‘Is he in a racket, too, then?’
‘Not a very serious one. I daresay he’s salted away twenty-five thousand dollars. But I’m not a good citizen. Let the Americans look after their own people.’
‘I’m damned.’ He said thoughtfully, ‘Is that the kind of thing Harry was up to?’
‘No. It was not so harmless.’
He said, ‘You know, this business – Koch’s death – has shaken me. Perhaps Harry did get mixed up in something bad. Perhaps he was trying to clear out again, and that’s why they murdered him.’
‘Or perhaps,’ I said, ‘they wanted a bigger cut of the spoils. Thieves fall out.’
He took it this time without any anger at all. He said, ‘We won’t agree about motives, but I think you check your facts pretty well. I’m sorry about the other day.’
‘That’s all right.’ There are times when one has to make a flash decision – this was one of them. I owed him something in return for the information he had given me. I said, ‘I’ll show you enough of the facts in Lime’s case for you to understand. But don’t fly off the handle. It’s going to be a shock.’
It couldn’t help being a shock. The war and the peace (if you can call it peace) let loose a great number of rackets, but none more vile than this one. The black marketeers in food did at least supply food and the same applied to all the other racketeers who provided articles in short supply at extravagant prices. But the penicillin racket was a different affair altogether. Penicillin in Austria was supplied only to the military hospitals; no civilian doctor, not even a civilian hospital, could obtain it by legal means. As the racket started, it was relatively harmless. Penicillin would be stolen by military orderlies and sold to Austrian doctors for very high sums – a phial would fetch anything up to seventy pounds. You might say that this was a form of distribution – unfair distribution because it benefited only the rich patient, but the original distribution could hardly have a claim to greater fairness.
This racket went on quite happily for a while. Occasionally an orderly was caught and punished, but the danger simply raised the price of penicillin. Then the racket began to get organized: the big men saw big money in it, and while the original thief got less for his spoils, he received instead a certain security. If anything happened to him he would be looked after. Human nature too has curious twisted reasons that the heart certainly knows nothing of. It eased the conscience of many small men to feel that they were working for an employer: they were almost as respectable soon in their own eyes as wage-earners; they were one of a group, and if there was guilt, the leaders bore the guilt. A racket works very like a totalitarian party.
This I have sometimes called stage two. Stage three was when the organizers decided that the profits were not large enough. Penicillin would not always be impossible to obtain legitimately; they wanted more money and quicker money while the going was good. They began to dilute the penicillin with coloured water, and, in the case of penicillin dust, with sand. I keep a small museum in one drawer in my desk, and I showed Martins examples. He wasn’t enjoying the talk, but he hadn’t yet grasped the point. He said, ‘I suppose that makes the stuff useless.’
I said, ‘We wouldn’t worry so much if that was all, but just consider. You can be immunized from the effects of penicillin. At the best you can say that the use of this stuff makes a penicillin treatment for the particular patient ineffective in the future. That isn’t so funny, of course, if you are suffering from V.D. Then the use of sand on a wound that requires penicillin – well, it’s not healthy. Men have lost their legs and arms that way – and their lives. But perhaps what horrified me most was visiting the children’s hospital here. They had bought some of this penicillin for use against meningitis. A number of children simply died, and a number went off their heads. You can see them now in the mental ward.’
He sat on the other side of the desk, scowling into his hands. I said, ‘It doesn’t bear thinking about very closely, does it?’
‘You haven’t showed me any evidence yet that Harry –’
‘We are coming to that now,’ I said. ‘Just sit still and listen.’ I opened Lime’s file and began to read. At the beginning the evidence was purely circumstantial, and Martins fidgeted. So much consisted of coincidence – reports from agents that Lime had been at a certain place at a certain time; the accumulation of opportunities; his acquaintance with certain people. He protested once, ‘But the same evidence would apply against me – now.’
