Strangers on a Train

by Patricia Highsmith

Methodically, Gerard gathered his papers and started to pocket them.

  “I thought you were going to leave those.”

  “Oh, if you think you’ll need them.” Gerard presented the papers courteously, and turned toward the door.

  “Mind telling me what you’ve got that’ll crack Guy Haines?”

  Gerard made a disdainful sound in his throat. “The man is tortured with guilt,” he said, and went out.

  forty-four

  “You know, in the whole world,” Bruno said, and tears started in his eyes so he had to look down at the long hearth-stone under his feet, “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else but here tonight, Anne.” He leaned his elbow jauntily on the high mantel.

  “Very nice of you to say,” Anne smiled, and set the plate of melted cheese and anchovy canapés on the sawbuck table. “Have one of these while they’re hot.”

  Bruno took one, though he knew he wouldn’t be able to get it down. The table looked beautiful, set for two with gray linen and big gray plates. Gerard was off on a vacation. They had beaten him, Guy and he, and the lid was off his brains! He might have tried to kiss Anne, he thought, if she didn’t belong to Guy. Bruno stood taller and adjusted his cuffs. He took great pride in being a perfect gentleman with Anne. “So Guy thinks he’s going to like it up there?” Bruno asked. Guy was in Canada now, working on the big Alberta dam. “I’m glad all this dumb questioning is over, so he won’t have to worry about it when he’s working. You can imagine how I feel. Like celebrating!” He laughed, mainly at his understatement.

  Anne stared at his tall restless figure by the mantel, and wondered if Guy, despite his hatred, felt the same fascination she did. She still didn’t know, though, whether Charles Bruno would have been capable of arranging his father’s murder, and she had spent the whole day with him in order to make up her mind. He slid away from certain questions with joking answers, he was serious and careful about answering others. He hated Miriam as if he had known her. It rather surprised Anne that Guy had told him so much about Miriam.

  “Why didn’t you want to tell anyone you’d met Guy on the train?” Anne asked.

  “I didn’t mind. I just made the mistake of kidding around about it first, said we’d met in school. Then all those questions came up, and Gerard started making a lot out of it. I guess because it looked bad, frankly. Miriam killed so soon after, you know. I think it was quite nice of Guy at the inquest on Miriam not to drag in anybody he’d just met by accident.” He laughed, a single loud clap, and dropped into the armchair. “Not that I’m a suspicious character, by any means!”

  “But that didn’t have anything to do with the questioning about your father’s death.”

  “Of course not. But Gerard doesn’t pay any attention to logic. He should have been an inventor!”

  Anne frowned. She couldn’t believe that Guy would have fallen in with Charles’ story simply because telling the truth would have looked bad, or even because Charles had told him on the train that he hated his father. She must ask Guy again. There was a great deal she had to ask him. About Charles’ hostility to Miriam, for instance, though he had never seen her. Anne went into the kitchen.

  Bruno strolled to the front window with his drink, and watched a plane alternating its red and green lights in the black sky. It looked like a person exercising, he thought, touching fingertips to shoulders and stretching arms out again. He wished Guy might be on that plane, coming home. He looked at the dusky pink face of his new wristwatch, thinking again, before he read the time on its tall gold numerals, that Guy would probably like a watch like this, because of its modern design. In just three hours more, he would have been with Anne twenty-four hours, a whole day. He had driven by last evening instead of telephoning, and it had gotten so late, Anne had invited him to spend the night. He had slept up in the guest room where they had put him the night of the party, and Anne had brought him some hot bouillon before he went to sleep. Anne was terribly sweet to him, and he really loved her! He spun around on his heel, and saw her coming in from the kitchen with their plates.

  “Guy’s very fond of you, you know,” Anne said during the dinner.

