The Talented Mr. Ripley

by Patricia Highsmith

  He looked out of the glass of the two front doors. The street looked normal: a man was walking on the opposite sidewalk, but there was always someone walking on one sidewalk or the other. He opened the first door with one hand, kicked it aside and dragged Freddie’s feet through. Between the doors, he shifted Freddie to the other shoulder, rolling his head under Freddie’s body, and for a second a certain pride went through him at his own strength, until the ache in his relaxing arm staggered him with its pain. The arm was too tired even to circle Freddie’s body. He set his teeth harder and staggered down the four front steps, banging his hip against the stone newel post.

  A man approaching him on the sidewalk slowed his steps as if he were going to stop, but he went on.

  If anyone came over, Tom thought, he would blow such a breath of Pernod in his face there wouldn’t be any reason to ask what was the matter. Damn them, damn them, damn them, he said to himself as he jolted down the curb. Passersby, innocent passersby. Four of them now. But only two of them so much as glanced at him, he thought. He paused a moment for a car to pass. Then with a few quick steps and a heave he thrust Freddie’s head and one shoulder through the open window of the car, far enough in that he could brace Freddie’s body with his own body while he got his breath. He looked around, under the glow of light from the street lamp across the street, into the shadows in front of his own apartment house.

  At that instant the Buffis’ youngest boy ran out of the door and down the sidewalk without looking in Tom’s direction. Then a man crossing the street walked within a yard of the car with only a brief and faintly surprised look at Freddie’s bent figure, which did look almost natural now, Tom thought, practically as if Freddie were only leaning into the car talking to someone, only he really didn’t look quite natural, Tom knew. But that was the advantage of Europe, he thought. Nobody helped anybody, nobody meddled. If this had been America—

  “Can I help you?” a voice asked in Italian.

  “Ah, no, no, grazie,” Tom replied with drunken good cheer.“I know where he lives,” he added in mumbled English.

  The man nodded, smiling a little, too, and walked on. A tall thin man in a thin overcoat, hatless, with a mustache. Tom hoped he wouldn’t remember. Or remember the car.

  Tom swung Freddie out on the door, pulled him around the door and on to the car seat, came around the car and pulled Freddie into the seat beside the driver’s seat. Then he put on the pair of brown leather gloves he had stuck into his overcoat pocket. He put Freddie’s key into the dashboard. The car started obediently. They were off. Down the hill to the Via Veneto, past the American Library, over to the Piazza Venezia, past the balcony on which Mussolini used to stand to make his speeches, past the gargantuan Victor Emmanuel Monument and through the Forum, past the Colosseum, a grand tour of Rome that Freddie could not appreciate at all. It was just as if Freddie were sleeping beside him, as sometimes people did sleep when you wanted to show them scenery.

  The Via Appia Antica stretched out before him, gray and ancient in the soft lights of its infrequent lamps. Black fragments of tombs rose up on either side of the road, silhouetted against the still not quite dark sky. There was more darkness than light. And only a single car ahead, coming this way. Not many people chose to take a ride on such a bumpy, gloomy road after dark in the month of January. Except perhaps lovers. The approaching car passed him. Tom began to look around for the right spot. Freddie ought to have a handsome tomb to lie behind, he thought. There was a spot ahead with three or four trees near the edge of the road and doubtless a tomb behind them or part of a tomb. Tom pulled off the road by the trees and shut off his lights. He waited a moment, looking at both ends of the straight, empty road.

  Freddie was still as limp as a rubber doll. What was all this about rigor mortis? He dragged the limp body roughly now, scraping the face in the dirt, behind the last tree and behind the little remnant of tomb that was only a four-foot-high, jagged arc of wall, but which was probably a remnant of the tomb of a patrician, Tom thought, and quite enough for this pig. Tom cursed his ugly weight and kicked him suddenly in the chin. He was tired, tired to the point of crying, sick of the sight of Freddie Miles, and the moment when he could turn his back on him for the last time seemed never to come. There was still the goddamned coat! Tom went back to the car to get it. The ground was hard and dry, he noticed as he walked back, and should not leave any traces of his steps. He flung the coat down beside the body and turned away quickly and walked back to the car on his numb, staggering legs, and turned the car around toward Rome again.

  As he drove, he wiped the outside of the car door with his gloved hand to get the fingerprints off, the only place he had touched the car before he put his gloves on, he thought. On the street that curved up to the American Express, opposite the Florida nightclub, he parked the car and got out and left it with the keys in the dashboard. He still had Freddie’s wallet in his pocket, though he had transferred the Italian money to his own billfold and had burnt a Swiss twenty-franc note and some Austrian schilling notes in his apartment. Now he took the wallet out of his pocket, and as he passed a sewer grate he leaned down and dropped it in.

