the opposite side of the street, apparently unoccupied.
‘ Sprechen Sie Englisch?’ he said, but again the driver merely grunted and shrugged. There was an odd kind of childishness in his behaviour. Gaddis tried again. ‘ Ich bin ein club finden,’ he said, fudging the language and adding to his sense of embarrassment by miming a dance in the back seat. ‘Club? Dancing? Ist ein bar?’
‘ Hier? Nein,’ the driver muttered, tapping the wheel. Gaddis felt foolish. The radio was on and he wondered if reports of Wilkinson’s murder would soon filter through to the local news. As Tanya had said, it was possible that the police had already assembled a vague description of the middle-aged man who was seen drinking with the victim, a tourist with dark brown hair, around six feet tall and wearing a dark jacket. Gaddis would be regarded as a suspect or, at best, an accomplice. He had vanished moments after the killing and conveniently abandoned the table just as the killer was approaching. He said: ‘Bar,’ again to the driver, this time with more urgency in his voice and the vehicle pulled away from the kerb.
‘ Danke,’ Gaddis told him.
The cab turned through one hundred and eighty degrees, passing within a few metres of the police car. Suddenly, behind the rain-obscured windscreen, Gaddis saw a shadow move in the front seat. There was somebody inside the car. The headlights switched on and the police vehicle moved out into the road behind them. Gaddis felt a wretched sense of bad luck, sure in the knowledge that he would now be pulled over and questioned. How was he going to explain what he was doing at the UN at two forty-five in the morning? It was one of the most sensitive buildings in western Europe, watched round the clock by police and security. It was stupid to have told the driver to come here, sloppy thinking. Why hadn’t he just gone straight to a bar? Now a random Austrian cop, some pre- adolescent cadet twiddling his thumbs on the night shift, held it in his power to bring the entire Crane investigation to a halt.
‘You want nightclub?’ the driver asked, but Gaddis was too distracted by the police car to absorb what he had been asked.
‘What’s that?’
‘I say, you want nightclub?’
He was startled to hear broken English. ‘ Ja, ja,’ he replied, feeling that they were suddenly allies lined up against the might of the Austrian police force. The cab re-joined the two-lane highway running perpendicular to the Danube, the policeman trailing them at a distance of no more than twenty metres. ‘ Nightclub gut,’ Gaddis said. He looked through the back window, the wipers on the police vehicle slicing against the rain.
‘Problem?’ the driver asked.
Gaddis turned back to face him. ‘No, no problem. Kein Problem.’
Now the cop was alongside them, running parallel with the taxi. Gaddis could hear the fizz of tyres on the wet road. The driver’s face was obscured in the darkness, yet Gaddis was sure that he saw him turn briefly and look across into the cab. It was surely only a matter of time before a siren was switched on and the taxi gestured on to the hard shoulder.
But, to Gaddis’s intense relief, the police car suddenly pulled off into the distance, accelerating to top speed in the darkness. Within moments his own driver had made a turn back on to the bridge and the cab was soon depositing him outside a nightclub in the centre of Vienna. Gaddis had no idea what district he was in, nor what sort of club he had been taken to, but paid the driver forty euros nonetheless and thanked him for his trouble.
It turned out to be the perfect place to lie low. For the next two hours, he was able to sit at an anonymous corner table in a dimly lit basement bar which thudded with the sort of music he heard all the time at UCL and which he could never successfully identify. A waitress kept up a constant supply of nuts and Polish beer and he smoked with impunity because the ban was being flouted seemingly by every customer in the place. There were pretty girls on the dance floor and clean-cut men wearing chinos and ironed blue shirts trying their best to seduce them. They looked like the future CEOs of Saatchis and the World Bank. At one point, Gaddis was sure that he spotted two of the guests from the wedding, but they did not appear to recognize him and left soon after four o’clock.
