Chapter 39
Gaddis’s train pulled into Vienna’s Westbahnhof a little after eight o’clock on the evening of Friday twenty- fourth, so it was nine by the time he had checked into the Goldene Spinne Hotel on Linke Bahngasse, a two-star in the centre of the city manned by a jovial receptionist in late middle age who appeared to be the only member of staff on the premises. Gaddis registered under his own name and was obliged to hand over his passport, but it was with a sense of relief that he saw the manager making a record of his personal details by hand, rather than storing them on a computer.
He had chosen the hotel because it was functional, cheap and anonymous. His spartan room on the top floor resembled a daytime cabin on a cross-Channel ferry: crisp white sheets were pulled taut across a narrow, hard- mattressed bed; there was a small tiled bathroom with a sink and shower; a kettle with sachets of tea and instant coffee; a view of a cobwebbed airshaft.
He was travelling light, but had a linen suit rolled up in his overnight bag and a pair of leather shoes for the wedding. He took out the suit, requested an iron from reception, then hung it on a coat-hanger behind the door. He showered and shaved, a blessed release after the cramp and sweat of his long journey, changed into a fresh cotton shirt and found a restaurant two blocks away where he wolfed a pepperoni pizza and half a carafe of red wine. It had gone eleven by the time he had paid the bill and set out for the Radisson.
Gaddis knew how overseas weddings worked. The guests usually knocked off work in the UK at around lunchtime on Friday, caught a budget flight to the host country in the late afternoon, inevitably bumped into some of their old school and university friends at one of the restaurants recommended by the happy couple in the literature posted out with the wedding invitation, sampled a couple of local dives, then headed back to their hotel to drink into the small hours at the residents’ bar. As Gaddis walked through the automatic doors of the Radisson, beneath the EU flags and the wrought-iron lampposts on Schubertring, he could hear the confident bellows of British laughter emanating from a room adjacent to the lobby. Somebody was shouting out: ‘Gus! Gus! Do you want ice with that?’ and there was a piano tinkling in the distance.
The bar was smaller than Gaddis had expected. He counted perhaps twenty guests seated at half a dozen wooden tables dotted around the room and a further twenty standing in the spaces between them, armed with schooners of lager, glasses of wine and tumblers of Scotch and brandy. There were photographs on the walls of famous guests who had stayed at the hotel: Gaddis picked out signed shots of Bonnie Tyler, Silvio Berlusconi and the African-American actor from Miami Vice who was either Crockett or Tubbs; he could never remember. At the bar, a thirtysomething Brit wielding his room key in lieu of payment recognized Gaddis as a fellow traveller and struck up conversation.
‘You one of us?’ he said. ‘The wedding?’
‘I’m one of you,’ Gaddis replied. ‘Just checked in.’
‘Phil,’ said the Brit, proffering a damp, though iron-strong handshake. ‘Friend of Catherine’s?’
‘Of Matthias. Have you seen him around tonight?’
It was the one major flaw in his strategy; if either Catherine or Matthias showed up, Gaddis would have to head back to the Goldene Spinne and find another way of gaining access to the wedding. Thankfully, Phil put his mind at ease.
‘Nah. Big family dinner over at the Sacher. Doubt we’ll see him. His lot are all staying over there.’
‘Catherine’s family as well?’ He was trying to ascertain whether or not there was a chance of bumping into Wilkinson.
‘Far as I know. What are you drinking, mate?’
Moments later, Gaddis had an eighteen-euro balloon of cognac in his hand and was being led to a table near the door which was occupied by Phil’s wife, Annie, his ‘oldest mate’, Dan, two women on a narrow, upholstered sofa whose names he didn’t quite catch, and a pink furry elephant with its trunk lodged inside a table lamp.
‘The wife won it at the Prater!’ Phil exclaimed. ‘Know it? Massive amusement park.’
Gaddis knew the Prater. ‘Congratulations,’ he said, smiling. Annie looked as though she had escaped from three small children for the first time in five years; there was a disconnectedness about her and shadows of sleepless nights around her eyes. ‘Coconut shy?’ he asked her. ‘Tombola?’
‘Shooting.’ She shouldered an imaginary gun, aimed it at Phil, and Gaddis knew that he had lucked on the right crowd; this lot were pissed and easygoing. They would tell him where the wedding was being held, what time the service began, probably how many sugars Catherine Wilkinson took in her tea.
‘Sam’s an old friend of Matthias,’ Phil announced, placing a hand on the small of Gaddis’s back and gesturing him into a non-existent space beside the two women.
‘You are?’ said one of them, budging along the sofa. ‘Tell us more. What’s he like? None of us has ever met him.’
‘I’ve met him,’ said Annie quietly. ‘He’s lovely.’
Thanks to the magic of Google, Gaddis had done his research on Matthias Drechsel. Catherine’s fiance was thirty-six, worked in shipping (specifically ‘the chartering of gas carriers’) and, according to his online company profile, had taken a graduate diploma in business administration from the International University in Vienna.
‘To be honest, I haven’t seen him for years,’ he began. ‘I was quite surprised to be invited.’
‘How do you know him?’ Dan asked. It didn’t look as though he was particularly interested in the answer.
Gaddis embarked on the lie. ‘I taught very briefly at the International University here. Matthias was a student of mine before he switched to business administration.’
‘Conscientious was he?’ asked the second woman. She was flushed with alcohol and wearing a scarlet skirt which had risen up above the knee.
‘Extremely,’ Gaddis told her, grinning.
After that, it was plain sailing. He laughed at Phil’s jokes, told a couple of his own, asked interested questions about Catherine’s past and bought several rounds of drinks. By one o’clock, he was firm friends with all of them, not least the lady in the scarlet skirt who had taken what his late mother would have described as ‘a bit of a fancy’ to him.
‘I hope we’re sitting next to each other tomorrow,’ she said, just as Gaddis was trying to bring an end to the conversation they were having about her brother’s ‘nightmare’ girlfriend. ‘You’re really lovely to talk to. You really know how to listen, Sam.’
‘Kath!’ Annie exclaimed. ‘You have to forgive her, Sam. She doesn’t know how to behave herself when she gets a few drinks inside her.’
‘I don’t even know where the reception is,’ Gaddis replied, seizing an opportunity to discover the last piece of information he needed before heading back to his hotel. ‘I left all my bumph back in London.’
‘Next door,’ said Phil, who was in the habit of overhearing other people’s conversations. He pointed behind him, in the vague direction of Schubertring. ‘Big building across the street. “Kursalon” or something. In the Stadtpark.’
‘And the service is at, what, two o’clock?’
‘Three, mate. Three.’
Chapter 40
Sure enough, at around half-past two the following afternoon, wedding guests began drifting into the Stadtpark in all their finery. Gaddis had been seated at a bench beneath a gold-plated statue of Johann Strauss, reading a copy of the Herald Tribune and smoking a succession of Winston Light cigarettes. He was wearing his linen suit and carrying a notebook and pen in the inside pocket of his jacket. He had spent the morning wandering around Vienna, dutifully eating Sacher Torte at Cafe Pruckel and confirming to himself a long-held suspicion that the city, though undoubtedly beautiful, was as lifeless and as irredeemably bourgeois as a Swiss museum.
It was a bride’s idea of a perfect wedding day. Sunshine poured through the windows of the Kursalon, a neo-
