The Boy Who Followed Ripley

by Patricia Highsmith

  “Isn’t it?” said Tom with satisfaction. He loved the dusty pinkness of it, suggesting an old lady’s bedcover, or maybe her nightdress. The background was murky brown and dark gray. Was she dying or simply tired and bored with life? But the title was “Dying Woman.”

  “Woman or a man here?” Frank asked.

  Tom had just been thinking that Edmund Banbury or Jeff Constant at the Buckmaster Gallery had probably given the picture its title—often Derwatt hadn’t bothered with titles—and one could not really tell if the figure was male or female.

  “ ‘Dying Woman,’ it’s called,” Reeves said to Frank. “You like Derwatt?” he asked in a tone of pleased surprise.

  “Frank says his father has one at home—in the States. One or two, Frank?” Tom asked.

  “One. ‘The Rainbow.’ ”

  “Ah-hah,” said Reeves, as if he could see it before his eyes.

  Frank drifted away toward a David Hockney.

  “You delivered a ransom?” Reeves asked Tom.

  Tom shook his head. “No, had it and didn’t deliver it.”

  “How much?” Reeves smiled as he poured wine.

  “Two million American.”

  “Well, well.— And now what?” Reeves nodded toward the boy who had his back to them.

  “Oh, he’s going back home. I thought if we could, Reeves, we’d stay tomorrow night also with you, and leave Friday for Paris. I don’t want the boy to be recognized in a hotel, and another day’s rest would do him good.”

  “Certainly, Tom. No problem.” Reeves frowned. “I don’t quite understand. The police are still looking for him?”

  Tom shrugged nervously. “They were before the kidnapping, and I’m assuming the detective in Paris has notified at least the French police that the boy’s been found.” Tom explained that there had been no police anywhere informed of the kidnapping.

  “You’re supposed to take him where?”

  “To the detective in Paris. He’s employed by the family. Frank’s brother Johnny is there with the detective too.— Thank you, Reeves.” Tom took his glass.

  Reeves carried another glass to Frank. Then Reeves went into his kitchen, and Tom followed him. From his refrigerator, Reeves produced a platter of sliced ham, cole slaw, and a variety of sliced sausages and pickles. Reeves said it was Gaby’s production. Gaby lived in the building with some other people who employed her, and she had insisted on coming in at seven this evening after her late shopping to “arrange” what she had bought for Reeves’s guests. “I’m lucky, she likes me,” Reeves said. “Finds my place more interesting than where she sleeps—in spite of that damned bomb here. Well, she happened to be out at the time it hit.”

  The three sat down at the table, and talked of other things than Frank, but it was still of Berlin. How was Eric Lanz? Who were his friends? Had he a girlfriend? A laugh from Reeves along with the question. Had Reeves a girlfriend, Tom wondered. Were Reeves and Eric so lukewarm, girls and women just didn’t matter? It was nice to have a wife, Tom thought, as the wine began to warm him. Heloise had once said to him that she liked him, or had she said she loved him, because he let her be herself, and gave her room to breathe. Tom had been gratified by her remark, though he had never thought about giving Heloise Lebensraum.

  Reeves was watching Frank. And Frank was looking extremely sleepy.

  They got Frank to bed by a little after eleven. Frank took the guest room bed.

  Then with another bottle of Piesporter Goldtröpfchen, Reeves and Tom installed themselves on the living room sofa, and Tom narrated the events of the last days, even the first days, when Frank Pierson, working as part-time gardener, had looked him up in Villeperce. Reeves laughed at the drag bit in Berlin, and wanted every detail. Then something dawned on Reeves, and he said:

  “That Berlin picture then—in the papers today. They said Lübars, I remember.” Reeves leapt up to look for his newspaper, and found it on a bookshelf.

  “That’s it,” Tom said. “I saw it in Berlin.” Tom felt sickish for a moment, and set his wineglass down. “The Italian type that I mentioned.” Tom had told Reeves that he had only knocked the man out.

  “No one saw you? You’re sure? Getting away?”

  “No.— Shall we wait for tomorrow’s news?”

  “The boy knows?”

  “I didn’t tell him. Don’t mention Lübars to him.— Reeves, old pal, could I trouble you for some coffee?”

