Ripley Under Water (10 page)

“Another blunt question—has he ever gone to a shrink?”

“Ha-ha! Hee!” Janice squirmed with mirth. “Certainly not! He laughs at them, says they’re phonies—if he ever mentions them.”

Tom signaled for the waiter. “But—Janice, don’t you think it’s unusual that a husband beats his wife?” Tom could hardly control his smile, since Janice surely enjoyed the treatment.

Janice shifted, and frowned. “Beats—” She stared at the wall. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said that.”

Tom had heard of the cover-up-for-mate type, and Janice was that, at least for now. He took a note from his wallet. The bill was less, and Tom motioned for the waiter to keep the rest. “Let’s be cheerful. Tell me David’s next move,” Tom said pleasantly, as if it were an amusing game.

“Move where?”

“Against me.”

Her gaze clouded as if a multitude of possibilities had filled her brain. She managed a smile. “I honestly can’t say, maybe couldn’t put it into words if I—”

“Why not? Try.” Tom waited. “Tossing a stone through one of my windows?”

She didn’t answer, and Tom, disgusted, stood up.

“If you’ll pardon me—” he said.

Silent, maybe affronted, she got up, and Tom let her precede him to the door.

“By the way, I saw you picked David up on Sunday in front of my house,” Tom said. “And now you pick him up again. You’re very attentive.”

Again no answer.

Tom felt suddenly a boiling anger, caused by frustration, he realized. “Why don’t you pull out? Why do you stick around and take it?”

Naturally Janice Pritchard wasn’t going to answer that one, that was hitting too close to home. Tom saw a tear brighten her right eye as they walked, presumably toward Janice’s car, as she was leading.

“Or are you even married?” Tom pursued.

“Oh, stop it!” Now the tears overflowed. “I so much wanted to like you.”

“Don’t bother, ma’am.” Tom was at that moment recalling her satisfied smile as she drove David Pritchard away from Belle Ombre last Sunday morning. “Goodbye.”

Tom turned and walked toward his own car, and trotted the last few yards. He felt like hurling his fist against something, a tree trunk, anything. On the road homeward, he had to be careful not to press too hard on the accelerator.

The front door was locked, Tom was glad to find, and Heloise opened it for him. She had been at the harpsichord. Her Schubert Lieder book was on its stand.

“Mother of God and God’s teeth!” Tom said with profound exasperation, and held his head with both hands for an instant.

“What happened, cheri?”

“The woman is cracked! And it’s depressing. Awful.”

“What did she say?” Heloise was calm.

It took a lot to rattle Heloise, and it did Tom good to look at her composure. “We had a coffee. I did. She—well, you know, these Americans.” He hesitated. Tom still felt he, he and Heloise, could simply ignore the Pritchards. Why upset Heloise with their quirks? “You know, my sweet, I am often bored by people, some people. Bored enough to explode, sorry.” Before Heloise could ask another question, Tom said, “Excuse me,” and went to the lavatory off the front hall, where he washed his face in cold water, his hands with soap and water, and his nails with a brush. With M. Roger Lepetit, he would soon be in another atmosphere entirely. Tom and Heloise never knew which of them would come first for the half-hour with M. Roger, as he chose suddenly and with a polite smile, saying, “Alors, m’sieur” or, “Madame, s’il vous plait?”

M. Lepetit arrived a few minutes later, and after the usual pleasantries about the good weather, the garden in such fine condition, he gestured to Heloise with his rosy little smile, lifted a rather pudgy hand and said, “You, madame? Would you like to begin? Shall we?”

Tom kept in the background, still on his feet. He knew that Heloise did not mind his presence when she played, a fact that Tom appreciated. He would have detested the role of Harsh Critic. He lit a cigarette, stood behind the long sofa, and gazed at the Derwatt over the fireplace. Not a Derwatt, Tom reminded himself, but a Bernard Tufts forgery called Man in Chair. It was reddish-brown with some yellow streaks, and like all Derwatts had multiple outlines, often with darker strokes, which some people said gave them headaches; from a distance the images seemed lifelike, even slightly moving. The man in the chair had a brownish, apelike face, with an expression that could be described as thoughtful, but was by no means defined by clear-cut features. It was the restless (even in a chair), doubting, troubled mood of it which pleased Tom; that and the fact that it was a phony. It had place of honor in his house.

