“Can you prove it?” Owen asked.
“Prove what? What is there to prove about my killing a man?”
The bottle slipped out of Owen’s fingers and fell onto the floor, but there was so little in it now that almost nothing spilled. “You’re an architect, aren’t you?” Owen asked. “I remember now.” He righted the bottle clumsily, leaving it on the floor.
“What does it matter?”
“I was wondering.”
“Wondering what?” Guy asked impatiently.
“Because you sound a little touched—if you want my honest opinion. Ain’t saying you do.” And behind Owen’s fogged expression now was a simple wariness lest Guy might walk over and hit him for his remark. When he saw that Guy didn’t move, he sat back in his chair again, and slumped lower than before.
Guy groped for a concrete idea to present to Owen. He didn’t want his audience to slip away, indifferent as it was. “Listen, how do you feel about the men you know who’ve killed somebody? How do you treat them? How do you act with them? Do you pass the time of day with them the same as you’d do with anybody else?”
Under Guy’s intense scrutiny, Owen did seem to try to think. Finally he said with a smile, blinking his eyes relaxedly, “Live and let live.”
Anger seized him again. For an instant, it was like a hot vise, holding his body and brain. There were no words for what he felt. Or there were too many words to begin. The word formed itself and spat itself from between his teeth: “Idiot!”
Owen stirred slightly in his chair, but his unruffledness prevailed. He seemed undecided whether to smile or to frown. “What business is it of mine?” he asked firmly.
“What business? Because you—you are a part of society!”
“Well, then it’s society’s business,” Owen replied with a lazy wave of his hand. He was looking at the Scotch bottle, in which only half an inch remained.
What business, Guy thought. Was that his real attitude, or was he drunk? It must be Owen’s attitude. There was no reason for him to lie now. Then he remembered it had been his own attitude when he had suspected Bruno, before Bruno had begun to dog him. Was that most people’s attitude? If so, who was society?
Guy turned his back on Owen. He knew well enough who society was. But the society he had been thinking about in regard to himself, he realized, was the law, was inexorable rules. Society was people like Owen, people like himself, people like—Brillhart, for instance, in Palm Beach. Would Brillhart have reported him? No. He couldn’t imagine Brillhart reporting him. Everyone would leave it for someone else, who would leave it for someone else, and no one would do it. Did he care about rules? Wasn’t it a rule that had kept him tied to Miriam? Wasn’t it a person who was murdered, and therefore people who mattered? If people from Owen to Brillhart didn’t care sufficiently to betray him, should he care any further? Why did he think this morning that he had wanted to give himself up to the police? What masochism was it? He wouldn’t give himself up. What, concretely, did he have on his conscience now? What human being would inform on him?
“Except a stool-pigeon,” Guy said. “I suppose a stool-pigeon would inform.”
“That’s right,” Owen agreed. “A dirty, stinking stool-pigeon.” He gave a loud, relieving laugh.
Guy was staring into space, frowning. He was trying to find solid ground that would carry him to something he had just seen as if by a flash, far ahead of him. The law was not society, it began. Society was people like himself and Owen and Brillhart, who hadn’t the right to take the life of another member of society. And yet the law did. “And yet the law is supposed to be the will of society at least. It isn’t even that. Or maybe it is collectively,” he added, aware that as always he was doubling back before he came to a point, making things as complex as possible in trying to make them certain.
“Hmm-m?” Owen murmured. His head was back against the chair, his black hair tousled over his forehead, and his eyes almost closed.
“No, people collectively might lynch a murderer, but that’s exactly what the law is supposed to guard against.”
“Never hold with lynchings,” Owen said. “’S not true! Gives the whole South a bad name—unnec’sarily.”
“My point is, that if society hasn’t the right to take another person’s life, then the law hasn’t either. I mean, considering that the law is a mass of regulations that have been handed down and that nobody can interfere with, no human being can touch. But it’s human beings the law deals with, after all. I’m talking about people like you and me. My case in particular. At the moment, I’m only talking about my case. But that’s only logic. Do you know something, Owen? Logic doesn’t always work out, so far as people go. It’s all very well when you’re building a building, because the material behaves then, but—” His argument went up in smoke. There was a wall that prevented him from saying another word, simply because he couldn’t think any further. He had spoken loudly and distinctly, but he knew Owen hadn’t been hearing, even if he was trying to listen. And yet Owen had been indifferent, five minutes ago, to the question of his guilt. “What about a jury, I wonder,” Guy said.
“What jury?”
“Whether a jury is twelve human beings or a body of laws. It’s an interesting point. I suppose it’s always an interesting point.” He poured the rest of the bottle into his glass and drank it. “But I don’t suppose it’s interesting to you, is it, Owen? What is interesting to you?”
Owen was silent and motionless.
“Nothing is interesting to you, is it?” Guy looked at Owen’s big scuffed brown shoes extended limply on the carpet, the toes tipped inward toward each other, because they rested on their heels. Suddenly, their flaccid, shameless, massive stupidity seemed the essence of all human stupidity. It translated itself instantly into his old antagonism against the passive stupidity of those who stood in the way of the progress of his work, and before he knew how or why, he had kicked, viciously, the side of Owen’s shoe. And still, Owen did not move. His work, Guy thought. Yes, there was his work to get back to. Think later, think it all out right later, but he had work to do.
He looked at his watch. Ten past 12. He didn’t want to sleep here. He wondered if there was a plane tonight. There must be something out. Or a train.
He shook Owen. “Owen, wake up. Owen!”
Owen mumbled a question.
“I think you’ll sleep better at home.”
Owen sat up and said clearly, “That I doubt.”
