The Third Man and the Fallen Idol Read online

  To me it is almost impossible to write a film play without first writing a story. Even a film depends on more than plot, on a certain measure of characterization, on mood and atmosphere; and these seem to me almost impossible to capture for the first time in the dull shorthand of a script. One can reproduce an effect caught in another medium, but one cannot make the first act of creation in script form. One must have the sense of more material than one needs to draw on. The Third Man, therefore, though never intended for publication, had to start as a story before those apparently interminable transformations from one treatment to another.

  On these treatments Carol Reed and I worked closely together, covering so many feet of carpet a day, acting scenes at each other. No third ever joined our conferences; so much value lies in the clear cut-and-thrust of argument between two people. To the novelist, of course, his novel is the best he can do with a particular subject; he cannot help resenting many of the changes necessary for turning it into a film or a play; but The Third Man was never intended to be more than the raw material for a picture. The reader will notice many differences between the story and the film, and he should not imagine these changes were forced on an unwilling author: as likely as not they were suggested by the author. The film in fact, is better than the story because it is in this case the finished state of the story.

  Some of these changes have obvious superficial reasons. The choice of an American instead of an English star involved a number of alterations. For example, Mr Joseph Cotten quite reasonably objected to the name Rollo. The name had to be an absurd one, and the name Holley occurred to me when I remembered that figure of fun, the American poet Thomas Holley Chivers. An American, too, could hardly have been mistaken for the great English writer Dexter, whose literary character bore certain echoes of the gentle genius of Mr E. M. Forster. The confusion of identities would have been impossible, even if Carol Reed had not rightly objected to a rather far-fetched situation involving a great deal of explanation that increased the length of a film already far too long. Another minor point: in deference to American opinion a Rumanian was substituted for Cooler, since Mr Orson Welles’ engagement had already supplied us with one American villain. (Incidentally, the popular line of dialogue concerning Swiss cuckoo clocks was written into the script by Mr Welles himself.)

  One of the very few major disputes between Carol Reed and myself concerned the ending, and he has been proved triumphantly right. I held the view that an entertainment of this kind was too light an affair to carry the weight of an unhappy ending. Reed on his side felt that my ending – indeterminate though it was, with no words spoken – would strike the audience, who had just seen Harry die, as unpleasantly cynical. I admit I was only half convinced; I was afraid few people would wait in their seats during the girl’s long walk from the graveside and that they would leave the cinema under the impression that the ending was as conventional as mine and more drawn-out. I had not given enough consideration to the mastery of Reed’s direction, and at that stage, of course, we neither of us could have anticipated Reed’s brilliant discovery of Mr Karas, the zither player.

  The episode of the Russians kidnapping Anna (a perfectly possible incident in Vienna) was eliminated at a fairly late stage. It was not satisfactorily tied into the story, and it threatened to turn the film into a propagandist picture. We had no desire to move people’s political emotions; we wanted to entertain them, to frighten them a little, to make them laugh.

  Reality, in fact, was only a background to a fairy tale; none the less the story of the penicillin racket is based on a truth all the more grim because so many of the agents were more innocent than Joseph Harbin. The other day in London a surgeon took two friends to see the film. He was surprised to find them subdued and depressed by a picture he had enjoyed. They then told him that at the end of the war when they were with the Royal Air Force they had themselves sold penicillin in Vienna. The possible consequences of their act had never before occurred to them.

  Chapter 1

  ONE NEVER KNOWS when the blow may fall. When I saw Rollo Martins first I made this note on him for my security police files: ‘In normal circumstances a cheerful fool. Drinks too much and may cause a little trouble. Whenever a woman passes raises his eyes and makes some comment, but I get the impression that really he’d rather not be bothered. Has never really grown up and perhaps that accounts for the way he worshipped Lime.’ I wrote there that phrase ‘in normal circumstances’ because I met him first at Harry Lime’s funeral. It was February, and the gravediggers had been forced to use electric drills to open the frozen ground in Vienna’s Central Cemetery. It was as if even nature were doing its best to reject Lime, but we got him in at last and laid the earth back on him like bricks. He was vaulted in, and Rollo Martins walked quickly away as though his long gangly legs wanted to break into a run, and the tears of a boy ran down his thirty-five-year-old face. Rollo Martins believed in friendship, and that was why what happened later was a worse shock to him than it would have been to you or me (you because you would have put it down to an illusion and me because at once a rational explanation – however wrongly – would have come to my mind). If only he had come to tell me then, what a lot of trouble would have been saved.

  If you are to understand this strange, rather sad story you must have an impression at least of the background – the smashed dreary city of Vienna divided up in zones among the Four Powers; the Russian, the British, the American, the French zones, regions marked only by notice boards, and in the centre of the city, surrounded by the Ring with its heavy public buildings and its prancing statuary, the Innere Stadt under the control of all Four Powers. In this once fashionable Inner City each Power in turn, for a month at a time, takes, as we call it, ‘the chair’, and becomes responsible for security; at night, if you were fool enough to waste your Austrian schillings on a night club, you would be fairly certain to see the International Power at work – four military police, one from each Power, communicating with each other, if they communicated at all, in the common language of their enemy. I never knew Vienna between the wars, and I am too young to remember the old Vienna with its Strauss music and its bogus easy charm; to me it is simply a city of undignified ruins which turned that February into great glaciers of snow and ice. The Danube was a grey flat muddy river a long way off across the Second Bezirk, the Russian zone where the Prater lay smashed and desolate and full of weeds, only the Great Wheel revolving slowly over the foundations of merry-go-rounds like abandoned millstones, the rusting iron of smashed tanks which nobody had cleared away, the frost-nipped weeds where the snow was thin. I haven’t enough imagination to picture it as it had once been, any more than I can picture Sacher’s Hotel as other than a transit hotel for English officers or see the Kärntnerstrasse as a fashionable shopping street instead of a street which exists, most of it, only at eye level, repaired up to the first storey. A Russian soldier in a fur cap goes by with a rifle over his shoulder, a few tarts cluster round the American Information Office, and men in overcoats sip ersatz coffee in the windows of the Old Vienna. At night it is just as well to stick to the Inner City or the zones of three of the Powers, though even there the kidnappings occur – such senseless kidnappings they sometimes seemed to us – a Ukrainian girl without a passport, an old man beyond the age of usefulness, sometimes, of course, the technician or the traitor. This was roughly the Vienna to which Rollo Martins came on February seventh last year. I have reconstructed the affair as best I can from my own files and from what Martins told me. It is as accurate as I can make it – I have tried not to invent a line of dialogue, though I can’t vouch for Martins’ memory; an ugly story if you leave out the girl: grim and sad and unrelieved, if it were not for that absurd episode of the British Council lecturer.

  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 Internatio
nal 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 tippe
d 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?’