Saavedra in The Honorary Consul, visualizing what I had just seen along the haunted 'Green Line' that slashed through the ruins of the city, and moaning with relief that Graham Greene had never been to Cyprus. On one of my first ventures as a foreign correspondent, in 1975, I sat in the garden bar of a taverna in Nicosia, reading about the adventures of Dr. In Mexico or Sierra Leone some old veteran will mumble something about the stranger in the off-white suit who was asking the same questions only a while back. Leaving the Orient Express, you will glimpse the tail of a raincoat just at the moment when that intriguing and anonymous fellow passenger vanishes discreetly at the end of the platform. As for Brighton, or Vienna, or Haiti-Greene was there just before you turned up.

A journalist, most especially an Anglo-American travel writer, will run the risk of disappointing his editor if he visits Saigon and leaves out any reference to quiet Americans, or turns in a piece from Havana that fails to mention the hapless Wormold. This mode of imitation or emulation or substitution-at once a form of flattery and a species of threat, or at any rate of challenge-was and is analogous to the role that Greene himself played and still plays in the lives of many writers and readers. So who or what was he? Semblable? Frère? Or perhaps hypocrite lecteur? He was caught once by a society photographer, and captioned in the press into the bargain, but a combination of flash and blur allowed him to escape unmasking.

The other man was suitably nondescript yet camera-shy. This 'other' Greene appeared to have anterior knowledge of the movements of his model, sometimes showing up to grant an interview or fill a seat in a restaurant, so that Greene himself, when he arrived in some old haunt or new locale, would be asked why he had returned so soon. Graham Greene once wrote a celebrated essay about a doppelgänger who cared enough to haunt and shadow him, even to masquerade as him.

De stille Amerikaan by Graham Greene