Strangers on a Train

by Strangers on a Train (2021) (retail) (epub)

  The twenty-first letter mentioned Anne. “You wouldn’t like Anne to know your part in Miriam’s murder, would you? What girl would marry a murderer? Certainly not Anne. The time is getting short. The first two weeks in March is my deadline. Until then it would be easy.”

  Then the gun came. It was handed him by his landlady, a big package in brown paper. Guy gave a short laugh when the black gun toppled out. It was a big Luger, shiny and new-looking except for a chip off the crosshatched handle.

  Some impulse made Guy take his own little revolver from the back of his top drawer, made him heft his own beautiful pearl-handled gun over his bed where the Luger lay. He smiled at his action, then brought the Texas gun up closer to his eyes and studied it. He had seen it in a glutted pawnshop window on lower Main Street in Metcalf when he was about fifteen, and had bought it with money from his paper route, not because it was a gun but because it was beautiful. Its compactness, the economy of its short barrel had delighted him. The more he had learned of mechanical design, the more pleased he had been with his gun. He had kept it in various top drawers for fifteen years. He opened the chamber and removed the bullets, three of them, and turned the cylinder around with six pulls of the trigger, admiring the deep pitched clicks of its perfect machinery. Then he slipped the bullets back, put the gun into its lavender-colored flannel bag, and replaced it in his drawer.

  How should he get rid of the Luger? Drop it over an embankment into the river? Into some ashcan? Throw it out with his trash? Everything he though of seemed either suspect or melodramatic. He decided to slip it under his socks and underwear in a bottom drawer until something better occurred to him. He thought suddenly of Samuel Bruno, for the first time as a person. The presence of the Luger brought the man and his potential death into juxtaposition in his mind. Here in his room was the complete picture of the man and his life, according to Bruno, the plan for his murder—a letter had been waiting in his box that morning, too, and lay on his bed now unopened—and the gun with which he was supposed to kill him. Guy got one of Bruno’s recent letters from among a few in the bottom drawer.

  Samuel Bruno [Bruno seldom referred to him as “my father”] is the finest example of the worst that America produces. He comes of low-class peasants in Hungary, little better than animals. He picked a wife of good family, with his usual greed, once he could afford her. All this time my mother quietly bore his unfaithfulness, having some concept of the sacredness of marriage contract. Now in his old age he tries to act pius before it is too late, but it is too late. I wish I could kill him myself but I have explained to you due to Gerard, his private detective, it is impossible. If you ever had anything to do with him, he would be your personal enemy, too. He is the kind of man who thinks all your ideas about architecture as beauty and about adiquate houses for everyone are idiotic & doesn’t care what kind of factory he has as long as the roof doesn’t leak and ruin his machinery. It may interest you to know his employees are on strike now. See N.Y. Times last Thurs. p. 31 bottom left. They are striking for a living wage. Samuel bruno does not hesitate to rob his own son . . .

  Who would believe such a story if he told it? Who would accept such fantasy? The letter, the map, the gun— They seemed like props of a play, objects arranged to give a verisimilitude to a story that wasn’t real and never could be real. Guy burnt the letter. He burnt all the letters he had, then hurried to get ready for Long Island.

  He and Anne were going to spend the day driving, walking in the woods, and tomorrow drive up to Alton. The house would be finished by the end of March, which would give them a leisurely two months before the wedding to furnish it. Guy smiled as he gazed out the train window. Anne had never said she wanted a June wedding; it was simply drifting that way. She had never said she wanted a formal wedding, only, “Let’s not have anything too slapdash.” Then when he had told her he wouldn’t mind a formal wedding if she wouldn’t, she had let out a long “Oh-h!” and grabbed him and kissed him. No, he didn’t want another three-minute wedding with a stranger for a witness. He began sketching on the back of an envelope the twenty-story office building he had learned last week he had a good chance of being commissioned for, that he had been saving as a surprise for Anne. He felt the future had suddenly become the present. He had everything he wanted. Running down the platform steps, he saw Anne’s leopard coat in the little crowd by the station door. Always he would remember the times she waited for him here, he thought, the shy dance of impatience she did when she caught sight of him, the way she smiled and half turned round, as if she wouldn’t have waited half a minute longer.

