The Third Man and the Fallen Idol

by Graham Greene

  The Englishman who objects to Americans in general usually carries in his mind’s eye just such an exception as Cooler: a man with tousled grey hair and a worried kindly face and long-sighted eyes, the kind of humanitarian who turns up in a typhus epidemic or a world war or a Chinese famine long before his countrymen have discovered the place in an atlas. Again the card marked ‘Harry’s friend’ was like an entrance ticket. Cooler was in officer’s uniform, with mysterious letters on his flash, and no badges of rank, although his maid referred to him as Colonel Cooler. His warm frank handclasp was the most friendly act that Martins had encountered in Vienna.

  ‘Any friend of Harry is all right with me,’ Cooler said. ‘I’ve heard of you, of course.’

  ‘From Harry?’

  ‘I’m a great reader of Westerns,’ Cooler said, and Martins believed him as he did not believe Kurtz.

  ‘I wondered – you were there, weren’t you? – if you’d tell me about Harry’s death.’

  ‘It was a terrible thing,’ Cooler said. ‘I was just crossing the road to go to Harry. He and Mr Kurtz were on the sidewalk. Maybe if I hadn’t started across the road, he’d have stayed where he was. But he saw me and stepped straight off to meet me and this jeep – it was terrible, terrible. The driver braked, but he didn’t stand a chance. Have a Scotch, Mr Martins. It’s silly of me, but I get shaken up when I think of it.’ He said as he splashed in the soda, ‘In spite of this uniform, I’d never seen a man killed before.’

  ‘Was the other man in the car?’

  Cooler took a long pull and then measured what was left with his tired kindly eyes. ‘What man would you be referring to, Mr Martins?’

  ‘I was told there was another man there.’

  ‘I don’t know how you got that idea. You’ll find all about it in the inquest reports.’ He poured out two more generous drinks. ‘There were just the three of us – me and Mr Kurtz and the driver. The doctor, of course. I expect you were thinking of the doctor.’

  ‘This man I was talking to happened to look out of a window – he has the next flat to Harry’s – and he said he saw three men and the driver. That’s before the doctor arrived.’

  ‘He didn’t say that in court.’

  ‘He didn’t want to get involved.’

  ‘You’ll never teach these Europeans to be good citizens. It was his duty.’ Cooler brooded sadly over his glass. ‘It’s an odd thing, Mr Martins, with accidents. You’ll never get two reports that coincide. Why, even Mr Kurtz and I disagreed about details. The thing happens so suddenly, you aren’t concerned to notice things, until bang crash, and then you have to reconstruct, remember. I expect he got too tangled up trying to sort out what happened before and what after, to distinguish the four of us.’

  ‘The four?’

  ‘I was counting Harry. What else did he see, Mr Martins?’

  ‘Nothing of interest – except he says Harry was dead when he was carried to the house.’

  ‘Well, he was dying – not much difference there. Have another drink, Mr Martins?’

  ‘No, I don’t think I will.’

  ‘Well, I’d like another spot. I was very fond of your friend, Mr Martins, and I don’t like talking about it.’

  ‘Perhaps one more – to keep you company. Do you know Anna Schmidt?’ Martins asked, while the whisky tingled on his tongue.

  ‘Harry’s girl? I met her once, that’s all. As a matter of fact, I helped Harry fix her papers. Not the sort of thing I should confess to a stranger, I suppose, but you have to break the rules sometimes. Humanity’s a duty too.’

  ‘What was wrong?’

  ‘She was Hungarian and her father had been a Nazi, so they said. She was scared the Russians would pick her up.’

  ‘Why should they want to?’

  ‘We can’t always figure out why they do these things. Perhaps just to show that it’s not healthy being friends with an Englishman.’

  ‘But she lives in the British zone.’

  ‘That wouldn’t stop them. It’s only five minutes’ ride in a jeep from the Commandatura. The streets aren’t well lighted, and you haven’t many police around.’

  ‘You took her some money from Harry, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, but I wouldn’t have mentioned that. Did she tell you?’

