Ripley Under Ground

by Patricia Highsmith

  “No,” Tom said.

  “You see, it is odd, you must agree, that three men disappear or die around you—Murchison, Derwatt, and Bernard Tufts. So did Richard Greenleaf disappear—his body was never found, I think. And what was his friend’s name? Fred? Freddie something?”

  “Miles, I think,” Tom said. “But I can’t say Murchison was very near me. I hardly knew Murchison. Or Freddie Miles for that matter.” At least Webster was not yet thinking of the possibility that he had impersonated Derwatt, Tom thought.

  Heloise and Mme. Annette came in, Mme. Annette pushing the cart that held a plate of sandwiches and a wine bottle in an ice bucket.

  “Ah, some refreshment!” Tom said. “I didn’t ask if you had a lunch engagement, Inspector, but this little—”

  “I have with the Melun police,” Webster said with a quick smile. “I must ring them shortly. And by the way I’ll reimburse you for all these telephone calls.”

  Tom waved a hand in protest. “Thank you, madame,” he said to Mme. Annette.

  Heloise offered Inspector Webster a plate and napkin, then presented the sandwiches. “Lobster and crab. The lobster are these,” she said, indicating.

  “How could I resist?” said the inspector, accepting one of each. But Webster was still on the subject. “I must alert the Salzburg police—via London, because I can’t speak German—to look for Bernard Tufts. And perhaps tomorrow we can arrange to meet in Salzburg. Are you free tomorrow, Mr. Ripley?”

  “Yes—I could be, of course.”

  “You’ve got to lead us to that spot in the woods. We must dig up the—you know. Derwatt was a British subject. Or was he, in fact?” Webster smiled with his mouth full. “But surely he wouldn’t have become a Mexican citizen.”

  “That’s something I never asked him,” Tom said.

  “It will be interesting to find his village in Mexico,” Webster remarked, “this remote and nameless village. What town is it near, do you know?”

  Tom smiled. “Derwatt never dropped a clue.”

  “I wonder if his house will be abandoned—or if he has a caretaker or a lawyer with the authority to wind things up there, once it’s known he’s dead.” Webster paused.

  Tom was silent. Was Webster casting about, hoping for Tom to drop a piece of information? As Derwatt, in London, Tom had told Webster that Derwatt had a Mexican passport and lived in Mexico under another name.

  Webster said. “Do you suppose Derwatt entered England and traveled about with a false name? A British passport possibly but with a false name?”

  Tom replied calmly, “I always supposed that.”

  “So he probably lived in Mexico under a false name also.”

  “Probably. I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “And shipped his canvases from Mexico under the same false name.”

  Tom paused, as if he were not very interested. “The Buckmaster Gallery ought to know.”

  Heloise presented the sandwiches again, but the inspector declined.

  “I feel sure they wouldn’t tell,” Webster said. “And maybe they don’t even know the name, if Derwatt sent his paintings under the name Derwatt, for instance. But he must have entered England under the false name, because we have no record of his comings and goings. May I ring the Melun police now?”

  “But of course,” Tom said. “Would you like to use my phone upstairs?”

  Webster said the downstairs telephone was quite all right. He consulted his notebook, and proceeded to speak with the operator in his adequate French. He asked for the commissaire.

  Tom poured white wine into the two glasses on the tray. Heloise had her wine.

  Webster was asking the Melun commissaire if they had any news about Thomas Murchison. Tom gathered no. Webster said that Mrs. Murchison was in London at the Connaught Hotel for the next few days, anxious for any information, if the Melun police would pass it on to Webster’s office. Webster also inquired about the missing painting “L’Horloge.” Nothing.

  When he had hung up, Tom wanted to ask what was happening in the search for Murchison, but Tom did not want it to appear that he had listened to Webster’s words over the phone.

  Webster insisted on leaving a fifty-franc note for his telephone calls. No, he thanked Tom, he did not care for another Dubonnet, but he sampled the wine.

