Ripley's Game

by Patricia Highsmith

  ‘Jonathan, I’d better go out before it’s too late,’ Tom said.

  ‘Too late – how?’ Jonathan had wiped his face with the wet towel, and some blond hair stood on end above his forehead.

  ‘Before they come to the door. They’ll be suspicious if their chums don’t come out.’ If the Italians saw the situation here, they’d blast the three of them with guns and make a getaway in their car, Tom was thinking. Tom went to the window and stooped, looking out just above the sill level, He listened for a car motor idling somewhere, looked for a car stationed with parking lights on. Parking was permitted on the opposite side of the street today. Tom saw it – maybe it – to the left, some twelve yards away diagonally. The big car’s parking lights were on, but Tom could not be sure the motor was, because of the hum of other noises on the street.

  Jonathan was up, walking towards Tom.

  ‘I think I see them,’ Tom said.

  ‘What should we do?’

  Tom was thinking of what he would do alone, stay in the house and try to shoot anyone who broke in the door. There’s Simone and Georges to consider. We don’t want a fight in here. I think we should rush them – outside. Otherwise they’ll rush us here, and it’ll be guns if they break in. – I can do it, Jon.’

  Jonathan felt a sudden rage, a desire to guard his house and home. ‘All right – we’ll go together!’

  ‘What are you going to do, Jon?’ Simone asked.

  ‘We think there might be more of them – coming,’ Jonathan said in French.

  Tom went to the kitchen. He got the hat from the linoleum floor near the dead man, stuck it on his head and found that it fell over his ears. Then he suddenly realized that these Italians, both of them, had guns in their shoulder-holsters. Tom took this man’s gun from the holster. He went back into the living-room. “These guns!’ he said, reaching for the gun of the man on the floor. The drawn gun was hidden under his jacket. Tom took the man’s hat, found that it fitted him better, and handed Jonathan the hat from the kitchen. ‘Try this. If we can look like them till we cross the street, it’s a slight advantage. Don’t come with me, Jon. It’s just as good if one person goes out. I just want them to move off!’

  “Then I’ll go,’ Jonathan said. He knew what he had to do: scare them off, and perhaps shoot one first if he could, before he was shot himself.

  Tom handed a gun to Simone, the small Italian gun. ‘It might be useful, madame.’ But she looked shy of taking the gun, and Tom laid the gun on the sofa. The safety was

  off-Jonathan pushed the safety off the gun in his hand.

  ‘Could you see how many are in the car?’

  ‘Couldn’t see a thing inside.’ On his last words, Tom heard someone walking up the front steps, cautiously, with an effort to be silent. Tom jerked his head at Jonathan. ‘Bolt the door after us, madame,’ he whispered to Simone.

  Tom and Jonathan, both wearing hats now, walked up the hall, and Tom slid the bolt and opened the door in the face of the man standing there. At the same time, Tom bumped him and caught him by the arm, turning him back down the stairs again. Jonathan had grabbed his other arm. At a glance, in the near darkness, Tom and Jonathan might have been taken for his two chums, but Tom knew the illusion wouldn’t last more than a second or two.

  To the left!’ Tom said to Jonathan. The man they held was struggling, but not yet yelling, and his efforts nearly lifted Tom off his feet.

  Jonathan had seen the car with its parking lights on, and now he saw the lights come full on, and heard the motor revving. The car backed a little.

  ‘Dump him!’ Tom said, and he and Jonathan, like a pair that had rehearsed it, hurled the Italian forward, and his head hit the side of the slowly moving car. Tom was aware of the clatter of the Italian’s drawn gun on the street. The car had stopped, and the door in front of Tom was opening: the Mafia boys wanted their chum back, apparently. Tom pulled his gun from his trousers pocket, aimed at the driver, and fired. The driver, with the aid of a man in the back, was trying to get the dazed Italian into the front seat. Tom was afraid to fire again, because a couple of people were running towards them from the Rue de France. And a window opened in one of the houses. Tom saw, or thought he saw, the other back door of the car being opened, someone being pushed out on to the pavement.

  One shot came from the back of the car, then a second, just as Jonathan stumbled or walked right in front of Tom. The car was moving off.

  Tom saw Jonathan slump forward, and before Tom could catch him, Jonathan fell on the place where the car had been. Damn it, Tom thought, if he’d hit the driver, it must have been only in the arm. The car was gone.

  A young man, then a man and woman came trotting up.

  ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘He’s shot?’

