Strangers on a Train

by Patricia Highsmith

  twenty-four

  For the hundredth time, he examined his face in the bathroom mirror, patiently touched every scratch with the styptic pencil, and repowdered them. He ministered to his face and hands objectively, as if they were not a part of himself. When his eyes met the staring eyes in the mirror, they slipped away as they must have slipped away, Guy thought, that first afternoon on the train, when he had tried to avoid Bruno’s eyes.

  He went back and fell down on his bed. There was the rest of today, and tomorrow, Sunday. He needn’t see anyone. He could go to Chicago for a couple of weeks and say he was away on a job. But it might seem suspicious if he left town the day after. Yesterday. Last night. Except for his scratched hands, he might have believed it one of his dreams that he had done it. Because he had not wanted to do it, he thought. It had not been his will. It had been Bruno’s will, working through him. He wanted to curse Bruno, curse him aloud, but he simply had not the energy now. The curious thing was that he felt no guilt, and it seemed to him now that the fact Bruno’s will had motivated him was the explanation. But what was this thing, guilt, that he had felt more after Miriam’s death than now? Now he was merely tired, and unconcerned about anything. Or was this how anyone would feel after killing? He tried to sleep, and his mind retraced the moments on the Long Island bus, the two workmen who had stared at him, his pretense of sleep with the newspaper over his face. He had felt more shame with the workmen. . . .

  His knees buckled on the front steps and he almost fell. He did not look to see if he were being observed. It seemed an ordinary thing he did, to go down and buy a paper. But he knew also he hadn’t the strength to look to see if he were being observed, the strength even to care, and he dreaded the time when the strength would come, as a sick or wounded man dreads the next inevitable operation.

  The Journal-American had the longest account, with a silhouette of the murderer, composed from the butler’s description, of a man six feet one, weighing about one hundred and seventy to eighty pounds, wearing a dark overcoat and hat. Guy read it with mild surprise, as if it might not have been about him: he was only five nine and weighed about a hundred and forty. And he had not been wearing a hat. He skipped the part of the story that told who Samuel Bruno was, and read with greatest interest the speculation about the murderer’s flight. North along Newhope Road, it said, where it was believed he lost himself in the town of Great Neck, perhaps taking the 12:18 A.M. train out. Actually, he had gone southeast. He felt suddenly relieved, safe. It was an illusion, he warned himself, safety. He stood up, for the first time as panicked as he had been when he floundered in the lot beside the house. The paper was several hours old. They could have found their mistake by now. They could be coming for him, right outside his door, by now. He waited, and there was no sound anywhere, and feeling tired again, he sat down. He forced himself to concentrate on the rest of the long column. The coolness of the murderer was stressed, and the fact it seemed to be an inside job. No fingerprints, no clue except some shoe prints, size nine and a half, and the smudge of a black shoe on the white plaster wall. His clothes, he thought, he must get rid of his clothes and immediately, but when would he find the energy to do it? It was odd they overestimated his shoe size, Guy thought, with the ground so wet. “. . . an unusually small caliber of bullet,” the paper said. He must get rid of his revolver, too. He felt a little wrench of grief. He would hate that, how he would hate the instant he parted from his revolver! He pulled himself up and went to get more ice for the towel he was holding against his head.

  Anne telephoned him in the late afternoon to ask him to go to a party with her Sunday night in Manhattan.

  “Helen Heyburn’s party. You know, I told you about it.”

  “Yes,” Guy said, not remembering at all. His voice came evenly, “I guess I don’t quite feel like a party, Anne.”

  For the last hour or so, he had felt numb. It made Anne’s words distant, irrelevant. He listened to himself saying the right things, not even anticipating, or perhaps not even caring, that Anne might notice any difference. Anne said she might get Chris Nelson to go with her, and Guy said all right, and thought how happy Nelson would be to go with her because Nelson, who had used to see a great deal of Anne before she met Guy, was still in love with her, Guy thought.

  “Why don’t I bring in some delicatessen Sunday evening,” Anne said, “and we’ll have a snack together? I could have Chris meet me later.”