‘Just wait,’ I said. For some reason Harry Lime had grown careless: he may have realized that we suspected him and got rattled. He held a quite distinguished position in the Relief Organization, and a man like that is the more easily rattled. We put one of our agents as an orderly in the British Military Hospital: we knew by this time the name of our go-between, but we had never succeeded in getting the line right back to the source. Anyway, I am not going to bother the reader now, as I bothered Martins then, with all the stages – the long tussle to win the confidence of the go-between, a man called Harbin. At last we had the screws on Harbin, and we twisted them until he squealed. This kind of police work is very similar to secret service work: you look for a double agent whom you can really control, and Harbin was the man for us. But even he only led us as far as Kurtz.
‘Kurtz!’ Martins exclaimed. ‘But why haven’t you pulled him in?’
‘Zero hour is almost here,’ I said.
Kurtz was a great step forward, for Kurtz was in direct communication with Lime – he had a small outside job in connection with international relief. With Kurtz, Lime sometimes put things on paper – if he was pressed. I showed Martins the photostat of a note. ‘Can you identify that?’
‘It’s Harry’s hand.’ He read it through. ‘I don’t see anything wrong.’
‘No, but now read this note from Harbin to Kurtz – which we dictated. Look at the date. This is the result.’
He read them both through twice.
‘You see what I mean?’ If one watched a world come to an end, a plane dive from its course, I don’t suppose one would chatter, and a world for Martins had certainly come to an end, a world of easy friendship, hero-worship, confidence that had begun twenty years before in a school corridor. Every memory – afternoons in the long grass, the illegitimate shoots on Brickworth Common, the dreams, the walks, every shared experience – was simultaneously tainted, like the soil of an atomized town. One could not walk there with safety for a long while. While he sat there, looking at his hands and saying nothing, I fetched a precious bottle of whisky out of a cupboard and poured out two large doubles. ‘Go on,’ I said, ‘drink that,’ and he obeyed me as though I were his doctor. I poured him out another.
He said slowly, ‘Are you certain that he was the real boss?’
‘It’s as far back as we have got so far.’
‘You see, he was always apt to jump before he looked.’
I didn’t contradict him, though that wasn’t the impression he had before given of Lime. He was searching round for some comfort.
‘Suppose,’ he said, ‘someone had got a line on him, forced him into this racket, as you forced Harbin to double-cross …’
‘It’s possible.’
‘And they murdered him in case he talked when he was arrested.’
‘It’s not impossible.’
‘I’m glad they did,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t have liked to hear Harry squeal.’ He made a curious little dusting movement with his hand on his knee as much as to say, ‘That’s that.’ He said, ‘I’ll be getting back to England.’
‘I’d rather you didn’t just yet. The Austrian police would make an issue if you tried to leave Vienna at the moment. You see, Cooler’s sense of duty made him call them up too.’
‘I see,’ he said hopelessly.
‘When we’ve found the third man …’ I said.
‘I’d like to hear him squeal,’ he said. ‘The bastard. The bloody bastard.’
Chapter 11
AFT
ER HE LEFT me, Martins went straight off to drink himself silly. He chose the Oriental to do it in, the dreary smoky little night club that stands behind a sham Eastern façade. The same semi-nude photographs on the stairs, the same half-drunk Americans at the bar, the same bad wine and extraordinary gins – he might have been in any third-rate night haunt in any other shabby capital of a shabby Europe. At one point of the hopeless early hours the International Patrol took a look at the scene, and a Russian soldier made a bolt for the stairs at the sight of them, moving with bent averted head like a small harvest animal. The Americans never stirred and nobody interfered with them. Martins had drink after drink; he would probably have had a woman too, but the cabaret performers had all gone home, and there were practically no women left in the place, except for one beautiful shrewd-looking French journalist who made one remark to her companion and fell contemptuously asleep.
Martins moved on: at Maxim’s a few couples were dancing rather gloomily, and at a place called Chez Victor the heating had failed and people sat in overcoats drinking cocktails. By this time the spots were swimming in front of Martins’ eyes, and he was oppressed by a sense of loneliness. His mind reverted to the girl in Dublin, and the one in Amsterdam. That was one thing that didn’t fool you – the straight drink, the simple physical act: one didn’t expect fidelity from a woman. His mind revolved in circles – from sentiment to lust and back again from belief to cynicism.
