Ripley Under Ground

  “Yes,” Tom said.

  “Did he by chance visit you recently? Wednesday? Or Thursday?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “Ah, bon! Is he with you now?”

  “No, he went back to London on Thursday.”

  “No, he did not. But his suitcase was found at Orly. He did not take the sixteen-hours plane he was supposed to.”

  “Oh?”

  “You are a friend of M. Murchison, M. Reeply?”

  “No, not a friend. I have known him for only a short time.”

  “How did he depart from your house to Orly?”

  “I drove him to Orly—around three-thirty Thursday afternoon.”

  “Do you know any friends of his in Paris—where he might be staying? Because he is not in any hotel in Paris.”

  Tom paused, thinking. “No. He did not mention anyone.”

  This was evidently disappointing to the agent. “You are at home in the next days, M. Reeply? . . . We may wish to speak with you. . . .”

  This time Christopher was curious. “What’s that all about?”

  Tom smiled. “Oh—someone asking me where a friend is. I don’t know.”

  Who was making the fuss about Murchison, Tom wondered? The man at the Tate Gallery? The French police at Orly, had they started it? Or even Murchison’s wife in America?

  “What’s Heloise like?” Christopher asked.

  9

  When Tom came downstairs the next morning, Mme. Annette told him that M. Christophe had gone out for a walk. Tom hoped not into the woods behind the house, but it was more likely Chris would look around the village. Tom picked up the London Sundays, which he had barely glanced at yesterday, and looked through the news sections for any item, however small, about Murchison, or a disappearance at Orly. There was nothing.

  Chris came in, pink-cheeked and smiling. He had bought a wire whisk, the kind the French beat eggs with, at the local droguerie. “Little present for my sister,” Chris said. “It doesn’t weigh much in a suitcase. I’ll tell her it came from your village.”

  Tom asked if Chris would like to take a drive and have lunch in another town. “Bring your Guide Bleu along. We’ll drive along the Seine.” Tom wanted to wait a few minutes for the post.

  The post brought only one letter addressed in a tall angular hand in black ink. Tom felt at once it was from Bernard, though he didn’t know Bernard’s writing. He opened the letter and saw from the signature at the bottom that he was correct.

  127 Copperfield St.

  S.E.1.

  Dear Tom,

  Forgive this unexpected letter. I would like very much to see you. Can I come over? You do not need to put me up. It would be good for me to speak with you for a bit, providing you are willing.

  Yours,

  Bernard T.

  P.S. I may try to ring you before you receive this.

  He would have to cable Bernard at once. Cable him what? A refusal would depress Bernard further, Tom supposed, although Tom certainly did not want to see him—not just now. Perhaps he could cable Bernard from a small town post office this morning, and give a false last name and address for himself, since the sender’s name and address were demanded at the bottom of French telegram forms. He must send Chris on his way as soon as possible, which he disliked doing. “Shall we shove off?”

  Chris got up from the sofa, where he had been writing a postcard. “Fine.”

  Tom opened the front door in the faces of two French police officers who had been about to knock. In fact, Tom stepped back from the upraised fist in the white glove.

  “Bonjour. M. Reeply?”

  “Yes. Come in, please.” They must be from Melun, Tom thought, because the two police in Villeperce knew him, and Tom knew their faces, too, but not these faces.

  The agents came in but declined to sit down. They removed their caps, stuck them under their arms, and the younger officer pulled a tablet and pencil from a pocket.

  “I telephoned you last evening in regard to a M. Murchison,” said the older officer, who was a commissaire. “We have spoken with London and after some telephone calls we ascertained that you and M. Murchison arrived at Orly on the same plane Wednesday and were also at the same hotel in London, the Mandeveel. So—” The commissaire smiled with satisfaction. “You say you brought M. Murchison to Orly at three-thirty on Thursday afternoon?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you accompanied M. Murchison into the terminal?”

  “No, because I couldn’t park my car at the pavement, you see, so I let him out.”

  “Did you see him go through the doors of the terminal?”

  Tom thought. “I did not look back as I drove away.”

