The Boy Who Followed Ripley

  Tom glanced over the Trib, and found a small item at the bottom of page two. PIERSON FAMILY SENDS DETECTIVE, said the modest headline. There was no photograph. Tom read:

  Mrs. Lily Pierson, widow of the late John J. Pierson, food manufacturing magnate, has sent a private detective to Europe to look for her missing son Frank, 16, who left their Maine home in late July and has been traced to London and Paris. Accompanying the detective is her older son John, 19, whose passport the younger brother took when he left his home. It is believed the search will begin in the Paris area. No kidnapping is suspected.

  Tom felt an unease akin to embarrassment on reading this, yet what would happen if they ran smack into Frank’s brother and the detective today? The family simply wanted to find the boy. Tom was not going to mention the item to Frank, and he would leave the IHT at home. Heloise gave the paper barely a glance, usually, but just might miss it if he took it with him and got rid of it. However, what were the French papers going to say about the private detective and the older brother? And would they oblige with a reprint of Frank’s photograph?

  Frank was ready. Tom went up to say good-bye to Heloise.

  “You could have taken me,” Heloise said.

  The second sour note of the morning. It was unlike Heloise. She always had things to do. “I wish you’d said it last night.” She was wearing pink-and-blue striped jeans, a sleeveless pink blouse. It didn’t matter what someone as pretty as Heloise wore in Paris in August, but Tom didn’t want Heloise to know that Frank was getting a passport photograph made. “We’re going to Beaubourg, and you’ve already seen the show with Noëlle.”

  “What’s the matter with this Billy?” she asked with a puzzled twitch of her blonde eyebrows.

  “The matter?”

  “He looks troubled about something. And he seems to adore you. Is he a tapette?”

  That meant a homosexual. “Not that I can see. Do you think so?”

  “How long does he want to stay with us? He’s been here nearly a week, no?”

  “I do know that he wants to go to a travel agency today. In Paris. He was talking about Rome. He’ll be taking off this week.” Tom smiled. “Bye-bye, darling. Back around seven.”

  When he left the house, Tom picked up the IHT, folded it, and jammed it into a back pocket.

  8

  Tom took the Renault, though he would have preferred the Mercedes. He reproached himself for not having asked Heloise if she needed a car today, because the Mercedes was still at the Grais’. Heloise would have said something, if she needed a car, Tom thought. Frank looked happy with his head back, and the wind blowing through the open window. Tom put on a cassette, Mendelssohn for a change.

  “I always leave my car here. Parking’s a bore in midtown.” Tom had stopped at a garage near the Porte d’Orléans. “Back around—eighteen hours,” Tom said in French to an attendant whom he knew by sight. Tom had passed through the gate which mechanically presented him with a ticket and his hour of arrival stamped on it. Then he and Frank got a taxi. “Avenue Gabriel, if you please,” Tom said to the driver. He did not want to get out right at the embassy, and had forgotten the name of the street at a right angle to Avenue Gabriel in which the photography place was. When they were in the neighborhood, Tom intended to ask the driver to let them out.

  “This is the life, riding with you in a taxi in Paris!” Frank said, still in his dream of—what? Freedom? The boy insisted on paying the taxi. He took his wallet from the inside jacket pocket of Tom’s old blazer.

  Tom wondered what else was in that wallet, in case the boy was searched? Tom asked the driver to stop just off Avenue Gabriel in the street he wanted. “There’s the photo place,” Tom said, indicating a small shingle hanging from a doorway twenty yards away. “Called Marguerite or something. I don’t want to go in with you. That mole looks all right now, but don’t touch it. Muss your hair. Maybe put on a—slight smile. Don’t look serious.” Tom said this because the boy did look serious most of the time. “They’ll ask you to sign your name. Sign Charles Johnson, for instance. They won’t ask for identity, I know, because I’ve recently been through this with them. All right?”

  “Okay. Yes, sir.”

  “I’ll be here,” Tom said, pointing to a bar-café across the street. “Come out and join me, because they’ll tell you you have an hour to wait for the photos, but really it’s about forty-five minutes.”