  The telephone rang, and Cooler drained his glass. ‘Hullo,’ he said. ‘Why, yes. This is Colonel Cooler.’ Then he sat with the receiver at his ear and an expression of sad patience, while some voice a long way off drained into the room. ‘Yes,’ he said once. ‘Yes.’ His eyes dwelt on Martins’ face, but they seemed to be looking a long way beyond him: flat and tired and kind, they might have been gazing out across the sea. He said, ‘You did quite right,’ in a tone of commendation, and then, with a touch of asperity, ‘Of course they will be delivered. I gave my word. Good-bye.’

  He put the receiver down and passed a hand across his forehead wearily. It was as though he were trying to remember something he had to do. Martins said, ‘Had you heard anything of this racket the police talk about?’

  ‘I’m sorry. What’s that?’

  ‘They say Harry was mixed up in some racket.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Cooler said. ‘No. That’s quite impossible. He had a great sense of duty.’

  ‘Kurtz seemed to think it was possible.’

  ‘Kurtz doesn’t understand how an Anglo-Saxon feels,’ Cooler replied.

  Chapter 9

  IT WAS NEARLY dark when Martins made his way along the banks of the canal: across the water lay the half-destroyed Diana baths and in the distance the great black circle of the Prater Wheel, stationary above the ruined houses. Over there across the grey water was the Second Bezirk, in Russian ownership. St Stephanskirche shot its enormous wounded spire into the sky above the Inner City, and, coming up the Kärntnerstrasse, Martins passed the lit door of the Military Police station. The four men of the International Patrol were climbing into their jeep; the Russian M.P. sat beside the driver (for the Russians had that day taken over the chair for the next four weeks) and the Englishman, the Frenchman, and the American mounted behind. The third stiff whisky fumed into Martins’ brain, and he remembered the girl in Amsterdam, the girl in Paris; loneliness moved along the crowded pavement at his side. He passed the corner of the street where Sacher’s lay and went on. Rollo was in control and moved towards the only girl he knew in Vienna.

  I asked him how he knew where she lived. Oh, he said, he’d looked up the address she had given him the night before, in bed, studying a map. He wanted to know his way about, and he was good with maps. He could memorize turnings and street names easily because he always went one way on foot.

  ‘One way?’

  ‘I mean when I’m calling on a girl – or someone.’

  He hadn’t, of course, known that she would be in, that her play was not on that night in the Josefstadt, or perhaps he had memorized that too from the posters. In at any rate she was, if you could really call it being in, sitting alone in an unheated room, with the bed disguised as a divan, and a typewritten script lying open at the first page on the inadequate too-fancy topply table – because her thoughts were so far from being ‘in’. He said awkwardly (and nobody could have said, not even Rollo, how much his awkwardness was part of his technique), ‘I thought I’d just look in and look you up. You see, I was passing …’

  ‘Passing? Where to?’ It had been a good half an hour’s walk from the Inner City to the rim of the English zone, but he always had a reply. ‘I had too much whisky with Colonel Cooler. I needed a walk and I just happened to find myself this way.’

  ‘I can’t give you a drink here. Except tea. There’s some of that packet left.’

  ‘No, no thank you.’ He said, ‘You are busy,’ looking at the script.

  ‘I didn’t get beyond the first line.’

  He picked it up and read: ‘Enter Louise. LOUISE: I heard a child crying.’

  ‘Can I stay a little?’ he asked with a gentleness that was more Martins than Ro
llo.

  ‘I wish you would.’ He slumped down on the divan, and he told me a long time later (for lovers reconstruct the smallest details if they can find a listener) that then it was he took his second real look at her. She stood there as awkward as himself in a pair of old flannel trousers which had been patched badly in the seat; she stood with her legs firmly straddled as though she were opposing someone and was determined to hold her ground – a small rather stocky figure with any grace she had folded and put away for use professionally.

  ‘One of those bad days?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s always bad about this time.’ She explained, ‘He used to look in, and when I heard you ring, just for a moment, I thought …’ She sat down on a hard chair opposite him and said, ‘Please talk. You knew him. Just tell me anything.’

  And so he talked. The sky blackened outside the window while he talked. He noticed after a while that their hands had met. He said to me, ‘I never meant to fall in love, not with Harry’s girl.’

  ‘When did it happen?’ I asked him.