  “I thought I might go out Sunday, Anne. Sketching.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry. I had something to tell you.”

  “What?”

  “Something I think you’ll like. Well—some other time.”

  Guy crept up the stairs, alert for Mrs. McCausland. Anne was cool to him, he thought monotonously, Anne was cool. The next time she saw him, she would know and she would hate him. Anne was through, Anne was through. He kept chanting it until he fell asleep.

  He slept until the following noon, then lay in bed the rest of the day in a torpor that made it agony even to cross the room to refill his towel with ice. He felt he would never sleep enough to get back his strength. Retracing, he thought. His body and mind retracing the long road they had traveled. Coming back to what? He lay rigid and afraid, sweating and shivering with fear. Then he had to get up to go to the bathroom. He had a slight case of diarrhea. From fear, he thought. As on a battlefield.

  He dreamt in half-sleep that he crossed the lawn toward the house. The house was soft and white and unresisting as a cloud. And he stood there unwilling to shoot, determined to fight it to prove he could conquer it. The gunshot awakened him. He opened his eyes to the dawn in his room. He saw himself standing by his work table, exactly as he stood in the dream, pointing the gun at a bed in the corner, where Samuel Bruno struggled to sit up. The gun roared again. Guy screamed.

  He sprang out of bed, staggering. The figure vanished. At his window was the same struggling light he had seen that dawn, the same mingling of life and death. The same light would come every dawn that he lived, would always reveal that room, and the room would grow more distinct with repetition, his horror sharper. Suppose he awakened every dawn that he lived?

  The doorbell rang in the kitchenette.

  The police are downstairs, he thought. This was just the time they would catch him, at dawn. And he didn’t care, didn’t care at all. He would make a complete confession. He would blurt it all out at once!

  He leaned on the release button, then went to his door and listened.

  Light quick steps ran up. Anne’s steps. Rather the police than Anne! He turned completely around, stupidly drew his shade. He thrust his hair back with both hands and felt the knot on his head.

  “Me,” Anne whispered as she slipped in. “I walked over from Helen’s. It’s a wonderful morning!” She saw his bandage, and the elation left her face. “What happened to your hand?”

  He stepped back in the shadow near his bureau. “I got into a fight.”

  “When? Last night? And your face, Guy!”

  “Yes.” He had to have her, had to keep her with him, he thought. He would perish without her. He started to put his arms around her, but she pushed him back, peering at him in the half light.

  “Where, Guy? Who was it?”

  “A man I don’t even know,” he said tonelessly, hardly realizing even that he lied, because it was so desperately necessary that he keep her with him. “In a bar. Don’t turn on the light,” he said quickly. “Please, Anne.”

  “In a bar?”

  “I don’t know how it happened. Suddenly.”

  “Someone you’d never seen before?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  She spoke slowly, and Guy was all at once terrified, realizing she was a separate person from himself, a person with a different mind, different reactions.

  “How can I?” she went on. “And why should I believe you about the letter, about not knowing who sent it?”

  “Because it’s true.”


  “Or the man you fought with on the lawn. Was it the same one?”

  “No.”

  “You’re keeping something from me, Guy.” Then she softened, but each simple word seemed to attack him: “What is it, darling? You know I want to help you. But you’ve got to tell me.”

  “I’ve told you,” he said, and set his teeth. Behind him, the light was changing already. If he could keep Anne now, he thought, he could survive every dawn. He looked at the straight, pale curtain of her hair, and put out his hand to touch it, but she drew back.

  “I don’t see how we can go on like this, Guy. We can’t.”

  “It won’t go on. It’s over. I swear to you, Anne. Please believe me.” The moment seemed a test, as if it were now or never again. He should take her in his arms, he thought, hold her fiercely until she stopped struggling against him. But he could not make himself move.

  “How do you know?”

  He hesitated. “Because it was a state of mind.”

  “That letter was a state of mind?”

  “The letter contributed to it. I felt tied in a knot. It was my work, Anne!” He bowed his head. Nailing his sins to his work!

