Patricia Highsmith - The Tremor of Forgery

by Patricia Highsmith

  Now Adams’s smile was paunchy, the shiny little squirrel again. CI simply don’t believe you—if you’ll forgive me,’ he said, even more gently. ‘You can trust me. I want to know’

  Ingham felt his face grow warm. It was a combination of anger and embarrassment.

  ‘I can see you’re not telling the whole story. You’ll feel better if you tell me,’ Adams said. ‘I know.’

  Ingham had a brief impulse to jump up and sock him. Was he a Father Confessor? Or just an old snoop? Holier-than-thou, whatever he was. ‘If you’ll forgive me,’ Ingham said, CI don’t see I’m under any obligation to tell you anything. Why are you quizzing me?’

  Adams chuckled. ‘No, Howard, you’re not under an obligation. But you can’t throw off your American heritage just because you’ve spent a few weeks in Africa.’

  ‘American heritage?’

  ‘You can’t laugh it off, either. You weren’t brought up like these Arabs.’

  ‘I didn’t say I was.’

  Adams went to the kitchen.

  Ingham stood up and followed him. ‘I really don’t want a drink, thanks. If I may, I’ll use your John.’

  ‘Go ahead! just here to the right,’ Adams said, happy to be able to offer something. He put on the light.

  Ingham had never been in Adams’s bathroom before. He faced a mirror, and rather than look at himself, opened the medicine cabinet and stared into it as he made use of the toilet. Toothpaste, shaving cream, aspirin, Entero-Vioform, a lot of little bottles with yellow pills. Everything neat as an old maid. The tubes of things had American brand names like Colgate’s, Squibb’s and so forth. Jensen wouldn’t take this load of crap, Ingham told himself, and he flushed the toilet and left the bathroom with a self-assured air. By load of crap, he meant his American heritage. Just precisely what did that mean?

  Adams was seated in the straight chair at his desk, but turned sideways so that he faced Ingham, who was again on the sofa. “The reason I sound so positive,’ Adams began affably, smiling a little, his bluish eyes terribly alert now, ‘is because I talked with the people in the cottage behind you. They’re French, a middle-aged couple. They heard the yell that night—and a clatter of some kind like something falling, and then they heard a door slam. Your door.—It must’ve been you who closed it.’

  Ingham shrugged. ‘Why not somebody in another bungalow?’

  ‘They’re positive where the sound came from.’ Adams was using the dogged, argumentative tone that Ingham had heard on his tapes. ‘Did you hit him with something that made a clatter?’

  Ingham now felt only a faint warmth in his cheeks. He thought he was as deadpan as a corpse. Is there any purpose in your asking me all this? Why?’

  ‘I like to know the truth about a story. I think Abdullah’s dead.’

  And he’s not Kennedy, Ingham thought. Should he stick to his story and continue to be heckled by Adams (the alternative seemed to be to leave Hammamet), or tell the truth, suffer the shame of having lied, defy Adams to do anything about it, and at least have the satisfaction of having told the truth? Ingham chose the latter course. Or should he wait until tomorrow? He’d had a few drinks, and was he making the right decision? Ingham said, ‘I’ve told you what happened, Francis.’ He smiled a little at Adams. But at least it was a real smile. Ingham was amused, and as yet he did not dislike Francis J. Adams. And his smile widened as a funny possibility crossed his mind: could it be that some very rich man—of Communist persuasion—was paying OWL his stipend for his weekly broadcasts just for a joke, a joke that he could afford? Some man who didn’t live in Russia? Because certainly OWL’s broadcasts helped the Russians. Adams’s earnestness made this possibility all the more hilarious to Ingham.

  ‘What’s amusing?’ Adams asked, but he asked it pleasantly.

  ‘Everything. Africa does turn things upside down. You can’t deny that. Or are you—immune to it?’ Ingham stood up. He wanted to leave.

  ‘I’m not immune to it. It’s a contrast to one’s—home-spun morals, shall we say. It doesn’t change them or destroy them. Oh, no! If you would only realize it, it makes us hang on all the harder to our proven principles of right and wrong. They’re our anchors in the storm. They’re our backbone. They cannot be shed, even if we wished.’

