Excerpt

The frightening postcard from Antibes, with his message written in that tiny, tight English handwriting, said he would not be at home in France when she was planning to visit, for he was going to Switzerland for treatment of anemia. Alas, Graham Greene wrote. Molly Benson knew what anemia meant; an American would have named the disease, but she thought only his close friends would be properly notified. A blood disorder, the family would say. He gave a telephone number for the apartment in Corseaux where he was moving, to be near the hospital, to have the innumerable blood transfusions that he would find so intolerable; but it was two weeks before she managed to call. It was never her habit to ring him; for years, she only used the mail. Her panic grew so acute that she dialed clumsily, reached a wrong number, and was chided by a cantankerous woman, who suspected a wicked prank. Then she was able to reach him. His voice was higher and thinner now, and all that was required of her, she thought, was to make him laugh, hardly one of her gifts. She spoke too rapidly and in a loud voice, although his hearing was very good. It was his eyes that were failing, he said; he could not read. This was unthinkable.

"I wanted you to know that the kiosk from The Third Man that Harry Lime used to get down into the sewer," she said, as if medication or pain might have blurred memory of his own great film, "has been re-created in an arcade on Fifty-fifth Street. It looks strange, because it is gilt. It is called Gottfried's and sells magazines and newspapers."

She was certain that he gave a low chuckle, and then provided an end to the conversation, for she would hav