Ripley Under Ground Page 9

  “If you find some really fresh parsley, M. Tome—”

  “I’ll remember it. Persil. I shall return before five o’clock, I think. Dinner tonight by myself. Something simple.”

  “Shall I help with the valises?” Mme. Annette stood up. “I don’t know where my mind is today.”

  Tom assured her it was not necessary, but she came out to say good-bye to the Count—who bowed to her and paid compliments in French on her cooking.

  They drove to Nemours, looked at the marketplace with its fountain, then went northward along the Loing to Moret, whose one-way streets Tom negotiated very knowledgeably now. The town had splendid gray stone towers, formerly the town gates, on both sides of the bridge over the river. The Count was enchanted.

  “It is not so dusty as Italy,” he remarked.

  Tom did his best not to appear nervous during their slow lunch, and he gazed frequently out the window at the weeping willows on the river bank, wishing he could achieve within himself the easy rhythm of their branches that the breeze swung this way and that. The Count told a very long story of his daughter’s second marriage to a young man of a titled family who had for a while been disowned by his Bologna family for marrying a girl who had been once married. Tom barely hung on to this story, because he was thinking about disposing of Murchison. Should he risk trying to dump him in some river? Could he manage Murchison’s weight over a bridge parapet, plus the weight of stones? And not be seen? If he simply dragged him down the bank of a river, could he be sure Murchison would sink deep enough, even weighted? It had begun to rain slightly. That would make the earth easier to dig, Tom thought. The woods behind the house might be the best idea after all.

  At the Melun station, Eduardo had only a ten-minute wait for his train to Paris. When he and Tom had said an affectionate good-bye, Tom drove to the nearest tabac and bought an excess of stamps to put on his envelope to Reeves’s man, so that it would not be stopped by some petty post office clerk for want of five centimes.

  Tom bought parsley for Mme. Annette. Persil, French. Petersilie, German. Prezzemolo, Italian. Tom then drove homeward. The sun was setting. Tom wondered if a flashlight or any kind of light in the woods would attract Mme. Annette’s attention if she looked out the window of her bathroom, which gave onto the back garden? If she would come up to his room (and find him gone) to tell him she had seen a light in the woods? The woods were never visited by anybody that Tom knew of, neither picnickers nor mushroom gatherers. Tom intended to go some distance into the woods, however, and perhaps Mme. Annette would not notice a light.

  When he got home, Tom had a compulsion to put on Levi’s at once and get the wheelbarrow out of the toolshed. He rolled the wheelbarrow near the stone steps that led down from the back terrace. Then, since there was still enough light, he trotted across the lawn to the shed again. If Mme. Annette noticed anything, he would say that he was considering making a compost heap in the woods.

  Mme. Annette’s light was on in her bathroom, which had a clouded glass window, and he supposed she was taking her bath, as she did at this hour if there was not too much to do in the kitchen. Tom got a four-pronged fork from the shed and took it to the woods. He was in search of a likely spot, and he hoped to start a hole which would give him a bit of cheer when he really had to finish the job tomorrow, very early tomorrow morning. He found a place among a few slender trees, where hopefully there would not be too many big roots to get through. In the dimness, Tom believed it was the best spot, even though it was only some eighty yards from the edge of the woods, where his lawn began. Tom dug vigorously, releasing some of the nervous energy that had bothered him all day.

  Next the garbage, he thought, and he stopped, panting, laughing out loud as he turned his face up to gulp air. Collect the potato peelings in the garbage bin now, and apple cores, and stick them all in with Murchison? And a big sprinkling of the powder that started the decomposition? There was a sack of it in the kitchen.

  Now it was rather dark.

  Tom went back with his fork, replaced it in the toolshed, and seeing that Mme. Annette’s bathroom light was still on—it was only seven—Tom went down to the cellar. Now he had more courage to touch Murchison, or the thing as they called it, and he reached at once into the inside pocket of Murchison’s jacket. Tom was curious about the plane ticket and the passport. He found only a wallet, and two business cards fell out of it onto the floor. Tom hesitated, then shoved the wallet, with the cards replaced in it, back into the pocket. A side pocket of the jacket held a key on a ring, which Tom left. The other pocket, on which Murchison was lying, was more difficult, as Murchison was stiff as a piece of sculpture and seemed to weigh nearly as much. The left pocket yielded nothing. The trousers pockets had only some French coins mixed with English, which Tom let remain. Tom also left Murchison’s two rings on his fingers. If Murchison was going to be found on his grounds, there would be no doubt who he was: Mme. Annette had met him. Tom left the cellar and turned out the light at the top of the stairs.

