Ripley Under Ground
Page 30
Mme. Annette came in with the bar cart. The silver ice bucket shone. The cart squeaked slightly. Tom had been meaning to oil it for weeks. Tom might have gone on bantering with Reeves because Mme. Annette, bless her soul, didn’t understand English, but Tom was tired of the subject, and delighted by Mme. Annette’s interruption. Mme. Annette was in her sixties, from a Normandy family, fine of feature and sturdy of body, a gem of a servant. Tom could not imagine Belle Ombre functioning without her.
Then Heloise came in from the garden, and Reeves got to his feet. Heloise was wearing bell-bottom pink-and-red-striped dungarees with LEVI printed vertically down all the stripes. Her blonde hair swung long and loose. Tom saw the firelight glow in it and thought, “What purity compared to what we’ve been talking about!” The light in her hair was gold, however, which made Tom think of money. Well, he didn’t really need any more money, even if the Derwatt picture sales, of which he got a percentage, would soon come to an end because there would be no more pictures. Tom still got a percentage from the Derwatt art supplies company, and that would continue. Then there was the modest but slowly increasing income from the Greenleaf securities which he had inherited by means of a will forged by Tom himself. Not to mention Heloise’s generous allowance from her father. No use being greedy. Tom detested murder unless it was absolutely necessary.
“Did you have a good talk?” Heloise asked in English, and fell back gracefully onto the yellow sofa.
“Yes, thank you,” said Reeves.
The rest of the conversation was in French, because Heloise was not comfortable in English. Reeves did not know much French but he got along, and they were not talking about anything important: the garden, the mild winter that seemed really to have passed, because here it was early March and the daffodils were opening. Tom poured champagne for Heloise from one of the little bottles on the cart.
“How ees eet in Hambourg?” Heloise ventured again in English, and Tom saw amusement in her eyes as Reeves struggled to get out a conventional response in French.
It was not too cold in Hamburg either, and Reeves added that he had a garden also, as his “petite maison” found itself on the Alster which was water, that was to say a sort of bay where many people had homes with gardens and water, meaning they could have small boats if they wished.
Tom knew that Heloise disliked Reeves Minot, mistrusted him, that Reeves was the kind of person Heloise wanted Tom to avoid. Tom reflected with satisfaction that he could honestly say to Heloise tonight that he had declined to cooperate in the scheme that Reeves had proposed. Heloise was always worried about what her father would say. Her father, Jacques Plisson, was a millionaire pharmaceutical manufacturer, a Gaullist, the essence of French respectability. And he had never cared for Tom. “My father will not stand for much more!” Heloise often warned Tom, but Tom knew she was more interested in his own safety than in hanging on to the allowance her father gave her, an allowance he frequently threatened to cut off, according to Heloise. She had lunch with her parents at their home in Chantilly once a week, usually Friday. If her father ever severed her allowance, they could not quite make it at Belle Ombre, Tom knew.
The dinner menu was médaillons de boeuf, preceded by cold artichokes with Mme. Annette’s own sauce. Heloise had changed into a simple dress of pale blue. She sensed already, Tom thought, that Reeves had not got what he had come for. Before they all retired, Tom made sure that Reeves had everything he needed, and at what hour he would like tea or coffee brought to his room. Coffee at 8 a.m., Reeves said. Reeves had the guest room in the left center of the house, which gave Reeves the bathroom that was usually Heloise’s, but from which Mme. Annette had already removed Heloise’s toothbrush to Tom’s bathroom, off his own room.
“I am glad he is going tomorrow. Why is he so tense?” Heloise asked, while brushing her teeth.
“He’s always tense.” Tom turned off the shower, stepped out and quickly enveloped himself in a big yellow towel. “That’s why he’s thin—maybe.” They were speaking in English, because Heloise was not shy about speaking English with him.
“How did you meet him?”
Tom couldn’t remember. When? Maybe five or six years ago. In Rome? Who was Reeves a friend of? Tom was too tired to think hard, and it didn’t matter. He had five or six such acquaintances, and would have been hard-pressed to say where he had met each and every one.
“What did he want from you?”
Tom put his arm around Heloise’s waist, pressing the loose nightdress close to her body. He kissed her cool cheek. “Something impossible. I said no. You can see that. He is disappointed.”
