Malcolm Bradbury - Doctor Criminale

‘What are you doing here, Lavinia?’ I asked. ‘Hallo, darling, I just came back to see if you were all right,’ said Lavinia, ‘I’m in the club, if you see what I mean.’ ‘You’re sitting in club class, are you, Lavinia?’ I asked, ‘Why?’ ‘Well, I am the executive producer,’ said Lavinia, ‘But I could only afford it for one, this show is on a very tight budget. Would you like me to get them to send you back a bottle of champagne?’ ‘No, Lavinia, I meant, where are you going?’ I asked, as if I didn’t know. ‘Vienna, darling,’ said Lavinia, ‘Home of the waltz and the Sachertorte, those wonderful creamy cakes, have you ever tried them? I just couldn’t resist. Well, I’d better get back up front for the liqueurs.’ ‘So I’ll see you in Vienna?’ I asked. ‘Yes, you will, darling,’ said Lavinia, ‘We’ll have an absolutely brilliant time there, hunting for that old bugger Criminale.’

From the very moment we landed (three hours late, of course) on that sharp cold noontide in Novem­ber, Vienna seemed to smell of hot roasting coffee and crisp new gingerbread – the haunting flavours of childhood and Christmas, which by now was not so very far away. Vienna’s airport is modern and international, spacious and pleasant, and yet the moment you walk into it from the bus that brings you in from the plane a strangely Austrian sense of tradition, the scent of a certain long-lived, leather-jacketed kind of history, immediately seems to prevail. Despite what is sometimes said, no one should really accuse the Austrians of neglecting their great men, especially the ones who are firmly and safely dead. And certainly no one can complain that they were ignoring the one they had carted out of the city, coated in lime, and buried deep in an unmarked pauper’s grave just one year short of two centuries earlier.

The fact was that we had arrived in Vienna on the very brink of one of those great end-of-century anniversaries that Austria and indeed the world as a whole had no intention of overlooking. The sign, the symbol, the signifier of little Wolfgang Amadeus was everywhere. His natty little portrait, perky and periwigged, hung all over Immigration. The fine bright notes of ‘La ci darem la mano’ soared out of the loud­speakers as, carrying off our carry-on luggage, Lavinia and I marched side by side through the corridors of expensive shops toward the central concourse. Here you could find a Mozart delicatessen where you could buy sticky Mozartkugeln (‘the sweet heritage of Amadeus’), rich Mozarttorte, Queen of the Night olive oil, Mozart mayonnaise. You could stock up on Seraglio perfume at the nearby boutique; there was a chocolate bust of the man melting beside the Don Giovanni cocktail bar. Even though there were still a couple of months to go to the full celebrations, it was already quite safe to say that, when 1991 dawned on us, in Vienna the Mozart bicentennial would not pass entirely unnoticed.

Nor could you accuse the Viennese of neglecting the many, many tourists who, despite the uneasy mood of the times, the fear of terrorism, the growing threat of war in the Gulf and disorder in the Soviet Union, still poured in massive numbers to the city of Amadeus, and Johann, and Ludwig, and Franz. Downstairs in the baggage claim, where a jumbo-load of Japanese tourists were noisily hunting for the cases that, in a properly organized world, should have come with them on their flight from Tokyo, Lavinia and I discovered the perfect economic Euro-toy: a fine electronic machine with flashing buttons that, at a press, gladly turned any form of currency into any other, in a hi-tech, silicon-chip version of the good old game of rates of exchange. ‘Look, Lavinia, a money machine,’ I said, stopping. ‘Not for you, darling, now come away,’ said Lavinia. ‘All you have to do is empty all the notes out of your wallet and put them in here,’ I said, ‘Then it turns them all into something else. Pounds to schillings, dollars to zlotys, Japanese yen to Slakan vloskan.’