  ‘Police!’ The last was the cry of a young woman.

  ‘Jon!’ Tom had thought Jonathan had merely tripped, but Jonathan wasn’t getting up, and was barely stirring. With the assistance of one of the young men, Tom got Jonathan to the kerb, but he was quite limp.

  Jonathan had been shot in the chest, he thought, but he was mainly aware of numbness. There had been a jolt. He was going to faint soon, and maybe it was more serious than fainting. People dashed around him, shouting.

  Only now did Tom recognize the figure on the sidewalk – Reeves! Reeves was crumpled, apparently trying to recover his breath.

  ‘… ambulance !’ a Frenchwoman’s voice was saying. ‘We must call an ambulance!’

  ‘I have a car!’ a man cried.

  Tom glanced at Jonathan’s house windows, and saw the black silhouette of Simone’s head as she peered through the curtains. He shouldn’t leave her there, Tom thought. He had to get Jonathan to the hospital, and his car would be quicker than any ambulance. ‘Reeves! – Hold the fort, I’ll be back in one minute. – Oui, madame? Tom said to a woman (now there were five or six people around them), ‘I’ll take him to the hospital in my car at once!’ Tom ran across the street and banged on the house door. ‘Simone, it’s Tom!’

  When Simone opened the door, Tom said:

  ‘Jonathan has been hurt. We must go to the hospital at once. Just take a coat and come. And Georges too!’

  Georges was in the hall. Simone didn’t waste time with a coat, but she did grope in a coat pocket, in the hall, for her keys, then hurried back towards Tom. ‘Hurt? Was he shot?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. My car is to the left. The green one.’ His car was twenty feet behind where the Italians’ car had been. Simone wanted to go to Jonathan, but Tom assured her that the most useful thing she could do was open the doors of his car, which was unlocked. There were more people, but no policeman as yet, and one officious little man asked Tom who in hell he thought he was, taking charge of everything?

  ‘Stuff yourself!’ Tom said in English. He was struggling with Reeves to lift Jonathan in the gentlest way possible. It would have been wiser to have brought the car closer, but having got Jonathan off the ground, they continued, and a couple of people assisted, so after a few steps it was not difficult. They braced Jonathan in a corner of the back seat.

  Tom got into his car, dry in the mouth. This is Mme Trevanny,’ Tom said to Reeves. ‘Reeves Minot.’

  ‘How do you do?’ said Reeves with his American accent.

  Simone got into the back, where Jonathan was. Reeves took Georges in beside him, and Tom pulled out, heading for the Fontainebleau hospital.

  ‘Papa has fainted?’ Georges asked.

  ‘Oui, Georges.’ Simone had begun to weep.

  Jonathan heard their voices, but couldn’t speak. He couldn’t move, not even a finger. He had a grey vision of a sea running out – somewhere on an English coast – sinking, collapsing. He was already far away from Simone whose breast he leaned against – or so he thought. But Tom was alive. Tom was driving the car, Jonathan thought, like God himself. Somewhere there had been a bullet, which somehow no longer mattered. This was death now, which he had tried to face before and yet had not f
aced, tried to prepare and yet hadn’t been able to. There was no preparation possible, it was merely a surrender, after all. And what he had done, misdone, accomplished, striven for – all seemed absurdity.

  Tom passed an ambulance just coming up, wailing. He drove carefully. It was only four or five minutes’ drive. The silence among all of them in the car became eerie to Tom. It was as if he and Reeves, Simone, Georges, Jonathan if he was conscious of anything, had been frozen in one second that went on and on.

  This man is dead? said an intern in an astonished voice.

  ‘But —’ Tom didn’t believe it. He couldn’t get another word out.

  Only Simone gave a cry.

  They were standing on the concrete at one entrance to the hospital. Jonathan had been put on a stretcher, and two helpers held the stretcher poised, as if they didn’t know what to do next.

  ‘Simone, do you want —’ But Tom didn’t even know what he had been going to say. And Simone was now running towards Jonathan who was being borne inside, and Georges followed her. Tom ran after Simone, thinking to get her keys from her, to remove the two corpses from her house, do something with them, then he stopped abruptly and his shoes slid on the concrete. The police would be at the Trevanny house before he was. The police were probably already breaking in, because the people in the street would have told them that the disturbance started from the grey house, that after the shots one person (Tom) had run back to the house, and he and a woman and small boy had come out and got into a car.

