Patricia Highsmith - The Tremor of Forgery

by Patricia Highsmith

  ‘Yes, sure,’ Jensen said attentively, as if waiting for the rest. ‘Well—I’d got behind my table, you see, as soon as I heard someone coming in. Then I grabbed the first thing to hand, my typewriter. He gave a howl and fell, and I shut the door. After a minute or so, I heard some of the hotel boys come and drag the fellow away.’ A longer pause. Jensen wasn’t saying anything. “The next morning I asked one of the boys, Mokta. He said he didn’t know anything about it, which I know isn’t true. The point is, I think the Arab was dead and they took him somewhere and buried him. I certainly haven’t seen Abdullah since.’

  Jensen shrugged.

  Ingham sensed the shrug without actually seeing it.

  ‘He could be recovering somewhere.’ Jensen laughed a little. ‘When was this?’

  The night of July fourteenth-fifteenth. A Friday night. That’s eleven days ago.—I’d like to know for sure, you see. It was a hell of a blow right in the forehead. It bent my typewriter frame. That’s why my typewriter’s being repaired.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ Jensen laughed.

  ‘Have you seen Abdullah lately?’

  ‘I hadn’t thought about it.—You know, he doesn’t dare to walk in my little street, they hate him so there.’

  ‘Really?’ Ingham said weakly. He realized he did not appreciate the information. He felt a little faint. ‘Let’s walk back. Another thing makes me think it was Abdullah. I saw him that evening around six near the hotel. And Adams also said he saw him by the gift shop on the road there. The same night.’ Ingham knew these details bored Jensen, but he could not stop himself from saying them.

  ‘Did you tell this story to Adams?’ Jensen asked, and Ingham could tell Jensen was smiling.

  ‘No, I lied.’

  ‘Lied?’

  ‘Well—Adams knows it was Abdullah. He knows since a couple of days, because of something he heard in the Plage. About Abdullah being gone, missing or something. Adams heard someone yell that night. Not only that, but one of the boys told Adams the Arab was on my terrace.’

  ‘But where did you lie?’

  1 told Adams I’d heard a yell, but I said I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t even admit I’d got out of bed.’

  ‘Just as well.’ Jensen said, and paused to light a cigarette.

  What do you think’ll happen if he’s dead? Ingham wanted to ask, but he waited for Jensen to speak.

  Jensen took so long, Ingham thought he was not going to speak, or was thinking of something else—maybe because the story was so commonplace, it did not much interest him.

  cIf I were you, I’d forget about it. You can’t tell what happened,’ Jensen said.

  It was vaguely comforting. Ingham realized he needed a great deal of reassurance.

  1 hope you got him,’ Jensen said in a slow voice. ‘That particular Arab was a swine. I like to think you got him, because it makes up a little for my dog—just a little. However, Abdullah wasn’t worth my dog.’

  Ingham felt suddenly better. ‘That’s true.’

  They lay down again, face down, faces buried in their sweatered arms for warmth. Jensen had blown the fire out.

  14

  IT was Friday, July 28th, before they got back to Hammamet. They had visited the city of Medinine and the island of Djerba. They had roughed it in a small town with no hotel, sleeping in a room above a restaurant where they had eaten. Ingham, like Jensen, had shaved every other day. In Metouia, an ancient town near Gabes where they stopped for coffee one afternoon, Jensen found a boy of about fourteen whom he liked, and went off with him, after asking Ingham if he minded waiting a few minutes. Jensen was back after only ten minutes, smiling, carrying a woollen mat with a black and red pattern. Jensen said the boy had taken him to his house, in no room of which had there been any privacy. Jensen had made him accept five hundred millimes, and the boy had stolen the mat behind his mother’s back, in order to give Jensen something. The boy said his mother had woven it, but did not receive five hundred millimes from the shopkeeper to whom she sold her mats. ‘He’s a nice boy. I’m sure he’ll give the money to his mother,’ Jensen said. The story lingered in Jensen’s mind, pleasantly. What had the mother thought of Jensen’s coming home with her son, or did it happen a couple of times a day ? And what did it matter if it did?

