It's in the Bag

Presenting Orson Well as the Third Man. The lives of Harry Lime. The fabulous stories of the immortal character originally created in the motion picture The Third Man. With the Zither music by Anton Cara. The story for you. It all happened on a train going through the Balkans from Istanbul to Belgrade.

All there's a mysterious veiled woman in it naturally. And the whole thing ends up with me losing a suitcase full of money and getting a medal for doing it. Well, as Harry Lime, the third man, in today's story, it's in the bag.

And that is, runs between Istanbul and Paris. I wanted as much mileage between me and Turkey as possible, so I had my ticket booked all away. Orient expression was one of those famous trains like the Scottish Flyer, the Chief, the 20th Century, the Blue Train, the Trans-Siberian, That old days before the war, the Orient expressed particularly as far as Athens could be relied on

to provide a better cross-section of weird animals than a traveling circus. The kind of arena where you found bearskin hats and velvet collars beards, like cowcatchers and moustaches as big as oxhorns, and of course always the mysterious failed ladies that turned the Balkan evenings into Arabian nights.

Now in the bad and new days, the traveling companions, you're likely to find yourself with a rarly more than faces to break them and not near the landscape. Take my own neighbor, a little Greek, and a suit that looked as if it had been flipped out of a comic strip, his face, if you could call it a face,

and adjust something that grew a few inches north of his neck. The only feature to indicate which side was front was a pair of eyes that looked like black, current, swimming in lemon juice altogether, not the prettiest traveling companion I could have chosen, and the personality about as charming as a ward of yesterday's chewing gum.