The trams had stopped, and he set out obstinately on foot to find Harry’s girl. He wanted to make love to her – just like that: no nonsense, no sentiment. He was in the mood for violence, and the snowy road heaved like a lake and set his mind on a new course towards sorrow, eternal love, renunciation. In the corner of a sheltering wall he was sick in the snow.
It must have been about three in the morning when he climbed the stairs to Anna’s room. He was nearly sober by that time and had only one idea in his head, that she must know about Harry too. He felt that somehow this knowledge would pay the mortmain that memory levies on human beings, and he would stand a chance with Harry’s girl. If you are in love yourself, it never occurs to you that the girl doesn’t know: you believe you have told it plainly in a tone of voice, the touch of a hand. When Anna opened the door to him, with astonishment at the sight of him tousled on the threshold, he never imagined that she was opening the door to a stranger.
He said, ‘Anna, I’ve found out everything.’
‘Come in,’ she said, ‘you don’t want to wake the house.’ She was in a dressing-gown; the divan had become a bed, the kind of tumbled bed that showed how sleepless the occupant had been.
‘Now,’ she said, while he stood there, fumbling for words, ‘what is it? I thought you were going to keep away. Are the police after you?’
‘No.’
‘You didn’t really kill that man, did you?’
‘Of course not.’
‘You’re drunk, aren’t you?’
‘I am a bit,’ he said sulkily. The meeting seemed to be going on the wrong lines. He said angrily, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Why? I would like a drink myself.’
He said, ‘I’ve been with the British police. They are satisfied I didn’t do it. But I’ve learned everything from them. Harry was in a racket – a bad racket.’ He said hopelessly, ‘He was no good at all. We were both wrong.’
‘You’d better tell me,’ Anna said. She sat down on the bed and he told her, swaying slightly beside the table where her typescript part still lay open at the first page. I imagine he told it to her pretty confusedly, dwelling chiefly on what had stuck most in his mind, the children dead with meningitis, and the children in the mental ward. He stopped and they were silent. She said, ‘Is that all?’
‘Yes.’
‘You were sober when they told you? They really proved it?’
‘Yes.’ He added drearily, ‘So that, you see, was Harry.’
‘I’m glad he’s dead now,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t have wanted him to rot for years in prison.’
‘But can you understand how Harry – your Harry, my Harry – could have got mixed up …?’ He said hopelessly, ‘I feel as though he had never really existed, that we’d dreamed him. Was he laughing at fools like us all the time?’
‘He may have been. What does it matter?’ she said. ‘Sit down. Don’t worry.’ He had pictured himself comforting her – not this other way about. She said, ‘If he was alive now, he might be able to explain, but we’ve got to remember him as he was to us. There are always so many things one doesn’t know about a person, even a person one loves – good things, bad things. We have to leave plenty of room for them.’
‘Those children –’
She said angrily, ‘For God’s sake stop making people in your image. Harry was real. He wasn’t just your hero and my lover. He was Harry. He was in a racket. He did bad things. What about it? He was the man we knew.’
He said, ‘Don’t talk such bloody wisdom. Don’t you see that I love you?’
She looked at him in astonishment. ‘You?’
‘Yes, me. I don’t kill people with fake drugs. I’m not a hypocrite who persuades people that I’m the greatest – I’m just a bad writer who drinks too much and falls in love with girls …’
She said, ‘But I don’t even know what colour your eyes are. If you’d rung me up just now and asked me whether you were dark or fair or wore a moustache, I wouldn’t have known.’
‘Can’t you get him out of your mind?’
‘No.’
He said, ‘As soon as they’ve cleared up this Koch murder, I’m leaving Vienna. I can’t feel interested any longer in whether Kurtz killed Harry – or the third man. Whoever killed him it was a kind of justice. Maybe I’d kill him myself under these circumstances. But you still love him. You love a cheat, a murderer.’
‘I loved a man,’ she said. ‘I told you – a man doesn’t alter because you find out more about him. He’s still the same man.’
