The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [118]
‘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 güt,’ 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