Chapter 3

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT I didn’t hear from Paine but from Martins a long time afterwards, as I reconstructed the chain of events which did indeed – though not quite in the way he had expected – prove me to be a fool. Paine simply saw him to the head porter’s desk and explained there, ‘This gentleman came in on the plane from London. Colonel Calloway says he’s to have a room.’ Having made that clear, he said, ‘Good evening, sir,’ and left. He was probably a bit embarrassed by Martins’ bleeding lip.

‘Had you already got a reservation, sir?’ the porter asked.

‘No. No, I don’t think so,’ Martins said in a muffled voice, holding his handkerchief to his mouth.

‘I thought perhaps you might be Mr Dexter. We had a room reserved for a week for Mr Dexter.’

Martins said, ‘Oh, I am Mr Dexter.’ He told me later that it occurred to him that Lime might have engaged a room for him in that name because perhaps it was Buck Dexter and not Rollo Martins who was to be used for propaganda purposes. A voice said at his elbow, ‘I’m so sorry you were not met at the plane, Mr Dexter. My name’s Crabbin.’

The speaker was a stout middle-aged young man with a natural tonsure and one of the thickest pairs of horn-rimmed glasses that Martins had ever seen. He went apologetically on, ‘One of our chaps happened to ring up Frankfurt and heard you were on the plane. H.Q. made one of their usual foolish mistakes and wired you were not coming. Something about Sweden, but the cable was badly mutilated. Directly I heard from Frankfurt I tried to meet the plane, but I just missed you. You got my note?’

Martins held his handkerchief to his mouth and said obscurely, ‘Yes. Yes?’

‘May I say at once, Mr Dexter, how excited I am to meet you?’

‘Good of you.’

‘Ever since I was a boy, I’ve thought you the greatest novelist of our century.’

Martins winced. It was painful opening his mouth to protest. He took an angry look instead at Mr Crabbin, but it was impossible to suspect that young man of a practical joke.

‘You have a big Austrian public, Mr Dexter, both for your originals and your translations. Especially for The Curved Prow, that’s my own favourite.’

Martins was thinking hard. ‘Did you say – room for a week?’

‘Yes.’

‘Very kind of you.’

‘Mr Schmidt here will give you tickets every day, to cover all meals. But I expect you’ll need a little pocket money. We’ll fix that. Tomorrow we thought you’d like a quiet day – to look about.’

‘Yes.’

‘Of course any of us are at your service if you need a guide. Then the day after tomorrow in the evening there’s a little quiet discussion at the Institute – on the contemporary novel. We thought perhaps you’d say a few words just to set the ball rolling, and then answer questions.’

Martins at that moment was prepared to agree to anything to get rid of Mr Crabbin and also to secure a week’s free board and lodging; and Rollo, of course, as I was to discover later, had always been prepared to accept any suggestion – for a drink, for a girl, for a joke, for a new excitement. He said now, ‘Of course, of course,’ into his handkerchief.

‘Excuse me, Mr Dexter, have you got toothache? I know a very good dentist.’

‘No. Somebody hit me, that’s all.’

‘Good God! Were they trying to rob you?’

‘No, it was a soldier. I was trying to punch his bloody colonel in the eye.’ He removed the handkerchief and gave Crabbin a view of his cut mouth. He told me that Crabbin was at a complete loss for words. Martins couldn’t understand why because he had never read the work of his great contemporary, Benjamin Dexter: he hadn’t even heard of him. I am a great admirer of Dexter, so that I could understand Crabbin’s bewilderment. Dexter has been ranked as a stylist with Henry James, but he has a wider feminine streak than his master – indeed his enemies have sometimes described his subtle, complex, wavering style as old-maidish. For a man still just on the right side of fifty his passionate interest in embroidery and his habit of calming a not very tumultuous mind with tatting – a trait beloved by his disciples – certainly to others seems a little affected.

‘Have you ever read a book called The Lone Rider of Santa Fé?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

Martins said, ‘This lone rider had his best friend shot by the sheriff of a town called Lost Claim Gulch. The story is how he hunted that sheriff down – quite legally – until his revenge was completed.’

‘I never imagined you reading Westerns, Mr Dexter,’ Crabbin said, and it needed all Martins’ resolution to stop Rollo saying, ‘But I write them.’