  When Ingham returned to his bungalow, the neat blue and white cleanliness seemed to have a personality of its own, to be on guard, and to hold something unhappy. Absurd, Ingham thought. He simply hadn’t seen anything comfortable for five solid days. But the distaste for the bungalow persisted. There were four or five letters, only two of which interested him: a contract by his agent for a Norwegian edition of The Game of ‘If’, and a letter from Reggie Muldaven, a friend in New York. Reggie was a free-lance journalist, married, with a small daughter, and he was working on a novel. He asked Ingham how long he was going to be in Tunisia, and what was he doing there since Castlewood’s suicide? How is Ina} I haven’t seen her in a month or so, and I only said hello in a restaurant that time … Reggie knew Ina pretty well, however, well enough to have rung her and talked with her. Ingham was sure Reggie was being diplomatic in saying nothing more about her. Ingham felt sure that people like Reggie would have heard about John’s relationship with Ina. People always wanted to know the reasons for a suicide, and kept asking questions until they found out.

  Ingham unpacked, showered and shaved. He moved slowly, thinking of other things. He was to pick up Jensen at eight o’clock, and they were going to have dinner in the hotel dining-room. It was now six-thirty.

  He remembered the letter he owed to Ina, and when he had dressed, he sat down and began it in longhand, not that he was in the mood, but because he did not want it hanging over his head any longer.

  July 28, 19—

  Dear Ina,

  Yes, your letter was rather a surprise. I had not known things had gone so far, shall we say. But no hard feelings here. Typewriter is being repaired, so I don’t write this with my usual ease.

  Of course I don’t see why we shouldn’t see each other again, if we both wish to. And of course I understand that, from your point of view, I perhaps seemed lukewarm. I was cautious, no doubt about that. I have a past, you’re familiar with it, and it wasn’t and hasn’t been easy to get through—I mean this past year and a half until I met you and began to love you. And when was that? Nearly a year ago. The whole time, now a year and eight months (since my divorce) seems a sort of prolonged nightmare without sleep (matter of fact I did not sleep well for nearly a year, as I’ve told you, and even after meeting you) but I hate to think what it would have been if I had not met you at all. You at least lifted me back among the living, you lifted my morale more than I can ever say. You made me realize that someone could care for me again, and that I could care for someone. I’ll always be grateful. You might even have saved my life, who knows, because even though I was able to work always, I was going downhill mentally, losing a little weight and so forth. How long could that have lasted?

  That was not bad, Ingham thought, and it was certainly sincere. He continued:

  I’ve just got back from a five-day trip south in the car. Gabes (oasis), camel rides, the island of Djerba. Much desert. It changes one’s thinking. I think it makes people see things more clearly, or not so close up. More simply, perhaps. Let us not take all this so seriously. Don’t feel guilty for what happened. If you’ll forgive me, I must tell you that I was laughing one night at the thought that: “John sacrificed his love for Ina on the altar of Howard’s bed.’ Somehow this had me in stitches.

  He was interrupted by a knock. It was OWL.

  ‘Well, hello! Greetings!’ Ingham said as heartily as OWL usually greeted him.

  ‘Greetings to you! When did you get back? I saw your car.’

  ‘Around five. Come in and have a drink.’

  ‘No, you’re working.’

  ‘I’m only writing a letter.’ Ingham persuaded Adams in, then at once became aware of his absent typewriter. ‘Sit down
somewhere. Anywhere.’ Ingham went into the kitchen. He was glad the boys had not cut the refrigerator off, so there was ice.

  ‘Whereabouts did you go?’ Adams asked.

  Ingham told him, and told about the freezing night on the desert, when he had got up at 5 a.m. and stomped around to get warm.

  ‘By the way, I went with Anders Jensen, the Danish fellow.’

  ‘Oh, did you? Is he a nice fellow?’

  Ingham didn’t know what Adams meant by ‘nice’. Maybe it included Jensen’s politics. ‘He’s good company,’ Ingham said. ‘He still can’t find his dog. He’s sure the Arabs got him, and he’s a little bitter about that. I can’t blame him.’

  It got to be seven-thirty. Ingham replenished Adams’s drink, then his own. ‘I’m meeting Anders at eight and we’re going to have dinner at the hotel. Would you like to join us, Francis?’

  OWL brightened. ‘Why, yes, thanks.’

