Authors: Patricia Highsmith
Tom said over his shoulder to Jonathan, ‘The string. We’ll give it a try, all right?’
Jonathan understood, or partly understood. Ripley was a friend of Reeves. He knew Reeves’ plan. Jonathan was wadding the garrotte up in his left-hand trousers pocket. He pulled his hand out and gave the garrotte into Tom’s willing hand. Jonathan looked away from Tom, and was aware of a sense of relief.
Tom pushed the garrotte into the right-hand pocket of his jacket. ‘Stay there, because I might need you.’ Tom went over to the w.c, saw it was empty, and went in.
Tom locked the toilet door. The garrotte wasn’t even through its loop. Tom adjusted it for action, and put it carefully into the right-hand pocket of his jacket. He smiled a little. Jonathan had gone pale as a sheet! Tom had rung up Reeves the day before yesterday, and Reeves had told him Jonathan was coming but would probably hold out for a gun. Jonathan must have a gun now, Tom thought, but Tom considered a gun impossible in such conditions.
Stepping on the water pedal, Tom wet his hands, shook them, and passed his palms over his face. He was feeling a bit nervous himself. His first Mafia effort!
Tom had felt that Jonathan might botch this job, and having got Trevanny into this, Tom thought it behooved him to try to help him out. So Tom had flown to Salzburg yesterday, in order to board the train today. Tom had asked Reeves what Marcangelo looked like, but rather casually, and Tom didn’t think Reeves suspected that he was going to be on the train. On the contrary, Tom had told Reeves that he thought his scheme was hare-brained, and had told Reeves that he might let Jonathan off with half the money and find someone else for the second job, if he wanted to make a success of it. But not Reeves. Reeves was like a small boy playing a game he had invented himself, a rather obsessive game with severe rules – for other people. Tom wanted to help Trevanny, and what a great cause it was! Killing a big shot Mafioso! Maybe even two Mafiosi!
Tom hated the Mafia, hated their loan-sharking, their blackmail, their bloody church, their cowardliness in forever delegating their dirty work to underlings, so that the law couldn’t get its hands on the bigger bastards among them, never get them behind bars except on charges of income tax evasion or some other triviality. The Mafiosi made Tom feel almost virtuous by comparison. At this thought, Tom laughed out loud, a laugh which rang in the tiny metal-and-tile room in which he stood. (He was aware too that he just might be keeping Marcangelo himself waiting outside the door.) Yes, there were people more dishonest, more corrupt, decidedly more ruthless than himself, and these were the Mafiosi – that charming, squabbling batch of families which the Italian-American League claimed did not exist, claimed were a figment of fiction-writers’ imagination. Why, the church itself with its bishops making blood liquefy at the festival of San Gennaro, and little girls seeing visions of the Virgin Mary, all
this
was more real than the Mafia! Yes, indeed! Tom rinsed his mouth and spat and ran water into the basin and let it drain. Then he went out.
There was no one but Jonathan Trevanny on the platform, Jonathan now smoking a cigarette, but he at once dropped the cigarette like a soldier who wanted to appear more efficient under the eyes of a superior officer. Tom gave him a reassuring smile, and faced the side window by Jonathan.
‘Did they go by, by any chance?’ Tom had not wanted to peer through the two doors into the restaurant car.
‘No.’
‘We may have to wait till after Strassburg, but I hope not.’
A woman was emerging from the restaurant car, having trouble with the doors, and Tom sprang to open the second for her.
‘Danke schön,’
she said.
‘Bitte,’
Tom replied.
Tom drifted to the other side of the platform and pulled a
Herald-Tribune
from a pocket of his jacket. It was now 5.11 p.m. They were to arrive at Strassburg at 6.33 p.m. Tom supposed the Italians had had a big lunch, and were not going to go into the restaurant car.
A man went into the lavatory.
Jonathan was looking down at his book, but Tom’s glance made Jonathan look at him, and Tom smiled once more. When the man came out, Tom moved over towards Jonathan. There were two men standing in the aisle of the carriage, several yards away, one smoking a cigar, both looking out the window and paying no attention to him and Jonathan.
I’ll try to get him
in
the loo,’ Tom said. ‘Then we’ll have to heave him out the door.’ Tom jerked his head to indicate the door on the lavatory side. ‘If I’m in the loo with him, knock twice on the door when the coast is clear. Then we’ll give him the old heave-ho as fast as poss.’ Very casually Tom lit a Gauloise, then slowly and deliberately yawned.
