Time and Time Again, page 24
On his way back to Mitte he noticed that it wasn’t just the cafes in the Tiergarten that were closing their doors, the whole city was shutting down. Remembering that he had no food at all in his room he darted into a little grocer on a corner of the Alexanderplatz just before they closed their doors. He was lucky to get in, otherwise he would have had no supper and probably no breakfast either. He bought bread, cheese and ham, biscuits and some peaches, which would keep him going till the city opened up again. He knew the store, he’d shopped there before, and he recognized the young woman who was serving behind the till. On the previous day when he’d bought some summer fruits from her he had been rather charmed because she smiled so broadly and sang softly to herself while she measured out the strawberries. It had been a song about Erdbeer being sweet but not as sweet as love. Today, however, there were no smiles and no singing. The girl had been crying so hard she could barely count out his change.
‘Our Kaiser is with God now,’ she said, before adding, ‘and may God curse whoever did this.’
She was cursing him. It was a strange feeling.
The grocer’s girl wasn’t the only one who was weeping and cursing. Leaders are always more popular in death and there were many on the streets unable to contain their emotions. Stanton saw one old woman beating her breast in despair. He’d never imagined anybody actually did that. He thought it was just some old-fashioned phrase from the days of melodrama, but this woman was actually pummelling at her chest in a kind of paroxysm of grief while another woman tried to comfort her. Those who weren’t openly crying just looked drawn and grim as if they were forcing back tears. There wasn’t a single person who was not obviously and deeply affected by what was clearly being seen as a national tragedy of previously undreamt of proportions. Stanton had expected as much, of course, but the intensity still took him by surprise.
He made his way back to his street and let himself into his building. The outer door opened into a little vestibule and stairwell where an old concierge sat. He was a taciturn man who had never said anything to Stanton beyond a brief Morgen or Abend. On this afternoon, however, the man felt moved to speak.
‘Bastards,’ he spat as Stanton greeted him. ‘Those swine. Those vermin. Those Untermensch. We’ll hang them all.’
‘Who?’ Stanton asked. ‘Who will you hang?’
‘The Socialists, of course,’ he answered. ‘And the Anarchists with them, those revolutionary scum.’
‘Well, first the police have to catch them, don’t they?’ Stanton reminded the man.
‘We know where they are,’ the old concierge replied darkly. ‘They can’t hide.’
Stanton went up to his little room, laid out his food for later and opened his bottle of wine. He drank a glass straight down, toasting himself in the mirror above his wash bowl.
Now was the time to look again at the list he’d begun that morning. Shackleton. Everest. Fly the Atlantic. Soldiering … Bernadette.
Now at last he could move on.
But at that moment he found he couldn’t even begin to move on. For some reason he felt no sense of completion whatsoever. He was as all at sea as he’d felt in those first moments when he had found himself apparently alone in the cellar in Istanbul, the taste of the half-naked Turkish girl’s spearmint lip gloss still on his lips.
Drinking deep at his wine he tried to put this feeling of unease down to the fact that he had killed someone that day. That was a terrible thing to have to do, and any man who remained unmoved by such a thing should never be trusted with a gun. Stanton had killed before, of course, but not very often and he’d found that it never got any easier. But that was just the natural human horror at taking a life; he didn’t regret it. Far from it, in fact. He was absolutely confident in his mind that he’d acted for the right reasons and done the right thing. If he had it to do again he would.
So why did he feel so unsettled?
Seeking comfort, he took a book from his bag. A book he had brought with him from the future and which also, because of him, would never now be written. It was the Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. A favourite of Stanton’s since he was a boy.
He’d read those poems many times since arriving in the past, because he could think of no better argument for his mission than those harrowing but infinitely moving chronicles of quiet heroism, appalling carnage and pointless sacrifice. Owen’s heartfelt verse described more poignantly than any statistics ever could the nightmare that Stanton was preventing. It had given Stanton great strength to know that Owen would write different poems after his mission was complete. That instead of dying in a great and terrible war, Wilfred Owen would instead get his chance to live. And Brooke and Sassoon and millions of other brave young men whose lives were equally important, though their names had only ever been celebrated on neglected war memorials in town and village squares.
But that afternoon, with his wine and his schnapps and the great German warmonger dead, he found the poems didn’t help. The troubled and uncomfortable feeling that had been growing in him since first he had emerged from the Wertheim store wasn’t to do with him doubting the validity of his mission.
It was just that he felt – uneasy.
Things were getting noisier outside now. Stanton’s window was open because of the warmth of the afternoon and it was beginning to sound as if the entire population of Berlin was spilling out on to the streets.
And if people were still weeping outside, then the sound of it was drowned out by other noises. Less peaceful ones. There were shouts and chanting and the occasional sound of breaking glass.
Also there were clanging bells, whistles and klaxons as the authorities spread their net hunting for a killer they would never find.
