Ripley Under Water (25 page)

They’d soon know each other in the afterworld, perhaps, Tom thought, and decided not to say another word.

Pritchard went on. “Good work. We’re accomplishing things.” A pause. “Still there? We’re …”

Tom cut it off by hanging up, gently. His heart was beating faster than usual, which he detested, but there had been times in his life when it had beat faster than this, he reminded himself. He got some adrenaline out of his system by running up the stairs two at a time.

In his studio, he turned on the fluorescent lights, and reached for a pencil and a pad of cheap paper. At a table convenient for standing at, Tom drew first the scene out his window as he knew it: vertical trees, the nearly horizontal line where his garden edge met the higher grass and bushes of land that did not belong to him. Retracing the lines, trying for an interesting composition, took his mind off Pritchard, but only to some extent.

Tom tossed his Venus pencil down and thought—the nerve of the bastard to ring him up a second time as Dickie Greenleaf! The third time, if he counted the telephone call Heloise had had. He and Janice were indeed working as a team on this, it seemed.

On another piece of paper, Tom drew a primitive Pritchard portrait, harsh of line, with dark, round-rimmed glasses, dark eyebrows, mouth open and nearly round with speech. The brows scarcely frowned: Pritchard was pleased with his activities. Tom used colored pencils, red for the lips, some purple under the eyes, green too. A rather forceful caricature. But Tom tore the sheet off, folded it and slowly tore it into bits and dropped it in his wastepaper basket. He would not want anybody finding that, he realized, in case he eliminated Mr. Pritchard.

Then Tom went into his bedroom, where he had plugged in the telephone that was, most of the time, in Heloise’s bedroom. He was thinking of ringing Jeff. Barely 10 p.m. in London now.

Then he asked himself, was he collapsing under the asshole Pritchard’s heckling? Was he scared, whining for assistance? After all, he’d got the better of Pritchard in a fistfight, in which Pritchard might have put up a lot more resistance, but hadn’t.

Tom started as the telephone rang. Pritchard resuming, he supposed. Tom was still on his feet. “Hello?”

“Hello, Tom, Jeff here. I—”

“Oh, Jeff!”

“Yes, I checked with Ed, you hadn’t telephoned him, so I thought I’d ask how things are.”

“Um, well—heating up a little. I think. Pritchard’s back in town—here. And I think he’s bought a boat. Not sure. Maybe a small boat with outboard motor. I’m only guessing, because it was under wraps in a pickup. I saw it when I was driving past his house.”

“Really? For—to do what?”

Tom supposed that Jeff could guess. “I suppose he could try dredging—grappling in the canals!” Tom laughed. “With grappling irons, I mean. I’m not sure. And he’s got a long way to go before he finds anything, I can guarantee that.”

“Now I get you,” Jeff said in a whisper. “That man’s obsessed, is he not?”

“Is he not,” Tom repeated pleasantly. “I haven’t seen him at it, mind you. But it’s only wise to think ahead. I’ll report again.”

“We’re here, Tom, if you need us.”

“That means a lot to me. Thank you, Jeff, and tell Ed thanks. Meanwhile I’ll hope a barge hits Pritchard’s canoe and sinks it. Ha-ha!”

They hung up after wishing each other well.

It was comforting to have reinforcements in view, Tom thought. Jeff Constant, for instance, was stronger and more alert than Bernard Tufts had been, certainly. He’d had to explain to Bernard each maneuver and its purpose when they were getting Murchison out of his grave behind Tom’s garden with the minimum of noise and car lights, then exactly what Bernard should say to a police investigator in case there were any, and there had been one.

In the present circumstances, Tom said to himself, the objective for him should be to keep Murchison’s decaying and canvas-wrapped corpse under water, provided any of the corpse still existed.

Just what did happen to a corpse under water for four, five years, even three? The tarpaulin or canvas would rot, perhaps more than half of it would disappear; the stones would likely have fallen out, therefore, enabling the corpse to drift more easily, even rise a little, provided any flesh was left. But wasn’t rising only due to bloating? Tom thought of the word maceration, the flaking off in layers of the outer skin. Then what? The nibbling of fish? Or wouldn’t the current have removed pieces of flesh until nothing but bones were left? The bloated period must be long past. Where was he going to find information on such as Murchison?

After breakfast the next day, Tom informed Mme Annette that he was going to Fontainebleau or perhaps Nemours for garden clippers, and did she need anything?

She did not, she replied with thanks, though with the air, which Tom knew by now, of possibly thinking of something before his departure.