Just after four-thirty, as the last of the customers were being thrown out, Gaddis attached himself to a group of students stumbling drunk into the morning. At the top of the stairs, he turned away from them and decided to walk for a few blocks in search of a secluded spot where he could wait until five. The rain had stopped and he began to look around for a cash machine, only to realize that any transaction he made would instantly give away his position to any interested party with a track on his credit cards. Some of the paranoia and anxiousness he had felt before entering the club now began to return. The sun had come up, bringing a low blue light to deserted streets still damp from the early-morning rain. Three times Gaddis looked at his watch, only to find the time creeping towards five o’clock with a maddening slowness. He felt that his body language, his entire demeanour as he walked, was a living clue to his guilt. Any passer-by would surely notice this strange foreigner, walking the streets to no discernible purpose, turning around too frequently, looking nervously down every alleyway and street. Gaddis was conscious of moving his hands incessantly in and out of his pockets, of touching his face and hair. He was finding it impossible to relax.
Eventually, pulling out the last of his cigarettes, he turned into a straggly park populated by dogs and restless pigeons and settled on a bench to smoke. He would get through the cigarette, then switch on the phone, waiting for Tanya’s instructions. He had no passport, no change of clothes, no means of contacting his friends or colleagues, other than by using a mobile phone which, when switched on, would give away his position like a fire lit suddenly in the darkness of a valley. The isolation was total.
He stubbed out the cigarette. The park was overlooked by a concrete flak tower smothered in incomprehensible graffiti. A relic of the Second World War. Gaddis took out the phone and switched it on. The simple act of pressing the power button felt like an admission of defeat, as if he was deliberately surrendering to the inevitability of his own capture. He listened to the innocent pings and melodies of the phone as it booted up and felt sure that, within moments, an army of jackbooted militia would come tearing down the street to arrest him. He stared at the phone’s tiny screen. He was at the mercy of a piece of technology smaller than his own hand. The system appeared to have locked on to a signal, with five full bars of reception. But nothing was happening. No text from Tanya. No missed call. Nothing.
A minute passed, two. Gaddis looked at his watch repeatedly. It was already almost five past five. How long could he afford to keep the phone switched on? He wondered if he had misunderstood Tanya’s instructions and booted up either an hour too early or an hour too late. Had she meant five o’clock Austrian time, or five o’clock in London? Across the park, a woman was stretching her back beside a set of children’s swings. Two hundred metres to her left, half-obscured by a screen of trees, two men appeared to be eating breakfast in the front seat of a car. Everybody now was a potential surveillance operative or paid assassin. Gaddis wondered if he would ever again be free of this constant paranoia.
The phone beeped. Gaddis plunged to it with a manic relief.
CUCKOO CLOCK.DIZZY MOUSE.
He spoke aloud to himself: ‘What?’ and looked again at the screen. It made no sense. Cuckoo clock? Dizzy mouse? What did Tanya mean? He had been expecting detailed instructions, the address of a safe house in Vienna, at the very least the timetable of trains leaving for Prague or Zurich. Not this. Not four apparently meaningless words in the small hours of the morning.
Cuckoo clock. His mind went to work. It was plainly a code. Tanya was trying to conceal her instructions from third parties who might be looking in. She could not afford to risk anybody knowing where MI6 were intending to meet him. That meant that she was speaking directly to Gaddis, using what she knew about him to create a private language which only he would understand. Dizzy Mouse. What did that mean? Was there more to come? He waited another thirty seconds for any further messages, but the mobile remained frustratingly inert. He knew that he had to switch it off and did so as he stood up off the bench, walking quickly out of the park.
Cuckoo clock. It was a reference to Switzerland. Was he supposed to head west, for the Alps? Or was the Cuckoo Clock a bar or cafe in Vienna? But Tanya wouldn’t be so literal. If such a bar existed, it would be the first place that anybody would think to wait for him.
Finally the answer came to him, as simple as taking a breath. She was referencing The Third Man. They had even talked about the film at dinner in London. Orson Welles at the Prater, delivering his famous speech to Joseph Cotten: ‘In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace — and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.’