Sitting listening to it all in his apartment, the Liebfraumilch tasting bitter for all its sweetness, Stanton sensed madness in the air. He’d experienced something very similar before: in Kabul, when an American drone aircraft had gone out of control and crashed down on to a school, destroying it totally. The Afghan people had flooded on to the streets then just as they were doing in Berlin now. It had been a bad time to be an American, or indeed a Westerner of any kind. Stanton and his comrades had barricaded themselves into their compound and sat it out for days with their safety catches off.
It was Socialists whom the crowd was seeking this time but Stanton suspected that the hatred would be just as general and arbitrary. Death to Socialists! he could hear them chant through his open window. Hang them all!
That was the message: all of them. Not just the guilty ones, but all of them.
Leaning out of his window he saw people brandishing the early editions of the evening papers. He went downstairs and bought one himself. The grim, black-trimmed headline adhered to the elegantly verbose standards of the day. There was no KAISER DEAD, as would have been the case in Stanton’s own age. Instead the headline ran: HIS IMPERIAL HIGHNESS IS ASSASSINATED IN BERLIN. Socialist Conspiracy Is Suspected.
Stanton felt a thrill at that. This was, after all, the first historic front page of a new and different twentieth century. He found himself thinking how one day the very headline he was looking at would be reproduced digitally in documentaries on the television in some other version of his own age.
But there was certainly going to be a price to pay. The mood in the street was getting angrier. Strangers were exchanging rumours that the police had uncovered a massive leftist conspiracy to overthrow the government. Stanton heard people speaking confidently about hundreds of ‘Revolutionaries’ and ‘Anarchists’ who had been poised to seize control.
Over and over again he heard the word ‘revenge’.
33
RETURNING TO HIS room he drank a little more schnapps and read the first reports in the evening paper.
The police had proved every bit as efficient as he’d expected they would be and more. They had already discovered his firing position and the Mauser shell. Also there was a mention of a wounded man who’d been found nearby on the roof. The reporter presumed this person to have been a security guard. It seemed that the police were waiting to ascertain the extent of his injuries before trying to question him.
Stanton was glad he hadn’t killed the guy, although he did wonder whether there was now a chance he could be identified. He decided that the risk of the guard having got a good enough look at him to give a description was pretty small. After all, as Stanton had spun around he’d been bringing up his gun in front of his face. All anyone could have seen with confidence was that he was tall and his hair was sandy blond. Plenty like that in the German capital. Besides which, the guard would probably die of his wounds anyway.
Despite the aching in his chest and back Stanton decided to take a walk. He drained his glass and went to the stairwell, then on an afterthought he returned to his room and took the Glock pistol from his damaged jacket and slipped it into his trouser pocket. It was an ugly night to be on the streets.
Stanton joined the milling throng which it seemed to him was gravitating towards the Brandenburg Gate. The gate had been erected by the Kaiser’s father to commemorate Prussia’s great victory over France and was therefore an obvious place to gather to remember a fallen German hero.
The mood outside was intensely emotional. Many wept as they walked, genuinely devastated by their collective loss. Others, however, had already transmuted their grief into fury and were shouting to the heavens for vengeance as they marched. Stanton was quite surprised at how quickly things were turning nasty. Of course he’d known that there’d be a massive public reaction and no doubt some random violence to go with it but he hadn’t quite expected what seemed to be developing into a collective and self-perpetuating hysteria for instant retribution.
People were acting as if they’d lost a saint. A guiding star.
Of course it made sense. After all, he’d killed the Kaiser before the man had screwed up. The Emperor had died while he was still the leader of a country untainted by war and barbarism and whose principal features were a world-beating industrial economy, a global technological lead and a highly developed Social Democratic movement.
Watching the growing fury of the crowd Stanton was uncomfortably aware that for the German people in July 1914 their Kaiser represented nothing so much as progress, prosperity and peace. Yes, of all things – peace. The crowd didn’t know what Stanton knew. As far as they were concerned, their King Emperor had been on the throne for twenty-six years and for all that time the nation had been at peace. And during that time Germany had grown into a premier world power with an industry to rival the United States, a navy that was threatening to one day equal Britain’s and an army that had no rival at all.
Understandably those early-twentieth-century Berliners surging through the streets in angry despair saw the Kaiser as the most potent symbol of their growing power and prosperity and were fearful that with his death their good luck would end. Only Stanton among them knew that it was the Kaiser’s survival that would have brought an end to their peaceful, comfortable world.
He wanted to shout it out: ‘Hey, guys! It’s OK! It’s all good! The man was a warmonger.’ He wanted to tell them that this apparent bastion of peace and stability had in fact led his country into suicidal conflict, and what was more had done it within five weeks of the current date. And that a mere four years after that, this man whom they were lamenting as the essential rock on which Germany’s future depended would be skulking out of Berlin into shameful and ignominious exile in Holland.
But of course all that was history now, or more to the point it wasn’t history. It never had been history and it never would be; it was just a strange dream in the mind of one single man on the planet. The new reality was that the mighty leader of the most successful ever period in German history was dead and his people were devastated.
And some of them were crazy angry.
Angry and getting dangerous.
