Ripley Under Ground Read online

  From the terminal, Tom rang Jeff Constant at his studio. Ed Banbury answered.

  “Hop in a taxi and come straight here!” Ed said, sounding wildly happy.

  Jeff’s studio was in St. John’s Wood. Second floor—first to the English—on the left. It was a proper neat little building, neither swank nor shabby.

  Ed whipped the door open. “My God, Tom, it’s great to see you!”

  They shook hands firmly. Ed was taller than Tom with lank blond hair that was apt to fall over his ears, so he was constantly shoving it aside. He was about thirty-five.

  “And where’s Jeff?” Tom fished out Gauloises and whiskey from the red net bag, then the smuggled Pernod from his suitcase. “For the house.”

  “Oh, super! Jeff’s at the gallery. Listen, Tom, you’ll do it?—Because I’ve got the stuff here and there isn’t too much time.”

  “I’ll try it,” Tom said.

  “Bernard’s due. He’ll help us. Briefing.” Ed looked hectically at his wristwatch.

  Tom had removed his topcoat and jacket. “Can’t Derwatt be a little late? Isn’t the opening at five?”

  “Oh, of course. No need to get there till six, anyway, but I do want to try the makeup. Jeff said to remind you you’re not much shorter than Derwatt was—and who remembers those statistics? Assuming I ever wrote them anywhere? And Derwatt had bluish-gray eyes. But yours’ll do.” Ed laughed. “Want some tea?”

  “No thanks.” Tom was looking at the dark-blue suit on Jeff’s couch. It looked too wide, and it was unpressed. A pair of awful black shoes were on the floor by the couch. “Why don’t you have a drink?” Tom suggested to Ed, because Ed looked as jumpy as a cat. As usual, another person’s nervousness was making Tom feel calm.

  The doorbell rang.

  Ed let Bernard Tufts in.

  Tom extended a hand. “Bernard, how are you?”

  “All right, thank you,” Bernard said, sounding miserable. Bernard was thin and olive-skinned, with straight black hair and gentle dark eyes.

  Tom thought it best not to try to talk to Bernard just now, but to be simply efficient.

  Ed drew a basin of water in Jeff’s tiny but modern bathroom, and Tom submitted to a hair rinse to make his hair darker. Bernard began to talk, but only after deliberate, then more importunate prodding from Ed.

  “He walked with a slight stoop,” Bernard said. “His voice— He was a little shy in public. It was sort of a monotone, I suppose. Like this, if I can illustrate,” Bernard said in a monotone. “Now and then he laughed.”

  “Don’t we all!” Tom said, laughing nervously himself. Now Tom was sitting in a straight chair, being combed by Ed. On Tom’s right was a platter of what looked like barbershop floor sweepings, but Ed shook this out, and it was a beard fastened to fine flesh-colored gauze. “Good God, I hope the lights are dim,” Tom murmured.

  “We’ll see to that,” said Ed.

  While Ed worked with a mustache, Tom pulled off his two rings, one a wedding ring, one Dickie Greenleaf’s ring, and pocketed them. He asked Bernard to bring him the ring from his left trousers pocket, and Bernard did. Bernard’s thin fingers were cold and shaking. Tom wanted to ask him how Cynthia was, and remembered that Bernard was not seeing her anymore. They had been going to marry, Tom remembered. Ed was snipping at Tom’s hair with scissors, creating a bush in front.

  “And Derwatt—” Bernard stopped, because his voice had cracked.

  “Oh, shut up, Bernard!” Ed said, laughing hysterically.

  Bernard laughed also. “Sorry. Really, I’m sorry.” He sounded contrite, as if he meant it.

  The beard was going on, with glue.

  Ed said, “I want you to walk around a bit here, Tom. Get used to it. At the gallery— You won’t have to go in with the crowd, we decided against that. There’s a back door, and Jeff will let us in. We’ll invite some of the press to come into the office, you see, and we’ll have just one standing lamp on across the room. We’ve removed a little lamp and the ceiling bulb, so that can’t go on.”

  The gluey beard felt cool on Tom’s face. In the mirror in Jeff’s loo, he looked a little like D. H. Lawrence, he thought. His mouth was surrounded by hair. It was a sensation Tom did not like. Below the mirror on a little shelf three snapshots of Derwatt were propped up—Derwatt reading a book in shirtsleeves in a deckchair, Derwatt standing with a man Tom did not know, facing the camera. Derwatt had glasses in all the pictures.