  Tom went with Reeves into the kitchen, not wanting to sit by himself. It was not pleasant, the realization that he had killed a man, even though the Italian type was not the first. He saw Reeves glance at him. There was one thing he had not told Reeves, and was not going to tell him, which was that Frank had killed his father. Tom took a little comfort from the fact that though Reeves had read about Pierson Senior’s death, and the question of suicide or accident, which had not been answered, Reeves had not thought to ask Tom if someone could have murdered Pierson Senior by pushing him over the cliff.

  “What was it made the boy run away?” Reeves asked. “Upset by his father’s death?— Or maybe the girl? Her name’s Teresa, you said?”

  “No, I think the Teresa situation was all right when he left. He was writing to her from my house. It’s only yesterday that he heard she has a new boyfriend.”

  Reeves chuckled in an avuncular way. “The world is full of girls, even pretty ones. Certainly Hamburg is! Shall we try to distract him—take him to a club? You know?”

  Tom said as lightly as he could, “He’s only sixteen. It’s hit him pretty hard.— The brother’s a bit thick-skinned, or he wouldn’t have blurted it out as he did—now.”

  “You expect to meet the brother? And the detective?” Reeves laughed as if at the word “detective,” as he might laugh at anybody whose job it was presumably to try to track down crime in the world.

  “I rather hope not,” Tom said, “but I may have to put the boy right in their charge, because he’s not keen to go home.” Tom was standing in the kitchen with his coffee. “I’m getting sleepy, even though your coffee tastes great. I’m going to have another cup.”

  “Won’t bother your sleep?” Reeves asked hoarsely, but with the concern of a mother or a nurse.

  “Not in my state. Tomorrow I’ll take Frank around Hamburg. One of those boat rides around the Alster, you know? I’ll try to cheer him up. Can you meet us for lunch, Reeves?”

  “Thanks, Tom, but I have a date tomorrow. I can give you a key. I’ll do it now.”

  Tom walked out of the kitchen with his cup. “How’s business been?” Tom meant the fence business, and a little bit of legitimate talent-scouting among German painters, and some art-dealing, the latter activities being Reeves’s front, at least.

  “Oh—” Reeves put a ring of keys into Tom’s hand, then cast an eye around his living room walls. “That Hockney’s—on loan, I might say. Really it’s stolen. It’s from Munich. I put it on the wall because I like it. After all, I’m very careful about the people I let in here. The Hockney’s being collected very soon.”

  Tom smiled. It struck him that Reeves led a delightful life in a most pleasant city. Something was always happening. Reeves never worried, he always bungled through even the very awkward moments, once for instance when he had been beaten up and tossed unconscious out of a moving car. Reeves hadn’t suffered even a broken nose on that occasion, which had been in France, Tom remembered.

  When Tom crept into bed that night, Frank didn’t stir. The boy was facedown with his arms around his pillow. Tom felt safe, safer than in Berlin. Reeves’s flat had been bombed, maybe burgled, but it felt as snug as a little castle. He might ask Reeves what kind of protection he had, besides perhaps a burglar alarm. Did he have to pay off anybody? Had Reeves ever asked the police for extra protection, because of the valuable pictures he sometimes dealt with? Not very likely, Tom thought. But maybe it would be rude to inquire into Reeves’s safety measures.

  A gentle knock awakened Tom, and he opened his eyes and real
ized where he was. “Herein?”

  Gaby came in, heavy and shy, talking in German, carrying a tray of coffee and rolls. “Herr Tom . . . we are so glad to see you again after such a long time! How long has it been? . . .” She spoke softly because of Frank, still asleep. Gaby was in her fifties, with black straight hair done in a bun behind her head. Her cheeks were rather blotchily pink.

  “I am so glad to be here, Gaby. And how have you been?— You can put it here, that is fine.” Tom meant on his lap. The tray had legs.

  “Herr Reeves has gone out, but he says you have the keys.” She looked, smiling, at the sleeping boy. “There is still more coffee in the kitchen.” Gaby spoke stolidly, giving the facts, and only her dark eyes showed liveliness and a childlike curiosity. “I am here another hour—not quite—in case you want something.”

  “Thank you, Gaby.” Tom wakened himself further with coffee and a cigarette, then went off to take a shower and shave.

  When he came back into the guest room, he saw Frank standing with one bare foot on the sill of the window which he had opened. Tom had the feeling the boy was about to jump. “Frank?” The boy hadn’t heard him come in.

