Those Who Walk Away

by Patricia Highsmith

  Signor Ciardi graciously conducted Ray and Luigi across an untidy garden and patio into the house, which was cold but had rather fine massive furniture and a stone stairway. Ray was offered a choice of two rooms, and chose the smaller, because he thought it would be easier to heat. The room was to cost five hundred lire per day, and the wood for his fire was to be bought at Ray’s expense. There was a small fireplace plus a red-tile stove. The toilet was an outdoor privy on a corner of the terrace, the bathroom a floor below Ray’s room. There were flower-pots around the edge of the roof terrace, and a garden behind the house, one grapevine of which climbed up past Ray’s window. Ray was quite satisfied. He paid a week in advance, and Signor Ciardi summoned a slender woman servant of about sixty and asked her to start a fire in Signor Wilson’s room.

  “Come and have a glass of wine with us,” Signor Ciardi said to Ray.

  They descended to a large tile kitchen, and Signor Ciardi poured wine from a basketed demijohn into three glasses which he had put on the large wooden table. Luigi had said Signor Ciardi was a wholesale merchant of fishermen’s gear, and had a store on the Fondamento Nuovo, but was mostly at home. Luigi, as nearly as Ray could make out, told Signor Ciardi that Signor Wilson had approached him yesterday morning near the Ponte di Rialto, where he had been delivering vegetables, and asked him about a room to be rented in ‘the true Venice.’ Signor Ciardi seemed satisfied and rather pleased to have a paying guest, and not at all curious about him personally, for which Ray was grateful.

  “The house is empty since my wife died,” said Signor Ciardi. “And no children.” He shrugged, a low, tragic shrug, followed by a resigned smile. “And you, signor, children?”

  “I am not married,” Ray answered. “Maybe one day.”

  “Sicuro,” said Signor Ciardi, tugging his sweater down over his paunch. He was wearing two sweaters.

  Ray asked about a house key, and was given one at once from a kitchen shelf. Then Luigi and Signor Ciardi talked about things which Ray could not translate—fishing equipment—and Signor Ciardi referred several times to a stack of receipts or bills stuck through with a vertical spike on his sideboard, bringing his hand down as if he would impale it. Ray at last excused himself and said he would like to go up to his room.

  “Signor Weelson has been ill with influenza,” Luigi put in thoughtfully. “He needs much rest.”

  Signor Ciardi was understanding.

  Ray promised to call on Luigi or send a message tomorrow and went up to his room.

  The fire had made some difference. Ray felt suddenly safe and secure, and happier than he had been for days. He looked through the rest of the Gazzettino. Nothing about him. He opened his suitcase, but saw nothing to hang up except his overcoat, which he put on a hook on the back of his door. Then he yielded to his tiredness, the bliss of his new-found refuge, put on pyjamas, and went to bed. The last thing he looked at before he slept was the vigorous, gnarled stem of the now leafless grapevine, as thick as his arm, beyond the glass of his window.

  He slept for more than an hour. The house was silent when he awakened. Ray felt much better, but he lay for a while in bed, arms behind his head in the now warm room, and his thoughts turned again to Coleman, to the problem that was still unsolved. It was possible, Ray realized, to dispel the muddle, at least the murderous aspect of it, by simply telephoning Coleman and saying that he, Ray, was willing to tell the police he fell into a canal, one near the Seguso, for instance, and suffered amnesia for eight days. Ray smiled. Would anybody believe it? Well, suffered amnesia for two days, woke up to himself again, but found himself so enjoying, anonymity he kept it up a few more days; but now that the police were worried—Ray laughed to himself. He could, however, at least tell Coleman he would go to the police with some innocuous story, and that would relieve Coleman of any fear that he would tell the police the truth; Coleman was bound to be anxious about that. On the other hand, Ray thought, Coleman simply wasn’t anxious as to what he might tell the police, Coleman hadn’t been anxious after his first attempt had failed in Rome. No, Coleman had been arrogant and increasingly hostile when Ray had seen him later in Venice. Still, Coleman now knew he was deliberately hiding, and that therefore he might be up to something hostile against him. Coleman just might be a little worried now, and he had certainly looked flustered when he saw him last night in Harry’s Bar. Or had that fluster been purely surprise, surprise that he was still alive?

