tent. When he listened at her door, he discovered that she was to marry the next day. The only reason, however, for her weeping was that she wanted to know her exact age. Her mother could not tell her this. The only thing the old crone could tell her was that her beloved daughter had been born in the year that Abu Hasan had farted. Abu Hasan was overtaken by grief and embarrassment. He mounted his camel once more, and cursed the people of Baghdad as peasants who kept track of time only by his flatulence. He disappeared off toward the horizon, never to be seen again.
* * *
Lorelei giggled. She thought of reading the story to Johan later, in a park, cooled from the sunshine under a tangerine tree.
* * *
Potiorek took his position with the other dignitaries, numbering fifteen in total, on the dusty station platform. The Walrus’s military uniform, laden with medals, stood at the group’s apex. A grim shadow of black suits and top hats flanked the General symmetrically, like a formation of geese heading south.
Elena, who also possessed an osmotic sense of symmetry, asked Drago every thirty seconds if he could see anything. He offered to lift her onto his shoulders. She considered accepting his unconventional offer.
With a burst of black, grubby smoke and genteel applause, the train pulled into the station.
Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his adoring, pregnant wife, Sophie, disembarked from their plush carriage to a fanfare of buglers, one of whom was distinctly off-key, much to the Countess’s amusement. She politely half smiled to herself, which brought a rouge blush to her porcelain cheeks. The note actually deserved more of a belly laugh, but Sophie knew that they had left the womb of the Hapsburgs and were in the provinces. Franz noticed her snigger, and smiled happily to himself at her wonderful ways and at the bugler’s inner turmoil. He placed a reassuring royal hand in the small of her back. Instantly she became unaware of all else, only of the secure touch of her (if not yet Austria’s) emperor.
The Walrus Potiorek stepped forward to welcome the couple as Johan watched from a distance. He felt a presence at his side and turned to see the friendly face of Müller.
“Thoms. You are to drive the first Packard. You will be driving them.”
Johan felt a rush of adrenaline surge to his extremities.
“Simply drive to the City Hall, straight along Appel Quay. The reception and luncheon will be held there. I trust you more than those other clowns.”
“No problem, Herr Müller,” Johan said before striding purposefully to the vehicle, the first of eight.
Minutes later, Walrus approached, leading the royal pair. Johan already had taken his seat and had the engine idling. He looked straight ahead as the three dignitaries climbed into the rear seats, the Walrus facing the back, opposite Ferdinand, resplendent in a light powder-blue military uniform and plumed cocked hat, and his radiant lady, Sophie Chotek, Her Serene Highness, the Princess of Hohenberg.
The couple smiled, radiating warmth and humanity. This belied the local propaganda, which Johan had weighed (and largely discarded) during his time at college. Radical ideas permeated the colleges there, as they did almost every European school at the time, but Johan tried to sidestep the egos of those who ranted at rallies, waved pamphlets, and grew self-important beards. If Cartwright had been political, then Johan might easily have been more exposed to an ideology, dragged along, and soon swayed. Cartwright, however, opted for mischief, girls, and mischievous girls; and for now Johan suspected it smart to follow his pal’s wisdom.
Johan was so relaxed now that he even felt he should be in the back with them, especially as he had started to quite like them. There was a magnetism in them, and certainly between them. He even found himself slowly nodding his approval.
He overheard Potiorek outlining the timetable to the couple, and then some giggles and laughter among the three. The first car, driven by Johan Thoms, then pulled off, steady speed, smooth clutchwork, low revs.
They left the station compound. Johan could hear nothing now above the sound of the engine and the low din of the crowds. They left the shade and drove into the full glare of the midsummer’s day.
* * *
Elena Thoms fainted when she saw her son driving the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Countess Sophie, and General Potiorek. Drago didn’t know what to do. Johan was not quite sure whether he saw the broad grin of the world’s proudest father in the corner of his eye.
Out of character, Lorelei became slightly flushed when she saw Johan. She slid off her chair and headed toward her hotel, in order to prep herself for him with a chilled bottle of brut. She kept her thumb in The Arabian Nights, on page one of “The Tale of Kafur the Black Eunuch,” which she would relish in the cool of her chambers.
* * *
Several assassination attempts had been planned. Belts, braces, belts. The dangerous figures who made up the vast majority at the menacing gatherings of the Black Hand bore absolutely no resemblance to the café conspirateurs who had been handed this important task. No, these were young, inexperienced boys in a hard man’s world. And it would show.
