The Lure

4 Bratislava

Vienna!

Petrie had seen Vienna on TV. Some documentary about Mozart. Vienna was all crinoline-dressed ladies dancing with tailors’ dummies, and prancing horses and elegant cafés.

But Freud and Turing are dead and the Vienna Circle is history and the real talent left for the States after the war. There’s nobody in Vienna.

The mystery consumed Petrie all the way over the Irish Sea. Why Vienna? The place is a desert!

In Terminal Four at Heathrow, he was astonished to hear his name being called over the tannoy: ‘Would Dr Petrie, on the British Airways flight from Dublin, please come to the information desk?’

At the desk a small fat woman in traditional Indian sari said, ‘We’ve been asked to give you this.’ The envelope she handed him was addressed to: Dr Thomas Petrie, 158 Rock Walk, Dublin.

‘Who sent this?’

‘The caller left no name, sir. She delivered it about ten minutes ago.’

‘She?’

‘It was a female, very English.’ The woman was trying not to give Petrie a knowing smile; she was seeing secret assignations, lovers snatching time in exotic places.

‘Okay, thank you.’

Petrie opened the envelope. It was empty. At a departures screen he checked his Vienna flight. He had a couple of hours. Back to the information desk. The sari lady directed him out of the airport, along a road near the bus stances and into a small, plain building: the airport chapel.

Petrie didn’t live in Rock Walk. He’d never heard of a Rock Walk in Dublin. For all he knew, Rock Walk was the name of a pop group. But more likely the Rock was pietro, petra, Peter.

Down spiral stairs. A man in a long green gown was standing at a table covered with a white linen tablecloth and candles, engaged in some ceremony which had no meaning for Petrie. A handful of people stood around the pews. Petrie was in luck: there was a lectern at the back of the chapel, and on it was a large Bible. He turned the pages to the First Epistle General of Saint Peter, chapter five, verse eight.

Some sort of warning. Petrie felt a slight tingling in his spine, like a mild electric current.

He made his way to the departure lounge and sat with his back to a wall, surveying his fellow passengers with deep suspicion, at the same time feeling vaguely ridiculous. None of them showed the least awareness of his presence.

Beware of strange women. Petrie looked for unattached females. Maybe the blonde girl, in her early twenties, with the golden Scandinavian hair and long skirt and boots. Petrie knew the type: Miss Lonely Planet, uncommitted and free as the wind, doing Europe and beyond on a shoestring. But she was too conspicuous, apparently attracting the attention of half the males in the lounge. Maybe the mousy little creature sipping from a paper cup and reading a paperback. She was so inconspicuous that she had to be a candidate. Or maybe it was the plump Hausfrau with the heavy-framed spectacles, the sandwich and the Cosmopolitan opened on her knee. She caught Petrie’s eye and smiled; Petrie looked away in alarm.

It was cloud all the way until, over Germany, he glimpsed forested hills, covered with white.

Through the Customs at Vienna airport, not knowing what to expect. In the public area a lean, thin-faced man was holding up a white card with Herr Craig printed on it in red crayon. Petrie followed him to a silver top-of-the-range BMW with an Austrian registration. There was no conversation. The man took him along a motorway lined with high-rise flats and sprawling pharmaceutical factories, and on to a quiet, straight road leading away from town. The car was silent, its suspension smooth, and Petrie’s imagination was becoming steadily wilder.

In an hour another city appeared on the skyline. There was a border. The policeman at the Kontrolla scarcely glanced at Petrie’s passport. A long bridge took them over the Dunaj, which Petrie took to be the Danube. A sign said Bratislava. He looked out on tall grey buildings, buses and trams, cobbled roads, churches with an Eastern look. Not Vienna, then, he thought. Bratislava.

The driver stopped in front of a large grey-fronted hotel and opened Petrie’s door without a word. By the time Petrie had reached the foyer, driver and BMW had gone.

Sir was expected.

His room was plain, wooden-floored with an embroidered rug. He tossed his holdall on a chair and left. On the first floor he navigated a crowded bar, its air thick with Turkish cigarette smoke, and reached a restauracia. It was pure Belle Époque, with oil paintings of Old Bratislava lining its walls and clusters of lights hanging like chrome and glass snowdrops from its high curved ceiling. Wooden partitions separated the tables, ensuring privacy for husband and wife, husband and mistress, businessmen making deals in the post-Communist market. Behind the nearest one, he heard snatches of conversation between a man and woman, in an unfamiliar tongue. The clatter of trams came through the window, and dark shapes like Lowry figures were crossing a slushy cobbled square. Wisps of the heavy tobacco smoke were drifting through from the bar.

By now Petrie was strung up like a cat. He felt somehow surreal, as if he was inside a dream; if a crocodile had slithered into the room it would hardly have seemed out of place.

A little waiter appeared. He had a dinner suit, bow tie, moustache and passable Slavic-tinted English.

‘I’d like some fish,’ Petrie said.

‘What kind of fish?’

‘What do you have?’

A shrug. ‘Much fish.’

‘What’s local?’

‘Štika. From the Danube this morning. It has sharp teeth.’

‘I’ll have that.’

‘With cheeps?’

‘Potatoes.’

‘And to drink?’

‘A white wine.’ Petrie paused, and added: ‘A carafe.’

‘You can have zee house wine.’

‘Fine.’

A boroviçka and a coffee later, he signed a chit and made his way, bloated, back to his room. He made sure his door was locked. He lay on the narrow bed and tried to analyse the sense of unease, anxiety even, which was now washing over him.

There was the sudden transplantation from the routine to the weird, from the familiar to the alien. There was the bizarre warning: Be sober, be vigilant. Beware of what? Roaring lions? Strange women? Slithering crocodiles?

But most of all, he realised, his tension was being driven by something else, by the conundrum still defeating his restless mind: What am I getting myself into? And what happens next?

Petrie wakened with a start. The telephone, its ringing tone unfamiliar. Disoriented, it was a second before he remembered he wasn’t in his Dublin flat. He fumbled for a light switch, knocking over a tumbler. His watch said 5.30 a.m. ‘Dr Petrie? Your car is waiting.’