That night there was an owl, a lonely owl calling somewhere in the pines of the communal forest behind Belle Ombre. Tom lay with his left arm under Heloise’s neck, thinking. She fell asleep, and her breathing became slow and soft. Tom sighed, and went on thinking. But he was not thinking in a logical, constructive way. His second coffee was keeping him awake. He was remembering a party he had been to a month ago in Fontainebleau, an informal birthday party for a Mme.—who? It was her husband’s name that Tom was interested in, an English name that might come to him in a few seconds. The man, the host, had been in his early thirties, and they had a small son. The house was a straight-up-and-down three-story, on a residential street in Fontainebleau, a patch of garden behind it. The man was a picture framer, that was why Tom had been dragged along by Pierre Gauthier, who had an art supply shop in the Rue Grande, where Tom bought his paints and brushes. Gauthier had said, “Oh, come along with me, M. Reeply. Bring your wife! He wants a lot of people. He’s a little depressed . . . And anyway, since he makes frames, you might give him some business.”
Tom blinked in the darkness, and moved his head back a little so his eyelashes would not touch Heloise’s shoulder. He recalled a tall blond Englishman with a certain resentment and dislike, because in the kitchen, that gloomy kitchen with worn-out linoleum, smoke-stained tin ceiling with a nineteenth-century bas-relief pattern, this man had made an unpleasant remark to Tom. The man—Trewbridge, Tewksbury?—had said in an almost sneering way, “Oh yes, I’ve heard of you.” Tom had said, “I’m Tom Ripley. I live in Villeperce,” and Tom had been about to ask him how long he’d been in Fontainebleau, thinking that perhaps an Englishman with a French wife might like to make acquaintance with an American with a French wife living not far away, but Tom’s venture had been met with rudeness. Trevanny? Wasn’t that his name? Blond, straight hair, rather Dutch-looking, but then the English often looked Dutch and vice versa.
What Tom was thinking of now, however, was what Gauthier had said later the same evening. “He’s depressed. He doesn’t mean to be unfriendly. He’s got some kind of blood disease—leukemia, I think. Pretty serious. Also as you can see from the house, he’s not doing too well.” Gauthier had a glass eye of a curious yellow-green color, obviously an attempt to match the real eye, but rather a failure. Gauthier’s false eye suggested the eye of a dead cat. One avoided looking at it, yet one’s eyes were hypnotically drawn to it, so Gauthier’s gloomy words, combined with his glass eye, had made a strong impression of Death upon Tom, and Tom had not forgotten.
Oh, yes, I’ve heard of you. Did that mean that Trevanny or whatever his name was thought he was responsible for Bernard Tufts’s death, and before that Dickie Greenleaf’s? Or was the Englishman merely embittered against everyone because of his ailment? Dyspeptic, like a man with a constant stomachache? Now Tom recalled Trevanny’s wife, not a pretty but a rather interesting-looking woman with chestnut hair, friendly and outgoing, making an effort at that party in the small living room and the kitchen where no one had sat down on the few chairs available.
What Tom was thinking was: would this man take on such a job as Reeves was proposing? An interesting approach to Trevanny had occurred to Tom. It was an approach that might work with any man, if one prepared the ground, but in this case the ground was already prepared. Trevanny was seriously worried about his health. Tom’s idea was nothing more than
a practical joke, he thought, a nasty one, but the man had been nasty to him. The joke might not last more than a day or so, until Trevanny could consult his doctor.
Tom was amused by his thoughts, and eased himself gently from Heloise, so that if he shook with repressed laughter for an instant, he wouldn’t awaken her. Suppose Trevanny was vulnerable, and carried out Reeves’s plan like a soldier, like a dream? Was it worth a try? Yes, because Tom had nothing to lose. Neither had Trevanny. Trevanny might gain. Reeves might gain—according to Reeves, but let Reeves figure that out, because what Reeves wanted seemed as vague to Tom as Reeves’s microfilm activities, which presumably had to do with international spying. Were governments aware of the insane antics of some of their spies? Of those whimsical, half-demented men flitting from Bucharest to Moscow and Washington with guns and microfilm—men who might with the same enthusiasm have put their energies to international warfare in stamp-collecting, or in acquiring secrets of miniature electric trains?
Copyright © 1970 by Patricia Highsmith
Copyright © 1993 by Diogenes Verlag AG, Zurich
First published as a Norton edition 2008
Originally published in hardcover by Doubleday & Company, New York, in 1970
All rights reserved
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Highsmith, Patricia, 1921–1995
Ripley under ground / Patricia Highsmith.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-393-33213-1 (trade pbk.)
1. Ripley, Tom (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Serial murderers—Fiction.
3. Psychopaths—Fiction. 4. Criminals—Fiction. 5. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3558.I366R56 2008
813’.54—dc22
2008007660
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