“I don’t quite understand all this,” Mr. Greenleaf said. He was sitting on the sofa, listening attentively.
“It’s blown over now, since Dickie and I are both alive. The reason I mention it at all is that Dickie knew I was being looked for by the police, because they had asked him where I was. He may not have known exactly where I was at the first interview with the police, but he did know at least that I was still in the country. But even when I came to Rome and saw him, he didn’t tell the police he’d seen me. He wasn’t going to be that cooperative, he wasn’t in the mood. I know this because at the very time Marge talked to me in Rome at the hotel, Dickie was out talking to the police. His attitude was, let the police find me themselves, he wasn’t going to tell them where I was.”
Mr. Greenleaf shook his head, a kind of fatherly, mildly impatient shake of the head, as if he could easily believe it of Dickie.
“I think that was the night he said, if one more thing happened to him— It caused me a little embarrassment when I was in Venice. The police probably thought I was a moron for not knowing before that I was being looked for, but the fact remains I didn’t.”
“Hm-m,” Mr. Greenleaf said uninterestedly.
Tom got up to get some brandy.
“I’m afraid I don’t agree with you that Richard committed suicide,” Mr. Greenleaf said.
“Well, neither does Marge. I just said it’s a possibility. I don’t even think it’s the most likely thing that’s happened.”
“You don’t? What do you think is?”
“That he’s hiding,” Tom said. “May I offer you some brandy, sir? I imagine this house feels pretty chilly after America.”
“It does, frankly.” Mr. Greenleaf accepted his glass.
“You know, he could be in several other countries besides Italy, too,” Tom said. “He could have gone to Greece or France or anywhere else after he got back to Naples, because no one was looking for him until days later.”
“I know, I know,” Mr. Greenleaf said tiredly.
26
Tom had hoped Marge would forget about the cocktail party invitation of the antique dealer at the Danieli, but she didn’t. Mr. Greenleaf had gone back to his hotel to rest around four o’clock, and as soon as he had gone Marge reminded Tom of the party at five o’clock.
“Do you really want to go?” Tom asked. “I can’t even remember the man’s name.”
“Maloof. M-a-l-o-o-f,” Marge said. “I’d like to go. We don’t have to stay long.”
So that was that. What Tom hated about it was the spectacle they made of themselves, not one but two of the principals in the Greenleaf case, conspicuous as a couple of spotlighted acrobats at a circus. He felt—he knew—they were nothing but a pair of names that Mr. Maloof had bagged, guests of honor that had actually turned up, because certainly Mr. Maloof would have told everybody today that Marge Sherwood and Tom Ripley were attending his party. It was unbecoming, Tom felt. And Marge couldn’t excuse her giddiness simply by saying that she wasn’t worried a bit about Dickie’s being missing. It even seemed to Tom that Marge guzzled the martinis because they were free, as if she couldn’t get all she wanted at his house, or as if he wasn’t going to buy her several more when they met Mr. Greenleaf for dinner.
Tom sipped one drink slowly and managed to stay on the other side of the room from Marge. He was the friend of Dickie Greenleaf, when anybody began a conversation by asking him if he was, but he knew Marge only slightly.
“Miss Sherwood is my houseguest,” he said with a troubled smile.
“Where’s Mr. Greenleaf? Too bad you didn’t bring him,” Mr. Maloof said, sidling up like an elephant with a huge Manhattan in a champagne glass. He wore a checked suit of loud English tweed, the kind of pattern, Tom supposed, the English made, reluctantly, especially for such Americans as Rudy Maloof.
“I think Mr. Greenleaf is resting,” Tom said. “We’re going to see him later for dinner.”
“Oh,” said Mr. Maloof. “Did you see the papers tonight?” This last politely, with a respectfully solemn face.
“Yes, I did,” Tom replied.
