Ripley's Game (2 page)

Oh, yes, I’ve heard of you.
Did that mean that Trevanny or whatever his name was thought he was responsible for Bernard Tuft’s death, and before that Dickie Greenleaf’s? Or was the Englishman merely embittered against everyone because of his ailment? Dyspeptic, like a man with a constant stomach ache? Now Tom recalled Trevanny’s wife, not a pretty but a rather interesting-looking woman with chestnut hair, friendly and outgoing, making an effort at that party in the small living-room and the kitchen where no one had sat down on the few chairs available.

What Tom was thinking was: would this man take on such a job as Reeves was proposing? An interesting approach to Trevanny had occurred to Tom. It was an approach that might work with any man, if one prepared the ground, but in this case the ground was already prepared. Trevanny was seriously worried about his health. Tom’s idea was nothing more than a practical joke, he thought, a nasty one, but the man had been nasty to him. The joke might not last more than a day or so, until Trevanny could consult his doctor.

Tom was amused by his thoughts, and eased himself gently from Heloise, so that if he shook with repressed laughter for an instant, he wouldn’t awaken her. Suppose Trevanny was vulnerable, and carried out Reeves’ plan like a soldier, like a dream? Was it worth a try? Yes, because Tom had nothing to lose. Neither had Trevanny. Trevanny might gain. Reeves might gain – according to Reeves, but let Reeves figure that out, because what Reeves wanted seemed as vague to Tom as Reeves’ microfilm activities, which presumably had to do with international spying. Were governments aware of the insane antics of some of their spies? Of those whimsical, half-demented men flitting from Bucharest to Moscow and Washington with guns and microfilm – men who might with the same enthusiasm have put their energies to international warfare in stamp-collecting, or in acquiring secrets of miniature electric trains?

2

So it was that some ten days later, on 22 March, Jonathan Trevanny, who lived in the Rue St Merry, Fontainebleau, received a curious letter from his good friend Alan McNear. Alan, a Paris representative of an English electronics firm, had written the letter just before leaving for New York on a business assignment, and oddly the day after he had visited the Trevannys in Fontainebleau. Jonathan had expected – or rather not expected – a sort of thank-you letter from Alan for the send-off party Jonathan and Simone had given him, and Alan did write a few words of appreciation, but the paragraph that puzzled Jonathan went:

Jon, I was shocked at the news in regard to the old blood ailment, and am even now hoping it isn’t so. I was told that you knew, but weren’t telling any of your friends. Very noble of you, but what are friends for? You needn’t think we’ll avoid you or that we’ll think you’ll become so melancholy that we won’t want to see you. Your friends (and I’m one) are here – always. But I can’t write anything I want to say, really. I’ll do better when I see you next, in a couple of months when I wangle myself a vacation, so forgive these inadequate words.

What was Alan talking about? Had his doctor, Dr Perrier, said something to his
friends,
something he wouldn’t tell him? Something about not living much longer? Dr Perrier hadn’t been to the party for Alan, but could Dr Perrier have said something to someone else?

Had Dr Perrier spoken to Simone? And was Simone keeping it from him, too?

As Jonathan thought of these possibilities, he was standing in his garden at 8.30 a.m., chilly under his sweater, his fingers smudged with earth. He’d best speak with Dr Perrier today. No use with Simone. She might put up an act.
But darling, what’re you talking about?
Jonathan wasn’t sure he’d be able to tell if she was putting up an act or not.

And Dr Perrier – could he trust him? Dr Perrier was always bouncing with optimism, which was fine if you had something minor – you felt fifty per cent better, even cured. But Jonathan knew he hadn’t anything minor. He had myeloid leukemia, characterized by an excess of yellow matter in the bone marrow. In the past five years, he’d had at least four blood transfusions per year. Every time he felt weak, he was supposed to get to his doctor, or to the Fontainebleau hospital for a transfusion. Dr Perrier had said (and so had a specialist in Paris) that there would come a time when the decline might be swift, when transfusions wouldn’t do the trick any longer. Jonathan had read enough about his ailment to know that himself. No doctor as yet had come up with a cure for myeloid leukemia. On the average, it killed after six to twelve years, or six to eight even. Jonathan was entering his sixth year with it.

