‘So I see,’ said Codicil, ‘What is the time, Gerstenbacker?’ Gerstenbacker looked at him blankly for a moment, and then said, ‘Oh dear, your lecture, Herr Professor. I think your students are already waiting you.’ ‘Quite, now that really is what our very young friend would call a fact. Please excuse me, sir, I have duties to perform.’ Codicil stood up, vast, and waved at the waiter. He had evidently had enough, if not too much, of me; I saw I was about to lose him. ‘One more question,’ I said, ‘Would you be willing to appear in our programme, just saying this?’ ‘Ever the sweet sweet blandishments of the media,’ said Codicil, opening his wallet wide to pay the waiter, ‘No, I am not. I am a busy man. I am a friend of ministers. I am extremely sorry, but I really have no time for your little ephemera.’ ‘Then may we stay in touch?’ I asked quickly, ‘Can we come to you for advice?’

‘If you have questions, pass them through Gerstenbacker,’ said Codicil, pulling on his topcoat, ‘I am giving you Gersten­backer.’ ‘I beg your pardon?’ I asked, not understanding. ‘My young assistant has offered to show you Vienna, since I think you do not know it very well,’ said Codicil, ‘He will give you his best assistance in any researches you like to make. However I fear you will quickly find that not everyone in this city likes questions. Also I think you will discover there is almost nothing to learn of Criminale in Vienna. His main life was always elsewhere, in other cities. But Gerstenbacker is helpful and a very good fellow. And as he told you he was in Britain once, so he knows your ways. Wiedersehen, young man.’ And Codicil patted my shoulder, shook my hand very firmly, and, the great professor, walked out through the other great professors, nodding gravely here and there. Through the window I could see him turn in the street, and stride off, briskly, largely, and I thought angrily, in the direction of the university buildings. I had not, alas, much advanced my quest for Bazlo Criminale.

So my man had gone. All I had left was young Gerstenbacker, sitting there opposite me in his natty wing collar, looking at me eagerly. Evidently he was waiting for me to say something; I did. ‘Professor Codicil certainly speaks very good English,’ I remarked to him. ‘Of course, they say he speaks the best English in the world,’ said Gerstenbacker, with the simple admiration of the perfect Germanic research assistant, ‘Now what do you like to do with yourself? I think you do not know Vienna so well?’ ‘My first visit,’ I said. ‘Excellent,’ said Gerstenbacker, ‘Then to start I will take you to see some things you ought to see, and then you can tell me those things you would like to see. By the way, the Spanish Riding School is closed, and the Belvedere is not yet open. But Vienna, you know, is many things.’ He took out a little handwritten list from his top pocket. ‘First we will start at the Hofburg, if this is all right, and then we will do some more things. I know you would like to see our gay Vienna. So now do we go?’

Seeing gay Vienna was not, I thought, going to help much in my search for Bazlo Criminale. On the other hand, there was Lavinia, engaging in naked tourism, and I could see no reason to refuse. At the same time I thought it was odd that Professor Codicil, apparently so determined to be unhelpful in most things, should have assigned his little assistant to take such good care of me. Still, as long as I had Gerstenbacker’s company, my path back towards Codicil was surely not closed completely. ‘Okay, fine,’ I said, ‘Let’s go.’ ‘Wiedersehen, meine Herren,’ said the head waiter as the two of us, young neophytes at the mysteries, went through the academic conclave in the café and out into the chilly street. Once there, Gerstenbacker pulled up his collar, turned, and began marching briskly along the Ringstrasse, through its great parade of late-nineteenth-century Habsburgian buildings: the imperial and the civic, the academic and the political, the theatrical and the musical.

As he walked on, Gerstenbacker began a kind of continuous commentary: ‘Here once were the city walls where we defended Europe against the Turk. Then our Habsburg monarchs, who ruled so much of the world, decided to make an imperial city. First do you see the university. One day you must go inside and see the hall where are displayed all our great professors.’ ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘There the Burgtheater, there the Parliament building, here the Rathaus,’ said Gerstenbacker, ‘This is Vienna.’ Outside the Rathaus, a Christmas street market was in progress. The chestnut sellers and the sausage fryers were all out; there were stalls stacked with elaborate ribboned candles, peasant woodcarving, great piles of gold and silver baubles, bags of biscuits. I stopped to witness a triumph of kitsch: a stall covered entirely in pink fabric and laden with thousands of pink toy rabbits. A fair-haired very pretty girl stood behind the counter, in a pink rabbit costume; she was teasingly running a rabbit glove puppet up and down her arm to tempt the children crowded round her to buy. ‘Isn’t that wonderful?’ I said, turning to Gerstenbacker; he had gone. Then I saw him, yards ahead, still striding briskly onward. ‘In front the Nature History Museum, then the Art Historical Museum, opposite the Heldenplatz . . .’ he was still saying, to no one in particular, as I caught him up.

Now certain memories began coming back to me. Helden-platz, the great square outside the Hofburg; wasn’t this where Adolf Hitler had addressed a cheering Austrian crowd when he dropped his troops, dressed as nuns, into the country in 1938? Well, now it was where all the tourists, mostly Japanese and American, gathered. Their great modern tour buses, equipped with central heating, toilets, kitchens, television sets, a home on wheels, stood lined up in rows. Landau drivers sat waving their whips over their horses and calling for customers. Great tour groups eddied here and there, herded by umbrella-waving female Austrian guides, evidently a formidable breed in their dirndls. ‘Hello, hello, my name is Angelika, do you like it?’ said one in English, steering a party of tired elderly Americans. (A round of applause.) ‘Yes, I think you do. Notice please my pretty dirndl, very typical, do you like it too?’ (More applause from party.) ‘Yes, you do.’

I stopped to listen. ‘Well, we make very nice tour today, the Hofburg, Schonbrunn, then the Blue Danube, very nice, ja?’ (More applause from party.) ‘I hope you know our Habsburgs, you remember the Empress Maria Theresa? Even if a woman she kept our empire great for many many years.’ (Murmurs of assent from party.) ‘Then, do you know, things went a little wrong for us. You remember the tragedy of Mayerling in 1889?’ (Murmurs of assent from party.) ‘Yes, of course you do, the young Archduke Rudolph and his pretty little Baroness Maria Vetsera, who died with him in his bed at the hunting lodge, ja?’ (Murmurs of sympathy from party.) ‘After this nothing went right for us. And yet you know those were our most brilliant times? And that is what we say about Austrians. The more things went wrong, the more we learned to be so modern and so gay!’ (Loud applause from party.)

There was a sharp tug at my sleeve. It was Gerstenbacker, and he did not look so modern and so gay. ‘Oh yes, 1889, when we learned to be so modern and so gay!’ he said, walking me off to the entrance to the Hofburg, ‘But I hope a little bit more critical and analytical than this. To be modern is not always so amusing, I think.’ He took me inside, and we went round the great complex of state rooms, the imperial fixtures, the regalia and the treasure chests. ‘The Emperor Franz Josef, he was not so modern,’ said Gerstenbacker, ‘Here in the Hofburg he refused most things: the telephone, the toilet, the electricity light. Until he died and his age too, this place was lit only by torches. I will show you the Capuchin crypt where the Habsburgs were buried. Of course first they took out their hearts and put them in another place.’