  “Because he left his suitcase on the pavement and he has simply disappeared. Was he expecting to meet someone at Orly?”

  “He did not say anything about that.”

  Christopher Greenleaf was standing some distance away, listening to all this, but Tom was sure he could not understand much.

  “He mentioned friends in London he was going to see?”

  “No. Not that I recall.”

  “This morning we telephoned again to the Mandeveel, where he was supposed to go, to ask if they had news. They informed us no, but a M.—” He turned to his colleague.

  “M. Riemer,” the younger officer supplied.

  “M. Riemer had telephoned to the hotel, because he had an appointment with M. Murchison on Friday. We also learned from the London police that M. Murchison is interested in verifying a painting in his possession. One by Derwatt. Do you know anything about this?”

  “Oh, yes,” Tom said. “M. Murchison had his painting with him. He wanted to see my Derwatts here.” Tom indicated them on his walls. “That is why he came over from London with me.”

  “Ah, I understand. How long have you known M. Murchison?”

  “Since Tuesday last. I saw him at the art gallery, where the Derwatt exhibition is on, and then I saw him in my hotel that evening, and we began talking.” Tom turned and said, “Excuse me, Chris, but this is important.”

  “Oh, go ahead, I don’t mind,” Chris said.

  “Where is the painting of M. Murchison?”

  “He took it with him,” Tom said.

  “It was in his suitcase? It is not in his suitcase.” The commissaire looked at his colleague, and both men’s faces showed some surprise.

  It had been stolen at Orly, and thank God, Tom thought. “It was wrapped in brown paper. M. Murchison was carrying it. I hope it wasn’t stolen.”

  “Ah, well—apparently it is. What was the picture called? And how big was it? Can you describe it?”

  Tom replied to all this accurately.

  “This is complicated for us, and perhaps is a matter for the London police, but we must tell them all we can. This is the picture—‘L’Horloge’—of whose authenticity Murchison doubts?”

  “Yes, he did doubt it at first. He is more of an expert than I am,” Tom said. “I was interested in what he said, because of my own two Derwatts, so I invited him to come to see them.”

  “And—” The commissaire frowned in a puzzled way. “—what did he say about yours?” It might have been a question inspired by simple curiosity.

  “Certainly he thinks mine are genuine and so do I,” Tom replied. “I think he began to think his own was genuine, too. He said he might cancel his appointment with M. Riemer.”

  “Ah-hah.” The commissaire looked at the telephone, perhaps debating ringing Melun, but he did not ask to use the telephone.

  “May I offer you a glass of wine?” Tom asked, including the two officers in his question.

  They declined the wine, but they did wish to look at his paintings. Tom was pleased to show them. The two agents walked about, murmuring comments which might have been quite knowledgeable, judging from their fascinated faces and their gestures as they looked at canvases and drawings. They might have been visiting a gallery in their spare time.

  “A famous painter in England, D
erwatt,” said the younger officer.

  “Yes,” Tom said.

  The interview was over. They thanked Tom and took their leave.

  Tom was glad Mme. Annette had been out on her morning shopping round.

  Christopher laughed a little when Tom had closed the door. “Well, what was that all about? All I could understand was ‘Orly’ and ‘Murchison.’”

  “It seems that Thomas Murchison, an American who visited me last week, didn’t take his plane back to London from Orly. He seems to have disappeared. And they found his suitcase on the pavement at Orly—where I left him Thursday.”

  “Disappeared? Gosh!— That’s four days ago.”

  “I didn’t know anything about it till last night. That was the telephone call I had last night. From the police.”

  “Gosh. How strange.” Chris asked a few questions, and Tom answered them, as he had answered the police. “Sounds like he had a blackout, leaving his luggage like that. Was he sober?”

  Tom laughed. “Absolutely. I can’t understand it.”

