‘They say Harry was mixed up in some racket.’

‘Oh, no,’ Cooler said. ‘No. That’s quite impossible. He had a great sense of duty.’

‘Kurtz seemed to think it was possible.’

‘Kurtz doesn’t understand how an Anglo-Saxon feels,’ Cooler replied.

Chapter 9

Chapter 9

IT WAS NEARLY dark when Martins made his way along the banks of the canal: 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 Stephanskirche shot its enormous wounded spire into the sky above the Inner City, and, coming up the Kärntnerstrasse, 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 memorize 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 memorized 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 a divan, and a typewritten script 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 Colonel 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.’