Read Online The Exiles Return by Elisabeth de Waal - Free Book Online Page B

had not been his purpose in coming to Vienna. He had not come to make money but to spend it; not to get rich, for he was already very rich indeed and, as wealth breeds wealth, getting richer all the time. Besides, what scope was there for making money, his kind of money, in poor little Austria? No, he had come, though this was not the time to let it be known, simply to enjoy himself.
    What he was looking for was, to start with, a very vague memory, or perhaps only a figment of his imagination. Somewhere, he believed, behind the flat-faced dwelling houses of nineteenth century construction, with their street-level shopfronts and their multiple flats on the three or four landings above them, somewhere, hidden behind these squalid habitations of shopkeepers, tradesmen and clerks, he would find a small hôtel particulier , a pavilion of graceful eighteenth century proportions, built perhaps by some nobleman for his mistress amidst what had been at that time gardens and orchards outside the city walls. A little palais , the Viennese would call it; that being the designation for any private house of some elegance. Now it would only be accessible through one or more courtyards belonging to the tall utilitarian buildings which had, for many decades now, been interposed between it and the wide suburban street with its noisy pavements and clanging tramcars. A lime tree and a few little lilac bushes had possibly survived when the surrounding area was urbanised, together with a small plot of ground which might still be termed a garden. Derelict, with boarded-up windows, or used as storage, it would have fallen into ever-greater disrepair, until it would require far more money than anyone could afford for rehabilitating a house so awkwardly and inconveniently situated.
    This was the house Kanakis had created in his imagination and which he believed could still be found. He racked his memory for the faint recollection of something he might have seen, or possibly only heard of, on which his fantasy had built his dream house. So clearly did he see it in his mind’s eye that he felt sure he could never have seen it in actual fact without remembering where, nor could he locate it anywhere on the map. It must have been hearsay, he concluded, something someone had once mentioned in his hearing when he was a child. But he was certain that, if it still existed, it was in one of the ‘inner suburbs’ which, for generations, had no longer been suburbs in the real sense, but an integral part of the town which had grown and was still growing far out beyond them in every direction. They lay between the concentric circles of the Ringstrasse, which encircled the Inner City, still called ‘ the City’, as the heart of London still enjoys the exclusive privilege of that name – where the medieval battlements had been – and the ‘belt’, an irregular sequence of broad streets, a ring road which, like the rings of a tree, marked the second stage of the town’s expanding growth.
    Kanakis asked the hall porter for the special directory of professions and trades and carried it up to his room. He had not, like Adler, arrived in Vienna without making provision for his comfort. The town’s most luxurious hotel was reserved for the staff of the American Occupation Forces and their advisers; and Kanakis, although not in uniform, had been able to secure a room there on the strength of the local knowledge he would be able to place at the disposal of the military administration. Once installed, he took the least possible notice of the busy, and often bewildered, officers, and they took none at all of him.
    Leafing through the directory, Kanakis ran his finger down the list of house and estate agents, and a name caught his eye as if it had been printed in larger type than all the others on the page. Dr Franz Traumüller – not an extraordinary name in Vienna, but not a very common one either. The address of the office in one of the old narrow streets in the