Strangers on a Train

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

  Guy couldn’t have made himself say a word. A hot, inarticulate anger was rising inside him. He slid his tie down and opened his shirt collar, and glanced at the open windows for an air-conditioning apparatus.

  Owen shrugged. He looked quite comfortable in his open-collared shirt and unzipped leather jacket. Guy had an absolutely unreasonable desire to ram something down Owen’s throat, to beat him and crush him, above all to blast him out of his complacent comfort in the chair.

  “Listen,” Guy began quietly, “I am a—”

  But Owen had begun to speak at the same instant, and he went on, droningly, not looking at Guy who stood in the middle of the floor with his mouth still open. “. . . the second time. Got married two months after my divorce, and there was trouble right away. Whether Miriam would of been any different, I don’t know, but I’d say she’d of been worse. Louisa up and left two months ago after damn near setting the house on fire, a big apartment house.” He droned on, and poured more Scotch into his glass from the bottle at his elbow, and Guy felt a disrespect, a definite affront, directed against himself, in the way Owen helped himself. Guy remembered his own behavior at the inquest, undistinguished behavior, to say the least, for the husband of the victim. Why should Owen have respect for him? “The awful thing is, the man gets the worst of it, because the women do more talking. Take Louisa, she can go back to that apartment house and they’ll give her a welcome, but let me so much—”

  “Listen!” Guy said, unable to stand it any longer. “I—I killed someone, too! I’m a murderer, too!”

  Owen’s feet came down to the floor again, he sat up again, he even looked from Guy to the window and back again, as if he contemplated having to escape or having to defend himself, but the befuddled surprise and alarm on his face was so feeble, so halfhearted, that it seemed a mockery itself, seemed to mock Guy’s seriousness. Owen started to set his glass on the table and then didn’t. “How’s that?” he asked.

  “Listen!” Guy shouted again. “Listen, I’m a dead man. I’m as good as dead right now, because I’m going to give myself up. Immediately! Because I killed a man, do you understand? Don’t look so unconcerned, and don’t lean back in that chair again!”

  “Why shouldn’t I lean back in this chair?” Owen had both hands on his glass now, which he had just refilled with Coca-Cola and Scotch.

  “Doesn’t it mean anything to you that I am a murderer, and took a man’s life, something no human being has a right to do?”

  Owen might have nodded, or he might not have. At any rate, he drank again, slowly.

  Guy stared at him. The words, unutterable tangles of thousands and thousands of words, seemed to congest even his blood, to cause waves of heat to sweep up his arms from his clenched hands. The words were curses against Owen, sentences and paragraphs of the confession he had written that morning, that were growing jumbled now because the drunken idiot in the armchair didn’t want to hear them. The drunken idiot was determined to look indifferent. He didn’t look like a murderer, he supposed, in his clean white shirtsleeves and his silk tie and his dark blue trousers, and maybe even his strained face didn’t look like a murderer’s to anybody else. “That’s the mistake,” Guy said aloud, “that nobody knows what a murderer looks like. A murderer looks like anybody!” He laid the back of his fist against his forehead and took it down again, because he had known the last words were coming, and had been unable to stop them. It was exactly like Bruno.

  Abruptly Guy went and got himself a drink, a straight three-finger shot, and drank it off.

  “Glad to see I’ve got a drinking companion,” Owen mumbled. Guy sat down on the neat, green-covered bed opposite Owen. Quite suddenly, he had felt tired. “It doesn’t mean anything,” he began again, “it doesn’t mean anything to you, does it?”

  “You’re not the first man I seen that killed another man. Or woman.” He chuckled. “Seems to me there’s more women that go free.”

  “I’m not going free. I’m not free. I did this in cold blood. I had no reason. Don’t you see that might be worse? I did it for—” He wanted to say he did it because there had been that measure of perversity within him sufficient to do it, that he had done it because of the worm in the wood, but he knew it would make no sense to Owen, because Owen was a practical man. Owen was so practical, he would not bother to hit him, or flee from him, or call the police, because it was more comfortable to sit in the chair.

