from RIPLEY‘S GAME

Patricia Highsmit

1

“There’s no such thing as a perfect murder,” Tom said to Reeves. “That’s just a parlor game, trying to dream one up. Of course you could say there are a lot of unsolved murders. That’s different.” Tom was bored. He walked up and down in front of his big fireplace, where a small but cozy fire crackled. Tom felt he had spoken in a stuffy, pontificating way. But the point was he couldn’t help Reeves, and he’d already told him that.

“Yes, sure,” said Reeves. He was sitting in one of the yellow silk armchairs, his lean figure hunched forward; hands clasped between his knees. He had a bony face, short light brown hair, cold gray eyes—not a pleasant face but a face that might have been rather handsome if it hadn’t borne a scar that traveled five inches from his right temple across his cheek almost to his mouth. Slightly pinker than the rest of his face, the scar looked like a bad job of stitching, or as if perhaps it had never been stitched. Tom had never asked about the scar, but Reeves had volunteered once, “A girl did it with her compact. Can you imagine?” (No. Tom couldn’t.) Reeves had given Tom a quick, sad smile, one of the few smiles Tom could recall from Reeves. And, on another occasion, “I was thrown from a horse—dragged by the stirrup for a few yards.” Reeves had said that to someone else, but Tom had been present. Tom suspected a dull knife in a very nasty fight somewhere.

Now Reeves wanted Tom to provide someone—suggest someone—to do one or perhaps two “simple murders” and perhaps one theft, also safe and simple. Reeves had come from Hamburg to Villeperce to talk to Tom, and he was going to stay the night and go to Paris tomorrow to talk to someone else, then return to his home in Hamburg, presumably to do some more thinking if he failed. Reeves was primarily a fence, but lately he had been dabbling in the illegal gambling world of Hamburg, which he was now undertaking to protect. Protect from what? Italian sharks who wanted to come in. One Italian in Hamburg was a Mafia button man, sent out as a feeler, Reeves thought, and the other might be one—from a different family. By eliminating one or both of these intruders, Reeves hoped to discourage further Mafia attempts, and also to draw the attention of the Hamburg police to a Mafia threat. Then let the police handle the rest; which was to say, throw the Mafia out. “These Hamburg boys are a decent batch,” Reeves had declared fervently. “Maybe what they’re doing is illegal, running a couple of private casinos, but as clubs they’re not illegal, and they’re not taking outrageous profits. It’s not like Las Vegas, all Mafia-controlled, and right under the noses of the American cops!”

Tom took the poker, pushed the fire together, and put another neatly cut third of a log on. It was nearly six. Soon be time for a drink. And why not now? “Would you—”

Mme. Annette, the Ripleys’ housekeeper, came in from the kitchen hall. “Excuse me, Messieurs. Would you like your drinks now, M. Tome, since the gentleman has not wanted any tea?”

“Yes, thank you, Mme. Annette. Just what I was thinking. And ask Mme. Héloïse to join us, would you?” Tom wanted Heloise to lighten the atmosphere a little. He had said to Heloise, before he went to Orly at three to fetch Reeves, that Reeves wanted to talk to him about something, so Héloïse had puttered about in the garden or stayed upstairs all afternoon.

“You wouldn’t consider taking it on yourself?” Reeves said with a last-minute urgency and hope. “You’re not connected, you see, and that’s what we want. Safety. And after all, the money—ninetysix thousand bucks—isn’t bad.”

Tom shook his head. “I’m connected with you—in a way.” Dammit, he’d done little jobs for Reeves Minot, such as mailing small stolen items, or recovering tiny objects like microfilm rolls from toothpaste tubes where Reeves had planted them. “How much of this cloak-and-dagger stuff do you think I can get away with? I’ve got my reputation to protect, you know.” Tom felt like smiling at that, but at the same time his heart had quickened with genuine feeling, and he stood taller, conscious of the fine house in which he lived, of his secure existence now, six whole months after the Derwatt episode, a near catastrophe from which he had escaped with no worse than a bit of suspicion upon him. Thin ice, yes, but the ice hadn’t broken through. Tom had accompanied the English Inspector Webster and a couple of forensic men to the Salzburg woods where he had cremated the body of the man presumed to be the painter Derwatt. Why had he crushed the skull? the police had asked. Tom still winced when he thought of it, because he had done it to try to scatter and hide the upper teeth. The lower jaw had come away easily, and Tom had buried it at a distance. But the upper teeth—some of them had been gathered by one of the forensic men. Fortunately there had been no record of Derwatt’s teeth with any dentist in London, Derwatt having been living (it was believed) in Mexico for the preceding six years. “It seemed part of the cremation, part of the idea of reducing him to ashes,” Tom had replied. The cremated body had been Bernard’s. Yes, Tom could still shudder, as much at the danger of that moment as at the horror of his act, dropping a big stone on the charred skull. But he hadn’t killed Bernard. Bernard Tufts had been a suicide.

Tom said, “Surely among all the people you know, you can find somebody who can do it.”

“Yes, and that would be a connection—more than you. Oh, the people I know are sort of known,” Reeves said with sad defeat in his voice. “You know a lot of respectable people, Tom, people really in the clear, people above reproach.”

Tom laughed. “How’re you going to get such people? Sometimes I think you’re out of your mind, Reeves.”

“No! You know what I mean. Someone who’d do it for the money, just the money. They don’t have to be experts. We’d prepare the way. It’d be like—public assassinations. Someone who, if he was questioned, would look—absolutely incapable of doing such a thing.”

Mme. Annette came in with the bar cart. The silver ice bucket shone. The cart squeaked slightly. Tom had been meaning to oil it for weeks. Tom might have gone on bantering with Reeves because Mme. Annette, bless her soul, didn’t understand English, but Tom was tired of the subject, and delighted by Mme. Annette’s interruption. Mme. Annette was in her sixties, from a Normandy family, fine of feature and sturdy of body, a gem of a servant. Tom could not imagine Belle Ombre functioning without her.

Then Héloïse came in from the garden, and Reeves got to his feet. Héloïse was wearing bell-bottom pink-and-red striped dungarees with LEVI printed vertically on all the stripes. Her blond hair swung long and loose. Tom saw the firelight glow in it and thought, What purity compared to what we’ve been talking about! The light in her hair was gold, however, which made Tom think of money. Well, he didn’t really need any more money, even if the Derwatt picture sales, of which he got a percentage, would soon come to an end because there would be no more pictures. He still got a percentage from the Derwatt Art Supplies Company, and that would continue. Then there was the modest but slowly increasing income from the Greenleaf securities that he had inherited in a will forged by Tom himself. Not to mention Héloïse’s generous allowance from her father. No use being greedy. Tom detested murder unless it was absolutely necessary.

“Did you have a good talk?” Héloïse asked in English, and fell back gracefully onto the yellow sofa.

“Yes, thank you,” said Reeves.

The rest of the conversation was in French, because Héloïse was not comfortable in English. Reeves did not know much French but he got along, and they were not talking about anything important: the garden, the mild winter, which seemed really to have passed because here it was early March and the daffodils were opening. Tom poured champagne for Héloïse from one of the little bottles on the cart.

“How ees eet in Hambourg?” Héloïse ventured again in English, and Tom saw amusement in her eyes as Reeves struggled to get out a conventional response in French.

It was not too cold in Hamburg, either, and Reeves added that he had a garden also, as his petite maison found itself on the Alster, which was water; that was to say, a sort of bay where many people had homes with gardens and water, meaning they could have small boats if they wished.