Jonathan’s panic, which had reached a peak when Tom had been in the w.c, was subsiding a little. Tom wanted to go through with it. Just why he did was beyond Jonathan’s power to imagine just now. Jonathan also had a feeling that Tom might intend to botch the thing, and leave Jonathan holding the bag. And yet, why? More likely Tom Ripley wanted a cut of the money, maybe all the rest of it. At that moment, Jonathan simply didn’t care. It didn’t matter. Now Tom himself looked a bit worried, Jonathan thought. He was leaning against the wall opposite the w.c. door, newspaper in hand, but he wasn’t reading.
Then Jonathan saw two men approaching. The second man was Marcangelo. The first man was not one of the Italians. Jonathan glanced at Tom – who at once looked at him – and Jonathan nodded once.
The first man looked around on the platform, saw the w.c. and made for it. Marcangelo passed in front of Jonathan, saw that the w.c. was occupied, and turned back and returned to the carriage aisle. Jonathan saw Tom grin and make a sweeping gesture with his right arm, as if to say, ‘Dammit, the fish got away!’
Marcangelo was in plain view of Jonathan, waiting just a few feet away in the aisle, looking out the window. It occurred to Jonathan that Marcangelo’s guards, who were in the middle of the carriage, wouldn’t know that Marcangelo had had to wait, so that this extra time would arouse their anxiety sooner if Marcangelo didn’t come back. Jonathan nodded slightly at Tom, which he hoped Tom would understand to mean that Marcangelo was waiting near by.
The man in the loo came out and returned to the carriage.
Now Marcangelo approached, and Jonathan gave a glance at Tom, but Tom was sunk in his newspaper.
Tom was aware that the dumpy figure entering the platform was Marcangelo again, but he did not look up from his newspaper. Just in front of Tom, Marcangelo opened the door of the w.c, and Tom sprang forward like a person who was determined to get into the toilet first, but at the same time he flipped the garrotte over the head of Marcangelo whose cry Tom hoped he stifled as he dragged him, with a jerk of the garrotte like a boxer’s right cross, into the little room and closed the door. Tom yanked the garrotte viciously – one of Marcangelo’s own weapons in his prime, Tom supposed – and Tom saw the nylon disappear in the flesh of his neck. Tom gave it another whirl behind the man’s head and pulled still tighter. With his left hand Tom flicked the lever that locked the door. Marcangelo’s gurgle stopped, his tongue began to protrude from the awful wet mouth, his eyes closed in misery, then opened in horror, and began to have the blank, what’s-happening-to-me stare of the dying. Lower false teeth clattered to the tiles. Tom was nearly cutting his own thumb and the side of his forefinger because of the force he was exerting on the string, but he felt it a pain worth enduring. Marcangelo had slumped to the floor, but the garrotte, or rather Tom, was holding him in more or less a seated position. Marcangelo was now unconscious, Tom thought, and it was impossible for him to be breathing at all. Tom picked up the teeth, dropped them into the toilet, and managed to step on the pedal which dumped the pan. He wiped his fingers with disgust on Marcangelo’s padded shoulder.
Jonathan had seen the flick of the latch that changed the colour from green to red. The silence was alarming to Jonathan. How long would it last? What was happening? How much time had passed? Jonathan kept glancing through the glass half of the door into the carriage.
A man came from the restaurant car, started for the toilet, and seeing that it was occupied, went on into the carriage.
Jonathan was thinking that Marcangelo’s friends Would appear at any moment, if Marcangelo was in the least long in getting back to his compartment. Now the coast was clear, and was it time to knock? There
must
have been time for Marcangelo to die. Jonathan went and rapped twice on the door.
Tom stepped calmly out, closed the door and surveyed the situation, and a woman in a reddish tweed suit entered the platform just then – a smallish, middle-aged woman who was plainly headed for the toilet. The indicator was now showing green.
‘Sorry,’ Tom said to her. ‘Someone – a friend of mine is being sick in there, I’m afraid.’
‘Bitte?’
(Mein Freund ist da drinnen ziemlich krank.’
Tom said with an apologetic smile.
‘Entschuldigen Sie, gnädige Frau. Er kommt sofort heraus.
’
She nodded and smiled, and went back into the carriage.
‘Okay, give me a hand!’ Tom whispered to Jonathan, and started for the w.c.