  Then Tom took a bath, and had just finished when the telephone rang. Tom lunged for it, hoping, expecting it was Jeff, perhaps with good news—but what could be good news?

  “’Ello, Tome! Jacqueline here. How are you?”

  It was one of their neighbors, Jacqueline Berthelin, who with her husband Vincent lived in a town a few kilometers away. She wanted him to come for dinner Thursday. She was having les Clegg, a middle-aged English couple whom Tom knew, who lived near Melun.

  “You know, my dear, it’s bad luck for me. I have a guest coming. A young man from America.”

  “Bring him. He is welcome.”

  Tom tried to get out of it and couldn’t completely. He said he would ring back in a couple of days and let her know, because he was not sure how long his American friend would be staying.

  Tom was leaving his room when the telephone rang again.

  This time it was Jeff, ringing from the Strand Palace Hotel, he said. “How are things there?” Jeff asked.

  “Oh, all right, thanks,” Tom said with a smile, and pushed his fingers through his hair, as if he couldn’t care less that there was a corpse in his cellar, a man Tom had killed for the protection of Derwatt Ltd. “And how are things with you?”

  “Where is Murchison? Is he still with you?”

  “He left yesterday afternoon for London. But—I don’t think he’s going to talk to—you know, the Tate Gallery man. I’m sure of it.”

  “You persuaded him?”

  “Yes,” Tom said.

  Jeff’s sigh, or gasp of relief, was audible across the Channel. “Super, Tom. You’re a genius.”

  “Tell them to calm down there. Especially Bernard.”

  “Well—that’s our problem. Sure, I’ll tell him, with pleasure. He’s—he’s depressed. We’re trying to get him to go somewhere, Malta, any damned place until the show’s over. He’s always like this with a show, but now it’s worse because of—you know.”

  “What’s he doing?”

  “Moping, frankly. We even rang up Cynthia—who still sort of likes him, I thought. Not that we told her about—about this scare,” Jeff hastened to add. “We just asked her if she could spend some time with Bernard.”

  “I gather she said no.”

  “Right.”

  “Does Bernard know you spoke with her?”

  “Ed told him. I know, Tom, maybe it was a mistake.”

  Tom was impatient. “Will you just keep Bernard quiet for a few days?”

  “We’re giving him sedatives, mild ones. I slipped one in his tea this afternoon.”

  “Would you tell him Murchison is—sedated?”

  Jeff laughed. “Yes, Tom. What’s he going to do in London?”

  “He said he had some things to do there. Then he’s going back to the States. Listen, Jeff, no more rings for a few days, eh? I’m not sure I’m going to be home, anyway.”

  Tom thought he could explain the few telephone calls he had made to Jeff, or received from Jeff, i
f the police bothered to look for them: he had considered buying “The Tub,” and had spoken to the Buckmaster Gallery about it.

  That evening Tom went out to the toolshed and brought back a tarpaulin and a rope. While Mme. Annette tidied in the kitchen, Tom wrapped Murchison’s body and tied the rope so he could get a grip on it. The corpse was unwieldy, resembling a tree trunk and weighing more, Tom thought. He dragged it to the cellar steps. The fact that the body was covered made him feel slightly better, but now its nearness to the door, the steps, the front door, exacerbated his nerves all over again. What could he say if Mme. Annette saw him, if one of the eternal doorbell-ringers—a gypsy selling baskets, Michel the town handyman asking if there was a job for him, a boy selling Catholic pamphlets—what would he say about the monstrous object that he was about to load in the wheelbarrow? People might not ask about it, but they would stare, and make a typical French comment in the negative:

  “Not a very light weight, is it?” And they would remember.

  Tom slept badly, and was curiously aware of his own snoring. He never quite fell asleep, so it was easy for him to get up at 5 a.m.