  Then Tom walked to Avenue Gabriel and went left toward Concorde, where he knew there was a newsstand. He bought Le Monde, Figaro, and Ici Paris, a gaudy scandal sheet, with blue, green, red, and yellow on the front page. Tom saw at a quick glance as he walked back toward the bar-café that Ici Paris had given a whole page to Christina Onassis’s surprising marriage to a Russian prole, and another page to Princess Margaret’s probably imaginary new escort, an Italian banker slightly younger than she. All sex, as usual, who was doing it to whom, who might start doing it, and who had knocked it off with whom. When Tom had sat down and ordered a coffee, he took a look at every page of Ici Paris, and found nothing about Frank. No sex angle there, of course. On the penultimate page were a lot of advertisements, how to meet your true partner—“Life is short, so realize your dream now”—and ads with illustrations of various inflatable rubber dolls, ranging in price from fifty-nine francs to three hundred and ninety, the dolls said to be shippable in plain wrapper and to be capable of everything. How did one blow them up, Tom wondered. It would take all the breath out of a man to do it, and what would a man’s housekeeper or his friends say, if they saw a bicycle pump and no bicycle in his apartment? Funnier, Tom thought, if a man just took the doll along to his garage with his car, and asked the attendant to blow her up for him. And if the man’s housekeeper found the doll in bed and thought it was a corpse? Or opened a closet door and a doll fell out on her? A man could buy more than one doll, certainly, one his wife and two or three others his mistresses, and could lead quite a busy fantasy life that way.

  His coffee had arrived, and Tom lit a Gauloise. He found nothing in Le Monde, nothing in Figaro. What if the French police had put a man in the photography place, a man who might be on the watch for Frank Pierson along with other wanted people? Wanted people often had to change their passports as well as their identification papers.

  Frank came back, smiling. “They said an hour. Just like you told me.”

  “Just as you told me,” said Tom. The mole was still covered, Tom saw, the boy’s hair still standing up a little on top. “You signed another name?”

  “In the book there, yes. Charles Johnson.”

  “Well, we can take a walk—for forty-five minutes,” Tom said. “Unless you’d like a coffee here.”

  Frank had not yet sat down at the little table, and suddenly his body went rigid as he stared at something across the street. Tom looked also, but cars were just then passing. The boy sat down, averted his face, and rubbed a hand across his forehead nervously. “I just saw—”

  Tom stood up now, looked on the pavement, the pavement across the street, and at that instant one of two men’s figures turned to look back, and Tom recognized Johnny Pierson. Tom sat down again. “Well, well,” Tom said, and glanced at the waiters behind the bar, who seemed to be paying no attention to them, so Tom at once got up and went to the doorway to look again. The detective (Tom assumed he was the detective) wore a gray summer suit and was bareheaded, with wavy reddish hair, a stocky build. Johnny was taller and blonder than Frank, wearing a waist-length, nearly white jacket. Tom wanted to see if they went into the passport photograph shop—which was not so labeled, it was just a place that sold cameras and took photographs for passports—and to Tom’s relief, they walked past it. But they had probably made inquiries at the United States Embassy, which was just around the corner. “Well—” Tom said again, sitting down. “They didn’t find out anything at the embassy, that’s for sure. Nothing that we don’t know, anyway.”

  The boy said nothing. His face was noticeably paler.

 
Tom took a five-franc piece from his pocket, ample for one cup of coffee, and motioned to the boy.

  They went out and turned left, toward Concorde and the Rue de Rivoli. Tom looked at his watch, and saw that the photographs should be ready by a quarter past twelve. “Take it easy.” Tom was not walking fast. “I’ll go back to that shop on my own first, and see if they’re possibly waiting there. But they just walked past it.”

  “They did?”

  Tom smiled. “They did.” Of course they could turn and go back, into the shop, if they had inquired of the embassy where people usually had photographs made. They might ask if a boy fitting Frank’s description had come in recently, and so forth. But Tom was tired of fretting over things he couldn’t do anything about. They gazed into windows in the Rue de Rivoli—silk scarves, miniature gondolas, swanky-looking shirts with French cuffs, postcards on racks out in front. Tom would have enjoyed looking into W. H. Smith’s bookshop, but he steered Frank away, saying that the place was always full of Americans and English. Tom would have liked to think the cloak-and-dagger game amused the boy, but Frank’s face looked stricken since he had seen his brother. Then it was time to walk back to the photography shop. Tom told Frank to walk slowly along the pavement, and to turn and go back to the arcades of the Rue de Rivoli in case he saw his brother and the detective again, and Tom would find him.

