The Talented Mr. Ripley

  There was an elderly Englishwoman on board the ship, traveling with her daughter who herself was forty, unmarried, and so wildly nervous she could not even enjoy the sun for fifteen minutes in her deck chair without leaping up and announcing in a loud voice that she was “off for a walk.” Her mother, by contrast, was extremely calm and slow, she had some kind of paralysis in her right leg, which was shorter than the other so that she had to wear a thick heel on her right shoe and could not walk except with a cane—the kind of person who would have driven Tom insane in New York with her slowness and her unvarying graciousness of manner, but now Tom was inspired to spend hours with her in the deck chair, talking to her and listening to her talk about her life in England and about Greece, when she had last seen Greece in 1926. He took her for slow walks around the deck, she leaning on his arm and apologizing constantly for the trouble she was giving him, but obviously she loved the attention. And the daughter was obviously delighted that someone was taking her mother off her hands.

  Maybe Mrs. Cartwright had been a hellcat in her youth, Tom thought, maybe she was responsible for every one of her daughter’s neuroses, maybe she had clutched her daughter so closely to her that it had been impossible for the daughter to lead a normal life and marry, and maybe she deserved to be kicked overboard instead of walked around the deck and listened to for hours while she talked, but what did it matter? Did the world always mete out just deserts? Had the world meted his out to him? He considered that he had been lucky beyond reason in escaping detection for two murders, lucky from the time he had assumed Dickie’s identity until now. In the first part of his life fate had been grossly unfair, he thought, but the period with Dickie and afterward had more than compensated for it. But something was going to happen now in Greece, he felt, and it couldn’t be good. His luck had held just too long. But supposing they got him on the fingerprints, and on the will, and they gave him the electric chair—could that death in the electric chair equal in pain, or could death itself, at twenty-five, be so tragic, that he could not say that the months from November until now had not been worth it? Certainly not.

  The only thing he regretted was that he had not seen all the world yet. He wanted to see Australia. And India. He wanted to see Japan. Then there was South America. Merely to look at the art of those countries would be a pleasant, rewarding life’s work, he thought. He had learned a lot about painting, even in trying to copy Dickie’s mediocre paintings. At the art galleries in Paris and Rome he had discovered an interest in paintings that he had never realized before, or perhaps that had not been in him before. He did not want to be a painter himself, but if he had money, he thought, his greatest pleasure would be to collect paintings that he liked, and to help young painters with talent who needed money.

  His mind went off on such tangents as he walked with Mrs. Cartwright around the deck, or listened to her monologues that were not always interesting. Mrs. Cartwright thought him charming. She told him several times, days before they got to Greece, how much he had contributed to her enjoyment of the voyage, and they made plans as to how they would meet at a certain hotel in Crete on the second of July, Crete being the only place their itineraries crossed. Mrs. Cartwright was traveling by bus on a special tour. Tom acquiesced to all her suggestions, though he never expected to see her again once they got off the ship. He imagined himself seized at once and taken on board another ship, or perhaps a plane, back to Italy. No radio messages had come about him—that he knew of—but would they necessarily inform him if any had come? The ship’s paper, a little one-page mimeographed sheet that appeared every evening at each place on the dinner tables, was entirely concerned with international political news, and would not have contained anything about the Greenleaf case even if something important had happened. During the ten-day voyage Tom lived in a peculiar atmosphere of doom and of heroic, unselfish courage. He imagined strange things: Mrs. Cartwright’s daughter falling overboard and he jumping after her and saving her. Or fighting through the waters of a ruptured bulkhead to close the breach with his own body. He felt possessed of a preternatural strength and fearlessness.

  When the boat approached the mainland of Greece Tom was standing at the rail with Mrs. Cartwright. She was telling him how the port of Piraeus had changed in appearance since she had seen it last, and Tom was not interested at all in the changes. It existed, that was all that mattered to him. It wasn’t a mirage ahead of him, it was a solid hill that he could walk on, with buildings that he could touch—if he got that far.

  The police were waiting on the dock. He saw four of them, standing with folded arms, looking up at the ship. Tom helped Mrs. Cartwright to the very last, boosted her gently over the curb at the end of the gangplank, and said a smiling good-bye to her and her daughter. He had to wait under the R’s and they under the C’s to receive their luggage, and the two Cartwrights were leaving right away for Athens on their special bus.

  With Mrs. Cartwright’s kiss still warm and slightly moist on his cheek, Tom turned and walked slowly toward the policemen. No fuss, he thought, he’d just tell them himself who he was. There was a big newsstand behind the policemen, and he thought of buying a paper. Perhaps they would let him. The policemen stared back at him from over their folded arms as he approached them. They wore black uniforms with visored caps. Tom smiled at them faintly. One of them touched his cap and stepped aside. But the others did not close in. Now Tom was practically between two of them, right in front of the newsstand, and the policemen were staring forward again, paying no attention to him at all.