  Downstairs, he pushed aside the mat before the front door, then went down to the cellar. Murchison went up half the steps very nicely, but Tom had spent a lot of energy on it, and had to pause. The rope was cutting his hands a bit, and he was too impatient to run to the toolshed for his gardening gloves. He took another grip and made it to the top. It was easier going across the marble floor. He varied his task by rolling the wheelbarrow round to the front and tipping it on its side. He would have preferred to get Murchison out via the French windows, but he couldn’t cross the living room with him without taking up the rug. Now Tom pulled the elongated lump down the four or five outside steps. He tried to put the thing sufficiently into the wheelbarrow, so that if he lifted one side of the wheelbarrow, he could right it. He did this, but the wheelbarrow tipped all the way over and spilled Murchison out the other side onto the ground again. It was almost funny.

  The thought of having to drag the corpse back into the cellar was awful. Unthinkable. Tom spent a moment, thirty seconds, trying to recover his energies, staring at the damned thing on the ground. Then he flung himself at it as if it were a live, screaming dragon, or something supernatural that he had to kill before it killed him, and hoisted it into the upright barrow.

  The front wheel of the barrow sank into the gravel. Tom knew at once it would be hopeless to take it across the lawn, already a bit soft from yesterday’s showers. Tom ran and opened the big gates of his home. There were irregular flagstones between front steps and gate, and this went quite well, and then the wheelbarrow was on the hard sandy ground of the road. A lane to Tom’s right led to the woods behind his house, a narrow lane that was more of a footpath or a way for carts than cars, though it was just wide enough for a car. Tom steered the barrow round little holes and puddles in the lane, and eventually he reached his woods—not his, certainly, but he rather felt they were his now, he was so glad to reach the concealment they offered.

  Tom pushed the barrow some distance, then stopped and looked for the place where he had started to dig. He soon found it. There was a slope from the lane up to the woods, which Tom had not reckoned on, so he had to dump the corpse in the lane and drag it up. Then Tom pulled the wheelbarrow into the woods, so in case anyone passed along the lane, the wheelbarrow wouldn’t be seen. By now there was a bit more light. Tom went off at a trot toward the toolshed for the fork. He also took a shovel—rusted, left behind by somebody when he and Heloise had bought the house. The shovel had a hole in it, but would still be of help. Tom went back and continued his digging. He struck roots. After fifteen minutes, it became obvious that he could not finish the hole that morning. By 8:30, Mme. Annette would come upstairs to his bedroom with his coffee, for one thing.

  Tom ducked as a man in faded blue came walking along the lane, pushing a wooden homemade wheelbarrow full of firewood. The man did not glance Tom’s way. He was walking toward the road that ran in front of Tom’s house. Where had he come from? Maybe he was pinching state wood, and was as glad to avoid Tom as Tom was to avoid him.

  Tom dug until the trench was nearly four feet deep, traversed by roots that would take a saw to cut. Then he climbed out and looked around for a slope, any depression in which to hide Murchison temporarily. Tom found one fifteen feet away, and dragged the corpse by the ropes once more. He covered the gray tarpaulin with fallen branches and leaves. At least it would not catch the eye of someone in the lane, he thought.

  Then he pushed the now featherlight barrow onto the lane, and for good measure returned the barrow to the shed, so that Mme. Annette would not ask him a question about it if she saw it out.

  He had to enter by the front door, because the French windows were locked. His forehead was wet with sweat.

  Upstairs, he wiped himself with a hot wet towel, got back into pajamas and went to bed. It was twenty to eight. He had done too much for Derwatt Ltd., he thought. Were they worth it? Curiously, Bernard was. If they could get Bernard past this crise.

  But that wasn’t the way to look at it. He wouldn’t have killed someone just to save Derwatt Ltd. or even Bernard, Tom supposed. Tom had killed Murchison because Murchison had realized, in the cellar, that he had impersonated Derwatt. Tom had killed Murchison to save himself. And yet, Tom tried to ask himself, had he intended to kill Murchison anyway when they went down to the cellar together? Had he not intended to kill him? Tom simply could not answer that. And did it matter, much?