Tom knew that Héloïse disliked Reeves Minot, distrusted him, that Reeves was the kind of person Héloïse wanted Tom to avoid. Tom reflected with satisfaction that he could honestly say to Héloïse tonight that he had declined to cooperate in the scheme that Reeves had proposed. Héloïse tonight that he had was always worried about what her father would say. Her father, Jacques Plissot, was a millionaire pharmaceutical manufacturer, a Gaullist, the essence of French respectability. And he had never cared for Tom. “My father will not stand for much more!” Héloïse often warned Tom, but Tom knew she was more interested in his own safety than in hanging on to the allowance her father gave her—an allowance he frequently threatened to cut off, according to Héloïse. She had lunch with her parents at their home in Chantilly once a week, usually Friday. If her father ever severed her allowance, they could not quite make it at Belle Ombre, Tom knew.

The dinner menu was medallions de boeuf, preceded by cold artichokes with Mme. Annette’s own sauce. Héloïse had changed into a simple dress of pale blue. She sensed already, Tom thought, that Reeves had not got what he had come for. Before they all retired, Tom made sure that Reeves had everything he needed, and at what hour he would like tea or coffee brought to his room. Coffee at eight, Reeves said. Reeves had the guest room in the left center of the house, which gave him the bathroom that was usually Héloïse’s, but from which Mme. Annette had already removed Héloïse’s toothbrush to Tom’s bathroom, off his room.

“I am glad he is going tomorrow. Why is he so tense?” Héloïse asked while brushing her teeth.

“He’s always tense.” Tom turned off the shower, stepped out, and quickly enveloped himself in a big yellow towel. “That’s why he’s thin—maybe.” They were speaking in English, because Héloïse was not shy about speaking English with him.

“How did you meet him?”

Tom couldn’t remember. When? Maybe five or six years ago. In Rome? Who was Reeves a friend of? Tom was too tired to think hard, and it didn’t matter. He had five or six such acquaintances, and would have been hard pressed to say where he had met each one.

“What did he want from you?”

Tom put his arm around Héloïse’s waist, pressing the loose nightdress close to her body. He kissed her cool cheek. “Something impossible. I said no. You can see that. He is disappointed.”

That night there was an owl, a lonely owl calling somewhere in the pines of the communal forest behind Belle Ornbre. Tom lay with his left arm under Héloïse’s neck, thinking. She fell asleep, and her breathing became slow and soft. Tom sighed, and went on thinking. But he was not thinking in a logical, constructive way. His second coffee was keeping him awake. He was remembering a party he had been to a month ago in Fontainebleau, an informal birthday party for a Mme.—who? It was her husband’s name that Tom was interested in, an English name that might come to him in a few seconds. The man, the host, had been in his early thirties, and they had a small son. The house was a straight-up-and-down three-story, on a residential street in Fontainebleau, a patch of garden behind it. The man was a picture framer; that was why Tom had been dragged along by Pierre Gauthier, who had an art-supply shop in the Rue Grande, where Tom bought his paints and brushes. Gauthier had said, “Oh, come along with me, M. Reeply. Bring your wife! He wants a lot of people. He’s a little depressed. … And anyway, since he makes frames, you might give him some business.”

Tom blinked in the darkness, and moved his head back a little so his eyelashes would not touch Héloïse’s shoulder. He recalled a tall blond Englishman with a certain resentment and dislike, because in the kitchen—that gloomy kitchen with worn-out linoleum and a smoke-stained tin ceiling with a nineteenth-century bas-relief pattern—this man had made an unpleasant remark to Tom. The man—Trewbridge, Tewksbury?—had said, in an almost sneering way, “Oh, yes, I’ve heard of you.” Tom had said, “I’m Tom Ripley. I live in Villeperce,” and Tom had been about to ask him how long he’d been in Fontainebleau, thinking that perhaps an Englishman with a French wife might like to make acquaintance with an American with a French wife living not far away, but Tom’s venture had been met with rudeness. Trevanny? Wasn’t that his name? Blond straight hair, rather Dutch-looking—but then the English often looked Dutch and vice versa.

What Tom was thinking of now, however, was what Gauthier had said later the same evening: “He’s depressed. He doesn’t mean to be unfriendly. He’s got some kind of blood disease—leukemia, I think. Pretty serious. Also, as you can see from the house, he’s not doing too well.” Gauthier had a glass eye of a curious yellow-green color, obviously an attempt to match the real one, but a failure. In fact, Gauthier’s false eye suggested the eye of a dead cat. You avoided looking at it, yet you were hypnotically drawn to it. Gauthier’s gloomy words, combined with the glass eye, had made a strong impression of death upon Tom, and Tom had not forgotten.

Oh, yes, I’ve heard of you. Did that mean that Trevanny, or whatever his name was, thought he was responsible for Bernard Tufts’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 stomachache? Now Tom recalled Trevanny’s wife, not pretty, but rather an 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 sat down on the few chairs available.

Tom was thinking. 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 Héloïse, so that if he shook with repressed laughter for an instant he wouldn’t awaken her. Suppose Trevanny was vulnerable, and carried out Reeves’s 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’s 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 into stamp-collecting, or acquiring secrets of miniature electric trains?

2

So 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, Périer, said something to his friends, something he wouldn’t tell him? Something about not living much longer? Dr. Périer hadn’t been to the party for Alan, but could Dr. Périer have said something to someone else?

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

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

And Dr. Périer—could he trust him? Dr. Périer was always bouncing with optimism, which was fine if you had something minor—you felt fifty percent better, even cured. But Jonathan knew he didn’t have anything minor. He had myelocytic 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. Périer 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 had yet come up with a cure for myelocytic leukemia. On the average, you died after six to twelve years, or even six to eight. Jonathan was entering his sixth year.

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 iron steps with a firm tread, thinking that it was already eight-fifty-two, and that he was due in his shop at nine or a few minutes after.

Simone had gone off with Georges to the ȣole 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. Périer 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 dialed Dr. Périer’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, when 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 anemia. You’d better have frequent checkups, 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 myelocytic 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 two-thirty until six-thirty at a shoe shop in the Avenue Franklin Roosevelt, which was within walking distance of their house. She had begun working only in the past year, when Georges had been old enough to be put into the French equivalent of kindergarten. They needed the two hundred francs a 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 to 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 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 especially annoyed Jonathan that that swine Brezard must have become aware of Simone’s very different kind of attractiveness and wanted some of it for himself. Not that Simone talked much about Brezard. Once she had mentioned that he tried it on with his women employees—two besides Simone. For an instant that morning, as Jonathan presented a framed watercolor 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 holding the watercolor 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 framing was not the same kind the older woman had chosen (Jonathan had not had enough in stock), but he 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 color 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 miter boxes, saws, and glass cutters. Also on the big table were his carefully protected sheets of matboard, a great roll of brown paper, string, wire, pots of glue, and boxes of variously sized nails, and above the table on the walls 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; he 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 eleven-thirty-five, 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. Périer’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. Périer’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; Jonathan found them more depressing than the laurel plant. Dr. Périer also worked at the big Hôpital de Fontainebleau, Jonathan reminded himself; otherwise it would have seemed an absurdity to entrust one’s life to, to believe a life-or-death diagnosis of, 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. Périer, rubbing his hands, then extending one to Jonathan.

Jonathan shook his hand. “I feel quite all right, thank you. But what this is about—I mean the tests of two months ago. I understand they are not favorable?”

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

“What do you mean unfavorable? 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. Périer 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. Périer 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 lunchtime.

Dr. Périer 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 mouth-watering smell 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?

Simone was at the stove, wearing an apron over her dress, wielding a long fork. “Hello, Jon. You’re late.”

Jonathan put an arm around her and kissed her cheek, then held up the paper box and swung it toward Georges, who was sitting at the table, blond head bent, cutting out parts for a mobile from an empty box of cornflakes.

“Ah, a cake! What kind?” Georges asked.

“Apple.” Jonathan set the box on the table.

They had a small steak each, the delicious fried potatoes, a green salad.

