Harry Lime and a Very Human Evil

Much of the black market can be relatively innocuous. It provides ordinairy people with at least some sort of access to necessities and luxuries that they might not otherwise be able to obtain. This is particularly true of wartime and occupied economies where almost everything is in short supply.

The subject of Graham Greene's The Third Man, however, is far more nefarious than trade in bootleg sugar and tires- it is a penicilin racket. The charming rogue Harry Lime and his partners, the smarmy Baron Kurtz and the supercillious Dr. Winkler, sell the antibiotic to civilian hospitals in occupied Vienna. Only the occupying militaries have access to it, and the antibiotic is in high demand. In order to increase their profits, Harry Lime's gang dilutes the penicilin with coloured water and sand, an action which at best renders future treatment ineffective, but most often leads to amputation, derangement, or death.

"But perhaps what horrified me most was visiting the children's hospital here. They had bought some of this penicillin for use against meningitis. A number of children simply died, and a number went off their heads. You can see them now in the mental ward."[1]

 This is a cold, cynical, vile act motivated by large profits. It is sickening, it is monstrous, it is inhuman, and it is unthinkable. Or so it would seem.

 When Harry Lime is confronted at the Ferris wheel by his best friend, Rollo Martins, the following exchange ensues.

"Martins said, "Have you ever visited the children's hospital? Have you seen any of your victims?"
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."
"Couldn't you have stuck to tyres?"
"Like Cooler? No, I've always been ambitious. "But they can't catch me, Rollo, you'll see. I'll pop up again. You can't keep a good man down." The car swung to a standstill at the highest point of the curve and Harry turned his back and gazed out of the window. Martins thought: one good shove and I could break the glass, and he pictured the body dropping among the flies. He said, "You know the police are planning to dig up your body: what will they find?"
"Harbin," Harry replied with simplicity. He turned away from the window and said, "Look at the sky."
The car had reached the top of the Wheel and hung there motionless, while the stain of the sunset ran in streaks over the wrinkled papery sky beyond the black girders...
"I'd like to knock you through the window."
"But you won't, old man. Our quarrels never last long. You remember that fearful one in the Monaco, when we swore we were through. I'd trust you anywhere, Rollo. Kurtz tried to persuade me not to come but I know you. Then he tried to persuade me to, well, arrange an accident. He told me it would be quite easy in this car."
"Except that I'm the stronger man."
"But I've got the gun. You don't think a bullet wound would show when you hit that ground?" Again the car began to move, sailing slowly down, until the flies were midgets, were recognisable human beings. "What fools we are, Rollo, talking like this, as if I'd do that to you-or you to me." He turned his back and leant his face against the glass. One thrust… "How much do you earn a year with your Westerns, old man?"
"A thousand."
"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..."[2]

What is particularly chilling about Harry Lime is that he still cares (somewhat) about (certain) people, he feels pity, and believes in God, yet makes a very profitable living from swindling children's hospitals. Innocents die, and Harry knows. This is a very human evil, an evil that can be rationalised and made to fit- or improve- one's lifestyle. Harry isn't even exceptionally fearless or desperate, and he certainly isn't certifiably insane. What Graham Greene does best, in my opinion, is to avoid black and white thinking when it comes to people, all the while never forgetting that there clearly is both good and evil, right and wrong. Evil is scary not because it is is distant and alien, but because it occupies the same sphere as we do. It could be present in our best friends, in our lovers, or scariest thought of all- it could even be part of ourselves.

 

This post would be incomplete without the equivalent scene from the movie, though in my opinion Orson Welles' famous quip regarding Switzerland subtly changes the scene's focus.

That, however, is a different topic for a different time.

 

[1]Graham Greene, "The Third Man and The Fallen Idol," Penguin Books, 1977, p. 80-81.

 

[2]"Third Man," p. 104-107.