  Owen waggled his head as if he really did consider Guy’s point. His lids were half dropped over his eyes. He twisted and reached for something in his hip pocket, a bag of tobacco. He got cigarette papers from the breast pocket of his shirts.

  Guy watched his operations for what seemed like hours. “Here,” Guy said, offering him his own cigarettes.

  Owen looked at them dubiously. “What kind are they?”

  “Canadian. They’re quite good. Try one.”

  “Thanks, I—” Owen drew the bag closed with his teeth—“prefer my own brand.” He spent at least three minutes rolling the cigarette.

  “This was just as if I pulled a gun on someone in a public park and shot him,” Guy went on, determined to go on, though it was as if he talked to an inanimate thing like a dictaphone in the chair, with the difference that his words didn’t seem to be penetrating in any way. Mightn’t it dawn on Owen that he could pull a gun on him now in this hotel room? Guy said, “I was driven to it. That’s what I’ll tell the police, but that won’t make any difference, because the point is, I did it. You see, I have to tell you Bruno’s idea.” At least Owen was looking at him now, but his face, far from being rapt, seemed actually to wear an expression of pleasant, polite, drunken attention. Guy refused to let it stop him. “Bruno’s idea was that we should kill for each other, that he should kill Miriam and I should kill his father. Then he came to Texas and killed Miriam, behind my back. Without my knowledge or consent, do you see?” His choice of words was abominable, but at least Owen was listening. At least the words were coming out. “I didn’t know about it, and I didn’t even suspect—not really. Until months later. And then he began to haunt me. He began to tell me he would pin the blame for Miriam’s death on me, unless I went through with the rest of his damned plan, do you see? Which was to kill his father. The whole idea rested on the fact that there was no reason for the murders. No personal motives. So we couldn’t be traced, individually. Provided we didn’t see each other. But that’s another point. The point is, I did kill him. I was broken down. Bruno broke me down with letters and blackmail and sleeplessness. He drove me insane, too. And listen, I believe any man can be broke down. I could break you down. Given the same circumstances, I could break you down and make you kill someone. It might take different methods from the ones Bruno used on me, but it could be done. What else do you think keeps the totalitarian states going? Or do you ever stop to wonder about things like that, Owen? Anyway, that’s what I’ll tell the police, but it won’t matter, because they’ll say I shouldn’t have broken down.

  It won’t matter, because they’ll say I was weak. But I don’t care now, do you see? I can face anyone now, do you see?” He bent to look into Owen’s face, but Owen seemed scarcely to see him. Owen’s head was sagged sideways, resting in his hand. Guy stood up straight. He couldn’t make Owen see, he could feel that Owen wasn’t understanding the main point at all, but that didn’t matter either. “I’ll accept it, whatever they want to do to me. I’ll say the same thing to the police tomorrow.”

  “Can you prove it?” Owen asked.

  “Prove what? What is there to prove about my killing a man?”

  The bottle slipped out of Owen’s fingers and fell onto the floor, but there was so little in it now that almost nothing spilled. “You’re an architect, aren’t you?” Owen asked. “I remember now.” He righted the bottle clumsily, leaving it on the floor.

  “What does it matter?”

  “I was wondering.”

  “Wondering what?” Guy asked impatiently.

  “Becau
se you sound a little touched—if you want my honest opinion. Ain’t saying you do.” And behind Owen’s fogged expression now was a simple wariness lest Guy might walk over and hit him for his remark. When he saw that Guy didn’t move, he sat back in his chair again, and slumped lower than before.

  Guy groped for a concrete idea to present to Owen. He didn’t want his audience to slip away, indifferent as it was. “Listen, how do you feel about the men you know who’ve killed somebody? How do you treat them? How do you act with them? Do you pass the time of day with them the same as you’d do with anybody else?”

  Under Guy’s intense scrutiny, Owen did seem to try to think. Finally he said with a smile, blinking his eyes relaxedly, “Live and let live.”

  Anger seized him again. For an instant, it was like a hot vise, holding his body and brain. There were no words for what he felt. Or there were too many words to begin. The word formed itself and spat itself from between his teeth: “Idiot!”