  They rambled along the Seine in the Alfa Romeo, and near Samois, Tom showed Chris the bridge where General Patton had crossed the Seine with his army, on the way to Paris in 1944. Chris got out and read the inscription on the gray little column, and came back as wet-eyed as Tom after the grave of Keats. Lunch in Fontainebleau, because Tom disliked the main restaurant in Bas Samois—Chez Bertrand or some such—where he and Heloise had never yet received an honest addition, and where the family who ran it had the habit of starting to mop the floors before people were finished eating, dragging metal-legged chairs across tiles with merciless unconcern for the human ear. Later, Tom did not forget his little chores for Mme. Annette—champignons à la grecque, céleri rémoulade, and some sausages whose name Tom could not remember, because he did not care for them—things one could not buy in Villeperce. He got them in Fontainebleau, and also some batteries for his transistor.

  On the way home, Chris burst out laughing and said, “This morning in the woods I came across what looked like a fresh grave. Really fresh. I thought it was funny because of the police this morning. They’re looking for a missing man who was at your house, and if they saw that grave shape in the woods—” He went off in guffaws.

  Yes, it was funny, damned funny. Tom laughed at the crazy danger of it. But he made no comment.

  10

  The next day was overcast, and it began to rain around nine o’clock. Mme. Annette went out to fasten a shutter that was banging somewhere. She had listened to her radio, and there were dire pronouncements of an orage, she warned Tom.

  Wind made Tom jumpy. Tourism, that morning, was out for him and Chris. By midday, the storm was worse, and the wind bent the tops of the tall poplars like whips or sword-tips. Now and then a branch—small and dead, probably—was blown from a tree near the house and rattled as it hit the roof and rolled down.

  “I really never saw anything like it—here,” Tom said at lunch.

  But Chris, with the coolness of Dickie, or maybe of his whole family, smiled and enjoyed the disturbance.

  The lights went out for half an hour, which Tom said happened all the time in the French countryside, even if the storm was a mild one.

  After lunch, Tom went up to the room where he painted. Sometimes painting helped when he was nervous. He painted standing up at his worktable, with the canvas propped against a heavy vice and a few thick art books and books on horticulture. The bottom of the canvas rested on some newspapers plus a large paint rag which had been part of an old bedsheet. Tom bent zealously over his work, stepping back frequently to look at it. This was a portrait of Mme. Annette done in—perhaps—rather a de Kooning style, which meant Mme. Annette would never possibly recognize it as an attempted likeness. Tom was not consciously imitating de Kooning, and had not consciously thought of him when he began this opus, but there was no doubt the picture looked like a portrait in de Kooning’s style. Mme. Annette’s pale lips were parted in a smile of slashing pink, her teeth decidedly off-white and irregular. She was in a pale purple dress with a white ruffle round the neck. All this was done with rather wide brushes and in long strokes. Tom’s preliminary work for this had been several hasty cartoons of Mme. Annette done on a pad on his knee in the living room, when Mme. Annette was unaware.

  Now there was lightning. Tom straightened up and breathed, his chest aching from tension. On his transistor, France Culture was interviewing another uncomfortable-sounding author: “Your book, M. Hublot (Heublein?) seems to me (crackle) . . . which is a departure from—as several critics have said—your up-to-now challenge to the concepts of anti-Sartrisme. But rather now it seems to be reversing . . .” Tom cut it off abruptly.

  There was an ominous crack close by in the woods direction, and Tom looked out his window. The tops of pines and poplars still flexed, but if any tree had fallen in the woods, he could not see it from here in the gray-green murk of the forest. A tree might just fall, even a smallish tree, and cover the damned grave, Tom thought. He hoped so. Tom was mixing a reddish brown for Mme. Annette’s hair—he wanted to finish the painting today—when he heard voices, or thought he did, from downstairs. Men’s voices.

  Tom went into the hall.

  The voices were speaking English, but he could not hear what they were saying. Chris and someone else. Bernard, Tom thought. An English accent. Yes, my God!

  Tom laid his palette knife carefully across the turpentine cup. He closed the door behind him and trotted downstairs.

  It was Bernard, standing bedraggled and wet on the mat just inside the front door. Tom was struck by his dark eyes, which seemed deeper sunken under the straight black brows. Bernard looked terrified, Tom thought. Then in the next instant, Tom thought Bernard looked like death itself.

