The Two Faces of January

by Patricia Highsmith

  “I should like to speak to M. Wedekind, if you please.”

  “Oui, m’sieur.”

  Rydal waited a whole minute. Longer, he thought. “He’s out?” Rydal asked.

  No one answered him.

  Then Chester’s voice said hoarsely, “Hello?” He sounded breathless.

  “Hello,” Rydal said. “Hello, Phil.”

  “Where are you?” coldly.

  “Well, I’d say—somewhere near l’Abbaye on Saint Germain —Why?”

  Chester did not speak immediately. “Are you with the police or what?”

  Rydal smiled. “I’m not with the police. I’m absolutely free. And you? You sound distrait.”

  Only Chester’s irregular breathing came over the telephone.

  “Are you with the police?” Rydal asked. “Are they letting you pack up?”

  “What kind of a trick is this?” Chester said in an angry tone that was familiar to Rydal.

  “No trick, Chester. I was with the police and now I’m not. Suppose I come to see you?” He hung up before Chester could answer.

  Rydal ran to a tête de taxis near the Brasserie Lipp.

  The taxi-driver didn’t know the hotel or the street.

  “Near the Opéra!” Rydal said. “Drive to the Opéra and I’ll direct you when we get there.”

  He sat up on the edge of the seat during the drive, feeling very happy, as if he were on a lark of some kind. He felt also as if he had surrendered to the totally irrational, as much as if he were blind drunk and embarking on a most unwise action, such as driving a car fast on the unprotected hairpin turns of the Saint Gotthard pass on a dark night. There were many factors in his visiting Chester now, Rydal thought. Chester was terrified, first of all, and Rydal was looking forward to seeing him with his own eyes in that condition. No more, perhaps, would Rydal ever see Chester with that paternal sternness—Rydal had, for obvious reasons, to call it paternal—on his face that he had seen the moment just before he gave Chester the no in the flower market of Les Halles. At Rydal’s shake of the head, he supposed, Chester’s courage had collapsed. He had probably fled back to his hotel, at any rate fled from Les Halles. And there was just the possibility that tonight he would beat Chester up. Say, no more than two good blows to the jaw. That would satisfy Rydal. Straightforward blows, none of the knee or the fist in the stomach stuff that Chester had tried with him on the boat from Crete. One paste in the mouth, on the mouth that had so often kissed Colette’s. No, that was a bit primitive, Rydal thought. None of that, he warned himself. No fisticuffs, just a few words. He glanced out at the lights of the Tuileries—it was like a glimpse into the seventeenth ­century—and Rydal suddenly saw a scene of mercy between himself and Chester, saw himself touching a shaking shoulder and saying to Chester—What? Some brilliant idea that would come to him, of course, in regard to Chester’s escaping from the police. Rydal was smiling slightly. He did not want to help Chester at all. Not at all. In reality, quite consciously and definitely, Rydal detested him.

  “Make a right at the next corner, please,” Rydal said to the driver. “Two streets up and it’s on the left.” He had the money ready.

  Rydal got out of the taxi in front of the hotel and walked in. It was a small, ornate lobby. Rydal went to the desk and asked the man to tell M. Wedekind that M. Stengel was on his way up. The name popped into his head. It didn’t matter. The man spoke to Chester, then said he could go up.

  Chester opened the door, pale and visibly shaking—or perhaps it was a shudder that Rydal saw. His shirt collar was unbuttoned, his tie slid down.

  “I’m alone,” Rydal said. He went into the room. The room was in disorder, even the bed rumpled, as if Chester might have tried to hide in it after he came back from Les Halles tonight.

  “I suppose you’ve come for the money,” Chester said.

  “Oh—Well, as I’ve said before, I’m not averse.”

  “This time you’re not getting it.”

  “Oh,” Rydal said in a polite tone, and with an absence of interest that was genuine. He looked at Chester.

  The only color in Chester’s face was around his eyes, and it was pink. He had picked up a nearly finished glass of Scotch from somewhere. The inevitable bottle was on the inevitable bureau.