Night had fallen and Stanton saw young men carrying clubs. Nobody carried a club unless they were looking for somebody to hit and these people really wanted to find somebody to hit. More sinister still were the gangs of students in their semi-military uniforms and caps, surging about in well-disciplined squads. They were carrying Imperial flags and the eagle banner and swearing that they would have vengeance or death.
But vengeance on whom?
Who should they hit with their clubs? Who should they march over with their banners? Who had done the deed? And who had put them up to it?
It was the Socialists that had done it. Nobody in Berlin was in any doubt about that. But which Socialists? And where were they? Where was their nest? Where were they hiding? The Chronos leaflet had been deliberately vague, leaving the mob with little to go on.
The later editions of evening papers changed all that. The journalists had had time to collect their thoughts and do some research and now began to name names. And while the newspapers couldn’t actually name any specific conspirators, they could certainly name Socialists. And did so with great enthusiasm, in so doing pointing a finger of implied guilt.
‘To the SPD Headquarters!’ the cry went up. ‘We’ll flush the bastards out.’
And so the Brandenburg Gate was forgotten in favour of converging on the offices of the Social Democratic Party, a highly respectable parliamentary party which had attracted millions of votes at the last election, but a party which the newspapers were eager to remind their readers had until 1890 been known as the Socialist Workers Party.
Stanton hoped for their own sake that the leaders of the SPD were not at their constituency offices that night.
Or, more particularly, one leader. Because above the general din and shouts, Stanton noticed one name beginning to emerge as the principal figure of hate. One name whom the evening papers had taken particular care in advertising.
Rosa Luxemburg.
Bernadette’s hero.
A famous Socialist who would one day set up the German Communist Party and die at the hands of a paramilitary death squad.
Or at least that had been Luxemburg’s fate in the first loop of time.
Who could guess what her fate would be in the second?
But it didn’t look good.
The very idea of Rosa Luxemburg seemed to infuriate the crowds. They hated her for a number of reasons. Because she was an uncompromising and highly vocal Socialist. Because she was a dirty foreigner, a Pollack no less, and only a naturalized German. Because she was a woman. And, most damning of all, because she was a Jew.
Stanton hadn’t thought of that.
That the Jews would get the blame.
But why not? They got blamed for most things in Europe in those days. And particularly for socialism. Ever since Karl Marx had first called on the workers of the world to unite, the Jews had been accused of being behind international socialism (while perversely also apparently being behind international capitalism). From time immemorial if there was any hating going on in Europe, the Jews copped it as a matter of course. It was therefore really no surprise that many in the crowd had already stopped blaming Luxemburg the Socialist for the death of their Emperor and had begun blaming Luxemburg the Jew.
Stanton really hadn’t thought of that. He wondered if McCluskey and her fellow Chronations had done. Of if they’d cared.
The uneasy feeling Stanton had felt earlier had developed into a sick and leaden sensation in his stomach which, try as he might, he could not push away. He tried to argue with himself that this was just one night. That the crowds were shocked and upset. Certainly it looked as if things were going to be rougher than he’d hoped, but it would pass.
He allowed himself to be drawn along with the mob. And mob it was becoming, there could be no doubt about that. Stanton felt the weight of history on his shoulders. New history. History in the making.
He spotted a bonfire up ahead.
A bonfire in the street, not a big one, just a little brazier with red and yellow tongues licking hungrily at the air, but Stanton felt his stomach tighten further at the sight of it. Angry crowds making fires in the Berlin night. Flame-flickered shadows on the cobbles. Smoke in the air, drifting on the breeze towards the river Spree. He’d seen that before. Not personally but in countless documentaries and old news reels. Images that had been stamped on the collective memory of his twentieth century. Once recognized by hundreds of millions, now known only to him.
It was leaflets they were burning. He could see them, dancing orange hot in the night air. At first Stanton wondered if they were his own flyers, but that couldn’t be. There had only been a few hundred of them, hours before and in another part of town. He caught one and pulled it down, black with soot and fringed with bright sparkle, but the smoky letters were still legible. It was a message from the Social Democrats. They’d guessed the way the rumour mill was working and had moved fast to declare their outrage and their loyalty to the Crown.
Fellow Berliners!
The leaflet read.
The murder of our beloved Prince is a crime against all Germans! We of the Social Democratic Party stand united with the nation in our condemnation of this heinous crime!
Long live Kaiser Wilhelm the Third!
That final declaration of loyalty to the Kaiser’s eldest son must have been hard for those sober-faced liberal parliamentarians to write. Young Willy was universally acknowledged to be a wastrel, a dilettante and a hopeless womanizer, his luxurious lifestyle being a particular irritation for those who, like the authors of the leaflet, yearned for social equality. Despite that, however, the SPD were anxious to tell the world that they stood behind the new Emperor. They must be pretty scared.
But the students on the street weren’t interested. They didn’t want to listen to mealy-mouthed Socialists offering weasel words of loyalty while in fear of their lives. They wanted vengeance and they weren’t minded to let any little matter of their targets being innocent deprive them of it. So they burned the leaflets and surged onwards.
