Chapter 2

A BRITISH SUBJECT can still travel if he is content to take with him only five English pounds which he is forbidden to spend abroad, but if Rollo Martins had not received an invitation from Lime of the International Refugee Office he would not have been allowed to enter Austria, which counts still as occupied territory. Lime had suggested that Martins might write up the business of looking after the international refugees, and although it wasn’t Martins’ usual line, he had consented. It would give him a holiday, and he badly needed a holiday after the incident in Dublin and the other incident in Amsterdam; he always tried to dismiss women as ‘incidents’, things that simply happened to him without any will of his own, acts of God in the eyes of insurance agents. He had a haggard look when he arrived in Vienna and a habit of looking over his shoulder that for a time made me suspicious of him until I realized that he went in fear that one of, say, six people might turn up unexpectedly. He told me vaguely that he had been mixing his drinks – that was another way of putting it.

Rollo Martins’ usual line was the writing of cheap paper-covered Westerns under the name of Buck Dexter. His public was large but unremunerative. He couldn’t have afforded Vienna if Lime had not offered to pay his expenses when he got there out of some vaguely described propaganda fund. Lime could also, he said, keep him supplied with paper bafs – the only currency in use from a penny upwards in British hotels and clubs. So it was with exactly five unusable pound notes that Martins arrived in Vienna.

An odd incident had occurred at Frankfurt, where the plane from London grounded for an hour. Martins was eating a hamburger in the American canteen (a kindly airline supplied the passengers with a voucher for sixty-five cents’ worth of food) when a man he could recognize from twenty feet away as a journalist approached his table.

‘You Mr Dexter?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ Martins said, taken off his guard.

‘You look younger than your photographs,’ the man said. ‘Like to make a statement? I represent the local forces paper here. We’d like to know what you think of Frankfurt.’

‘I only touched down ten minutes ago.’

‘Fair enough,’ the man said. ‘What about views on the American novel?’

‘I don’t read them,’ Martins said.

‘The well-known acid humour,’ the journalist said. He pointed at a small grey-haired man with protruding teeth, nibbling a bit of bread. ‘Happen to know if that’s Carey?’

‘No. What Carey?’

‘J. G. Carey of course.’

‘I’ve never heard of him.’

‘You novelists live out of the world. He’s my real assignment,’ and Martins watched him make across the room for the great Carey, who greeted him with a false headline smile, laying down his crust. Dexter wasn’t the man’s assignment, but Martins couldn’t help feeling a certain pride – nobody had ever before referred to him as a novelist; and that sense of pride and importance carried him over the disappointment when Lime was not there to meet him at the airport. We never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us – Martins felt the little jab of dispensability, standing by the bus door, watching the snow come sifting down, so thinly and softly that the great drifts among the ruined buildings had an air of permanence, as though they were not the result of this meagre fall, but lay, for ever, above the line of perpetual snow.

There was no Lime to meet him at the Hotel Astoria, the terminus where the bus landed him, and no message – only a cryptic one for Mr Dexter from someone he had never heard of called Crabbin. ‘We expected you on tomorrow’s plane. Please stay where you are. On the way round. Hotel room booked.’ But Rollo Martins wasn’t the kind of man who stayed around. If you stayed around in a hotel lounge, sooner or later incidents occurred; one mixed one’s drinks. I can hear Rollo Martins saying to me, ‘I’ve done with incidents. No more incidents,’ before he plunged head first into the most serious incident of all. There was always a conflict in Rollo Martins – between the absurd Christian name and the sturdy Dutch (four generations back) surname. Rollo looked at every woman that passed, and Martins renounced them for ever. I don’t know which one of them wrote the Westerns.

Martins had been given Lime’s address and he felt no curiosity about the man called Crabbin; it was too obvious that a mistake had been made, though he didn’t yet connect it with the conversation at Frankfurt. Lime had written that he could put Martins up in his own flat, a large apartment on the edge of Vienna that had been requisitioned from a Nazi owner. Lime could pay for the taxi when he arrived, so Martins drove straight away to the building lying in the third (British) zone. He kept the taxi waiting while he mounted to the third floor.