  Tom walked to the shop and went in. An American-looking couple sat waiting on straight chairs and the same skinny, tall young man whom Tom remembered from a couple of months ago, the photographer himself, was offering the name-signing book to a new customer, an American girl. Then the young man disappeared with the girl behind a curtain, where Tom knew the studio was. Tom had pretended to be looking at cameras in a glass case, and now he went out. He told Frank that the coast was clear.

  “I’ll be on the street here,” Tom said. “You’ve paid for the pictures, haven’t you?” Tom knew the procedure, and the boy had paid thirty-five francs in advance. “Just take it easy, and I’ll be here.” Tom gave him an encouraging smile. “Slowly,” Tom said, as the boy went off.

  Frank obediently slowed his pace, and did not look back.

  Tom walked not fast, but as if he might have a destination, to the end of the street. He was keeping an eye out for the return of Johnny and the detective, but he did not see them. When Tom reached the Avenue Gabriel end of the block, and turned, Frank was walking toward him from the shop. Frank crossed the street, pulled a small white envelope from his jacket pocket and handed it to Tom.

  The pictures did look different from the one Tom had seen in France-Dimanche, hair more mussed on top, the vague smile that Tom had suggested, the mole not visible, but still the eyes and brows were much the same. Under careful inspection, the two photographs would of course be seen to be of the same boy.

  “As good as can be expected,” Tom said. “Now let’s get a taxi.”

  Frank had hoped for higher praise, Tom could see. They got a taxi by good luck before Concorde. Tom put one of the photographs into the envelope he had prepared for Reeves Minot. Tom sealed the envelope and felt relieved. He had asked the driver to go to Beaubourg, near which place there was bound to be a snack bar and a post box. Tom found both these things within yards of the bulbous exterior of the Centre Pompidou.

  “Amazing, isn’t it,” Tom said, referring to the blue monstrosity of the museum’s exterior. “I find it ugly—outside, anyway.”

  It looked like many long blue balloons inflated to near bursting point and wrapped around each other. There was definitely something like plumbing about it, but one hesitated to guess whether the ten-foot diameter balloons might contain water or air. Tom again thought of the inflated dolls for sexual purposes, and imagined one bursting under a man, which surely must happen occasionally. What a letdown! Tom bit his lip to stop his laughter. They had a mediocre steak with potato chips in a bar-café-tabac, outside which Tom had dropped his express letter into a yellow box. The collection time was at 16:00 hours.

  At the “Paris-Berlin” show, Frank seemed most impressed by Emil Nolde’s “Dance Before the Golden Calf,” a violently prancing trio or quartet of vulgar ladies, one quite naked. “Golden calf. That’s money, isn’t it?” said Frank, looking dazed and glassy-eyed with what he had seen already.

  “Money, yes,” said Tom. It was not an exhibit to give one quietude, and Tom felt tense also because he thought he ought to look around now and then for Johnny Pierson and the detective. It was strange to try to take in artists’ statements on German society of the 1920s, anti-Kaiser posters from World War I, Kirchner, portraits by Otto Dix—plus his brilliant “Three Prostitutes on the Street”—and at the same time to be worried about the possible appearance of a pair of Americans who would put a sudden end to his pleasure. To hell with the Americans, Tom thought, and said to Frank, “You keep an eye out for—you know, your brother. I’d like to enjoy this.” Tom spoke a bit severely, but the pictures that surrounded him were like music pouring into his ears in silence, or into his eyes anyway. Tom took a deep breath. Ah, the Beckmanns!

  “Does your brother,” Tom asked, “like art exhibits?”

  “Not as much as I do,” was the reply, “but he does like them.”

