The Talented Mr. Ripley

by Patricia Highsmith

  83 Stazione Polizia

  Roma

  14 Feb., 19——

  Most esteemed Signor Greenleaf:

  You are urgently requested to come to Rome to answer some important questions concerning Thomas Ripley. Your presence would be most appreciated and would greatly expedite our investigations.

  Failure to present yourself within a week will cause us to take certain measures which will be inconvenient both to us and to you.

  Most respectfully yours,

  Cap. Enrico Farrara

  So they were still looking for Tom. But maybe it meant that something had happened on the Miles case, too, Tom thought. The Italians didn’t summon an American in words like these. That last paragraph was a plain threat. And of course they knew about the forged check by now.

  He stood with the letter in his hand, looking blankly around the room. He caught sight of himself in the mirror, the corners of his mouth turned down, his eyes anxious and scared. He looked as if he were trying to convey the emotions of fear and shock by his posture and his expression, and because the way he looked was involuntary and real, he became suddenly twice as frightened. He folded the letter and pocketed it, then took it out of his pocket and tore it to bits.

  He began to pack rapidly, snatching his robe and pajamas from the bathroom door, throwing his toilet articles into the leather kit with Dickie’s initials that Marge had given him for Christmas. He stopped suddenly. He had to get rid of Dickie’s belongings, all of them. Here? Now? Should he throw them overboard on the way back to Naples?

  The question didn’t answer itself, but he suddenly knew what he had to do, what he was going to do when he got back to Italy. He would not go anywhere near Rome. He could go straight up to Milan or Turin, or maybe somewhere near Venice, and buy a car, secondhand, with a lot of mileage on it. He’d say he’d been roaming around Italy for the last two or three months. He hadn’t heard anything about the search for Thomas Ripley. Thomas Reepley.

  He went on packing. This was the end of Dickie Greenleaf, he knew. He hated becoming Thomas Ripley again, hated being nobody, hated putting on his old set of habits again, and feeling that people looked down on him and were bored with him unless he put on an act for them like a clown, feeling incompetent and incapable of doing anything with himself except entertaining people for minutes at a time. He hated going back to himself as he would have hated putting on a shabby suit of clothes, a grease-spotted, unpressed suit of clothes that had not been very good even when it was new. His tears fell on Dickie’s blue-and-white-striped shirt that lay uppermost in the suitcase, starched and clean and still as new-looking as when he had first taken it out of Dickie’s drawer in Mongibello. But it had Dickie’s initials on the pocket in little red letters. As he packed he began to reckon up defiantly the things of Dickie’s that he could still keep because they had no initials, or because no one would remember that they were Dickie’s and not his own. Except maybe Marge would remember a few, like the new blue leather address book that Dickie had written only a couple of addresses in, and that Marge had very likely given to him. But he wasn’t planning to see Marge again.

  Tom paid his bill at the Palma, but he had to wait until the next day for a boat to the mainland. He reserved the boat ticket in the name of Greenleaf, thinking that this was the last time he would ever reserve a ticket in the name of Greenleaf, but that maybe it wouldn’t be, either. He couldn’t give up the idea that it might all blow over. Just might. And for that reason it was senseless to be despondent. It was senseless to be despondent, anyway, even as Tom Ripley. Tom Ripley had never really been despondent, though he had often looked it. Hadn’t he learned something from these last months? If you wanted to be cheerful, or melancholic, or wistful, or thoughtful, or courteous, you simply had to act those things with every gesture.

  A very cheerful thought came to him when he awoke on the last morning in Palermo: he could check all Dickie’s clothes at the American Express in Venice under a different name and reclaim them at some future time, if he wanted to or had to, or else never claim them at all. It made him feel much better to know that Dickie’s good shirts, his studbox with all the cuff links and the identification bracelet and his wristwatch would be safely in storage somewhere, instead of at the bottom of the Tyrrhenian Sea or in some ashcan in Sicily.