Mr. Maloof nodded, without saying anything more. Tom wondered what inconsequential item he could have been going to report if he had said he hadn’t read the papers. The papers tonight said that Mr. Greenleaf had arrived in Venice and was staying at the Gritti Palace. There was no mention of a private detective from America arriving in Rome today, or that one was coming at all, which made Tom question Mr. Greenleaf’s story about the private detective. It was like one of those stories told by someone else, or one of his own imaginary fears, which were never based on the least fragment of fact and which, a couple of weeks later, he was ashamed that he could have believed. Such as that Marge and Dickie were having an affair in Mongibello, or were even on the brink of having an affair. Or that the forgery scare in February was going to ruin him and expose him if he continued in the role of Dickie Greenleaf. The forgery scare had blown over, actually. The latest was that seven out of ten experts in America had said that they did not believe the checks were forged. He could have signed another remittance from the American bank, and gone on forever as Dickie Greenleaf, if he hadn’t let his imaginary fears get the better of him. Tom set his jaw. He was still listening with a fraction of his brain to Mr. Maloof, who was trying to sound intelligent and serious by describing his expedition to the islands of Murano and Burano that morning. Tom set his jaw, frowning, listening, and concentrating doggedly on his own life. Perhaps he should believe Mr. Greenleaf’s story about the private detective coming over, until it was disproven, but he would not let it rattle him or cause him to betray fear by so much as the blink of an eye.
Tom made an absentminded reply to something Mr. Maloof had said, and Mr. Maloof laughed with inane good cheer and drifted off. Tom followed his broad back scornfully with his eyes, realizing that he had been rude, was being rude, and that he ought to pull himself together, because behaving courteously even to this handful of second-rate antique dealers and bric-à-brac and ashtray buyers—Tom had seen the samples of their wares spread out on the bed in the room where they had put their coats—was part of the business of being a gentleman. But they reminded him too much of the people he had said good-bye to in New York, he thought, that was why they got under his skin like an itch and made him want to run.
Marge was the reason he was here, after all, the only reason. He blamed her. Tom took a sip of his martini, looked up at the ceiling, and thought that in another few months his nerves, his patience, would be able to bear even people like this, if he ever found himself with people like this again. He had improved, at least, since he left New York, and he would improve still more. He stared up at the ceiling and thought of sailing to Greece, down the Adriatic from Venice, into the Ionian Sea to Crete. That was what he would do this summer. June. June. How sweet and soft the word was, clear and lazy and full of sunshine! His reverie lasted only a few seconds, however. The loud, grating American voices forced their way into his ears again, and sank like claws into the nerves of his shoulders and his back. He moved involuntarily from where he stood, moved toward Marge. There were only two other women in the room, the horrible wives of a couple of the horrible businessmen, and Marge, he had to admit, was better-looking than either of them, but her voice, he thought, was worse, like theirs only worse.
He had something on the tip of his tongue to say about their leaving, but, since it was unthinkable for a man to propose leaving, he said nothing at all, only joined Marge’s group and smiled. Somebody refilled his glass. Marge was talking about Mongibello, telling them about her book, and the three gray-templed, seamy-faced, bald-headed men seemed to be entranced with her.
When Marge herself proposed leaving a few minutes later, they had a ghastly time getting clear of Maloof and his cohorts, who were a little drunker now and insistent that they all get together for dinner, and Mr. Greenleaf, too.
“That’s what Venice is for—a good time!” Mr. Maloof kept saying id
iotically, taking the opportunity to put his arm around Marge and maul her a little as he tried to make her stay, and Tom thought it was a good thing that he hadn’t eaten yet because he would have lost it right then. “What’s Mr. Greenleaf’s number? Let’s call him up!” Mr. Maloof weaved his way to the telephone.
“I think we’d better get out of here!” Tom said grimly into Marge’s ear. He took a hard, functional grip on her elbow and steered her toward the door, both of them nodding and smiling good-bye as they went.
“What’s the matter?” Marge asked when they were in the corridor.
“Nothing. I just thought the party was getting out of hand,” Tom said, trying to make light of it with a smile. Marge was a little high, but not too high to see that something was the matter with him. He was perspiring. It showed on his forehead, and he wiped it. “People like that get me down,” he said, “talking about Dickie all the time, and we don’t even know them and I don’t want to. They make me ill.”