‘Well, I’m gunning just the same way for Colonel Callaghan.’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘Heard of Harry Lime?’

‘Yes,’ Crabbin said cautiously, ‘but I didn’t really know him.’

‘I did. He was my best friend.’

‘I shouldn’t have thought he was a very – literary character.’

‘None of my friends are.’

Crabbin blinked nervously behind the horn-rims. He said with an air of appeasement, ‘He was interested in the theatre though. A friend of his – an actress, you know – is learning English at the Institute. He called once or twice to fetch her.’

‘Young or old?’

‘Oh, young, very young. Not a good actress in my opinion.’

Martins remembered the girl by the grave with her hands over her face. He said, ‘I’d like to meet any friend of Harry’s.’

‘She’ll probably be at your lecture.’

‘Austrian?’

‘She claims to be Austrian, but I suspect she’s Hungarian. She works at the Josefstadt.’

‘Why claims to be Austrian?’

‘The Russians sometimes get interested in the Hungarians. I wouldn’t be surprised if Lime had helped her with her papers. She calls herself Schmidt. Anna Schmidt. You can’t imagine a young English actress calling herself Smith, can you? And a pretty one, too. It always struck me as a bit too anonymous to be true.’

Martins felt he had got all he could from Crabbin, so he pleaded tiredness, a long day, promised to ring up in the morning, accepted ten pounds’ worth of bafs for immediate expenses, and went to his room. It seemed to him that he was earning money rapidly – twelve pounds in less than an hour.

He was tired: he realized that when he stretched himself out on his bed in his boots. Within a minute he had left Vienna far behind him and was walking through a dense wood, ankle-deep in snow. An owl hooted, and he felt suddenly lonely and scared. He had an appointment to meet Harry under a particular tree, but in a wood so dense how could he recognize any one tree from the rest? Then he saw a figure and ran towards it: it whistled a familiar tune and his heart lifted with the relief and joy at not after all being alone. The figure turned and it was not Harry at all – just a stranger who grinned at him in a little circle of wet slushy melted snow, while the owl hooted again and again. He woke suddenly to hear the telephone ringing by his bed.

A voice with a trace of foreign accent – only a trace – said, ‘Is that Mr Rollo Martins?’

‘Yes.’ It was a change to be himself and not Dexter.

‘You wouldn’t know me,’ the voice said unnecessarily, ‘but I was a friend of Harry Lime.’

It was a change too to hear anyone claim to be a friend of Harry’s. Martins’ heart warmed towards the stranger. He said, ‘I’d be glad to meet you.’

‘I’m just round the corner at the Old Vienna.’

‘Couldn’t you make it tomorrow? I’ve had a pretty awful day with one thing and another.’

‘Harry asked me to see that you were all right. I was with him when he died.’

‘I thought –’ Rollo Martins said and stopped. He had been going to say, ‘I thought he died instantaneously,’ but something suggested caution. He said instead, ‘You haven’t told me your name.’

‘Kurtz,’ the voice said. ‘I’d offer to come round to you, only, you know, Austrians aren’t allowed in Sacher’s.’

‘Perhaps we could meet at the Old Vienna in the morning.’

‘Certainly,’ the voice said, ‘if you are quite sure that you are all right till then?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Harry had it on his mind that you’d be penniless.’ Rollo Martins lay back on his bed with the receiver to his ear and thought: Come to Vienna to make money. This was the third stranger to stake him in less than five hours. He said cautiously, ‘Oh, I can carry on till I see you.’ There seemed no point in turning down a good offer till he knew what the offer was.

‘Shall we say eleven, then, at the Old Vienna in the Kärntnerstrasse? I’ll be in a brown suit and I’ll carry one of your books.’

‘That’s fine. How did you get hold of one?’

‘Harry gave it to me.’ The voice had enormous charm and reasonableness, but when Martins had said good night and rung off, he couldn’t help wondering how it was that if Harry had been so conscious before he died he had not had a cable sent to stop him. Hadn’t Callaghan too said that Lime died instantaneously – or without pain, was it? – or had he put the words into Callaghan’s mouth? It was then the idea first lodged firmly in Martins’ mind that there was something wrong about Lime’s death, something the police had been too stupid to discover. He tried to discover it himself with the help of two cigarettes, but he fell asleep without his dinner and with the mystery still unsolved. It had been a long day, but not quite long enough for that.