  An anchor for a backbone! Was that one’s ass? Ingham had not the faintest idea what to say, though he wanted to be polite as he left.€ You’re probably right—I must go, Francis. So I’ll say good night.’

  ‘Good night, Howard. And sleep well.’ There was no sarcasm in the ‘sleep well’.

  They shook hands.

  15

  THE next morning was Saturday, the day when Ingham could get his typewriter. Ingham was at the post office at a quarter to ten, and dropped Ina’s letter into the box. Then he walked to Jensen’s house, this time avoiding a glance at the spot where the dead Arab had lain.

  Jensen was not up, but at last he stuck his head out of the window. ‘I’ll open the door!’

  Ingham walked into the little cement court ‘I’m going to Tunis to pick up my typewriter. Can I get anything for you?’

  ‘No, thanks. I can’t think of anything.’

  Jensen had bought some painting supplies in Sousse, Ingham remembered. 1 was wondering if I could find a place like yours to rent in Hammamet. Do you know of anything?’

  Jensen took a few seconds to let this sink in. ‘ You mean a couple of rooms somewhere? Or a house?’

  ‘A couple of rooms. Something Arab. Something like you’ve got.’

  1 can ask. Sure, Howard. ‘I’ll ask this morning.’

  Ingham said he would look in when he came back from Tunis. He wanted to tell Jensen about his conversation with Adams last night.

  His typewriter was ready. They had kept the old frame, its brown paint worn at the comers down to the steel. Ingham was so pleased, he did not mind the bill, which he thought a bit excessive, seven dinars or slightly more than fourteen dollars. He tried the machine on a piece of paper in the shop. It was his old typewriter, as good as ever. Ingham thanked the man in the shop, and walked out to his car, happily weighted again.

  He was back in Hammamet before twelve-thirty. He had bought newspapers, Time, Playboy, tins of smoked oysters, potted ham, and Cross & Blackwell soups. Jensen was in the alley, straightening a bent garbage can, presumably his own, with a foot.

  ‘Come in,’ Jensen said. ‘I’ve got some cold beer for us.’

  Jensen had the beer in a bucket of water. They sat in his bedroom.

  There’s a house a quarter of a kilometre this way.’ Jensen said, pointing in the Tunis direction, ‘but there’s nothing in it, and I wouldn’t trust the owner to put anything in it, no matter what he says. There’s a sink, but no loo. Workmen still creeping around. Forty dinars a month, I’m sure I can get him down to thirty, but I think that’s out. Now the couple of rooms below me are free. Thirty dinars a month. There’s a little stove there, about like mine, and there’s a sink and a sort of bed. Want to see it ? I got the key from old Gamal.’ Gamal was Jensen’s landlord.

  Ingham went downstairs with Jensen. The door was just to the right of the hole-in-the-floor toilet, which projected from the wall. The larger room was next to the street, with one rather high arched window on the street. A door opposite the street led into a small square room with two windows, both on the tiny court—which had the virtue of not being overlooked, Ingham had noticed. This room had a good-sized sink and a two-burner stove on a low wooden table. The bed was a flush door, or so it appeared, with a thin mattress resting on three wooden fruit crates. Presumably white, the interior was not really white but grey with dirt, and tan in patches where the paint had been knocked off. A crumpled khaki blanket lay on the door-bed. There was an ashtray full of cigarette butts on the floor.

  ‘Is any one sleeping here now?’ Ingham asked.

  ‘Oh, one of Gamal’s nephews or something. He’ll throw him out quickly enough, because he isn’t paying anything. Is this all right or—i
s it too tatty?’ Jensen asked with a facetious swish.

  1 suppose it’s okay. Is there any place where I could buy a table? And a chair?’

  ‘I’m sure I can get something. I’ll put the people next door on to it.’

  So the deal was on. Ingham was optimistic. The bedroom door had a padlock that could be switched on a chain from inside to outside. His front door key would be the same as Jensen’s. They’d have the same awful John, but as Jensen pointed out, it had at least a door, which Jensen had put on himself. Ingham felt a little safer being so close to Jensen. If something went wrong, if he had an invader, at least he had an ally within shouting distance. Ingham said he would like to move in on Monday, and he gave Jensen fifteen dinars to give Gamal to clench the thing. Then Ingham drove on to the Reine.

