The Boy Who Followed Ripley (7 page)

“And later—the journalists?”

“My mom had to see a couple of them. I spoke to one at least, had to.”

“And you said what—exactly?”

“I said my father was near the edge. It seemed to me that he really did mean to send himself over.” On the last word, Frank sounded as if he had no breath left. He got up from the chair and walked to the window, which was partly open. Frank turned. “I lied. I told you.”

“Does your mother suspect you—at all?”

Frank shook his head. “I’d know if she did, and she doesn’t. I’m considered rather—um—
serious—
if you know what I mean. Honest too.” Frank smiled nervously. “Johnny was more rebellious at my age, they had to have tutors for him, he was so often running away from Groton, going to New York. Then he sobered up—a little. I don’t mean he ever drank booze, but pot sometimes, sure. A little cocaine. He’s better now. But I mean, I’m considered something like a Boy Scout by comparison. That’s why Dad put the pressure on me, you see, to take an interest in his company, the Pierson
empire
!” Frank flung his arms out and laughed.

Tom saw that the boy was tired.

Frank wandered back to the chair, sat down, and tipped his head back with his eyes half shut. “You know what I sometimes think? That my father was so near to being dead anyway. Half dead in his chair and maybe going to die pretty soon. And I wonder if I think that just to excuse myself a little? Awful to think that!” Frank said with a gasp.

“Back to Susie for a minute. She thinks you sent the chair over and she said that to you?”

“Yes.” Frank looked at Tom. “She even said she saw me from the house, so that’s why no one believes her. You can’t see the cliff from the house. But Susie was very upset when she said that. Sort of hysterical.”

“Susie also talked to your mother?”

“Oh, sure, I know. My mother didn’t believe her. My mother doesn’t like Susie really. My father liked her, because she’s very reliable—was—and she’s been with us so many years, since Johnny and I were babies almost.”

“She was your governess?”

“No, she was more the housekeeper. We always had separate—women as governess. Mostly English.” Frank smiled. “Mother’s helpers. We only got rid of the last one when I was about twelve.”

“And Eugene? Did he say anything?”

“About me? No. Not a thing.”

“Do you like him?”

Now Frank laughed a little. “He’s all right. He’s from London. Has a sense of humor. But whenever Eugene and I used to joke, my dad would say to me later that I shouldn’t joke with the butler or the chauffeur. Eugene was both most of the time.”

“Anyone else in the household? Other servants?”

“Not just now. Part-time people now and then. Vic the gardener, on vacation in July, maybe longer, so we have part-time fellows sometimes. My father always wanted the minimum of servants and secretaries around.”

Tom was thinking that perhaps Lily and Tal were not so unhappy at John Pierson’s demise. What went on there? He got up and went to his desk. “Just in case you do feel like writing it all out,” Tom said, handing the boy some twenty sheets of typewriter paper, “with a pen or on the typewriter. Anyway, they’re both here.” Tom’s typewriter sat in the middle of his desk.

“Thank you.” Frank stared at the sheets in his hand, musingly.

“You’d probably like to take a walk—but unfortunately you can’t.”

Frank stood up, paper in hand. “Just what I’d like to do.”

“You could try the back road there,” Tom said. “It’s a one-lane; nobody ever on it but an occasional farmer. You know, beyond where we were working this morning.” The boy knew, and moved toward the door. “And don’t run,” Tom said, because Frank looked charged with nervous energy. “Come back in half an hour, or I’ll be worried. You’ve got a watch?”

“Oh, yes.— Two-thirty-two.”

Tom checked his own, early by a minute. “If you want the typewriter later, just come in and get it.”

The boy went to his room next door to deposit the paper, then went down the stairs. From a side window, Tom could see Frank crossing the lawn, plunging through a section of underbrush, jumping, tripping once and falling on his hands, then springing up as lithely as an acrobat. The boy turned to the right and became hidden by trees as he followed the narrow road.

