The dramatic space that was until recently Mifune is now Wano, under the same management, Tokyo Restaurant Factory, and now features Japanese fine ding via a kaiseki tasting by chef Ryota Sakaba. It was good to see the company has retained affable general manager Ayana Mazon and beverage director Daniel Eng.
         The restaurant was designed by Katsunori Takeuchi, who fashioned it into two rooms: one, up front, a well-lighted, 11-seat counter, the other a large, high-ceilinged main room done in traditional natural wood. Tables of polished dark wood are of good size to allow spreading out the lovely food, which might be even lovelier if they trained overhead lights or table lamps on it.
      Sakaba trained in kaiseki cuisine at Hana and become a  “vegetable sommelier,” trained in over 60 types of vegetables, and his expertise shows well at Wano.    
     The menu is long and has many categories, so three of us simply let the chef choose the meal, stipulating that we were most ravenous for sushi and sashimi.  But first we began with a warm dish of sea urchin with salmon roe chawanmushi ($15) that was a proper entry to the fried prawn tempura of a fine crisp exterior and moist inside ($25). Miso cod ($40) was as velvety and sweet-fleshed as any I’ve had this year.
        Of course, the requisite for good sushi and sashimi is not just its impeccable freshness but that the various species have their own distinct flavor, and on that score Sakaba really delivers. Nigiri sushi included kampachi ($15), the silvery amberjack; salmon ($7) that tasted of the river, not the farm; botan ebi ($12), the soft-shelled Japanese shrimp; ikura salmon roe ($10), Japanese scallops ($12) and more. None tasted like another, and the rice was moist and at the right temperature. We also enjoyed a hefty spicy tuna roll ($15).
         There are many other options, as well as tasting menus, and wagyu beef puts in appearances in both appetizers and hot fishes. There are five fried items, and for main courses abalone (when available), foie gras (unusual) and duck breast.
         As is often the case, Japanese desserts lack the creamy enticement of western sweets, and the green tea panna cotta ($12) was bland.
         Eng, who is a certified sake master, offers a few cocktails based in Japanese spirits, but he doesn’t stock much in the way of western liquors, so you’re out of luck if you want a Manhattan or a margarita. There are the usual Japanese beers, quite pricey with Suntory Malt Beer (not easy to find everywhere) at $14 a can.
         Suntory was quiet when I dined there, happily so, but things went slow for a while. Wano is probably better when it’s in full swing and there’s a bigger staff.
         I would go back to eat pretty much anything the chef recommends, believing that seasonality and rich flavors make Japanese cuisine as special as it is at Wano.

Lunch Tues.-Fri.; dinner Tues.-Sat.