Guy picked up his topcoat from the bed. He looked around, but he hadn’t left anything because he hadn’t brought anything. It might be better to telephone the airport now, he thought.
“Where’s the john?” Owen stood up. “I don’t feel so good.”
Guy couldn’t find the telephone. There was a wire by the bed table, though. He traced the wire under the bed. The telephone was off the hook, on the floor, and he knew immediately it hadn’t fallen, because both parts were dragged up near the foot of the bed, the hand piece eerily focused on the armchair where Owen had been sitting. Guy pulled the telephone slowly toward him.
“Hey, ain’t there a john anywheres?” Owen was opening a closet door.
“It must be down the hall.” His voice was like a shudder. He was holding the telephone in a position for speaking, and now he brought it closer to his ear. He heard the intelligent silence of a live wire. “Hello?” he said.
“Hello, Mr. Haines.” The voice was rich, courteous, and just the least brusque.
Guy’s hand tried unavailingly to crush the telephone, and then he surrendered without a word. It was like a fortress falling, like a great building falling apart in his mind, but it crumbled like powder and fell silently.
“There wasn’t time for a dictaphone. But I heard most of it from just outside your door. May I come in?”
Gerard must have had his scouts at the airport in New York, Guy thought, must have followed in a chartered plane. It was possible. And here it was. And he had been stupid enough to si
gn the register in his own name. “Come in,” Guy echoed. He put the telephone on the hook and stood up, rigidly, watching the door. His heart was pounding as it never had before, so fast and hard, he thought surely it must be a prelude to his dropping dead. Run, he thought. Leap, attack as soon as he comes in. This is your very last chance. But he didn’t move. He was vaguely aware of Owen being sick in the basin in the corner behind him. Then there was a rap at the door, and he went toward it, thinking, wouldn’t it have to be like this after all, by surprise, with someone, a stranger who didn’t understand anything, throwing up in a basin in a corner of the room, without his thoughts ordered, and worse, having already uttered half of them in a muddle. Guy opened the door.
“Hello,” Gerard said, and he came in with his hat on and his arms hanging, just as he had always looked.
“Who is it?” Owen asked.
“Friend of Mr. Haines,” Gerard said easily, and glancing at Guy with his round face as serious as before, he gave him a wink. “I suppose you want to go to New York tonight, don’t you?”
Guy was staring at Gerard’s familiar face, at the big mole on his cheek, at the bright, living eye that had winked at him, undoubtedly had winked at him. Gerard was the law, too. Gerard was on his side, so far as any man could be, because Gerard knew Bruno. Guy knew it now, as if he had known it the whole time, yet it had never even occurred to him before. He knew, too, that he had to face Gerard. That was part of it all, and always had been. It was inevitable and ordained, like the turning of the earth, and there was no sophistry by which he could free himself from it.
“Eh?” Gerard said.
Guy tried to speak, and said something entirely different from what he had intended. “Take me.”
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.
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 Basel.
PRAISE FOR PATRICIA HIGHSMITH:
“Patricia Highsmith’s novels are peerlessly disturbing . . . bad dreams that keep us thrashing for the rest of the night.”
—The New Yorker
“A border zone of the macabre, the disturbing, the not quite accidental . . . Highsmith achieves the effect of the occult without any recourse to supernatural machinery.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Though Highsmith would no doubt disclaim any kinship with Jonathan Swift or Evelyn Waugh, the best of [her work] is in the same tradition. . . . It is Highsmith’s dark and sometimes savage humor, and the intelligence that informs her precise and hard-edged prose which puts one in mind of those authors.”
—Newsday
“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
“For eliciting the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings, there’s no one like Patricia Highsmith.”
—Time
“The feeling of menace behind most Highsmith novels, the sense that ideas and attitudes alien to the reasonable everyday ordering of society are suggested, has made many readers uneasy. One closes most of her books with a feeling that the world is more dangerous than one had ever imagined.”
—Julian Symons, New York Times Book Review
“Mesmerizing . . . not to be recommended for the weak-minded and impressionable.”
—Washington Post Book World
“A writer who has created a world of her own—a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger . . . Patricia Highsmith is the poet of apprehension.”
—Graham Greene
“Patricia Highsmith is often called a mystery or crime writer, which is a bit like calling Picasso a draftsman.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“An atmosphere of nameless dread, of unspeakable foreboding, permeates every page of Patricia Highsmith, and there’s nothing quite like it.”
—Boston Globe
“[Highsmith] has an uncanny feeling for the rhythms of terror.”
—Times Literary Supplement
“To call Patricia Highsmith a thriller writer is true but not the whole truth: her books have stylistic texture, psychological depth, mesmeric readability.”
—The Sunday Times (London)
“Highsmith is an exquisitely sardonic etcher of the casually treacherous personality.”
—Newsday
“Highsmith’s novels skew your sense of literary justice, tilt your internal scales of right and wrong. The ethical order of things in the real world seems less stable [as she] deftly warps the moral sense of her readers.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Highsmith . . . conveys a firm, unshakable belief in the existence of evil—personal, psychological, and political. . . . The genius of Highsmith’s writing is that it is at once deeply disturbing and exhilarating.”
—Boston Phoenix
Copyright 1950 by Patricia Highsmith
First published as a Norton paperback 2001
Originally published in 1950 by Harper & Brothers, New York,
and Cresset Press, London
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
The text of this book is composed in Bembo
Composition and design by Amanda Morrison
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Highsmith, Patricia, 1921–
Strangers on a train / by Patricia Highsmith.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-393-32198-3 (pbk.)
1. Railroad travel—Fiction. 2. Murderers—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3558.I366 S77 2001
813’.54—dc21 2001030821
ISBN: 978-0-393-34469-1 (e-book)
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
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W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
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Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train
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