The Third Man and the Fallen Idol Read online

  ‘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.

  Chapter 4

  ‘WHAT I DISLIKED about him at first sight,’ Martins told me, ‘was his toupée. It was one of those obvious toupées – flat and yellow, with the hair cut straight at the back and not fitting close. There must be something phoney about a man who won’t accept baldness gracefully. He had one of those faces too where the lines have been put in carefully, like a make-up, in the right places – to express charm, whimsicality, lines at the corners of the eyes. He was made up to appeal to romantic schoolgirls.’

  This conversation took place some days later – he brought out his whole story when the trail was nearly cold. We were sitting in the Old Vienna at the table he had occupied that first morning with Kurtz, and when he made that remark about the romantic schoolgirls I saw his rather hunted eyes focus suddenly. It was a girl – just like any other girl, I thought, hurrying by outside in the driving snow.

  ‘Something pretty?’

  He brought his gaze back and said, ‘I’m off that for ever. You know, Calloway, a time comes in a man’s life when he gives up all that sort of thing …’

  ‘I see. I thought you were looking at a girl.’

  ‘I was. But only because she reminded me for a moment of Anna – Anna Schmidt.’

  ‘Who’s she? Isn’t she a girl?’

  ‘Oh, yes, in a way.’

  ‘What do you mean, in a way?’

  ‘She was Harry’s girl.’

  ‘Are you taking her over?’

  ‘She’s not that kind, Calloway. Didn’t you see her at his funeral? I’m not mixing my drinks any more. I’ve got a hangover to last me a lifetime.’

  ‘You were telling me about Kurtz.’ I said.

  It appeared that Kurtz was sitting there, making a great show of reading The Lone Rider of Santa Fé. When Martins sat down at his table he said with indescribably false enthusiasm, ‘It’s wonderful how you keep the tension.’

  ‘Tension?’

  ‘Suspense. You’re a master at it. At the end of every chapter one’s left guessing …’

  ‘So you were a friend of Harry’s,’ Martins said.

  ‘I think his best,’ but Kurtz added with the smallest pause, in which his brain must have registered the error, ‘except you, of course.’

  ‘Tell me how he died.’

  ‘I was with him. We came out together from the door of his flat and Harry saw a friend he knew across the road – an American called Cooler. He waved to Cooler and started across the road to him when a jeep came tearing round the corner and bowled him over. It was Harry’s fault really – not the driver’s.’

  ‘Somebody told me he died instantaneously.’

  ‘I wish he had. He died before the ambulance could reach us though.’

  ‘He could speak, then?’

  ‘Yes. Even in his pain he worried about you.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘I can’t remember the exact words, Rollo – I may call you Rollo, mayn’t I? he always called you that to us. He was anxious that I should look after you when you arrived. See that you were looked after. Get your return ticket for you.’ In telling me, Martins said, ‘You see I was collecting return tickets as well as cash.’

  ‘But why didn’t you cable to stop me?’

  ‘We did, but the cable must have missed you. What with censorship and the zones, cables can take anything up to five days.’

  ‘There was an inquest?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Did you know that the police have a crazy notion that Harry was mixed up in some racket?’

  ‘No. But everyone in Vienna is. We all sell cigarettes and exchange schillings for bafs and that kind of thing. You won’t find a single member of the Control Commission who hasn’t broken the rules.’

  �
��The police meant something worse than that.’

  ‘They get rather absurd ideas sometimes,’ the man with the toupée said cautiously.

  ‘I’m going to stay here till I prove them wrong.’

  Kurtz turned his head sharply and the toupée shifted very very slightly. He said, ‘What’s the good? Nothing can bring Harry back.’

  ‘I’m going to have that police officer run out of Vienna.’

  ‘I don’t see what you can do.’

  ‘I’m going to start working back from his death. You were there and this man Cooler and the chauffeur. You can give me their addresses.’

  ‘I don’t know the chauffeur’s.’

  ‘I can get it from the coroner’s records. And then there’s Harry’s girl …’

  Kurtz said, ‘It will be painful for her.’

  ‘I’m not concerned about her. I’m concerned about Harry.’

