More interesting still is that Popescu, who was with Kurtz when Harry was killed, is there. Kurtz introduces Martins to him. Martins gives him the usual treatment, questioning him tirelessly over the details - the Third Man, the time of death. He recounts the porter's evidence: that there was a third man and that Harry died immediately. Popescu brushes the questions aside and criticises the porter for not appearing at the inquest: 'You'll never teach these Austrians to be good citizens. It was his duty to give evidence, even though he remembered wrong.../i> ' [46]. Martins also mentions the accusation that Harry was involved in a racket. Popescu, again, brushes it aside with high-minded talk of duty, etc. 'That's quite impossible. He had a great sense of duty.'
In the book, the Popescu character is an American named Cooler. He is certainly a cool player in both book and film but, in the book, he comes across to Martins as very trustworthy. Martins describes his first impressions:
'... a man with tousled grey hair and a worried kindly face and long-sighted eyes, the kind of humanitarian who turns up in a typhus epidemic or a world war or a Chinese famine long before his countrymen have discovered the place in an atlas... ' (57)
Martins tells Calloway a little later when he knows a little more:
'I still can't believe Cooler's concerned. I'd stake anything on his honesty. He's one of those Americans with a real sense of duty.' (85)
Such a character is almost statutory in the sort of Westerns that Martins writes. He is the character that the hero, however wise, trusts mistakenly - the one that gives him the wrong advice, leads him off the trail or into a trap. Here too, in Martins' real life Lone Rider of Santa Fe, is such a character in the form of Cooler. In the film, the feeling is somewhat different. Martins doesn't have the same kind of reaction to Popescu as he does to Cooler in the book. It is certainly a lot less warm and trusting. Popescu leaves him with some chilling advice:
'That's a nice girl, that. But she ought to be careful in a city like this. Everybody ought to be careful in a city like this.'[46]
The next scene is of Popescu making a 'phone call. We hear only the end of it, 'He will meet us at the bridge, good.' This is followed by silent shots of Kurtz, Winkel and Popescu leaving their respective houses at dawn. The next thing we see is Martins outside Lime's house, tracing and retracing Harry's fatal steps. The porter leans out of the window to talk to him:
'PORTER: I am not a bad man, mein Herr. Not a bad man. Is it really so important?
MARTINS: Very important.
PORTER: Come this evening when my wife is out then.'[57]
Popescu is wrong: these Austrians are good citizens. They too, have a 'sense of duty'. The next we see is a look of horror on the Porter's face. Popescu is right: 'everybody ought to be careful in a city like this'.
Martins visits Anna in the early-evening, a 'bad time' - Harry used to visit around six. She asks Martins to tell her about Harry. This, the stage directions say, is the 'everyday Anna', 'All the grace she may have had seems to have been folded up with her dresses and put away for professional use.' [59]. He tells her how he was good at schemes, fixing things up, etc. She agrees. He fixed her papers. More importantly, 'he just made it all seem fun'.
Anna looks to the future but without a great deal of hope, 'Something may happen ... Perhaps there'll be another war or I'll die or the Russians will take me. ' Martins replies 'You'll fall in love again'. If he is trying to reassure her, he fails. She doesn't want to fall in love again, ever. She has just lost the man she loved. As they leave to go and meet the porter, she tells him, 'You know, you ought to find yourself a girl'. Martins, it is clear, has not been in love. If he loved Harry, it was the schoolboy Harry, not the real Harry.
They arrive at the Lime's flat to find a crowd gathered. They enquire and find that the porter is dead. A little boy, Hansl, gives impromptu and informal evidence - he heard the porter having a row with a foreigner. When Martins leaves the scene, Hansl and his father follow. Martins leaves Anna in a cinema and returns to his hotel, with the purpose of contacting Calloway. He is trying to do so when he whisked away to the 'Cultural centre'. The time has come for Martins, the writer, to give his lecture on the modern novel. It is, of course, an amusing scene. High comedy ('James Joyce - I've never heard of him... He wrote Ulysses... I don't read Greek... ') is laced, however, with a more serious matter, the matter of the Third Man: Popescu is at the meeting and asks whether Martins is engaged on any story. Martins replies that he is writing a story called 'The Third Man', a murder story, based on fact. Popescu advises him to stick to fiction. Martins replies that he has gone too far to turn back. Popescu leaves and sets a trap for Martins. Martins, seeing Popescu and his thugs waiting outside, finds an alternative exit and evades his pursuers as he runs to Calloway's office.
Calloway has had enough:
'I told you to go away, Martins. This isn't Santa Fe, I'm not a sheriff and you aren't a cowboy.'[81]
He tells Martins about Lime's racket. Joseph Harbin was a medical orderly at the military hospital. Lime and his associates bought penicillin that Harbin stole from supplies. Penicillin was in very short demand and Lime sold diluted batches to the civilian hospitals. The outcome was grave: gangrene, lost limbs were a common result of insufficient penicillin injections. Death was not uncommon either. The doctors were not guilty - they did not know that the penicillin they prescribed had been diluted by Lime. The most disturbing result of Lime's racket was to be found on the children's ward. Meningitis was rife: the lucky children died; the unlucky ones went mad.
Calloway goes on to present the evidence that these awful scenes were the result of Lime's racket. The evidence is convincing. The best description of Martins' reaction is in the book:
'If one watched a world come to an end, a plane dive from its course, I don't suppose one would chatter, and a world for Martins had certainly come to an end, a world of friendship, hero-worship, confidence that had begun twenty years before - in a school corridor. Every memory - afternoons in the long grass, the illegitimate shoots on Brickworth Common, the dreams, the walks, every shared experience as simultaneously tainted, like the soil of an atomised town.' (89)
So, the Western ends - inconclusively. Reality is not as simple as the good guy - bad guy world of cheap novelettes. Martins decides to leave Vienna.
Life is never so simple. Certainly, life is never so simple for a man such as Martins in a situation such as Martins'. He tries to break his crushing fall into the world of reality with drink. Drunk he goes in search of Anna. She, too, has learnt from Calloway about Harry. Her reaction is somewhat different. She doesn't have to face a reality that has been hiding for twenty years:
'For twenty years I knew him - the drinks he liked, the girls he liked. We laughed at the same things. He couldn't bear the colour greens. But it wasn't true. He never existed, we dreamed him.'
Anna tries to console him:
'There are so many things you don't know about a person you love, good things, bad things.'
But Martins never really loved Harry. He loved the image of 'Harry the hero' that he dreamed up for himself. Anna reprimands him with this:
'For heaven's sake, stop making him in your image. Harry was real. He wasn't just your friend and my lover. He was Harry.'[94]
Martins is confused. His reality, he realises, was fantasy - just as his idea of love was fantasy. In the book, he tells Calloway how Anna has disabused him of his mistaken notion of love:
'As I stood up I looked down at her face. It wasn't a beautiful face - that was the trouble. It was a face to live with, day in, day out. A face for wear. I felt as though I'd come into a new country where I couldn't speak the language. I had always thought it was beauty one loved in a woman.' (64)
This truth, a truth about himself more than anything else, emerges now - in vino veritas - and he tells her:
'Don't talk wisdom at me. You make it sound as if [Harry's] manners were occasionally bad... I don't know... I'm just a bad writer who falls in love with girls... you.'
He has come to terms with the truth about himself - no longer a lone rider, just a bad writer - and about love, but he is still confused about Harry. Anna is right: he is still Harry. As Calloway says early on in the book, his image of Harry and Martins' image of Harry are two perspectives - admittedly very different - on the same man. Martins has been forced to walk around this 'Harry' to look at him from a different angle. He looks very different - Martins now sees the dark side of Harry - but Anna is right, he is still Harry. Martins is confused. He even goes so far as saying that whoever killed Harry did him justice and that he might have done the same thing himself. Anna replies, reiterating her point:>
'A man doesn't alter just because you find out more.'
Martins makes Anna laugh. Martins, desperately in love with her, sees it perhaps as a sign that she could love him. He asks her to laugh again but she loves Harry, 'There isn't enough for to laughs'. Previously, Martins describes Harry as someone who just made everything so fun [59]. His attempts to do so fall a long way short:
'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... I'd…You still love Harry, don't you?'
The film is a good deal more ambiguous at this point. In the book, Anna replies 'Yes' as we would expect, to which Martins rejoins, 'Perhaps I do. I don't know' (96). In the film, she doesn't reply so directly, 'I've got to learn my lines' and he leaves with the hopeless line, 'You told me to find a girl'. This is something of an improvement upon the original. Their emotions might not have changed in the transfer from book to film but the suspense is kept up, keeps us guessing...
Up until this point, the assumption is that Harry has been killed. We saw the frozen bricks of earth shovelled onto his coffin. It comes as something of a surprise, to say the least, when Martins sees Harry. He leaves Anna's flat and is aware of a man standing in the shadows of a doorway across the street. A passing car disperses the shadows which conceal the man and reveal Harry. Martins gives chase but Harry disappears.
Calloway does not believe the story. Martins was, after all, very drunk at the time. Martins barely believes it himself. He refers to the figure not as Harry but as 'it', 'a ghost'. But despite his realistic appreciation of his drunken fallibility, he is driven by a faith. He takes Calloway to the scene of the chase:
'And it vanished with a puff of smoke, I suppose, and a clap of ... It wasn't the German gin, Paine.' [96]
There is an iron kiosk in the middle of the square. Innocent though it looks - Martins hadn't given it a second look when chasing Harry - it conceals a door. Inside is a staircase leading down to the sewers. Martins hasn't seen a ghost. Harry Lime is alive. Who, then, was buried? They dig up the grave and find the body of Joseph Harbin, medical orderly, Harry's supplier and Calloway's double-agent. It is Harbin who has been murdered, presumably because Lime and his colleagues discovered that he had been informing the police.
The international police arrest Anna on account of her false identity papers. Calloway interviews her when she arrives at the police headquarters, hoping that she might be able to help him catch Lime. Initially, she is happy to hear that he is alive but Calloway's warning, 'A rat would have more chance in a closed room without a hole and a pack of terriers loose' prompts a sharp change in her emotion:
'Poor Harry. I wish he was dead. He'd be safe from all of you then.' [106]
She refuses to help Calloway and so he refuses to help her and hands her over to the Russians.
Meanwhile, Harry goes to the Russian quarter to find Kurtz. He tells him that he knows that Harry is alive and tells him to send Harry a message that he will meet him by the big wheel. Their meeting is overcast by a strange tension. They have not seen each other for some time of course, but it is no longer as simple a situation as the meeting of two old friends. Martins is meeting not just Harry - his old friend from school, but also Lime, the penicillin racketeer. He is nevertheless, as Anna said, still Harry and so Martins emotions cannot be polarised either way - they are amalgamated into an unhappy union.
The stage directions are very explicit at this point:
'Life to MARTINS has always quickened when HARRY came, as he comes now, as though nothing much has really happened: with an amused geniality, a recognition that his happiness will make the world's day. Only sometimes the cheerfulness will be suddenly clouded; a melancholy beats through his guard; a memory that this life does not go on. Now he does not make the mistake of offering a hand that might be rejected, but instead just pats MARTINS on his bandaged hand.'[111]
Harry, with characteristic ease, manages to secure an empty car of the big wheel in which he and Martins can talk: 'We couldn't be more alone. Lovers used to do this in the old days, but they haven't money to spare, poor devils, now' [112]. They can hardly be described as lovers in the conventional sense. Martins' tone is cold compared to Harry's breeziness. Nevertheless, Martins is not unfriendly. In the image of Lime, the racketeer, that stands before him, he also sees Harry, the school friend.
Martins tells Harry about Anna. He can hardly be described as concerned. It transpires that it was Harry that informed the Russians that Anna's papers were false in return for his safety in the Russian quarter.
As they reach the top of the big wheel, Martins asks Harry whether he has ever seen any of his victims. Harry's reply is effectively his Apology in the theological sense of the word, his moral creed:
'Victims? Don't be melodramatic. Look down there. [He points through the window at the people moving like black flies at the base of the wheel.]Would you ever really feel any pity if one of those black dots stopped moving for ever? If I said that you can have twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stops, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money - or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax.'
Martins seriously considers shoving Harry through the window at this point. But he doesn't. Neither does Harry, as Kurtz suggested to him, take this opportunity to dispose of his dangerous friend.
'HARRY: What fools we are, Holly, talking like this, as if I'd do that to you - or you to me.... In these days, nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, so why should we? They talk of the people and the proletariat, and I talk of mugs. It's the same thing. They have their five year plans and so have I.
MARTINS: You used to believe in a God.
[That shade of melancholy crosses HARRY'S face.]
HARRY: Oh, I still believe, old man. In God and Mercy and all that. The dead are happier dead. They don't miss much here poor devils [As he speaks the last words with the odd touch of genuine pity, the car reaches the platform and the faces of the doomed-to-be victims peer in at them.]
MARTINS: What do you believe in?
HARRY: If you ever get Anna out of this mess, be kind to her. You'll find she's worth it. I wish I'd asked you to bring me some of those tablets. [116]
Until this scene, we have been shown images of Harry only through the eyes of Martins, Calloway and Anna. Now we actually see him for ourselves and he is indeed an odd amalgam. There are elements of the boyish Harry, the schoolboy Harry. We see this in the ease with which he secures a separate car for Martins and himself on the big wheel. Lime, the racketeer, is the older incarnation of this schoolboy. He has not grown up. He remains entirely self-motivated, ruthlessly so, without any of the notions of social responsibility that are meant to accompany maturity.
Martins tells Harry, 'You've never grown up' [114]. In the book, he is more explicit:
'For the first time, Rollo Martins looked back through the years without admiration as he thought: He's never grown up. Marlowe's devils wore squibs attached to their tails; evil was like Peter Pan. It carried with it the horrifying and horrible gift of eternal youth.'(116)
They leave the wheel and Harry asks after 'Bracer', presumably an old school friend. 'I had a card from him at Christmas' comes the reply. The relationship is a distant one, confined to a youth that has long since passed in Martins. Harry is still young. His famous parting speech (Orson Welles' inspiration) reflects a child-like logic:
'When you've made up your mind, send me a message - I'll meet you any place, any time, and when we do meet, old man, it's you I want to see, not the police... and don't be so gloomy... After all, it's not that awful - you know what the fellow said... In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - the produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce... ? The cuckoo clock.' [117]
Just as the Harry that Martins knew as a schoolboy and the Lime that Calloway knows is but a shift in perspective, so too is the world that Harry sees and the world that Martins sees. Where Martins sees people, Harry sees dots; where governments see 'the people', Harry sees 'the mugs'. It is again, a child- like logic that allows Harry to make this jump in perspective and sustain it as a basis for the morality of his actions.
In other ways, though, Harry has a much more realistic view of the world than Martins: 'We aren't heroes, Holly, you and I. The world doesn't make heroes outside your books.' [114]. This realism extends to his own warped view of the world: 'a melancholy beats through his guard; a memory that this life does not go on.' This melancholy can be seen penetrating his 'guard' of cheerful boyishness, the 'recognition that his happiness will make the world's day' when he talks of God, Mercy and the misery of the worldly existence of the 'poor devils' that feed his racket. He talks with a genuine concern.
Harry's attitude to Anna sums up this uneasy amalgam of the boyish fantastic and mature realistic. He evidently cares for her as an individual, as more than a 'dot' or a mug, but ultimately his interests come first. He does not love Anna as she loves him. It is debatable whether he is capable of love. The boyish Harry is certainly not capable of love precisely because his interests come before anyone else's. Anna, on the other hand, cares less for herself than for Harry. She is given the chance to save herself from the Russians if she helps Calloway catch Harry but she refuses.
Martins also refuses. He has nothing to gain by it and, possibly, someone he loves to lose by it. 'Love' is perhaps too strong a word. In any case, in Martins' own words, 'twenty years is a long time. Don't ask me to tie the knot' [118]. Brodsky's arrival on the scene is timely, to say the least. Anna, it becomes clear, is to be handed over to the Russians. Martins now has a great deal to gain by helping Calloway.
Anna is somewhat surprised o find herself with official papers and a train ticket out of Vienna to Klagenfurt. Paine takes her to the station where she is yet more surprised to see Martins waiting. She is naturally inquisitive whilst he is defiantly off-hand. Eventually, Martins' nerve breaks and he comes clean:
'They want me to help take him.'[120]
Her reply to this - 'Poor Harry' - exemplifies her love for Harry. Martins desn't understand how she can love a murderer who had turned her in to the police in return for his own safety. She explains:
'I don't want him any more. I don't want to see him, hear him. But he's in me - that's a fact. I wouldn't do a thing to harm him... I loved him. You loved him, and what good have we done him? Oh love! Look at yourself in the window - they have names for faces like that... '
Her love comes before justice.
Martins is repentant. He returns to Calloway and tells him that he will not help after all. He has finally agreed to scrap his novel, The Third Man. He has taken Popescu's advice. He is sticking to fiction. Calloway grudgingly admits, 'Oh well, I always wanted you to catch that plane anyway, didn't I?' He drives Martins to the airport. They stop on the way and Calloway takes him into a building which turns out to be the biggest children's hospital in Vienna. Martins follows him through the wards, his face filled with horror as he sees for himself the reality of Lime's racket - children deformed, demented. As they leave for the airport, Calloway intensifies the shock by talking of Martins' books - the comfortable fantasy land where death is just a word on a page. Martins submits, 'I'll be your dumb decoy duck' [125]. It is language from the Wild West but Martins' reality is no longer confused with fiction.
Martins and Calloway set the trap. Martins arranges to meet Harry in a café, late at night. The stage directions explain that, as he sits waiting, 'He is divided in mind between the sight he saw in the hospital of HARRY'S victims, and the consciousness of the rôle that he is playing, of decoy to his friend.' [132]. To add further pressure to his tortured conscience, Anna turns up. She is bitter in her criticism, 'Honest, sober, Holly Martins. Holly, what a silly name, You must feel proud to be a police informer.'
At this juncture, Harry appears. Martins does not shout, nor does he shoot. He is confused, torn between love and loyalty and moral duty. Anna shouts a warning. Harry does not hesitate. He aims his gun at Martins but Anna happens to be in the way. He makes his escape. Calloway, Paine, Martins and other police officers give chase. Harry takes to the sewers. The others are not far behind, following the sound of footsteps in the reverberant tunnels. Harry shoots blindly. He misses Martins but the ricochet hits Paine and kills him. Martins is ahead of the rest, caught between them and Harry. They cannot fire for fear of hitting Martins. He dithers, unsure of what to do. This is the culmination of his moral tussle, his conscience in confusion. Eventually, Harry is hit. Martins, ahead of the rest gets to him first. A shot is heard and Martins emerges into their search lights, his head hanging.
The last we see of Harry Lime is his coffin, lowered into the earth. Around his grave are Anna, Martins and Calloway. It is the same scene as Harry's 'first burial' but Kurtz and Winkler are absent. Anna ignores Martins. He says it himself, 'A man's not dead because you put him underground.'