  “You once said I made you happy,” she said slowly, “or that I could in spite of anything. I don’t see it anymore.”

  Certainly he did not make her happy, she meant to say. But if she could still love him now, how he would try to make her happy! How he would worship and serve her! “You do, Anne. I have nothing else.” He bent lower with sudden sobs, shameless, wracking sobs that did not cease the long moment before Anne touched his shoulder. And though he was grateful, he felt like twisting away from the touch, too, because he felt it was only pity, only humanity that made her touch him at all.

  “Shall I fix you some breakfast?”

  Even in the note of exasperated patience he heard in her voice, there was a hint of forgiveness that meant total forgiveness, he knew. For fighting in a bar. Never, he thought, would she penetrate to Friday night, because it was already buried too deep for her or for any other person to go.

  twenty-five

  “I don’t give a damn what you think!” Bruno said, his foot planted in his chair. His thin blond eyebrows almost met with his frown, and rose up at the ends like the whiskers of a cat. He looked at Gerard like a golden, thin-haired tiger driven to madness.

  “Didn’t say I thought anything,” Gerard replied with a shrug of hunched shoulders, “did I?”

  “You implied.”

  “I did not imply.” The round shoulders shook twice with his laugh. “You mistake me, Charles. I didn’t mean you told anyone on purpose you were leaving. You let it drop by accident.”

  Bruno stared at him. Gerard had just implied that if it was an inside job, Bruno and his mother must have had something to do with it, and it certainly was an inside job. Gerard knew that he and his mother had decided only Thursday afternoon to leave Friday. The idea of getting him all the way down here in Wall Street to tell him that! Gerard didn’t have anything, and he couldn’t fool him by pretending that he had. It was another perfect murder.

  “Mind if I shove off?” Bruno asked. Gerard was fooling around with papers on his desk as if he had something else to keep him here for.

  “In a minute. Have a drink.” Gerard nodded toward the bottle of bourbon on the shelf across the office.

  “No, thanks.” Bruno was dying for a drink, but not from Gerard.

  “How’s your mother?”

  “You asked me that.” His mother wasn’t well, wasn’t sleeping, and that was the main reason he wanted to get home. A hot resentment came over him again at Gerard’s friend-of-the-family attitude. A friend of his father’s maybe! “By the way, we’re not hiring you for this, you know.”

  Gerard looked up with a smile on his round, faintly pink-and-purple mottled face. “I’d work on this case for nothing, Charles. That’s how interesting I think it is.” He lighted another of the cigars that were shaped something like his fat fingers, and Bruno noticed once more, with disgust, the gravy stains on the lapels of his fuzzy, light-brown suit and the ghastly marble-patterned tie. Every single thing about Gerard annoyed Bruno. His slow speech annoyed him. Memories of the only other times he had seen Gerard, with his father, annoyed him. Arthur Gerard didn’t even look like the kind of a detective who was not supposed to look like a detective. In spite of his record, Bruno found it impossible to believe that Gerard was a top-notch detective. “Your father was a very fine man, Charles. A pity you didn’t know him better.”

  “I knew him well,” said Bruno.

  Gerard’s small, speckled tan eyes looked at him gravely. “I think he knew you better than you knew him. He left me several letters concerning you, your character, what he hoped to make of you.”

  “He didn’t know me at all.” Bruno reached for a cigarette. “I don’t know why we’re talking about this. It’s beside the point and it’s morbid.” He sat down coolly.

  “You hated your father, didn’t you?”

  “He hated me.”

  “But he didn’t. That’s where you didn’t know him.”

  Bruno pushed his hand off the chair arm and it squeaked with sweat. “Are we getting anywhere or what’re you keeping me here for? My mother’s not feeling well and I want to get home.”

  “I hope she’ll be feeling better soon, because I want to ask her some questions. Maybe tomorrow.”

  Heat rose up the sides of Bruno’s neck. The next few weeks would be terrible on his mother, and Gerard would make it worse because he was an enemy of both of them. Bruno stood up and tossed his raincoat over one arm.