  Owen stirred slightly in his chair, but his unruffledness prevailed. He seemed undecided whether to smile or to frown. “What business is it of mine?” he asked firmly.

  “What business? Because you—you are a part of society!”

  “Well, then it’s society’s business,” Owen replied with a lazy wave of his hand. He was looking at the Scotch bottle, in which only half an inch remained.

  What business, Guy thought. Was that his real attitude, or was he drunk? It must be Owen’s attitude. There was no reason for him to lie now. Then he remembered it had been his own attitude when he had suspected Bruno, before Bruno had begun to dog him. Was that most people’s attitude? If so, who was society?

  Guy turned his back on Owen. He knew well enough who society was. But the society he had been thinking about in regard to himself, he realized, was the law, was inexorable rules. Society was people like Owen, people like himself, people like—Brillhart, for instance, in Palm Beach. Would Brillhart have reported him? No. He couldn’t imagine Brillhart reporting him. Everyone would leave it for someone else, who would leave it for someone else, and no one would do it. Did he care about rules? Wasn’t it a rule that had kept him tied to Miriam? Wasn’t it a person who was murdered, and therefore people who mattered? If people from Owen to Brillhart didn’t care sufficiently to betray him, should he care any further? Why did he think this morning that he had wanted to give himself up to the police? What masochism was it? He wouldn’t give himself up. What, concretely, did he have on his conscience now? What human being would inform on him?

  “Except a stool-pigeon,” Guy said. “I suppose a stool-pigeon would inform.”

  “That’s right,” Owen agreed. “A dirty, stinking stool-pigeon.” He gave a loud, relieving laugh.

  Guy was staring into space, frowning. He was trying to find solid ground that would carry him to something he had just seen as if by a flash, far ahead of him. The law was not society, it began. Society was people like himself and Owen and Brillhart, who hadn’t the right to take the life of another member of society. And yet the law did. “And yet the law is supposed to be the will of society at least. It isn’t even that. Or maybe it is collectively,” he added, aware that as always he was doubling back before he came to a point, making things as complex as possible in trying to make them certain.

  “Hmm-m?” Owen murmured. His head was back against the chair, his black hair tousled over his forehead, and his eyes almost closed.

  “No, people collectively might lynch a murderer, but that’s exactly what the law is supposed to guard against.”

  “Never hold with lynchings,” Owen said. “’S not true! Gives the whole South a bad name—unnec’sarily.”

  “My point is, that if society hasn’t the right to take another person’s life, then the law hasn’t either. I mean, considering that the law is a mass of regulations that have been handed down and that nobody can interfere with, no human being can touch. But it’s human beings the law deals with, after all. I’m talking about people like you and me. My case in particular. At the moment, I’m only talking about my case. But that’s only logic. Do you know something, Owen? Logic doesn’t always work out, so far as people go. It’s all very well when you’re building a building, because the material behaves then, but—” His argument went up in smoke. There was a wall that prevented him from saying another word, simply because he couldn’t think any further. He had spoken loudly and distinctly, but he knew Owen hadn’t been hearing, even if he was trying to listen. And yet Owen had been indifferent, five minutes ago, to the question of his guilt. “What about a jury, I wonder,” Guy said.

  “What jury?”

  “Whether a jury is twelve human beings or a body of laws. It’s an interesting point. I suppose it’s always an interesting point.” He poured the rest of the bottle into his glass and drank it. “But I don’t suppose it’s interesting to you, is it, Owen? What is interesting to you?”

  Owen was silent and motionless.

  “Nothing is interesting to you, is it?” Guy looked at Owen’s big scuffed brown shoes extended limply on the carpet, the toes tipped inward toward each other, because they rested on their heels. Suddenly, their flaccid, shameless, massive stupidity seemed the essence of all human stupidity. It translated itself instantly into his old antagonism against the passive stupidity of those who stood in the way of the progress of his work, and before he knew how or why, he had kicked, viciously, the side of Owen’s shoe. And still, Owen did not move. His work, Guy thought. Yes, there was his work to get back to. Think later, think it all out right later, but he had work to do.