“Funny. Not a soul talked to me about Dickie or even mentioned his name. I thought it was much better than yesterday at Peter’s house.”
Tom lifted his head as he walked and said nothing. It was the class of people he despised, and why say that to Marge, who was of the same class?
They called for Mr. Greenleaf at his hotel. It was still early for dinner, so they had apéritifs at a café in a street near the Gritti. Tom tried to make up for his explosion at the party by being pleasant and talkative during dinner. Mr. Greenleaf was in a good mood, because he had just telephoned his wife and found her in very good spirits and feeling much better. Her doctor had been trying a new system of injections for the past ten days, Mr. Greenleaf said, and she seemed to be responding better than to anything they had tried before.
It was a quiet dinner. Tom told a clean, mildly funny joke, and Marge laughed hilariously. Mr. Greenleaf insisted on paying for the dinner, and then said he was going back to his hotel because he didn’t feel quite up to par. From the fact that he carefully chose a pasta dish and ate no salad, Tom thought that he might be suffering from the tourist’s complaint, and he wanted to suggest an excellent remedy, obtainable in every drugstore, but Mr. Greenleaf was not quite the person one could say a thing like that to, even if they had been alone.
Mr. Greenleaf said he was going back to Rome tomorrow, and Tom promised to give him a ring around nine o’clock the next morning to find out which train he had decided on. Marge was going back to Rome with Mr. Greenleaf, and she was agreeable to either train. They walked back to the Gritti—Mr. Greenleaf with his taut face-of-an-industrialist under his gray homburg looking like a piece of Madison Avenue walking through the narrow, zigzagging streets—and they said good night.
“I’m terribly sorry I didn’t get to spend more time with you,” Tom said.
“So am I, my boy. Maybe some other time.” Mr. Greenleaf patted his shoulder.
Tom walked back home with Marge in a kind of glow. It had all gone awfully well, Tom thought. Marge chattered to him as they walked, giggling because she had broken a strap of her bra and had to hold it up with one hand, she said. Tom was thinking of the letter he had received from Bob Delancey this afternoon, the first word he’d gotten from Bob except one postcard ages ago, in which Bob had said that the police had questioned everybody in his house about an income tax fraud of a few months ago. The defrauder, it seemed, had used the address of Bob’s house to receive his checks, and had gotten the checks by the simple means of taking the letters down from the letterbox edge where the postman had stuck them. The postman had been questioned, too, Bob had said, and remembered the name George McAlpin on the letters. Bob seemed to think it was rather funny. He described the reactions of some of the people in the house when they were questioned by the police. The mystery was, who took the letters addressed to George McAlpin? It was very reassuring. That income tax episode had been hanging over his head in a vague way, because he had known there would be an investigation at some time. He was glad it had gone this far and no further. He couldn’t imagine how the police would ever, could ever, connect Tom Ripley with George McAlpin. Besides, as Bob had remarked, the defrauder had not even tried to cash the checks.
He sat down in the living room to read Bob’s letter again when he got home. Marge had gone upstairs to pack her things and to go to bed. Tom was tired too, but the anticipation of freedom tomorrow, when Marge and Mr. Greenleaf would be gone, was so pleasant to relish he would not have minded staying up all night. He took his shoes off so he could put his feet up on the sofa, lay back on a pillow, and continued reading Bob’s letter. “The police think it’s some outsider who dropped by occasionally to pick up his mail, because none of the dopes in this house look like criminal types. . . .” It was strange to read about the people he knew in New York, Ed and Lorraine, the newt-brained girl who had tried to stow herself away in his cabin the day he sailed from New York. It was strange and not at all attractive. What a dismal life they led, creeping around New York, in and out of subways, standing in some dingy bar on Third Avenue for their entertainment, watching television, or even if they had enough money for a Madison Avenue bar or a good restaurant now and then, how dull it all was compared to the worst little trattoria in Venice with its tables of green salads, trays of wonderful cheeses, and its friendly waiters bringing you the best wine in the world! “I certainly do envy you sitting there in Venice in an old palazzo!” Bob wrote. “Do you take a lot of gondola rides? How are the girls? Are you getting so cultured you won’t speak to any of us when you come back? How long are you staying, anyway?”