A moment later, Tom found himself switching on his transistor. It was partly because he wanted to catch the French news at 3 p.m., partly because he felt a need to change the atmosphere after Frank’s story. Amazing, in fact, that the boy hadn’t broken down even more while telling it. Would that come, or wouldn’t it? Or had it come in the night, perhaps nights before, when the boy was in London or alone at the house of Mme. Boutin, his mind in terror of an imagined judgment from somewhere? Or had the few seconds of tears, today before lunch, been enough? There were boys (and girls) aged ten or so in New York, who had witnessed murder, murdered in gangs their contemporaries or strangers, but Frank was hardly that type. Such guilt as Frank’s would show itself in some way, some time. Tom thought that every strong emotion such as love, hatred, or jealousy eventually showed itself in some gesture, and not always in the form of a clear illustration of that emotion, not always what the person himself, or the public, might have expected.

Restless, Tom went downstairs to speak with Mme. Annette, who was engaged in the gruesome task of dropping a live lobster into a huge pot of boiling water. She was just lifting it toward the steam, the crustacean’s limbs were stirring, and Tom recoiled at the threshold, making a gesture to indicate that he would wait a moment in the living room.

Mme. Annette gave him an understanding smile, because she had seen such a reaction in him before.

Had Tom heard a hiss of protest from the lobster? Was Tom even now, with some highly attuned part of his own auditory nerve, hearing a cry of pain and outrage from the kitchen, a final high-pitched shriek as the life went out? Where had the unfortunate creature spent the night, because Mme. Annette must have bought it yesterday Friday from the mobile
poissonerie
van that parked itself in Villeperce? This lobster was a big one, not like some of the little creatures Tom had seen wriggling vainly, tied upside down to the shelf bars in the fridge. When Tom heard the clunk of the vessel’s lid, he approached the kitchen again, head a little down.

“Ah, Madame Annette,” he said. “Nothing important, just—”

“Oh, Monsieur Tome, you are always so worried about the lobsters! Even the mussels, isn’t it?” She laughed with real mirth. “I tell my chums—
mes copines
Geneviève and Marie-Louise—” These were other servants of local gentry, whom Mme. Annette encountered while marketing, and who sometimes visited one another on good TV evenings, because they all had TV, and rotated their get-togethers.

Tom admitted his weakness with a nod and a polite smile. “Liver of yellow,” Tom said in French, the phrase useless, he realized, because he had meant to translate either lily-livered or yellow-bellied. No matter. “Madame Annette,
another
guest tomorrow, but just for Sunday night till Monday morning. A gentleman. I’ll bring him home around eight-thirty for dinner, and he’ll have the young man’s room, and I’ll sleep in the room of my wife. Monsieur Billy will sleep in my room. I’ll remind you tomorrow.” But he knew he wouldn’t need to remind her.

“Very good, Monsieur Tome. An American also?”

“No, he—European,” Tom said with a shrug. He fancied he could smell the lobster, and he backed from the kitchen. “Merci, madame!”

Tom went back to his room, listened to the news at three on a French pop station, and heard nothing about Frank Pierson. When the news was over, Tom realized that a half hour had passed, just, since Frank’s departure. Tom looked out his side window again. The woods at the corner of his garden showed no human figure. Tom waited, lit a cigarette, and went back to the window. Seven past three now.

Absolutely no reason to feel worried, Tom told himself. Ten minutes one way or the other. Whoever used that road? Sleepy-looking farmers leading or driving a horse and wagon, an old fellow driving a tractor now and then, headed for a field across the main road. Still, Tom was worried. Suppose someone had been watching, since Moret, and had trailed Frank to Belle Ombre? Tom had walked alone one night to Georges’ and Marie’s noisy café to take a coffee and see if any new character had appeared who showed curiosity even in him. Tom hadn’t seen any new personage, and more important, the talkative Marie had asked nothing about a boy staying in his house. Tom had been slightly relieved.