  Bruno looked at her, having already forgotten what they had been talking about. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for him! I feel a tremendous tie with him, like a brother. I guess because everything started happening to him just after we met each other on the train.” And though he had started out to be gay, even funny, the seriousness of his real feeling for Guy got the better of him. He fingered the rack of Guy’s pipes near him on an end table. His heart was pounding. The stuffed potato was beautiful, but he didn’t dare eat another mouthful. Nor the red wine. He had an impulse to try to spend the night again. Couldn’t he manage to stay again tonight, if he didn’t feel well? On the other hand, the new house was closer than Anne thought. Saturday he was giving a big party. “You’re sure Guy’ll be back this weekend?” he asked.

  “So he said.” Anne ate her green salad thoughtfully. “I don’t know whether he’ll feel like a party, though. When he’s been working, he usually doesn’t like anything more distracting than a sail.”

  “I’d like a sail. If you wouldn’t mind company.”

  “Come along.” Then she remembered, Charles had already been out on the India, had invited himself with Guy, had dented the gunwail, and suddenly she felt puzzled, tricked, as if something had prevented her remembering until now. And she found herself thinking, Charles could probably do anything, atrocious things, and fool everyone with the same ingratiating naïveté, the same shy smile. Except Gerard. Yes, he could have arranged his father’s murder. Gerard wouldn’t be speculating in that direction if it weren’t possible. She might be sitting opposite a murderer. She felt a little pluck of terror as she got up, a bit too abruptly as if she were fleeing, and removed the dinner plates. And his grim, merciless pleasure in talking of his loathing for Miriam. He would have enjoyed killing her, Anne thought. A fragile suspicion that he might have killed her crossed her mind like a dry leaf blown by the wind.

  “So you went on to Santa Fe after you met Guy?” she almost stammered, from the kitchen.

  “Uh-huh.” Bruno was deep in the big green armchair again.

  Anne dropped a demitasse spoon and it made an outrageous clatter on the tiles. The odd thing, she thought, was that it didn’t seem to matter what one said to Charles or asked him. Nothing would shock him. But instead of making it simpler to talk to him, this was the very quality that she felt rattling her and throwing her off.

  “Have you ever been to Metcalf?” she heard her own voice call around the partition.

  “No,” Bruno replied. “No, I always wanted to. Have you?”

  Bruno sipped his coffee at the mantel. Anne was on the sofa, her head tipped back so the curve of her throat above the tiny ruffled collar of her dress was the lightest thing about her. Anne is like light to me, Bruno remembered Guy once saying. If he could strangle Anne, too, then Guy and he could really be together. Bruno frowned at himself, then laughed and shifted on his feet.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Just thinking,” he smiled. “I was thinking of what Guy always says, about the doubleness of everything. You know, the positive and negative, side by side. Every decision has a reason against it.” He noticed suddenly he was breathing hard.

  “You mean two sides to everything?”

  “Oh, no, that’s too simple!” Women were really so crude sometimes! “People, feelings, everything! Double! Two people in each person. There’s also a person exactly the opposite of you, like the unseen part of you, somewhere in the world, and he waits in ambush.” It thrilled him to say Guy’s words, though he hadn’t liked hearing them, he remembered, because Guy had said the two people were mortal enemies, too, and Guy had meant him and himself.

  Anne brought her head up slowly from the sofa back. It sounded so like Guy, yet he had never said it to her. Anne thought of the unsigned letter last spring. Charles must have written it. Guy must have meant Ch
arles when he talked of ambush. There was no one else beside Charles to whom Guy reacted so violently. Surely it was Charles who alternated hatred with devotion.

  “It’s not all good and evil either, but that’s how it shows itself best, in action,” Bruno went on cheerfully. “By the way, I mustn’t forget to tell Guy about giving the thousand dollars to a beggar. I always said when I had my own money, I’d give a thousand to a beggar. Well, I did, but you think he thanked me? It took me twenty minutes to prove to him the money was real! I had to take a hundred in a bank and break if for him! Then he acted as if he thought I was crazy!” Bruno looked down and shook his head. He had counted on its being a memorable experience, and then to have the bastard look practically sore at him the next time he saw him—still begging on the same street corner, too—because he hadn’t brought him another thousand! “As I was saying anyway—”

  “About good and evil,” Anne said. She loathed him. She knew all that Guy felt now about him. But she didn’t yet know why Guy tolerated him.