  Ingham and Jensen found Adams in the hotel bar a little after eight o’clock. They stood at the bar and had a Scotch. Ingham noticed that the cash register showed the alarming figure of 480.00. A bang from a waiter, and the figure jumped to 850.00. Ingham leaned closer and saw that the register had been made in Chicago. It was registering millimes, and the dollar sign had been removed.

  Jensen and OWL chatted pleasantly. Ingham had asked Jensen if everything had been all right at his house, and everything had, except that there was no news about his dog. Jensen said he had spoken to the Arab people next door, with whom he was on good terms.

  Jensen ate like a starved wolf, though his table manners, in this ambience, were perfect. They had kebab tunisien, kidneys on a skewer. Ingham ordered a second bottle of rosé. The blonde Frenchwoman and her small son were still here, Ingham noticed, but otherwise most of the people had changed since he had last been in the dining-room.

  ‘There’s still no sign of Abdullah.’ Adams said to Ingham in a lull in the conversation.

  ‘And tant—mieux? Jensen said firmly.

  ‘Oh, you know about Abdullah?’ Adams asked.

  Ingham and Jensen were opposite each other. Adams sat at one end of the table, between them, partly in the path of waiters.

  ‘Howard told me the story.’ Jensen said.

  Ingham shifted and kicked Jensen deliberately with his right foot under the table, but since Adams looked quickly at Ingham at this moment, Ingham was not sure he had not kicked Adams.

  ‘Yes, you know it happened right outside Howard’s bungalow. I think the fellow was killed,’ Adams said to Jensen.

  Jensen gave Ingham a quick, amused glance. ‘And so what? One less thief in this town. Plenty more to go.’

  ‘Well —’ Adams tried to smile with good humour. ‘He was still a human being. You can’t just —’

  ‘That could be debated,’ Jensen said. ‘What makes a human being? The fact something walks on two legs instead of four?’

  ‘Why, no. Not merely,’ Adams said. ‘There’s the brain.’

  Jensen said calmly, buttering yet another bit of bread, ‘I think Abdullah used his exclusively for thinking about how to get his hands on other people’s property.’

  Adams managed a chuckle. ‘That doesn’t make him any less a human being.’

  ‘Any less? Why not? It makes him exactly that,’ Jensen replied.

  ‘If we started figuring that way, we’d just kill everybody who annoyed us,’ Adams said. ‘That wouldn’t quite do, as the English say.’

  ‘The nice thing is, half the time they manage to get themselves killed, one way or another. Do you know Abdulla couldn’t even walk in the little street where I live? The Arabs chased him out with stones. You call him a loss? That walking bag of rags and—’ Jensen couldn’t think of a word ‘Merde,’ he said finally.

  Ingham glanced at Jensen, trying to convey that he didn’t want Jensen to go too far. Jensen knew that, of course, but Ingham could practically feel the heat of Jensen’s boiling blood across the table.

  “All people can be improved, given a chance at a new way of life.’ said OWL.

  If you’ll forgive me, I won’t be alive to see much of it, and while I’m here I prefer to trust to my own experience and my own eyes,’ said Jensen. “When I came here about a year ago, I had quite a wardrobe. I had suitcases, cuff-links, a good easel. I was renting a private house in Sidi Bou Said, that picturesque, immaculate little village of blue and white houses’—Jensen waved a hand airily—‘noted for delicately wrought bird-cages, for its coffee-houses where you can’t get an honest drink for love nor money, a town where you can’t buy a bottle of wine in a shop. They cleaned me out there, even took a lot of my landlord’s furniture. All my canvases. I wonder what they did with them? After that, I decided to live like a beatnik, and maybe I wouldn’t get robbed again.’

  ‘Oh, bad luck,’ said Adams sympathetically.’ Your dog — He didn’t guard the house?’

  ‘Hasso at that time was at a vet’s in Tunis. Somebody had thrown hot water on his back. He was in pain, and I wanted to make sure the hair would grow back.—Oh, no, I don’t think these mongrels would come into any house if Hasso was there. They knew he was gone for a few days.’

  ‘Good God,’ Ingham said. The story depressed him. No use asking if Jensen ever found out who robbed him, Ingham supposed. No one ever found out.

  ‘You cannot fight or change an enormous tide,’ Jensen said with a sigh. ‘You must give it up, become reconciled. And yet I am human enough—yes, human—to be glad when one of them gets what he gave. I mean Abdullah.’

