Chapter 2

Chapter 2

A BRITISH SUBJECT can still travel if he is content to take with him only five English pounds which he is forbidden to spend abroad, but if Rollo Martins had not received an invitation from Lime of the International Refugee Office he would not have been allowed to enter Austria, which counts still as occupied territory. Lime had suggested that Martins might write up the business of looking after the international refugees, and although it wasn’t Martins’ usual line, he had consented. It would give him a holiday, and he badly needed a holiday after the incident in Dublin and the other incident in Amsterdam; he always tried to dismiss women as ‘incidents’, things that simply happened to him without any will of his own, acts of God in the eyes of insurance agents. He had a haggard look when he arrived in Vienna and a habit of looking over his shoulder that for a time made me suspicious of him until I realized that he went in fear that one of, say, six people might turn up unexpectedly. He told me vaguely that he had been mixing his drinks – that was another way of putting it.

Rollo Martins’ usual line was the writing of cheap paper-covered Westerns under the name of Buck Dexter. His public was large but unremunerative. He couldn’t have afforded Vienna if Lime had not offered to pay his expenses when he got there out of some vaguely described propaganda fund. Lime could also, he said, keep him supplied with paper bafs – the only currency in use from a penny upwards in British hotels and clubs. So it was with exactly five unusable pound notes that Martins arrived in Vienna.

An odd incident had occurred at Frankfurt, where the plane from London grounded for an hour. Martins was eating a hamburger in the American canteen (a kindly airline supplied the passengers with a voucher for sixty-five cents’ worth of food) when a man he could recognize from twenty feet away as a journalist approached his table.

‘You Mr Dexter?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ Martins said, taken off his guard.

‘You look younger than your photographs,’ the man said. ‘Like to make a statement? I represent the local forces paper here. We’d like to know what you think of Frankfurt.’

‘I only touched down ten minutes ago.’

‘Fair enough,’ the man said. ‘What about views on the American novel?’

‘I don’t read them,’ Martins said.

‘The well-known acid humour,’ the journalist said. He pointed at a small grey-haired man with protruding teeth, nibbling a bit of bread. ‘Happen to know if that’s Carey?’

‘No. What Carey?’

‘J. G. Carey of course.’

‘I’ve never heard of him.’