  The fact remained that he could start things moving in a more pacific direction, if he said to Coleman that he was not going to tell anyone what had really happened. He could write a letter to Coleman, so there would be no chance of Inez’s overhearing a telephone conversation, or possibly knowing he had telephoned.

  But as soon as he thought this, Ray began to realize that Coleman’s anger against him went much deeper. It was the deepest thing in Coleman’s existence now. Coleman would obviously risk his own life, or life imprisonment, for it. People did that for love quite often. Coleman was doing it for hatred.

  Ray could not come to any conclusion about the next thing to do, the next move to make, but he was tired of his bed, and got up. As he dressed, he felt once more, and more strongly, impelled to write Coleman a letter. He needn’t post it, or at least not at once, but he had to write it. He had bought a block of writing-paper and some envelopes. He sat down at the wicker table, on which he had to spread his newspaper to get a flat enough surface even for the pad.

  ‘19 November 19—’

  “Dear Ed,” Ray began uneasily, hating calling Coleman by this name, but it seemed the best of three possibilities.

  I thought it might relieve you, if only a little, if I tell you that I have no intention of telling the police or anyone else what happened that Thursday night. That is one reason for my writing this letter.

  The second is Peggy. I have not yet made you understand, though I have tried often enough. I feel that I have failed somehow in everything I tried to put into words to you about her. I would like to say first of all that Peggy was unusually young for her age—and the word immature doesn’t convey the whole thing. I think it was because she was so sheltered as a child and in her adolescence (I know I have said this before) and this of course entered into all her relationships—with me and with her painting also, for instance. She had not begun to realize the long and often slow progress every artist has to make before he becomes ‘mature’ or achieves any kind of mastery. Her education—finished a short while before I met her—by not concentrating on art (a pity this wasn’t arranged, as she said she had always wanted to be a painter like you, that by sixteen she had been quite determined about it, but she may have exaggerated) deprived her of beginning this knowledge, which is a knowledge of progress and also of capacities and limitations. Most people who are going to be painters know a great deal about these things by the time they are eighteen or twenty. I think Peggy was bewildered and frightened by the world she saw opening before her. I know she was frightened by her pleasure in sex (whatever you may think, I am in a better position than you to know) and also she expected more from it than is actually there—with anyone. But far from being frightened of sex itself, she was more enthusiastic than I was, which is saying a lot, as I loved her.

  He wanted to finish that sentence with ‘both tenderly and passionately,’ but could not bear to imagine Coleman sneering at this, not believing it, and even labelling it crude.

  It seems too obvious to say that we are both still in a state of trauma from her death, but it is all too evident in our respective behaviour. Can you not realize that I loved her too and would have done anything to prevent this and would give anything to turn back time a few weeks so it would not have happened?

  Ray felt he was becoming vague, and that he had said enough. He put the letter into an envelope and addressed it to Edward Coleman at the Bauer-Gruenwald, but he did not seal it, because he thought he might want to add something. He put the envelope in the pocket of his suitcase lid.

  A few m
oments later, Ray went out to walk about Giudecca. It was called ‘the garden island,’ he remembered, and he saw lots of trees, but the gardens were apparently behind the houses and not for public view. The day seemed warmer than yesterday. He loved the feeling of being on the large island, so close to the mainland of Venice, yet separated from it by the wide Giudecca Canal which now seemed protective to him. The Ciardi house was on the south side of Giudecca, and almost on the water (only one row of houses intervened) and from that bank there was a faint view of the marshy islands, where Ray had never been, which clustered near the mainland of Italy, and in the other direction a fuzzy view of the Lido. Ray walked across the island until he could see the mainland of Venice with its point of land on which della Salute stood, and beyond, across the Grand Canal, the heart of the city where the campanile of San Marco raised its pointed, gold-glinting tower. A handsome white ship, the San Giorgio, was moving to the right, towards the Adriatic, a blue-and-gold winged lion of Venice on its smokestack. And one of the ramp-nosed car ferries, which plied between the Lido and the mainland, churned the water going in the opposite direction, so close Ray could read its name, Amminiara, He remembered the Marianna II, He should keep an eye out for that boat, too, he thought, in his walks about Venice. Five or six people—Coleman, Inez, the Smith-Peters, Antonio (if he was still here), the woman on the Lido whose name he had forgotten, Elisabetta, and now the Marianna II.