“Brezard is starting inventory,” Simone said. “The summer stock comes in next week, so he wants to have a sale Friday and Saturday. I might be a little late tonight.”

She had warmed the apple tart on the asbestos plate. Jonathan waited impatiently for Georges to go in the living room, where a lot of his toys were, or out to the garden.

When Georges left finally, Jonathan said, “I had a funny letter today from Alan.”

“Alan? Funny how?”

“He wrote it just before he went to New York. It seems he’s heard—” Should he show her Alan’s letter? She could read English well enough. Jonathan decided to go on. “He’s heard somewhere that I’m worse, due for a bad crisis—or something. Do you know anything about it?” Jonathan watched her eyes.

Simone looked genuinely surprised. “Why, no, Jon. How would I hear—except from you?”

“I spoke with Dr. Périer just now. That’s why I was late. Périer says he doesn’t know of any change in the situation, but you know Périer!” Jonathan smiled, still watching Simone anxiously. “Well, here’s the letter,” he said, pulling it from his back pocket. He translated the paragraph.

“Mon Dieu! Well, where did he hear it from?”

“Yes, that’s the question. I’ll write him and ask, don’t you think?” Jonathan smiled again, a more genuine smile. He was sure Simone didn’t know anything about it.

Jonathan carried a second cup of coffee into the small square living room where Georges was now sprawled on the floor with his cut-outs. Jonathan sat down at the writing desk, which always made him feel like a giant. It was a rather dainty French écritoire, a present from Simone’s family. Jonathan was careful not to put too much weight on the writing shelf. He addressed an airmail letter to Alan McNear at the Hotel New Yorker, began the letter breezily enough, and wrote a second paragraph:

I don’t know quite what you mean in your letter about the news (about me) which shocked you. I feel all right, but this morning spoke with my doctor here to see if he was giving me the whole story. He disclaims any knowledge of a worse condition. So, dear Alan, what does interest me is where did you hear it? Could you possibly drop me a line soon? It sounds like a misunderstanding, and I’d be delighted to forget it, but I hope you can understand my curiosity as to where you heard it.

He dropped the letter in a mailbox en route to his shop. It would probably be a week before he heard from Alan.

That afternoon, Jonathan’s hand was as steady as ever as he pulled his razor knife down the edge of his steel ruler. He thought of his letter, making its progress to Orly airport maybe by this evening, maybe by tomorrow morning. He thought of his age, thirty-four, and of how pitifully little he would have done if he were to die in another couple of months. He’d produced a son, and that was something, but hardly an achievement worthy of special praise. He would not leave Simone very secure. If anything, he had lowered her standard of living slightly. Her father was only a coal merchant, but somehow over the years her family had gathered a few conveniences around them—a car, for instance, and decent furniture. They vacationed in June or July down south in a villa which they rented, and last year they had paid a month’s rent so that Jonathan and Simone could go there with Georges. Jonathan had not done as well as his brother Philip, two years older than himself, though Philip had looked physically weaker and had been a dull, plodding type all his life. Philip was a professor of anthropology at Bristol University—not brilliant, Jonathan was sure, but a good solid man with a solid career, a wife, and two children. Jonathan’s mother, a widow now, had a happy existence with her brother and sister-in-law in Oxfordshire, taking care of the big garden there and doing all the shopping and cooking. Jonathan felt himself the failure of his family, both physically and as to his work. He had first wanted to be an actor. At eighteen he’d gone to a drama school for two years. He didn’t have a bad face for an actor, he thought—not too handsome, with his big nose and wide mouth, but good-looking enough to play romantic roles and heavy enough to play heavier roles in time. What pipedreams! He’d hardly got two walk-on parts in the three years he’d hung around London and Manchester theatres—supporting himself by odd jobs, including one as a veterinary’s assistant. “You take up a lot of space and you’re not even sure of yourself,” a director once said to him. And then, working for an antique dealer in another of his odd jobs, Jonathan had thought he might like the antique business. He had learned all he could from his boss, Andrew Mott. Then the grand move to France with his friend Roy Johnson, who had had enthusiasm, if not much knowledge, about starting an antique shop via the junk trade. Jonathan remembered his dreams of glory and adventure in a new country, France; dreams of freedom, of success. And instead of success, instead of a series of educational mistresses, instead of making friends with bohemians, or with some stratum of French society which Jonathan had imagined existed but perhaps didn’t—instead of all this, Jonathan had continued to limp along, no better off really than when he’d been trying to get jobs as an actor and had supported himself any old way.

The only successful thing in his whole life was his marriage to Simone, Jonathan thought. The news of his disease had come in the same month he had met Simone Foussadier. He’d begun to feel strangely weak, and had romantically thought that it might be due to falling in love. But a little extra rest hadn’t shaken the weakness; he had fainted once in a street in Nemours, so he had gone to a doctor—Dr. Périer in Fontainebleau, who had suspected a blood condition and sent him to a specialist in Paris. The specialist, Dr. Moussu, after two days of tests, had confirmed myelocytic leukemia, and said that he might have from six to eight—or, with luck, twelve—years to live. There would be an enlargement of the spleen, which in fact Jonathan already had without having noticed it. Thus Jonathan’s proposal to Simone had been a declaration of love and death in the same awkward speech. It would have been enough to put most young women off, or to have made them say they needed some time to think about it. Simone had said yes, she loved him, too. “It is the love that is important, not the time,” Simone had said. None of the calculation that Jonathan had associated with the French, and with Latins in general. Simone said she had already spoken to her family. And this after they had known each other only two weeks. Jonathan felt himself suddenly in a world more secure than any he had ever known. Love—in a real and not a merely romantic sense, love that he had no control over—had miraculously rescued him. In a way, he felt that it had rescued him from death, but he realized that he meant that love had taken the terror out of death. And here was death six years later, as Dr. Moussu in Paris had predicted. Perhaps. Jonathan didn’t know what to believe.

He must make another visit to Moussu in Paris, he thought. Three years ago, Jonathan had had a complete change of blood under Dr. Moussu’s supervision in a Paris hospital. The treatment was called Vincainestine, the idea or the hope being that the excess of white with accompanying yellow components would not return to the blood. But the yellow excess had reappeared in about eight months.

Before he made an appointment with Dr. Moussu, however, Jonathan preferred to wait for a letter from Alan McNear. Alan would write at once, Jonathan felt sure. One could count on Alan.

Jonathan, before he left his shop, cast one desperate glance around its Dickensian interior. It wasn’t really dusty; it was just that the walls needed repainting. He wondered if he should make an effort to spruce the place up, start soaking his customers as so many picture framers did, sell lacquered brass items with big markups? Jonathan winced. He wasn’t the type.

That day was Wednesday. On Friday, while bending over a stubborn screw eye that had been in an oak frame for perhaps a hundred and fifty years and had no intention of yielding to his pliers, Jonathan suddenly had to drop the pliers and look for a seat. The seat was a wooden box against the wall. He got up almost at once and went to the sink to wet his face, bending as low as he could. In five minutes or so, the faintness passed, and by lunchtime he had forgotten about it. Such moments came every two or three months, and Jonathan was glad if they didn’t catch him on the street.

On Tuesday, six days after he had posted his letter to Alan, he received a letter from the Hotel New Yorker.

Saturday, March 25th

Dear Jon,

Believe me, I’m glad you spoke with your doctor and that the news is good! The person who told me you were in a serious way was a little balding fellow with a mustache and a glass eye—early forties, maybe. He seemed really concerned, and perhaps you shouldn’t hold it too much against him, as he may have heard it from someone else.