Having heard nothing from Mme Annette, Tom took off before ten, and thought to try Nemours first for the clippers. Tom found himself taking unknown lanes again, because he had ample time: he had only to glance at the next cluster of signs on a post for directions. At a petrol station, he stopped and filled the tank. He was driving the brown Renault.

He took a road northward, thinking to go a couple of kilometers then head left toward Nemours. Farmlands, a tractor moving slowly across yellow stubble, such were the sights from Tom’s open window, and the vehicles he passed were as likely to be four-wheel farm cars with big rear tires as passenger cars. Now another canal, with an arched black bridge visible, and bucolic clumps of trees near either end of the bridge. Tom’s route would take him over the bridge, he saw. He drove slowly, because he was not holding up anyone behind him.

Tom had just rolled on to the black iron bridge when a glance to his right revealed two men in a rowing boat, one seated, holding what looked like a very wide rake. The man standing had his right arm lifted high, a rope in his right hand. Tom’s gaze returned to the road for an instant, then back to the men, who were paying no attention to him.

The man seated, in light-colored shirt, and with black hair, was David Pritchard, no less, and the man standing in beige trousers and shirt was a stranger to Tom, tall and with fair hair. They were handling a meter-or-more-wide metal bar with at least six small hooks on it, which in a larger version Tom would think of as grapnels or grapnel irons.

Well, well. So engrossed were they, they hadn’t looked up at his car, which by now just might be familiar to David Pritchard. On the other hand, recognizing the car, Tom realized, would only have fed David Pritchard’s ego: Tom Ripley was worried enough to cruise around to see what Pritchard was up to, and what had Pritchard to lose?

That boat had an outboard motor, Tom had noticed. And maybe they had two such rake like devices with grappling hooks?

The fact that they would have to cringe against the canal side when a barge passed, and absent themselves somehow if two barges wanted to pass each other, was not of much comfort to Tom at the moment. Pritchard and his companion looked as if they meant business and as if they would stick with their task. Perhaps Pritchard was paying the helper well too? Was he sleeping at the Pritchard house? And who was he, a local or from Paris? What had Pritchard told him they were looking for? Agnes Grais just might know something about the fair-haired stranger.

What chance had Pritchard of finding Murchison? Pritchard was about twelve kilometers from his quarry right now.

A crow came zooming down from Tom’s right with an ugly and insolent “Caw! Caw! Caw!” like a laugh. Who was the bird laughing at, him or Pritchard, Tom wondered. Pritchard, of course! Tom’s hands gripped the wheel harder and he smiled. Pritchard was going to get what he deserved, the meddling bastard.

Chapter 17

Tom had had no word from Heloise in days, and he could only assume they were still in Casablanca, and that a couple of postcards had been written and launched in the Villeperce direction: they would probably arrive a few days after Heloise was back home.

Tom felt restless, rang the Cleggs and managed a most relaxed and cheerful conversation with both of them, spoke about Tangier and Heloise’s further travels. But he wriggled out of a drinks date with them. They were English, he a retired lawyer, very reliable and proper, knowing nothing of Tom’s connection with the Buckmaster Gallery people, of course, and probably the name Murchison had gone out of their heads, if it had ever much entered.

His inspiration having changed, Tom made sketches for a room interior as his next painting, a room giving on a hall. He wanted a composition of purples and near-blacks, relieved by one pale object, which he envisioned as a vase, perhaps empty, or maybe with a single red flower which he could add later, if he so chose.

Mme Annette thought he was a little “melancholique, because Madame Heloise has not written.”

“Very true,” said Tom, smiling. “But you know—the atrocious postal service there—”

One evening he went around nine-thirty to the bar-tabac, for a change of atmosphere. At this time, it was a slightly different crowd from the five-thirty after-work crowd. Now there were a few card-playing men, who Tom had once supposed were mostly bachelors, but he knew now that this wasn’t so. Many married men simply liked to spend their evenings in the local tavern, instead of watching TV, for instance—which in fact they could also do at Marie and Georges’.

“Ah-h, people who don’t know the facts should shut up!” Marie was screaming at someone, or maybe the whole room, as she drew a Here pression. She gave Tom a quick, red-lipped grin and a nod.

Tom found a place at the bar. He always preferred to stand when he was here.

“M’sieur Reepley,” said Georges, his plump hands planted on the rim of the aluminium sink on the other side of the bar.

“Mm—un demi pression,” said Tom, and Georges went off to get it.