  He looked at his watch. Ten past 12. He didn’t want to sleep here. He wondered if there was a plane tonight. There must be something out. Or a train.

  He shook Owen. “Owen, wake up. Owen!”

  Owen mumbled a question.

  “I think you’ll sleep better at home.”

  Owen sat up and said clearly, “That I doubt.”

  Guy picked up his topcoat from the bed. He looked around, but he hadn’t left anything because he hadn’t brought anything. It might be better to telephone the airport now, he thought.

  “Where’s the john?” Owen stood up. “I don’t feel so good.”

  Guy couldn’t find the telephone. There was a wire by the bed table, though. He traced the wire under the bed. The telephone was off the hook, on the floor, and he knew immediately it hadn’t fallen, because both parts were dragged up near the foot of the bed, the hand piece eerily focused on the armchair where Owen had been sitting. Guy pulled the telephone slowly toward him.

  “Hey, ain’t there a john anywheres?” Owen was opening a closet door.

  “It must be down the hall.” His voice was like a shudder. He was holding the telephone in a position for speaking, and now he brought it closer to his ear. He heard the intelligent silence of a live wire. “Hello?” he said.

  “Hello, Mr. Haines.” The voice was rich, courteous, and just the least brusque.

  Guy’s hand tried unavailingly to crush the telephone, and then he surrendered without a word. It was like a fortress falling, like a great building falling apart in his mind, but it crumbled like powder and fell silently.

  “There wasn’t time for a dictaphone. But I heard most of it from just outside your door. May I come in?”

  Gerard must have had his scouts at the airport in New York, Guy thought, must have followed in a chartered plane. It was possible. And here it was. And he had been stupid enough to sign the register in his own name. “Come in,” Guy echoed. He put the telephone on the hook and stood up, rigidly, watching the door. His heart was pounding as it never had before, so fast and hard, he thought surely it must be a prelude to his dropping dead. Run, he thought. Leap, attack as soon as he comes in. This is your very last chance. But he didn’t move. He was vaguely aware of Owen being sick in the basin in the corner behind him. Then there was a rap at the door, and he went toward it, thinking, wouldn’t it have to be like this after all, by surprise, with someone, a stranger who d
idn’t understand anything, throwing up in a basin in a corner of the room, without his thoughts ordered, and worse, having already uttered half of them in a muddle. Guy opened the door.

  “Hello,” Gerard said, and he came in with his hat on and his arms hanging, just as he had always looked.

  “Who is it?” Owen asked.

  “Friend of Mr. Haines,” Gerard said easily, and glancing at Guy with his round face as serious as before, he gave him a wink. “I suppose you want to go to New York tonight, don’t you?”

  Guy was staring at Gerard’s familiar face, at the big mole on his cheek, at the bright, living eye that had winked at him, undoubtedly had winked at him. Gerard was the law, too. Gerard was on his side, so far as any man could be, because Gerard knew Bruno. Guy knew it now, as if he had known it the whole time, yet it had never even occurred to him before. He knew, too, that he had to face Gerard. That was part of it all, and always had been. It was inevitable and ordained, like the turning of the earth, and there was no sophistry by which he could free himself from it.

  “Eh?” Gerard said.

  Guy tried to speak, and said something entirely different from what he had intended. “Take me.”

  FURTHER PRAISE FOR STRANGERS ON A TRAIN

  “An incredible study of psychological torture and how fine the membrane is between normality and the underlying darkness.”

  —Tana French, New York Times bestselling author of The Witch Elm

  “A moody and disturbing excavation of guilty paranoia. . . . Strangers on a Train was her debut novel, but [Patricia Highsmith’s] sense of anxious foreboding was already fully formed.”

  —Leonard Cassuto, Wall Street Journal

  “One is held by an evil kind of suspense. . . . [A] perceptive study in criminal psychology.”

  —New York Herald Tribune

  “Strangers on a Train is filled with paranoia and anxiety, and through its twists and turns, we, like poor Guy Haines, are also drawn into psychopath Bruno’s web.”