  There were only two things wrong, he thought as he walked toward his house: robbers would logically have taken the polo coat, because it was a good one, and also the passport, which was still in the overcoat pocket. But not every robber was logical, he thought, maybe especially an Italian robber. And not every murderer was logical, either. His mind drifted back to the conversation with Freddie. “. . . an Italian fellow. Just a young kid . . .” Somebody had followed him home at some time, Tom thought, because he hadn’t told anybody where he lived. It shamed him. Maybe two or three delivery boys might know where he lived, but a delivery boy wouldn’t be sitting in a place like the Café Greco. It shamed him and made him shrink inside his overcoat. He imagined a dark, panting young face following him home, staring up to see which window had lighted up after he had gone in. Tom hunched in his overcoat and walked faster as if he were fleeing a sick, passionate pursuer.

  17

  Tom went out before eight in the morning to buy the papers. There was nothing. They might not find him for days, Tom thought. Nobody was likely to walk around an unimportant tomb like the one he had put Freddie behind. Tom felt quite confident of his safety, but physically he felt awful. He had a hangover, the terrible, jumpy kind that made him stop halfway in everything he began doing, even stop halfway in brushing his teeth to go and see if his train really left at ten-thirty or at ten-forty-five. It left at ten-thirty.

  He was completely ready by nine, dressed and with his overcoat and raincoat out on the bed. He had even spoken to Signora Buffi to tell her he would be gone for at least three weeks and possibly longer. Signora Buffi had behaved just as usual, Tom thought, and had not mentioned his American visitor yesterday. Tom tried to think of something to ask her, something quite normal in view of Freddie’s questions yesterday, that would show him what Signora Buffi really thought about the questions, but he couldn’t think of anything, and decided to let well enough alone. Everything was fine. Tom tried to reason himself out of the hangover, because he had had only the equivalent of three martinis and three Pernods at most. He knew it was a matter of mental suggestion, and that he had a hangover because he had intended to pretend that he had been drinking a great deal with Freddie. And now when there was no need of it, he was still pretending, uncontrollably.

  The telephone rang, and Tom picked it up and said “Pronto,” sullenly.

  “Signor Greenleaf?” asked the Italian voice.

  “Si.”

  “Qui parla la stazione polizia numero ottantarre. Lei è un amico di un’ americano chi se chiama Fred-derick Meelays?”

  “Frederick Miles? Si,” Tom said.

  The quick, tense voice stated that the corpse of Fred-derick Mee-lays had been found that morning on the Via Appia Antica, and that Signor Mee-lays had visited him at some time yesterday, was that not so?

  “Yes, th
at is so.”

  “At what time exactly?”

  “From about noon to—perhaps five or six in the afternoon, I am not quite sure.”

  “Would you be kind enough to answer some questions? . . . No, it is not necessary that you trouble yourself to come to the station. The interrogator will come to you. Will eleven o’clock this morning be convenient?”

  “I’ll be very glad to help if I can,” Tom said in a properly excited voice. “But can’t the interrogator come now? It is necessary for me to leave the house at ten o’clock.”

  The voice made a little moan and said it was doubtful, but they would try it. If they could not come before ten o’clock, it was very important that he should not leave the house.

  “Va bene,” Tom said acquiescently, and hung up.

  Damn them! He’d miss his train and his boat now. All he wanted to do was get out, leave Rome and leave his apartment. He started to go over what he would tell the police. It was all so simple, it bored him. It was the absolute truth. They had had drinks, Freddie had told him about Cortina, they had talked a lot, and then Freddie had left, maybe a little high but in a very good mood. No, he didn’t know where Freddie had been going. He had supposed Freddie had a date for the evening.

  Tom went into the bedroom and put a canvas, which he had begun a few days ago, on the easel. The paint on the palette was still moist because he had kept it underwater in a pan in the kitchen. He mixed some more blue and white and began to add to the grayish-blue sky. The picture was still in Dickie’s bright reddish-browns and clear whites—the roofs and walls of Rome out of his window. The sky was the only departure, because the winter sky of Rome was so gloomy, even Dickie would have painted it grayish-blue instead of blue, Tom thought. Tom frowned, just as Dickie frowned when he painted.

  The telephone rang again. “Goddamn it!” Tom muttered, and went to answer it. “Pronto!”

  “Pronto! Fausto!” the voice said. “Come sta?” And the familiar bubbling, juvenile laugh.

  “Oh-h! Fausto! Bene, grazie! Excuse me.” Tom continued in Italian in Dickie’s laughing, absent voice, “I’ve been trying to paint—trying.” It was calculated to be possibly the voice of Dickie after having lost a friend like Freddie, and also the voice of Dickie on an ordinary morning of absorbing work.

  “Can you have lunch?” Fausto asked. “My train leaves at four-fifteen for Milano.”

