The clatter of trams and carts coming from the street had a muffled, somewhat distant sound. Some boys were throwing a big brown football around on the little field in the middle of the park. Opposite the park, on the other side of the trees, a woman leaned out of a top-storey window and shook a white sheet into the street, looking from side to side to make sure that there were no policemen watching. The old chestnuts were suddenly full of tiny buds.

Gurdweill felt a thousand miles away from the cares of the city. He could have gone on sitting idly on the bench forever, but the pangs of hunger began to gnaw at his stomach, and he got up and went to the bar of the nearby Hotel Metropol to have a bite to eat.

2

2

That afternoon, at about three o’clock, Gurdweill was on his way to his regular café, where he hoped to find a ‘victim’, some acquaintance from whom he could borrow money. If he was in luck, he would use the money to go out of town to Kahlenberg or the Prater.

In the narrow, shady Tiefer Graben, a quiet street in the heart of the city, full of leather warehouses and textile wholesalers, workers in their shirtsleeves were loading huge crates onto wide, flat wagons. While this was going on, the heavy cart-horses with tufts of hair above their hooves munched steadily and gloomily from the feed bags tied around their heads. A cleaner in wooden clogs, who had a long pipe dangling from his mouth, sprayed the pavement with a rusty hose. In one of the doorways a maid in a white apron was calling over and over again in a long-drawn-out voice, ‘Flo-ckieee, come he-eeere!’ But the little brown dog with his long back and short crooked legs was busy chasing a cigarette butt blown by the wind, and showed no inclination to go home. A sturdy labourer called teasingly to the maid from the opposite pavement: ‘Why don’t you come and sleep with me tonight, pussycat?’ Then a heavy truck came roaring down the road and swept Flockie aside.