  Tom looked over the array of papers in front of him, feeling dazed and faint. His hand moved automatically to take a familiar paper of Rome. It was only three days old. He pulled some lire out of his pocket, realized suddenly that he had no Greek money, but the newsdealer accepted the lire as readily as if he were in Italy, and even gave him back change in lire.

  “I’ll take these, too,” Tom said in Italian, choosing three more Italian papers and the Paris Herald-Tribune. He glanced at the police officers. They were not looking at him.

  Then he walked back to the shed on the dock where the ship’s passengers were awaiting their luggage. He heard Mrs. Cartwright’s cheerful halloo to him as he went by, but he pretended not to have heard. Under the R’s he stopped and opened the oldest Italian paper, which was four days old.

  NO ONE NAMED ROBERT S. FANSHAW FOUND,

  DEPOSITOR OF GREENLEAF BAGGAGE

  said the awkward caption on the second page. Tom read the long column below it, but only the fifth paragraph interested him:

  The police ascertained a few days ago that the fingerprints on the suitcases and paintings are the same as the fingerprints found in Greenleaf’s abandoned apartment in Rome. Therefore, it has been assumed that Greenleaf deposited the suitcases and the paintings himself. . . .

  Tom fumbled open another paper. Here it was again:

  . . . In view of the fact that the fingerprints on the articles in the suitcases are identical with those in Signor Greenleaf’s apartment in Rome, the police have concluded that Signor Greenleaf packed and dispatched the suitcases to Venice, and there is speculation that he may have committed suicide, perhaps in the water in a state of total nudity. An alternative speculation is that he exists at present under the alias of Robert S. Fanshaw or another alias. Still another possibility is that he was murdered, after packing or being made to pack his own baggage—perhaps for the express purpose of confusing the police inquiries through fingerprints. . . .

  In any case, it is futile to search for “Richard Greenleaf” any longer, because, even if he is alive, he has not his “Richard Greenleaf” passport. . . .

  Tom felt shaky and lightheaded. The glare of sunlight under the edge of the roof hurt his eyes. Automatically he followed the porter with his luggage toward the customs counter, and tried to realize, as he stared down at his open suitcase that the inspector was hastily examining, exactly what the news meant. It meant he was not suspected at all. It meant that the
fingerprints really had guaranteed his innocence. It meant not only that he was not going to jail, and not going to die, but that he was not suspected at all. He was free. Except for the will.

  Tom boarded the bus for Athens. One of his table companions was sitting next to him, but he gave no sign of greeting, and couldn’t have answered anything if the man had spoken to him. There would be a letter concerning the will at the American Express in Athens, Tom was sure. Mr. Greenleaf had had plenty of time to reply. Perhaps he had put his lawyers on to it right away, and there would be only a polite negative reply in Athens from a lawyer, and maybe the next message would come from the American police, saying that he was answerable for forgery. Maybe both messages were awaiting him at the American Express. The will could undo it all. Tom looked out of the window at the primitive, dry landscape. Nothing was registering on him. Maybe the Greek police were waiting for him at the American Express. Maybe the four men he had seen had not been police but some kind of soldiers.

  The bus stopped. Tom got out, corralled his luggage, and found a taxi.

  “Would you stop at the American Express, please?” he asked the driver in Italian, but the driver apparently understood “American Express” at least, and drove off. Tom remembered when he had said the same words to the taxi driver in Rome the day he had been on his way to Palermo. How sure of himself he’d been that day, just after he had given Marge the slip at the Inghilterra!

  He sat up when he saw the American Express sign, and looked around the building for policemen. Perhaps the police were inside. In Italian, he asked the driver to wait, and the driver seemed to understand this too, and touched his cap. There was a specious ease about everything, like the moment just before something was going to explode. Tom looked around inside the American Express lobby. Nothing unusual. Maybe the minute he mentioned his name—

  “Have you any letters for Thomas Ripley?” he asked in a low voice in English.

  “Reepley? Spell it, if you please.”

  He spelled it.

  She turned and got some letters from a cubbyhole.

  Nothing was happening.

  “Three letters,” she said in English, smiling.

  One from Mr. Greenleaf. One from Titi in Venice. One from Cleo, forwarded. He opened the letter from Mr. Greenleaf.

  9 June, 19——

  Dear Tom,

  Your letter of 3 June received yesterday.

