The Boy Who Followed Ripley

by Patricia Highsmith

  But Tom knew the boy would be anxious to hear what Tom thought of his account, would probably want a word of praise for his honesty at least, and Tom felt the boy had really tried to be honest.

  Frank was now in the living room. Tom had switched on the television for him after their dinner, but evidently Frank had been bored (very likely on a Saturday night), because he had put on the Lou Reed record again, though not so loudly as Heloise had played it. Tom went down, having left the boy’s pages in his room.

  The boy lay on the yellow sofa, his feet carefully over the edge so as not to soil the yellow satin, his hands behind his head, eyes closed. He had not even heard Tom come down the stairs. Or was he asleep?

  “Billy?” Tom said, again trying to fix “Billy” in his mind for as long as he would need it, and how long would that be?

  Frank sat up at once. “Yes, sir.”

  “I think what you wrote is very good—interesting as far as it goes.”

  “Do you?— What do you mean as far as it goes?”

  “I was hoping—” Tom glanced toward the kitchen, but the light there was already off, Tom saw through the half open door. Tom had decided to stop, however. Why force his own thoughts into the mind of a sixteen-year-old? “Still, the moment when you did it, when you rushed forward toward the edge of the cliff—”

  The boy shook his head quickly. “Amazing I didn’t go over myself. I often think of that.”

  Tom could imagine, but it wasn’t what he meant. He meant the realization that he had stopped the life of someone else. If the boy had so far escaped that mystery, or its puzzlement, then perhaps so much the better, because what could be accomplished by pondering it, even finally understanding it? Was it even possible?

  Frank was waiting for a further word from Tom, but Tom had none.

  “Did you ever kill a person?” the boy asked.

  Tom moved nearer the sofa, a movement to relax himself, also to be farther from Mme. Annette’s quarters. “Yes, I did.”

  “Even more than one?”

  “To be honest, yes.” The boy must have combed quite well through his dossier in the newspaper files of the New York Public Library, and used a bit of imagination too. Suspicion, rumors, nothing more, Tom knew, never an outright charge against him. Bernard Tufts’s death over a mountainside near Salzburg oddly enough had been Tom’s closest call in the direction of being accused, and Bernard—God rest his troubled soul—had been a suicide.

  “I don’t think what I did has sunk into me yet,” Frank said in a voice barely audible. Now his left elbow rested on the sofa arm, a more relaxed attitude than that of a few minutes before, but he was far from relaxed. “Does it ever sink in?”

  Tom shrugged. “Maybe we can’t face it.” The “we” had a special meaning for Tom then. He wasn’t talking to a hired killer, and he had met a few.

  “I hope you don’t mind that I put this music on again. I used to play it with Teresa. She has it. We both have the record. So—”

  The boy couldn’t go on, but Tom understood, and he was glad to see that Frank’s face looked more inclined to self-confidence, even inclined to a smile, rather than to the tears of a breakdown. What about buzzing Teresa now, Tom wanted to say, and if you boomed the music up and told her you’re okay and coming home? But Tom had said this to Frank before and got nowhere. Tom pulled up one of the upholstered chairs. “You know—Frank, if no one suspects you, you have no reason to hide. Maybe now that you’ve written it out, you can go back home—soon. Don’t you think?”

  Frank’s eyes met Tom’s. “I just need to be with you for a few days. I’ll work, you know? I don’t want to be a drag in the house. But maybe you think I’m some kind of danger to you?”

  “No.” He was, slightly, but Tom couldn’t have said how, exactly, except that the name Pierson was dangerous, because kidnappers would be interested. “I’m getting a new passport for you—by next week. Different name.”

  Frank smiled as if Tom had given him a surprise, a present. “You are? How?”

  Tom again glanced unnecessarily toward the kitchen. “Let’s go to Paris Monday for a new photograph. The passport will be done in—Hamburg.” Tom was not used to betraying his Hamburg connection, Reeves Minot. “I ordered it today. That phone call at lunch. You’ll have a different American name.”

  “Great!” said Frank.

  The record moved into another song, a different, simpler rhythm. Tom watched the dream in the boy’s face. Was he thinking of the new identity he would have, or of the pretty girl called Teresa? “Is Teresa in love with you too?” Tom asked.