  Simone was now disappearing round a corner, following the stretcher of Jonathan. It was as if Tom saw her already in a funeral procession. Tom turned and walked back to Reeves.

  ‘We take off.’ Tom said, ‘while we can.’ He wanted to take off before someone asked questions or made a note of his license number.

  He and Reeves got into Tom’s car. Tom drove off, towards the Monument and home.

  ‘Jonathan’s dead – do you think?’ Reeves asked.

  ‘Yes. Well – you heard the intern.’

  Reeves slumped and rubbed his eyes.

  It wasn’t sinking in, Tom thought, not to either of them. Tom was apprehensive lest a car from the hospital be trailing him, even a police car. One didn’t deposit a dead man and drive off with no questions asked. What was Simone going to say? They’d excuse her for not saying anything this evening, perhaps, but tomorrow? ‘And you, my friend.’ Tom said, his throat hoarse. ‘No bones broken, no teeth knocked out?’ He’d talked, Tom remembered, and maybe at once.

  ‘Only cigarette burns.’ Reeves said in a humble voice, as if burns were nothing compared to a bullet. Reeves had an inch-long beard, reddish.

  ‘I suppose you know what’s at the Trevannys’ house – two dead men.’

  ‘Oh. Good. – Yes, of course I know. They’re missing. They never came back.’

  ‘I’d have gone by the house to do something, try to, but the police must be there now.’ A siren behind Tom made him grip the wheel in sudden panic, but it turned out to be a white ambulance with a blue light on its roof, which passed Tom at the Monument, and whisked away in a quick right turn towards Paris. Tom wished it might have been Jonathan, being taken to a Paris hospital where they were better able to deal with him. Tom thought that Jonathan had deliberately stepped between him and a man’s gun in the car. Was he wrong? No one overtook them, or sirened them to a stop, in the drive to Villeperce. Reeves had fallen asleep against the door, but he woke up when the car stopped.

  This is home sweet home.’ Tom said.

  They got out in the garage, and Tom locked the garage, then opened his house door with a key. All was serene. It was rather unbelievable.

  ‘Do you want to flop on the sofa while I make some tea?’ Tom asked. ‘Tea is what we need.’

  They had tea and whisky, more tea than whisky. Reeves, with his usual apologetic manner, asked Tom if he had any anti-burn ointment, and Tom produced something from the downstairs loo medicine cabinet, and Reeves retired there to dress his wounds, which he said were all on his stomach. Tom lit a cigar, not so much because he craved a cigar as because a cigar gave him a sense of stability, perhaps illusory, but it was the illusion, the attitude towards problems that counted. One simply had to have a confident attitude.

  When Reeves came into the living-room, he took note of the harpsichord.

  ‘Yes.’ Tom said. ‘A new acquisition. Pm going to see about taking lessons in Fontainebleau – or somewhere. Maybe Heloise will take lessons too. We can’t go on twiddling on the thing like a pair of monkeys.’ Tom felt curiously angry, not against Reeves, not against anything specific. ‘Tell me what happened in Ascona.’

  Reeves sipped his tea and whisky again, silent for a few seconds like a man who had to drag himself back inch by inch from another world. I’m thinking about Jonathan. Dead. – 1 didn’t want that, you know.’

  Tom recrossed his legs. He was thinking about Jonathan too. ‘About Ascona. What did happen there?’

  ‘Oh. Well, I told you I thought they’d spotted me. Then a couple of nights ago – yes – one of these fellows approached me on the street. Young fellow, summer sports clothes, looked like an Italian tourist. He said in English, “Get your suitcase packed and check out. We’ll be waiting.’ Natch, I – I knew what the alternative was – I mean if I’d decided to pack my suitcase and run. This was around seven p.m. Sunday. Yesterday?’

  ‘Yesterday was Sunday, yes.’

  Reeves stared at the coffee-table, but he sat upright, one hand delicately against his midriff, where perhaps the burns were. ‘By the way, I never took my suitcase. It’s still in the lobby of the hotel in Ascona. They just beckoned me out the door and said “Leave it”.’

  ‘You can telephone the hotel,’ Tom said, ‘from Fontaine-bleau, for instance.’

  ‘Yes. So – they kept asking me questions. They wanted to know the master-mind of it all. I told them there wasn’t any. Couldn’t have been me, a master-mind!’ Reeves laughed weakly. ‘I wasn’t going to say you, Tom. Anyway it wasn’t you who wanted to keep the Mafia out of Hamburg. So then – the cigarette burns started. They asked me who’d been on the train. I’m afraid I didn’t do as well as Fritz. Good old Fritz —’

  ‘He’s not dead, is he?’ asked Tom.

