The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [122]
Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was in Sarajevo to observe military maneuvers and to open a new state museum. He arrived at the train station in the morning, and he and his entourage were driven to the first stop in six automobiles. Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were in the third vehicle, a convertible, and he instructed the drivers to proceed at a leisurely pace so that he could take in the local sights of beautiful downtown Sarajevo as the procession wended its way down the historic boulevard Appel Quay. There, the conspiracy ringleader Danilo Ilic had arranged his six assassins at strategic locations, arming them at the last moment.
As the motorcade entered the kill zone, the first two assassins, Muhamed Mehmedbasic, armed with a hand grenade, and Vaso Cubrilovic, equipped with a pistol and hand grenade, failed to act, either out of fear or an inability to get a clean line on the targets. Next in line was Nedeljko Cabrinovic, who hurled his hand grenade directly at the target third vehicle. It bounced off the rolled-down roof behind Franz Ferdinand and Sophie, skirted across the back of the car, and landed under the following vehicle where it then detonated, wounding the passengers and a number of police and bystanders in the crowd.
In a panic, Cabrinovic swallowed the cyanide pill given to him in the event of capture, and jumped into the nearby Miljacka River. But the river was too shallow at that time of year for drowning, and the cyanide resulted only in violent vomiting, so Cabrinovic was captured, beaten by the crowd, and hauled off to the police station. The vehicles sped off to safety while the other three assassins—Cvjetko Popovic, Trifun Grabez, and Gavrilo Princip—slunk away in defeat, the assassination conspiracy foiled by incompetence and bad luck.
Even the best-planned conspiracies hardly ever go according to plan, and this one was not yet over. Remarkably, Franz Ferdinand decided to complete his appointed rounds, and so continued on to the town hall reception for him, where he upbraided Sarajevo’s elected leader: “Mr. Mayor, I came here on a visit and I get bombs thrown at me. It is outrageous.” The archduke then delivered his speech, read from blood-soaked sheets of paper that were retrieved from car number four, acknowledging what he thought he saw in the faces of his audience, “an expression of their joy at the failure of the attempt at assassination.” He spoke too soon, as conspiracies often turn on the quirkiest of events. In this case, Franz Ferdinand decided to visit the hospital where his wounded comrades from car four were being treated. Sophie canceled her plans and thought it best to join her husband.
Meanwhile, dejected by the failed conspiracy, Gavrilo Princip meandered over to a delicatessen on the corner of Appel Quay and Franz Joseph Street for a sandwich and private consolation. Finishing his meal, he emerged from Schiller’s café and lo and behold what appeared before his startled eyes was the convertible vehicle making its way from the town hall to the hospital back along Appel Quay, with Franz Ferdinand and Sophie sticking out of the back like sitting ducks. Princip instantly saw this as his glorious moment of good fortune and took it, moving to the right of the car and firing his pistol, hitting the archduke in the jugular vein of the neck and hitting Sophie in the torso. Both bled out and died shortly after.
This is how conspiracies really work—as messy events that unfold according to real-time contingencies. They often turn on the minutiae of chance and the reality of human error. Our propensity to think otherwise—to believe that conspiracies are well-oiled machines of Machiavellian manipulations—is to fall into the trap of conspiratorial patternicity and agenticity, where the patterns are too well delineated and the agents superhuman in knowledge and power.
PART IV
BELIEF IN THINGS SEEN
When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical,