The Third Man

“If you are to understand this strange rather sad story you must have an impression at least of the background—the smashed dreary city of Vienna divided up in zones among the four powers; the Russian, the British, the American, the French zones, regions marked only by a notice board, and in the centre of the city, surrounded by the Ring with its heavy public buildings and its prancing statuary, the Inner Stadt under the control of all four powers. In this once fashionable Inner Stadt each power in turn, for a month at a time, takes, as we call it, ‘the chair,’ and becomes responsible for security; at night, if you were fool enough to waste your Austrian schillings on a night club, you would be fairly certain to see the International Patrol at work—four military police, one from each power, communicating with each other if they communicated at all in the common language of their enemy. I never knew Vienna between the wars, and I am too young to remember the old Vienna with its Strauss music and its bogus easy charm; to me it is simply a city of undignified ruins which turned that February into great glaciers of snow and ice.”

Calloway, as narrator, takes pains to set the scene, specifically the peculiar realities of a postwar city that had survived Nazi defeat and was then under Allied occupation. Vienna is “smashed and dreary”—a city, perhaps, in mourning of its own, just as Rollo Martins arrived there and found himself attending an unexpected funeral. However, Vienna is the “background,” as the relationship between Martins and Lime will dictate the action as much as the setting does, if not more. The description of the occupation and its arrangement for policing becomes important in the plot, as Lime takes dramatic measures to avoid the British authorities and exploit the Russian ones. Calloway portrays the occupation as lacking harmony—the four powers speak German to each other, using the “language of the enemy.” Calloway remarks that Vienna’s past grandeur isn’t part of his reality, in which “undignified ruins” and a bleak, paralyzing cold are dominant features. This brief sketch of a postwar European capital is devoid of hope or grandeur and foreshadows the later events.

“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.”

This quote suggests Martins’s casual, informal approach to some matters, as Calloway recalls that he portrayed writing about wartime refugees as a project for a friend and provided few details. Further, creative drive or moral interest in world politics do not motivate Martins. Even his need for a vacation is slightly frivolous, as he only seeks respite from failed love affairs in other European cities. Martins portrays himself as someone without agency or ability, given that he views the women in his life as “incidents,” not people he pursued or made decisions about.

“I can hear Rollo Martins saying to me now, ‘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 forever. I don’t know which of them wrote the Westerns.”

Calloway recalls how Martins remarked on his new resolve to avoid “incidents”—emphasizing again the younger man’s preoccupation with women. In addition, Calloway portrays him as a man divided, using genealogy as an explanation. In this analogy, his first name is absurd, making him a figure of ridicule; his last name is “sturdy”—stable and enduring. His absurd and frivolous side is responsible for his romantic failures, while his surname functions as a kind of sobering influence. Throughout the story, Martins experiences confusion and inner conflict, and Calloway returns to this device to describe it. This habit reinforces the story’s theme of divided loyalty, as Martins becomes increasingly torn between his conscience and his love for a childhood friend.

“Martins stood there, till the end, close beside me. He said to me later that as an old friend he didn’t want to intrude on these newer ones—Lime’s death belonged to them, let them have it. He was under the sentimental illusion that Lime’s life—twenty years of it anyway—belonged to him. As soon as the affair was over—I am not a religious man and always feel a little impatient with the fuss that surrounds death—Martins strode away on his long gangly legs that always seemed likely to get entangled together, back to his taxi: he made no attempt to speak to anyone, and the tears now were really running, at any rate the few meagre drops that any of us can squeeze out at our age. One’s file, you know, is never quite complete: a case is never really closed, even after a century when all the participants are dead. So I followed Martins: I knew the other three: I wanted to know the stranger.”

The description of Martins at the funeral emphasizes Calloway’s pity, edging toward contempt, as he dubs Martins’s sense of ownership over Harry Lime a “sentimental illusion.” His physical appearance is similarly unimpressive, as Calloway remarks particularly on his lack of grace and coordination. Martins is weeping, openly grieving. Calloway, in contrast, is the consummate investigator, driven to understand the newcomer because his file feels incomplete. He’s driven by an analytical curiosity, not sentiment.

“He said, ‘It was a long time ago. I don’t suppose anyone knows Harry the way I do,’ and I thought of the thick file of agents’ reports in my office, each claiming the same thing. I believe in my agents: I’ve sifted them all very thoroughly. ‘How long?’ ‘Twenty years—or a bit more. I met him my first term at school. I can see the place. I can see the notice-board and what was on it. I can hear the bell ringing. He was a year older and knew the ropes. He put me wise to a lot of things.’ He took a quick dab at his drink and then turned the crystal again as if to see more clearly what there was to see. He said, ‘It’s funny. I can’t remember meeting any woman quite as well.’”

Calloway’s internal monologue here further establishes his investigative habits. Martins’s claim to know his old friend best of all brings Calloway back to his office, full of reports from his agents claiming to know those they reported on. His comment that be believes his agents because he has verified their skills implies that he’s more skeptical of Martins’s claim. Martins falls into memory, the sounds of his school days, and his gaze into a glass, as if back into the past, establishes him as a kind of captive to nostalgia. Significantly, he admits that his memories of women are not as vivid or persistent. Lime, then, is his life’s most significant relationship.

“‘Because if Harry was that kind of racketeer, I must be one too. We always worked together.’ ‘I daresay he meant to cut you in—somewhere in the organisation. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had meant to give you the baby to hold. That was his method at school—you told me, didn’t you? And, you see, the headmaster was getting to know a thing or two. You are running true to form, aren’t you?’ ‘I suppose there was some petty racket going on with petrol and you couldn’t pin it on anyone, so you’ve picked a dead man. That’s just like a policeman.’”

In this exchange, Calloway and Martins find themselves on adversarial footing, as they are for much of the story. Martins claims that any indication of his own criminality is a baseless assumption. Calloway replies with cynicism and uses a metaphor that portrays Lime as an irresponsible parent. He argues that Lime has not changed from his youth but, lacking Martins’s sentimentality, suggests that their youthful friendship was always about Lime’s search or a gullible scapegoat. Martins, for his part, disdains the idea as proof that Calloway is bad at his profession—and that his profession itself isn’t deserving of trust. He clings to the narrative of Lime as his friend and protector, portraying Calloway’s account as baseless.

“He removed the handkerchief and gave Crabbin a view of his cut mouth. He told me that Crabbin was at a complete loss for words: Martins couldn’t understand why because he had never read the work of his great contemporary, Benjamin Dexter: he hadn’t even heard of him. I am a great admirer of Dexter, so that I could understand Crabbin’s bewilderment. Dexter has been ranked as a stylist with Henry James, but he has a wider feminine streak than his master—indeed his enemies have sometimes described his subtle complex wavering style as old maidish.”

Martins is drunk and belligerent, willing to shock the bookish Crabbin with evidence of his recent activities. Calloway points out that Martins lacks critical knowledge of who Crabbin believes him to be: a great novelist, a literary genius. In Crabbin’s imagination, the great Benjamin Dexter stands before him, abused and beaten despite his greatness. This incident further underscores the distance between Martins and Calloway: Despite Martins’s accusations about Calloway’s lack of intelligence, Calloway knows the work of Benjamin Dexter and can compare him to other figures such as American novelist Henry James. Calloway even comments on Dexter’s critics and his prose style. Martins, then, may have talents in his chosen genre, but he’s not an intellectual and is perpetually out of his depth with those who are.

“Within a minute he had left Vienna far behind him and was walking through a dense wood, ankle deep in snow. An owl hooted, and he felt suddenly lonely and scared. He had an appointment to meet Harry under a particular tree, but in a wood so dense as this how could he recognise any one tree from the rest? Then he saw a figure and ran towards it: it whistled a familiar tune and his heart lifted with the relief and joy at not after all being alone. Then the figure turned and it was not Harry at all—just a stranger who grinned at him in a little circle of wet slushy melted snow, while the owl hooted again and again.”

This episode of Martins’s dream transports him from a postwar gloom to a fairy tale, one that links the unconscious to the preoccupations of waking life. He’s lost in the woods, alone, and frightened, rather like the protagonist in a story that he is. As in Vienna, he’s chasing Lime, but Lime is elusive, and the way forward is unclear. The sound of Lime whistling the familiar tune—the music that Calloway knows Lime didn’t write—shapes Martins’s path, playing on his childish faith. However, his faith is betrayed when the tune leads him to a stranger. The sounds of the owl are, perhaps, an omen that trouble lies ahead.

“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.”

This passage conveys that Martins, for all his flaws and naiveté about Lime, can be a keen observer. He watches Kurtz and notes that he’s been “frozen” by the implication that Lime’s death was something other than an unfortunate accident. Greene’s meta-literary commentary notes that “only in stories” would such discomfiture manifest in a loud or dramatic gesture. Martins successfully plays detective and in this rare instance correctly draws conclusions from more subtle behavior. Though he’s unwilling to consider Lime anything but irreproachable, he’s far less trusting of Lime’s friends.

“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.”

This description of Kurtz further emphasizes his capacity for deception, as his smile is “studied” though also attributed directly to his nationality. This likely reveals Calloway’s, or Martins’s, patriotic sympathies, with a tinge of xenophobia: Kurtz is less trustworthy because he’s Austrian. He subtly tries to dissuade any further investigation, calling it “unwise” rather than engaging in stronger statements. His studied nature, however, suggests that his compliments on Martins’s writing may be insincere, simply another social script. Indeed, his very smile seems to evaporate too quickly. Kurtz, then, is an early indication of the kind of company that the adult Lime keeps: smooth, polished, and controlled, unlike the more emotional Martins.

“When Rollo Martins left Dr. Winkler’s he was in no danger. He could have gone home to bed at Sacher’s and slept with a quiet mind. He could even have visited Cooler at this stage without trouble. No one was seriously disturbed. Unfortunately for him—and there would always be periods of his life when he bitterly regretted it—he chose to go back to Harry’s flat. He wanted to talk to the little vexed man who said he had seen the accident—or had he really not said as much? There was a moment in the dark frozen street, when he was inclined to go straight to Cooler, to complete his picture of those sinister birds who sat around Harry’s body, but Rollo, being Rollo, decided to toss a coin and the coin fell for the other action, and the deaths of two men.”

Here, Calloway presents a catalog of hypotheticals. Martins “could have” made a succession of different choices, which might have made his life safer. Somehow, Calloway looks into Martins’s future and notes that he comes to regret his choice “bitterly”—which foreshadows pain and suffering. Martins, for a moment, uses his writer’s imagination, envisioning a visit to Lime’s friend Cooler as completing a picture of “sinister birds” circling Lime’s corpse. This portrays Lime’s friends as malevolent scavengers, betraying a deeper sense that something foreboding is at work even if Martins previously insisted on Lime’s innocence. His choice is compared to a coin toss, almost random, not deliberative—perhaps another sign of his impulsive nature. Calloway foreshadows further that this will result in more death—that Martins’s quest will be painful for him, and for others.

“It was very cold and I got up to close the window curtains. I only noticed my hand was on hers when I took it away. As I stood up I looked down at her face and she was looking up. 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. I stood there at the curtains, waiting to pull them, looking out. I couldn’t see anything but my own face, looking back into the room, looking for her.”

This moment between Martins and Anna is etched in his memory. He’s a person driven by sentiment, as his quest to avenge Lime shows. The moment is not particularly romantic: Martins moves toward her only to relieve the cold in her small room. As it turns out, this is the “trouble”: Martins continues to see his romantic feelings as a burden or a problem. Martins sees Anna as a “face to live with”—someone who could be permanent rather than an incident. This changes his entire perception, as he begins to disregard the idea that beauty alone is sufficient. Significantly, in the window, he sees only his own face: his love for Anna is egocentric, selfish, not based on a real interest in her as a person.

“Walking back down the street towards Anna, he looked back once. The child was pulling at his father’s hand and he could see the lips forming round those syllables like the refrain of a grim ballad, ‘Papa, Papa.’ He said to Anna: ‘Koch has been murdered. Come away from here.’ He walked as rapidly as the snow would let him, turning this corner and that. The child’s suspicion and alertness seemed to spread like a cloud over the city—they could not walk fast enough to evade its shadow. He paid no attention when Anna said to him, ‘Then what Koch said was true. There was a third man,’ nor a little later when she said, ‘It must have been murder. You don’t kill a man to hide anything less.’”

After Koch’s murder, even the plaintive questions of a child seem like a threat to Rollo, as he flees the scene with Anna before he can hear more from the neighbors. The child becomes a symbol of his anxiety, and all prior thoughts of romance are forgotten. A “cloud” of gloom, entirely separate from the falling snow, covers the city. Martins at this moment is no longer the detective, as Anna who must remind him that the events have a deeper meaning. She understands, as he doesn’t, that he’s uncovered a conspiracy.

“As Martins sat down and started signing Benjamin Dexter’s title pages, he could see in a mirror the young man showing the inscription to Crabbin. Crabbin smiled weakly and stroked his chin, up and down, up and down. ‘B. Dexter, B. Dexter, B. Dexter.’ Martins wrote rapidly—it was not after all a lie. One by one the books were collected by their owners: little half sentences of delight and compliment were dropped like curtseys—was this what it was to be a writer? Martins began to feel distinct irritation towards Benjamin Dexter. The complacent tiring pompous ass, he thought, signing the twenty-seventh copy of The Curved Prow.”

Even though the mysterious identity of one man plagues Martins, he has no qualms about assuming the identity of another: the more famous Benjamin Dexter. He signs, over and over, taking advantage of the mistaken identity, not overly concerned. Crabbin is aware of the problem, his smile “weak,” but Martins maintains the deception. He compares the compliments of his guileless audience to curtseys—empty social gestures of a bygone age. He wonders if this is typical of the literary occupation, perhaps implying that it’s not to his taste. He becomes increasingly irritated with his shadow self, the more famous writer, calling him a “pompous ass.” Martins steps, for a moment, out of his detective role and into the role of an accidental impersonator, an awkward public speaker, a writer who doesn’t want an audience. Perhaps this moment betrays Greene’s own distaste for his public, but the overall effect is to briefly transport the reader to an ordinary world, out of the shadows cast by Harry Lime.

“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 easy 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 was simultaneously tainted, like the soil of an atomised town. One could not walk there with safety for a long while. While he sat there, looking at his hands and saying nothing, I fetched a precious bottle of whisky out of a cupboard and poured out two large doubles.”

Calloway compares Martins’s realization of Lime’s moral bankruptcy to a disaster—the apocalypse or a plane crash. His youth has been suddenly, irrevocably destroyed, marked as it was by his adoration of Lime. All his memories are “tainted,” no longer beloved but despised. Significantly, Greene likens this to the “soil of an atomised town,” evoking the relatively recent reality of the atomic age, the specter of all life being eradicated. Martins can’t even find security in childhood memories. Calloway, for his part, is somewhat sympathetic, as he doesn’t try to force Martins to speak and appears to provide him with alcohol out of sympathy rather than with an ulterior motive of acquiring information, as he did earlier. The two former adversaries have reached a greater understanding as the loyalty between Martins and Lime dissipates.

“She said angrily, ‘For God’s sake stop making people in your image. Harry was real. He wasn’t just your hero and my lover. He was Harry. He was in a racket. He did bad things. What about it? He was the man we knew.’ He said, ‘Don’t talk such bloody wisdom. Don’t you see that I love you?’ She looked at him in astonishment. ‘You?’ ‘Yes, me. I don’t kill people with fake drugs. I’m not a hypocrite who persuades people that I’m the greatest... I’m just a bad writer who drinks too much and falls in love with girls…’ She said, ‘But I don’t even know what colour your eyes are. If you’d rung me up just now and asked me whether you were dark or fair or wore a moustache, I wouldn’t have known.’”

In this scene, Anna is far from a demure hero or the stuff of Martins’s dreams. She’s outraged by his moralizing about Lime and refuses to share it. Where Martins relies on clear binaries of good and evil, Anna states forthrightly, “stop making people in your image,” effectively calling Martins deluded. She, on the other hand, embraces complexity, noting that Lime was more than the role he played in either of their lives and that his crimes can’t alter her regard for him. Without meaning to, she shatters Martins’s illusions of romance also, looking stunned by his confession of love. He can offer her only his supposed moral superiority, citing first his lack of homicide history and then his lack of “hypocrisy.” However, in setting himself up as Lime’s opposite, he seems to ignore that this is of no interest to her. 

“Somewhere behind the cake stall a man was whistling and Martins knew the tune. He turned and waited. Was it fear or excitement that made his heart beat—or just the memories that tune ushered in, for life had always quickened when Harry came, came just as he came now, as though nothing much had happened, nobody had been lowered into a grave or found with cut throat in a basement, came with his amused deprecating take-it-or-leave-it manner—and of course one always took it.”

Though his illusions about his friend are shattered, Martins still associates Lime with his signature music. As befits his current mental state, he can’t read his own emotions, uncertain whether he’s excited or anxious. Despite his disillusionment, memory still has power, as “life had always quickened when Harry came,” and in this moment it’s still setting the pace and dictating the action. Unlike Martins or Calloway, Lime seems unaffected by the recent events, as he arrives “as though nothing much had happened,” a man unaffected by death, immune to stress. Rather, he’s “amused” and “deprecating”—apart from the postwar landscape or the other characters, with a sardonic distance. Martins, for all his resolve to change, seems still in Lime’s thrall, as the narrator remarks, “of course one always took it.” Harry Lime is a force of nature Martins can’t resist.

“Don’t picture Harry Lime as a smooth scoundrel. He wasn’t that. The picture I have of him on my files is an excellent one: he is caught by a street photographer with his stocky legs apart, big shoulders a little hunched, a belly that has known too much good food too long, on his face a look of cheerful rascality, a geniality, a recognition that his happiness will make the world’s day. Now he didn’t make the mistake of putting out a hand—that might have been rejected, but instead just patted Martins on the elbow and said, ‘How are things?’”

Calloway quickly dispenses with the idea that morally reprehensible people are easily identifiable, like cartoon villains. He rejects the idea that Lime was a “smooth scoundrel.” Significantly, Calloway reveals that his own documentation of Lime captures him well—perhaps in contrast to Martins’s idealized portraits. He has a strong physical presence, and the reference to his having “known too much good food too long” presents him as a hedonist. He’s charming, smiling, certain that “his happiness will make the world’s day.” Harry Lime, then, has no doubts about himself or pursuing pleasure and interests. He’s also an astute social observer, as he knows not to presume that Martins is happy to see him. He’s careful not to push his friend too far.

“Harry took a look at the toy landscape below and came away from the door. ‘I never feel quite safe in these things,’ he said. He felt the back of the door with his hand, as though he were afraid that it might fly open and launch him into that iron-ribbed space. ‘Victims?’ he asked. ‘Don’t be melodramatic, Rollo, look down there,’ he went on, pointing through the window at the people moving like black flies at the base of the Wheel. ‘Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving—for ever? If I said you can have twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stops, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money—without hesitation? or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax.’ He gave his boyish conspiratorial smile, ‘It’s the only way to save nowadays.’”

On the Ferris wheel, Lime’s remark about heights and safety briefly displays some human vulnerability. However, he quickly turns to lecturing, calling Martins’s moral concerns about his penicillin trading “melodramatic,” as though they have no place in reality but are perhaps an extension of a writer’s imagination. The narration compares the people below to “black flies,” reducing humanity to insects. Lime compares them to mobile “dots,” arguing that from a distance, no death is particularly consequential. He adds that money quickly dispenses with moral concerns, joking about efforts to economize and the burden of income tax.

“‘Taxed. I earn thirty thousand free. It’s the fashion. In these days, old man, 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 the mugs. It’s the same thing. They have their five year plans and so have I.’ ‘You used to be a Catholic.’ ‘Oh, I still believe, old man. In God and Mercy and all that. I’m not hurting anybody’s soul by what I do. The dead are happier dead. They don’t miss much here, poor devils,’ he added with that odd touch of genuine pity, as the car reached the platform and the faces of the doomed-to-be-victims, the tired pleasure-hoping Sunday faces, peered in at them.”

Lime continues his ironic detachment with his insistence that black-market earnings are “the fashion” and implying that he’s only following the zeitgeist with his disdain for human life. He openly engages with the emerging ideological conflict of the period—the conflict between communism, represented by the Soviet Union, and capitalism. He argues that his ideology is no different than the Marxist reduction of most individuals to the proletariat—the people who sell their labor to capitalists. He argues that “they have their five year plans and so have I,” effectively claiming that his long-term strategy, like that of the Soviet system, is about survival, not emancipation or individual dignity. He’s one man but is far from alone in his inhumane logic. He even claims to have held on to theology, arguing that his work has not damaged the immortal soul as a kind of warped justification. He calls individuals “poor devils” with “that odd touch of genuine pity.” Lime, then, is not without feeling, even though sentiment can’t alter his pursuit of profit.

“I don’t know what he heard, if he heard anything. The mere sight of a man wanted by the police and without friends in Vienna speaking on the telephone would have been enough to warn him. He was out of the cafe again before Martins had put down the receiver. It was one of those rare moments when none of my men was in the cafe. One had just left and another was on the pavement about to come in. Harry Lime brushed by him and made for the kiosk. Martins came out of the cafe and saw my men. If he had called out then it would have been an easy shot, but it was not, I suppose, Lime, the penicillin racketeer who was escaping down the street; it was Harry.”

Lime’s actions drive the plot even more directly as he runs from Martins and Calloway. As before, he’s calculating and observant, not needing to hear a phone call to know he’s been betrayed. Calloway highlights the role of chance, noting that it was a “rare” opportunity for escape. Calloway observes that Martins is silent—silent, as he was earlier, when the reality of Lime’s illegal activities set in. However, this time his silence helps his friend. Calloway ascribes this to lingering sentimentality and the language of a dual self. There are two Limes: the criminal and the childhood friend. Martins, in this moment, sees only the latter, a fact that Calloway reports without rancor or malice.

“We moved slowly on, our revolvers trained for a chance, and Lime turned this way and that way like a rabbit dazzled by headlights: then suddenly he took a flying jump into the deep central rushing stream. When we turned the searchlight after him he was submerged, and the current of the sewer carried him rapidly on, past the body of Bates, out of the range of the searchlight into the dark. What makes a man, without hope, cling to a few more minutes of existence? Is it a good quality or a bad one? I have no idea.”

In this moment, the narrative likens the cunning criminal to animal instincts, a “rabbit dazzled by headlights.” The analogy is significant, as Martins previously recalled an incident during his childhood when Lime spotted a rabbit and asked Martins to shoot it. No longer the mastermind, Lime is the prey. He uses the environment to his advantage, as it takes him past the man he just killed. He has passed “into the dark,” beyond perception, and his motives are beyond understanding. Calloway questions them openly when he asks why Lime persists, knowing that his capture is inevitable. This passage preserves the narrative’s overall commitment to ambiguity: In a story with no heroes and a self-assured villain who questions traditional morality, answers aren’t straightforward.

“For a moment I thought he was dead, but then he whispered with pain. I said, ‘Harry,’ and he swivelled his eyes with a great effort to my face. He was trying to speak, and I bent down to listen. ‘Bloody fool,’ he said—that was all: I don’t know whether he meant that for himself—some sort of act of contrition however inadequate (he was a Catholic)—or was it for me—with my thousand a year taxed and my imaginary cattle rustlers who couldn’t even shoot a rabbit clean. Then he began to whimper again. I couldn’t bear it any more and I put a bullet through him. ‘Well forget that bit,’ I said. Martins said, ‘I never shall.’”

In their last conversation, Martins can’t bear Lime’s suffering and is uncertain what his friend’s last words mean—whether Lime is condemning Martins for betraying him or he means something else. Martins preserves a kind of optimism, positing that Lime may be trying to express remorse and save his immortal soul. However, Martins condemns himself, most of all, recalling his childhood inability to shoot and noting how the same inability now caused Lime’s suffering. For Martins, the echoes of his youth are always present. He takes pity on Lime, who is no longer polished and self-assured but “whimpering.” Calloway, more stoic, tries to suggest that Martins “forget” his action, but Martins remains steadfast. Just as he clung to his youthful memories, now he will cling to his guilt.