  Frank lifted his lip at one side, and it was not quite a smile. “She doesn’t say so. She did say so once, weeks ago now. But there’re a couple of other fellows—not that she likes them, but they’re always hanging around. I know, because I told you, I think, her family has a house near Bar Harbor—also an apartment in New York. So I know. It’s better not to make speeches about how I feel—to her or to anybody. But she knows.”

  “She’s your only girlfriend?”

  “Oh, yes.” Frank smiled. “I can’t imagine liking two girls at once. A little bit, maybe. But not really.”

  Tom left him to listen to the music.

  Tom was upstairs in his room, in pajamas, reading Christopher Isherwood’s Christopher and His Kind, when he heard a car turning in at Belle Ombre. Heloise. Tom glanced at his watch: five to midnight. Frank was still downstairs, playing records, in a trance of his own, Tom supposed, and he hoped a happy one. Tom heard the car give a br-room before the engine cut, and he realized that it was not Heloise. He leapt off the bed, grabbed his dressing gown and put it on as he went down the stairs. Tom opened the front door slightly and saw Antoine Grais’ cream-colored Citroën on the graveled area in front of the steps. Heloise was getting out on the passenger side. Tom closed the door and turned the key.

  Frank was on his feet in the living room, looking worried.

  “Go upstairs,” Tom said. “It’s Heloise. She’s come home with a visitor. Just go up and close your door.”

  The boy ran.

  Tom was walking toward the door as Heloise tried the handle. Tom unlocked the door and Heloise entered, followed by Antoine who was smiling genially. Tom saw Antoine’s eyes lift in the direction of the staircase. Had he heard something? “How are you, Antoine?” Tom asked.

  “Tome, the strangest thing!” Heloise said in French. “The car wouldn’t start just now, just wouldn’t! So Antoine kindly brought me home. Come in, Antoine! Antoine thinks it’s only—”

  Antoine’s baritone voice interrupted: “I think a bad connection of the battery. I looked. It needs a big wrench, a cleaning with a file. Simple. But I haven’t got the big wrench. Ha-ha! And how are you, Tome?”

  “Very well, thank you.” They were by now in the living room where music still played. “May I offer you something, Antoine?” Tom asked. “Sit down.”

  “Ah, no more the harpsichord music,” said Antoine, referring to the gramophone, and he seemed to be sniffing the air as if in hopes of picking up a scent of perfume. He had black and gray hair, and a stocky figure which swiveled now, on its toes.

  “What’s the matter with rock?” Tom asked. “My tastes are catholic, I hope.” As Tom watched Antoine’s eyes drift over the living room, looking for a clue as to what kind of person might have run up the stairs, possibly, Tom was reminded of the boring argument he and Antoine had got into over the pale blue rubber-tube-like structure called the Centre Pompidou, or Beaubourg. Tom detested it, Antoine defended it, saying it was “too new” for Tom’s uneducated eye (that was the implication) to appreciate.

  “You have a friend? I am sorry to disturb you,” Antoine said. “Male or female?” This was meant to be funny, but had a nasty curiosity in it.

  Tom could have hit him with pleasure, but only smiled, tight-lipped, and said, “Guess.”

  Heloise was in the kitchen during this, and appeared very soon with a small coffee for Antoine. “Here you are, A
ntoine dear. Force for the drive home.”

  The abstemious Antoine drank only a bit of wine at dinner.

  “Sit down, Antoine,” said Heloise.

  “No, my dear, this is fine,” said Antoine, sipping. “We saw the light in your room, you know, and the living room light on, so—I invited myself in.”

  Tom nodded politely, like a toy ducking bird. Was Antoine thinking that a girl or boy had fled at once to Tom’s bedroom, and that Heloise connived at it? Tom folded his arms, and just then the record came to its end.

  “Tome will take me to Moret tomorrow, Antoine,” Heloise said. “We’ll tell the garage mechanic and bring him to your house for the car. Marcel. Do you know him?”

  “Very good, Heloise.” Antoine set his coffee cup down, efficient as always, even at drinking hot coffee fast. “Now I must be off. Good night, Tome.”