At twenty past three, Tom went downstairs again. Where was Heloise? Tom went out by way of the French windows, and walked slowly across the lawn toward the little road. His eyes were on the grass, and he expected the boy to shout a “Hello!” at any moment. Or did he? Tom picked up a stone from the grass and threw it awkwardly with his left hand toward the woods. He kicked away a wild blackberry vine, and finally stepped onto the road. Now he could see at least thirty yards along the road, even if it was a bit overgrown, because the road was straight. Tom began walking, listening, but he heard only the innocent and absentminded tweets of sparrows, and from somewhere a turtle dove.

He certainly didn’t want to call Frank’s name or even “Billy!” Tom stopped and listened again. Really nothing, no sound of a car motor, not even from behind him on the Belle Ombre road. Tom started trotting, thinking he’d better have a look at the end of the road—and what
was
the end? Tom thought it went on for a kilometer or so, and met another road more important, while all around were farm fields, corn for cattle, cabbages sometimes, mustard. Tom had by now begun to look for broken branches on either side of the lane, which might indicate a struggle, but he knew a wagon could have broken some just as well, and also he did not see anything unusual in the foliage. He walked again. He had by now come to the crossroad, a bigger road though still not paved, that ended what he thought of as the woods. Beyond lay cleared fields, belonging to farmers whose houses he could not see. Tom took a deep breath, and turned back. Had the boy possibly gone back to the house, got back, before Tom went out? Was he even now in his room? Tom leaned forward and again ran.

“Tom?” The voice had come from Tom’s right.

Tom skidded in his desert boots and looked into the woods.

Frank came from behind a tree—or so it seemed to Tom, materializing suddenly from green leaves and brown tree trunks in gray trousers and beige sweater almost blending with the verdure in the spotty sunlight. He was alone.

Tom felt relief, like an ache. “What happened? You’re okay?”

“Sure.” The boy lowered his head and began to walk with Tom, back toward Belle Ombre.

Tom understood. The boy had deliberately hidden, to see if Tom cared about finding him. Frank had wanted to see if he could trust him. Tom shoved his hands into his pockets and lifted his head. He felt the boy glance at him, shyly. “You
were
a bit late, later than you said you’d be.”

The boy said nothing, and rammed his hands in his pockets, exactly like Tom.

6

A
round 5 o’clock that same Saturday afternoon, Tom said to Heloise, “I don’t feel like going to the Grais’ tonight, dear. Is that so serious?
You
can go.” They were invited for dinner and due around eight.

“Oh, Tome, why not? We can ask if they will have Billy. I’m sure they will say yes.” Heloise looked up from the triangular table that she had bought that afternoon at an auction, and which she was now waxing. She knelt on the floor in blue jeans.

“It’s not Billy,” Tom said, though it was exactly Billy. “They always have a couple of other people—” Tom meant other people to amuse Heloise. “What does it matter? I’ll phone them and make some excuse, if you like.”

Heloise brushed back her blonde hair. “Antoine insulted you the last time. Is that it?”

Tom laughed. “Did he? If so, I forgot. He
can’t
insult me, I’d just laugh.” Antoine Grais, a hardworking architect of forty, diligent gardener at his country house, had a certain scorn for Tom’s leisurely life, but his slightly insulting remarks bounced right off Tom, and Tom thought Heloise picked up fewer of them than Tom did. “Old Puritan,” Tom added. “Belongs in America three hundred years ago. I just feel like staying home. I hear enough about Chirac from the locals.” A right-winger, Antoine Grais, pretentious enough not to be caught dead with
France-Dimanche,
but just the type to sneak a look at someone else’s in a bar-café. The last thing Tom wanted was Antoine to recognize Billy as Frank Pierson. Antoine and his wife Agnès, a little less straitlaced but not much, would never keep it quiet. “Want me to ring them, darling?” Tom asked.

“No, I shall just—arrive,” said Heloise, going on with her waxing.