Nedjelko Čabrinović, Cvjetko Popović, and Danilo Ilić were charged with the responsibilities for three of the contingency attacks, but only if the first assassin, one Muhammed Mehmedbasic, failed. Mehmedbasic lost his nerve when the cars approached along the Appel Quay. Even though he had been drilled thoroughly, he forgot to count to ten after pulling the pin on his grenade. Johan saw what he thought was a bomb rise up out of the crowd. It was about to land in the back of his Packard, but he accelerated. The device hit the back of the car and exploded on the road to his rear, seriously injuring the two people in the car behind. One was the Count of Mancini, a close friend of the Archduke’s.
Other attempts were made by the Black Hand, equally disorderly. Unsteady hands fired bullets wide; a lunge with a bayonet from behind the lines only scratched the paintwork of the Packard; a backfiring handgun was knocked from a would-be assassin’s hand by a teenage girl. The others in the gang of seven did not even have the courage to attempt their duties. As for Gavrilo Princip, the captain of the crew, he fled, and sloped away to his shame. The three members of the Black Hand who had had the courage to at least attempt their duties were apprehended.
First, though, came further ignominy. They had planned to swallow their phials of cyanide and jump into the rapids of the Miljacka for a glorious martyr’s end. (Or, if they were lucky enough to be in a position to flee, the entrances to the sewers on the south banks should have led them to safety.)
After the indignities of malfunctioning weapons, unexploding devices, and abysmal marksmanship, each of the coughing, spluttering trio of failed assassins had stormed, at distances a furlong apart, through the crowds. They then swigged their poison and, from the walls by the river, faced the crowds and declared, “Greater Serbia until Eternity!” They each then turned and leaped into the river.
However:
The cops, excited by an event of any kind in this backwater, dragged the men out of the sludge and carted them off for questioning.
* * *
The convoy reached the City Hall, a stunning design in the style of the ancient Mameluks. There, the local dignitaries acted as if nothing untoward had happened, and attempted to carry on with all the scripted details in their itineraries. Officials darted around in the mayhem. This all may seem incredible given the attempts on Ferdinand’s life. It would be so easy to edit those grainy Keystone Cops flicks of the time into the footage that still survives of Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. One would never know where slapstick Hollywood ended and the day that changed the world began. The footage of the steps of Sarajevo City Hall might suddenly include a young Charlie Chaplin, a spazzy-eyed Mack Sennett, or deadpan Buster Keaton. In the midst of a Fatty Arbuckle scene would appear two drunken, flatulent grubsters staggering to a bar, Bill Cartwright in a tree eating a banana, or our innocent young hero, Johan Thoms, looking bemused but serene as the day’s crazy events unfolded around him. Inside the City Hall, however, the talks started as planned. Ferdinand was dumbfounded.
“What is the good of your speeches?” he asked when he had recovered his ability to speak. “I come to Sarajevo on a visit and I get bombs thrown at me. It is outrageous.”
Kaunitz’s arms were in full windmilling mode.
News filtered through of Mancini’s serious injuries. Ferdinand insisted on visiting him in the hospital. “We must. Come on. Drive me. Sophie, you please stay here, my dear.”
Potiorek butted in. “Your Highness. Do you think that Sarajevo is full of assassins?”
Now it was the pregnant Sophie’s turn. “As long as the Archduke shows himself in public today, I will not leave his side.”
And so it was settled. But Johan had received other instructions: to head to the military inspection outside the city; also others: to drive back to the train station.
So it was that Johan drove the Packard off from the City Hall with his passengers, into a void.
The city had settled into a surreal calm. If you have ever been in Baton Rouge, Biloxi, or Key Largo after a hurricane, then you have witnessed a similar stillness, under silent skies of deep azure. The drive toward the military camps (or was it the hospital? or the train station?) began in such a still, queer silence.
Heading west, Johan reached the crossroads by the Miljacka, opposite the right turn north into Franz Joseph Street by the Latin Bridge.
Johan Thoms turned.
The confused orders and the silence had disoriented him. Now, alone again with Ferdinand, Sophie, and Potiorek, he took a ninety-degree turn away from the river and trundled forward into the city. The reason would remain a mystery for decades.
There on the corner (and still there today) was the parfumerie where he used to refill his El Capitán.
* * *
In the blue-lit shack, Johan tilted his head back and seemed for a while to be meditating. He lowered his gaze until he was staring into Ernest’s eyes.
“A single whiff from that damned fine store sparks an involuntary memory in me. I know that I am a full eight hundred and forty-one miles from Paris. Even further from Proust’s madeleine biscuit. I know these facts, but I am more lost than I can ever tell. This captured aroma leads me to imagine an errant act with my belle, involving the powder-blue plume feather which has blown from the Archduke’s military headgear in the earlier furor and has settled on my driving seat.