Jonathan set his fork back in the little brick structure, formerly an outside toilet, that served as a tool shed, then walked to his back steps. He paused with one foot on the first step and drew the fresh morning air into his lungs, thinking, ‘How many weeks will I have to enjoy such mornings?’ He remembered thinking the same thing last spring, however. Buck up, he told himself, he’d known for six years that he might not live to see thirty-five. Jonathan mounted the eight iron steps with a firm tread, already thinking that it was 8.’2 a.m., and that he was due in his shop at 9 a.m. or a few minutes after.

Simone had gone off with Georges to the Ecole Maternelle, and the house was empty. Jonathan washed his hands at the sink and made use of the vegetable brush, which Simone would not have approved of, but he left the brush clean. The only other sink was in the bathroom on the top floor. There was no telephone in the house. He’d ring Dr Perrier from his shop the first thing.

Jonathan walked to the Rue de la Paroisse and turned left, then went on to the Rue des Sablons which crossed it. In his shop, Jonathan dialled Dr Perrier’s number, which he knew by heart.

The nurse said the doctor was booked up today, which Jonathan had expected.

‘But this is urgent. It’s something that won’t take long. Just a question really – but I must see him.’

‘You are feeling weak, M. Trevanny?’

‘Yes, I am,’ Jonathan said at once.

He got an appointment for twelve noon. The hour had a certain doom about it.

Jonathan was a picture framer. He cut mats and glass, made frames, chose frames from his stock for clients who were undecided, and once in a blue moon, in buying old frames at auctions and from junk dealers, he got a picture that was of some interest with the frame, a picture which he could clean and put in his window and sell. But it wasn’t a lucrative business. He scraped along. Seven years ago he’d had a partner, another Englishman, from Manchester, and they had started an antique shop in Fontainebleau, dealing mainly in junk which they refurbished and sold. This hadn’t paid enough for two, and Roy had pushed off and got a job as a garage mechanic somewhere near Paris. Shortly after that, a Paris doctor had said the same thing that a London doctor had told Jonathan: ‘You’re inclined to anaemia. You’d better have frequent check-ups, and it’s best if you don’t do any heavy work.’ So from handling armoires and sofas, Jonathan had turned to the lighter work of handling picture frames and glass. Before Jonathan had married Simone, he had told her that he might not live more than another six years, because just at the time he met Simone, he’d had it confirmed by two doctors that his periodic weakness was caused by myeloid leukemia.

Now, Jonathan thought as he calmly, very calmly began his day, Simone might remarry if he died. Simone worked five afternoons a week from 2.30 p.m. until 6.30 p.m. at a shoe shop in the Avenue Franklin Roosevelt, which was within walking distance of their house, and this was only in the past year when Georges had been old enough to be put into the French equivalent of kindergarten. He and Simone needed the two hundred francs per week that Simone earned, but Jonathan was irked by the thought that Brezard, her boss, was a bit of a lecher, liked to pinch his employees’ behinds, and doubtless try his luck in the back room where the stock was. Simone was a married woman, as Brezard well knew, so there was a limit as to how far he could go, Jonathan supposed, but that never stopped his type from trying. Simone was not at all a flirt – she had a curious shyness, in fact, that suggested that she thought herself not attractive to men. It was a quality that endeared her to Jonathan. In Jonathan’s opinion, Simone was supercharged with sex appeal, though of the kind that might not be apparent to the average man, and it annoyed Jonathan especially that the cruising swine Brezard must have become aware of Simone’s very different kind of attractiveness, and that he wanted some of it for himself. Not that Simone talked much about Brezard. Only once had she mentioned that he tried it on with his women employees who were two besides Simone. For an instant that morning, as Jonathan presented a framed watercolour to a client, he imagined Simone, after a discreet interval, succumbing to the odious Brezard, who after all was a bachelor and financially better off than Jonathan. Absurd, Jonathan thought. Simone hated his type.

‘Oh, it’s lovely! Excellent!’ said the young woman in a bright red coat, holding the watercolour at arm’s length.

Jonathan’s long, serious face slowly smiled, as if a small and private sun had come out of clouds and begun to shine within him. She was so genuinely pleased! Jonathan didn’t know her, in fact she was picking up the picture that an older woman, perhaps her mother, had brought in. The price should have been twenty francs more than he had first estimated, because the frame was not the same as the older woman had chosen (Jonathan had not had enough in stock), but Jonathan didn’t mention this and accepted the eighty francs agreed upon.