  So, after scraping the initials off Dickie’s two suitcases, he sent them, locked, from Naples to the American Express Company, Venice, together with two canvases he had begun painting in Palermo, in the name of Robert S. Fanshaw, to be stored until called for. The only things, the only revealing things, he kept with him were Dickie’s rings, which he put into the bottom of an ugly little brown leather box belonging to Thomas Ripley, that he had somehow kept with him for years everywhere he traveled or moved to, and which was otherwise filled with his own interesting collection of cuff links, collar pins, odd buttons, a couple of fountain pen points, and a spool of white thread with a needle stuck in it.

  Tom took a train from Naples up through Rome, Florence, Bologna, and Verona, where he got out and went by bus to the town of Trento about forty miles away. He did not want to buy a car in a town as big as Verona, because the police might notice his name when he applied for his license plates, he thought. In Trento he bought a secondhand cream-colored Lancia for the equivalent of about eight hundred dollars. He bought it in the name of Thomas Ripley, as his passport read, and took a hotel room in that name to wait the twenty-four hours until his license plates should be ready. Six hours later nothing had happened. Tom had been afraid that even this small hotel might recognize his name, that the office that took care of the applications for plates might also notice his name, but by noon the next day he had his plates on his car and nothing had happened. Neither was there anything in the papers about the quest for Thomas Ripley, or the Miles case, or the San Remo boat affair. It made him feel rather strange, rather safe and happy, and as if perhaps all of it were unreal. He began to feel happy even in his dreary role as Thomas Ripley. He took a pleasure in it, overdoing almost the old Tom Ripley reticence with strangers, the inferiority in every duck of his head and wistful, sidelong glance. After all, would anyone, anyone, believe that such a character had ever done a murder? And the only murder he could possibly be suspected of was Dickie’s in San Remo, and they didn’t seem to be getting very far on that. Being Tom Ripley had one compensation, at least: it relieved his mind of guilt for the stupid, unnecessary murder of Freddie Miles.

  He wanted to go straight to Venice, but he thought he should spend one night doing what he intended to tell the police he had been doing for several months: sleeping in his car on a country road. He spent one night in the backseat of the Lancia, cramped and miserable, somewhere in the neighborhood of Brescia. He crawled into the front seat at dawn with such a painful crick in his neck he could hardly turn his head sufficiently to drive, but that made it authentic, he thought, that would make him tell the story better. He bought a guidebook of Northern Italy, marked it up appropriately with dates, turned down corners of its pages, stepped on its covers and broke its binding so that it fell open at Pisa.

  The next night he spent in Venice. In a childish way Tom had avoided Venice simply because he expected to be disappointed in it. He had thought only sentimentalists and American tourists raved over Venice, and that at best it was only a town for honeymooners who enjoyed the inconvenience of not being able to go anywhere except by a gondola moving at two miles an hour. He found Venice much bigger than he had supposed, full of Italians who looked like Italians anywhere else. He found he could walk across the entire city via the narrow streets and bridges without setting foot in a gondola, and that the major canals had a transportation system of motor launches just as fast and efficient as the subway system, and that the canals did not smell bad, either. There was a tremendous choice of hotels, from the Gritti and the Danieli, which he had heard of, down to crummy little hotels and pensions in back alleys so off the beaten track, so removed from the world of police a
nd American tourists, that Tom could imagine living in one of them for months without being noticed by anybody. He chose a hotel called the Costanza, very near the Rialto bridge, which struck the middle between the famous luxury hotels and the obscure little hostelries on the back streets. It was clean, inexpensive, and convenient to points of interest. It was just the hotel for Tom Ripley.

  Tom spent a couple of hours pottering around in his room, slowly unpacking his old familiar clothes, and dreaming out of the window at the dusk falling over the Canale Grande. He imagined the conversation he was going to have with the police before long. . . . Why, I haven’t any idea. I saw him in Rome. If you’ve any doubt of that, you can verify it with Miss Marjorie Sherwood. . . . Of course I’m Tom Ripley! (He would give a laugh.) I can’t understand what all the fuss is about!. . . San Remo? Yes, I remember. We brought the boat back after an hour. . . . Yes, I came back to Rome after Mongibello, but I didn’t stay more than a couple of nights. I’ve been roaming around the north of Italy. . . . I’m afraid I haven’t any idea where he is, but I saw him about three weeks ago. . . . Tom got up from the windowsill smiling, changed his shirt and tie for the evening, and went out to find a pleasant restaurant for dinner. A good restaurant, he thought. Tom Ripley could treat himself to something expensive for once. His billfold was so full of long ten- and twenty-thousand-lire notes it wouldn’t bend. He had cashed a thousand dollars’ worth of traveler’s checks in Dickie’s name before he left Palermo.