  ‘It was very cold and I got up to close the window curtains. I only noticed my hand was on hers when I took it away. As I stood up I looked down at her face and she was looking up. It wasn’t a beautiful face – that was the trouble. It was a face to live with, day in, day out. A face for wear. I felt as though I’d come into a new country where I couldn’t speak the language. I had always thought it was beauty one loved in a woman. I stood there at the curtains, waiting to pull them, looking out. I couldn’t see anything but my own face, looking back into the room, looking for her. She said, “And what did Harry do that time?” and I wanted to say. “Damn Harry. He’s dead. We both loved him, but he’s dead. The dead are made to be forgotten.” Instead, of course, all I said was, “What do you think? He just whistled his old tune as if nothing was the matter,” and I whistled it to her as well as I could. I heard her catch her breath, and I looked round and before I could think: Is this the right way, the right card, the right gambit? – I’d already said, “He’s dead. You can’t go on remembering him for ever.”’

  She said, ‘I know, but perhaps something will happen first.’

  ‘What do you mean – something happen?’

  ‘Oh, I mean perhaps there’ll be another war, or I’ll die, or the Russians will take me.’

  ‘You’ll forget him in time. You’ll fall in love again.’

  ‘I know, but I don’t want to. Don’t you see I don’t want to?’

  So Rollo Martins came back from the window and sat down on the divan again. When he had risen half a minute before he had been the friend of Harry, comforting Harry’s girl; now he was a man in love with Anna Schmidt who had been in love with a man they had both once known called Harry Lime. He didn’t speak again that evening about the past. Instead he began to tell her of the people he had seen. ‘I can believe anything of Winkler,’ he told her, ‘but Cooler – I liked Cooler. He was the only one of his friends who stood up for Harry. The trouble is, if Cooler’s right, then Koch is wrong, and I really thought I had something there.’

  ‘Who’s Koch?’

  He explained how he had returned to Harry’s flat and he described his interview with Koch, the story of the third man.

  ‘If it’s true,’ she said, ‘it’s very important.’

  ‘It doesn’t prove anything. After all, Koch backed out of the inquest; so might this stranger.’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ she said. ‘It means that they lied: Kurtz and Cooler.’

  ‘They might have lied so as not to inconvenience this fellow – if he was a friend.’

  ‘Yet another friend – on the spot. And where’s your Cooler’s honesty then?’

  ‘What do we do? Koch clamped down like an oyster and turned me out of his flat.’

  ‘He won’t turn me out,’ she said, ‘or his Ilse won’t.’

  They walked up the long road to the flat together; the snow clogged on their shoes and made them move slowly like convicts weighed down by irons. Anna Schmidt said, ‘Is it far?’

  ‘Not very far now. Do you see that knot of people up the road? It’s somewhere about there.’ The group was like a splash of ink on the whiteness, a splash that flowed, changed shape, spread out. When they came a little nearer Martins said, ‘I think that’s his block. What do you suppose this is, a political demonstration?’

  Anna Schmidt stopped. She said, ‘Who else have you told about Koch?’

  ‘Only you and Colonel Cooler. Why?’

  ‘I’m frightened. It reminds me …’ She had her eyes fixed on the crowd and he never knew what memory out of her confused past had risen to warn her. ‘Let’s go away,’ she implored him.

  ‘You’re crazy. We’re on to something here, something big …’

  ‘I’ll wait for you.’

  ‘But you’re going to talk to him.’

  ‘Find out first what all those people …’ She said, strangely for one who worked behind the footlights, ‘I hate crowds.’

  He walked slowly on alone, the snow caking on his heels. It wasn’t a political meeting, for no one was making a speech. He had the impression of heads turning to watch him come, as though he were somebody who was expected. When he reached the fringe of the little crowd, he knew for certain that it was the house. A man looked hard at him and said, ‘Are you another of them?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The police.’

  ‘No. What are they doing?’

  ‘They’ve been in and out all day.’

  ‘What’s everybody waiting for?’

  ‘They want to see him brought out.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Herr Koch.’ It occurred to Martins that somebody besides himself had discovered Herr Koch’s failure to give evidence, though that was hardly a police matter. He said, ‘What’s he done?’

  ‘Nobody knows that yet. They can’t make their minds up in there – it might be suicide, you see, and it might be murder.’

  ‘Herr Koch?’

  ‘Of course.’

