wellbeing.
He went to the bar. A young man in an ill-fitting jacket was serving a customer with a few precious strands of greasy hair combed neatly across his scalp. Gaddis bought a cup of white-hot coffee and a sticky pastry filled with glutinous yellow custard. It would do his gut no good, but he was still hungry and felt that the caffeine might sharpen his wits. He sat on a stool beneath the logo of a ‘No Smoking’ sign, chewing on the pastry and slowly sipping his coffee. Everything about the train was clean and smooth but debilitatingly slow. It felt as though they were travelling at walking pace, stopping every half-mile; even the air-conditioning was sluggish. When he had finished eating, Gaddis walked back to his table, passing through carriages where the seating was divided into compartments accessed by sliding doors. The curtains were closed on certain booths; others were occupied by weary businessmen and old-age pensioners who, lacking something better to do, stared at Gaddis as he walked by.
He returned to his seat. The crew-cut Hungarian was slumped asleep against the window, his girlfriend checking her make-up in a compact. She looked up at him, then slid her gaze back to the smudged mirror. Across the aisle, the teenage girl was still listening to her MP3 player and Gaddis thought that he could hear the melody of a Beatles song coming through the headphones. The businessman beside her had now woken up, wiped his chin, and was busily inputting data into a laptop. Gaddis sat down and returned the smile of a woman whom he had not noticed before; a red-haired executive in a black pin-striped jacket who must have boarded at the last station. There was nothing to occupy him. He grew bored and wanted something to read. It would be interesting to see what books Eva had found for him.
Gaddis stood up. He was about to reach for the bag when the train came to a sudden halt. He would have thought nothing of it, but from his standing position in the carriage he could see through a window towards the front of the train. It had stopped at a level crossing. Two police cars were parked on a deserted country road, blue lights revolving noiselessly. Gaddis felt a caving sense of dread as the mute sirens pulsed against the late-morning sky; he had a sure sense that the train had been stopped by the Hungarian police, in co-operation with their Austrian colleagues, as part of a co-ordinated search for the murderer of Robert Wilkinson.
He sat down without a book. This in itself seemed a reckless act. Why stand, only to sit down again without unzipping his bag? He felt a dozen eyes upon him, as if his guilt was as plain to his fellow passengers as some mark on his body. He was being blamed for what was happening, for the delay to the journey. The tattooed man, his girlfriend, the teenager with the MP3, the red-haired executive with the smile and the pin-stripe suit — all of them knew that he was on the run from Vienna.
Then the engine of the train shut off, like a definitive signal of the hopelessness of his predicament. There was a moan of frustration throughout the carriage as the suspension shuddered and then fell silent, all power stripped from the train. There were shared looks of annoyance from the seats around him; Gaddis tried to join in by frowning and shaking his head. I’m one of you, he was saying. None of this has anything to do with the Kleines Cafe. The red-haired executive caught his eye and he produced what he hoped was a look of friendly camaraderie; instead, she frowned, as if Gaddis had in some way offended her. She looked past him at the far end of the carriage. Somebody was coming through the door.
Gaddis turned. There were two uniformed policemen ten metres from his seat. Was it his imagination, or did the taller of them immediately double-take, as if he had recognized him? Gaddis looked across the aisle at the teenage girl, who was bobbing her head to ‘Eleanor Rigby’. He felt a rush of panic involuntarily turn his face scarlet. He began to imagine a scenario whereby he would be arrested not by the police, but by the executive, who was again staring at him, and whom he was now certain was a plain-clothes Austrian law enforcement official positioned close by in order to facilitate his capture.
Calm down, he told himself. Take it easy. The train could have stopped for any number of reasons. There could be illegal immigrants on board, a smuggler taking drugs or cigarettes into Budapest. Behind him, Gaddis could hear the policemen working their way through the carriage, as slow as the ticket inspector, as thorough and as sinister as jackbooted thugs in the Waffen SS.
‘Tickets please.’
The taller of the two policemen, the one who appeared to have recognized him at the door, was standing above the table. Gaddis fumbled in his jacket for the ticket Eva had handed to him at Hegyeshalom. He could not remember any of the advice that she had given him. Why had she not joined him on the train? Had he been set up? Why had Tanya not arranged for a second MI6 agent to accompany him to Budapest?
‘Thank you,’ said the policeman, as Gaddis passed him the ticket. He made a deliberate point of looking the policeman in the eye, trying to seem bored, trying to seem indifferent. For a wild moment, he was convinced that he was the same man who had tailed his cab from the UN.
‘You are English?’
Gaddis had not spoken. How had the policemen managed to establish his nationality? The game was up. They knew who he was, where he was from, what he was doing. For a split second he considered responding to the question in Russian, but if the police had seen his face on CCTV at the Kleines Cafe, any attempt at subterfuge would simply convince them of his guilt.
‘Yes. From London. How did you know?’
Though he had asked his question in English, the policeman did not appear to understand the reply. Gaddis looked behind him, at the second officer, who was busily checking tickets on the opposite side of the carriage. This, in itself, gave him a glimmer of hope: why would they carry on with their search if they knew that they had found Wilkinson’s companion? The girl with the pink-and-yellow headphones was reaching into the pocket of her jeans; she had not even bothered to take off the headphones. Gaddis was staggered by her sense of calm. But what was she looking for? A ticket or an identity card? If the police asked Gaddis to produce a passport, he was finished. Across the table, the crew-cut Hungarian had woken up. One of the tattoos on his arm was a caricature of Elvis.
‘So you are going to Budapest?’
‘Just for the night, yes.’ Gaddis remembered what Eva had told him. You are coming back tomorrow. A one- way journey always looks more suspicious. He cursed her for not providing him with a passport, a driving licence, some kind of photo ID with which to bluff his way through. What kind of tourist crossed an international border without a passport? What kind of intelligence agency left a man to fend for himself on a train crawling with cops?
‘Enjoy yourself,’ said the policeman.
Gaddis wasn’t sure that he had heard correctly. Was he imagining it? But the officer had turned his attention to the Hungarian and his girlfriend, both of whom flashed tickets at him with complete indifference to his authority. Perhaps these kind of searches were commonplace. Just then, a radio crackled on the jacket of the second officer. He responded instantly to the message, walking directly out of the carriage and down on to the track.
‘What happened?’ Gaddis asked.
‘They find him,’ said the Hungarian.
Both men stood in their seats and craned to look at the police cars parked at the level crossing. Through the cluster of passengers trying to see the same thing, Gaddis made out a young man who was being bundled into the back seat of the furthest car. A policewoman pushed his head downwards with the flat of her hand, and there were handcuffs on his wrists, secured behind his back.
‘Any idea what that was?’ Gaddis asked.
The Hungarian shook his head. ‘No. I do not,’ he said, and leaned over to kiss his girlfriend.
Chapter 47
An hour later, the train was pulling through the ghost town suburbs of Budapest, past abandoned freight cars on sidings, clusters of wild poppies and weeds. Gaddis saw the entrance to Keleti station opening up ahead in a delta of gleaming tracks. It felt like a cause for celebration. It was now surely just a question of meeting Eva’s contact and of being driven out to the airport.
He stepped down on to the platform and was immediately surrounded by a gaggle of local men and women offering him a room for the night, a taxi into town, a meal at a local restaurant.