  “What happened to your police friends?” asked Chester.

  “I gave them the slip.”

  Chester sipped his drink. “They picked you up?”

  Then Rydal was suddenly angry, felt a fury that was like a brush of flame. He waited until it had passed. “No. I dropped by and talked to them.”

  “What?” Chester said, frowning. “Don’t give me that crap.—What’re they waiting for?”

  Rydal looked at him, and he didn’t need Chester to tell him that all his money, his “assets” in the States were gone now, seized by the American police or perhaps absconded with by Chester’s scared pals. Only a loss of money could have broken Chester down so. Losing Colette hadn’t had this much effect on him.

  “What kind of game are you playing, Rydal?” Chester asked.

  Rydal shrugged. “It must have dawned on you I haven’t told the police your name or the name of this hotel, or they’d be here.”

  “All right, you’re asking me to pay for that. Is that right?”

  Rydal had an unpleasant reply in mind, but the bickering irked him. Chester would have paid now for his not telling the police his alias, or would pay if Rydal promised not to tell it for twenty-four hours, or something like that, so Chester would have time to get to America. “Why don’t you get out of the country?”

  Chester looked at him suspiciously. “You came here to tell me that?”

  “Certainly not. I could have told you that on the telephone. I came here to see you.” Rydal smiled, and lit a cigarette.

  Chester’s pink-rimmed eyes stared at him. “What did you tell the police?”

  “I told them what happened at Knossos. What happened in Crete. I said that’s where I’d met you. Mr. and Mrs. Chamberlain. And then I told them you’d vanished in Athens. The Athens part didn’t hold water very well, but when I told them I had a date with you tonight, they weren’t too fussy about the rest of it. They wanted to get you.”

  “And? Why didn’t you let them?” Chester’s voice was hoarse again, and there was a note of self-pity in it, which probably alcohol had brought. “Rydal, I’m a ruined man. Look at that! At that letter!” He gestured towards the papers on the night table, which in the general disorder of the room, Rydal had not noticed before. “I haven’t a cent in the States! I’m MacFarland—in that letter. I’m wanted for murder—” His voice stopped, the tone dangling.

  “I can imagine. I’m not interested,” Rydal said.

  “Tell me what you want. Let’s have it. If you told the police to come here—”

  “If I’d told the police to come here, they’d have been here sooner than I. Do you know what I want, Chester?” Rydal asked, walking towards him. He said slowly, “I’d like a photograph of Colette. Have you got one?”

  Chester had taken a step back. He frowned. “Yes. Yes, I’ve got one,” he answered, angry but reconciled, stunned, hopeless. He went as if in a daze to his jacket that was thrown over a chair and groped in the inside pocket of it. He pulled out a mass of papers and money. A small card fell to the floor.

  Rydal moved to pick the card up, and caught also a five-hundred dollar bill that was fluttering down.

  “It’s the only one I’ve got left,” Chester said in a maudlin voice. “The others—are in the States.”

  “Pity.” Rydal snatched the photograph from his fingers and looked at it. He smiled. It was in color. Colette looked straight at him in a full-face view, her reddish hair fluffy, her mouth smiling. Looking at her lavender eyes, Rydal could hear her voice speaking to him: I do love you, Ryda
l. I do. Had she ever said it in those words? No matter, she was saying it now. Rydal put it into his jacket pocket, the left breast pocket, the handkerchief pocket. “A pity you had to kill her,” he said to Chester.

  Chester put his hands over his face and wept. He sat down on the bed, his face sunk in his hands.

  Rydal had had enough. “Pull yourself together. Either go to the police or pack up and fly to the States.” Chester looked as if he hadn’t the energy to do anything but give himself up to the police, if that. Then Rydal realized there was a small matter he might bargain about. It concerned the Greek agent’s body in the Hotel King’s Palace in Athens. In return for Chester’s not mentioning his services there—No, Rydal shied away from it. It was dishonest, cowardly. And he had to smile at his own resurgent sense of honor, risen again like a phoenix, out of where, out of what? “Which do you choose to do?” Rydal asked.