  Antoine and Heloise exchanged French kisses at the door, smacks on the cheeks, one, two. Tom hated it. Not French kisses in the American sense, certainly, nothing sexy about them, just damned silly. Had Antoine been able to see Frank’s legs dashing up the stairs? Tom didn’t think so. “So Antoine thinks I might have a girlfriend!” Tom said with a chuckle after Heloise had closed the door.

  “Of course he does not! But why are you hiding Billy?”

  “I’m not hiding him, he’s hiding himself. He’s even a little shy with Henri, of all people. Anyway, darling, I’ll take care of the Mercedes—Tuesday.” It had to be Tuesday because tomorrow was Sunday, and Monday their usual garage was closed, as were most French garages, since they stayed open Saturday.

  Heloise slipped out of her high-heeled shoes. Now she was barefoot.

  “Nice evening? Any other people?” Tom put a record back in its sleeve.

  “A couple from Fontainebleau, another architect—younger than Antoine.”

  Tom hardly listened. He was thinking of Frank’s pages on his desk in the place where the typewriter usually sat. Heloise was now going up the stairs. She used his bathroom most of the time, now that the boy had the guest room. But Tom continued putting away records—only one more to go. Heloise was not inclined to pause and look at pages of any kind on his desk. Tom turned out the living room lights, locked the front door, and went upstairs. Heloise was in her own room undressing, Tom supposed. He took the boy’s pages, put a paperclip on them, and stuck them in his top right drawer, then on second thought into a folder marked “Personal.” The boy would have to get rid of those pages, regardless of their literary merit, Tom thought. Burn them. Tomorrow. With the boy’s consent, of course.

  7

  On the following day, Sunday, Tom took Frank for an outing in the Fontainebleau woods, west of Fontainebleau where Frank had not been before, and to a section Tom knew where there were few or no hikers or tourists. Heloise had not wanted to come, and said she preferred to lie in the sun and read a novel that Agnès Grais had lent her. Heloise tanned amazingly well for a blonde. She never overdid her sunbathing, but sometimes her skin became a bit darker than her hair. Perhaps she had conveniently mixed genes, as her mother was blonde, and her father evidently brunette, because his hair, what was left of it, was a fringe of dark brown with an inner circle of gray, suggesting saintliness to Tom, though nothing was further from the truth.

  Near noon, Tom and Frank were driving toward Larchant, a quiet village several kilometers west of Villeperce. The cathedral at Larchant had been half destroyed by fire a couple of times since the tenth century. The little private houses, all close together in cobblestoned lanes, looked like illustrations from children’s books, cottages almost too small for man and wife to live in, which made Tom think it might be interesting to live alone again. But when had he ever lived alone? With bloody Aunt Dottie—dotty about everything except money—from childhood, until he left her Boston establishment in his teens, then crummy apartments in Manhattan for brief periods, unless he shacked up with more affluent friends who had a spare bedroom or a living room sofa. And then Mongibello and Dickie Greenleaf when he had been twenty-six. And why should all that go through his head as he stood looking up at the cream-and-dust-colored interior of the Larchant cathedral?

  The cathedral was empty but for them. Larchant attracted so few tourists, Tom was not afraid of Frank’s being spotted. Tom would have been afraid of the château at Fontainebleau, for instance, with its international clientele, and probably Frank had already seen it. Tom didn’t ask.

  At an unattended counter by the door, Frank acquired some postcards of the cathedral, and dutifully dropped the correct sum into the slot in a wooden box, then seeing that his palm was still full of francs and centimes, Frank tipped his hand and dropped the lot in.

  “Your family go to church?” Tom asked as they walked down a steep cobbled slope toward the car.

  “Na-a-ah,” Frank said. “My father always called the church a cultural lag and my mother’s plain bored with it. She won’t be pressured.”

  “Is your mother in love with Tal?”

  Frank gave Tom a glance and laughed. “In love? My mother plays it cool. Maybe she is. But she’d never act silly, never show it. She was an actress, you know. I think she can act even in real life, I mean.”

  “Do you like Tal?”