‘I hate the way you talk. I’ve got a splitting headache, and you talk and talk …’
‘I didn’t ask you to come.’
‘You make me cross.’
Suddenly she laughed. She said, ‘You are so comic. You come here at three in the morning – a stranger – and say you love me. Then you get angry and pick a quarrel. What do you expect me to do – or say?’
‘I haven’t seen you laugh before. Do it again. I like it.’
‘There isn’t enough for two laughs,’ she said.
He took her by the shoulders and shook her gently. He said, ‘I’d make comic faces all day long. I’d stand on my head and grin at you between my legs. I’d learn a lot of jokes from the books on after-dinner speaking.’
‘Come away from the window. There are no curtains.’
‘There’s nobody to see.’ But automatically checking his statement, he wasn’t quite so sure: a long shadow that had moved, perhaps with the movement of clouds over the moon, was motionless again. He said, ‘You still love Harry, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Perhaps I do. I don’t know.’ He dropped his hands and said, ‘I’ll be pushing off.’
He walked rapidly away. He didn’t bother to see whether he was being followed, to check up on the shadow. But, passing by the end of a street, he happened to turn, and there just around the corner, pressed against a wall to escape notice, was a thick stocky figure. Martins stopped and stared. There was something familiar about that figure. Perhaps, he thought, I have grown unconsciously used to him during these last twenty-four hours; perhaps he is one of those who have so assiduously checked my movements. Martins stood there, twenty yards away, staring at the silent motionless figure in the dark street who stared back at him. A police spy, perhaps, or an agent of those other men, those men who had corrupted Harry first and then killed him – even possibly the third man?
It was not the face that was familiar, for he could not make out so much as the angle of the jaw; nor a movement, for the body was so still th
at he began to believe that the whole thing was an illusion caused by shadow. He called sharply, ‘Do you want anything?’ and there was no reply. He called again with the irascibility of drink, ‘Answer, can’t you,’ and an answer came, for a window curtain was drawn petulantly back by some sleeper he had awakened, and the light fell straight across the narrow street and lit up the features of Harry Lime.
Chapter 12
‘DO YOU BELIEVE in ghosts?’ Martins said to me.
‘Do you?’
‘I do now.’
‘I also believe that drunk men see things – sometimes rats, sometimes worse.’
He hadn’t come to me at once with his story – only the danger to Anna Schmidt tossed him back into my office, like something the sea had washed up, tousled, unshaven, haunted by an experience he couldn’t understand. He said, ‘If it had been just the face, I wouldn’t have worried. I’d been thinking about Harry, and I might easily have mistaken a stranger. The light was turned off again at once, you see. I only got one glimpse, and the man made off down the street – if he was a man. There was no turning for a long way, but I was so startled I gave him another thirty yards’ start. He came to one of those advertisement kiosks and for a moment moved out of sight. I ran after him. It only took me ten seconds to reach the kiosk, and he must have heard me running, but the strange thing was he never appeared again. I reached the kiosk. There wasn’t anybody there. The street was empty. He couldn’t have reached a doorway without my seeing him. He simply vanished.’
‘A natural thing for ghosts – or illusions.’
‘But I can’t believe I was as drunk as all that!’
‘What did you do then?’
‘I had to have another drink. My nerves were all in pieces.’
‘Didn’t that bring him back?’
‘No, but it sent me back to Anna’s.’
I think he would have been ashamed to come to me with his absurd story if it had not been for the attempt on Anna Schmidt. My theory, when he did tell me his story, was that there had been a watcher – though it was drink and hysteria that had pasted on the man’s face the features of Harry Lime. The watcher had noted his visit to Anna, and the member of the ring – the penicillin ring – had been warned by telephone. Events that night moved fast. You remember that Kurtz lived in the Russian zone – in the Second Bezirk to be exact, in a wide, empty, desolate street that runs down to the Prater Platz. A man like that had probably obtained his influential contacts. It was ruin for a Russian to be observed on very friendly terms with an American or an Englishman, but the Austrian was a potential ally – and in any case one doesn’t fear the influence of the ruined and defeated.
The Third Man and the Fallen Idol Page 8