  Ray lunched at a trattoria on Giudecca (not Mi Favorita) for an incredibly small sum, but neither was the bistecca very tender. Then he took a boat to San Marco and spent the latter part of the afternoon visiting the Palace of the Doges. The huge, formal council halls, the ornate emptiness of the place made him feel more calm and in command of himself. It was, somehow, the shattering purposelessness of the Palace that now made him feel so, he realized.

  When he went out into the Piazzetta, the day seemed warmer, perhaps because he had expected a contrast between the temperature of the Ducal Palace (frigid) and the outdoors. He walked slowly, smoking a cigarette, down the arcade on the south side of the Piazza. He realized he could hardly be in a more conspicuous place for Coleman’s group or for the police, assuming they were actively looking for him, but just then Ray was reconciled to being found. He also realized he had felt this way before, at moments in the past week, and that the sensation had not lasted long. He was passing a tobacconist’s shop on his left, when Coleman stepped briskly out of it and saw him.

  Coleman stopped. They were only some eight feet apart.

  Ray blinked, but did not move, and Ray had not the shocked surprise of last evening, though last evening he had more than half anticipated seeing Coleman in Harry’s Bar. In a split second, Ray thought: there is a chance now for us to speak to each other, for me to tell him I’m not going to say anything to the police. And he made the start, a step towards Coleman, but before the step was finished, Coleman had turned himself away with a jerk of his heavy shoulders and was walking on.

  Ray looked ahead of him, and saw Inez and Antonio just turning from a shop window twenty yards away, Inez looking in Coleman’s direction. They had obviously been waiting while Coleman went off for cigars. For a moment, Ray felt too stunned to move, then at last he turned and walked in the direction he had come from, walked quickly so as to get away from them. He did not think Inez had seen him. He crossed the Piazzetta, bearing right, crossed the bridge paralleling the bridge of Sighs, wanting only to go in a direction in which they would probably not go. Ray had seen the twitch of Coleman’s lip, the hardening of his eyes, a look that said, “That bastard again!” It was awful, somehow so devastating to Ray that he did not know how to take it, how he should take it.

  Ray had tarried for a possible word, and it was evident Coleman did not care for one. Coleman could have beckoned him behind a pillar, Inez need not have seen him. Coleman might have said, “All right, so you’re alive. I think you’re a louse, but I’ve had enough. Just keep out of my sight.” But Coleman did not want to come to any settlement. Ray began to walk more slowly on the Riva degli Schiavoni, but his fear, which had been almost panic as he fled the Piazza, was still with him. He had to go into a bar in order to use the toilet. Then he ordered a caffé, and deliberately tried not to think about the situation, about Coleman, because he was making no progress at all. He stood at the bar, sipping the coffee, and an image came to his mind: himself walking in a dark alley of Venice, over a small curved bridge that spanned a canal, under a street-lamp that projected from a house corner—and from the shadow of the house across from the light, Coleman stepped and hit him a fatal blow on the back of the head. Was that what he wanted? A blow with a rock-in-hand, with an iron pipe? Or was the image, like a dream, preparing him for something that was going to happen, most likely going to happen, anyway?

  Ray lifted his eyes and saw the teen-aged boy behind the counter staring at him. He finished his coffee.

  “Altro, signor?” asked the boy.

  “No, grazie.” Ray had paid for the coffee, and now he fished a ten lire piece from his overcoat pocket and dropped it into the saucer for a tip.

  12

  It was on the afternoon of 19 November, a Friday, that Coleman saw Ray Garrett in the arcade of the Piazza. That Ray walked about in the most conspicuous place in Venice—apart, perhaps, from Harry’s Bar, into which he had stuck his nose the night before—that Ray arrogantly assumed Coleman would be afraid to speak to him, or to tell anyone he’d seen Ray, put Coleman into a bad temper which he tried to conceal from Inez. He could not conceal all of it. That evening, she asked him what was the matter, and since he could give her no reason, she told him that he looked as if he were suffering from a nervous disorder. This piqued Coleman further.