  “Bernard!” Tom said. “Welcome!”

  “Hello,” Bernard said. He had a duffelbag at his feet.

  “This is Christopher Greenleaf,” Tom said. “Bernard Tufts. Maybe you’ve introduced yourselves.”

  “Yes, we have,” said Chris, smiling, pleased to have company it seemed.

  “I hope it’s all right if I just arrived—like this,” Bernard said.

  Tom assured him it was. Now Mme. Annette came in, and Tom introduced them.

  Mme. Annette asked to take Bernard’s coat.

  Tom said to her in French, “You might prepare the little room for M. Bernard.” This was a second guest room, seldom used, with a single bed, which he and Heloise called “the little bedroom.” “And M. Bernard will dine with us tonight.” Then Tom said to Bernard, “What did you do? Take a taxi from Melun? Or Moret?”

  “Yes. Melun. I looked up the town on a map in London.” Thin and angular, like his writing, Bernard stood chafing his hands. Even his jacket looked wet.

  “Want a sweater, Bernard? How about a brandy to warm you up?”

  “Oh, no, no, thank you.”

  “Come in the living room! Some tea? I’ll ask Madame to make some when she comes down. Sit down, Bernard.”

  Bernard looked anxiously at Chris, as if expecting him to sit down first or something. But in the next minutes, Tom realized that Bernard looked anxiously at everything, even at an ashtray on the coffee table. The exchange of words, such as it was, was extremely sticky, and Bernard plainly wished that Christopher were not here. But Chris did not seem to grasp this, Tom could see, and on the contrary thought his presence might be useful, because Bernard, obviously, was in a state. Bernard stuttered, and his hands shook.

  “I really won’t disturb you for long,” Bernard said.

  Tom laughed. “But you’re not going back today! We’re being treated to the worst weather I’ve seen in the three years I’ve been here. Did the plane have a hard time landing?”

  Bernard didn’t remember. His eyes drifted to the—his own—“Man in Chair” over the fireplace, and away again.

  Tom thought of the cobalt violet in that picture. Now it was like a chemical poison to Tom. To Bernard, too, Tom supposed. “You
haven’t seen ‘The Red Chairs’ in a long time,” Tom said, getting up. The picture was behind Bernard.

  Bernard got to his feet and twisted around, legs still pressed against the sofa.

  Tom’s effort was rewarded by a faint but genuine smile on Bernard’s face. “Yes. It’s beautiful,” Bernard said in his quiet voice.

  “Are you a painter?” asked Chris.

  “Yes.” Bernard sat down again. “But not as good as—as Derwatt.”

  “Mme. Annette, could you put on some water for tea?” Tom asked.

  Mme. Annette had come down from upstairs, carrying towels or something. “At once, M. Tome.”

  “Can you tell me,” Christopher began to Bernard, “what makes a painter good—or not? For instance, it seems to me several painters are painting like Derwatt now. I can’t remember their names offhand, because they’re not as famous. Oh, yes, Parker Nunnally, for one. Do you know his work? What is it that makes Derwatt so good?”

  Tom also tried for a correct answer, perhaps “originality.” But the word “publicity” flashed into his mind, too. He was waiting for Bernard to speak.

  “It is personality,” Bernard said carefully. “It is Derwatt.”

  “You know him?” Chris asked.

  A slight pang went through Tom, a twinge of sympathy for Bernard.

  Bernard nodded. “Oh, yes.” Now his bony hands were clasped around one knee.

  “Do you feel this personality when you meet him? See him, I mean?”

  “Yes,” Bernard said more firmly. But he writhed, perhaps in agony, at the conversation. At the same time his dark eyes seemed to be searching for something else he might say on the subject.

  “That probably wasn’t a fair question,” Chris said. “Most good artists don’t show their personalities or waste their fire in their personal life, I think. They seem perfectly ordinary on the surface.”

  Tea was served.

  “You have no suitcase, Bernard?” Tom asked. Tom knew he had no suitcase, and was worried about Bernard’s general comfort.