Like the fella says, in Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love. They had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.
—Harry Lime in the film version of The Third Man
October 1945
They were to fly to Vienna in a military aircraft, leaving from the small RAF strip at Northolt. Even with the bureaucracy of the paperwork overcome, physical passage across Europe was still not easy. However, Johan and Cicero had engaged an aging cigar-puffing general by the name of Fannet-Holmes, with a belly like a bay window, in the bar at the Langham. Half a dozen gin and tonics later, they had been given a telephone number and a password in order to purchase air tickets to Vienna. From there they would take the train.
Cicero was fascinated by the general’s knowledge of the war and of planes in particular, especially how the machine guns on a Spitfire were synchronized to fire through the aircraft’s propellers. (If the General had been complete in his information, he would have attributed this technology to the Germans in the Great War, when the Fokker Scourge of 1915 gave Teutonic supremacy for almost a year. During this time, a British airman’s average life expectancy was just eleven days.)
The slightly drunk general, however, was far more tickled by the fact that Johan Thoms’s anglicized name was actually John Thomas.
(“Oh, my word! John Thomas! How delightfully degenerate!” as Johan looked on with a puzzled crease in his forehead. The general continued, “I went to school with a Richard William Cock. He actually married a wee slip of a girl by the name of Fanny Hyman. What were the parents thinking of? And why would anyone by the name of Johnson not change his or her name? I ask you!”)
They thanked the general for his help. The battle-weary general laughed as they said good-bye.
He was still laughing as they slipped through the great glass doors and out onto Langham Place.
* * *
They landed in the Vienna of Harry Lime, not of Lorelei Ribeiro. And yet it seemed that, despite two world wars and a heavily shaken kaleidoscope, Johan’s papers and his bank accounts functioned as well in 1945 as they had back in 1914. Johan thought of his good friend Kaunitz, and how very deeply his ancient institutions must be rooted to have survived all that horror.
A train took them south through a land blistered and burned.
They had prepared for their arrival at the Sarajevo train station by pouring the lion’s share of a bottle of vodka down Johan’s throat en route. It was malice aforethought. As was Cicero’s Republican uniform, which lubricated their entrance into the Communist quarter of Vienna. He even enjoyed a pat on the back from the Soviet guards before they ventured into Tito’s new Yugoslavia.
At the station in Sarajevo, two porters lifted Johan into a waiting car. His wealth allowed this luxury over the train, which was still as uncomfortable as it had been in his youth, but was now also far more unreliable. He was briefly reminded of how the city had smelled in his youth. The air was full of memories, and an old, happy feeling seemed to pass by on the sighing wind. However, the less he saw of this particular part of his past, the better. He did lift an eye above the parapet for a split second when he felt he was in the environs of the Hotel President, but he slipped on his elbow and crashed back down in the rear seat, slammed his head against something hard, and groaned off into another temporary coma.
The driver was given the instructions which Johan had written down in Vienna: To the outlying town of Argona. Please.
from “The Unpublished Diaries of D. Parker”
That bastard! That damned bastard! If I ever . . . I took a telegram this lunchtime at the bar in the Algonquin. It was from London. It was Lorelei. Carl’s ship has been lost off the Philippines. A second loved one of hers condemned to the bottom of an ocean. Let’s hope that bastard Thoms is in a deep trench of his own somewhere. She is returning to New York City. Poor, poor girl. No Hollywood endings here, it seems. Maybe there is a God.