I’m enjoying this town and wish you and Simone were here, esp. as I’m on an expense account. …

The man Alan meant was obviously Pierre Gauthier, who had the art-supply shop in the Rue Grande. He was not a friend of Jonathan’s, just an acquaintance. Gauthier often sent people to Jonathan to have their pictures framed. He had been at the house the night of Alan’s send-off party, Jonathan remembered distinctly, and must have spoken to Alan then. It was out of the question that Gauthier had spoken maliciously. Jonathan was only a little surprised that Gauthier even knew he had a blood ailment, though word did get around, Jonathan realized. Jonathan thought the thing to do was speak to Gauthier and ask him where he’d heard the story.

It was ten to nine. Jonathan had waited for the mail, as he had yesterday morning. His impulse was to go straight to Gauthier, but he felt this would show unseemly anxiety, and that he’d better get his bearings by going to his shop and opening as usual.

Because of three or four customers, Jonathan didn’t have a break till ten-thirty. He left his clock card in the glass of his door indicating that he would be open again at eleven.

When Jonathan entered the art-supply shop, Gauthier was busy with two women customers. Jonathan pretended to browse among racks of paintbrushes until Gauthier was free. Then he said, “M. Gauthier! How goes it?” and extended a hand.

Gauthier clasped Jonathan’s hand in both his own and smiled. “And you, my friend?” 

“Well enough, thank you. … Écoutez. I don’t want to take your time—but there is something I would like to ask you.”

“Yes? What’s that?” Jonathan beckoned Gauthier farther away from the door, which might open at any minute. There was not much standing room in the little shop. “I heard from a friend—my friend Alan, you remember? The Englishman. At the party at my house a few weeks ago.”

“Yes! Your friend the Englishman. Alain.” Gauthier remembered and looked attentive.

Jonathan tried to avoid even glancing at Gauthier’s false eye by concentrating on the other eye. “Well, it seems you told Alan that you’d heard I was very ill, maybe not going to live much longer.”

Gauthier’s soft face grew solemn. He nodded. “Yes, M’sieur, I did hear that. I hope it’s not true. I remember Alain, because you introduced him to me as your best friend. So I assumed he knew. Perhaps I should have said nothing. I am sorry. It was perhaps tactless. I thought you were—in the English style—putting on a brave face.”

“It’s nothing serious, M. Gauthier, because as far as I know, it’s not true! I’ve just spoken with my doctor. But—”

“Ah, bon! Ah, well, that’s different! I’m delighted to hear that, M. Trevanny! Ha! Ha!” Pierre Gauthier gave a peal of laughter as if a ghost had been laid and he found not only Jonathan but himself back among the living.

“But I’d like to know where you heard this. Who told you I was so ill?” 

“Ah-yes!” Gauthier pressed a finger to his lips, thinking. “Who? A man. Yes—of course!” He had it, but he paused.

Jonathan waited.

“But I remember he said he wasn’t sure. He’d heard it, he said. An incurable blood disease, he said.” Jonathan felt warm with anxiety again, as he had felt several times in the past week. He wet his lips. “But who? How did he hear it? Didn’t he say?”

Gauthier again hesitated. “Since it isn’t true—shouldn’t we best forget it?” “Someone you know very well?” “No! Not at all well, I assure you.”

“A customer?”

“Yes. Yes, he is. A nice man, a gentleman. But since he said he wasn’t sure—Really, M’sieur, you shouldn’t bear a resentment, although I can understand how you could resent such a remark.”

“Which leads to the interesting question of how the gentleman came to hear I was very ill,” Jonathan went on, laughing now.

“Yes. Exactly. Well, the point is, it isn’t true. Isn’t that the main thing?” Jonathan saw in Gauthier a French politeness, and unwillingness to alienate a customer, and—which was to be expected—an aversion to the subject of death. “You’re right. That’s the main thing.” Jonathan shook hands with Gauthier, both of them smiling now, and bade him adieu.

That very day at lunch, Simone asked Jonathan if he had heard from Alan. Jonathan said yes.

“It was Gauthier who said something to Alan.” 

“Gauthier? The art-shop man?” “Yes.” Jonathan was lighting a cigarette over his coffee. Georges had gone out into the garden. “I went to see Gauthier this morning and I asked him where he’d heard it. He said from a customer. A man. … Funny, isn’t it? Gauthier wouldn’t tell me who, and I can’t really blame him. It’s some mistake, of course. Gauthier realizes that.”

“But it’s a shocking thing,” said Simone.

Jonathan smiled, knowing Simone wasn’t really shocked, since she knew Dr. Perier had given him rather good news. “As we say in English, one mustn’t make a mountain out of a molehill.”

In the following week, Jonathan bumped into Dr. Perier in the Rue Grande, the doctor in a hurry to enter the Societe Generale before it shut at twelve sharp. But he paused to ask him how he was.

“Quite well, thank you,” said Jonathan, whose mind was on buying a plunger for the toilet from a shop, a hundred yards away, which also shut at noon.

“M. Trevanny.” Dr. Perier paused with one hand on the big knob of the bank’s door. He moved away from the door, closer to Jonathan. “In regard to what we were talking about the other day, no doctor can be sure, you know. In a situation like yours. I don’t want you to think I’ve given you a guarantee of perfect health, immunity for years. You know yourself—”

“Oh, I didn’t assume that!” Jonathan interrupted.

“Then you understand,” said Dr. Perier, smiling, and dashed at once into his bank.

Jonathan trotted on in quest of the plunger. It was the kitchen sink that was stopped up, not the toilet, he remembered, and Simone had lent a neighbor their plunger months ago and … Jonathan was thinking of what Dr. Prier had said. Did he know something, suspect something from the last test, something not sufficiently definite to warrant telling him about? At the door of the droguerie, Jonathan encountered a smiling, dark-haired girl who was just locking up, removing the outside door handle.

“I’m sorry. It’s five minutes past twelve,” she said.

3

Tom, during the last week in March, was engaged in painting a full-length portrait of Ht loise horizontal on the yellow satin sofa. And Heldise seldom agreed to pose. But the sofa stayed still, and Tom had it satisfactorily on his canvas. He had also made seven or eight sketches of Heloise with her head propped upon her left hand, her right hand resting on a big art book. He kept the two best sketches and threw the others away.

Reeves Minot had written him a letter asking if he had come up with a helpful idea—as to a person, Reeves meant. The letter had arrived a couple of days after Tom had spoken with Gauthier, from whom Tom usually bought his paints. Tom had replied to Reeves: “Am trying to think, but meanwhile you should go ahead with your own ideas, if you have any.” The “am trying to think” was merely polite, even false, like a lot of phrases that served to oil the machinery of social intercourse, as Emily Post might say. Reeves hardly kept Belle Ombre oiled financially; in fact, Reeves’s payments to Tom for occasional services as go-between and fence would hardly cover the dry-cleaning bills, but it never hurt to maintain friendly relations. Reeves had procured a false passport for Tom and had got it to Paris fast when Tom had needed it to help defend the Derwatt industry. Tom might one day need Reeves again.

The business with Jonathan Trevanny was merely a game for Tom. He was not doing it for Reeves’s gambling interests. Tom happened to dislike gambling and had no respect for people who chose to earn their living, or even part of their living, from it. It was pimping, of a sort. Tom had started the Trevanny game out of curiosity, and because Trevanny had once sneered at him—and because Tom wanted to see if his own wild shot would find its mark, and make Jonathan Trevanny, who Tom sensed was priggish and self-righteous, uneasy for a time. Then Reeves could offer his bait, hammering in the point that Trevanny was soon to die anyway. Tom doubted that Trevanny would bite, but it would be a period of discomfort for the man, certainly. Unfortunately Tom couldn’t guess how soon the rumor would get to Jonathan Trevanny’s ears. Gauthier was gossipy enough, but it just might happen, even if Gauthier told two or three people, that no one would have the courage to broach the subject to Trevanny himself.