  That night, Inez was very cool and rejected even his touch on her shoulder, his attempted kiss on her cheek. Coleman, resentful, slept in his own bed for the first time.

  Then the next morning, Saturday, there came a telephone call from the police while Coleman and Inez were breakfasting. Would Signor Coleman be so kind as to come to the office of police at Piazzale Roma that afternoon at four o’clock? Coleman had to say that he would. It would be a long, nasty ride as it was a rainy day. Gusts of wind hurled the rain at their windows in the Bauer-Gruenwald, and it sounded like buckshot when it hit.

  Coleman told Inez what he had to do. Then he said, “Let’s get out of this hotel today. Change it, I mean.”

  “To what?” Inez asked in a tone of rhetorical indifference.

  “The Gritti Palace, for instance. That’s a nice place. I’ve stayed there.” Coleman had not; he had only eaten there once with friends, he recalled. But no matter, it was a good place. It irked him that Ray knew where he was based, and that he did not know where Ray was.

  “If you wish,” Inez said, as if she were humouring a child.

  Coleman was glad, at least, that she didn’t propose leaving Venice. He was not at all sure he would be allowed to leave Venice now, anyway, and perhaps Inez realized this, too. “We can get out by twelve easily, I should think. That’s probably checking-out time.”

  “You had better see first if they have rooms there.”

  “This time of year? Sure.” But Coleman went to the telephone. He booked two rooms, each with a separate bath, as there was no two rooms with one bath available. Inez wanted a room of her own, even if they spent all their time in his or hers.

  A few minutes later, a boy brought a letter on a tray. Coleman saw that it was for him. He gave the boy a hundred-lire coin.

  “From Rome,” Coleman said.

  Inez was across the room and did not see the black ink writing—angular and mostly printed—which Coleman recognized as Ray’s.

  He strolled slowly into his room as he opened the letter, then said, “Yep, from Dick Purcell,” in a casual tone. Coleman had introduced Inez to Dick Purcell in Rome. Purcell was an American architect and a neighbour of his.

  Coleman stood by his reading-lamp on the other side of the bed from the bathroom
door, and stood sideways so he would know if Inez came in. He read the letter, and his heart beat a trifle faster at every paragraph. “…whatever you may think…” Ha! Not all the excuses and explanations in the world could explain away Ray’s guilt, not even to Ray himself. The paragraph beginning, ‘It seems too obvious to say that we are both still in a state of trauma from her death’ made Coleman sneer. It sounded like something from an etiquette book on how to write a letter of condolence. Ray picked up a little in the last paragraph:

  Another attempt by you to kill me might succeed. Though it’s evident you want this, you must realize I could—now—tell someone or several people that you may try to do this. In which case you would suffer later, if anything happens to me. It is an absurd game, Ed. I am willing to see you and try to talk again, if you are willing. You may write to me Posta Restante, San Marco post office.

  Yours,

  Ray Garrett

  Coleman chuckled loudly, partly because he felt like it, partly for Inez’s benefit, since Dick Purcell was witty. Ray grovelling in the first paragraph, saying he wouldn’t tell the police anything, then coming out with what amounted to a threat at the end! Coleman tore the letter into small pieces. He stuffed the pieces into a pocket with a view to disposing of them somewhere outside. He tore up the envelope, too.

  “Is my red dressing-gown in there?” Inez called to him.

  Coleman found it on the back of the door. Coleman was thinking that it would be amusing to see Ray calling daily, maybe twice a day, at the post office at the west end of the Piazza, and being disappointed. But Coleman had no intention of wasting time in watching him. And a fresh resentment went through him, painfully tangled with grief, at the memory of Peggy, of her soft young flesh, his flesh, her bright young eyes, her long dark hair. She had not begun to live before she died. If she had not married Garrett, she would be alive now. That was a fact, and no one in the world could dispute it. His grief frightened him, and he felt he was spinning in a whirlpool, being sucked down. Gone now the hope of seeing Peggy mature into a happy woman, dreams of taking her and a couple of small grandchildren to St Moritz or Ascona for a holiday, or playing with them all in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Ray Garrett’s children? Well, never, thank God!