  It would be just his luck, Ingham thought, to run into OWL as he was taking his typewriter from the car to the bungalow. He even wanted to look around, from his car, and if he saw OWL to postpone removing the typewriter, but he felt ashamed of his queasiness, and at the bungalows’ parking place stopped his car, and without a look around at all, opened the other door and took his typewriter out. He locked his car, then walked to his bungalow. OWL, evidently, was not around at the moment.

  Monday would leave time, he thought, to give the hotel decent notice, to find a table and chair, and to write, perhaps another ten pages on his novel. Last night, oddly enough after his disturbing conversation with Adams, Ingham had thought of a title for his book, The Tremor of Forgery. It was much better than the two other ideas he had had. He had read somewhere, before he left America, that forgers’ hands usually trembled very slightly at the beginning and end of their false signatures, sometimes so slightly the tremor could be seen only under a microscope. The tremor also expressed the ultimate crumbling of Dennison, the dual-personality, as his downfall grew imminent. It would be a profound yet unrealised crumbling, like a mountain collapsing from within, undetectable from the outside for a long while—in fact until the complete crash—because Dennison had no pangs of conscience which he recognized as such, and hardly any apprehension of danger.

  Ingham went over and spoke to the hotel, and asked them to make up his bill through Sunday. Then he went back to his bungalow and answered, in a rather gay tone, Reggie Muldaven’s letter. He said he didn’t know what Ina was up to, and that she had shown a strange disinclination to write to him. He said he had started a novel. And of course he expressed regret at Castlewood’s suicide. Then Ingham worked and did eight pages between three and six o’clock, when he went for a swim. He felt, for some reason, extremely happy. It was pleasant, first of all, to have a little money, to be able to send a cheque for a rather expensive apartment in New York every month, to be staying at a comfortable hotel here, and to think nothing of the cost. Money wasn’t everything, as OWL might say (or would he?), but Ingham had known the mind-pinching torment of being even slightly short of it.

  He met Jensen by appointment at the Plage around eight o’clock, and they had a drink before going to Melik’s. Jensen said the family next door had promised to find a table by tomorrow. A chair was a little more difficult, and they might have to scout the souk or buy or borrow one from Melik. Jensen had only one.

  ‘Don’t sit next to any English.’ Ingham said as they climbed the steps to Melik’s terrace. ‘I’d like to talk to you.’

  They shared a table with two shirt-sleeved Arabs who talked constantly to each other.

  Ingham said, ‘What do you think? Adams went on with it last night He said the people in the bungalow behind me heard the yell, plus a clatter, plus a door being shut. Slammed, Imagine OWL going to the trouble to quiz the neighbours? Like Inspector Maigret?’

  Jensen smiled. ‘What do you call him?’

  ‘OWL. Our way of life. The American Way. He’s always preaching it, or haven’t you noticed? Goodness, Godness—and democracy. They’ll save the world.’

  The couscous looked better than usual, with more meat.

  ‘Last night, I denied hearing anything except the yell,’ Ingham went on. ‘I denied having opened my door.’ Jensen so patently took Abdullah’s death as no more important than a flea’s death. Ingham found that he could speak more lightly of it himself now, even practically lie about it with ease.

  Jensen smiled, and shook his head as if in wonderment that anyone could spend so much time on such an unimportant matter.

  Ingham tried to amuse Jensen further. ‘Adams is trying the soft treatment, & la Porfyrivitch—or the English investigators. “I see that you’re not telling the whole truth, Howard You’ll feel better if you do, you know.”‘

  ‘What do the French people behind you say?’

  ‘They’ve left. A pair of Germans there now, man and wife, I presume.—And you know, Anders, last night I was on the brink of telling OWL the truth? As you say, so what? What could he do? Gloat? Because he’s solved a mystery? I don’t think it would bother me.’

  ‘He couldn’t do a thing, not a thing. Are you talking about the machinery of justice? Bugger it. The last thing this country wants is to bring the thieves and the tourists face to face—in a court, that is.—Americans are funny.’