The other Derwatt in the living room was The Red Chairs, another medium-large canvas, of two small girls about ten years old, sitting on straight chairs in tense attitudes, with wide, frightened eyes. Again the reddish-yellow outlines of chairs and figures were tripled and quadrupled, and after a few seconds (Tom always thought, imagining a first view) the observer realized that the background could be flames, that the chairs might be on fire. What was that picture worth now? A six-figure sum in pounds, a high six-figure. Maybe more. It depended on who was auctioning it. Tom’s insurer was always upping his two paintings. Tom had no intention of selling them.

If the vulgar David Pritchard managed to blow all the forgeries, he could never touch The Red Chairs, of course, whose provenance was old and from London. Pritchard couldn’t stick his clumsy nose in and cause devastation, Tom thought. Pritchard had never heard of Bernard Tufts. The lovely measures of Franz Schubert gave Tom strength and heart, even though Heloise’s playing was not of concert standard: the intention, the respect for Schubert, was there, just as in Derwatt’s—no, Bernard Tufts’s—Man in Chair the respect for Derwatt had been there when Bernard painted it in Derwatt’s style.

Tom relaxed his shoulders, flexed his fingers and looked at his nails. All neat and proper. Bernard Tufts had never wanted to share in the profits, in the rising income of the false Derwatts, Tom recalled. Bernard had always accepted just enough to keep himself going in his studio in London.

If a type like Pritchard exposed the forgeries—how?—Bernard Tufts would also be exposed, Tom supposed, dead though he was. Jeff Constant and Ed Banbury would have to answer the question of who had been forging, and of course Cynthia Gradnor knew. The interesting question was, would she have enough respect for her former love Bernard Tufts not to betray him by name? Tom felt a curious and proud desire to do just that, protect the idealistic and childlike Bernard, who had finally died by his own hand (or action, jumping off a cliff in Salzburg) for his sins.

Tom’s story had been that Bernard had left his duffelbag with Tom while he, Bernard, went off to look for a hotel room, as he wanted to change his hotel; and Bernard had never come back. In truth, Tom had followed Bernard, who had jumped off a cliff. And Tom had cremated the body the next day as best he could, and claimed that the body had been that of Derwatt. And Tom had been believed.

Funny, if Cynthia nourished a smoldering resentment, asking herself: Where is Bernard’s body, after all? And Tom knew that she hated him and the Buckmaster Gallery boys.

Chapter 7

The plane began its descent with a dramatic dip of its right wing, and Tom was on his feet, as much as his seatbelt would permit. Heloise had the window seat, Tom had insisted on that, and there it was—the dramatic two prongs, curved inward, of the port of Tangier, reaching out into the Strait as if wanting to capture something.

“Remember the map? There it is!” Tom said.

“Oui, mon cheri.” Heloise seemed not as excited as he, but she did not take her eyes from the round window either.

Unfortunately the window was dirty, and the view not clear. Tom stooped, trying to see Gibraltar. He couldn’t, but he did see the southern tip of Spain, where sat Algeciras. It all looked so small.

The plane straightened, bent the other way and turned left. No view. But again the right wing dipped, and Tom and Heloise were given a prospect, closer now, of white, jammed-together houses on a rise of land, chalky-white little houses with tiny squares of windows. On the ground, the plane taxied for ten minutes, people unfastened seatbelts, and grew too impatient to keep their seats.

They walked into a passport control room with a high ceiling, where sunlight poured down through high closed windows. Warm, Tom removed his summer jacket and put it over his arm. The people on the two slowly moving lines seemed to be French tourists, and there were Moroccan natives also, Tom thought, some wearing djellabas.

In the next room, where Tom claimed their luggage from the floor—a most informal arrangement—he changed one thousand French francs into dirhams, then inquired of a dark-haired woman sitting at the Information Desk the best way to get to the center of town. Taxi. And the price? About fifty dirhams, she replied in French.

Heloise had been “reasonable” and the two of them could manage their few suitcases without a porter. Tom had reminded Heloise that she could buy things in Morocco, and even another suitcase to carry them in.

“Fifty to the city, all right?” Tom said in French to the taxi driver who opened his car door. “Hotel Minzah?” Tom knew there were no taxi meters.

“Get in,” was the brusque reply in French.

Tom and the driver did the loading.

Off they went like a rocket, Tom felt, but the sensation was due to the somewhat bumpy road plus the wind through the open windows. Heloise was holding on to her seat and a strap. Dust came in through the driver’s window. But at least the road was straight, and they seemed to be heading for the cluster of white houses that Tom had seen from the airplane.