How quickly one becomes aware of silence even in so silent a city as Vienna with the snow steadily settling. Martins hadn’t reached the second floor before he was convinced that he would not find Lime there, but the silence was deeper than just absence – it was as if he would not find Lime anywhere in Vienna, and, as he reached the third floor and saw the big black bow over the door handle, anywhere in the world at all. Of course it might have been a cook who had died, a housekeeper, anybody but Harry Lime, but he knew – he felt he had known twenty stairs down – that Lime, the Lime he had hero-worshipped now for twenty years, since the first meeting in a grim school corridor with a cracked bell ringing for prayers, was gone. Martins wasn’t wrong, not entirely wrong. After he had rung the bell half a dozen times a small man with a sullen expression put his head out from another flat and told him in a tone of vexation, ‘It’s no use. There’s nobody there. He’s dead.’

‘Herr Lime?’

‘Herr Lime, of course.’

Martins said to me later, ‘At first it didn’t mean a thing. It was just a bit of information, like those paragraphs in The Times they call “News in Brief”. I said to him, “When did it happen? How?”’

‘He was run over by a car,’ the man said. ‘Last Thursday.’ He added sullenly, as if really this were none of his business, ‘They’re burying him this afternoon. You’ve only just missed them.’

‘Them?’

‘Oh, a couple of friends and the coffin.’

‘Wasn’t he in hospital?’

‘There was no sense in taking him to hospital. He was killed here on his own doorstep – instantaneously. The right-hand mudguard struck him on his shoulder and bowled him over like a rabbit.’

It was only then, Martins told me, when the man used the word ‘rabbit’, that the dead Harry Lime came alive, became the boy with the gun which he had shown Martins the means of ‘borrowing’; a boy starting up among the long sandy burrows of Brickworth Common saying, ‘Shoot, you fool, shoot! There,’ and the rabbit limped to cover, wounded by Martins’ shot.

‘Where are they burying him?’ he asked the stranger on the landing.

‘In the Central Cemetery. They’ll have a hard time of it in this frost.’

He had no idea how to pay for his taxi, or indeed where in Vienna he could find a room in which he could live for five English pounds, but that problem had to be postponed until he had seen the last of Harry Lime. He drove straight out of town into the suburb (British zone) where the Central Cemetery lay. One passed through the Russian zone to reach it, and took a short cut through the American zone, which you couldn’t mistake because of the ice-cream parlours in every street. The trams ran along the high wall of the Central Cemetery, and for a mile on the other side of the rails stretched the monumental masons and the market gardeners – an apparently endless chain of gravestones waiting for owners and wreaths waiting for mourners.

Martins had not realized the size of this huge snowbound park where he was making his last rendezvous with Lime. It was as if Harry had left a message for him, ‘Meet me in Hyde Park’, without specifying a spot between the Achilles statue and Lancaster Gate; the avenues of graves, each avenue numbered and lettered, stretched out like the spokes of an enormous wheel; they drove for a half-mile towards the west, and then turned and drove a half-mile north, turned south.… The snow gave the great pompous family headstones an air of grotesque comedy; a toupée of snow slipped sideways over an angelic face, a saint wore a heavy white moustache, and a shako of snow tipped at a drunken angle over the bust of a superior civil servant called Wolfgang Gottmann. Even this cemetery was zoned between the Powers: the Russian zone was marked by huge tasteless statues of armed men, the French by rows of anonymous wooden crosses and a torn tired tricolour flag. Then Martins remembered that Lime was a Catholic and was unlikely to be buried in the British zone for which they had been vainly searching. So back they drove through the heart of a forest where the graves lay like wolves under the trees, winking white eyes under the gloom of the evergreens. Once from under the trees emerged a group of three men in strange eighteenth-century black and silver uniforms with three-cornered hats pushing a kind of barrow: they crossed a ride in the forest of graves and disappeared again.