Forever, Tom thought. Maybe he’d never go back to the States. It was not so much Europe itself as the evenings he had spent alone, here and in Rome, that made him feel that way. Evenings by himself simply looking at maps, or lying around on sofas thumbing through guidebooks. Evenings looking at his clothes—his clothes and Dickie’s—and feeling Dickie’s rings between his palms, and running his fingers over the antelope suitcase he had bought at Gucci’s. He had polished the suitcase with a special English leather dressing, not that it needed polishing because he took such good care of it, but for its protection. He loved possessions, not masses of them, but a select few that he did not part with. They gave a man self-respect. Not ostentation but quality, and the love that cherished the quality. Possessions reminded him that he existed, and made him enjoy his existence. It was as simple as that. And wasn’t that worth something? He existed. Not many people in the world knew how to, even if they had the money. It really didn’t take money, masses of money, it took a certain security. He had been on the road to it, even with Marc Priminger. He had appreciated Marc’s possessions, and they were what had attracted him to the house, but they were not his own, and it had been impossible to make a beginning at acquiring anything of his own on forty dollars a week. It would have taken him the best years of his life, even if he had economized stringently, to buy the things he wanted. Dickie’s money had given him only an added momentum on the road he had been traveling. The money gave him the leisure to see Greece, to collect Etruscan pottery if he wanted to (he had recently read an interesting book on that subject by an American living in Rome), to join art societies if he cared to and to donate to their work. It gave him the leisure, for instance, to read his Malraux tonight as late as he pleased, because he did not have to go to a job in the morning. He had just bought a two-volume edition of Malraux’s Psychologie de l’Art which he was now reading, with great pleasure, in French with the aid of a dictionary. He thought he might nap for a while, then read some in it, whatever the hour. He felt cozy and drowsy, in spite of the espressos. The curve of the sofa corner fitted his shoulders like somebody’s arm, or rather fitted it better than somebody’s arm. He decided he would spend the night here. It was more comfortable than the sofa upstairs. In a few minutes he might go up and get a blanket.
“Tom?”
He opened his eyes. Marge was coming down the stairs, barefoot. Tom sat up. She had his brown leather box in h
er hand.
“I just found Dickie’s rings in here,” she said rather breathlessly.
“Oh. He gave them to me. To take care of.” Tom stood up.
“When?”
“In Rome, I think.” He took a step back, struck one of his shoes and picked it up, mostly in an effort to seem calm.
“What was he going to do? Why’d he give them to you?”
She’d been looking for thread to sew her bra, Tom thought. Why in hell hadn’t he put the rings somewhere else, like in the lining of that suitcase? “I don’t really know,” Tom said. “A whim or something. You know how he is. He said if anything ever happened to him, he wanted me to have his rings.”
Marge looked puzzled. “Where was he going?”
“To Palermo. Sicily.” He was holding the shoe in both hands in a position to use the wooden heel of it as a weapon. And how he would do it went quickly through his head: hit her with the shoe, then haul her out by the front door and drop her into the canal. He’d say she’d fallen, slipped on the moss. And she was such a good swimmer, he’d thought she could keep afloat.
Marge stared down at the box. “Then he was going to kill himself.”
“Yes—if you want to look at it that way, the rings— They make it look more likely that he did.”
“Why didn’t you say anything about it before?”
“I think I absolutely forgot them. I put them away so they wouldn’t get lost and I never thought of looking at them since the day he gave them to me.”
“He either killed himself or changed his identity—didn’t he?”
“Yes.” Tom said it sadly and firmly.
“You’d better tell Mr. Greenleaf.”
“Yes, I will. Mr. Greenleaf and the police.”
“This practically settles it,” Marge said.