“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.
“Well,” he took another sip, “of course I wish you luck, though I don’t believe there’s anything to find. Just ask me for any help you want.”
“I want Cooler’s address.”
“Certainly. I’ll write it down for you. Here it is. In the American zone.”
“And yours?”
“I’ve already put it-underneath-in the Russian zone.”
He rose, giving one of his studied Viennese smiles, the charm carefully painted in with a fine brush in the little lines about the mouth and eyes. “Keep in touch,” he said, “and if you need help… but I still think you are very unwise.” He picked up The Lone Rider. “I’m so proud to have met you. A master of suspense,” and one hand smoothed the toupee, while another passing softly over the mouth brushed out the smile, as though it had never been.
MARTINS SAT on a hard chair just inside the stage door of the Josefstadt Theatre. He had sent up his card to Anna Schmidt after the matinee, marking it “a friend of Harry’s.” An arcade of little windows, with lace curtains and the lights going out one after another showed where the artists were packing up for home, for the cup of coffee without sugar, the roll without butter to sustain them for the evening performance. It was like a little street built indoors for a film set, but even indoors it was cold, even cold to a man in a heavy overcoat, so that Martins rose and walked up and down, underneath the little windows. He felt, he said, a little like a Romeo who wasn’t sure of Juliet’s balcony.
He had had time to think: he was calm now, Martins not Rollo was in the ascendant. When a light went out in one of the windows and an actress descended into the passage where he walked, he didn’t even turn to take a look. He was done with all that. He thought: Kurtz is right. They are all right. I’m behaving like a romantic fooclass="underline" I’ll just have a word with Anna Schmidt, a word of commiseration, and then I’ll pack and go. He had quite forgotten, he told me, the complication of Mr Crabbin.
A voice over his head called “Mr Martins,” and he looked up at the face that watched him from between the curtains a few feet above his head. It wasn’t beautiful, he firmly explained to me, when I accused him of once again mixing his drinks. Just an honest face with dark hair and eyes which in that light looked brown: a wide forehead, a large mouth which didn’t try to charm. No danger anywhere, it seemed to Rollo Martins, of that sudden reckless moment when the scent of hair or a hand against the side alters life. She said, “Will you come up, please? The second door on the right.”
There are some people, he explained to me carefully, whom one recognises instantaneously as friends. You can be at ease with them because you know that never, never will you be in danger. “That was Anna,” he said, and I wasn’t sure whether the past tense was deliberate or not.
Unlike most actress’s rooms this one was almost bare; no wardrobe packed with clothes, no clutter of cosmetics and grease paints: a dressing gown on the door, one sweater he recognised from Act II on the only easy chair, a tin of half used paints and grease. A kettle hummed softly on a gas ring. She said, “Would you like a cup of tea? Someone sent me a packet last week-sometimes the Americans do, instead of flowers, you know, on the first night.”
“I’d like a cup,” he said, but if there was one thing he hated it was tea. He watched her while she made it, made it, of course, all wrong: the water not on the boil, the teapot unheated, too few leaves. She said, “I never quite understand why English people like tea so.”
He drank his cupful quickly like a medicine and watched her gingerly and delicately sip at hers. He said, “I wanted very much to see you. About Harry.”
It was the dreadful moment: he would see her mouth stiffen to meet it.
“Yes?”
“I had known him twenty years. I was his friend. We were at school together, you know, and after that-there weren’t many months running when we didn’t meet…”
She said, “When I got your card, I couldn’t say no. But there’s nothing really for us to talk about, is there?—nothing.”
“I wanted to hear…”
“He’s dead. That’s the end. Everything’s over, finished. What’s the good of talking?”
“We both loved him.”
“I don’t know. You can’t know a thing like that-afterwards. I don’t know anything any more except-“
“Except?”
“That I want to be dead too.”
Martins told me, “Then I nearly went away. What was the good of tormenting her because of this wild idea of mine? But instead I asked her one question. ‘Do you know a man called Cooler?’”
“An American?” she asked. “I think that was the man who brought me some money when Harry died. I didn’t want to take it, but he said Harry had been anxious-at the last moment.”
“So he didn’t die instantaneously?”
“Oh, no.”
Martins said to me, “I began to wonder why I had got that idea so firmly into my head, and then I thought it was only the man in the flat who told me so… no one else. I said to her, ‘He must have been very clear in his head at the end-because he remembered about me too. That seems to show that there wasn’t really any pain.’”
“That’s what I tell myself all the time.”
“Did you see the doctor?”
“Once. Harry sent me to him. He was Harry’s own doctor. He lived nearby, you see.”
Martins suddenly saw in that odd chamber of the mind that constructs such pictures, instantaneously, irrationally, a desert place, a body on the ground, a group of birds gathered. Perhaps it was a scene from one of his own books, not yet written, forming at the gate of consciousness. Immediately it faded, he thought how odd that they were all there, just at that moment, all Harry’s friends-Kurtz, the doctor, this man Cooler; only the two people who loved him seemed to have been missing. He said, “And the driver? Did you hear his evidence?”
“He was upset, scared. But Cooler’s evidence exonerated him, and Kurtz’s. No, it wasn’t his fault, poor man. I’ve often heard Harry say what a careful driver he was.”
“He knew Harry too?” Another bird flapped down and joined the others round the silent figure on the sand who lay face down. Now he could tell that it was Harry, by the clothes, by the attitude like that of a boy asleep in the grass at a playing field’s edge, on a hot summer afternoon.