It was just chance that they found the funeral in time – one patch in the enormous park where the snow had been shovelled aside and a tiny group was gathered, apparently bent on some very private business. A priest had finished speaking, his words coming secretively through the thin patient snow, and a coffin was on the point of being lowered into the ground. Two men in lounge suits stood at the graveside; one carried a wreath that he obviously had forgotten to drop on to the coffin, for his companion nudged his elbow so that he came to with a start and dropped the flowers. A girl stood a little way away with her hands over her face, and I stood twenty yards away by another grave, watching with relief the last of Lime and noticing carefully who was there – just a man in a mackintosh I was to Martins. He came up to me and said, ‘Could you tell me who they are burying?’

‘A fellow called Lime,’ I said, and was astonished to see the tears start to this stranger’s eyes: he didn’t look like a man who wept, nor was Lime the kind of man whom I thought likely to have mourners – genuine mourners with genuine tears. There was the girl of course, but one excepts women from all such generalizations.

Martins stood there, till the end, close beside me. He said to me later that as an old friend he didn’t want to intrude on these newer ones – Lime’s death belonged to them, let them have it. He was under the sentimental illusion that Lime’s life – twenty years of it anyway – belonged to him. As soon as the affair was over – I am not a religious man and always feel a little impatient with the fuss that surrounds death – Martins strode away on his long legs, which always seemed likely to get entangled together, back to his taxi. He made no attempt to speak to anyone, and the tears now were really running, at any rate the few meagre drops that any of us can squeeze out at our age.

One’s file, you know, is never quite complete; a case is never really closed, even after a century, when all the participants are dead. So I followed Martins: I knew the other three: I wanted to know the stranger. I caught him up by his taxi and said, ‘I haven’t any transport. Would you give me a lift into town?’

‘Of course,’ he said. I knew the driver of my jeep would spot me as we came out and follow us unobtrusively. As we drove away I noticed Martins never looked behind – it’s nearly always the fake mourners and the fake lovers who take that last look, who wait waving on platforms, instead of clearing quickly out, not looking back. Is it perhaps that they love themselves so much and want to keep themselves in the sight of others, even of the dead?

I said, ‘My name’s Calloway.’

‘Martins,’ he said.

‘You were a friend of Lime?’

‘Yes.’ Most people in the last week would have hesitated before they admitted quite so much.

‘Been here long?’

‘I only came this afternoon from England. Harry had asked me to stay with him. I hadn’t heard.’

‘Bit of a shock?’

‘Look here,’ he said, ‘I badly want a drink, but I haven’t any cash – except five pounds sterling. I’d be awfully grateful if you’d stand me one.’

It was my turn to say ‘Of course’. I thought for a moment and told the driver the name of a small bar in the Kärntnerstrasse. I didn’t think he’d want to be seen for a while in a busy British bar full of transit officers and their wives. This bar – perhaps because it was exorbitant in its prices – seldom had more than one self-occupied couple in it at a time. The trouble was too that it really only had one drink – a sweet chocolate liqueur that the waiter improved at a price with cognac – but I got the impression that Martins had no objection to any drink so long as it cast a veil over the present and the past. On the door was the usual notice saying the bar opened from six till ten, but one just pushed the door and walked through the front rooms. We had a whole small room to ourselves; the only couple were next door, and the waiter, who knew me, left us alone with some caviare sandwiches. It was lucky that we both knew I had an expense account.

Martins said over his second quick drink, ‘I’m sorry, but he was the best friend I ever had.’

I couldn’t resist saying, knowing what I knew, and because I was anxious to vex him – one learns a lot that way – ‘That sounds like a cheap novelette.’

He said quickly, ‘I write cheap novelettes.’