  “The specs,” Ed said, as if he read Tom’s thoughts.

  Tom took the round-rimmed glasses Ed handed him, and put them on. That was better. Tom smiled, gently so as not to spoil the drying beard. The specs were plain glass, apparently. Tom walked with a stoop back into the studio, and said in what he hoped was Derwatt’s voice, “Now tell me about this man Murchison—”

  “Deeper!” Bernard said, his skinny hands flailing wildly.

  “This man Murchison,” Tom repeated.

  Bernard said, “M-Murchison, according to Jeff, thinks—Derwatt has returned to an old technique. In his painting ‘The Clock,’ you see. I don’t know what he means—specifically—to tell you the truth.” Bernard shook his head quickly, pulled a handkerchief from somewhere and blew his nose. “I was just looking at one of Jeff’s shots of ‘The Clock.’ I haven’t seen it in three years, you see. Not the picture itself.” Bernard was talking softly, as if the walls might be listening.

  “Is Murchison an expert?” Tom asked, thinking, what was an expert?

  “No, he’s just an American businessman,” Ed said. “He collects. He’s got a bee in his bonnet.”

  It was more than that, Tom thought, or they wouldn’t all be so upset. “Am I supposed to be prepared for anything specific?”

  “No,” Ed said. “Is he, Bernard?”

  Bernard almost gasped, then tried to laugh, and for an instant he looked as he had looked years ago, younger, naïve. Tom realized that Bernard was thinner than when he had last seen him three or four years ago.

  “I wish I knew,” Bernard said. “You must only—stand by the fact that the picture, ‘The Clock,’ is Derwatt’s.”

  “Trust me,” Tom said. He was walking about, practicing the stoop, assuming a slowish rhythm which he hoped was correct.

  “But,” Bernard went on, “if Murchison wants to continue whatever he’s talking about, whatever it is—‘Man in Chair’ you’ve got, Tom—”

  A forgery. “He need never see that,” said Tom. “I love it, myself.”

  “‘The Tub,’” Bernard added. “It’s in the show.”

  “You’re worried about that?” Tom asked.

  “It’s in the same technique,” Bernard said. “Maybe.”

  “Then you know what technique Murchison is talking about? Why don’t you take ‘The Tub’ out of the show if you’re worried about it?”

  Ed said, “It was announced on the program. We were afraid if we removed it, Murchison might want to see it, want to know who bought it and all that.”

  The conversation got nowhere, because Tom could not get a clear statement of what they, or Murchison, meant by the technique in these particular pictures.

  “You’ll never meet Murchison, so stop worrying,” Ed said to Bernard.

  “Have you met him?” Tom asked Ed.

  “No, only Jeff has. This morning.”

  “And what’s he like?”

  “Jeff said about fifty or so, a big American type. Polite enough but stubborn. Wasn’t there a belt in those trousers?”

  Tom tightened the belt in his trousers. He sniffed at the sleeve of his jacket. There was a faint smell of mothballs, which probably wouldn’t be noticed in all the cigarette smoke. And anyway, Derwatt could have been wearing Mexican clothes for the past few years, and his European clothes might have been put away. Tom looked at himself in a long mirror, under one of Jeff’s very bright spotlights that Ed had put on, and suddenly doubled over with laughter. Tom turned around and said, “Sorry, I was just thinking that considering Derwatt’s fantastic
earnings, he certainly hangs on to his old gear!”

  “That’s okay, he’s a recluse,” Ed said.

  The telephone rang. Ed answered, and Tom heard him assuring someone, no doubt Jeff, that Tom had arrived and was ready to go.

  Tom did not feel quite ready to go. He felt sweaty from nerves. He said to Bernard, trying to sound cheerful, “How’s Cynthia? Do you ever see her?”

  “I don’t see her anymore. Not very often, anyway.” Bernard glanced at Tom, then looked back at the floor.

  “What’s she going to say when she finds out Derwatt’s come back to London for a few days?” Tom asked.

  “I don’t think she’ll say anything,” Bernard replied dully. “She’s not—going to spoil things, I’m sure.”

  Ed finished his telephone conversation. “Cynthia won’t say anything, Tom. She’s like that. You remember her, don’t you, Tom?”

