Things were a bit uncertain, at the moment.
Reeves came down before 10 a.m. Tom made more coffee, and scrambled some eggs for him.
‘I must take off for your sake,’ Reeves said. ‘Can you drive me to – I was thinking of Orly. Also I want to telephone about my suitcase, but not from your house. Gould you take me to Fontainebleau?’
‘I can take you to Fontainebleau and Orly. Where are you headed?’
‘Zürich, I was thinking. Then I could swoop back to Ascona and get my suitcase. But if I telephone the hotel, they might send the suitcase to Zürich care of American Express. I’ll just say I forgot it!’ Reeves laughed a boyish, carefree laugh – or rather, forced it out of himself.
Then there was the money situation. Tom had about thirteen hundred francs in cash in the house. He said he could easily let Reeves have some for the plane ticket and to change into Swiss francs once he got to Zürich. Reeves had traveller’s cheques in his suitcase.
‘And your passport?’ Tom asked.
‘Here.’ Reeves patted his breast pocket. ‘Both of them. Ralph Piatt with the beard and me without. Had the picture taken by a chum in Hamburg, me wearing a phoney beard. Can you imagine the Italians didn’t take the passports off me? That’s luck, eh?’
It certainly was. Reeves was unkillable, Tom thought, like a slender lizard flitting over stone. Reeves had been kidnapped, cigarette-burnt, intimidated God knew how, dumped, and here he was eating scrambled eggs, both eyes intact, not even his nose broken.
‘I’m going back to my own passport. So I’ll shave off my beard this morning, take a bath too, if I may. I just came down in a hurry, because I thought I’d slept pretty late.’
Tom telephoned while Reeves was bathing, and found out about planes to Zürich. There were three that day, the first taking off at 1.20 p.m., and the girl at Orly said there would very likely be a single seat available.
24
TOM was at Orly with Reeves a few minutes past noon. He parked his car. Reeves telephoned the hotel Three Bears in Ascona about his suitcase, and the hotel agreed to send it to Zürich. Reeves was not much concerned, not as concerned as Tom would have been if he’d left behind an unlocked suitcase with an interesting address book in it. Reeves would probably recover his suitcase with all its contents undisturbed tomorrow in Zürich. Tom had insisted on Reeves’ taking one of his small suitcases with an extra shirt, a sweater, pyjamas, socks and underwear, and Tom’s own toothbrush and toothpaste, which Tom thought essential for a suitcase to look normal. Somehow Tom hadn’t wanted to give Reeves the new toothbrush that Jonathan had used only once. Tom also gave Reeves a raincoat.
Reeves looked paler without the beard. ‘Tom, don’t wait to see me off, I’ll manage. Thanks infinitely. You saved my life.’
That wasn’t quite true, unless the Italians had been going to plug Reeves on the pavement, which Tom doubted. ‘If I don’t hear from you,’ Tom said with a smile, ‘I’ll assume you’re all right.’
‘Okay, Tom!’ A wave of the hand, and he vanished through the glass doors.
Tom got his car and drove homeward, feeling wretched and increasingly sad. He didn’t care to try to shake it off by seeing people this evening, not the Grais again, not the Cleggs either. Not even a film in Paris. He’d ring Heloise around 7 p.m., and see if she’d departed on the Swiss jaunt. If she had, her parents would know her telephone number in the Swiss chalet, or some way of reaching her. Heloise always thought of things like that, leaving a telephone number or an address where she could be found.
Then of course he might have a visit from the police, which would put an end to his efforts to shake off his depression. What could he say to the police, that he had been home all last evening? Tom laughed, and the laugh was a relief. He ought to find out first, of course, what Simone had already said, if he could.
But the police did not come, and Tom made no effort to speak with Simone. Tom suffered his usual apprehension that the police were spending this time in amassing evidence and testimony before they dumped it on him. Tom bought some things for his dinner, practised some finger exercises on the harpsichord, and wrote a friendly note to Mme Annette in care of her sister in Lyon:
My dear Mme Annette,
Belle Ombre misses you painfully. But I hope you are relaxing and enjoying these beautiful days of early summer. Everything is all right here. I will telephone one of these evenings and see how you are. All the best wishes.