So Tom, although he was busy as usual with his painting, his spring planting, his German and French studies (Schiller and now), plus supervising a crew of three masons who were constructing a greenhouse along the right side of Belle Ombre’s back lawn, still counted the passing days and imagined what might have happened after that afternoon in the middle of March when he had said to Gauthier that he’d heard Trevanny wasn’t long for this world. Not too likely that Gauthier would speak to Trevanny directly, unless they were closer than Tom thought. Gauthier would more likely tell someone else about it. Tom counted on the fact (he was sure it was a fact) that the possibility of anyone’s imminent death was a fascinating subject to everyone.

Tom went to Fontainebleau, some twelve miles from Villeperce, every two weeks or so. Fontainebleau was better than Moret for shopping, for having suede coats cleaned, for buying radio batteries and the rarer things that Mme. Annette wanted for her cuisine. Jonathan Trevanny had a telephone in his shop, Tom had noted in the directory, but apparently not in his house in the Rue Saint-Merry. Tom had been trying to look up the house number, although he thought he would recognize the house when he saw it. Around the end of March, Tom became curious to see Trevanny again—from a distance, of course. So on a trip to Fontainebleau one morning, a market day, for the purpose of buying two round terra-cotta flower tubs, Tom, after putting these items in the back of the green Renault station wagon, walked through the Rue des Sablons where Trevanny’s shop was. It was nearly noon.

Trevanny’s shop looked in need of paint and a bit depressing, as if it belonged to an old man, Tom thought. Tom had never patronized Trevanny, because there was a good framer in Moret, closer to Tom. The little shop with “Encadrement” in fading red letters on the wood over the door stood in a row of shops—a launderette, a cobbler’s, a modest travel agency—with its door on the left side and to the right a square window with assorted frames and two or three paintings with handwritten price tags on them. Tom crossed the street casually, glanced into the shop, and saw Trevanny’s tall, Nordic-looking figure behind the counter some twenty feet away. Trevanny was showing a man a length of frame, slapping it into his palm, talking. Then Trevanny glanced at the window, saw Tom for an instant, but continued talking to the customer with no change in his expression.

Tom strolled on. Trevanny hadn’t recognized him. Tom turned right, in to the Rue de France, the second important street after the Rue Grande, and continued till he came to the Rue Saint-Merry, where he turned right. Or had Trevanny’s house been to the left? No, right.

Yes, there it was, surely, the narrow, cramped-looking gray house with slender black handrails going up the front steps. The tiny areas on either side of the steps were cemented, and no flowerpots relieved the barrenness. But there was a garden behind, Tom recalled. The windows, though sparkling clean, showed rather limp curtains. Yes, this was where he’d come on the invitation of Gauthier that evening in February. There was a narrow passage on the left side of the house that must lead to the garden beyond. A green plastic garbage bin stood in front of the padlocked iron gate to the garden, and Tom imagined that the Trevannys usually got to the garden via the back door off the kitchen, which Tom remembered.

Tom was on the other side of the street, walking slowly, but careful not to appear to be loitering, because he couldn’t be sure that the wife, or someone else, was not even now looking out one of the windows.

Was there anything else he needed to buy? Zinc white. He was nearly out of it. And that purchase would take him to Gauthier, the art-supply man. Tom quickened his step, congratulating himself because his need of zinc white was a real need, so he’d be entering Gauthier’s on a real errand, while at the same time he might be able to satisfy his curiosity.

Gauthier was alone in the shop.

“Bonjour, M. Gauthier!” said Tom.

“Bonjour, M. Reepley!” Gauthier replied, smiling. “And how are you?”

“Very well, thank you, and you? … I find I need some zinc white.”

“Zinc white.” Gauthier pulled a flat drawer from his cabinet against a wall. “Here they are. And you like the Rembrandt, as I recall.”

Tom did. Derwatt zinc white and other Derwatt-made colors were available, too, their tubes emblazoned with the bold, downward-slanting signature of Derwatt in black on the label, but somehow Tom didn’t want to paint at home with the name Derwatt catching his eye every time he reached for a tube of anything.

Tom paid, and as Gauthier was handing him his change and the little bag with the zinc white in it, Gauthier said, “Ah, M. Reepley, you recall M. Trevanny, the framer in the Rue Saint-Merry?”

“Yes, of course,” said Tom, who had been wondering how to bring Trevanny up.

“Well, the rumor that you heard, that he is going to die soon, is not true at all.” Gauthier smiled.

“No? Well, very good! I’m glad to hear that.”

“Yes. M. Trevanny went to see his doctor, even. I think he was a bit upset. Who wouldn’t be, eh? Ha-ha! But you said somebody told you, M. Reepley?”

“Yes. A man who was at the party—in February. Mme. Trevanny’s birthday party. So I assumed it was a fact and everybody knew it, you see.”

Gauthier looked thoughtful.

“You spoke to M. Trevanny?” Tom asked.

“No-no. But I did speak to his best friend one evening, another evening at the Trevannys’ house, this month. Evidently he spoke to M. Trevanny. How these things get around!”

“His best friend?” Tom asked with an air of innocence.

“An Englishman. Alain something. He was going to America the next day. But—do you recall who told you, M. Reepley?”

Tom shook his head slowly. “Can’t recall his name, not even how he looked. There were so many people that night.”

“Because”—Gauthier bent closer and whispered, as if there were someone else present—“M. Trevanny asked me, you see, who had told me. Of course I didn’t say it was you. These things can be misinterpreted. I didn’t want to get you into trouble. Ha!” Gauthier’s shiny glass eye did not laugh but looked out from his head with a bold stare, as if there were a different brain controlling that eye, a computer kind of brain that would know everything at once, if someone just programmed it properly.

“I thank you for that, because it is not nice to make remarks that are not true about people’s health, eh?” Tom was grinning now, ready to take his leave, but he added, “M. Trevanny does have a blood condition, however, didn’t you say?”

“That is true. I think it’s leukemia. But that’s something he lives with. He once told me he’d had it for years.”

Tom nodded. “At any rate, I’m glad he’s not in danger. À bientôt, M. Gauthier. Many thanks.”

Tom walked in the direction of his car. Trevanny’s shock, though it may have lasted only a few hours until he consulted his doctor, must at least have put a little crack in his self-confidence. A few people had believed—and maybe Trevanny himself had believed—that he was not going to live more than a few weeks. That was because such a possibility wasn’t out of the question for a man with Trevanny’s ailment. A pity Trevanny was now reassured, but that little crack might be all that Reeves needed. The game could now enter its second stage. Trevanny would probably say no to Reeves. End of game, in that case. On the other hand, Reeves would approach him as if he was a doomed man. It would be amusing if Trevanny weakened. That day after lunch with Heldise and her Paris friend Noelle, who was going to stay overnight, Tom left the ladies and wrote a letter to Reeves on his typewriter.

March 28th

Dear Reeves,

I have an idea for you, in case you have not yet found what you are looking for. His name is Jonathan Trevanny, early thirties, English, a picture framer, married to Frenchwoman with small son. [Here Tom gave Trevanny’s home and shop addresses and shop telephone number.] He looks as if he could use some money, and although he may not be the type you want, he looks the picture of decency and innocence, and, what is more important for you, I have found out that he has only a few months or weeks to live. He’s got leukemia, and has just heard the bad news. He might be willing to take on a dangerous job to earn some money now.

I don’t know Trevanny personally. Need I emphasize that I don’t wish to make his acquaintance, nor do I wish you to mention my name? My suggestion is if you want to sound him out, come to F’bleau, put yourself up at a charming hostelry called L’Aigle Noir for a couple of days, ring Trevanny at his shop, make an appointment, and talk it over. And do I have to tell you to give another name besides your own?

