Patricia Highsmith - Strangers on a Train

“No.”

“You’re a fine one, don’t even look at the papers!” Bruno said softly. “Gerard’s hot on a bum scent. This crook friend of mine, Matt Levine. He doesn’t have an alibi for that night. Herbert thinks it could be him. I been talking with all three of them for three days. Matt might get it.”

“Might die for it?”

Bruno hesitated, still smiling. “Not die, just take the rap. He’s got two or three killings on him now. The cops’re glad to have him.” Bruno shuddered, and drank the rest in his glass.

Guy wanted to pick up the big ashtray in front of him and smash Bruno’s bloated head, burn out the tension he felt would grow and grow until he did kill Bruno, or himself. He caught Bruno’s shoulders hard in both hands. “Will you get out? I swear this is the last time!”

“No,” Bruno said quietly, without any movement of resistance, and Guy saw the old indifference to pain, to death, that he had seen when he had fought him in the woods.

Guy put his hands over his own face, and felt its contortion against his palms. “If this Matt gets blamed,” he whispered,“I’ll tell them the whole story.”

“Oh, he won’t. They won’t have enough. It’s a joke, son!” Bruno grinned. “Matt’s the right character with the wrong evidence. You’re the wrong character with the right evidence. You’re an important guy, f’ Christ’s sake!” He pulled something out of his pocket and handed it to Guy. “I found this last -week. Very nice, Guy.”

Guy looked at the photograph of “The Pittsburgh Store,” funereally backgrounded by black. It was a booklet from the Modern Museum. He ready: “Guy Daniel Haines, hardly thirty, follows the Wright tradition. He has achieved a distinctive, uncompromising style noted for a rigorous simplicity without starkness, for the grace he calls ‘singingness’…” Guy closed it nervously, disgusted by the last word that was an invention of the Museum’s.

Bruno repocketed the booklet. “You’re one of the tops. If you kept your nerve up, they could turn you inside out and never suspect.”

Guy looked down at him. “That’s still no reason for you to see me. Why do you do it?” But he knew. Because his life with Anne fascinated Bruno. Because he himself derived something from seeing Bruno, some torture that perversely eased.

Bruno watched him as if he knew everything that passed through his mind. “I like you, Guy, but remember—they’ve got a lot more against you than against me. I could wiggle out if you turned me in, but you couldn’t. There’s the fact Herbert might remember you. And Anne might remember you were acting funny around that time. And the scratches and the scar. And all the little clues they’d shove in front of you, like the revolver, and glove pieces—” Bruno recited them slowly and fondly, like old memories. “With me against you, you’d crack up, I bet.”

Thirty-seven

Guy knew as soon as Anne called to him that she had seen the dent. He had meant to get it fixed, and had forgotten. He said first that he didn’t know how it got there, then that he did. He had taken the boat out last week, he said, and it had bumped a buoy.

“Don’t be terribly sorry,” she mocked him, “it isn’t worth it.” She took his hand as she stood up. “Egon said you had the boat out one afternoon. Is that why you didn’t say anything about it?”

“I suppose.”

“Did you take it out by yourself?” Anne smiled a little, because he wasn’t a good-enough sailor to take the boat out by himself.

Bruno had called up and insisted they go out for a sail. Gerard had come to a new deadend with Matt Levine, deadends everywhere, and Bruno had insisted that they celebrate. “I took it out with Charles Bruno one afternoon,” he said. And he had brought the revolver with him that day, too.

“It’s all right, Guy. Only why’d you see him again? I thought ‘ you disliked him so.”

“A whim,” he murmured. “It was the two days I was doing that work at home.” It wasn’t all right, Guy knew. Anne kept the India’s brass and white-painted wood gleaming and spotless, like something of chryselephantine. And Bruno! She mistrusted Bruno now.

“Guy, he’s not the man we saw that night in front of your apartment, is he? The one who spoke to us in the snow?”

“Yes. He’s the same one.” Guy’s fingers, supporting the weight of the revolver in his pocket, tightened helplessly.

“What’s his interest in you?” Anne followed him casually down the deck. “He isn’t interested in architecture particularly. I talked with him the night of the party.”

“He’s got no interest in me. Just doesn’t know what to do with himself.” When he got rid of the revolver, he thought, he could talk.

“You met him at school?”

“Yes. He was wandering around a corridor.” How easy it was to lie when one had to lie! But it was wrapping tendrils around his feet, his body, his brain. He would say the wrong thing one day. He was doomed to lose Anne. Perhaps he had already lost her, at this moment when he lighted a cigarette and she stood leaning against the mainmast, watching him. The revolver seemed to weight him to the spot, and determinedly he turned and walked toward the prow. Behind him, he heard Anne’s step onto the deck, and her soft tread in her tennis shoes, going back toward the cockpit. ‘I It was a sullen day, promising rain. The India rocked slowly on the choppy surface, and seemed no farther from the gray shore than it had been an hour ago. Guy learned on the bowsprit and looked down at his white-clad legs, the blue gilt-buttoned jacket he had taken from the India’s locker, that perhaps had belonged to Anne’s father. He might have been a sailor instead of an architect, he thought. He had been wild to go to sea at fourteen. What had stopped him? How different his life might have been without—what? Without Miriam, of course. He straightened impatiently and pulled the revolver from the pocket of the jacket.

He held the gun in both hands over the water, his elbow on the bowsprit. How intelligent a jewel, he thought, and how innocent it looked now. Himself—He let it drop. The gun turned once head-over, in perfect balance, with its familiar look of willingness, and disappeared.

“What was that?”

Guy turned and saw her standing on the deck near the cabin. He measured the ten or twelve feet between them. He could think of nothing, absolutely nothing to say to her.

Thirty-eight

Bruno hesitated about the drink. The bathroom walls had that look of breaking up in little pieces, as if the walls might not really have been there, or he might not really have been here.

“Ma!” But the frightened bleat shamed him, and he drank his drink.

He tiptoed into his mother’s room and awakened her with a press of the button by her bed, which signaled to Herbert in the kitchen that she was ready for her breakfast.

“Oh-h,” she yawned, then smiled. “And how are you?” She patted his arm, slid up from the covers, and went into the bathroom to wash.

Bruno sat quietly on her bed until she came out and got back under the cover again.

“We’re supposed to see that trip man this afternoon. What’s his name, Saunders? You’d better feel like going in with me.”

Bruno nodded. It was about their trip to Europe, that they might make into a round-the-world trip. It didn’t have any charm this morning. He might like to go around the world with Guy. Bruno stood up, wondering whether to go get another drink.

“How’re you feeling?”

His mother always asked him at the wrong times. “Okay,” he said, sitting down again.

There was a knock on the door, and Herbert came in. “Good morning, madam. Good morning, sir,” Herbert said without looking at either of them.