“Say I’ve got one of my awful friends visiting. Someone socially unacceptable,” Tom said. He knew Antoine thought his social list suspect also. Who was it Antoine had once met by accident? Yes, the genius Bernard Tufts, who had often looked scruffy, and was sometimes too daydreamy to be polite.

“I think Billy is quite nice,” said Heloise, “and I know you are not worried about Billy, you just don’t like
les Grais
.”

Tom was bored with this, and so nervous, because of Billy in the house, that he had to repress another remark about the Grais—that they
were
arch-bores. “They have a right to live—I suppose.” Tom decided suddenly not to mention the man called Eric Lanz turning up tomorrow evening, though he had meant to tell Heloise now.

“But how do you really like the table? It’s for my room, in that corner, the side where you sleep. Then my table there would look better between the
twin
beds in the guest room,” Heloise said, admiring the shine now on the table top.

“I do like it—really,” Tom said. “How much did you say?”

“Only four hundred francs.
Chêne
—and it’s a Louis Quinze copy—a hundred years old itself. I bargained. Hard.”

“You did well,” said Tom, meaning it, because the table was handsome and looked sturdy enough to sit on, though no one ever would, and Heloise adored to think she had got a bargain, when often she hadn’t. His mind was on other things.

Tom went back to his room, where he had set himself the boring task of spending one hour, by the clock, on his monthly income and expenses for his accountant. Rather, Heloise’s father’s accountant. This man, one Pierre Solway, kept Tom’s and Heloise’s accounts separate from the august Jacques Plisson accounts, of course, but Tom was glad enough to be relieved of the accountant’s fee (paid by Jacques Plisson), and also to know that the accounts met Plisson’s approval, because the old gentleman certainly found time to look them over. Heloise’s income or allowance from her father was given her in cash, so was not liable for income tax on the Ripley bill. Tom’s Derwatt company income—maybe ten thousand francs a month or close to two thousand dollars if the dollar was strong enough—came also under the table in the form of Swiss franc checks, this money being filtered almost entirely through Perugia, where the Derwatt Art Academy was, though some came from the Buckmaster Gallery sales too. Tom’s ten percent of Derwatt profits derived also from Derwatt-labeled art supplies, from easels to erasers, but it was easier to smuggle money from northern Italy into Switzerland than to get it from London to Villeperce. Then there was the income from Dickie Greenleaf’s bequest to Tom, which had risen to about eighteen hundred dollars a month from the original three or four hundred years ago. On this, curiously enough, Tom did pay full USA income tax, considerable because it was capital gains. Ironic and a bit fitting, Tom thought, because he had forged Dickie’s will after Dickie’s death, writing it on Dickie’s own Hermes in Venice, and signing it with Dickie’s forged signature.

But when you came down to it, Tom thought, as he thought every month, what was Belle Ombre apparently living on? Peanuts. After a fifteen-minute swat at listing expenditures, Tom’s mind started to swim with ennui, and he stood up and smoked a cigarette.

Yes, well, why should he complain, he thought as he stared out his window. Tom declared some of the Derwatt company income, but not all of it, to the French, origin being labeled stocks in Derwatt Ltd. Tom now had his own stocks and a few U.S. Treasury Bonds, on which he had to declare the interest. His French Déclaration was for French-source income only (a bit for Heloise, not him), while the Americans wanted to know his global income. Tom was a French resident, though he still kept his American passport. Tom had to make a separate worksheet for Pierre Solway in English, as Solway dealt also with the Ripleys’ USA taxes. Mind-boggling. Papers were the curse of the French populace, and even the humblest citizen had to fill out a score of forms to acquire state health insurance. Fond as Tom was of mathematics or plain arithmetic, it bored him to copy postal expenses from last month’s record, and he stared down at the efficient-looking pale green graph paper, income above, output below, and cursed it filthily. One more swat, and he’d have filled out the hour and have it done. This was for July, should have been done at the end of that month, and now it was late August.