  “Anne!” He put his arm around her and kissed her cheek.

  “You didn’t wear a hat.”

  He smiled because it was exactly what he had expected her to say. “Well, neither did you.”

  “I’m in the car. And it’s snowing.” She took his hand and they ran across the crisp ash lane toward the cars. “I’ve got a surprise!”

  “So have I. What’s yours?”

  “Sold five designs yesterday on my own.”

  Guy shook his head. “I can’t beat that. I’ve just got one office building. Maybe.”

  She smiled and her eyebrows went up. “Maybe? Yes!”

  “Yes, yes, yes!” he said, and kissed her again.

  That evening, standing on the little wooden bridge over the stream back of Anne’s house, Guy started to say, “Do you know what Bruno sent me today? A gun.” Then, not that he had come close to saying it, but the remoteness of Bruno and his connection with him from his and Anne’s life shocked him with a terrible realization. He wanted no secrets from Anne, and here was one bigger than all he had told her. Bruno, the name that haunted him, would mean nothing to Anne.

  “What is it, Guy?”

  She knew there was something, he thought. She always knew. “Nothing.”

  He followed her as she turned and walked toward the house. The night had blackened the earth, made the snowy ground hardly distinguishable from woods and sky. And Guy felt it again—the sense of hostility in the clump of woods east of the house. Before him, the kitchen door spilled a warm yellow light some way onto the lawn. Guy turned again, letting his eyes rest on the blackness where the woods began. The feeling he had when he gazed there was discomforting and relieving at once, like biting on an ailing tooth.

  “I’ll walk around again,” he said.

  Anne went in, and he turned back. He wanted to see if the sensation were stronger or weaker when Anne was not with him. He tried to feel rather than see. It was still there, faint and evasive, where the darkness deepened at the baseline of the woods. Nothing of course. What chance combination of shadow and sound and his own thoughts had created it?

  He slipped his hands into his overcoat pockets and moved stubbornly closer.

  The dull snap of a twig plummeted his consciousness to earth, focused it at a certain point. He sprinted toward it. A crackling of bushes now, and a moving black figure in the blackness. Guy released all his muscles in a long dive, caught it, and recognized the hoarse intake of breath as Bruno’s. Bruno plunged in his arms like a great powerful fish underwater, twisted and hit him an agonizing blow on the cheekbone. Clasping each other, they both fell, fighting to free arms, fighting as if they both fought death. Bruno’s fingers scratched frenziedly at his throat, though Guy kept his arms straight. Bruno’s breath hissed in and out between his drawn-back lips. Guy hit the mouth again with his right fist that felt broken, that would no longer close.

  “Guy!” Bruno burst out indignantly.

  Guy caught him by the front of his collar. Suddenly they both stopped fighting.

  “You knew it was me!” Bruno said in a fury. “Dirty bastard!”

  “What’re you doing here?” Guy pulled him to his feet.

  The bleeding mouth spread wider, as if he were going to cry. “Lemme go!”

  Guy shoved him. He fell like a sack to the ground and tottered up again.

  “Okay, kill me if you want to! You can say it’
s self-defense!” Bruno whined.

  Guy glanced toward the house. They had struggled a long way into the woods. “I don’t want to kill you. I’ll kill you next time I find you here.”

  Bruno laughed, the single victorious clap.

  Guy advanced menacingly. He did not want to touch Bruno again. Yet a moment before, he had fought with “Kill, kill!” in his mind. Guy knew there was nothing he could do to stop Bruno’s smile, not even kill him. “Clear out.”

  “You ready to do that job in two weeks?”

  “Ready to turn you over to the police.”

