Patricia Highsmith - Ripley Under Ground

ADDITIONAL BOOKS BY PATRICIA HIGHSMITH
PUBLISHED BY W. W. NORTON

The Talented Mr. Ripley

Ripleys Game

The Boy Who Followed Ripley

Ripley Under Water

Strangers on a Train

The Price of Salt (as Claire Morgan)

The Blunderer

Deep Water

This Sweet Sickness

The Glass Cell

A Suspension of Mercy

A Dogs Ransom

Little Tales of Misogyny

The Animal-Lovers Book of Beastly Murder

Slowly, Slowly in the Wind

The Black House

People Who Knock on the Door

Mermaids on the Golf Course

Small g: A Summer Idyll

Nothing That Meets the Eye: The Uncollected Stories of Patricia Highsmith

ADDITIONAL TITLES FROM OTHER PUBLISHERS

Miranda the Panda Is on the Veranda (with Doris Sanders)

A Game for the Living

The Cry of the Owl

The Two Faces of January

Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction

Those Who Walk Away

The Tremor of Forgery

The Snail-Watcher and Other Stories

Ediths Diary

Found in the Street

Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes

Ripley
Under Ground

Patricia Highsmith

W. W. N ORTON & C OMPANY
N EW YORK L ONDON

To my Polish neighbors, Agns and Georges
Barylski, my friends of France, 77.

I think I would more readily die for what I do not believe in than for what I hold to be true.... Sometimes I think that the artistic life is a long and lovely suicide, and I am not sorry that it is so.

Oscar Wilde in his Personal Letters

Contents

T om was in the garden when the telephone rang. He let Mme. Annette, his housekeeper, answer it, and went on scraping at the soppy moss that clung to the sides of the stone steps. It was a wet October.

M. Tome ! came Mme. Annettes soprano voice. Its London!

Coming, Tom called. He tossed down the trowel and went up the steps.

The downstairs telephone was in the living room. Tom did not sit down on the yellow satin sofa, because he was in Levis.

Hello, Tom. Jeff Constant. Did you... Burp .

Can you talk louder? Its a bad connection.

Is this better? I can hear you fine.

People in London always could. A little.

Did you get my letter?

No, Tom said.

Oh. Were in trouble. I wanted to warn you. Theres a...

Crackling, a buzz, a dull click, and they were cut off.

Damn, Tom said mildly. Warn him ? Was something wrong at the gallery? With Derwatt Ltd? Warn him? Tom was hardly involved. He had dreamed up the idea of Derwatt Ltd., true, and he derived a little income from it, but Tom glanced at the telephone, expecting it to ring again at any moment. Or should he ring Jeff? No, he didnt know if Jeff was at his studio or at the gallery. Jeff Constant was a photographer.

Tom walked toward the French windows that gave onto the back garden. Hed scrape a bit more at the moss, he thought. Tom gardened casually, and he liked spending an hour at it every day, mowing with the push-powered lawnmower, raking and burning twigs, weeding. It was exercise, and he could also daydream. He had hardly resumed with the trowel, when the telephone rang.

Mme. Annette was coming into the living room, carrying a duster. She was short and sturdy, about sixty, and rather jolly. She knew not a word of English and seemed incapable of learning any, even Good morning, which suited Tom perfectly.

Ill get it, madame, said Tom, and took the telephone.

Hello . Jeffs voice said. Look, Tom, Im wondering if you could come over. To London, I...

You what? It was again a poor connection, but not as bad.

I saidIve explained it in a letter. I cant explain here. But its important, Tom.

Has somebody made a mistake? Bernard?

In a way. Theres a man coming from New York, probably tomorrow.

Who?

I explained it in my letter. You know Derwatts show opens on Tuesday. Ill hold him off till then. Ed and I just wont be available. Jeff sounded quite anxious. Are you free, Tom?

Wellyes. But Tom didnt want to go to London.

Try to keep it from Heloise. That youre coming to London.

Heloise is in Greece.

Oh, thats good. The first hint of relief in Jeffs voice.

Jeffs letter came that afternoon at five, express and registered.

104 Charles Place

N.W.8.

Dear Tom,

The new Derwatt show opens on Tuesday, the 15th, his first in two years. Bernard has nineteen new canvases and other pictures will be lent. Now for the bad news.

There is an American named Thomas Murchison, not a dealer but a collectorretired with plenty of lolly. He bought a Derwatt from us three years ago. He compared it with an earlier Derwatt he has just seen in the States, and now he says his is phony. It is, of course, as it is one of Bernards. He wrote to the Buckmaster Gallery (to me) saying he thinks the painting he has is not genuine, because the technique and colors belong to a period of five or six years ago in Derwatts work. I have the distinct feeling Murchison intends to make a stink here. And what to do about it? Youre always good on ideas, Tom.

Can you come over and talk to us? All expenses paid by the Buckmaster Gallery? We need an injection of confidence more than anything. I dont think Bernard has messed up any of the new canvases. But Bernard is in a flap, and we dont want him around even at the opening, especially at the opening.

Please come at once if you can!

Best,

Jeff

P.S. Murchisons letter was courteous, but supposing hes the kind who will insist on looking up Derwatt in Mexico to verify, etc.?

The last was a point, Tom thought, because Derwatt didnt exist. The story (invented by Tom), which the Buckmaster Gallery and Derwatts loyal little band of friends put out, was that Derwatt had gone to a tiny village in Mexico to live, and he saw no one, had no telephone, and forbade the gallery to give his address to anyone. Well, if Murchison went to Mexico, he would have an exhausting search, enough to keep any man busy for a lifetime.

What Tom could see happening was Murchisonwho would probably bring his Derwatt painting overtalking to other art dealers and then the press. It could arouse suspicion, and Derwatt might go up in smoke. Would the gang drag him into it? (Tom always thought of the gallery batch, Derwatts old friends, as the gang, though he hated the term every time it came into his head.) And Bernard might mention Tom Ripley, Tom thought, not out of malice but out of his own insanealmost Christ-likehonesty.

Tom had kept his name and his reputation clean, amazingly clean, considering all he did. It would be most embarrassing if it were in the French papers that Thomas Ripley of Villeperce-sur-Seine, husband of Heloise Plisson, daughter of Jacques Plisson, millionaire owner of Plisson Pharmaceutiques, had dreamed up the money-making fraud of Derwatt Ltd., and had for years been deriving a percentage from it, even if it was only ten percent. It would look exceedingly shabby. Even Heloise, whose morals Tom considered next to nonexistent, might react to this, and certainly her father would put the pressure on her (by stopping her allowance) to get a divorce.

Derwatt Ltd. was now big, and a collapse would have ramifications. Down would go the lucrative art supply line of materials labeled Derwatt, from which the gang, and Tom, got royalties also. Then there was the Derwatt School of Art in Perugia, mainly for nice old ladies and American girls on holiday, but still a source of income, too. The art school got its money not so much from teaching art and selling Derwatt supplies as from acting as a rental agent, finding houses and furnished apartments, of the most expensive order, for well-heeled tourist-students, and taking a cut from it all. The school was run by a pair of English queens, who were not in on the Derwatt hoax.