I had learned something anyway. Until he had had a third drink I was under the impression that he wasn’t an easy talker, but I felt fairly certain he was one of those who turn unpleasant after their fourth glass.

I said, ‘Tell me about yourself – and Lime.’

‘Look here,’ he said, ‘I badly need another drink, but I can’t keep on scrounging on a stranger. Could you change me a pound or two into Austrian money?’

‘Don’t bother about that,’ I said and called the waiter. ‘You can treat me when I come to London on leave. You were going to tell me how you met Lime?’

The glass of chocolate liqueur might have been a crystal, the way he looked at it and turned it this way and that. He said, ‘It was a long time ago. I don’t suppose anyone knows Harry the way I do,’ and I thought of the thick file of agents’ reports in my office, each claiming the same thing. I believe in my agents; I’ve sifted them all very thoroughly.

‘How long?’

‘Twenty years – or a bit more. I met him my first term at school. I can see the place. I can see the notice board and what was on it. I can hear the bell ringing. He was a year older and knew the ropes. He put me wise to a lot of things.’ He took a quick dab at his drink and then turned the crystal again as if to see more clearly what there was to see. He said, ‘It’s funny. I can’t remember meeting any woman quite as well.’

‘Was he clever at school?’

‘Not the way they wanted him to be. But what things he did think up! He was a wonderful planner. I was far better at subjects like History and English than Harry, but I was a hopeless mug when it came to carrying out his plans.’ He laughed: he was already beginning, with the help of drink and talk, to throw off the shock of the death. He said, ‘I was always the one who got caught.’

‘That was convenient for Lime.’

‘What the hell do you mean?’ he asked. Alcoholic irritation was setting in.

‘Well, wasn’t it?’

‘That was my fault, not his. He could have found someone cleverer if he’d chosen, but he liked me.’ Certainly, I thought, the child is father to the man, for I too had found Lime patient.

‘When did you see him last?’

‘Oh, he was over in London six months ago for a medical congress. You know, he qualified as a doctor, though he never practised. That was typical of Harry. He just wanted to see if he could do a thing and then he lost interest. But he used to say that it often came in handy.’ And that too was true. It was odd how like the Lime he knew was to the Lime I knew: it was only that he looked at Lime’s image from a different angle or in a different light. He said, ‘One of the things I liked about Harry was his humour.’ He gave a grin which took five years off his age. ‘I’m a buffoon. I like playing the silly fool, but Harry had real wit. You know, he could have been a first-class light composer if he had worked at it.’

He whistled a tune – it was oddly familiar to me. ‘I always remember that. I saw Harry write it. Just in a couple of minutes on the back of an envelope. That was what he always whistled when he had something on his mind. It was his signature tune.’ He whistled the tune a second time, and I knew then who had written it – of course it wasn’t Harry. I nearly told him so, but what was the point? The tune wavered and went out. He stared down into his glass, drained what was left, and said, ‘It’s a damned shame to think of him dying the way he did.’

‘It was the best thing that ever happened to him,’ I said.

He didn’t take in my meaning at once: he was a little hazy with his drinks. ‘The best thing?’

‘Yes.’

‘You mean there wasn’t any pain?’

‘He was lucky in that way, too.’

It was my tone of voice and not my words that caught Martins’ attention. He asked gently and dangerously – I could see his right hand tighten – ‘Are you hinting at something?’

There is no point at all in showing physical courage in all situations: I eased my chair far enough back to be out of reach of his fist. I said, ‘I mean that I had his case completed at police headquarters. He would have served a long spell – a very long spell – if it hadn’t been for the accident.’

‘What for?’

‘He was about the worst racketeer who ever made a dirty living in this city.’

I could see him measuring the distance between us and deciding that he couldn’t reach me from where he sat. Rollo wanted to hit out, but Martins was steady, careful. Martins, I began to realize, was dangerous. I wondered whether after all I had made a complete mistake: I couldn’t see Martins being quite the mug that Rollo had made out. ‘You’re a policeman?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve always hated policemen. They are always either crooked or stupid.’

