IT WAS NEARLY dark when Martins made his way along the banks of the canaclass="underline" 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. Stefanskirche shot its enormous wounded spire into the sky above the Inner City, and coming up the Kartnerstrasse 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 memorise 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 memorised 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 divan, and the typewritten part 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 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 if 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 Rollo.
“I wish you would.” He slumped down on the divan, and he told me a long time later (for lovers talk and reconstruct the smallest details if they can find a listener) that there 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 your 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 way, or I’ll die, or something.”
“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 girclass="underline" 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? He 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 of people up the road was like a splash of ink on the whiteness that flowed, changed shape, spread out. When they came a little nearer Martins said, “I think that is 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 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?”