  Tom groaned, like Dickie. “I’m just taking off for Naples. Yes, immediately, in twenty minutes!” If he could escape Fausto now, he thought, he needn’t let Fausto know that the police had called him at all. The news about Freddie wouldn’t be in the papers until noon or later.

  “But I’m here! In Roma! Where’s your house? I’m at the railroad station!” Fausto said cheerfully, laughing.

  “Where’d you get my telephone number?”

  “Ah! allora, I called up information. They told me you didn’t give the number out, but I told the girl a long story about a lottery you won in Mongibello. I don’t know if she believed me, but I made it sound very important. A house and a cow and a well and even a refrigerator! I had to call her back three times, but finally she gave it to me. Allora, Deekie, where are you?”

  “That’s not the point. I’d have lunch with you if I didn’t have this train, but—”

  “Va bene, I’ll help you carry your bags! Tell me where you are and I’ll come over with a taxi for you!”

  “The time’s too short. Why don’t I see you at the railroad station in about half an hour? It’s the ten-thirty train for Naples.”

  “Okay!”

  “How is Marge?”

  “Ah—innamorata di te,” Fausto said, laughing. “Are you going to see her in Naples?”

  “I don’t think so. I’ll see you in a few minutes, Fausto. Got to hurry. Arrivederch.”

  “Rivederch, Deekie! Addio!” He hung up.

  When Fausto saw the papers this afternoon, he would understand why he hadn’t come to the railroad station, otherwise Fausto would just think they had missed each other somehow. But Fausto probably would see the papers by noon, Tom thought, because the Italian papers would play it up big—the murder of an American on the Appian Way. After the interview with the police, he would take another train to Naples—after four o’clock, so Fausto wouldn’t be still around the station—and wait in Naples for the next boat to Majorca.

  He only hoped that Fausto wouldn’t worm the address out of information, too, and decide to come over before four o’clock. He hoped Fausto wouldn’t land here just when the police were here.

  Tom shoved a couple of suitcases under the bed, and carried the other to a closet and shut the door. He didn’t want the police to think he was just about to leave town. But what was he so nervous about? They probably hadn’t any clues. Maybe a friend of Freddie’s had known that Freddie was going to try to see him yesterday, that was all. Tom picked up a brush and moistened it in the turpentine cup. For the benefit of the police, he wanted to look as if he was not too upset by the news of Freddie’s death to do a little painting while he waited for them, though he was dressed to go out, because he had said he intended to go out. He was going to be a friend of Freddie’s, but not too close a friend.

  Signora Buffi let the police in at ten-thirty. Tom looked down the stairwell and saw them. They did not stop to ask her any questions. Tom went back into his apartment. The spicy smell of turpentine was in the room.

  There were two: an older man in the uniform of an officer, and a younger man in an ordinary police uniform. The older man greeted him politely and asked to see his passport. Tom produced it, and the officer looked sharply from Tom to the picture of Dickie, more sharply than anyone had ever looked at it before, and Tom braced himself for a challenge, but there was none. The officer handed him the passport with a little bow and a smile. He was a short, middle-aged man who looked like thousands of other middle-aged Italians, with heavy gray-and-black eyebrows and a short, bushy gray-and-black mustache. He looked neither particularly bright nor stupid.

  “How was he killed?” Tom asked.

  “He was struck on the head and in the neck by some heavy instrument,” the officer replied, “and robbed. We think he was drunk. Was he drunk when he left your apartment yesterday afternoon?”

  “Well—somewhat. We had both been drinking. We were drinking martinis and Pernod.”

  The officer wrote it down in his tablet, and also the time that Tom said Freddie had been there, from about twelve until about six.

  The younger policeman, handsome and blank of face, was strolling around the apartment with his hands behind him, bending close to the easel with a relaxed air as if he were alone in a museum.

  “Do you know where he was going when he left?” the officer asked.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “But you thought he was able to drive?”

  “Oh, yes. He was not too drunk to drive or I would have gone with him.”

  The officer asked another question that Tom pretended not quite to grasp. The officer asked it a second time, choosing different words, and exchanged a smile with the younger officer. Tom glanced from one to the other of them, a little resentfully. The officer wanted to know what his relationship to Freddie had been.

  “A friend,” Tom said. “Not a very close friend. I had not seen or heard from him in about two months. I was terribly upset to hear about the disaster this morning.” Tom let his anxious expression make up for his rather primitive vocabulary. He thought it did. He thought the questioning was very perfunctory, and that they were going to leave in another minute or so. “At exactly what time was he killed?” Tom asked.

  The officer was still writing. He raised his bushy eyebrows. “Evidently just after the signor left your house, because the doctors believe that he had been dead at least twelve hours, perhaps longer.”