  “Oh. Well, these things come out in actions. But for instance, murderers. Punishing them in the law courts won’t make them any better, Guy says. Every man is his own law court and punishes himself enough. In fact, every man is just about everything to Guy!” He laughed. He was so tight, he could hardly see her face now, but he wanted to tell her everything that he and Guy had ever talked about, right up to the last little secret that he couldn’t tell her.

  “People without consciences don’t punish themselves, do they?” Anne asked.

  Bruno looked at the ceiling. “That’s true. Some people are too dumb to have consciences, other people too evil. Generally the dumb ones get caught. But take the two murderers of Guy’s wife and my father.” Bruno tried to look serious. “Both of them must have been pretty brilliant people, don’t you think?”

  “So that have consciences and don’t deserve to get caught?”

  “Oh, I don’t say that. Of course not! But don’t think they aren’t suffering a little. In their fashion!” He laughed again, because he was really too tight to know just where he was going. “They weren’t just madmen, like they said the murderer of Guy’s wife was. Shows how little the authorities know about real criminology. A crime like that took planning.” Out of the blue, he remembered he hadn’t planned that one at all, but he certainly had planned his father’s, which illustrated his point well enough. “What’s the matter?”

  Anne laid her cold fingers against her forehead. “Nothing.”

  Bruno fixed her a highball at the bar Guy had built into the side of the fireplace. Bruno wanted a bar just like it for his own house.

  “Where did Guy get those scratches on his face last March?”

  “What scratches?” Bruno turned to her. Guy had told him she didn’t know about the scratches.

  “More than scratches. Cuts. And a bruise on his head.”

  “I didn’t see them.”

  “He fought with you, didn’t he?” Charles stared at her with a strange pinkish glint in his eyes. She was not deceitful enough to smile now. She was sure. She felt Charles was about to rush across the room and strike her, but she kept her eyes fixed on his. If she told Gerard, she thought, the fight would be proof of Charles’ knowledge of the murder. Then she saw Charles’ smile waver back.

  “No!” he laughed. He sat down. “Where did he say he got the scratches? I didn’t see him anyway in March. I was out of town then.” He stood up. He suddenly didn’t feel well in the stomach, and it wasn’t the questions, it was his stomach. Suppose he was in for another attack now. Or tomorrow morning. He mustn’t pass out, mustn’t let Anne see that in the morning! “I’d better go soon,” he murmured.

  “What’s the matter? You’re not feeling well? You’re a little pale.”

  She wasn’t sympathetic. He could tell by her voice. What woman ever was, except his mother? “Thank you very much, Anne, for—for all day.”

  She handed him his coat, and he stumbled out the door, gritting his teeth as he started the long walk toward his car at the curb.

  The house was dark when Guy came home a few hours later. He prowled the living room, saw the cigarette stub ground on the heart, the pipe rack askew on the end table, the depression in a small pillow on the sofa. There was a peculiar disorder that couldn’t have been created by Anne and Teddy, or by Chris, or by Helen Heyburn. Hadn’t he known?

  He ran up to the guest room. Bruno wasn’t there, but he saw a tortured roll of newspaper on the bed table and a dime and two pennies domestically beside it. At the window, the dawn was coming in like that dawn. He turned his back on the window, and his held breath came out like a sob. What did Anne mean by doing this to him? Now of all times when it was intolerable—when half of himself was in Canada and the other half here, caught in the tightening grip of Bruno, Bruno with the police off his trail. The police had given him a little insulation! But he had overreached now. There was no enduring much longer.

  He went into the bedroom and knelt beside Anne and kissed her awake, frightenedly, harshly, until he felt her arms close around him. He buried his face in the soft muss of the sheets over her breast. It seemed there was a rocking, roaring storm all around him, all around both of them, and that Anne was the only point of stillness, at its center, and the rhythm of her breathing the only sign of a normal pulse in a sane world. He got his clothes off with his eyes shut.

  “I’ve missed you,” were the first words Anne said.