‘Another one’s coming,’ Jonathan said. ‘One of the Italians.’
‘Oh, Christ.’ The Italian might simply wait on the platform, Tom thought, if he went into the loo and locked the door.
The Italian, a sallow chap of about thirty, gave Jonathan and Tom a look, saw that the lavatory said
libre,
then went into the restaurant car, no doubt to see if Marcangelo was there.
Tom said to Jonathan, ‘Can you bash him with the gun after I hit him?’
Jonathan nodded. The gun was small, but Jonathan’s adrenalin was at last stirring.
‘As if your life depended on it,’ Tom added. ‘Maybe it does.’
The bodyguard came back from the restaurant car, moving more quickly. Tom was on the Italian’s left, and pulled him by the shirtfront suddenly, out of view of the restaurant car’s doors, and hit him in the jaw. Tom followed this with a left fist in the man’s abdomen, and Jonathan cracked the Italian on the back of the head with the gun butt.
The door!’ Tom said, jerking his head, trying to catch the Italian who was falling forward.
The man was not unconscious, his arms flailed weakly, but Jonathan already had the side door open, and Tom’s instinct was to get him out without spending a second on another blow. The noise of the train wheels came with a sudden roar. They pushed, kicked and poured the bodyguard out, and Tom lost his balance and would have toppled out, if not for Jonathan catching him by his jacket tails.
Bang
went the door shut again.
Jonathan pushed his fingers through his tousled hair.
Tom motioned for Jonathan to go to the other side of the platform, where he could see down the aisle. Jonathan went, and Tom could see him making an effort to collect himself and look like the ordinary passenger again.
Tom raised his eyebrows in a question, and Jonathan nodded, and Tom nipped into the w.c. and swung the latch, trusting that Jonathan would have the wit to knock again when it was safe. Marcangelo lay crumpled on the floor, head next to the basin pedestal, his face pale now with a touch of blue in it. Tom looked away from him, heard the rustle of doors outside – the restaurant car doors – and then a welcome two knocks. This time Tom opened the door just a crack.
‘Looks all right,’ Jonathan said.
Tom kicked the door open past Marcangelo’s shoes which the door bumped, and signalled for Jonathan to open the side door of the train. But in fact they worked together, Jonathan having to help Tom with some of Marcangelo’s weight before the side door was in a fully open position. The door tended to close because of the direction of the train. They tumbled Marcangelo through it head-first, heels over head, and Tom, giving him a final kick, didn’t touch him at all, because his body had already fallen clear on to a cinder bank so close to Tom that he could see individual ashes and blades of grass. Now Tom held Jonathan’s right arm while Jonathan reached for the door’s lever and caught it.
Tom pulled the toilet door shut, breathless, trying to assume a calm air. ‘Go back to your seat and get off at Strassburg,’ he said. They’ll be looking at everyone on this train.’ He gave Jonathan a nervous pat on the arm. ‘Good luck, my friend.’ Tom watched Jonathan open the door that went into the carriage aisle.
Then Tom started to enter the restaurant car, but a party of four was coming out, and Tom had to step aside while they waddled, talked and laughed through the two doors. Tom at last entered and took the first vacant table. He sat down in a chair facing the door he had just come through. He was expecting the second bodyguard at any moment. He drew the menu towards him and casually studied it. Cole slaw. Tongue salad. Gulaschsuppe … The menu was in French, English and German.
Jonathan, walking down the aisle of Marcangelo’s carriage, came face to face with the second Italian bodyguard who rudely bumped into him in getting past. Jonathan was glad he felt a bit dazed, otherwise he might have reacted with alarm at the physical contact. The train gave one whistle followed by two shorter ones. Did that mean something? Jonathan got back to his seat and sat down without removing his overcoat, careful not to glance at any of the four people in the compartment. His watch said 5.31 p.m. It seemed more than an hour since he had looked at his watch and it had been a couple of minutes past 5 p.m. Jonathan squirmed, closed his eyes, cleared his throat, imagining the bodyguard and Marcangelo, having rolled under the train wheels, being chewed into various bits. Or maybe they hadn’t rolled under. Was the bodyguard even dead? Maybe he’d be rescued and would describe him and Tom Ripley with accuracy. Why had Tom Ripley helped him? Or should he call it help? What did Ripley want out of it? He was now under Ripley’s thumb, he realized. Ripley probably wanted only money, however. Or was he due for worse? Some kind of blackmail? Blackmail had a lot of forms.