  Tom could see Webster speculating, as he stood there, as to how much Tom Ripley was concealing, where was he guilty, how was he guilty, and where and how did Tom Ripley stand to gain anything? But it was obvious, Tom thought, that no person would have murdered two people, or even three—Murchison, Derwatt, and Bernard Tufts—to protect the value of the two Derwatt paintings which hung on Tom’s walls. And if Webster should go so far as to investigate the Derwatt Art Supply Company, through whose bank Tom received a monthly income, that income was sent without name to a numbered account in Switzerland.

  However, there was still Austria tomorrow, and Tom would have to accompany the police.

  “Can I ask you to ring for a taxi for me, Mr. Ripley? You know the number better than I.”

  Tom went to the telephone and rang a Villeperce taxi service. They would arrive at once, they said.

  “You’ll hear from me later this evening,” Webster said to Tom, “about Salzburg tomorrow. Is it a difficult place to get to?”

  Tom explained the change of planes at Frankfurt, and said he had been told a bus from Munich to Salzburg, if one landed at Munich, was quicker than waiting at Frankfurt for the plane to Austria. But this would have to be coordinated by telephone, once Webster found the time of the plane from London to Munich. He would be traveling with a colleague.

  Then Inspector Webster thanked Heloise, and Heloise and Tom accompanied him to the door as the taxi arrived. Webster saw the shoe box on the hall table before Tom could fetch it, and picked it up.

  “I have Bernard’s note and his two notebooks in my case,” Webster said to Tom.

  Tom and Heloise were on their front doorsteps as Webster’s taxi drove away, with Webster smiling his rabbit smile through the window. Then they walked back into the house.

  A peaceful silence reigned. Not of peace, Tom knew, but at least it was silence. “This evening—today—can we just do nothing? Watch television tonight?” This afternoon Tom wanted to garden. That always straightened him out.

  So he gardened. And in the evening they lay in pajamas on Heloise’s bed and watched television and sipped tea. The telephone rang just before 10 p.m. and Tom answered it in his room. He had been braced for Webster, and had a pen in hand ready to take down the schedule for tomorrow, but it was Chris Greenleaf in Paris. He had returned from the Rheinland and wondered if he could visit with his friend Gerald.

  Tom, when he had finished talking with Chris, came back to Heloise’s room and said, “That was Dickie Greenleaf’s cousin Chris. He wants to come to see us Monday and bring his friend Gerald Hayman. I told him yes. I hope it’s all right, darling. They’ll just stay overnight, probably. It’ll be a nice change—a little tourism, nice lunches. Yes? Peaceful.”

  “You are back from Salzburg when?”

  “Oh, I should be back Sunday. I don’t see why that business should take more than one day—tomorrow and part of Sunday. All they want is for me to show them the spot in the woods. And Bernard’s hotel.”

  “Um-m. Très bien,” Heloise murmured, propped against her pillows. “They arrive Monday.”

  “They’ll ring again. I’ll make it Monday evening.” Tom got back into bed. Heloise was curious about Chris, Tom knew. Boys like Chris and his friend would amuse her, for a while. Tom was pleased with the arrangement. He stared at the old French film unreeling before them on the television screen. Louis Jouvet, dressed like a Vatican Swiss Guard, was threatening someone with a halberd. Tom decided he must be solemn and direct tomorrow in Salzburg. The Austrian police would have a car, of course, and he would lead them directly to the place in the woods, while it was still light, and tomorrow evening directly to Der Blaue something in t
he Linzergasse. The dark-haired woman behind the desk would remember Bernard Tufts, and that Tom had once asked for him there. Tom felt secure. As he was beginning to follow the soporific dialogue on the screen, the telephone rang.

  “That’s no doubt Webster,” Tom said, and got out of bed again.

  Tom’s hand stopped in the act of reaching for the telephone—only for a second, but in that second he anticipated defeat and seemed to suffer it. Exposure. Shame. Carry it off as before, he thought. The show wasn’t over as yet. Courage! He picked up the telephone.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, Patricia Highsmith spent much of her adult life in Switzerland and France. She was educated at Barnard College, where she studied English, Latin, and Greek. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train, published initially in 1950, proved to be a major commercial success, and was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock. Despite this early recognition, Highsmith was unappreciated in the United States for the entire length of her career.

