The Third Man (3 page)

       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 a 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 to Santa F??"

       "No, 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. I wouldn't be surprised if Lime had not 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 realised 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 as this how could he recognise 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. Then 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."

       "Wouldn'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 was 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 Old Vienna in the Kartnerstrasse? 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 had died instantaneously—or without pain, was it? or had he himself put the words into Callaghan's mouth? It was then that 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.

4

WHAT I DISLIKED about him at first sight," Martins told me, "was his toupee. It was one of those obvious toupees—flat and yellow, with the hair cut straight at the back and not fitting close. There must be something phony 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. 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 my office in the driving snow.

       "Something pretty?"

       He brought his gaze back and said, "I'm off that for ever. You know,? alloway, 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 life-time."

       "You were telling me about Kurtz," I said.

       It appeared that Kurtz was sitting there, making a great show of reading The Lone Rider from Santa F?. 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."

       "The police meant something worse than that."

       "They get rather absurd ideas sometimes," the man with the toupee said cautiously.

       "I'm going to stay here till I prove them wrong."

       Kurtz turned his head sharply and the toupee 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 halfway 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 realised that after all Kurtz had not been unaffected by his wild statement: hadn't he 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 finished his coffee as though nothing had been said.