‘Is that the kind of book you write?’

I could see him edging his chair round to block my way out. I caught the waiter’s eye and he knew what I meant – there’s an advantage in always using the same bar for interviews.

Martins brought out a surface smile and said gently, ‘I have to call them sheriffs.’

‘Been in America?’ It was a silly conversation.

‘No. Is this an interrogation?’

‘Just interest.’

‘Because if Harry was that kind of racketeer, I must be one too. We always worked together.’

‘I daresay he meant to cut you in – somewhere in the organization. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had meant to give you the baby to hold. That was his method at school – you told me, didn’t you? And, you see, the headmaster was getting to know a thing or two.’

‘You are running true to form, aren’t you? I suppose there was some petty racket going on with petrol and you couldn’t pin it on anyone, so you’ve picked a dead man. That’s just like a policeman. You’re a real policeman, I suppose?’

‘Yes, Scotland Yard, but they’ve put me into a colonel’s uniform when I’m on duty.’

He was between me and the door now. I couldn’t get away from the table without coming into range. I’m no fighter, and he had six inches of advantage anyway. I said, ‘It wasn’t petrol.’

‘Tyres, saccharin – why don’t you policemen catch a few murderers for a change?’

‘Well, you could say that murder was part of his racket.’

He pushed the table over with one hand and made a dive at me with the other; the drink confused his calculations. Before he could try again my driver had his arms round him. I said, ‘Don’t treat him rough. He’s only a writer with too much drink in him.’

‘Be quiet, can’t you, sir,’ my driver said. He had an exaggerated sense of officer-class. He would probably have called Lime ‘sir’.

‘Listen, Callaghan, or whatever your bloody name is …’

‘Calloway. I’m English, not Irish.’

‘I’m going to make you look the biggest bloody fool in Vienna. There’s one dead man you aren’t going to pin your unsolved crimes on.’

‘I see. You’re going to find me the real criminal? It sounds like one of your stories.’

‘You can let me go, Callaghan. I’d rather make you look the fool you are than black your bloody eye. You’d only have to go to bed for a few days with a black eye. But when I’ve finished with you, you’ll leave Vienna.’

I took out a couple of pounds’ worth of bafs and stuck them in his breast pocket. ‘These will see you through tonight,’ I said, ‘and I’ll make sure they keep a seat for you on tomorrow’s London plane.’

‘You can’t turn me out. My papers are in order.’

‘Yes, but this is like other cities: you need money here. If you change sterling on the black market I’ll catch up on you inside twenty-four hours. Let him go.’

Rollo Martins dusted himself down. He said, ‘Thanks for the drinks.’

‘That’s all right.’

‘I’m glad I don’t have to feel grateful. I suppose they were on expenses?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll be seeing you again in a week or two when I’ve got the dope.’ I knew he was angry. I didn’t believe then that he was serious. I thought he was putting over an act to cheer up his self-esteem.

‘I might come and see you off tomorrow.’

‘I shouldn’t waste your time. I won’t be there.’

‘Paine here will show you the way to Sacher’s. You can get a bed and dinner there. I’ll see to that.’

He stepped to one side as though to make way for the waiter and slashed out at me. I just avoided him, but stumbled against the table. Before he could try again Paine had landed him one on the mouth. He went bang over in the alleyway between the tables and came up bleeding from a cut lip. I said, ‘I thought you promised not to fight.’

He wiped some of the blood away with his sleeve and said, ‘Oh, no, I said I’d rather make you a bloody fool. I didn’t say I wouldn’t give you a black eye as well.’

I had had a long day and I was tired of Rollo Martins. I said to Paine, ‘See him safely into Sacher’s. Don’t hit him again if he behaves,’ and turning away from both of them towards the inner bar (I deserved one more drink), I heard Paine say respectfully to the man he had just knocked down, ‘This way, sir. It’s only just around the corner.’