Affectionately
Tom
The Paris radio reported a ‘shoot-up’ in a Fontainebleau street, three men killed, no names given. The Tuesday paper (Tom bought France-Soir in Villeperce) had a five-inch-long item: Jonathan Trevanny of Fontainebleau shot dead, and two Italians also shot in Trevanny’s house. Tom’s eyes glided over their names as though he didn’t want to remember them, though he knew they might linger a long time in his memory: Alfiori and Ponti. The Italians had invaded the house for no reason that Mme Simone Trevanny knew, she had told the police. They had rung the doorbell, then burst in. A friend whom Mme Trevanny did not name had aided her husband, and later driven them both, with their small son, to the hospital in Fontainebleau where her husband had been found dead on arrival.
Aided, Tom thought with amusement, in view of the two Mafiosi with their skulls bashed in in the Trevanny house. Pretty handy with a hammer, that friend of the Trevannys, and maybe Trevanny himself, considering they had been up against a total of four men with guns. Tom began to relax, to laugh even – and if there was a little hysteria in the laugh, who could blame him? He knew that more details were going to come out in the newspapers, and if not the newspapers then via the police themselves – direct to Simone, direct to him, maybe. But Mme Simone was going to try to protect her husband’s honour and her nest-egg in Switzerland, Tom believed, otherwise she would have told them a bit more already. She could have mentioned Tom Ripley, and her suspicion of him. The newspapers could have said that Mme Trevanny promised to make a more detailed statement later. But evidently she hadn’t.
The funeral of Jonathan Trevanny was to be held Wednesday afternoon, 17 May, at 3 p.m. in the church of St Louis. On Wednesday, Tom wanted to go, but he felt it would have been exactly the wrong thing to do, from Simone’s point of view, and after all funerals were for the living, not the dead. Tom spent that time in silence, working in his garden. (He must prod those blasted workmen about the greenhouse.) Tom became more and more convinced that Jonathan had on purpose shielded him from that bullet by stepping in front of him.
Surely the police were going to question Simone in the days to come, demand to know the name of the friend who had aided her husband. Hadn’t the Italians, maybe identified by now as the Mafia, been in pursuit of the friend, perhaps, not Jonathan Trevanny? The police would give Simone a few days to recover from her grief, and then they would question her again. Tom could imagine Simone’s will strengthened even more in the direction in which she had started: the friend didn’t want his name given, he was not a close friend, he had acted in self-defence, as had her husband, and she wanted to forget the whole nightmare.
About a month later, in June, when Heloise was long back from Switzerland, and Tom’s speculations on the Trevanny affair had come true – there had been no further statements from Mme Trevanny in the newspapers – Tom saw Simone approaching him on the same pavement in the Rue de France in Fontainebleau. Tom was carrying a heavy um-like thing for the garden, which he had just bought. Tom was surprised to see Simone, because he had heard that she had already removed herself and her son to Toulouse where she had bought a house. Tom had heard this news via the young and thrusting owner of the new and expensive delicatessen shop into which Gauthier’s art supply shop had been converted. So with his arms nearly giving out from the load which he had almost entrusted to the clerk at the florist’s, the unpleasant memory céleri rémoulade and herrings-in-cream in his mind instead of the as yet odourless tubes of paint, virgin brushes and canvases that he was used to seeing in Ga
uthier’s premises, plus the belief that Simone was already hundreds of miles away – Tom had the feeling he was seeing a ghost, having a vision. Tom was in shirtsleeves, beginning to crumple, and if not for Simone, he might have set the urn down to rest for a moment. His car was at the next corner. Simone saw him and at once began to glare like a focusing enemy. She paused briefly beside him, and as Tom almost came to a stop also, thinking at least to say ‘Bonjour, madame,’ she spat at him. She missed his face, missed him entirely, and plunged on towards the Rue St Merry.
That, perhaps, corresponded to the Mafia revenge. Tom hoped that would be all that there was to it – either from the Mafia or Mme Simone. In fact, the spit was a kind of guarantee, unpleasant to be sure, whether it hit or not. But if Simone hadn’t decided to hang on to the money in Switzerland, she wouldn’t have bothered spitting and he himself would be in prison. Simone was just a trifle ashamed of herself’ Tom thought. In that, she joined much of the rest of the world. Tom felt, in fact, that her conscience would be more at rest than that of her husband, if he were still alive.
Patricia Highsmith, Ripley's Game
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