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Or Raise the Titanic, maybe? Similar scene in both book and film, the old salt is played by Alec Guiness.
I can't be right as I just remembered the line - "Thank God for Maltby!"So not Raise the Titanic then?
The story starts off with someone 'asking for the details' or 'asking for the inside story' --trying to track down a man?-- and all he has is the man's name.
For convenience, let's say the man's name is 'Mark Almond'.
He makes this inquiry to some old salt(?) an old sailor or soldier(?) or ex-con? Someone such as that.
This is how the story begins. The old-sailor begins by reminiscing, he starts recollecting some 'buried history' for (the narrator-character-protagonist) who is conducting the investigation.
He starts off like this: "Well, ye know that's the thing..that's the thing no one ever understood. Its not just one story, its two stories. Ye can't tell one half of the story without tellin' the other half of the story. Mark Almond isn't just one thing, just one bloke, just one thing. It's two things, see? Two things rolled up inside each other. There's Mark and then there's Almond. One was always with the other. They always went together like ham and eggs. You see one, you see the other. That's how it was, get me?"
And so it is brought to dawn (on the character who is asking the questions), that what he thought all along was simply one man's name, was false. His lead --his scrap of info--is actually just *half* of two men's names conjoined together. Thus, it just seems like its one individual. One man named 'something-Mark' and one man named 'something-Almond'. Does that make any sense?
Auuugh. What the heck is this I'm thinking of? Is it the early Cambridge history of Jim Prideaux and Bill Haydon in 'Tinker, Tailor'? Is the interrogator I'm recalling, George Smiley?
Am I thinking of Drake and Nelson Ko? Their childhood history as recounted by Connie Sachs in 'Honourable Schoolboy'?