Tom felt a sudden optimism about the project. The vision of Reeves with his disarming air of uncertainty and anxiety—almost suggestive of probity—laying such an idea before Trevanny, who looked as upright as a saint, made Tom laugh. Did he dare occupy a table in L’Aigle Noir’s dining room or bar when Reeves made his date with Trevanny? No, that would be too much. This reminded him of another point, and he added to his letter:

If you come to F’bleau, please don’t telephone or write a note to me under any circumstances. Destroy my letter now,

please.

Yours ever,

Tom

4

The telephone rang in Jonathan’s shop on Friday afternoon, March 31st. He was just gluing brown paper to the back of a large picture, and he had to find suitable weights—an old sandstone saying LONDON, the glue pot itself, a wooden mallet—before he could lift the telephone.

“Hello?”

“Bonjour, M’sieur. M. Trevanny? … You speak English, I think. My name is Stephen Wister, W-i-s-t-e-r. I’m in Fontainebleau for a couple of days, and I wonder if you could find a few minutes to talk with me about something—something that I think would interest you.”

The man had an American accent. “I don’t buy pictures,” Jonathan said. “I’m a framer.”

“I didn’t want to see you about anything connected with your work. It’s something I can’t explain over the phone. … I’m staying at the Aigle Noir.”

“Oh?”

“I was wondering if you have a few minutes this evening after you close your shop. Around seven? Six-thirty? We could have a drink or a coffee.”

“But—I’d like to know why you want to see me.” A woman had come into the shop—Mme. Tissot, Tissaud?—to pick up a picture. Jonathan smiled apologetically to her.

“I’ll have to explain when I see you,” said the soft, earnest voice. “It’ll take only ten minutes. Have you any time? At seven today, for instance?”

Jonathan shifted. “Six-thirty would be all right.”

“I’ll meet you in the lobby. I’m wearing a gray plaid suit. But I’ll speak to the porter. It won’t be difficult.”

Jonathan usually closed around six-thirty. At six-fifteen, he stood at his cold-water sink, scrubbing his hands. It was a mild day, and Jonathan had worn a polo-neck sweater with an old beige corduroy jacket, not elegant enough for L’Aigle Noir, and the addition of his second-best mack would have made things worse. Why should he care? The man wanted to sell him something. It couldn’t be anything else.

The hotel was only a five-minute walk from the shop. It had a small front court enclosed by high iron gates, and a few steps led up to its front door.

Jonathan saw a slender, tense-looking man with crew-cut hair move toward him with a faint uncertainty, and Jonathan said, “Mr. Wister?”

“Yes.” Reeves gave a twitch of a smile and extended his hand. “Shall we have a drink in the bar here, or do you prefer somewhere else?”

The bar was pleasant and quiet. Jonathan shrugged. “As you like.” He noticed an awful scar the length of Wister’s cheek.

They went to the wide door of the hotel’s bar, which was empty except for a man and a woman at a small table.

Wister turned away as if put off by the quietude, and said, “Let’s try somewhere else.”

They walked out of the hotel and turned right. Jonathan knew the next bar, the Café du Sport or some such, roistering at this hour with boys at the pinball machines and workmen at the counter. On the threshold of the bar-café, Wister stopped as if he had come unexpectedly upon a battlefield in action.

“Would you mind,” Wister said, turning away, “coming up to my room? It’s quiet and we can have something sent up.”

They went back to the hotel, climbed a flight of stairs, and entered an attractive room in Spanish decor—black ironwork, a raspberry-colored bedspread, a pale green carpet. A suitcase on the rack was the only sign of the room’s occupancy. Wister had entered without a key.

“What’ll you have?” Wister went to the telephone. “Scotch?”

“Fine.”

The man ordered in clumsy French. He asked for the bottle to be brought up, and for plenty of ice, please.

Then there was a silence. Why was the man uneasy, Jonathan wondered. Jonathan stood by the window where he had been looking out. Evidently Wister didn’t want to talk until the drinks arrived. Jonathan heard a discreet tap at the door.

A white-jacketed waiter came in with a tray and a friendly smile. Stephen Wister poured generous drinks.

“Are you interested in making some money?”

Jonathan smiled, settled in a comfortable armchair now, with the huge iced Scotch in his hand. “Who isn’t?”

“I have a dangerous job in mind—well, an important job—for which I’m prepared to pay quite well.”

Jonathan thought of drugs: the man probably wanted something delivered or held. “What business are you in?” Jonathan inquired politely.

“Several. Just now one you might call—gambling.… Do you gamble?”

“No.” Jonathan smiled.

“I don’t, either. That’s not the point.” The man got up from the side of the bed and walked slowly about the room. “I live in Hamburg.”

“Oh?”

“Gambling isn’t legal in the city limits, but it goes on in private clubs. However, whether it’s legal or not is not the point. I need a person eliminated, possibly two—and maybe a theft done. Now, that’s putting my cards on the table.” He looked at Jonathan with a serious, hopeful expression.

Killed, the man meant. Jonathan was startled; then he smiled and shook his head. “I wonder where you got my name!”

Stephen Wister didn’t smile. “Never mind that.” He continued walking up and down with his drink in his hand, and his gray eyes glanced at Jonathan and away again. “I wonder if you’re interested in ninety-six thousand dollars? That’s about forty thousand pounds, and about four hundred and eighty thousand francs—new francs. Just for shooting a man—maybe two; we’ll have to see how it goes. It’ll be an arrangement that’s safe and foolproof for you.”

Jonathan shook his head again. “I don’t know where you heard that I’m a—a gunman. You’ve got me confused with someone else.”

“No. Not at all.”

Jonathan’s smile faded under the man’s intense stare. “It’s a mistake. Do you mind telling me how you came to ring me?”

“Well, you’re—” Wister looked more pained than ever. “You’re not going to live more than a few months. You know that. You’ve got a wife and a small son—haven’t you? Wouldn’t you like to leave them a little something when you’re gone?”

Jonathan felt the blood drain from his face. How did Wister know so much? Then he realized it was all connected, that whoever told Gauthier he was going to die soon knew this man, was connected with him somehow. Jonathan was not going to mention Gauthier. Gauthier was an honest man, and Wister was a crook. Suddenly Jonathan’s Scotch didn’t taste so good. “There was a crazy rumor—recently—”

Now Wister shook his head. “It is not a crazy rumor. It may be that your doctor hasn’t told you the truth.”

“And you know more than my doctor? My doctor doesn’t lie to me. It’s true I have a blood disease, but I’m in no worse state now—” Jonathan broke off. “The essential thing is, I’m afraid I can’t help you, Mr. Wister.”

As Wister bit his underlip, the long scar moved in a distasteful way, like a live worm.

Jonathan looked away from him. Was Dr. Périer lying, after all? Jonathan thought he should ring up the Paris laboratory tomorrow morning and ask some questions, or simply go to Paris and demand another examination.

“Mr. Trevanny, I’m sorry to say it’s evidently you who aren’t informed. At least you’ve heard what you call the rumor, so I’m not the bearer of bad tidings. It’s your own choice, but under the circumstances, a considerable sum like this, I would think, should sound rather pleasant. You could stop working and enjoy your—Well, for instance, you could take a cruise around the world with your family and still leave your wife—”

Jonathan felt slightly faint. He stood up and took a deep breath. The sensation passed, but he preferred to be on his feet. Wister was talking, but Jonathan barely listened.

“ …my idea. There’re a few men in Hamburg who would contribute toward the ninety-six thousand dollars. The man, or men, we want out of the way are Mafia men.”

Jonathan had only half recovered. “Thanks, I am not a killer. You may as well get off the subject.”

Wister went on. “But exactly what we want is someone not connected with any of us, or with Hamburg. Although the first man, only a button man, must be shot in Hamburg. The reason is that we want the police to think that two Mafia gangs are fighting each other in Hamburg. In fact, we want the police to step in on our side.” He continued to walk up and down, looking at the floor mostly. “The first man ought to be shot in a crowd, a U-bahn crowd. That’s our subway—’underground’ you’d call it. The gun would be dropped at once, the—the assassin blends into the crowd and vanishes. An Italian gun, with no fingerprints on it. No clues.” He brought his hands down like a conductor finishing.

