The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [120]
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 café 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.’
Gaddis grinned, admiring her conceit. She was paying homage to the most famous Viennese film of them all. She was telling Gaddis to go to the Ferris Wheel.
Chapter 45
But why Dizzy Mouse?
Gaddis rode the U1 subway, clean and plastic, north-east to Praterstern station. The last half of Tanya’s message made no sense to him. He tried blending the words and re-working them as an anagram, attempted to think of nicknames or word associations with ‘Dizzy’ and ‘Mouse’, but nothing materialized. He could only conclude that it was a phrase or codeword he would have at some point later in the morning.
It was quarter to six by the time the train pulled into the platform. Gaddis took an escalator up into a low-roofed indoor shopping mall, deserted in the air-conditioned chill of a Sunday morning. He passed a shuttered newsagent, a café serving a single customer, his every move tracked by banks of surveillance cameras. Walking outside through a set of automatic doors, he emerged into a wide pedestrianized square. Three hundred metres to the north-east was the Ferris Wheel, her red booths stilled above a line of chestnut trees, ancient radiating spokes almost invisible against the pale morning sky. He quickened his pace and crossed a main road which ran alongside the square, joining a path towards the Wheel. To his right was a broad, well-maintained park, dotted with picnic tables; to his left, a Shell garage surrounded by parked cars. A group of migrants were crouched at the base of a tree and they stared at Gaddis as he walked by. He passed a line of ice-cream booths and was soon walking beneath a low bridge which led into a deserted square lined with mock-Regency buildings. This was plainly the entrance of the amusement park, a mini-Disneyland overlooked by distant rollercoasters, death slides and dodgem circuits. Gaddis had only a few vagrants and cleaners for company as he walked towards the base of the Ferris Wheel, wondering if he had even come to the right place.
He saw immediately that he had, because no more than thirty metres away was a cut-out of a huge cartoon cat with bared teeth beneath a pair of gleaming yellow eyes. A child-size rollercoaster track was disappearing into its open mouth. Above the cat was a technicolor sign: ‘DIZZY MOUSE’.
‘Sam?’
Gaddis turned quickly to find a stocky, matronly woman in blue jeans and a cream sweater emerging from the shadows beneath the Ferris Wheel. Her hair was dyed black, her face pale and round. She extended a gloved hand which he shook, coming to terms with his surprise.
‘I’m Sam, yes.’ He was amazed that Tanya had worked so quickly, amazed that anybody should have found him in such a place.
‘I was sent by your friend. You knew her as Josephine Warner. This is something that she told me she regrets. Her real name is Tanya Acocella. Does that reassure you about my identity?’
‘Yes it does, yes it does.’ Gaddis looked up at the Wheel, half-expecting to see a crowd of smiling onlookers observing their conversation.
‘My name is Eva.’
‘Sam,’ Gaddis replied, pointlessly. He acknowledged his mistake with a smile. ‘Are you with the Embassy?’
She ignored the question. ‘I understand that I am to take