  “Great view, isn’t it?” said Frank, both feet on the floor now.

  Had the boy shuddered, or had Tom imagined it? Tom moved to the window and looked out at excursion boats plowing toward the left on the Alster’s blue water, at a half dozen little sailboats scooting about, at people strolling on the quay beside the water. Bright pennants flew everywhere, and the sun shone. It was like a Dufy, only German, Tom thought. “You weren’t thinking of jumping out just now, were you?” Tom asked as if he were joking. “Only a few stories here. Not very satisfying.”

  “Jumping?” Frank shook his head quickly, and took a step back from Tom, as if he were shy about standing so close to him. “Certainly not. . . . Okay if I wash?”

  “Go ahead. Reeves is out, but Gaby’s here, the housekeeper. Just say ‘Guten Morgen’ to her. She’s very friendly.” Tom watched the boy take his trousers and go across the hall. He thought perhaps he had been wrong to be anxious. Frank had a purposeful air this morning, as if the pills had worn off.

  By mid-morning, they were at St Pauli. They had taken a look at the sex-shop windows in the Reeperbahn, at the garish fronts of the nonstop blue-film cinemas, at shop windows with astounding underwear for all sexes. Rock music poured from somewhere, and even at this hour there were customers browsing and buying. Tom found himself blinking, maybe with amazement, maybe at the glaring colors that seemed circus-like in the clear sunlight. Tom realized that he had a prudish side, maybe due to his childhood in Boston, Massachusetts. Frank looked cool, but then he would make an effort to look cool, confronted by dildoes and vibrators with price tags.

  “Place must be hopping at night,” Frank remarked.

  “Doing all right now,” Tom said, seeing two girls approaching them with intent. “Let’s hop a streetcar—or a taxi. Let’s go to the zoo, that’s always fun.”

  Frank laughed. “The zoo again!”

  “Well, I like zoos. Wait till you see this zoo.” Tom saw a taxi.

  The two girls, one of whom looked in her teens and rather attractively unmade-up, seemed to think the taxi might be for all four of them, but Tom waved them away with a polite smile and shook his head.

  Tom bought a newspaper at the kiosk in front of the Tierpark entrance, and took a minute to glance at it. He went through it a second time, looking now for a small item that might have to do with the kidnappers in Berlin, or Frank Pierson. His second search was not thorough, but he didn’t see anything. This was Die Welt.

  “No news,” Tom said to Frank, “is good news. Let’s go.”

  Tom bought tickets which came in orange-colored perforated strips. These enabled them to ride the toylike trains that traveled all over the Carl Hagenbeck Tierpark. Frank looked enchanted, and Tom was pleased. The little train had perhaps fifteen carriages; one stepped aboard from the ground without opening a side door, and the train had no roof. They rolled along almost noiselessly past adventure playgrounds where kids hung from rubber tires that slid along cables from a height, or crawled in and out of two-story plastic constructions with holes, tunnels, and slopes. They passed lions and elephants with, apparently, no barrier between them and the human race. In the bird section, they detrained, bought beer and peanuts at a stand, then got aboard another passing train.

  Then a taxi to a big restaurant on the harbor which Tom remembered from a previous trip. Its walls were glass, and one could look down at the port where tankers, white cruise liners, and barges lay moored, being loaded and unloaded, while water poured from their automatic pumps. Seagulls cruised, and occasionally dived.

  “We go to Paris tomorrow,” Tom said after they had begun their meal. “How about that?”

  Frank at once looked on guard, but Tom could see him collecting himself. It was either Paris tomorrow, Tom thought, or the boy would blow up in another day and insist on striking out somewhere from Hamburg on his own. “I don’t like to tell people what they should do. But you’ve got to face your family at some point, haven’t you?” Tom glanced to right and left, but he was speaking softly, the wall of glass was just to his left, and the nearest table was more than a yard away behind Frank. “You can’t hop one plane after another for months to come, can you?— Eat your Bauernfrühstück.”

  The boy fell to again, more slowly. He had been amused by “Farmer’s Breakfast” on the menu and ordered it: fish, home-fried potatoes, bacon, onions, all mixed on a king-sized platter. “You’ll be coming to Paris too tomorrow?”

  “Sure, since I’m going home.”

  After lunch, they walked, crossed a Venice-like inlet of water bordered by beautiful old peak-roofed houses. Then on the pavement of a commercial street, Frank said, “I want to change some money. Can I go in here for a minute?”

