The Third Man and the Fallen Idol Read online

  ‘I’m going to get those bastards,’ Rollo Martins said.

  ‘It won’t do any good. Perhaps the police are right. Perhaps poor Harry got mixed up –’

  ‘Fräulein Schmidt,’ the voice called again.

  ‘I must go.’

  ‘I’ll walk with you a bit of the way.’

  The dark was almost down; the snow had ceased for a while to fall, and the great statues of the Ring, the prancing horses, the chariots and eagles, were gun-shot grey with the end of evening. ‘It’s better to give up and forget,’ Anna said. The moonlit snow lay ankle-deep on the unswept pavements.

  ‘Will you give me the doctor’s address?’

  They stood in the shelter of a wall while she wrote it down for him.

  ‘And yours too?’

  ‘Why do you want that?’

  ‘I might have news for you.’

  ‘There isn’t any news that would do any good now.’ He watched her from a distance board her tram, bowing her head against the wind, a dark question mark on the snow.

  Chapter 6

  AN AMATEUR DETECTIVE has this advantage over the professional, that he doesn’t work set hours. Rollo Martins was not confined to the eight-hour day: his investigations didn’t have to pause for meals. In his one day he covered as much ground as one of my men would have covered in two, and he had this initial advantage over us, that he was Harry’s friend. He was, as it were, working from inside, while we pecked at the perimeter.

  Dr Winkler was at home. Perhaps he would not have been at home to a police officer. Again Martins had marked his card with the open-sesame phrase: ‘A friend of Harry Lime’s.’

  Dr Winkler’s waiting-room reminded Martins of an antique shop – an antique shop that specializes in religious objets d’art. There were more crucifixes than he could count, none of later date probably than the seventeenth century. There were statues in wood and ivory. There were a number of reliquaries: little bits of bone marked with saints’ names and set in oval frames on a background of tinfoil. If they were genuine, what an odd fate it was, Martins thought, for a portion of Saint Susanna’s knuckle to come to rest in Dr Winkler’s waiting-room. Even the high-backed hideous chairs looked as if they had once been sat in by cardinals. The room was stuffy, and one expected the smell of incense. In a small gold casket was a splinter of the True Cross. A sneeze disturbed him.

  Dr Winkler was the cleanest doctor Martins had ever seen. He was very small and neat, in a black tail-coat and a high stiff collar; his little black moustache was like an evening tie. He sneezed again: perhaps he was cold because he was so clean. He said, ‘Mr Martins?’

  An irresistible desire to sully Dr Winkler assailed Rollo Martins. He said, ‘Dr Winkle?’

  ‘Dr Winkler.’

  ‘You’ve got an interesting collection here.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘These saints’ bones …’

  ‘The bones of chickens and rabbits.’ Dr Winkler took a large white handkerchief out of his sleeve rather as though he were a conjurer producing his country’s flag, and blew his nose neatly and thoroughly twice, closing each nostril in turn. You expected him to throw away the handkerchief after one use. ‘Would you mind, Mr Martins, telling me the purpose of your visit? I have a patient waiting.’

  ‘We were both friends of Harry Lime.’

  ‘I was his medical adviser,’ Dr Winkler corrected him and waited obstinately between the crucifixes.

  ‘I arrived too late for the inquest. Harry had invited me out here to help him in something. I don’t quite know what. I didn’t hear of his death till I arrived.’

  ‘Very sad,’ Dr Winkler said.

  ‘Naturally, under the circumstances, I want to hear all I can.’

  ‘There is nothing I can tell you that you don’t know. He was knocked over by a car. He was dead when I arrived.’

  ‘Would he have been conscious at all?’

  ‘I understand he was for a short time, while they carried him into the house.’

  ‘In great pain?’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  ‘You are quite certain that it was an accident?’

  Dr Winkler put out a hand and straightened a crucifix. ‘I was not there. My opinion is limited to the cause of death. Have you any reason to be dissatisfied?’