         Katie thought it best to get back to New York as soon as possible, but the information and color she would get from spending a day or two in the city where The Third Man took place would be invaluable.  In fact, the concierge said she could buy a map at the newsstand with all the locations in which Carol Reed shot the movie.
         She and David were delighted that one of the first stops on the map was nearby the Sacher, the stunning Café Mozart—that year celebrating its 100th anniversary—where Martins met Lime’s devious friend Kurtz, although they learned at the Café that the actual scene was filmed elsewhere. 
         Now fully recovered and glad to be alive, David was blissful strolling the beautiful majestic city with Katie, seeing its great Gothic St. Stephen’s Cathedral and its grand Neo-Renaissance-style Vienna State Opera House (right). 
         “It’s such a wide open city,” he said, “there seem as many plazas as there are streets, and the traffic looks light everywhere. Nobody seems to honk their horns.”
          They walked to the baroque Palais Pallavicini on Josefsplatz, where Lime lived and where, in front of its ornate entrance, he was said to have been hit by a truck and died, his body quickly carried away.  The map noted that the Casanova Club, where Martins met another of Lime’s friends, Popescu, was still on Dorotheergasse, but had since become a modern coffee shop not worth visiting. The building denoted as number 8 Schreyvogelgasse (below) was where Lime hid in the shadows of the doorway, revealed by a cat nibbling at his shoelaces. The huge cobblestone square Lime ran into and mysteriously disappeared within a kiosk leading to the underground sewers looked exactly as it did in the film, except for the kiosk itself, which had been only a movie prop.
         So, too, did Hoher Market, Vienna’s oldest square, look the same as in the movie, where Lime agreed to meet Martins and again disappeared into a sewer (below), pursued by the English and Austrian police and eventually shot and killed by Martins, with Lime’s fingers shown frantically squirming through the sewer cover.
         “We’ve got to get out to the amusement park,” said Katie, who remembered that it had been in the Russian sector in the movie.  “I hope we can ride up to the top of the Ferris wheel.”
         They were happy to find the park open for the Christmas holidays and the Riesenrad in operation. Slowly each car of the huge wheel was loaded with passengers; luckily Katie and David got a car all to themselves.  As the car rose and rocked gently, Katie and David saw Vienna begin to spread out below, with the wide ribbon of the Danube and the Ringstrasse  that encircled the entire city.  At the top David said, “So this is where Holly and Lime found a neutral zone where they could both speak freely.”
         Only the high sound of a slight winter’s breeze was heard outside the car. Katie and David stared at each other, smiling. She said, “It’s really like we’ve come full circle, isn’t it? I’m glad we ended rather than began here.”
         “Yeah,” said David looking out over the city, “I can see why Greene chose it for the scene. Two old friends, one an American looking for explanations, the other a complete bastard, maybe thinking of pushing Holly out the door, getting him out of the way. Lime always thinks he can get away with anything.”
         “It’s amazing to think that Greene might’ve come up here with Neame. You think he did?”
         “I guess I’d like to think he did,” said David. “Makes me wonder how soon afterwards they met that Neame got out of Vienna. Greene must have known Neame was one of the bad guys.”
         “Maybe that’s why Greene kills off Lime at the end of the story,” said Katie. “We were thinking Philby had been the inspiration for Lime, but Greene forgave his old friend everything, even after Philby betrayed his own country. Greene could kill off a guy like Neame with pleasure.”
         “Being up here sure clears the head, doesn’t it,” said David, smiling broadly at Katie.  
         Since it was then too late for them to tour the sewers, Katie and David’s last stop was the Zentral-Friedhof cemetery, where Lime was supposedly buried and where Holly Martins first meets the English intelligence officer Major Calloway.
         “Here’s where it all began in the movie,” said David.
         “And where it all ends,” said Katie, who during their walk-through had been amazed to come upon the graves of Beethoven, Brahms, Salieri, Schubert and Johann Strauss.  “Remember Calloway saying, ‘Next time we'll have afoolproof coffin’? That reminds me that Kim Philby was like Lime in one respect: he managed to be both dead and buried and still very much alive all this time.”
      “And for the time being,” David responded, “so is Neame, who managed to be reborn as Gorgo Toth. I wonder if Greene ever knew that.”
      “Well, Philby did—he was the one who told us—so we’ve got to suppose he told Greene before he died. Make himself look better in Greene’s eyes.”
      “And you’re going to be the one to tell the world about all of them. I’m sure Philby will feel vindicated, at least of people thinking he was a pathetic criminal like Harry Lime.”
      “I’m not sure how I’m going to handle all that,” said Katie, “trying not to make Philby into a sympathetic character. The guy was an unrepentant traitor. Was Neame worse? I guess he was if children died because of what he did. And we would have been next.”
      David interrupted. “Have you forgotten how many people were murdered because of Philby exposing them, including British agents?  To me it’s a toss-up of two kinds of monster, both of them trying to hang on to some shred of dignity.”
      Katie sighed and said, “It’s all very, very complicated.  I’m supposed report things as objectively as possible—which is tough when your subject almost murders you. I’m not one of those actors who plays a villain and says he has to find a way to understand the guy’s psyche.  But the truth is, everyone has many shadings, many colors to them.”
      “Yeah, and some are blood red.”

                                      *                *                *                * 

         By the time Katie and David left Vienna for New York the next day, the news that Gorgo Toth had been kidnapped made the Hungarian papers, though only the English-language Budapest Times had it on the front page, but not as the lead article.  All the stories referred to Toth as Hungary’s top pharmaceutical industrialist but noted that it was believed Hungarian Pharm had significant Russian ownership in the company. The official statements by the Hungarian police said only that they were following promising leads as to who had kidnapped the magnate but offered no suspects.
         Otherwise, the European papers, including The International Herald Tribune, which picked up the story from Reuters and Associated Press filings, paid scant attention to Toth’s arrest. It would be the European business weeklies and the pharmaceutical industry magazines that would eventually do in-depth stories about Toth, noting that he had been a controversial figure dating back to his dealings with the Soviets.
         In fact, it was the Russian newspapers that announced Toth’s kidnapping as an arrest by Russian police—they didn’t say if it was FSS—on corruption charges that required his removal so that he could stand trial in Moscow. There was a brief flurry of objections by the Hungarian government and a protest by its ambassador in Moscow but nothing came of them. No mention by any quarter was made of Toth’s previous activities as Harold Neame.

                                    WELL WORTH THE WAIT:
                          Some Terrific Red Wines Now Fully Matured

                                                                            By John Mariani