Tom was thinking of Frank, who was writing his account of his father’s last day. Now and again, Tom faintly heard his typewriter clicking. The boy had taken it into his room. Once Tom heard an “Oof!” from Frank. Was he going through agony? There were such long silences from the typewriter, that Tom wondered if the boy were writing some of it in longhand.

Seizing his little batch of receipts—telephone, electricity, water bill, car repair—Tom sat down for a final onslaught, determined to finish. He did, and finally the worksheet and the receipts, but not the canceled checks, because the French bank kept those, went into a manila envelope to be kept in a bigger envelope with the other monthly reports for Pierre Solway. Tom stuck the big envelope into a lower left drawer of his desk, and stood up with a sense of joy and virtue.

He stretched. And just at that moment one of Heloise’s rock ’n’ roll records started playing below stairs. Just what he needed! This was a Lou Reed. Tom went into the bathroom and washed his face in cold water. What time was it? Six fifty-five already! Tom decided to tell Heloise about Eric now.

Frank just then came out of his room. “I heard the music,” he said to Tom in the hall. “Radio? No, it’s the record, isn’t it?”

“Heloise’s,” Tom said. “Come down.”

The boy had changed from sweater to a shirt now, and the tails hung out of his trousers. He glided down the stairs with a happy smile, like one in a trance, Tom thought. The music had really struck a chord.

Heloise had it up loud, and was dancing by herself, with shoulder-shrugging movements, but she stopped shyly as Tom and the boy came down the steps, and she turned the music lower.

“Don’t turn it down for me! It’s nice,” said Frank.

Tom could see that they were going to get on well in the music and dance department. “Finished the bloody accounts!” Tom announced loudly. “All dressed? You look nice!” Heloise wore a pale blue dress with a black patent leather belt, and high-heeled shoes.

“I telephoned Agnès. She said come early so we could talk,” Heloise said.

Frank looked at Heloise with a new admiration. “You like this record?”

“Oh, yes!”

“I play it at home.”

“Go ahead and dance,” Tom said cheerfully, but he saw that Frank, at least, was a bit constrained at the moment. What a life for the boy, Tom thought, writing about murder minutes ago, and now plunged into rock. “Progress this afternoon?” Tom asked softly.

“Seven and a half pages. Some in my writing. I was switching.”

Heloise, standing near the gramophone, had not heard the boy’s words.

“Heloise,” Tom said, “I’m picking up a friend of Reeves’s tomorrow night. The friend stays the night only. Billy can take my room, so I’ll be with you.”

Heloise turned her pretty, made-up face toward Tom. “Who is coming?”

“Reeves said his name was Eric. I’ll pick him up at Moret. We have no date for tomorrow evening, have we?”

She shook her head. “I think I will go now.” She went to the telephone table, where she had left her handbag, and got a transparent raincoat from the front closet, as the weather looked uncertain.

Tom walked out with her to the Mercedes-Benz. “By the way, darling, don’t mention to the Grais that anyone is staying with us. Don’t say anything about an American boy. Say I’m expecting a phone call tonight. That’s simple.”

Her face lit with a sudden idea. “Are you maybe
hiding
Billy? To render Reeves a service?” She was talking through the open car window.

“No, dear. Reeves has never heard of Billy! Billy’s just an American kid doing some gardening for us. But you know what a bourgeois snob Antoine is. ‘Putting up a gardener in your guest room!’— Have a nice evening.” Tom bent and kissed her cheek. “Promise?” Tom added.

He meant promise to say nothing about Billy, and he could see from her calm, amused smile and her nod that she did promise. She knew Tom did favors now and then for Reeves, some of which she had an inkling of, others of which she hadn’t. Somehow his favors meant money earned, or acquired, anyway, and that was useful. Tom had opened the big gates for her, and he waved as she drove through and turned right.