  ‘Do you know what it is that the police suspect?’

  ‘No. I lost my temper too soon.’

  ‘Has it occurred to you,’ Kurtz said gently, ‘that you might dig up something – well, discreditable to Harry?’

  ‘I’ll risk that.’

  ‘It will take a bit of time – and money.’

  ‘I’ve got time and you were going to lend me some money, weren’t you?’

  ‘I’m not a rich man,’ Kurtz said. ‘I promised Harry to see you were all right and that you got your plane back …’

  ‘You needn’t worry about the money – or the plane,’ Martins said. ‘But I’ll make a bet with you – in pounds sterling – five pounds against two hundred schillings – that there’s something queer about Harry’s death.’

  It was a shot in the dark, but already he had this firm instinctive sense that there was something wrong, though he hadn’t yet attached the word ‘murder’ to the instinct. Kurtz had a cup of coffee half-way to his lips and Martins watched him. The shot apparently went wide; an unaffected hand held the cup to the mouth and Kurtz drank, a little noisily, in long sips. Then he put down the cup and said, ‘How do you mean – queer?’

  ‘It was convenient for the police to have a corpse, but wouldn’t it have been equally convenient, perhaps, for the real racketeers?’ When he had spoken he realized that after all Kurtz might not have been unaffected by his wild statement: hadn’t he perhaps been frozen into caution and calm? The hands of the guilty don’t necessarily tremble; only in stories does a dropped glass betray agitation. Tension is more often shown in the studied action. Kurtz had drunk his coffee as though nothing had been said.

  ‘Well –’ he took another sip – ‘of course I wish you luck, though I don’t believe there’s anything to find. Just ask me for any help you want.’

  ‘I want Cooler’s address.’

  ‘Certainly. I’ll write it down for you. Here it is. In the American zone.’

  ‘And yours?’

  ‘I’ve already put it – underneath. I’m unlucky enough to be in the Russian zone – so don’t visit me very late. Things sometimes happen round our way.’ He was giving one of his studied Viennese smiles, the charm carefully painted in with a fine brush in the little lines about the mouth and eyes. ‘Keep in touch,’ he said, ‘and if you need any help … but I still think you are very unwise.’ He touched The Lone Rider. ‘I’m so proud to have met you. A master of suspense,’ and one hand smoothed the toupée, while another, passing softly over the mouth, brushed out the smile as though it had never been.

  Chapter 5

  MARTINS SAT ON a hard chair just inside the stage door of the Josefstadt Theatre. He had sent up his card to Anna Schmidt after the matinée, marking it ‘a friend of Harry’s’. An arcade of little windows, with lace curtains and the lights going out one after another, showed where the artists were packing up for home, for the cup of coffee without sugar, the roll without butter to sustain them for the evening performance. It was like a little street built indoors for a film set, but even indoors it was cold, even cold to a man in a heavy overcoat, so that Martins rose and walked up and down underneath the little windows. He felt, he said, rather like a Romeo who wasn’t sure of Juliet’s balcony.

  He had had time to think: he was calm now, Martins not Rollo was in the ascendant. When a light went out in one of the windows and an actress descended into the passage where he walked, he didn’t even turn to take a look. He was done with all that. He thought, Kurtz is right. They are all right. I’m behaving like a romantic fool. I’ll just have a word with Anna Schmidt, a word of commiseration, and then I’ll pack and go. He had quite forgotten, he told me, the complication of Mr Crabbin.

  A voice over his head called ‘Mr Martins’, and he looked up at the face that watched him from between the curtains a few feet above his head. It wasn’t a beautiful face, he firmly explained to me, when I accused him of once again mixing his drinks. Just an honest face; dark hair and eyes which in that light looked brown; a wide forehead, a large mouth which didn’t try to charm. No danger anywhere, it seemed to Rollo Martins, of that sudden reckless moment when the scent of hair or a hand against the side alters life. She said, ‘Will you come up, please? The second door on the right.’

  There are some people, he explained to me carefully, whom one recognizes instantaneously as friends. You can be at ease with them because you know that never, never will you be in danger. ‘That was Anna,’ he said, and I wasn’t sure whether the past tense was deliberate or not.