  He meant a bank. “Okay.” Tom went into the bank with him and waited while the boy stood on a short queue and made a transaction at the window marked “Foreign Exchange.” Frank hadn’t his Benjamin Andrews passport with him, as far as Tom knew, but he wouldn’t need it if he was changing French francs into marks. Tom did not try to see. Tom had put some other kind of cream on Frank’s mole that morning. Why was he always thinking about that damned mole? What if anybody did recognize Frank now? Frank came back smiling, pushing marks into his billfold.

  They walked on to the museum of Völkerkunde und Vorgeschichte, where Tom had been once before. Here were table models of fire bomb implosions that had flattened much of the Hamburg dock area in World War II: nine-inch-high warehouses on fire, sculpted yellow and blue flames. Frank poured over a model of ship-raising, the little ship three inches long resting on sand and under what appeared to be meters of sea. As usual, after an hour of this, including oil paintings of Hamburg Burgermeisters signing this and commemorating that, all in dress of the Benjamin Franklin period, Tom was rubbing his eyes and longing for a cigarette.

  Minutes later, in an avenue of shops and pushcarts of flowers and fruit, Frank said, “Will you wait for me? Five minutes?”

  “Where’re you going?”

  “I’ll be back. By this tree.” Frank pointed to a plane tree near the curb beside them.

  “But I’d like to know where you’re going,” Tom said.

  “Trust me.”

  “All right.” Tom turned away, walked slowly several paces on, doubting the boy, and at the same time reminding himself that he couldn’t play nursemaid to Frank Pierson forever. Yes, if the boy disappeared—and how much money had he cashed at the bank, how much had he left in French or American?—Tom would take Frank’s suitcase to Paris and deliver it to the Lutetia. Had Frank possibly taken his passport with him this morning? Tom turned back and walked toward the plane tree, which he recognized from others only because of an elderly gentleman sitting on a chair and reading a newspaper under it. The boy was not there, and more than five minutes had passed.

  Then Frank reappeared t
hrough a trickle of pedestrians, smiling, carrying a big red-and-white plastic bag. “Thanks,” Frank said.

  Tom was relieved. “Bought something?”

  “Yep. Show you later.”

  Next, the Jungfernstieg. Tom remembered the name of the street or promenade, because Reeves had once told him it was where the pretty girls of Hamburg strolled in the old days. The sightseeing boats set off for round-the-Alsters cruises from a quay at right angles to the Jungfernstieg, and Tom and Frank boarded one.

  “My last day of freedom!” Frank said on the boat. The wind blew his brown hair back and whipped his trousers against his legs.

  Neither wanted to sit down, but they were not in anyone’s way, hanging onto a corner of the superstructure. A jolly man in a white cap spoke through a megaphone, explaining the sights they were passing, the big hotels on sloping green lawns overlooking the water, where he assured everyone the tariff was “among the highest in the world.” Tom was amused. The boy’s eyes had focused on some distant point, maybe on a seagull, maybe on Teresa, Tom didn’t know.

  When they got back to Reeves’s at just after six, Reeves was not home, but he had left a message in the middle of the neatly made bed in the guest room: “Back at seven or before. R.” Tom was glad Reeves was still out, because he wanted to speak with Frank alone.

  “You remember what I told you at Belle Ombre—in regard to your father,” Tom said.

  Frank looked puzzled for an instant, then said, “I think I remember everything you ever said to me.”

  They were in the living room, Tom standing near the window, the boy sitting on the sofa.

  “I said, never tell anyone what you did. Don’t confess. Don’t entertain for a minute the idea of confessing.”

  Frank looked from Tom to the floor.

  “Well—are you thinking about telling someone? Your brother?” Tom threw it out in the hope of eliciting something.

  “No, I’m not.”

  The boy’s voice was firm and deep enough, but Tom was not sure he could believe him. He wished he could take the boy by the shoulders and shake some sense into him. Did he dare? No. And what was he afraid of, Tom wondered—failure to shake any sense into the boy? “This you ought to know. Where is it?” Tom went to the little heap of newspapers at one end of the sofa and found yesterday’s. He opened it to the front page on which was the picture of the dead man in Lübars. “I saw you looking at this yesterday on the plane. This—this man I killed in Lübars, north Berlin.”