  Guy stood near the foot of the bed with his hands in the pockets of his robe, clenched. The tension was still in him, and all the storm seemed gathered in his own core now. “I’ll be here three days. Have you missed me?”

  Anne slid up a few inches in the bed. “Why do you look at me like that?”

  Guy did not answer.

  “I’ve seen him only once, Guy.”

  “Why did you see him at all?”

  “Because—” Her cheeks flushed as pink as the spot on her shoulder, Guy noticed. His beard had scratched her shoulder. He had never spoken to her like this before. And the fact she was going to answer him reasonably seemed only to give more reason to his anger. “Because he came by—”

  “He always comes by. He always telephones.”

  “Why?”

  “He slept here!” Guy burst out, then he saw Anne’s recoil in the subtle lift of her head, the flicker of her lashes.

  “Yes. Night before last,” her steady voice challenged him. “He came by late, and I asked him to stay over.”

  It had crossed his mind in Canada that Bruno might make advances to Anne, simply because she belonged to him, and that Anne might encourage him, simply because she wanted to know what he had not told her. Not that Bruno would go very far, but the touch of his hand on Anne’s, the thought of Anne permitting it, and the reason for which she would permit it, tormented him. “And he was here last evening?”

  “Why does it bother you so?”

  “Because he’s dangerous. He’s half insane.”

  “I don’t think that’s the reason he bothers you,” Anne said in the same slow steady voice. “I don’t know why you defend him, Guy. I don’t know why you don’t admit he’s the one who wrote that letter to me and the one who almost drove you insane in March.”

  Guy stiffened with guilty defensiveness. Defense of Bruno, he thought, always defense of Bruno! Bruno hadn’t admitted sending the letter to Anne, he knew. It was just that Anne, like Gerard, with different facts, was putting pieces together. Gerard had quit, but Anne would never quit. Anne worked with the intangible pieces, and the intangible pieces were the ones that would make the picture. But she didn’t have the picture yet. It would take time, a little more time, and a little more time to torture him! He turned to the window with a tired leaden movement, too dead even to cover his face or bow his head. He did not care to ask Anne what she and Bruno had talked of yesterday. Somehow he could feel exactly what they had said, exactly how much more Anne had learned. There was some allotted period of time, h
e felt suddenly, in this agony of postponement. It had gone on beyond all logical expectation, as life sometimes did against a fatal disease, that was all.

  “Tell me, Guy,” Anne said quietly, not pleading with him now, her voice merely like the tolling of a bell that marked another length of time. “Tell me, will you?”

  “I shall tell you,” he replied, still looking at the window, but hearing himself say it now, believing himself, such a lightness filled him, he was sure Anne must see it in the half of his face, in his whole being, and his first thought was to share it with her, though for a moment he could not take his eyes from the sunlight on the window sill. Lightness, he thought, both a lifting of darkness and of weight, weightlessness. He would tell Anne.

  “Guy, come here.” She held up her arms for him, and he sat beside her, slipped his arms around her, and held her tight against him. “There’s going to be a baby,” she said. “Let’s be happy. Will you be happy, Guy?”

  He looked at her, feeling suddenly like laughing for happiness, for surprise, for her shyness. “A baby!” he whispered.

  “What’ll we do these days you’re here?”

  “When, Anne?’

  “On—not for ages. I guess in May. What’ll we do tomorrow?”

  “We’ll definitely go out on the boat. If it’s not too rough.” And the foolish, conspiratorial note in his voice made him laugh out loud now.

  “Oh, Guy!”

  “Crying?”

  “It’s so good to hear you laugh!”

  forty-five

  Bruno telephoned Saturday morning to congratulate Guy on his appointment to the Alberta Committee, and to ask if he and Anne would come to his party that evening. Bruno’s desperate, elated voice exhorted him to celebrate. “Talking over my own private wires, Guy. Gerard’s gone back to Iowa. Come on, I want you to see my new house.” Then, “Let me talk to Anne.”

  “Anne’s out right now.”

  Guy knew the investigations were over. The police had notified him and so had Gerard, with thanks.