Patricia Highsmith - Strangers on a Train

“Hasn’t he annoyed you? Hasn’t he thrust himself on you many times?”

“I don’t think so,” Guy said.

“Were you annoyed when he came to your wedding?”

“No.”

“Did Charles ever tell you that he hated his father?”

“Yes, he did.”

“Did he ever tell you he’d like to kill him?”

“No,” he replied in the same matter-of-fact tone.

Gerard got the brown paper-wrapped book from a drawer in his desk. “Here’s the book Charles meant to mail you. Sorry I can’t let you have it just now, because I may need it. How did Charles happen to have your book?”

“He told me he found it on the train.” Guy studied Gerard’s sleepy, enigmatic smile. He had seen a trace of it the night Gerard called at the house, but not like this. This smile was calculated to inspire dislike. This smile was a professional weapon. What it must be, Guy thought, facing that smile day after day. Involuntarily, he looked over at Bruno.

“And you didn’t see each other on the train?” Gerard looked from Guy to Bruno.

“No,” said Guy.

“I spoke with the waiter who served you two dinner in Charles’ compartment.”

Guy kept his eyes on Gerard. This naked shame, he thought, was more annihilating than guilt. This was annihilation he was feeling, even as he sat upright, looking straight at Gerard.

“So what?” Bruno said shrilly.

“So I’m interested in why you two take such elaborate trouble,” Gerard wagged his head amusedly, “to say you met months later.” He waited, letting the passing seconds eat at them. “You won’t tell me the answer. Well, the answer is obvious. That is, one answer, as a speculation.”

All three of them were thinking of the answer, Guy thought. It was visible in the air now, linking him and Bruno, Bruno and Gerard, Gerard and himself. The answer Bruno had declared beyond thought, the eternally missing ingredient.

“Will you tell me, Charles, you who read so many detective stories?”

“I don’t know what you’re getting at.”

“Within a few days, your wife was killed, Mr. Haines. Within a few months, Charles’ father. My obvious and first speculation is that you both knew those murders were going to happen—”

“Oh, crap!” Bruno said.

“—and discussed them. Pure speculation, of course. That’s assuming you met on the train. Where did you meet?” Gerard smiled. “Mr. Haines?”

“Yes,” Guy said, “we met on the train.”

“And why’ve you been so afraid of admitting it?” Gerard jabbed one of his freckled fingers at him, and again Guy felt in Gerard’s prosaicness his power to terrify.

“I don’t know,” Guy said.

“Wasn’t it because Charles told you he would like to have his father killed? And you were uneasy then, Mr. Haines, because you knew?”

Was that Gerard’s trump? Guy said slowly, “Charles said nothing about killing his father.”

Gerard’s eyes slid over in time to catch Bruno’s tight smirk of satisfaction. “Pure speculation, of course,” Gerard said.

Guy and Bruno left the building together. Gerard had dismissed them together, and they walked together down the long block toward the little park where the subways were, and the taxicabs. Bruno looked back at the tall narrow building they had left.

“All right, he still hasn’t anything,” Bruno said. “Any way you look at it, he hasn’t anything.”

Bruno was sullen, but calm. Suddenly Guy realized how cool Bruno had been under Gerard’s attack. Guy was continually imagining Bruno hysterical under pressure. He glanced quickly at Bruno’s tall hunched figure beside him, feeling that wild, reckless comradeship of the day in the restaurant. But he had nothing to say. Surely, he thought, Bruno must know that Gerard wasn’t going to tell them everything he had discovered.

“You know, the funny thing,” Bruno continued, “Gerard’s not looking for us, he’s looking for other people.”

Forty-two

Gerard poked a finger between the bars and waggled it at the little bird that fluttered in terror against the opposite side of the cage. Gerard whistled a single soft note.

From the center of the room, Anne watched him uneasily. She didn’t like his having just told her Guy had been lying, then his strolling off to frighten the canary. She hadn’t liked Gerard for the last quarter hour, and because she had thought she did like him on his first visit, her misjudgment annoyed her.

“What’s his name?” Gerard asked.

“Sweetie,” Anne replied. She ducked her head a little, embarrassedly, and swung half around. Her new alligator pumps made her feel very tall and graceful, and she had thought, when she bought them that afternoon, that Guy would like them, that they would coax a smile from him as they sat having a cocktail before dinner. But Gerard’s arrival had spoilt that.

“Do you have any idea why your husband didn’t want to say he met Charles June before last?”

The month Miriam was murdered, Anne thought again. June before last meant nothing else to her. “It was a difficult month for him,” she said. “It was the month his wife died. He might have forgotten almost anything that happened that month.” She frowned, feeling Gerard was making too much of his little discovery, that it couldn’t matter so very much, since Guy hadn’t even seen Charles in the six months afterwards.

“Not in this case,” Gerard said casually, reseating himself. “No, I think Charles talked with your husband on the train about his father, told him he wanted him dead, maybe even told him how he intended to go about—”

“I can’t imagine Guy listening to that,” Anne interrupted him.

“I don’t know,” Gerard went on blandly, “I don’t know, but I strongly suspect Charles knew about his father’s murder and that he may have confided to your husband that night on the train. Charles is that kind of a young man. And I think the kind of man your husband is would have kept quiet about it, tried to avoid Charles from then on. Don’t you?”

It would explain a great deal, Anne thought. But it would also make Guy a kind of accomplice. Gerard seemed to want to make Guy an accomplice. “I’m sure my husband wouldn’t have tolerated Charles even to this extent,” she said firmly, “if Charles had told him anything like that.”

“A very good point. However—” Gerard stopped vaguely, as if lost in his own slow thoughts.

Anne did not like to look at the top of his bald freckled head, so she stared at the tile cigarette box on the coffee table, and finally took a cigarette.

“Do you think your husband has any suspicion who murdered his wife, Mrs. Haines?”

Anne blew her smoke out defiantly. “I certainly do not.”

“You see, if that night on the train, Charles went into the subject of murder, he went into it thoroughly. And if your husband did have some reason to think his wife’s life was in danger, and if he mentioned it to Charles—why then they have a sort of mutual secret, a mutual peril even. It’s only a speculation,” he hurried to add, “but investigators always have to speculate.”

“I know my husband couldn’t have said anything about his wife’s being in danger. I was with him in Mexico City when the news came, and with him days before in New York.”

“How about March of this year?” Gerard asked in the same even tone. He reached for his empty highball glass, and submitted to Anne’s taking it to refill.

Anne stood at the bar with her back to Gerard, remembering March, the month Charles’ father was killed, remembering Guy’s nervousness then. Had that fight been in February or March? And hadn’t he fought with Charles Bruno?

“Do you think your husband could have been seeing Charles now and then around the month of March without your knowing about it?”