Viennese café

I forget the name of the café because it has been about thirty five years since I’ve been in it, but it was somewhere just off the Ringstrasse if I remember correctly. I had been cold all day, just walking around the city taking it in and hadn’t been able to afford food. The little change I had I decided to hold onto to buy a hot drink before going back to my cheap, cold and not so pleasant room. I was owed money from my job in Rotterdam and it hadn’t come through.

So around eleven o’clock I opened the door of the cafe I’d had my eye on. A blast of heat rushed past me into the cold street and the weight of coffee in the air made my empty stomach heave a bit.

Vienna in the 1970s was of course a centre for espionage and covert surveillance. Its cafés and concert halls were populated by diplomats, military types and Yasser Arafat lookalikes and the city seemed always to be on edge. The Viennese people of course were charming, but that didn’t count. If anything was going down on the international scene it would have been planned in a Viennese café. So I’m told anyway. It positively bristled with characters straight off the page of a Graham Greene novel.

I sat at a small table and sank into the most luxurious leather armchair. I ordered a coffee and pastry, though the waiter looked at me askance as if muttering to himself “Who in their right mind eats pastries at this time of night?”

Snow started to fall outside. It fell thick and steady and a chased a man in a black overcoat in off the street.