Jonathan moved back to the chair, in need of it for a few seconds. “Sorry. No.” He would walk to the door as soon as he got his strength back.

“I’m here all tomorrow, and probably till late Sunday afternoon. I wish you’d think about it. …Another Scotch? Might do you good.”

“No, thanks.” Jonathan hauled himself up. “I’ll be pushing off.” Wister nodded, looking disappointed.

“And thanks for the drink.”

“Don’t mention it.” Wister opened the door for Jonathan.

Jonathan went out. He had expected Wister to press a card with his name and address into his hand. Jonathan was glad he hadn’t.

The streetlights had come on in the Rue de France. Seven twenty-two. Had Simone asked him to buy anything? Bread, perhaps. Jonathan went into a boulangerie and bought a long stick. The familiar chore was comforting.

The supper consisted of vegetable soup, a couple of slices of leftover fromage de tête, a salad of tomatoes and onions. Simone talked about a wallpaper sale at a shop near where she worked. For a hundred francs, they could paper the bedroom, and she had seen a beautiful mauve and green pattern, very light and art nouveau.

“With only one window, that bedroom’s very dark, you know, Jon.”

“Sounds fine,” Jonathan said. “Especially if it’s a sale.”

“It is a sale. Not one of these silly sales where they reduce something five percent—like my stingy boss.” She wiped bread crust in her salad oil and popped it into her mouth. “You’re worried about something? Something happened today?”

Jonathan smiled suddenly. He wasn’t worried about anything. He was glad Simone hadn’t noticed he was a little late, and that he’d had a big drink “No, darling. Nothing happened. The end of the week, maybe. Almost the end.”

“You feel tired?”

It was like a question from a doctor, routine now “No. I’ve got to telephone a customer tonight between eight and nine.” It was eight thirty-seven. “I may as well do it now, dear. Maybe I’ll have some coffee later.”

“Can I go with you?” Georges asked, dropping his fork, sitting back ready to leap out of his chair.

“Not tonight, mon petit copain. I’m in a hurry. And you just want to play the pinball machines—I know you.”

“Hollywood Chewing Gum!” Georges shouted, pronouncing it in the French manner, “Ollyvoo Schvang Gom!”

Jonathan winced as he lifted his jacket from the hall hook. Hollywood Chewing Gum, whose green and white wrappers littered the gutters and occasionally Jonathan’s garden, had mysterious attractions for infants of the French nation. “Oui, M’sieur,” Jonathan said, and went out the door.

Dr. Périer had a home number in the directory, and Jonathan hoped he was in tonight. A certain bar-tabac, which had a telephone, was closer than Jonathan’s shop. Panic was taking hold of him, and he began to trot toward the slanting lighted red cylinder that marked the tabac two streets away. He would insist on the truth. Jonathan nodded a greeting to the young man behind the bar, whom he knew slightly, and pointed to the telephone and also to the shelf where the directories lay. “Fontainebleau!” Jonathan shouted. The place was noisy, and the jukebox was going. Jonathan searched out the number and dialed.

Dr. Périer answered and recognized Jonathan’s voice.

“I would like to have another test. Even tonight. Now—if you could take a sample.”

“Tonight?”

“I could come to see you at once. In five minutes.”

“Are you—You are weak?”

“Well—I thought if the test went to Paris tomorrow—” Jonathan knew that Dr. Perier was in the habit of sending various samples to Paris on Saturday mornings. “If you could take a sample either tonight or early tomorrow morning—”

“I am not in my office tomorrow morning. I have visits to make. If you are so upset, M. Trevanny, come to my house now.”

Jonathan paid for his call, and remembered just before he went out the door to buy two packages of Hollywood Chewing Gum. Périer lived way over on the Boulevard Maginot, which would take nearly ten minutes. Jonathan trotted and walked. He had never been to the doctor’s house.

It was a big, gloomy building, and the concierge was an old, slow, skinny woman who was watching television in a little glass-enclosed room full of plastic plants.

While Jonathan waited for the lift to descend into the rickety cage, the concierge crept into the hall and asked curiously, “Your wife is having a baby, M’sieur?”

“No. No,” Jonathan said, smiling, and recalled that Dr. Périer was a general practitioner.

He rode up.

“Now what is the matter?” Dr. Périer asked, beckoning him through the dining room. “Come into this room.”

The apartment was dimly lighted. The television set was on somewhere. The room they went into was like a little office, with medical books on the shelves, and a desk on which the doctor’s black bag now sat.

“Mon Dieu, one would think you are on the brink of collapse. You’ve just been running, obviously, and your cheeks are pink. Don’t tell me you’ve heard another rumor that you’re on the edge of the grave!”

Jonathan made an effort to sound calm. “It’s just that I want to be sure. I don’t feel so splendid, to tell the truth. I know it’s been only two months since the last test but—since the next is due the end of April, what’s the harm—” He broke off, shrugging. “Since it’s easy to take some marrow, and since it can go off tomorrow early—” Jonathan was aware that his French was clumsy at that moment, aware of the word moelle, marrow, which had become revolting, especially when Jonathan thought of his as being abnormally yellow. He sensed Dr. Perier’s attitude of humoring his patient.

“Yes, I can take the sample. The result will probably be the same as last time. You can never have complete assurance from medical men, M. Trevanny. …” The doctor continued to talk while Jonathan removed his sweater, obeyed Dr. Périer’s gesture, and lay down on an old leather sofa. The doctor jabbed the anesthetizing needle in. “But I can appreciate your anxiety,” Dr. Périer said seconds later, pressing and tapping on the tube that was going into Jonathan’s sternum.

Jonathan disliked the crunching sound of it, but found the slight pain quite bearable. This time, perhaps, he’d learn something. Jonathan could not refrain from saying before he left, “I must know the truth, Dr. Fierier. You don’t think that the laboratory might not be giving us a proper summing up? I’m ready to believe their figures are correct—”

“This summing up or prediction is what you can’t get, my dear young man!”

Jonathan then walked home. He thought of telling Simone that he’d gone to see Périer, that he again felt anxious, but he couldn’t: he’d put Simone through enough. What could she say if he told her? She would only become a little more anxious herself.

Georges was already in bed upstairs, and Simone was reading to him. Asterix again. Georges, propped against his pillows, and Simone, on a low stool under the lamplight, were like a tableau vivant of domesticity. The year might have been 1880, Jonathan thought, except for Simone’s slacks. Georges’s hair was as yellow as corn silk under the light.

“Le schvang gom?” Georges asked, grinning.

Jonathan smiled and produced one packet. The other could wait for another occasion.

“You were gone a long time,” said Simone.

“I had a beer at the café,” Jonathan said.

The next afternoon between four-thirty and five, as Dr. Périer had told him to do, Jonathan telephoned the Ebberle-Valent Laboratoires in Neuilly. He gave his name and spelled it and said he was a patient of Dr. Périer’s in Fontainebleau. Then he waited to be connected with the right department, while the telephone gave a blup every minute for the pay units. Jonathan had pen and paper ready. Could he spell his name again, please? Then a woman’s voice began to read the report, and Jonathan jotted figures down quickly. Hyperleukocytose 190,000. Wasn’t that bigger than before?

“We shall, of course, send a written report to your doctor, which he should receive by Tuesday.”

“This report is less favorable than the last, is it not?”

“I have not the previous report here, M’sieur.”

“Is there a doctor there? Could I speak with a doctor, perhaps?”

“I am a doctor, M’sieur.”

“Oh. Then this report—whether you have the old one or not—is not a good one, is it?”