  Chester was now staring into space, his shoulders hunched. “It’s best if I get to the States. Get back home. Got to start over again.” Chester hauled himself up and went to the bureau for the bottle. Then, with the bottle, he looked around the room, like someone half blind, for his glass.

  Rydal saw it first and handed it to him. “Your fortitude is admirable,” Rydal said in a tone his father might have used in one of his devastating speeches, “but just how long do you think you can keep it up in the States? What’s Philip Wedekind going to do first? Start selling phony stock to gullible old ladies or—”

  “Ah, Philip Wedekind can disappear as soon as I hit home ground,” Chester said.

  The drink in his hand had raised his confidence, for the moment. Rydal felt the warm anger in his face again. “And then—then, when you’re caught as Mr. X, and they find out you’re also Chamberlain and MacFarland and so forth, you’ll give out with the old story again? Rydal Keener killed my wife, Keener blackmailed me, and, way back, Keener killed the agent in the hotel in Athens. Is that it, Chester?”

  Chester did not answer, did not even look at him. He didn’t have to. Rydal knew that was it. What else could it be, from a man like Chester? Chester dragged himself across the room to the closet.

  “I’m wasting my time here and yours, too,” Rydal said. “We could put everything off a little while longer, maybe I could buy a French identity card, maybe you could get to the States. But what’s the use? Why don’t you get on the tele­phone, Chester? I know the French police would like to—”

  Chester was facing him with a gun in his hand.

  Rydal was surprised, but not frightened. “What’s the use of that? It’ll just make a noise and you’ll have the whole hotel up here.”

  Chester came closer, his face and his hand with the gun very steady now.

  Chester had nothing to lose, Rydal realized. Chester wouldn’t mind at all killing him. Rydal grabbed for Chester’s wrist, struck it but failed to get a grip, as Chester fired. In sudden anger, Rydal hit him hard on the jaw with his fist. Chester fell. Rydal went to the door and out. He took the stairs down to the floor below, saw by the indicator that the elevator was on its way up, and he pressed the down button. The elevator went on up, past his floor.

  “What was that?” asked a woman’s voice in French in the hall above.

  “A gunshot?” said a man’s voice.

  The elevator stopped on the way down, and Rydal got in. He was so tense, his tension seemed to hold his brain immobile. He thought only: don’t hurry.

  His objective was merely the dark street outside, and he felt a kind of triumph and relief when he got there. The man who had ridden down in the elevator with him walked quietly away in the opposite direction on the pavement. Rydal walked one street, then two. He felt confused, shocked—as if what had just happened was complicated and inexplicable.

  Rydal felt suddenly very sad and old. He raised his head, took stock of where he was—at the corner of the boulevard Haussmann and chaussée d’Antin—then proceeded purposefully to find a telephone.

  He called from a brasserie. He did not know the location of the police station the operator had connected him with, but the man he spoke to knew the name William Chamberlain, and Rydal told him Chamberlain could be found at the Hôtel Élysée-Madison under the name Philip Wedekind.

  “Very good! May I ask your name, sir?”

  “Rydal Keener,” Rydal said.

  “Rydal Keener! Where are you? If you do not tell us, this call can be traced, anyway.”

  “Save yourself the trouble. I’m in the Café Normandie, boulevard Haussmann and—near the Opéra. I shall wait for you.”

  So ended his freedom.