  Writing under the pseudonym of Claire Morgan, she then published The Price of Salt in 1952, which had been turned down by her previous American publisher because of its frank exploration of homosexual themes. Her most popular literary creation was Tom Ripley, the dapper sociopath who first debuted in her 1955 novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley. She followed with four other Ripley novels. Posthumously made into a major motion picture, The Talented Mr. Ripley has helped bring about a renewed appreciation of Highsmith’s work in the United States, as has the posthumous publication of The Selected Stories and Nothing That Meets the Eye: The Uncollected Stories, both of which received widespread acclaim when they were published by W. W. Norton & Company.

  The author of more than twenty books, Highsmith has won the O. Henry Memorial Award, the Edgar Allan Poe Award, Le Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, and the Award of the Crime Writers’ Association of Great Britain. She died in Switzerland on February 4, 1995, and her literary archives are maintained in Berne.

  Praise for Patricia Highsmith

  and the Ripley novels

  “Tom Ripley is one of the most interesting characters of world literature.”

  —Anthony Minghella

  “Mesmerizing . . . a Ripley novel is not to be safely recommended to the weak-minded or impressionable.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  “The brilliance of Highsmith’s conception of Tom Ripley was her ability to keep the heroic and demonic American dreamer in balance in the same protagonist—thus keeping us on his side well after his behavior becomes far more sociopathic than that of a con man like Gatsby.”

  —Frank Rich, New York Times Magazine

  “The most sinister and strangely alluring quintet the crime-fiction genre has ever produced. . . . This young, charismatic American protagonist is, it turns out, a murderer, a gentleman of calm amorality. It’s an unnerving characterization, and time and again Highsmith pulls it off, using all the singular tools of her trade.”

  —Mark Harris, Entertainment Weekly

  “Highsmith’s subversive touch is in making the reader complicit with Ripley’s cold logic.”

  —Daily Telegraph (UK)

  “[Highsmith] forces us to re-evaluate the lines between reason and madness, normal and abnormal, while goading us into sharing her treacherous hero’s point of view.”

  —Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

  “[Tom Ripley] is as appalling a protagonist as any mystery writer has ever created.”

  —Newsday

  “Savage in the way of Rabelais or Swift.”

  —Joyce Carol Oates, New York Review of Books

  “For eliciting the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings, there’s no one like Patricia Highsmith.”

  —Time

  “Murder, in Patricia Highsmith’s hands, is made to occur almost as casually as the bumping of a fender or a bout of food poisoning. This downplaying of the dramatic . . . has been much praised, as has the ordinariness of the details with which she depicts the daily lives and mental processes of her psychopaths. Both undoubtedly contribute to the domestication of crime in her fiction, thereby implicating the reader further in the sordid fantasy that is being worked out.”

  —Robert Towers, New York Review of Books

  If you enjoyed this novel, you’ll enjoy the other Ripley novels. To entice you, here is the first chapter of Ripley’s Game.

  1

  “There’s no such thing as a perfect murder,” Tom said to Reeves. “That’s just a parlor game, trying to dream one up. Of course you could say there are a lot of unsolved murders. That’s different.” Tom was bored. He walked up and down in front of his big fireplace, where a small but cozy fire crackled. Tom felt he had spoken in a stuffy, pontificating way. But the point was, he couldn’t help Reeves, and he’d already told him that.

  “Yes, sure,” said Reeves. He was sitting in one of the yellow silk armchairs, his lean figure hunched forward, hands clasped between his knees. He had a bony face, short, light-brown hair, cold gray eyes—not a pleasant face but a face that might have been rather handsome if not for a scar that traveled five inches from his right temple across his cheek almost to his mouth. Slightly pinker than the rest of his face, the scar looked like a bad job of stitching, or as if perhaps it had never been stitched. Tom had never asked about the scar, but Reeves had volunteered once, “A girl did it with her compact. Can you imagine?” (No, Tom couldn’t.) Reeves had given Tom a quick, sad smile, one of the few smiles Tom could recall from Reeves. And on another occasion, “I was thrown from a horse—dragged by the stirrup for a few yards.” Reeves had said that to someone else, but Tom had been present. Tom suspected a dull knife in a very nasty fight somewhere.