  A small child came up to his informant and pulled at his hand. ‘Papa, Papa.’ He wore a wool cap on his head, like a gnome; his face was pinched and blue with cold.

  ‘Yes, my dear, what is it?’

  ‘I heard them talking through the grating, Papa.’

  ‘Oh, you cunning little one. Tell us what you heard, Hansel.’

  ‘I heard Frau Koch crying, Papa.’

  ‘Was that all, Hansel?’

  ‘No. I heard the big man talking, Papa.’

  ‘Ah, you cunning little Hansel. Tell Papa what he said.’

  ‘He said. “Can you tell me, Frau Koch, what the foreigner looked like?”’

  ‘Ha, ha, you see, they think it’s murder. And who’s to say they are wrong? Why should Herr Koch cut his own throat in the basement?’

  ‘Papa, Papa.’

  ‘Yes, little Hansel?’

  ‘When I looked through the grating, I could see some blood on the coke.’

  ‘What a child you are. How could you tell it was blood? The snow leaks everywhere.’ The man turned to Martins and said, ‘The child has such an imagination. Maybe he will be a writer when he grows up.’

  The pinched face stared solemnly up at Martins. The child said, ‘Papa.’

  ‘Yes, Hansel?’

  ‘He’s a foreigner too.’

  The man gave a big laugh that caused a dozen heads to turn. ‘Listen to him, sir, listen,’ he said proudly. ‘He thinks you did it just because you are a foreigner. As though there weren’t more foreigners here these days than Viennese.’

  ‘Papa, Papa.’

  ‘Yes, Hansel?’

  ‘They are coming out.’

  A knot of police surrounded the covered stretcher which they lowered carefully down the steps for fear of sliding on the trodden snow. The man said, ‘They can’t get an ambulance into this street because of the ruins. They have to carry it round the corner.’ Frau Koch came out at the tail of the procession;
she had a shawl over her head and an old sack-cloth coat. Her thick shape looked like a snowman as she sank in a drift at the pavement’s edge. Someone gave her a hand and she looked round with a lost hopeless gaze at this crowd of strangers. If there were friends there she did not recognize them, looking from face to face. Martins bent as she passed, fumbling at his shoelace, but looking up from the ground he saw at his own eyes’ level the scrutinizing cold-blooded gnome-gaze of little Hansel.

  Walking back down the street towards Anna, he looked back once. The child was pulling at his father’s hand and he could see the lips forming round those syllables like the refrain of a grim ballad, ‘Papa, Papa.’

  He said to Anna, ‘Koch has been murdered. Come away from here.’ He walked as rapidly as the snow would let him, turning this corner and that. The child’s suspicion and alertness seemed to spread like a cloud over the city – they could not walk fast enough to evade its shadow. He paid no attention when Anna said to him, ‘Then what Koch said was true. There was a third man,’ nor a little later when she said, ‘It must have been murder. You don’t kill a man to hide anything less.’

  The tramcars flashed like icicles at the end of the street: they were back at the Ring. Martins said, ‘You had better go home alone. I’ll keep away from you awhile till things have sorted out.’

  ‘But nobody can suspect you.’

  ‘They are asking about the foreigner who called on Koch yesterday. There may be some unpleasantness for a while.’

  ‘Why don’t you go to the police?’

  ‘They are so stupid. I don’t trust them. See what they’ve pinned on Harry. And then I tried to hit this man Callaghan. They’ll have it in for me. The least they’ll do is send me away from Vienna. But if I stay quiet – there’s only one person who can give me away. Cooler.’

  ‘And he won’t want to.’

  ‘Not if he’s guilty. But then I can’t believe he’s guilty.’

  Before she left him, she said, ‘Be careful. Koch knew so very little and they murdered him. You know as much as Koch.’

  The warning stayed in his brain all the way to Sacher’s: after nine o’clock the streets are very empty, and he would turn his head at every padding step coming up the street behind him, as though that third man whom they had protected so ruthlessly were following him like an executioner. The Russian sentry outside the Grand Hotel looked rigid with the cold, but he was human, he had a face, an honest peasant face with Mongol eyes. The third man had no face: only the top of a head seen from a window. At Sacher’s Mr Schmidt said, ‘Colonel Calloway has been in, asking for you, sir. I think you’ll find him in the bar.’