THE LUCONA AFFAIR - Chicago Tribune

More than a year after Udo Proksch vanished, his Viennese cafe, Demel`s, remains one of the world`s calorie capitals. Every day well-padded Viennese gather around its tiny marble-topped tables to sip the city`s bewildering variety of coffees and eat the chocolate cakes that fill the glass cases just inside the door.

Demel`s is as it has always been: a gilded refuge from care, a gossip mill where the Viennese can read about Proksch in their newspapers and sum him up in the cynical jokes with which this city copes with reality.

Overhead, globe chandeliers hang from soaring ceilings. At the end of one room stands a towering mirror framed by two cherubs, round, cheery and improbable, just like Proksch himself.

Proksch owned Demel`s and maybe still does. More important, he ran Club 45, a club upstairs from Demel`s that brought together everyone who is anyone in Austria: politicians, bankers, generals, judges, editors. Because the Socialist Party has run Austria almost nonstop since World War II, most of the members belonged to the nation`s Socialist elite.

Proksch, now on the lam, has been charged with fraud, sabotage and being an accomplice to murder, all part of an elaborate plot to sink a ship and collect insurance on its cargo.

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