  “Yes. Slightly,” Tom said.

  “If she hasn’t said anything by now, she’s not going to,” Ed said. The way he said it made it sound like. “She’s not a bad sport or a blabbermouth.”

  “She is quite wonderful,” Bernard said dreamily, to nobody. He suddenly got up and darted for the bathroom, perhaps because he had to go there, but it might have been to throw up.

  “Don’t worry about Cynthia, Tom,” Ed said softly. “We live with her, you see. I mean, here in London. She’s been quiet for three years or so. Well, you know—since she broke up with Bernard. Or he broke up with her.”

  “Is she happy? Found somebody else?”

  “Oh, she has a boyfriend, I think.”

  Bernard was coming back.

  Tom had a scotch. Bernard took a Pernod, and Ed drank nothing. He was afraid to, he said, because he’d had a sedative. By five o’clock, Tom had been briefed or refreshed on several things: the town in Greece where Derwatt had officially last been seen nearly six years ago. Tom, in case he was queried, was to say he had left Greece under another name on a Greek tanker bound for Vera Cruz, working as oiler and ship’s painter.

  They borrowed Bernard’s topcoat, which was older looking than Tom’s or any of Jeff’s in his closet. Then Tom and Ed set off, leaving Bernard in Jeff’s studio, where they all were to meet later.

  “My God, he’s down in the mouth,” Tom said on the pavement. He was walking with a slump. “How long can he go on like this?”

  “Don’t judge by today. He’ll go on. He’s always like this when there’s a show.”

  Bernard was the old workhorse, Tom supposed. Ed and Jeff were burgeoning on extra money, good food, good living. Bernard merely produced the pictures that made it possible.

  Tom drew back sharply from a taxi, not having expected it to be bowling along on the left side of the road.

  Ed smiled. “That’s great. Keep it up.”

  They came to a taxi rank and got into a cab.

  “And this—caretaker or manager at the gallery,” Tom said. “What’s his name?”

  “Leonard Hayward,” Ed said. “He’s about twenty-six. Queer as Dick’s hatband, belongs in a King’s Road boutique, but he’s okay. Jeff and I let him into the circle. Had to. It’s really safer, because he can’t spring any blackmail, if he signed a written agreement with us to caretake the place, which he did. We pay him well enough and he’s amused. He also sends us some good buyers.” Ed looked at Tom and smiled. “Don’t forget a bit of woikin’ class accent. You can do it quite well as I remember.”

  3

  Ed Banbury rang a bell at a dark-red door flush with the back of a building. Tom heard a key being turned, then the door opened and Jeff stood there, beaming at them.

  “Tom! It’s super!” Jeff whispered.

  They went down a short corridor, then into a cozy office with a desk and typewriter, books, cream-colored wall-to-wall carpeting. Canvases and portfolios of drawings leaned against the wall.

  “I can’t tell you how right you look—Derwatt!” Jeff slapped Tom’s shoulder. “I hope that won’t make your beard fall off.”

  “Even a high wind wouldn’t,” Ed put in.

  Jeff Constant had gained weight, and his face was flushed—or perhaps he had been using a suntan lamp. His shirt cuffs were adorned with square gold links, and his blue-and-black striped suit looked brand new. Tom noticed that a toupee—what they called a hairpiece—covered the bald spot on the top of Jeff’s head, which Tom knew must be quite barren by now. Through the closed door that led to the gallery came a hubbub of voices, lots of voices, out of which a woman’s laugh leapt like a porpoise over the surface of a troubled sea, Tom thought, though he was not in the mood for poetry now.

  “Six o’clock,” Jeff announced, flashing more cuff to see his watch. “I shall now quietly tell a few of the press that Derwatt is here. This being England, there will not be a—”

  “Ha-ha! Not be a what?” Ed interrupted.

  “—not be a stampede,” Jeff said firmly. “I’ll see to that.”

  “You’ll sit back here. Or stand, as you like,” Ed said, indicating the desk which was set at an angle and had a chair behind it.

  “This Murchison chap is here?” Tom asked in Derwatt tones.

  Jeff’s fixed smile widened, but a little uneasily. “Oh, yes. You ought to see him, of course. But after the press.” Jeff was jumpy, eager to be off, though he looked as if he might have said more, and he went out. The key turned in the lock.