  OWL looked a little squelched. ‘Yes. Well, maybe the boys at the hotel did finish him off. But—’ Adams glanced at Ingham. “That night, the boys didn’t leave their bunks until they heard someone yell. I think he was killed by that one blow, whatever it was’.

  A blow now, not a bump. An insane amusement, perhaps caused by tension, made Ingham set his teeth.

  ‘Maybe one of his own people stabbed him,’ Jensen said and gave a titter. ‘Maybe two Arabs were after the same house I’ Now Jensen sat sideways, threw an arm over the back of his chair, and laughed. He was looking at Adams.

  Adams looked surprised. ‘What do you know about it?’ Adams asked. ‘Do you know something?’

  ‘I don’t think I would say if I did,’ Jensen said. ‘And do you know why? Because it just—doesn’t—matter.’ With the last two words, he tapped a cigarette on the table, then lit it. ‘We speculate about Abdullah’s death as if he were President Kennedy. I don’t think he’s quite that important.’

  This quietened Adams, but it was a resentful silence, Ingham could tell. Jensen daydreamed and brooded, speaking, when he did speak, in monosyllables. Ingham was sorry Jensen had made his personal resentments seem resentments against Adams. And Ingham felt that Adams had guessed that he had told Jensen something about that night that he had not told to Adams. Adams knew, too, that Ingham was essentially in accord with Jensen’s outlook on life, which was not exactly OWL in nature.

  They drove to the Plage in Ingham’s car. Ingham had thought Adams would prefer to say good night when they left the Reine’s dining-room, but he did not. Jensen now stood the drinks.

  ‘A bitter young man. It’s too bad all that happened to him,’ Adams said when Jensen was at the bar ordering.

  They were sitting at a table. Again, it was hard to talk in the place. Livened by wine and beer, the shouted conversations now and then exploded in startling whoops and roars. ‘I’m sure he’ll get over it—when he gets back to Denmark.’

  Ingham had thought Jensen might ask Adams to come to his house and see his paintings, but Jensen did not. Adams would have come, Ingham was sure. They left after the single round of drinks.

  ‘I’ll be seeing you!’ Ingham said to Jensen on the road.

  ‘A bientôt.Thank you very much for dinner. Good night, Francis.’

  ‘Good night, good night,’ said Adams.

  Silence as they drove back to the Reine. Ingham felt Adams’s thoughts turning. Ingham put
his car up near Adams’s bungalow. Adams asked if he would like to come in for a nightcap.

  ‘I think I’m a little tired tonight, thanks.’

  ‘I’d sort of like to speak with you for a minute.’

  Ingham came with him. The bungalow headquarters was silent and dark. The side door, where the kitchen was, stood open for air. To the left of the kitchen was the room where ten or twelve boys slept. Ingham declined another drink, but he sat down, on the edge of the sofa this time, elbows on his knees. Adams lit a cigarette and walked slowly up and down.

  ‘I just have the feeling, if you’ll forgive me—that you’re not telling the truth about that night. You needn’t forgive me for asking, if you don’t want to.’ He smiled, not so pouchily, and in fact it was not a real smile. ‘I’ve been frank with you, you know, about my tapes. You’re the only person in Tunisia who knows. Because you’re a writer and an intellectual and an honest man.’ He cocked his head for emphasis.

  Ingham disliked being called an intellectual. He was silent, and for too long, he felt.

  ‘First of all,’ Adams said, ever so gently, ‘it’s funny you wouldn’t have opened your door or at least listened that night after hearing that yell. And since it was on your terrace—what am I supposed to think?’

  Ingham sat back. There was a comfortable pillow to lean back against, but he did not feel comfortable. He felt he was fighting a silly duel. What Adams said was true. He couldn’t continue lying without obviously lying. Ingham wished very much he could claim some kind of diplomatic immunity for the moment, put off an answer at least until tomorrow. His real problem was, he did not know the importance of whatever he might say. If he told the truth, for instance, would Adams say anything to the police? What would happen then? ‘I forgive you for asking.’ Ingham began, a statement whose falseness he realized as soon as he had uttered it. He could have gone on, Do you mind if I reserve the right… After all, you’re not the police. It happened that night as I told you. You can call me a coward for not opening the door, I suppose.’