  ‘No. Not that I know of. Anyway to make this disgraceful story short, I told them Jonathan’s name – where he lived. I said it – because they were holding me down in the car in some woods somewhere, giving me the cigarette burns. I remember thinking that if I screamed like mad for help, no one would have heard me. Then they started holding my hose, pretending they were going to suffocate me.’ Reeves squirmed on the sofa.

  Tom could sympathize. They didn’t mention my name?’

  ‘No.’

  Tom wondered if he could dare believe that his coup with Jonathan had come off. Perhaps the Genotti family really thought that Tom Ripley had been a wrong trail. These were the Genotti family, I presume.’

  ‘Logically, yes.’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  They don’t mention the family, Tom, for goodness’ sake!’

  That was true. ‘No mention of Angy – or Lippo? Or a capo called Luigi?’

  Reeves thought. ‘Luigi – maybe I heard the name. I’m afraid I was scared stiff, Tom—’

  Tom sighed. ‘Angy and Lippo are the two Jonathan and I did in Saturday night,’ Tom said in a soft voice as if someone might overhear him. Two of the Genotti family. They came to the house here, and we — They were incinerated in their own car, miles from here. Jonathan was here and he was marvellous; You should see the papers!’ Tom added, smiling. ‘We made Lippo phone his boss Luigi and tell him that I wasn’t the man he wanted. That’s why I’m asking you about the Genottis. I’m very interested to know whether it was a success or not.’

  Reeves was still trying to remember. ‘They didn’t mention your name, I know. Killed two of them here. In the house! That’s something, Tom!’ Reeves sank back on the sofa with a gentle smile, loo
king as if it were the first time he’d relaxed in days. Perhaps it was.

  ‘However, they know my name,’ Tom said. ‘I’m not sure whether the two in the car recognized me tonight. That’s – in the stars.’ He was surprised at the phrase coming from his lips. He meant it was fifty-fifty, something like that. ‘I mean,’ Tom continued on a firmer note, ‘I don’t know whether their appetites are satisfied by getting Jonathan tonight or not.’

  Tom stood up, turning away from Reeves. Jonathan dead. And Jonathan hadn’t even needed to go out with Tom to the car. Hadn’t Jonathan deliberately stepped in front of him, between him and the pistol pointing from the car? But Tom wasn’t quite sure he’d seen a pistol pointing. It had all happened so quickly. Jonathan had never reconciled Simone, never had a word of forgiveness from her – nothing but those few minutes of attention she had given him after he’d been nearly garrotted.

  ‘Reeves, shouldn’t you think about turning in? Unless you’d like to eat something first. Are you hungry?’

  ‘I think I’m too bushed to eat, thanks. I’d really like to turn in. Thanks, Tom. I wasn’t sure you could put me up.’

  Tom laughed. ‘Neither was I.’ Tom showed Reeves up to the guest-room, apologized for the fact Jonathan had slept for a few hours in the bed, and offered to change the sheets, but Reeves assured him that it didn’t matter.

  That bed looks like bliss,’ Reeves said, weaving with exhaustion as he started to undress.

  Tom was thinking, if the Mafia boys tried another attack tonight, he had the bigger Italian gun, plus his rifle, the Luger also, with a tired Reeves instead of Jonathan. But he didn’t think the Mafia would come tonight. They would probably prefer to get a great distance from Fontainebleau. Tom hoped he had wounded the driver, at least, and badly.

  The next morning, Tom let Reeves sleep on. Tom sat in his living-room with his coffee, with the radio tuned to a French popular programme which gave the news every hour. Unfortunately it was just after 9 a.m. He wondered what Simone was saying to the police, and what she had said last night? She wouldn’t, Tom thought, mention him, because that would expose Jonathan’s part in the Mafia killings. Or was he right? Couldn’t she say that Tom Ripley had coerced her husband — But how? By what kind of pressure? No, it was more likely that Simone would say, more or less, ‘I can’t imagine why the Mafia (or the Italians) came to our house.9 ‘But who was the other man with your husband? The witnesses say there was another man – with an American accent.’ Tom hoped none of the by-standers would remark on his accent, but probably they would. ‘I don’t know,’ Simone might say. ‘Someone my husband knew. I have forgotten his name…’