And despite all his difficulties, Nietzsche did manage to bring out a last book in that year of 1889. Called Götzendämmerung, or The Twilight of the False Gods, it was all about the age of earthquakes, apocalypse, and the coming of the modern. It was subtitled ‘How to Philosophize With a Hammer’, and this new technique in philosophy was to interest several people who came to birth in 1889. One was the child of a customs official at Braunau, up on the German-Austrian border, who attended the same school as Ludwig Wittgenstein, and then went to Vienna, hoping to become a painter. He did, though only of houses. But he joined the German army, survived the great collapse of 1918, and then reappeared, philosophical hammer at the ready, as Adolf Hitler, trying to forge the new world order exactly fifty years further on, in the year of 1939, and fifty years before the Berlin Wall came down.

So when you thought about it 1889 was quite a year, right across Europe – the time of Freud and Nietzsche, Ibsen and Zola, Max Nordau and Max Weber. In fact it was the great year of Modernismus, modern thought. And in Britain that year . . . well, in Britain that year, the British, as the British do, were coming along just a little late. The book of the year (I recalled from my research for my piece) was Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, and London’s newest opera, all fantastic dreams and celestial-sounding music, was Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Gondoliers. But a dock strike produced a famous anthem, ‘The Red Flag’, George Bernard Shaw produced his Fabian Essays, and people started talking about Decadence. That year Oscar Wilde was feted, and Emile Zola’s British publisher was sent to prison for foulness. Six years later it was all changed. Emile Zola was being feted, and Oscar Wilde was being sent to prison for foulness. But nobody, not even Gustave Eiffel, ever claimed that the modern always proceeded in straight lines.

Nonetheless, it proceeded. Twenty-five years after 1889, the famous shot was fired at the Archduke in Sarajevo, somewhere to the south of me now. The Habsburg Empire fell the whole map of Europe was reshaped, and, as Gerstenbacker had so thoughtfully explained to me, the Blue Danube became even bluer. Twenty-five years after that, the age of disaster resumed. Freud died in London, James Joyce—published the finale of modernism, Finnegans Wake, in Paris, Hitler unwrapped his philosophical hammer in Poland, world war started again. Violence went crazy, modernity exploded, Europe tore up its borders and its cities, the Holocaust came, and the Blue Danube became bluer still. Twenty-five years after that was a quieter year, though some things of importance happened. The Cold War peaked, President Kennedy had just been assassinated, Leonid Brezhnev, Harold Wilson and Lyndon B. Johnson were all appointed to various top offices, and I saw the light of day. And twenty-five years after that . . . well, we all know about twenty-five years after that. In the world as graced now by my own presence, the statues of a hundred years ago, fifty years ago, twenty-five years ago, all came tumbling down. And the Hungarian border – which I just happened to be crossing at this particular moment, guards going down the train – opened up. And so did the entire eastern landscape my train now began to cross.

Which brought me back again to Bazlo Criminale, the man I was chasing once more as my train edged slowly on towards Budapest. Where did he fit in all this, where did it put him? He belonged, I reflected, just about one age back from mine: in the trough after the Modern, but before what people now call postmodern times – rightly, I suppose, because the crises, the anxieties, the hideous outrages left by the modern age have certainly not gone away. As Gerstenbacker had reminded me, he lived through the worst, as I had not: the Age of the Holocaust and the Age of Hiroshima, the times of Stalin and Eisenhower, Krushchev and Kennedy, Castro and Mao, Andropov and Khomeini, Gorbachev and Reagan. He had seen crisis follow crisis: the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian Revolution, the Berlin Crisis and the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War and the Prague Spring, the Paris events of 1968 and the Watergate Crisis, the Afghanistan Crisis and the Iran Hostage Crisis – and now, stirring in the background, the Gulf Crisis. He had lived through thaw and freeze, repression and then hope and then more repression. He had lived in occupied cities, crossed dangerous borders, been overlooked by watchtowers and telephone bugs and unmarked cars and censors, menaced by gulags and all the dangers that had been hidden in the kinds of landscape I saw beyond the window. He had lived among theories and philosophies that had sought to territorialize the entire modern idea. He belonged to the age of forgetting, of avoiding, eliminating, blanking, burning, in a time of terror and error, of ideas imprisoned, books forbidden, thoughts silenced, people unpersoned, classes eliminated.

And, in ways I did not understand, he had survived, become a hero of ideas. He had managed, in ways that I did not begin to understand, to be on both sides of the wall, find the key to the back door, build the bridges of thinking, backwards and forwards, sideways and upwards, that were needed through a chaotic and tragic human age. He did not come from my age, and that meant I did not understand his. In fact, as Codicil said, I was an investigative simpleton, and he was born in dramas and tragedies I could hardly begin to share. From what Gerstenbacker had said with the wine in him last night, it seemed clear he had his share of secrets that he’d made his tricky way through a time of chaos, terror, deception and disguise. He was probably flawed, tainted in some fashion; he was certainly interesting. And now that I too lived in a time of transition, and saw in my own small way that no age lasts, that no framework is secure, that even the contemporary is not forever, I began to see a good deal more point to my search.

I stared out of the window of the Salieri Express. Contrary to myth, European trains are usually lumbering, contemplative, slow. They move reflectively through complicated landscapes, shuddering over bridges and going through strange valleys or impossible passes. The crews change suddenly, the tempera­ments of the passengers shift. Now there was plainly an Eastern European world to be seen outside. I saw high-rise concrete suburbs, workers’ apartments and grim-fronted stores, gridded streets and crowded yellow trams. There was a glimpse of water, a spire or two, a sudden sight of a long stone aqueduct. I checked the railway timetable and saw the train must now be coming into Budapest, at just the time the management said it would. I picked up The Magic Mountain, put it in the pocket of my anorak, there on the hook, took down the luggage from the rack, slipped the Kurier in my bag. I went down the corridor as the train doors jerked open, and stepped onto the platform.

People in grey clothes and plastic leather caps pushed and bus­tled; overalled porters shoved along great barrows. The posters on the station walls were in a language of very great obscurity, but they spoke of the things I immediately recognized – colas and jeans, television sets and pantihose. The architecture was grimly tiled, savagely functional. I looked round everywhere for a glimpse of Eiffel’s ironwork and Eiffel’s glass, but there was nothing there to suggest the work of the old bridgebuilder. No, as seems to happen so often in the kind of life I lead, I had plainly ended up in some completely different station. I went through a plastic-walled passage and out to the forecourt, found a small, air-polluting taxi, and gave the address of my hotel, where I would call Sandor Hollo, the only real line I now had to Doctor Bazlo Criminale.