The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [104]
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