  The next day, Ingham moved one suitcase into his new quarters, and he and Jensen went to the souk to buy a few things, a couple of bath-towels, a broom, some cooking-pots, a little mirror to hang on the wall, a few glasses, cups and saucers. The family next door had come up with a table, not very big but of the right height and sturdy. The chair was more difficult, but Jensen persuaded Melik to part with one of his for a dinar five hundred millimes.

  On Monday morning, Ingham moved in. He had wiped the kitchen shelf down, so it was reasonably clean. He was not at all fussy. It was as if he had shed, suddenly, his ideas about cleanliness, spotless cleanliness, anyway, and of comfort also. A fruit crate was his night-table, the ceiling light his reading light, causing him to move the head of his bed under it, if he wanted to read in bed. His second blanket, the steamer rug, rolled up, served as a pillow. Any dirty clothes, Jensen told him, could be laundered by the ‘teen-aged girl of the family next door.

  On Monday and Tuesday, Ingham wrote a total of seventeen pages. Jensen lent him three canvases of Ingham’s choice. Ingham had not chosen the disembowelled Arab, because Jensen seemed to like to live with it, and Ingham found it disturbing. He borrowed a picture of the Spanish fortress, very roughly painted, pale sand in foreground, blue sea and sky behind. Another picture was of a small boy in a jubbah sitting on a white doorstep, the boy looking round-eyed and abandoned. The third picture was one of Jensen’s orange chaoses, and Ingham could not tell what it was, but he liked the composition.

  Ingham went daily to the Reine’s main desk and to the bungalow headquarters for post, though he had written his agent and Ina his new address—15 Rue El Hout. Once he saw Mokta and bought him a beer. Mokta was amused and amazed that Ingham had moved where he had. Mokta knew the street.

  ‘All Arabs !’ Mokta said.

  ‘It is interesting.’ Ingham smiled also. ‘Very simple.’

  ‘Ah, I believe it!’

  The air-conditioner Ingham had applied for had never appeared, Mokta had not mentioned it, so Ingham didn’t.

  On Wednesday, Ingham invited Adams for a drink. He gave one of Melik’s boys a couple of hundred millimes in exchange for a tray of ice cubes. Ingham stood on the street to meet Adams and to guide him to the house. Adams looked around with interest as they walked through the narrow alleys. The Arabs had almost stopped staring at Ingham, but a few of them stared at Adams now.

  Ingham had turned his work-table into a cocktail-table. His typewriter and manuscript, papers and dictionary were arranged neatly on the floor in a comer.

  ‘ Well! It’s certainly simple !’ Adams said, laughing. “Practically bare.’

  ‘Yes. Don’t bother with compliments on the decor. Fm not expecting any.’ He extricated what was left of the ice from the tray, put some in a couple of glasses, and put the ice back i
nto the metal tray because it was cooler.

  ‘How’re you going to get along without a refrigerator?’ asked Adams.

  ‘Oh, I buy things in small tins and finish them. I buy a couple of eggs at a time.’

  Adams was now contemplating the bed.

  ‘Cheers,’ Ingham said, handing Adams his drink.

  ‘Cheers.—Where’s your friend?’

  Ingham had told him his apartment was below Jensen’s. ‘He’s coming down in a few minutes. He’s probably working. Sit down. On the bed, if you like.’

  ‘Is there a bathroom?’

  ‘There’s a thing outside in the court. A toilet.’ Ingham hoped that Adams wouldn’t want to have a look at it. A few minutes ago, he wouldn’t have cared, Ingham realized.

  Adams sat down. ‘Can you work here?’he asked dubiously.

  ‘Yes. Why not? Just as well as at the bungalow.’

  ‘You should be sure you get enough food. And clean food. Well—’ He lifted his glass again. I hope you’ll like it here.’

  “Thank you, Francis.’

  Adams looked at Jensen’s orange chaos. It was the only picture of the three that was signed. Adams smiled and jerked his head to one side. ‘That picture makes me hot just looking at it. What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know. You’ll have to ask Anders.

  Jensen came down. Ingham gave him a Scotch.

  ‘Any news of your dog?’ Adams asked.