  That was not very cheering. Now Frank was riveted by what looked like a charcoal drawing of a room’s interior with a window at the back on the left, and a masculine figure standing in the foreground in an attitude of strain and confinement. The perspective of the walls and floor suggested confinement. Not a brilliant drawing, perhaps, but the conviction and intensity in the artist’s mind was plain. It was prison-like, whatever kind of room it was. Tom knew why Frank was fixated.

  Tom had to put his hand on the boy’s shoulder to tear him away.

  “Sorry.” Frank shook his head a little, and looked at the two doors of the room in which they stood. “My dad used to take us to exhibits. He always liked Impressionists. Mainly French. Snowstorms in Paris streets. We have a Renoir at home—of that. Snowstorm, I mean.”

  “So that’s one thing nice about your father, he liked paintings. And he could also afford to buy them.”

  “Well—at least. I mean, paintings—a few hundred thousand dollars—” Frank said it as if it were nothing. “I notice you’re always trying to say something nice about my father,” he added a bit resentfully.

  Was he? The exhibition was bringing out some emotion in Frank. “De mortuis,” Tom said, shrugging.

  “He could buy Renoirs? Certainly.” Frank flexed his arms as if he were getting ready to hit somebody, but he looked rather emptily straight ahead of him. “His market was the whole world, everybody. Well, everybody who could afford it. A lot of his stuff was luxury goods. ‘More than half of America is too fat,’ he used to say.”

  They were walking slowly back through a room where they had already been. One of the three or four miniature cinema shows was going on to their left, six or eight people sat on chairs looking at it, others stood. On the screen Russian tanks were attacking Hitler’s army.

  “I told you,” Frank continued, “besides the ordinary and gourmet stuff, there’s the same stuff with a low calorie count. It reminds me of what they say about gambling or prostitution—they make money out of other people’s vices. You fatten them up, then make them thin, and start over again.”

  Tom smiled at the boy’s intensity. What bitterness! Was he trying to justify himself in having killed his father? It was like a little steam being let out of a kettle, when the lid rises and falls again. How was Frank ever going to achieve the big justification, which would take away all his guilt? He might never find a total justification, but he had to find an attitude. Every mistake in life, Tom thought, had to be met by an attitude, either the right attitude or the wrong one, a constructive or self-destructive attitude. What was tragedy for one man was not for another, if he could assume the right attitude toward it. Frank felt guilt, which was why he had looked up Tom Ripley, and curiously Tom had never felt such guilt, never let it serio
usly trouble him. In this, Tom realized that he was odd. Most people would have experienced insomnia, bad dreams, especially after committing a murder such as that of Dickie Greenleaf, but Tom had not.

  Frank clenched his hands suddenly—but he hadn’t seen anything. The gesture was due to his own thoughts.

  Tom took his arm. “Had enough? Let’s go out this way.” Tom steered him toward what he thought was an exit room, back through still another room, where Tom had a feeling of walking past one soldier after another—the pictures—as if they were an army of variously attired fighters, somehow armed to the teeth, even though some were in evening clothes. Tom felt in a curious way conquered, and he didn’t like that. What caused it? Something besides the pictures, he was sure. He would have to send the boy away. The situation was getting a bit warm, emotional, worse.

  Suddenly Tom laughed.

  “What?” asked Frank, alert as ever to Tom, and he glanced around to see what might be funny.

  “Never mind,” Tom said. “I’m always thinking of crazy things.” Tom had been thinking, if the detective and Johnny saw Tom Ripley with Frank, they might at first think Tom had kidnapped him, since Tom had such a bad reputation. That could still arise, Tom thought, if the detective even thought to discover his residence and learned that a boy had been staying at the Ripley’s house. On the other hand, who in Villeperce knew that, besides Mme. Annette, and also Tom had not presented any ransom demand.

  They took a taxi to the garage, and were back at Belle Ombre at a little after six. Heloise was upstairs, washing her hair, which would take another twenty minutes, Tom knew, with the dryer. All to the good, because he wanted to try once again with Frank. The boy had sat down in the living room and was looking at a French magazine.

  “Why don’t you ring up Teresa and tell her you’re okay?” Tom asked in a cheerful voice. “You won’t have to tell her where you are. She must know you’re in France anyway.”