‘You novelists live out of the world. He’s my real assignment,’ and Martins watched him make across the room for the great Carey, who greeted him with a false headline smile, laying down his crust. Dexter wasn’t the man’s assignment, but Martins couldn’t help feeling a certain pride – nobody had ever before referred to him as a novelist; and that sense of pride and importance carried him over the disappointment when Lime was not there to meet him at the airport. We never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us – Martins felt the little jab of dispensability, standing by the bus door, watching the snow come sifting down, so thinly and softly that the great drifts among the ruined buildings had an air of permanence, as though they were not the result of this meagre fall, but lay, for ever, above the line of perpetual snow.

There was no Lime to meet him at the Hotel Astoria, the terminus where the bus landed him, and no message – only a cryptic one for Mr Dexter from someone he had never heard of called Crabbin. ‘We expected you on tomorrow’s plane. Please stay where you are. On the way round. Hotel room booked.’ But Rollo Martins wasn’t the kind of man who stayed around. If you stayed around in a hotel lounge, sooner or later incidents occurred; one mixed one’s drinks. I can hear Rollo Martins saying to me, ‘I’ve done with incidents. No more incidents,’ before he plunged head first into the most serious incident of all. There was always a conflict in Rollo Martins – between the absurd Christian name and the sturdy Dutch (four generations back) surname. Rollo looked at every woman that passed, and Martins renounced them for ever. I don’t know which one of them wrote the Westerns.

Martins had been given Lime’s address and he felt no curiosity about the man called Crabbin; it was too obvious that a mistake had been made, though he didn’t yet connect it with the conversation at Frankfurt. Lime had written that he could put Martins up in his own flat, a large apartment on the edge of Vienna that had been requisitioned from a Nazi owner. Lime could pay for the taxi when he arrived, so Martins drove straight away to the building lying in the third (British) zone. He kept the taxi waiting while he mounted to the third floor.