  “Ready to turn yourself over?” Bruno jeered shrilly. “Ready to tell Anne all about it, huh? Ready to spend the next twenty years in jail? Sure, I’m ready!” He brought his palms together gently. His eyes seemed to glow with a red light. His swaying figure was like that of an evil spirit’s that might have stepped from the twisted black tree behind him.

  “Get someone else for your dirty work,” Guy muttered.

  “Look who’s talking! I want you and I’ve got you! Okay!” A laugh. “I’ll start. I’ll tell your girl friend all about it. I’ll write her tonight.” He lurched away, tripped heavily, and staggered on, a loose and shapeless thing. He turned and shouted, “Unless I hear from you in a day or so.”

  Guy told Anne he had fought with a prowler in the woods. He suffered only a reddened eye from the battle, but he saw no way to stay on at the house, not go to Alton tomorrow, except by feigning injury. He had been hit in the stomach, he said. He didn’t feel well. Mr. and Mrs. Faulkner were alarmed, and insisted to the policeman who came to look over the grounds that they have a police guard for the next few nights. But a guard was not enough. If Bruno came back, Guy wanted to be there himself. Anne suggested that he stay on Monday, so he would have someone to look after him in case he were sick. Guy did stay on.

  Nothing had ever shamed him so much, he thought, as the two days in the Faulkner house. He was ashamed that he felt the need to stay, ashamed that on Monday morning he went into Anne’s room and looked on the writing table where the maid put her mail to see if Bruno had written. He hadn’t. Anne left each morning for her shop in New York before the mail was delivered. On Monday morning, Guy looked through the four or five letters on her writing table, then hurried out like a thief, afraid the maid might see him. But he often came into her room when she was not there, he reminded himself. Sometimes when the house was filled with people, he would escape to Anne’s room for a few moments. And she loved to find him there. At the threshold, he leaned his head back against the door jamb, picking out the disorder in the room—the unmade bed, the big art books that didn’t fit in the bookshelves, her last designs thumbtacked to a strip of green cork down one wall, on the corner of the table a glass of bluish water that she had neglected to empty, the brown and yellow silk scarf over the chair back, that she had evidently changed her mind about. The gardenia scent of the cologne she had touched to her neck at the last moment still lingered in the air. He longed to merge his life with hers.

  Guy stayed until Tuesday morning when there was no letter from Bruno either, and then went in to Manhattan. Work had piled up. A thousand things nettled him. The contract with the Shaw Realty Company for the new office building still had not been settled. He felt his life disorganized, without direction, more chaotic than when he had heard of Miriam’s murder. There was no letter from Bruno that week except one that awaited him, that had arrived Monday. It was a short note saying thank God his mother was better today and he could leave the house. His mother had been dangerously ill for three weeks with pneumonia, he said, and he had stayed with her.

  Thursday evening when Guy got back from a meeting of an architectural club, his landlady Mrs. McCausland said he had had three calls. The telephone rang as they stood in the hall. It was Bruno, sullen and drunk. He asked if Guy was ready to talk sense.

  “I didn’t think so,” Bruno said. “I’ve written Anne.” And he hung up.

  Guy went upstairs and took a drink himself. He didn’t believe Bruno had written or intended to write. He tried for an hour to read, called Anne to ask how she was, then restlessly went out and found a late movie.

  On Saturday afternoon, he was supposed to meet Anne in Hempstead, Long Island, to see a dog show there. If Bruno had written the letter, Anne would have gotten it by Saturday morning, Guy thought. But obviously she hadn’t. He could tell from her wave to him from the car where she sat waiting for him. He asked her if she had enjoyed the party last night at Teddy’s. Her cousin Teddy had had a birthday.

  “Wonderful party. Only no one wanted to go home. It got so late I stayed over. I haven’t even changed my clothes yet.” And she shot the car through the narrow gate and into the road.

  Guy closed his teeth. The letter might be waiting for her at home then. All at once, he felt sure the letter would be waiting for her, and the impossibility of stopping it now made him weak and speechless.

  He tried desperately to think of something to say as they walked along the rows of dogs.