By a quarter past nine that evening, Tom was lying on his bed with his shoes off, reading Frank’s manuscript, or account. It went:

Saturday 22nd July had started like an ordinary day for me. Nothing unusual. The sun was shining and it was what everybody called a great day, meaning the weather. The day is doubly strange to me now, because I had no idea in the morning how it was going to end. I had no plans about anything. I remember Eugene asked me around three that afternoon if I wanted to play some tennis, since there were no visitors (guests) and he had some time. I said no, don’t know why I said no. I tried to phone Teresa then, and her mother said she was out (Bar Harbor) and for the evening too and wouldn’t be home till maybe after midnight. I felt very jealous, wondering whom she was with, even a lot of people or just one, it would have been the same feeling. I decided I would go to New York the next day no matter what, even if I couldn’t use our apartment which was closed for the summer with drapes over the furniture and all. I would telephone Teresa and persuade her to come to New York, and we could either take a hotel room for several days or she could stay with me in the New York apartment. I wanted to make a move, and NY seemed great to suggest to her, to look forward to. I might have been in New York already except for the fact that my father wanted me to have “talks” with a guy called Bumpstead or something that sounded like that, who was going to be in Hyannisport for a couple of weeks vacationing. This Bumpstead is a businessman of some kind about 30, my dad said, My dad thought 30 would be young enough to convert me, I’m sure. To his way of life, business. This Bumpstead was due the next day. He didn’t come because of what happened.

(Here Frank had switched to a ballpoint pen.)

But I was trying to think of bigger things, of my whole life, if I could. I was trying to sum my life up, as Maugham says in a paperback I have called
The Summing Up
, but I am not sure I could or that I got very far with it. I had been reading some Somerset Maugham short stories (very good), and they seemed to understand everything, in just a few pages. I tried to think what is my life
for
, as if my life of course had a meaning, which is not necessarily so. I tried to think what I wanted from life, and all I could think of was Teresa, because I am so happy when I am with her, and she seems happy too, and I thought with the two of us together, we’d arrive at something called a meaning, or happiness, or going forward. I know I want to be happy and I think everyone should be happy and not confined by anything or anyone. By this I mean comfortable physically, and as to how they live. But

(Frank had crossed out the but and switched to the typewriter again.)

I remember after lunch my mother’s friend Tal with us, my father as usual made some remark about having the grandfather clock in the downstairs hall repaired. It hasn’t run for about a year, and Dad was always talking about getting it repaired, but he didn’t trust any of the local places to do it and didn’t want to send it to NY. It is an old clock from his family. I was bored at lunch. My mother and Tal managed to laugh a lot but they have their own jokes about people they know in NY.

After lunch I heard my father screaming on the telephone to Tokyo in the library. I switched off and waited in the hall. My father said he had something he wanted to say to me. Finally, this was to come and see him in the library around 6 p.m. I thought he could have told me that at lunch. I then went to my room, feeling angry. The others started playing croquet on the side lawn.

I detested my father, that I will admit, and I have heard that a lot of people detest their fathers. This does not mean that a person has to kill his father. I think I am unable as yet to realize what I did, and for this reason can walk around like a more or less ordinary human being, although I should not, and inside I feel different, uptight, and maybe I will never get over it. This is why after I did it I decided to look up T.R. who for some reason I felt very interested in. This was partly because of the Derwatt picture mystery. My family has a Derwatt, my father was interested a couple of years ago when some Derwatt paintings were suspected of being fakes or forgeries. I was around 14. Several names mentioned in the newspapers, mainly English names in London, Derwatt lived in Mexico, and I was reading a lot of spy stuff then, and I got interested and went to the big library in NY and looked up the records of all those names in the newspaper files, the way detectives have to do in their work. T.R.’s entries seemed the most interesting, American living in Europe, had lived in Italy, something about a friend of his bequeathing him his income when he died—so he must have liked T.R.—and also something about a missing American called Murchison, in connection with the Derwatt mystery, the American disappearing after visiting T.R.’s house. I thought T.R. might also have killed someone, just maybe, but that anyway he did not look tough or like a stuffed shirt even, because there were two pictures of him in the newspaper items I saw. He was rather good looking and did not look cruel. And whether he killed anybody seemed rather unproven.