  He bought two evening newspapers, tucked them under his arm and walked on, over a little arched bridge, through a long street hardly six feet wide full of leather shops and men’s shirt shops, past windows glittering with jeweled boxes that spilled out necklaces and rings like the boxes Tom had always imagined that treasures spilled out of in fairy tales. He liked the fact that Venice had no cars. It made the city human. The streets were like veins, he thought, and the people were the blood, circulating everywhere. He took another street back and crossed the great quadrangle of San Marco’s for the second time. Pigeons everywhere, in the air, in the light of shops—even at night, pigeons walking along under people’s feet like sightseers themselves in their own home town! The chairs and tables of the cafés spread across the arcade into the plaza itself, so that people and pigeons had to look for little aisles through them to get by. From either end of the plaza blaring phonographs played in disharmony. Tom tried to imagine the place in summer, in sunlight, full of people tossing handfuls of grain up into the air for the pigeons that fluttered down for it. He entered another little lighted tunnel of a street. It was full of restaurants, and he chose a very substantial and respectable-looking place with white tablecloths and brown wooden walls, the kind of restaurants which experience had taught him by now concentrated on food and not the passing tourist. He took a table and opened one of his newspapers.

  And there it was, a little item on the second page:

  POLICE SEARCH FOR MISSING AMERICAN

  Dickie Greenleaf, Friend of the Murdered Freddie Miles,

  Missing After Sicilian Holiday

  Tom bent close over the paper, giving it his full attention, yet he was conscious of a certain sense of annoyance as he read it, because in a strange way it seemed silly, silly of the police to be so stupid and ineffectual, and silly of the newspaper to waste space printing it. The text stated that H. Richard (“Dickie”) Greenleaf, a close friend of the late Frederick Miles, the American murdered three weeks ago in Rome, had disappeared after presumably taking a boat from Palermo to Naples. Both the Sicilian and Roman police had been alerted and were keeping a vigilantissimo watch for him. A final paragraph said that Greenleaf had just been requested by the Rome police to answer questions concerning the disappearance of Thomas Ripley, also a close friend of Greenleaf. Ripley had been missing for about three months, the paper said.

  Tom put the paper down, unconsciously feigning so well the astonishment that anybody might feel on reading in a newspaper that he was “missing,” that he didn’t notice the waiter trying to hand him the menu until the menu touched his hand. This was the time, he thought, when he ought to go straight to the police and present himself. If they had nothing against him—and what could they have against Tom Ripley?—they wouldn’t likely check as to when he had bought the car. The newspaper item was quite a relief to him, because it meant that the police really had not picked up his name at the bureau of automobile registration in Trento.

  He ate his meal slowly and with pleasure, ordered an espresso afterward, and smoked a couple of cigarettes as he thumbed through his guidebook on Northern Italy. By then he had had some different thoughts. For example, why should he have seen an item this small in the newspaper? And it was in only one newspaper. No, he oughtn’t to present himself until he had seen two or three such items, or one big one that would logically catch his attention. They probably would come out with a big item before long: when a few days passed and Dickie Greenleaf still had not appeared, they would begin to suspect that he was hiding away because he had killed Freddie Miles and possibly Tom Ripley, too. Marge might have told the police she spoke with Tom Ripley two weeks ago in Rome, but the police hadn’t seen him yet. He leafed through the guidebook, letting his eyes run over the colorless prose and statistics while he did some more thinking.