  “Now I want you to try to think once more,” Gerard wagged a finger at him as casually as if he still sat in the chair, “just where you went and whom you saw Thursday night. You left your mother and Mr. Templeton and Mr. Russo in front of the Blue Angel at 2:45 that morning. Where did you go?”

  “Hamburger Hearth,” Bruno sighed.

  “Didn’t see anyone you knew there?”

  “Who should I know there, the cat?”

  “Then where’d you go?” Gerard checked on his notes.

  “Clarke’s on Third Avenue.”

  “See anyone there?”

  “Sure, the bartender.”

  “The bartender said he didn’t see you,” Gerard smiled.

  Bruno frowned. Gerard hadn’t said that a half an hour ago. “So what? The place was crowded. Maybe I didn’t see the bartender either.”

  “All the barmen know you in there. They said you weren’t in Thursday night. Furthermore, the place wasn’t crowded. Thursday night? Three or 3:30?—I’m just trying to help you remember, Charles.”

  Bruno compressed his lips in exasperation. “Maybe I wasn’t in Clarke’s. I usually go over for a nightcap, but maybe I didn’t. Maybe I went straight home, I don’t know. What about all the people my mother and I talked to Friday morning? We called up a lot of people to say good-by.”

  “Oh, we’re covering those. But seriously, Charles—” Gerard leaned back, crossed a stubby leg, and concentrated on puffing his cigar to life—“you wouldn’t leave your mother and her friends just to get a hamburger and go straight home by yourself, would you?”

  “Maybe. Maybe it sobered me up.”

  “Why’re you so vague?” Gerard’s Iowan accent made his “r” a snarl.

  “So what if I’m vague? I’ve got a right to be vague if I was tight!”

  “The point is—and of course it doesn’t matter whether you were at Clarke’s or some other place—who you ran into and told you were leaving for Maine the next day. You must think yourself it’s funny your father was killed the night of the same day you left.”

  “I didn’t see anyone. I invite you to check up on everyone I know and ask them.”

  “You just wandered around by yourself until after 5 in the morning.”

  “Who said I got home after 5?”

  “Herbert. Herbert said so yesterday.”

  Bruno sighed. “Why d
idn’t he remember all that Saturday?”

  “Well, as I say, that’s how the memory works. Gone—and then it comes. Yours’ll come, too. Meanwhile, I’ll be around. Yes, you can go now, Charles.” Gerard made a careless gesture.

  Bruno lingered a moment, trying to think of something to say, and not being able to, went out and tried to slam the door but the air pressure retarded it. He walked back through the shabby, depressing corridor of the Confidential Detective Bureau, where the typewriter that had been pecking thoughtfully throughout the interview came louder—“We,” Gerard was always saying, and here they all were, grubbing away back of the doors—nodded good-by to Miss Graham, the receptionist-secretary who had expressed her sympathies to him an hour ago when he had come in. How gaily he had come in an hour ago, determined not to let Gerard rile him, and now—He could never control his temper when Gerard made cracks about him and his mother, and he might as well admit it. So what? So what did they have on him? So what clues did they have on the murderer? Wrong ones.

  Guy! Bruno smiled going down in the elevator. Not once had Guy crossed his mind in Gerard’s office! Not one flicker even when Gerard had hammered at him about where he went Thursday night! Guy! Guy and himself! Who else was like them? Who else was their equal? He longed for Guy to be with him now. He would clasp Guy’s hand, and to hell with the rest of the world! Their feats were unparalleled! Like a sweep across the sky! Like two streaks of red fire that came and disappeared so fast, everybody stood wondering if they really had seen them. He remembered a poem he had read once that said something of what he meant. He thought he still had it in a pocket of his address case. He hurried into a bar off Wall Street, ordered a drink, and pulled the tiny paper out of the address-book pocket. It was torn out of a poetry book he had had in college.

  THE LEADEN-EYED

  by Vachel Lindsay

  Let not young souls be

  smothered out before

  They do quaint deeds and fully

  flaunt their pride.