  Frank shrugged. “I suppose he’s all right. I’ve seen worse. He’s an outdoor type, very strong physically, considering he’s a lawyer. I leave them alone, you know?”

  Tom was still curious whether Frank’s mother might marry Talmadge Stevens, but why should he be? Frank was more important, and Frank didn’t care about his family’s money, from what Tom could see, if his mother and Tal should for some reason, maybe even suspicion of patricide, decide to cut the boy off.

  “Those pages you wrote,” Tom said, “they ought to be destroyed, you know. Dangerous to keep, don’t you think?”

  The boy, watching his footing, seemed to hesitate. “Yes,” he said firmly.

  “If anyone found them, you couldn’t say it’s a short story, with all those names in it.” Of course the boy could, Tom thought, but it would be a bit mad. “Or are you toying with the idea of confessing?” Tom asked, in a tone that implied that this would be total madness, out of the question.

  “Oh, no. No.”

  The strength of that negative pleased Tom. “Okay then. With your permission I’ll get rid of the pages this afternoon. Maybe you want to read them once more?” Tom was opening the car door.

  The boy shook his head. “I don’t think so. I read it over once.”

  After lunch at Belle Ombre Tom went out to the garden (because Heloise was practicing on the harpsichord in the living room where the fireplace was) with the pages folded twice in his hand. Frank was wielding the spade near the greenhouse, wearing his blue jeans, which Mme. Annette had washed in her machine for him and also ironed. Tom burned the pages in a back corner of the garden, near where the woods began.

  Shortly before eight that evening, Tom drove to Moret to fetch Reeves’s friend Eric Lanz from the railway station. Frank wanted to come with him for the ride, and to walk back, and insisted that he could get back to Belle Ombre on foot. Tom had reluctantly agreed. Tom had said to Heloise before leaving, “Billy’s having dinner in his room tonight. He doesn’t want to meet a stranger, and I don’t want this friend of Reeves to meet him either.” Heloise had said, “Oh? Why?” and Tom had replied, “Because he might try to engage Billy for some little job. I don’t want the boy to get into trouble, even if he’s paid well for it. You know Reeves and his chums.” Indeed Heloise did, and Tom often had to say to her, “Reeves is useful—sometimes,” which could and had meant that Reeves could do services that were sometimes much needed, such as providing new passports, acting as go-between, a safe house in Hamburg. Sometimes Heloise half understood what was going on, and the half that she did not know, she didn’t want to know. All to the good. Her nosy father couldn’t pump much out of her that way either.

  At a clearing at the edge of the road, Tom pulled over and stopped the car. “Now
let’s compromise, Billy. You’re three or four kilometers from Belle Ombre, a nice walk. I don’t want to take you all the way to Moret.”

  “Right.” The boy started to open the car door.

  “And this. Just a sec.” Tom pulled a flat box from his trousers pocket. It was pancake makeup that he had taken from Heloise’s room. “I don’t want that mole showing.” He put a little of the paste on the boy’s cheek and rubbed it smooth.

  Frank grinned. “Makes me feel silly.”

  “Keep this. I don’t think Heloise’ll miss it, she’s got so much other stuff. I’m going back one kilometer.” Tom turned the car around. There was almost no traffic.

  The boy said nothing.

  “I want you to be home before I get back. I can’t have you coming in the front door.” Tom stopped the car only one kilometer from Belle Ombre. “Have a nice walk. Madame Annette’s put your supper in my room—or she will. I told her you wanted to go to bed early. Stay in my room. All right, Billy?”

  “Yes, sir.” Now the boy smiled, and with a wave of his hand, walked away toward Belle Ombre.

  Tom again turned the car and headed for Moret. He arrived just as the train from Paris was disgorging its passengers. Tom felt a bit awkward, because Eric Lanz knew what he looked like, and he didn’t know Eric from Adam. Tom walked slowly toward the exit gate, where a scruffy little ticket-taker in a peaked cap bent over every passenger’s ticket to see if it was valid for today, though Tom thought three-quarters of French passengers, being students, elderly, civil servants, war-damaged, traveled at half-fare anyway. No wonder the French railway was always crying bankruptcy. Tom lit a Gauloise and looked up at the sky.