  “Any water anywhere?” Tom asked.

  Ed showed him a small bathroom, which had been concealed by a section of bookshelf that swung out. Tom took a hasty gulp, and as he stepped out of the bathroom, two gentlemen of the press were coming in with Jeff, their faces blank with surprise and curiosity. One was fifty-odd, the other in his twenties, but their expressions were much alike.

  “May I present Mr. Gardiner of the Telegraph,” Jeff said. “Derwatt. And Mr.—”

  “Perkins,” said the younger man. “Sunday . . .”

  Another knock on the door before they could exchange greetings. Tom walked with a stoop, almost rheumatically, toward the desk. The single lamp in the room was near the door to the gallery, a good ten feet away from him. But Tom had noticed that Mr. Perkins carried a flash camera.

  Four more men and one woman were admitted. Tom feared a woman’s eyes, under the circumstances, more than anything. She was introduced to him as a Miss Eleanor Somebody of the Manchester Something or other.

  Then the questions began to fly, although Jeff suggested that each reporter should ask his questions in turn. This was a useless proposal, as each reporter was too eager to get his own questions answered.

  “Do you intend to live in Mexico indefinitely, Mr. Derwatt?”

  “Mr. Derwatt, we’re so surprised to see you here. What made you decide to come to London?”

  “Don’t call me Mister Derwatt,” Tom said grumpily. “Just Derwatt.”

  “Do you like the latest—group of canvases you’ve done? Do you think they’re your best?”

  “Derwatt—are you living alone in Mexico?” asked Eleanor Somebody.

  “Yes.”

  “Could you tell us the name of your village?”

  Three more men came in, and Tom was aware of Jeff urging one of them to wait outside.

  “One thing I will not tell you is the name of my village,” Tom said slowly. “It wouldn’t be fair to the inhabitants.”

  “Derwatt, uh—”

  “Derwatt, certain critics have said—”

  Someone was banging with fists on the door.

  Jeff banged back and yelled, “No more just now, please!”

  “Certain critics have said—”

  Now the door gave a sound of splitting, and Jeff set his shoulder against it. The door was not giving, Tom saw, and turned his calm eyes from it to regard his questioner.

  “—have said that your work resembles a period of Picasso’s related to his cubist period, when he began to split faces and forms.”

  “I have no periods,” Tom said. “Picasso has periods
. That’s why you can’t put your finger on Picasso—if anybody wants to. It’s impossible to say ‘I like Picasso,’ because no one period comes to mind. Picasso plays. That’s all right. But by doing this he destroys what might be a genuine—a genuine and integrated personality. What is Picasso’s personality?”

  The reporters scribbled diligently.

  “What is your favorite painting in this show? Which do you think you like best?”

  “I have no— No, I can’t say that I have a favorite painting in this show. Thank you.” Did Derwatt smoke? What the hell. Tom reached for Jeff’s Craven A’s and lit one with a table lighter before two reporters could spring to his cigarette. Tom drew back to protect his beard from their fire. “My favorites perhaps are the old ones—‘The Red Chairs,’ ‘Falling Woman,’ maybe. Sold, alas.” Out of nowhere, Tom had recalled the last title. It did exist.

  “Where is that? I don’t know that, but I know the name,” someone said.

  Shyly, recluse-like, Tom kept his eyes on the leatherbound blotter on Jeff’s desk. “I’ve forgot. ‘Falling Woman.’ Sold to an American, I think.”

  The reporters plunged in again: “Are you pleased with your sales, Derwatt?”

  (Who wouldn’t be?)

  “Does Mexico inspire you? I notice there are no canvases in the show with a Mexican setting.”

  (A slight hurdle, but Tom got over it. He had always painted from imagination.)

  “Can you at least describe the house where you live in Mexico, Derwatt?” asked Eleanor.

  (This Tom could do. A one-story house with four rooms. A banana tree out front. A girl came to clean every morning at ten, and did a little shopping for him at noon, bringing back freshly baked tortillas, which he ate with red beans—frijoles—for lunch. Yes, meat was scarce, but there was some goat. The girl’s name? Juana.)

  “Do they call you Derwatt in the village?”

  “They used to, and they had a very different way of pronouncing it, I can tell you. Now it’s Filipo. There’s no need of another name but Don Filipo.”