  “Have you heard anything from the Shaw people?” Anne asked him.

  “No.” He stared at a nervous dachshund and tried to listen as Anne said something about a dachshund that someone in her family had.

  She didn’t know yet, Guy thought, but if she didn’t know by today, it would be only a matter of time, a matter of a few days more, perhaps, until she did know. Know what, he kept asking himself, and going over the same answer, whether for reassurance or self-torture, he did not know: that on the train last summer he had met the man who murdered his wife, that he had consented to the murder of his wife. That was what Bruno would tell her, with certain details to make it convincing. And in a courtroom, for that matter, if Bruno distorted only slightly their conversation on the train, couldn’t it amount to an agreement between murderers? The hours in Bruno’s compartment, that tiny hell, came back suddenly very clearly. It was hatred that had inspired him to say as much as he had, the same petty hatred that had made him rage against Miriam in Chapultepec Park last June. Anne had been angry then, not so much at what he had said as at his hatred. Hatred, too, was a sin. Christ had preached against hatred as against adultery and murder. Hatred was the very seed of evil. In a Christian court of justice, wouldn’t he be at least partially guilty of Miriam’s death? Wouldn’t Anne say so?

  “Anne,” he interrupted her. He had to prepare her, he thought. And he had to know. “If someone were to accuse me of having had a part in Miriam’s death, what would you—? Would you—?”

  She stopped and looked at him. The whole world seemed to stop moving, and he and Anne stood at its still center.

  “Had a part? What do you mean, Guy?”

  Someone jostled him. They were in the middle of the walk. “Just that. Accused me, nothing more.”

  She seemed to search for words.

  “Just accused me,” Guy kept on. “I just want to know. Accused me for no reason. It wouldn’t matter, would it?” Would she still marry him, he wanted to ask, but it was such a pitiful, begging question, he could not ask it.

  “Guy, why do you say that?”

  “I just want to know, that’s all!”

  She pressed him back so they would be out of the traffic of the path. “Guy, has someone accused you?”

  “No!” he protested. He felt awkward and vexed. “But if someone did, if someone tried to make out a strong case against me—”

  She looked at him with that flash of disappointment, of surprise and mistrust that he had seen before when he said or did something out of anger, or out of a resentment, that Anne did not approve, did not understand. “Do you expect someone to?” she asked.

  “I just want to know!” He was in a hurry and it seemed so simple!

  “At times like this,” she said quietly, “you make me feel we’re complete strangers.”

  “I’m sorry,” he murmured. He felt she had cut an invisible bond between them.

  “I don’t think you’re sorry, or you wouldn
’t keep on doing this!” She looked straight at him, keeping her voice low though her eyes had filled with tears. “It’s like that day in Mexico when you indulged yourself in that tirade against Miriam. I don’t care—I don’t like it, I’m not that kind of person! You make me feel I don’t know you at all!”

  Don’t love you, Guy thought. It seemed she gave him up then, gave up trying to know him or to love him. Desperate, slipping, Guy stood there unable to make a move or say a word.

  “Yes, since you ask me,” Anne said, “I think it would make a difference if someone accused you. I’d want to ask why you expected it. Why do you?”

  “I don’t!”

  She turned away from him, walked to the blind end of the lane, and stood with her head bent.

  Guy came after her. “Anne you do know me. You know me better than anyone in the world knows me. I don’t want any secrets from you. It came to my mind and I asked you!” He felt he made a confession, and with the relief that followed it, he felt suddenly sure—as sure as he had been before that Bruno had written the letter—that Bruno hadn’t and wouldn’t.

  She brushed a tear from the corner of her eye quickly, indifferently. “Just one thing, Guy. Will you stop expecting the worst—about everything?”

  “Yes,” he said. “God, yes.”

  “Let’s go back to the car.”

  He spent the day with Anne, and they had dinner that evening at her house. There was no letter from Bruno. Guy put the possibility from his mind, as if he had passed a crisis.