  He thought of Marge, who was probably winding up her house in Mongibello now, packing for America. She’d see in the papers about Dickie’s being missing, and Marge would blame him, Tom knew. She’d write to Dickie’s father and say that Tom Ripley was a vile influence, at very least. Mr. Greenleaf might decide to come over.

  What a pity he couldn’t present himself as Tom Ripley and quiet them down about that, then present himself as Dickie Greenleaf, hale and hearty, and clear up that little mystery, too!

  He might play up Tom a little more, he thought. He could stoop a little more, he could be shyer than ever, he could even wear horn-rimmed glasses and hold his mouth in an even sadder, droopier manner to contrast with Dickie’s tenseness. Because some of the police he might talk to might be the ones who had seen him as Dickie Greenleaf. What was the name of that one in Rome? Rovassini? Tom decided to rinse his hair again in a stronger solution of henna, so that it would be even darker than his normal hair.

  He looked through all the papers a third time for anything about the Miles case. Nothing.

  22

  The next morning there was a long account in the most important newspaper, saying in only a small paragraph that Thomas Ripley was missing, but saying very boldly that Richard Greenleaf was “exposing himself to suspicion of participation” in the murder of Miles, and that he must be considered as evading the “problem,” unless he presented himself to be cleared of suspicion. The paper also mentioned the forged checks. It said that the last communication from Richard Greenleaf had been his letter to the Bank of Naples, attesting that no forgeries had been committed against him. But two experts out of three in Naples said that they believed Signor Greenleaf’s January and February checks were forgeries, concurring with the opinion of Signor Greenleaf’s American bank, which had sent photostats of his signatures back to Naples. The newspaper ended on a slightly facetious note: “Can anybody commit a forgery against himself? Or is the wealthy American shielding one of his friends?”

  To hell with them, Tom thought. Dickie’s own handwriting changed often enough: he had seen it on an insurance policy among Dickie’s papers, and he had seen it in Mongibello, right in front of his eyes. Let them drag out everything he had signed in the last three months, and see where it got them! They apparently hadn’t noticed that the signature on his letter from Palermo was a forgery, too.

  The only thing that really interested him was whether the police had found anything that actually incriminated Dickie in the murder of Freddie Miles. And he could hardly say that that really interested him, personally. He bought Oggi and Epoca at a newsstand in the corner of San Marco’s. They were tabloid-sized weeklies full of photographs, full of anything from murder t
o flagpole-sitting, anything spectacular that was happening anywhere. There was nothing in them yet about the missing Dickie Greenleaf. Maybe next week, he thought. But they wouldn’t have any photographs of him in them, anyway. Marge had taken pictures of Dickie in Mongibello, but she had never taken one of him.

  On his ramble around the city that morning he bought some rimmed glasses at a shop that sold toys and gadgets for practical jokers. The lenses were of plain glass. He visited San Marco’s cathedral and looked all around inside it without seeing anything, but it was not the fault of the glasses. He was thinking that he had to identify himself, immediately. It would look worse for him, whatever happened, the longer he put it off. When he left the cathedral he inquired of a policeman where the nearest police station was. He asked it sadly. He felt sad. He was not afraid, but he felt that identifying himself as Thomas Phelps Ripley was going to be one of the saddest things he had ever done in his life.

  “YOU ARE THOMAS REEPLEY?” the captain of police asked, with no more interest than if Tom had been a dog that had been lost and was now found. “May I see your passport?”

  Tom handed it to him. “I don’t know what the trouble is, but when I saw in the papers that I am believed missing—” It was all dreary, dreary, just as he had anticipated. Policemen standing around blank-faced, staring at him. “What happens now?” Tom asked the officer.

  “I shall telephone to Rome,” the officer answered calmly, and picked up the telephone on his desk.

  There was a few minutes’ wait for the Rome line, and then, in an impersonal voice, the officer announced to someone in Rome that the American, Thomas Reepley, was in Venice. More inconsequential exchanges, then the officer said to Tom, “They would like to see you in Rome. Can you go to Rome today?”

  Tom frowned. “I wasn’t planning to go to Rome.”

  “I shall tell them,” the officer said mildly, and spoke into the telephone again.