“He is a slob, he is!” said a man on Tom’s right, and the same man was jostled by his companion, who retorted something both belligerent and comical, and laughed.

Tom edged further to his left, as the two were tipsy. He heard snatches of conversation: about North Africans, about a building project somewhere, about a construction entrepreneur who was going to need masons, at least six.

“… Preechard, non?” A short laugh. “Fishing!”

Tom tried to listen, without turning his head. The words had come from a table behind and to his left, and he saw at a glance that the three men seated were in work clothes, all about forty. One was shuffling the deck.

“Fishing in—”

“Why doesn’t he fish from the bank?” asked another. “Une peniche arrive”—a crunching sound and gesture with hands—“he’s going to get sunk in that silly boat!”

“Hey, do you know what he’s doing?” said a new voice, and a younger man strolled over with his glass. “He’s not Fishing, he’s dragging the bottom! Two gadgets with hooks!”

“Ah, oui, I saw them,” said a card-player, uninterested and ready to return to the game.

Cards were being dealt.

“He won’t catch any gardons with those.”

“No, only old rubber boots, sardine cans, bicycles! Ha-ha!”

“Bicycles!” said the younger man, still on his feet. “M’sieur, you do not jest! He has already caught a bicycle! I saw it!” He guffawed. “Rusted—bent!”

“What’s he after?”

“Antiques! With Americans, you never know their tastes, eh?” This from an older man.

Laughter, and someone coughed.

“It is true he has an assistant,” a man at the table piped up, just as the slot-machine game with the motorcyclist gave somebody a jackpot, and a whoop from that direction (near the door) drowned out the words uttered in the following seconds. “… another American. I heard them talking.”

“For fish, it is absurd.”

“Americans—if they have the money for such nonsense …”

Tom sipped his beer, and slowly lit a Gitane.

“He is really trying. I saw him near Moret!”

Tom continued to listen, his back to the table, even as he exchanged a friendly word with Marie. But nothing more came from the men in regard to Pritchard. The card-players were back in their own closed world. Tom knew the two words the men had used, gardons, a type of roach, and chevesnes, an edible fish also, and of the carp family. No, Pritchard wasn’t fishing for those silvery creatures, and also not for old bicycles.

“Et Madame Heloise ? Encore en vacances?” asked Marie, dark hair and eyes looking a bit wild as usual, but she was wiping, automatically, the wooden bar top with a damp cloth.

“Ah, well, yes,” Tom said, reaching for his money to pay. “The charms of Morocco, you know.”

“Maroc! Ah, how beautiful! I have seen photos!”

Marie had said the same words several days ago, as Tom recollected, but Marie was a busy woman, having to be hospitable to a hundred or so customers morning, noon and night. Tom bought a packet of Marlboros before he quit the premises, as if the cigarettes would bring Heloise back to him sooner.

At home, Tom chose the tubes of color he thought he would want for tomorrow’s work, and set up the canvas on the easel. He thought of his composition, dark, intense, with a focus on a still darker area in the background which would remain undefined, like a small room without a light. He had made several sketches. Tomorrow he would begin with pencil strokes on the white canvas. But not tonight. He was a bit tired, and afraid of failing, of smudging, of its simply not being good enough.

The telephone by 11 p.m. had not rung. It was 10 p.m. in London, and his friends there might be thinking that no news from Tom was good news. And Cynthia? Very likely reading a book this evening, secure and almost smug in her conviction that Tom was guilty of murdering Murchison—she must know of Dickie Greenleaf s questionable means of departing this life, too—and sure that fate would at last dominate, put its stamp on Tom’s existence, whatever that meant. Annihilate him, perhaps.

As for books, Tom was glad to have Richard Ellmann’s biography of Oscar Wilde as bedtime reading that night. He was enjoying every paragraph. Something about Oscar’s life, reading it, was like a purge, man’s fate encapsulated; a man of goodwill, of talent, whose gifts to human pleasure remained considerable, had been attacked and brought low by the vindictiveness of hoi polloi, who had taken sadistic pleasure in watching Oscar brought low. His story reminded Tom of that of Christ, a man of generous goodwill, with a vision of expanding consciousness, of increasing the joy of life. Both had been misunderstood by contemporaries, both had suffered from an envy deeply buried in the breasts of those who wished them dead, and who mocked them while they were alive. No wonder, Tom thought, that people of all types and ages kept reading about Oscar, perhaps not even realizing why they were so fascinated.