  It was not so much of a surprise to my wife and me as you may have imagined. We were both aware that Richard was very fond of you, in spite of the fact he never went out of his way to tell us this in any of his letters. As you pointed out, this will does, unhappily, seem to indicate that Richard has taken his own life. It is a conclusion that we here have at last accepted—the only other chance being that Richard has assumed another name and for reasons of his own has chosen to turn his back on his family.

  My wife concurs with me in the opinion that we should carry out Richard’s preferences and the spirit of them, whatever he may have done with himself. So you have, insofar as the will is concerned, my personal support. I have put your photostat copy into the hands of my lawyers, who will keep you informed as to their progress in making over Richard’s trust fund and other properties to you.

  Once more, thank you for your assistance when I was overseas. Let us hear from you.

  With best wishes,

  Herbert Greenleaf

  Was it a joke? But the Burke-Greenleaf letterpaper in his hand felt authentic—thick and slightly pebbled and the letterhead engraved—and besides, Mr. Greenleaf wouldn’t joke like this, not in a million years. Tom walked on to the waiting taxi. It was no joke. It was his! Dickie’s money and his freedom. And the freedom, like everything else, seemed combined, his and Dickie’s combined. He could have a house in Europe and a house in America too, if he chose. The money for the house in Mongibello was still waiting to be claimed, he thought suddenly, and he supposed he should send that to the Greenleafs, since Dickie put it up for sale before he wrote the will. He smiled, thinking of Mrs. Cartwright. He must take her a big box of orchids when he met her in Crete, if they had any orchids in Crete.

  He tried to imagine landing in Crete—the long island, peaked with the dry, jagged lips of craters, the little bustle of excitement on the pier as his boat moved into the harbor, the small boy porters, avid for his luggage and his tips, and he would have plenty to tip them with, plenty for everything and everybody. He saw four motionless figures standing on the imaginary pier, the figures of Cretan policemen waiting for him, patiently waiting with folded arms. He grew suddenly tense, and his vision vanished. Was he going to see policemen waiting for him on every pier that he ever approached? In Alexandria? Istanbul? Bombay? Rio? No use thinking about that. He pulled his shoulders back. No use spoiling his trip worrying about imaginary policemen. Even if there were policemen on the pier, it wouldn’t necessarily mean—

  “A donda, a donda?” the taxi driver was saying, trying to speak Italian for him.

  “To a hotel, please,” Tom said. “Il meglio albergo. Il meglio, il meglio!”

  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 and Nothing That Meets the Eye: The Uncollected Stories, both of which received widespread acclaim when they were published by W. W. Norton & Company.

  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

  and the Ripley novels

  “Tom Ripley is one of the most interesting characters of world literature.”

  —Anthony Minghella

  “Mesmerizing . . . a Ripley novel is not to be safely recommended to the weak-minded or impressionable.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  “The brilliance of Highsmith’s conception of Tom Ripley was her ability to keep the heroic and demonic American dreamer in balance in the same protagonist—thus keeping us on his side well after his behavior becomes far more sociopathic than that of a con man like Gatsby.”

  —Frank Rich, New York Times Magazine

  “The most sinister and strangely alluring quintet the crime-fiction genre has ever produced. . . . This young, charismatic American protagonist is, it turns out, a murderer, a gentleman of calm amorality. It’s an unnerving characterization, and time and again Highsmith pulls it off, using all the singular tools of her trade.”

  —Mark Harris, Entertainment Weekly

  “Highsmith’s subversive touch is in making the reader complicit with Ripley’s cold logic.”

  —Daily Telegraph (UK)

  “[Highsmith] forces us to re-evaluate the lines between reason and madness, normal and abnormal, while goading us into sharing her treacherous hero’s point of view.”

  —Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

  “[Tom Ripley] is as appalling a protagonist as any myst
ery writer has ever created.”

  —Newsday

  “Savage in the way of Rabelais or Swift.”

  —Joyce Carol Oates, New York Review of Books

  “For eliciting the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings, there’s no one like Patricia Highsmith.”

  —Time

  “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

  If you enjoyed this novel, you’ll enjoy the other Ripley novels. To entice you, here is the first chapter of Ripley Under Ground.

  1

  Tom was in the garden when the telephone rang. He let Mme. Annette, his housekeeper, answer it, and went on scraping at the soppy moss that clung to the sides of the stone steps. It was a wet October.

  “M. Tome!” came Mme. Annette’s soprano voice. “It’s London!”

  “Coming,” Tom called. He tossed down the trowel and went up the steps.

  The downstairs telephone was in the living room. Tom did not sit down on the yellow satin sofa, because he was in Levi’s.

  “Hello, Tom. Jeff Constant. Did you . . .” Burp.