“I turn right and head in the direction of the old Hotel President. This is what the history books say.
“I am in love. What can I tell you? How fragile we are. How fragile we ALL are.
“True to form, I am half in a reverie of last night’s degeneracy and half in the evening to come, when all I need to do is to drive a car in a straight line by the river.
“However, the scent of that cologne is soon to be replaced by the pungency of burned gunpowder, and I am no longer elsewhere. On the opposite side, there stands the old café—Schiller’s. A hacking cough emanates from within.
“Old Potiorek is still comforting the Archduke after the earlier attempts on his life, and paying particular attention to Sophie; she is quite the lady, after all.
“As before, Ferdinand and Sophie are sitting in the back facing forward, with the Walrus facing them. The car comes to a slow stop. My passengers gasp, seeming to realize that we are penned in, in an otherwise silent side street, by high, close, grubby walls. Ahead is a cul-de-sac, a temporary dead end, blocked off for the procession.
“From an open window above, I can hear the calming strains of the Gymnopédies from a pianist of some talent. Does this cause a pause? It certainly seems to.
“As I try to put the car in reverse gear (which I have never done before, but have also never imagined would be either required or difficult), we again hear a death-rattling cough from within the coffee shop. As the splutter grows louder and more frequent, I look up to the pavement outside. There stands an incredulous Gavrilo Princip, scabby sandwich in his wretched hand, gob open, half-chewed fatty pig covering his graying incisors. In slow motion (if slow motion can pass in a split second), a revolver that started its life in Russia is pulled from a jacket resembling a hessian sack, and three, four, five, and then six bullets are shot into the back of the Packard.
“On this somber and dangerous corner, my destiny and that of the twentieth century and beyond are decided. The unearthly consummation of my happiness has started.”
Johan held up his hand to beg for Ernest’s continued silence, and then looked away from him. They sat for almost an hour before Johan continued.
* * *
Franz Ferdinand took a soon-to-be-fatal shot in the neck and four more across his torso and arm; the pregnant Countess Sophie, one in the abdomen.
Franz and Sophie declared their undying love for each other as they bled and died slowly in each other’s arms. They implored each other to stay alive to look after their offspring. One of Princip’s few comments after his arrest was that his only regret was the love he had destroyed. He had had no idea that Franz Ferdinand was such a humane man, full of love for his family, full of love for his wife.
Later, between coughs, Princip would speak of his remorse far more articulately and with far more humanity than he had ever spoken of a Greater Serbia. It was as if some thing, some soul, had transmigrated from the back of the car that day into the creature who had destroyed it. Sophie and her unborn were dead within minutes.
* * *
Johan found himself repeating, blurting out loud just one word:
“Zuruck . . . zuruck . . . zuruck . . .” (Backward, backward, backward.)
He was still whimpering this an hour later as the royal physician covered the Ferdinands’ drained, bloodless faces with a unifying death shroud. They lay on their luxurious bed in the Konak, where they should have slept soundly that night.
* * *
Bill Cartwright was heading back from the riverside through the park to his dorm. He approached two young boys, of maybe nine and fifteen years old, playing chess under an oak tree of biblical proportions. The concentration on their faces was almost as intense as the muck. The younger scruff, in graying white shorts and blue shirt, played black and faced his teenage counterpart, in khaki shorts and canary-yellow vest, shoeless, holding white. Cartwright hovered above them for ten seconds. The scenario did not look good for the older boy as the endgame neared. Bill tapped khaki and canary, no shoes, with the outside of his tough reddish brown leather Yorkshire brogue and announced, with a deadpan delivery, in English:
“If you need the answer, kid, just ask my girlfriend. She’s got the answer for bloody everything! And if you don’t take that damned castle soon, the bloody Prussians will!”
The kid just frowned, understanding not one word.
Cartwright waited for an answer, out of bloody-mindedness, though he knew none was forthcoming in a month of such Sundays.
“Speak up or forever hold your chess piece,” he said.
Then he was on his way, leaving in his slipstream his unique version of harmless confusion.
“Some folk are as thick as ten thousand shithouse doors nailed together,” he bellowed, shaking his head. Then in the distance, in the eerie lunchtime silence, he heard three, four, five, and then six gunshots. Thirty seconds later, he was being deafened by birdsong.
There were no camels, and this was not Baghdad, yet Abu Hasan had indeed farted.