I’d already got my own wallet out when Lavinia took me by the hand, to the strains of ‘La ci darem la mano’, and took me outside into the chilly Viennese air. ‘All right, Francis,’ she said, ‘Let’s get this straight. This show is on a very tight budget. I’m in charge. Money’s not a game. Or if it is, I’m the one who’s playing it. Stay away from banks, leave money machines alone, \ forget about rates of exchange. That’s for the big people, I’ll see to all that. Just stick to simple art and ideas, that’s what you’re here for. Every time you want anything, ask me first. Keep all your receipts, write down your expenditure in a little book. Now where’s the bus?’ ‘With two of us it’s probably just as cheap to take a taxi,’ I said. ‘No, Francis, this is your first lesson in television economics,’ said Lavinia, ‘If I was alone I’d go in a taxi. With you I go on the bus.’

But I’d already learned one thing from the money machine: Vienna was evidently a place where one thing quickly turned into something quite different. As we rode the airport bus down the autobahn toward the centre, a great black cloud from the not-so-distant Alps suddenly swept across the clear blue skies ahead of us, and deposited over the city of dreams and deceptions a light crystalline surface of glittering snow. To one side of the road, four seedy gasometers had been transformed, by some gesture of architectural magic, into four great monuments of art nouveau. As we moved along the city boulevards, fresh flights of architectural theatre stood every­where. Grim Gothic sat side by side with sprightly Jugendstil, white and gold baroque looked benignly across the street at pink postmodernism. Gaiety confronted virtue. Over the apartment blocks, if you looked in one direction, you could see the red Ferris wheel of the Prater, suspended still for the winter’s duration; if you looked in another you could see the spires and jagged zigzag roof of the great Stephansdom. It was towards the Stephansdom we headed when the airport bus deposited us somewhere just short of the Ringstrasse, the wide boulevard that marks the edges of the central city; we crossed it with our luggage and headed towards comforts and warmth.

It was strange how the city of waltzes and Sachertorte had a look oddly like Chicago in the 1920s; almost everyone you passed on the street was carrying a violin case. Musicians toiled everywhere. Hurdy-gurdy men with monkeys stood in doorways; down pedestrianized sidestreets entire string quartets stood busking in evening dress, gaily playing the works of Ludwig and Franz and Johann Sebastian and Gustav, not to mention, of course, Wolfgang Amadeus. Jangling horsedrawn landaus passed us by; each one contained very round Japanese faces hidden by very rectangular Japanese cameras. Behind them in the street they deposited a rich smell of equine dung that added yet another scented chord to the aromatic feast that was winter Vienna. From the tempting windows of the coffee houses and delicatessens came the bitter odour of coffee, the sweet smell of baking torte. Inside, earing cakes made of cream, drinking coffee with cream, were the crème de la crème of the Viennese bourgeoisie.

‘Ah, Demel’s,’ said Lavinia, stopping outside one fine-looking cakeshop, ‘This is where you really see the crème de la crème of the crème de la crème. Let’s go in.’ ‘Why not, Lavinia,’ I said. ‘Brilliant,’ she said a few moments later, mouth full of cake, waving her fat hand at the human display, ‘I always loved Vienna. Thank God for bloody old Bazlo.’ I stared at her wiping the crumbs from her mouth, and tried her with a question that had been troubling my mind from the moment I had seen her walking towards me down the plane. ‘Tell me, Lavinia,’ I asked nonchalantly, ‘Where are you actually staying?’ ‘Scuse me,’ said Lavinia, wiping her mouth, ‘Staying? Oh, I’m at the Hotel de France on the Schottenring. It’s very famous, actually.’ I felt in my pocket, and inconspicuously checked the contents of the travel wallet she had handed me at Ros’s small house the night before. ‘Ah, I see I’m somewhere else. The Hotel Von Trapp.’ ‘Yes, I think that’s somewhere way out in the suburbs, out past the Belevedere Palace,’ said Lavinia, ‘Vienna’s bloody full at the moment. It’s the music season, you see.’ ‘Yes, of course,’ I said, deeply relieved.