Houses rose on either side, rather crude-looking redbrick dwellings, four and six stories high. They rolled into a main street of some sort, with sandaled men and women walking on the pavements, a sidewalk cafe or two, and small children dashing recklessly across the street, causing the driver to brake suddenly. This was undoubtedly the city proper, dusty, grayish, busy with shoppers and strollers. The driver turned left and stopped after a few yards.

Hotel El Minzah. Tom got out and paid, adding another ten dirhams, and a bellhop in red came out to assist them.

Tom registered in the rather formal and high-ceilinged lobby. At least it looked clean, and had a predominance of red and dark red in its colors, although the walls were creamy white.

A few minutes later, Tom and Heloise were in their “suite,” a term Tom always found ludicrously elegant. Heloise washed her hands and face in her quick and efficient way, and set about unpacking, while Tom surveyed the scene from the windows. They were on the fourth floor by European counting. Tom looked down on a busy panorama of grayish and white buildings, none more than six stories high, a disorder of hanging laundry, some tattered and unidentifiable flags from a few roof poles, television aerials aplenty, and more laundry spread out on the rooftops. Directly below, visible from another window in the room, the moneyed class, of which he was presumably one, sunned itself and sprawled on hotel grounds. The sun had disappeared from the area around the Minzah’s swimming pool. Beyond the horizontal forms in bikinis and swimming trunks was a border of white tables and chairs, and beyond these, pleasant and well-cared-for palm trees, bushes, and bougainvilleas in bloom.

At the level of Tom’s thighs, an air-conditioner blew up cool air, and he held out his hands, letting the coolness go up his sleeves.

“Cheri!” A cry of mild distress. Then a short laugh. “L’eau est coupee! Tout d’un coup!” She continued, “Just as Noelle said. Remember?”

“For four hours a day in toto, didn’t she say?” Tom smiled. “And what about the toilet? And the bath?” Tom went into the bathroom. “Didn’t Noelle say—yes, look at this! A bucket of clean water! Not that I’d want to drink it, but to wash with—“

Tom did manage to wash his hands and face in cold water, and between them they unpacked nearly everything. Then they went out for a stroll.

Tom jingled strange coins in his right-hand trouser pocket, and wondered what to buy first. A cafe, postcards? They were at the Place de France, an intersection of five streets, including the Rue de la Liberte, where their hotel was, according to Tom’s map.

“This!” said Heloise , pointing at a tooled leather purse. It hung outside a shop along with scarves and copper bowls of questionable utility. “Pretty, Tome? Unusual.”

“Um-m—won’t there be other shops, my sweet? Let’s look around.” It was already nearly 7 p.m. And a couple of shopkeepers were starting to close for the day, Tom observed. He took Heloise ‘s hand suddenly. “Isn’t it terrific? A new country!”

She smiled back at him. He saw the curious dark lines in her lavender eyes that went from the pupil like spokes from a hub; a heavy image for something as beautiful as Heloise ‘s eyes.

“I love you,” Tom said.

They walked into the Boulevard Pasteur, a broad street which sloped slightly downward. More shops, and denser everything. Girls and women in long gowns swept by, their bare feet in sandals, while the boys and young men seemed to prefer blue jeans and sneakers and summer shirts.

“Would you like an iced tea, my pet? Or a kir? I bet they know how to make a kir.”

Back toward their hotel then, and at the Place de France, according to Tom’s undetailed map in the brochure, found the Cafe de Paris, which had a long and noisy row of tables and chairs along the pavement. Tom captured what seemed the last little round table, and wangled a second chair from a table nearby.

“Some money, my dear,” Tom said, pulling out his wallet and offering Heloise half the paper dirhams.

She had a graceful way of opening her handbag—this one was something like a saddlebag, but smaller—and making the banknotes or whatever disappear instantly, yet in the right place. “And what is this?”

“About—four hundred French. I’ll change more this evening at the hotel. The Minzah has the same rate, I noticed, as at the airport.”

Heloise showed no sign of interest in his remark, but Tom knew she would remember. He heard no French around him, only Arabic or what he had read was a Berber dialect. Either way, it was unintelligible to Tom. The tables were taken almost entirely by men, several middle-aged and a bit heavy, in short-sleeved shirts. Only one distant table, in fact, was occupied by a blondish man in shorts and a woman.