  Unlike most actresses’ rooms this one was almost bare; no wardrobe packed with clothes, no clutter of cosmetics and grease-paints; a dressing-gown on the door, one sweater he recognized from Act II on the only easy chair, a tin of half-used paints and grease. A kettle hummed softly on a gas ring. She said, ‘Would you like a cup of tea? Someone sent me a packet last week – sometimes the Americans do, instead of flowers, you know, on the first night.’

  ‘I’d like a cup,’ he said, but if there was one thing he hated it was tea. He watched her while she made it, made it, of course, all wrong: the water not on the boil, the teapot unheated, too few leaves. She said, ‘I never quite understand why English people like tea.’

  He drank his cupful quickly like a medicine and watched her gingerly and delicately sip at hers. He said, ‘I wanted very much to see you. About Harry.’

  It was the dreadful moment; he could see her mouth stiffen to meet it.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I had known him twenty years. I was his friend. We were at school together, you know, and after that – there weren’t many months running when we didn’t meet …’

  She said, ‘When I got your card, I couldn’t say no. But there’s nothing really for us to talk about, is there? – nothing.’

  ‘I wanted to hear –’

  ‘He’s dead. That’s the end. Everything’s over, finished. What’s the good of talking?’

  ‘We both loved him.’

  ‘I don’t know. You can’t know a thing like that – afterwards. I don’t know anything any more except –’

  ‘Except?’

  ‘That I want to be dead too.’

  Martins told me, ‘Then I nearly went away. What was the good of tormenting her because of this wild idea of mine? But instead I asked her one question. “Do you know a man called Cooler?”’

  ‘An American?’ she asked. ‘I think that was the man who brought me some money when Harry died. I didn’t want to take it, but he said Harry had been anxious – at the last moment.’

  ‘So he didn’t die instantaneously?’

  ‘Oh, no.’

  Martins said to me, ‘I began to wonder why I had got that idea so firmly into my head, and then I thought it was only the man in the flat who told me so – no one else. I said to her, “He must have been very clear in his head at the end – because he remembered about me too. That seems to show that there wasn’t really any pain.”’

  ‘That’s what I tell myself all the time.’

  ‘Did you see the doctor?’

  ‘Once. Harry sent me to
him. He was Harry’s own doctor. He lived near by, you see.’

  Martins suddenly saw in that odd chamber of the mind that constructs such pictures, instantaneously, irrationally, a desert place, a body on the ground, a group of birds gathered. Perhaps it was a scene from one of his own books, not yet written, forming at the gate of consciousness. It faded, and he thought how odd that they were all there, just at that moment, all Harry’s friends – Kurtz, the doctor, this man Cooler; only the two people who loved him seemed to have been missing. He said, ‘And the driver? Did you hear his evidence?’

  ‘He was upset, scared. But Cooler’s evidence exonerated him. No, it wasn’t his fault, poor man. I’ve often heard Harry say what a careful driver he was.’

  ‘He knew Harry too?’ Another bird flapped down and joined the others round the silent figure on the sand who lay face down. Now he could tell that it was Harry, by the clothes, by the attitude like that of a boy asleep in the grass at a playing-field’s edge, on a hot summer afternoon.

  Somebody called outside the window, ‘Fräulein Schmidt.’

  She said, ‘They don’t like one to stay too long. It uses up their electricity.’

  He had given up the idea of sparing her anything. He told her, ‘The police say they were going to arrest Harry. They’d pinned some racket on him.’

  She took the news in much the same way as Kurtz. ‘Everybody’s in a racket.’

  ‘I don’t believe he was in anything serious.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But he may have been framed. Do you know a man named Kurtz?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘He wears a toupée.’

  ‘Oh.’ He could tell that that struck home. He said, ‘Don’t you think that it was odd they were all there – at the death? Everybody knew Harry. Even the driver, the doctor …’

  She said with hopeless calm, ‘I’ve wondered that too, though I didn’t know about Kurtz. I wondered whether they’d murdered him, but what’s the use of wondering?’