The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [105]
‘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 Café 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-classical pavilion on the western perimeter of the Stadtpark, and the sky was obligingly blue for the series of photographs which a moustachioed Austrian began to take as the guests filed inside for the ceremony. Gaddis remained outdoors until, at five to three, he spotted Phil and Annie coming towards him with Kath in tow, each of them wearing a pair of thick-rimmed hangover sunglasses.
‘I was waiting for you,’ he said, kissing Annie and then Kath on the cheek. ‘What time did you get to bed?’
‘Don’t ask,’ Annie mumbled.
They sat together in a row, on cushioned, hard-backed chairs at the centre of a gilt-ceilinged reception hall in the heart of the Kursalon. There were perhaps two hundred guests in attendance. Gaddis could only wonder how many of them were former colleagues of Wilkinson’s from SIS, or surveil-lance officers with orders to prevent Gaddis making contact with ATTILA’s final handler. At exactly five-past three, a string quartet struck up the opening bars of ‘Gabriel’s Oboe’ and Matthias Drechsel, a short man with a lumbering, agricultural gait, turned to acknowledge the arrival of his bride with an unexpected look of terror in his eyes. Catherine