  Now Reeves wanted Tom to provide someone, suggest someone to do one or perhaps two “simple murders” and perhaps one theft, also safe and simple. Reeves had come from Hamburg to Villeperce to talk to Tom, and he was going to stay the night and go to Paris tomorrow to talk to someone else about it, then return to his home in Hamburg, presumably to do some more thinking if he failed. Reeves was primarily a fence, but lately was dabbling in the illegal gambling world of Hamburg, which he was now undertaking to protect. Protect from what? Italian sharks who wanted to come in. One Italian in Hamburg was a Mafia button man, sent out as a feeler, Reeves thought, and the other might be, from a different family. By eliminating one or both of these intruders, Reeves hoped to discourage further Mafia attempts, and also to draw the attention of the Hamburg police to a Mafia threat, and let the police handle the rest, which was to say, throw the Mafia out. “These Hamburg boys are a decent batch,” Reeves had declared fervently. “Maybe what they’re doing is illegal, running a couple of private casinos, but as clubs they’re not illegal, and they’re not taking outrageous profits. It’s not like Las Vegas, all Mafia-corrupted, and right under the noses of the American cops!”

  Tom took the poker and pushed the fire together, put another neatly cut third-of-a-log on. It was nearly 6 p.m. Soon be time for a drink. And why not now? “Would you—”

  Mme. Annette, the Ripleys’ housekeeper, came in from the kitchen hall just then. “Excuse me, messieurs. Would you like your drinks now, M. Tome, since the gentleman has not wanted any tea?”

  “Yes, thank you, Mme. Annette. Just what I was thinking. And ask Mme. Heloise to join us, would you?” Tom wanted Heloise to lighten the atmosphere a little. He had said to Heloise, before he went to Orly at 3 p.m. to fetch Reeves, that Reeves wanted to talk to him about something, so Heloise had pottered about in the garden or stayed upstairs all afternoon.

  “You wouldn’t,” Reeves said with a last-minute urgency and hope, “consider taking it on yourself? You’re not connected, you see, and that’s what we want. Safety. And after all, the money, ninety-six thousand bucks, isn’t bad.”

  Tom shook his head. “I’m connected with you—in a way.” Dammit, he’d done little jobs for Reeves Minot, like posting on small, stolen items, or recovering from toothpast
e tubes, where Reeves had planted them, tiny objects like microfilm rolls from the unsuspecting toothpaste carriers. “How much of this cloak and dagger stuff do you think I can get away with? I’ve got my reputation to protect, you know.” Tom felt like smiling at that, but at the same time his heart had quickened with genuine feeling, and he stood taller, conscious of the fine house in which he lived, of his secure existence now, six whole months after the Derwatt episode, a near-catastrophe from which he had escaped with no worse than a bit of suspicion upon him. Thin ice, yes, but the ice hadn’t broken through. Tom had accompanied the English Inspector Webster and a couple of forensic men to the Salzburg woods where he had cremated the body of the man presumed to be the painter Derwatt. Why had he crushed the skull, the police had asked. Tom could still wince when he thought of it, because he had done it to try to scatter and hide the upper teeth. The lower jaw had easily come away, and Tom had buried it at a distance. But the upper teeth— Some of them had been gathered by one of the forensic men, but there had been no record of Derwatt’s teeth with any dentist in London, Derwatt having been living (it was believed) in Mexico for the preceding six years. “It seemed part of the cremation, part of the idea of reducing him to ashes,” Tom had replied. The cremated body had been Bernard’s. Yes, Tom could still shudder, as much at the danger of that moment as at the horror of his act, dropping a big stone on the charred skull. But at least he hadn’t killed Bernard. Bernard Tufts had been a suicide.

  Tom said, “Surely among all the people you know, you can find somebody who can do it.”

  “Yes, and that would be a connection—more than you. Oh, the people I know are sort of known,” Reeves said with a sad defeat in his voice. “You know a lot of respectable people, Tom, people really in the clear, people above reproach.”

  Tom laughed. “How’re you going to get such people? Sometimes I think you’re out of your mind, Reeves.”

  “No! You know what I mean. Someone who’d do it for the money, just the money. They don’t have to be experts. We’d prepare the way. It’d be like—public assassinations. Someone who if he was questioned would look—absolutely incapable of doing such a thing.”