  The amateur has another advantage over the professional: he can be reckless. He can tell unnecessary truths and propound wild theories. Martins said, ‘The police have implicated Harry in a very serious racket. It seemed to me that he might have been murdered – or even killed himself.’

  ‘I am not competent to pass an opinion,’ Dr Winkler said.

  ‘Do you know a man called Cooler?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘He was there when Harry was killed.’

  ‘Then of course I have met him. He wears a toupée.’

  ‘That was Kurtz.’

  Dr Winkler was not only the cleanest, he was also the most cautious doctor that Martins had ever met. His statements were so limited that you could not for a moment doubt their veracity. He said, ‘There was a second man there.’ If he had to diagnose a case of scarlet fever he would, you felt, have confined himself to a statement that a rash was visible, that the temperature was so and so. He would never find himself in error at an inquest.

  ‘Had you been Harry’s doctor for long?’ He seemed an odd man for Harry to choose – Harry who liked men with a certain recklessness, men capable of making mistakes.

  ‘For about a year.’

  ‘Well, it’s good of you to have seen me.’ Dr Winkler bowed. When he bowed there was a very slight creak as though his shirt were made of celluloid. ‘I mustn’t keep you from your patients any longer.’ Turning away from Dr Winkler, he confronted yet another crucifix, the figure hanging with arms above the head: a face of elongated El Greco agony. ‘That’s a strange crucifix,’ he said.

  ‘Jansenist,’ Dr Winkler commented and closed his mouth sharply as though he had been guilty of giving away too much information.

  ‘Never heard the word. Why are the arms above the head?’

  Dr Winkler said reluctantly, ‘Because He died, in their view, only for the elect.’

  Chapter 7

  AS I SEE it, turning over my files, the notes of conversations, the statements of various characters, it would have been still possible, at this moment, for Rollo Martins to have left Vienna safely. He had shown an unhealthy curiosity, but the disease had been checked at every point. Nobody had given anything away. The smooth wall of deception had as yet shown no real crack to his roaming fingers. When Rollo Martins left Dr Winkler’s he was in no danger. He could have gone home to bed at Sacher’s and slept with a quiet mind. He could even have visited Cooler at this stage without trouble. No one was seriously disturbed. Unfortunately for him – and there would always be periods of his life when he bitterly regretted it – he chose to go back to Harry’s flat. He wanted to talk to the little vexed man who said he had seen the accident – or had he really not said so much? There was a moment in the dark frozen street when he was inclined to go straight to Cooler, to complete his picture of those sinister birds who sat around Harry’s body, but Rollo, being Rollo, decided to toss a coin and the coin fell for the other action, and the deaths of two men.

  Perhaps the little man – who bore the name of Koch – had drunk a glass too much of wine, perhaps he had simply spent a good day at the office, but this time, when Rollo Martins rang his bell, he was friendly and quite ready to talk. He had just finished dinner and had crumbs on his moustache. ‘Ah, I remember you. You are Herr Lime’s friend.’

  He welcomed Martins in with great cordiality and introduced him to a mountainous wife whom he obviously kept under very strict control. ‘Ah, in the old days, I would have offered you a cup of coffee, but now –’

  Martins passed round his cigarette case and the atmosphere of cordiality deepened. ‘When you came yesterday I was a little abrupt,’ Herr Koch said, ‘but I had a touch
of migraine and my wife was out, so I had to answer the door myself.’

  ‘Did you tell me that you had actually seen the accident?’

  Herr Koch exchanged glances with his wife. ‘The inquest is over, Ilse. There is no harm. You can trust my judgement. The gentleman is a friend. Yes, I saw the accident, but you are the only one who knows. When I say that I saw it, perhaps I should say that I heard it. I heard the brakes put on and the sound of the skid, and I got to the window in time to see them carry the body to the house.’

  ‘But didn’t you give evidence?’

  ‘It is better not to be mixed up in such things. My office cannot spare me. We are short of staff, and of course I did not actually see –’

  ‘But you told me yesterday how it happened.’

  ‘That was how they described it in the papers.’

  ‘Was he in great pain?’