Then Jonathan pushed a broom over his wooden floor, and feather-dusted the three or four pictures in his small front window. His shop was positively shabby, Jonathan thought that morning. No colour anywhere, frames of all sizes leaning against unpainted walls, samples of frame wood hanging from the ceiling, a counter with an order book, ruler, pencils. At the back of the shop stood a long wooden table where Jonathan worked with his mitre boxes, saws and glass cutters. Also on the big table were his carefully protected sheets of mat board, a great roll of brown paper, rolls of string, wire, pots of glue, boxes of variously sized nails, and above the table on the wall were racks of knives and hammers. In principle, Jonathan liked the nineteenth-century atmosphere, the lack of commercial frou-frou. He wanted his shop to look as if a good craftsman ran it, and in that he had succeeded, he thought. He never overcharged, did his work on time, or if he was going to be late, he notified his clients by postcard or a telephone call. People appreciated that, Jonathan had found.

At 11.35 a.m., having framed two small pictures and fixed their owners’ names to them, Jonathan washed his hands and face at the cold water tap in his sink, combed his hair, stood up straight and tried to brace himself for the worst. Dr Perrier’s office was not far away in the Rue Grande. Jonathan turned his door card to
OUVERT
at 14.30, locked his front door, and set out.

Jonathan had to wait in Dr Perrier’s front room with its sickly, dusty rose laurel plant. The plant never flowered, it didn’t die, and never grew, never changed. Jonathan identified himself with the plant. Again and again his eyes were drawn to it, though he tried to think of other things. There were copies
of Paris Match
on the oval table, out of date and much thumbed, but Jonathan found them more depressing than the laurel plant. Dr Perrier also worked at the big Hôspital de Fontainebleau, Jonathan reminded himself, otherwise it would have seemed an absurdity to entrust one’s life, to believe an opinion of whether one lived or died, to a doctor who worked in such a wretched little place as this looked.

The nurse came out and beckoned.

‘Well, well, how’s the interesting patient, my most interesting patient?’ said Dr Perrier, rubbing his hands, then extending one to Jonathan.

Jonathan shook his hand. ‘I feel quite all right, thank you. But what is this about – I mean the tests of two months ago. I understand they are not so favourable?’

Dr Perrier looked blank, and Jonathan watched him intently. Then Dr Perrier smiled, showing yellowish teeth under his carelessly trimmed moustache.

‘What do you mean unfavourable? You saw the results.’

‘But – you know I’m not an expert in understanding them – perhaps.’

‘But I explained them to you – Now what is the matter? You’re feeling tired again?’

‘In fact no.’ Since Jonathan knew the doctor wanted to get away for lunch, he said hastily, ‘To tell the truth, a friend of mine has learned somewhere that – I’m due for a crisis. Maybe I haven’t long to live. Naturally, I thought this information must have come from you.’

Dr Perrier shook his head, then laughed, hopped about like a bird and came to rest with his skinny arms lightly outspread on the top of a glass-enclosed bookcase. ‘My dear sir – first of all, if it were true, I would not have said it to anybody. That is not ethical. Second, it is not true, as far as I know from the last test. – Do you want another test today? Late this afternoon at the hospital, maybe I —’

‘Not necessarily. What I really wanted to know is – is it true? You wouldn’t just not tell me?’ Jonathan said with a laugh. Just to make me feel better?’

‘What nonsense! Do you think I’m that kind of a doctor?’

Yes, Jonathan thought, looking Dr Perrier straight in the eye. And God bless him, maybe, in some cases, but Jonathan thought he deserved the facts, because he was the kind of man who could face the facts. Jonathan bit his underlip. He could go to the lab in Paris, he thought, insist on seeing the specialist Moussu again. Also he might get something out of Simone today at lunch-time.

Dr Perrier was patting his arm. ‘Your friend – and I won’t ask who he is! – is either mistaken or not a very nice friend, I think. Now then, you should tell me when and if you become tired,
that
is what counts…’

Twenty minutes later, Jonathan was climbing the front steps of his house, carrying an apple tart and a long loaf of bread. He let himself in with his key, and walked down the hall to the kitchen. He smelled frying potatoes, a mouthwatering smell always signifying lunch, not dinner, and Simone’s potatoes would be in long slender pieces, not short chunks like the chips in England. Why had he thought of English chips?