“When I saw Rollo Martins first I made this note on him for my security police files: ‘In normal circumstances a cheerful fool. Drinks too much and may cause a little trouble. Whenever a woman passes raises his eyes and makes some comment, but I get the impression that really he’d rather not be bothered. Has never really grown up and perhaps that accounts for the way he worshipped Lime.’ I wrote there that phrase ‘in normal circumstances’ because I met him first at Harry Lime’s funeral.”

The story’s opening lines establish that Calloway is looking back on the past, preserving an official record as well as telling a story. Unsurprisingly, he calls Martins a “fool,” which lays the groundwork for their adversarial relationship. Calloway, significantly, portrays Martins as a perpetual child, unable to fully rein in his impulses to drink and chase women. He calls the relationship between Lime and Martins one of “worship” which indicates Martins’s status as a subordinate—and worship is an act not rooted in the rational, cynical calculation that Calloway is prone to. In addition, Calloway acknowledges that his tale concerns exceptional circumstances, in which Martins is a man dogged by grief.

“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.