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.
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 one is in love oneself, it never occurs to one that the girl doesn’t know: one believes one has 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 rumbled 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 could do with a bit of 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 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 the 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 side-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 that 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.
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 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 newspaper 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 meeting him. He’d simply vanished.”