“Oh, no.” Manzoni drew his head and shoulders back, and kept his seat. “I’ve got a gun here, so watch out.—Clarence, I found that Rowajinski when you let him go. I was the—”
Clarence pulled his fist back.
Just as quickly, Manzoni drew his gun and pointed it at Clarence. Manzoni was still seated.
“I’m not afraid of your gun. I said get out!”
“You oughta be afraid. I can plug you and say you put up a fight. You think anybody’s gonna worry about your life?”
Clarence smiled slightly.
The gun was just inches from him now, pointing at his stomach. Clarence advanced with an intention of knocking Manzoni off the chair.
Manzoni jumped up, and the straight chair went over backwards. In his dark, creased face was sudden terror, a fear for his life. Clarence saw the terror. Clarence took a step back.
Manzoni looked scared and puzzled.
I’ve won, Clarence was thinking, and it’s because I have nothing to lose. How simple! How obvious!
“Come on, take a walk,” Manzoni said, gesturing with his gun towards the door.
“A walk why?”
“I feel like it. S’matter? You scared?”
“I have no reason to take a walk. Just leave me.”
“I asked you to!”
Clarence felt well, very well, no longer tired. He had won over the little scum, and he knew he ought to let it go at that. It was crazy to take a walk—just so Manzoni could pull something on the street, a phony fight between them so Manzoni could use his gun. “I’ve been walking all day,” Clarence said. “No, thanks, Pete, just—”
The gun went off and Clarence felt a thin jolt in the stomach. He stared at Manzoni, who curiously looked just as frightened as he had a few minutes ago, but now there was anticipation and anxiety in his face also. Whether to fire another shot? Manzoni was waiting for him to drop. And Clarence wilted.
Clarence was on the floor. Manzoni was briskly departing but Clarence’s thoughts ran even faster. He was thinking Manzoni would say he had put up a fight—therefore in self-defense—That was, if Manzoni had to say anything. Any way you looked at it, Manzoni was safe. And he thought of Marylyn, a glimpse of the impossible, the unattainable. What a pity she had never understood, really, what it was all about. And Ed, and Greta—they never understood that he would practically have died for them. I had wished for so much better.
Manzoni’s brisk departure was achieved. A door closed.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, Patricia Highsmith spent much of her adult life in Switzerland and France. She was educated at Barnard College, where she studied English, Latin, and Greek. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train, published initially in 1950, proved to be a major commercial success and was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock. Despite this early recognition, Highsmith was unappreciated in the United States for the entire length of her career.
Writing under the pseudonym of Claire Morgan, she then published The Price of Salt in 1952, which had been turned down by her previous American publisher because of its frank exploration of homosexual themes. Her most popular literary creation was Tom Ripley, the dapper sociopath who first debuted in her 1955 novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley. She followed with four other Ripley novels. Posthumously made into a major motion picture, The Talented Mr. Ripley has helped bring about a renewed appreciation of Highsmith’s work in the United States as has the posthumous publication of The Selected Stories, which received widespread acclaim when it was published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2001.
The author of more than twenty books, Highsmith has won the O. Henry Memorial Award, the Edgar Allan Poe Award, Le Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, and the Award of the Crime Writers’ Association of Great Britain. She died in Switzerland on February 4, 1995, and her literary archives are maintained in Berne.
PRAISE FOR PATRICIA HIGHSMITH
“Highsmith’s writing is wicked . . . it puts a spell on you, after which you feel altered, even tainted. . . . A great American writer is back to stay.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Savage in the way of Rabelais or Swift.”
—Joyce Carol Oates, New York Review of Books
“Highsmith’s gift as a suspense novelist is to show how this secret desire can bridge the normal and abnormal. . . . She seduces us with whisky-smooth surfaces only to lead us blindly into darker terrain.”
—Commercial Appeal
“Patricia Highsmith’s novels are peerlessly disturbing . . . bad dreams that keep us thrashing for the rest of the night.”
—The New Yorker
“A border zone of the macabre, the disturbing, the not quite accidental. . . . Highsmith achieves the effect of the occult without any recourse to supernatural machinery.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Though Highsmith would no doubt disclaim any kinship with Jonathan Swift or Evelyn Waugh, the best of [her work] is in the same tradition. . . . It is Highsmith’s dark and sometimes savage humor and the intelligence that informs her precise and hard-edged prose which puts one in mind of those authors.”
—Newsday
“Murder, in Patricia Highsmith’s hands, is made to occur almost as casually as the bumping of a fender or a bout of food poisoning. This downplaying of the dramatic . . . has been much praised, as has the ordinariness of the details with which she depicts the daily lives and mental processes of her psychopaths. Both undoubtedly contribute to the domestication of crime in her fiction, thereby implicating the reader further in the sordid fantasy that is being worked out.”
—Robert Towers, New York Review of Books
“For eliciting the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings, there’s no one like Patricia Highsmith.”
—Time
“The feeling of menace behind most Highsmith novels, the sense that ideas and attitudes alien to the reasonable everyday ordering of society are suggested, has made many readers uneasy. One closes most of her books with a feeling that the world is more dangerous than one had ever imagined.”
—Julian Symons, New York Times Book Review
“Mesmerizing . . . not to be recommended for the weak-minded and impressionable.”
—Washington Post Book World
“A writer who has created a world of her own—a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger. . . . Miss Highsmith is the poet of apprehension.”
—Graham Greene
“Patricia Highsmith is often called a mystery or crime writer, which is a bit like calling Picasso a draftsman.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“An atmosphere of nameless dread, of unspeakable foreboding, permeates every page of Patricia Highsmith, and there’s nothing quite like it.”
—Boston Globe
“[Highsmith] has an uncanny feeling for the rhythms of terror.”
—Times Literary Supplement
“To call Patricia Highsmith a thriller writer is true but not the whole truth: her books have stylistic texture, psychological depth, mesmeric readability.”
—Sunday Times (London)
“Highsmith is an exquisitely sardonic etcher of the casually treacherous personality.”
—Newsday
“Highsmith’s novels skew your sense of literary justice, tilt your internal scales of right and wrong. The ethical order of things in the real world seems less stable [as she] deftly warps the moral sense of her readers.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Highsmith . . . conveys a firm, unshakable belief in the existence of evil—personal, psychological, and political. . . . The genius of Highsmith’s writing is that it is at once deeply disturbing and exhilarating.”
—Bosto
n Phoenix
“Highsmith writes the verbal equivalent of a drug—easy to consume, darkly euphoric, totally addictive. . . . Highsmith belongs in the moody company of Dostoevsky or Angela Carter.”
—Time Out
“Read [The Selected Stories] at your own risk, knowing that this is not everyone’s cup of poisoned tea.”
—Janet Maslin, New York Times
Copyright © 1972 by Patricia Highsmith
First published as a Norton paperback 2002
First published in Great Britain by William Heinemann 1972
First published in the United States of America by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1972
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue,
New York, NY 10110
The text of this book is composed in Bembo
Design and composition by Amanda Morrison
ISBN 0-393-32336-6 pbk.
eISBN: 978-0-393-34569-8
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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Patricia Highsmith, A Dog's Ransom
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