  20

  At that moment, Chester was hurrying along the same street, the boulevard Haussmann, but in a direction away from the café where Rydal sat. He wore an overcoat and a hat, and his passport was where it always was, in the inside pocket of the overcoat, but otherwise he carried no possessions. I dropped a lightbulb . . . I dropped a lightbulb. . . . He had said it to the woman who stuck her head out of her door into the hall, two doors away from his, just as he was looking out of his own door. J’ai laissé tomber une—une lumière? What had he said? Anyway, though she still looked puzzled, she hadn’t done anything about it. He’d got out of the hotel, that was the main thing. Coolness, Chester, that’s what counts, said a distant and tired voice, an automatic voice within him. He had taken the elevator down calmly, as usual. Gone calmly through the lobby, which he had half expected to be full of police, summoned by Rydal. He had certainly expected to see Rydal in the lobby. In fact, he couldn’t understand what Rydal was up to, running off like that. Unless Rydal was going to call the police from some safe spot, like a public telephone booth, call them and inform and not give his own name. Chester had thought that was the most likely, and so he had lost no time in getting out of the hotel. J’ai laissé tomber tine—Chester shook his head nervously. Stop that nonsense. Rigmarole going around in his head. He had to get out of Paris. He wanted to go to Marseille. Or to Calais, or Le Havre, where the boats left from. Whichever city a train was going to first. It would take too long to get to an airport, and airports, he thought, were more easily watched than railway stations.

  There at last was a hack stand across the street.

  Chester got into a taxi and told the driver, “Gare du Nord”. It was the busiest gare in Paris, Chester thought. At least he had always come in or taken off from there, when he wasn’t flying.

  There was a train to Marseille at 6 a.m., a slow train. And there were several trains to Calais, but Chester chose Marseille.

  He left the station and went into a bar nearby, and ordered a Scotch. The Scotch steadied him wonderfully. It made him realize the stupidity of waiting for the train, if Rydal had reported him to the police. Yes, indeed. And he’d better assume Rydal had. Rydal was in some kind of suicidal mood. Hadn’t he proposed that both of them go to the police and tell all? The absurdity of it! Chester indulged himself in one more Scotch.

  Then he went out and, after trying three taxi-drivers, got one who was willing to take him as far as Lyon for the fifty-dollar bill that Chester showed him under a light. Chester said he had just heard that a ship he was supposed to sail on was leaving Marseille in the morning, and he had to make it.

  Chester felt quite safe in the taxi. He felt hidden, invisible, in the darkness. The taxi-driver was chatty at first, asked him how he happened to be in Paris without luggage—Chester said he had just come up for a two-day last-minute visit and had been staying with a friend in Paris—but then the driver settled down to his business, and they did not speak any more.

  They arrived in Lyon at 5 a.m., Chester gave the driver fifty francs besides the fifty dollars he had given him in Paris, and then, seeing an all night café—or perhaps one that had opened very early—Chester decided to sit it out there until daylight. He felt he had got a slight jump on the police, and that Lyon was not a likely place
for them to be looking for him. At 8:30, he had a shave in a barber’s shop, then he bought a ticket for a 9:30 train to Marseille. On the train, he slept. His companions in the compartment were two men engrossed in newspapers, enviably rested and fresh-looking in clean shirts and neat suits.

  In the early afternoon, the train spilled its passengers out in a large, grey railway station, and Chester, without pausing for a newspaper or a drink, kept walking until he was out of it. He felt very conspicuous in railway stations, as if every man behind a newspaper on a bench was in reality a police agent on the lookout for him. The streets had a downward slope, Chester presumed towards the water, which he did not see even after several minutes of walking. At last he came to a broad, busy avenue, which he saw was the Cannebière. He had heard of the Cannebière, the main avenue of Marseille. Looking down it, he could see a short span of water, the Mediterranean. Chester turned in the direction of the water. The Cannebière was lined with shops of all kinds, haberdasheries, bar-tabacs, pharmacies, and there seemed to be three or four glass-fronted restaurants or bars to every block, the kind which in summer would have tables and chairs spread out on the broad pavement, he supposed. He liked the bustling activity of the street, the variety of characters he saw among the people—workmen with shovels over their shoulders, women with a little too much make-up, cripples peddling pencils, a couple of British sailors, men with trays of trinkets slung on cords around their necks. He imagined he could smell the sea.