  ‘He was dead. I looked right down from my window here and I saw his face. I know when a man is dead. You see, it is, in a way, my business. I am the head clerk at the mortuary.’

  ‘But the others say that he did not die at once.’

  ‘Perhaps they don’t know death as well as I do.’

  ‘He was dead, of course, when the doctor arrived. He told me that.’

  ‘He was dead at once. You can take the word of a man who knows.’

  ‘I think, Herr Koch, that you should have given evidence.’

  ‘One must look after oneself, Herr Martins. I was not the only one who should have been there.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘There were three people who helped to carry your friend to the house.’

  ‘I know – two men and the driver.’

  ‘The driver stayed where he was. He was very much shaken, poor man.’

  ‘Three men …’ It was as though suddenly, fingering that bare wall, his fingers had encountered, not so much a crack perhaps, but at least a roughness that had not been smoothed away by the careful builders.

  ‘Can you describe the men?’

  But Herr Koch was not trained to observe the living: only the man with the toupée had attracted his eyes – the other two were just men, neither tall nor short, thick nor thin. He had seen them from far above, foreshortened, bent over their burden; they had not looked up, and he had quickly looked away and closed the window, realizing at once the wisdom of not being seen himself.

  ‘There was no evidence I could really give, Herr Martins.’

  No evidence, Martins thought, no evidence! He no longer doubted that murder had been done. Why else had they lied about the moment of death? They wanted to quieten with their gifts of money and their plane ticket the only two friends Harry had in Vienna. And the third man? Who was he?

  He said, ‘Did you see Herr Lime go out?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you hear a scream?’

  ‘Only the brakes, Herr Martins.’

  It occurred to Martins that there was nothing – except the word of Kurtz and Cooler and the driver – to prove that in fact Harry had been killed at that precise moment. There was the medical evidence, but that could not prove more than that he had died, say, within a half-hour, and in any case the medical evidence was only as strong as Dr Winkler’s word: that clean controlled man creaking among his crucifixes.

  ‘Herr Martins, it just occurs to me – you are staying in Vienna?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If you need accommodation and spoke to the authorities quickly, you might secure Herr Lime’s flat. It is a requisitioned property.’

  ‘Who has the keys?’

  ‘I have them.’

  ‘Could I see the flat?’

  ‘Ilse, the keys.’

  Herr Koch led the way into the flat that had been Harry’s. In the little dark hall there was still the smell of cigarette smoke – the Turkish cigarettes that Harry always smoked. It seemed odd that a man’s smell should cling in the folds of a curtain so long after the man himself had become dead matter, a gas, a decay. One light, in a heavily beaded shade, left them in semi-darkness, fumbling for door handles.

  The living-room was completely bare – it seemed to Martins too bare. The chairs had been pushed up against the walls; the desk at which Harry must have written was free from dust or any papers. The parquet reflected the light like a mirror. Herr Koch opened a door and showed the bedroom: the bed neatly made with clean sheets. In the bathroom not even a used razor blade indicated that a few days ago a living man had occupied it. Only the dark hall and the cigarette smell gave a sense of occupation.

  ‘You see,’ Herr Koch said, ‘it is quite ready for a newcomer. Ilse has cleaned up.’

  That she certainly had done. After a death there should have been more litter left than this. A man can’t go suddenly and unexpectedly on his longest journey without forgetting this or that, without leaving a bill unpaid, an official form unanswered, the photograph of a girl. ‘Were there no papers, Herr Koch?’

  ‘Herr Lime was always a very tidy man. His waste-paper basket was full and his brief-case, but his friend fetched that away.’

  ‘His friend?’

  ‘The gentleman with the toupée.’

  It was possible, of course, that Lime had not taken the journey so unexpectedly, and it occurred to Martins that Lime had perhaps hoped he would arrive in time to help. He said to Herr Koch, ‘I believe my friend was murdered.’

  ‘Murdered?’ Herr Koch’s cordiality was snuffed out by the word. He said, ‘I would not have asked you in here if I had thought you would talk such nonsense.’

  ‘Why should it be nonsense?’

  ‘We do not have murders in this zone.’