  Bernard was the only one of the trio whom he could not understand perfectly, and yet Tom liked Bernard best. The motive of Ed and Jeff was so simple, to make money. Tom doubted that Cynthia had done the breaking off with Bernard. It would not have surprised Tom if Bernard (who certainly at one point had been in love with Cynthia) had broken it off, because he was ashamed of his forging. It would be interesting to sound Bernard out about this some time. Yes, in Bernard there was a mystery, and it was mystery that made people attractive, Tom thought, that caused people to fall in love, too. Despite the ugly, tarpaulin-bound lump in the woods behind his house, Tom felt his own thoughts bearing him away as if he were on a cloud. It was strange, and exceedingly pleasant, to daydream about Bernard’s drives, fears, shames, and possible loves. Bernard, like the real Derwatt, was a bit of a saint.

  A pair of flies, insane as usual, were annoying Tom. He pulled one out of his hair. They were zooming around his night table. Late for flies, and he’d had quite enough of them this summer. The French countryside was famous for its variety of flies, which outnumbered the variety of cheeses, Tom had read somewhere. One fly jumped on the other’s back. In plain view! Quickly Tom struck a match and held it to the bastards. Wings sizzled. Buzz-buzz. Legs struck in the air and flailed their last. Ah, Liebestod, united even in death!

  If it could happen in Pompeii, why not at Belle Ombre, Tom thought.

  8

  Tom spent Saturday morning lazily, writing a letter to Heloise c.o. American Express, Athens, and at 2:30 p.m. he listened to a comic program on the radio, as he often did. Mme. Annette, on Saturday afternoons, sometimes found Tom convulsed on the yellow sofa, and Heloise now and then asked him to translate, but much of it didn’t translate, not the puns. At four, responding to an invitation that had come that noon by telephone, Tom went to take tea with Antoine and Agnès Grais, who lived on the other side of Villeperce, walking distance. Antoine was an architect who worked in Paris and spent weekdays there in his atelier. Agnès, a quiet blonde of about twenty-eight, stayed in Villeperce and took care of their two small children. There were four other guests at the Grais’, all Parisians.

  “What have you been doing, Tome?” Agnès asked, bringing out her husband’s speciality at the end of the tea, a bottle of strong old Holland gin, which the Grais recommended to be drunk neat.

  “Painting a little. Wandering around the garden cleaning the wrong things, probably.” The French said “cleaning” for “w
eeding.”

  “Not lonely? When is Heloise coming back?”

  “Maybe in a month.”

  The hour and a half at the Grais’ was soothing to Tom. The Grais made no comment on his two guests, Murchison and Count Bertolozzi, and perhaps had not noticed them or heard of them via Mme. Annette, who chatted freely in the food shops. Nor did the Grais notice his pink and almost bleeding palms, sore from the ropes around Murchison.

  That evening, Tom lay with his shoes off on the yellow sofa, browsing in Harrap’s Dictionary, which was so heavy he had to hold it against his thighs or rest it upon a table. He anticipated a telephone call, without being quite sure who would ring, and at a quarter past ten, one came. Chris Greenleaf in Paris.

  “Is this—Tom Ripley?”

  “Yes. Hello, Chris. How are you?”

  “Fine, thanks. I just got here with my friend. I’m awfully glad you’re in. I didn’t have time to get a letter from you, in case you wrote. Well—look—”

  “Where’re you staying?”

  “At the Hotel Louisiane. Highly recommended by the fellows back home! It’s my first night in Paris. I haven’t even opened my suitcase. But I thought I’d call you.”

  “What’re your plans? When would you like to visit?”

  “Oh, any time. Of course I want to do some tourism. The Louvre first, maybe.”

  “How about Tuesday?”

  “Well—all right, but I was thinking of tomorrow, because my friend is busy all day tomorrow. He has a cousin living here, an older man, an American. So I was hoping . . .”

  Somehow Tom couldn’t turn him down, or think of a good excuse. “Tomorrow. All right. In the afternoon? I’m a little busy in the morning.” Tom explained that he would have to take a train at Gare de Lyon for Moret-les-Sablons, and that he should ring again when he had chosen his train, so that Tom would know when to meet him.

  Obviously Chris would stay overnight tomorrow. Tom realized that he would have to finish Murchison’s grave and get him into it tomorrow morning. That was, in fact, probably why he had allowed Chris to come tomorrow. It was an added prod for himself.