  ‘All the same, your evidence may be very valuable.’

  ‘I have no evidence. I saw nothing. I am not concerned. You must leave here at once, please. You have been very inconsiderate.’ He hustled Martins back through the hall; already the smell of the smoke was fading a little more. Herr Koch’s last word before he slammed his own door was, ‘It’s no concern of mine.’ Poor Herr Koch! We do not choose our concerns. Later, when I was questioning Martins closely, I said to him, ‘Did you see anybody at all on the stairs, or in the street outside?’

  ‘Nobody.’ He had everything to gain by remembering some chance passer-by, and I believed him. He said, ‘I noticed myself how quiet and dead the whole street looked. Part of it had been bombed, you know, and the moon was shining on the snow slopes. It was so very silent. I could hear my own feet creaking in the snow.’

  ‘Of course, it proves nothing. There is a basement where anybody who had followed you could have hidden.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Or your whole story may be phoney.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The trouble is I can see no motive for you to have done it. It’s true you are already guilty of getting money on false pretences. You came out here to join Lime, perhaps to help him …’

  Martins said to me, ‘What was this precious racket you keep on hinting at?’

  ‘I’d have told you all the facts when I first saw you if you hadn’t lost your temper so damned quickly. Now I don’t think I shall be acting wisely to tell you. It would be disclosing official information, and your contacts, you know, don’t inspire confidence. A girl with phoney papers supplied by Lime, this man Kurtz …’

  ‘Dr Winkler …’

  ‘I’ve got nothing against Dr Winkler. No, if you are phoney, you don’t need the information, but it might help you to learn exactly what we know. You see, our facts are not complete.’

  ‘I bet they aren’t. I could invent a better detective than you in my bath.’

  ‘Your literary style does not do your namesake justice.’ Whenever he was reminded of Mr Crabbin, that poor harassed representative of the British Council, Rollo Martins turned pink, with annoyance, embarrassment, shame. That too inclined me to trust him.

  He had certainly given Crabbin some uncomfortable hours. On returning to Sacher’s Hotel after his interview with Herr Koch he h
ad found a desperate note waiting for him from the representative.

  ‘I have been trying to locate you all day.’ Crabbin wrote. ‘It is essential that we should get together and work out a proper programme for you. This morning by telephone I have arranged lectures at Innsbruck and Salzburg for next week, but I must have your consent to the subjects, so that proper programmes can be printed. I would suggest two lectures: “The Crisis of Faith in the Western World” (you are very respected here as a Christian writer, but this lecture should be quite unpolitical and no references should be made to Russia or Communism) and “The Technique of the Contemporary Novel”. The same lectures would be given in Vienna. Apart from this, there are a great many people here who would like to meet you, and I want to arrange a cocktail party for early next week. But for all this I must have a few words with you.’ The letter ended on a note of acute anxiety. ‘You will be at the discussion tomorrow night, won’t you? We all expect you at 8.30 and, needless to say, look forward to your coming. I will send transport to the hotel at 8.15 sharp.’

  Rollo Martins read the letter and, without bothering any further about Mr Crabbin, went to bed.

  Chapter 8

  AFTER TWO DRINKS Rollo Martins’ mind would always turn towards women – in a vague, sentimental, romantic way, as a sex, in general. After three drinks, like a pilot who dives to find direction, he would begin to focus on one available girl. If he had not been offered a third drink by Cooler, he would probably not have gone quite so soon to Anna Schmidt’s house, and if – but there are too many ‘ifs’ in my style of writing, for it is my profession to balance possibilities, human possibilities, and the drive of destiny can never find a place in my files.

  Martins had spent his lunch-time reading up the reports of the inquest, thus again demonstrating the superiority of the amateur to the professional, and making him more vulnerable to Cooler’s liquor (which the professional in duty bound would have refused). It was nearly five o’clock when he reached Cooler’s flat, which was over an ice-cream parlour in the American zone: the bar below was full of G.I.s with their girls, and the clatter of the long spoons and the curious free unformed laughter followed him up the stairs.