Like a textbook, she said, “This is a potentially dangerous condition involving lowered resistance. …”

Jonathan had telephoned from his shop. He had turned his sign to FERMÉ and drawn his door curtain, though he had been visible through the window. Now, as he went to remove the sign, he realized he hadn’t locked his door. Since no one else was due to call for a picture that afternoon, Jonathan thought he could afford to close. It was five to five.

He walked to Dr. Périer’s office, prepared to wait more than an hour if he had to. Saturday was a busy day, because most people didn’t work and were free to see the doctor. There were three people ahead of Jonathan, but the nurse asked if he would be long, Jonathan said no, and the nurse squeezed him in with an apology to the next patient. Had Dr. Pérrier spoken to his nurse about him? Jonathan wondered.

Dr. Périer raised his black eyebrows at Jonathan’s scribbled notes, and said, “But this is incomplete.”

“I know, but it tells something, doesn’t it? It’s slightly worse—isn’t it?”

“One would think you want to get worse!” Dr. Prier said with his customary cheer, which now Jonathan mistrusted. “Frankly, yes, it is worse, but only a little worse. It is not crucial.”

“In percentage—ten percent worse, would you say?”

“M. Trevanny, you are not an automobile! Now, it is not reasonable for me to make a remark until I get the full report Tuesday.”

Jonathan walked homeward rather slowly, walked through the Rue des Sablons just in case he saw someone who wanted to go into his shop. There wasn’t anyone. Only the launderette was doing a brisk business. People with bundles of laundry were bumping into each other at the door. It was nearly six. Simone would be quitting the shoe shop sometime after seven, later than usual, because Brezard wanted to take in every franc possible before closing for Sunday and Monday. And Wister was still at L’Aigle Noir. Was he only waiting for him, waiting for him to change his mind and say yes? Wouldn’t it be funny if Dr. Périer was in conspiracy with Stephen Wister, if between them they might have fixed the Ebberle-Valent Laboratoires to give him a bad report? And if Gauthier were in on it, too, the little messenger of bad tidings? Like a nightmare in which the strangest elements join forces against—against the dreamer. But Jonathan knew he wasn’t dreaming. He knew that Dr. Périer wasn’t in the pay of Stephen Wister. Nor was Ebberle-Valent. And it was not a dream that his condition was worse, that death was a little closer, or sooner, than he had thought. It was, however, true of everyone who lived one more day, Jonathan reminded himself. Jonathan thought of death, and the process of aging, as a decline, literally a downward path. Most people had a chance to take it slowly, starting at fifty-five or whenever they slowed up, descending until seventy or whatever year was their number. Jonathan realized that his death was going to be like falling over a cliff. When he tried to “prepare” himself, his mind wavered and dodged. His attitude, or his spirit, was still thirty-four years old and wanted to live.

The Trevannys’ narrow house, blue-gray in the dusk, showed no lights. It was a rather somber house, and that fact had amused Jonathan and Simone when they had bought it five years ago. “The Sherlock Holmes house,” Jonathan used to call it when they were debating against another in Fontainebleau. “I still prefer the Sherlock Holmes house,” Jonathan remembered saying once. The house had an 1890 air, suggestive of gaslights and polished banisters, though none of the wood anywhere had been polished when they moved in. The house had looked as if it could be made into something with turn-of-the-century charm, however. The rooms were small but interestingly arranged, the garden a rectangular patch full of wildly overgrown rosebushes, but at least the rosebushes were there, and all the garden had needed was a clearing out. And the scalloped glass portico over the back steps, its little glass-enclosed porch, had made Jonathan think of Vuillard, Bonnard. Now it struck Jonathan that five years of occupancy hadn’t really defeated the gloom. New wallpaper would brighten the bedroom, yes, but that was only one room. The house wasn’t yet paid for: they had three more years to go on the mortgage. An apartment such as they’d had in the first year of their marriage would have been cheaper, but Simone was used to a house with a bit of garden—she’d had a garden all her life in Nemours—and as an Englishman, Jonathan liked a bit of garden, too. He had never regretted that the house took such a hunk of their income.

What Jonathan was thinking of as he climbed the front steps was not so much the remaining mortgage but the fact that he was probably going to die in this house. More than likely, he would never know another, more cheerful house with Simone. He was thinking that the Sherlock Holmes house had been standing for decades before he had been born, and that it would stand for decades after his death. It had been his fate to choose this house, he felt. One day they would carry him out feet first, maybe still alive but dying, and he would never enter the house again.

To Jonathan’s surprise, Simone was in the kitchen playing some kind of card game with Georges. She looked up, smiling; then Jonathan saw her remember: the Paris laboratory this afternoon. He had told her he was going to call, to try to speak to Moussu again. But she couldn’t mention that in front of Georges.

“The old creep closed early today,” Simone said. “No business.”

“Good!” Jonathan said brightly. “What goes on in this gambling den?”

“I’m winning!” Georges said in French.

Simone got up and followed Jonathan into the hall as he hung his raincoat. She looked at him inquiringly.

“Nothing to worry about,” Jonathan said, but she beckoned him farther down the hall to the living room. “It seems to be a trifle worse, but I don’t feel worse, so what the hell? I’m sick of it. Let’s have a Cinzano.”

“You were worried because of that story, weren’t you, Jon?” “Yes. That’s true.”

“I wish I knew who started it.” Her eyes narrowed bitterly. “It’s a nasty story. Gauthier never told you who said it?”

“No. As Gauthier said, there was some mistake somewhere, some kind of exaggeration.” Jonathan was repeating what he had said to Simone before. But he knew it was no mistake, that it was a quite calculated story.

5

Jonathan stood at the first floor bedroom window, watching Simone hang the wash on the garden line. There were pillowcases, Georges’s sleep suits, a dozen pairs of Georges’s and Jonathan’s socks, two white nightdresses, bras, Jonathan’s beige work trousers—everything except sheets, which Simone sent to the laundry, because well-ironed sheets were important to her. Simone wore tweed slacks and a thin red sweater that clung to her body. Her back looked strong and supple as she bent over the big oval basket, pegging out dishcloths now It was a fine, sunny morning with a hint of summer in the breeze.

Jonathan had wriggled out of going to Nemours to have lunch with Simone’s parents, the Foussadiers. He and Simone went every other Sunday as a rule. Unless Simone’s brother Gérard fetched them, they took the bus to Nemours. Then, at the Foussadiers’ house, they had a big lunch with Gérard and his wife and two children, who also lived in Nemours. Simone’s parents always made a fuss over Georges, always had a present for him. Around three, Simone’s father, Jean-Noёl, would turn on the TV. Jonathan was frequently bored, but he went with Simone because it was the correct thing to do, and because he respected the closeness of French families.

“Do you feel all right?” Simone had asked when Jonathan had begged off.

“Yes, darling. It’s just that I’m not in the mood today, and I’d also like to get that patch ready for the tomatoes. So why don’t you go with Georges?”

So Simone and Georges went on the bus at noon. Simone had put the remains of a boeuf bourguignon into a small red casserole on the stove, and all Jonathan had to do was heat it when he felt hungry.

Jonathan had wanted to be alone. He was thinking about the mysterious Stephen Wister and his proposal. Jonathan was very much aware that Wister was still there, at L’Aigle Noir, not three hundred yards away. He certainly had no intention of getting in touch with Wister, though the idea was curiously exciting and disturbing, a bolt from the blue, a shaft of color in his uneventful existence, and he wanted to observe it—to enjoy it, in a sense. Jonathan also had the feeling (it had been proved quite often) that Simone could read his thoughts, or at least knew when something was preoccupying him. If he appeared absentminded that Sunday, he didn’t want Simone to notice it and ask him what was the matter. So Jonathan gardened with a will, and daydreamed. He thought of forty thousand pounds, a sum which meant the mortgage could be paid off at once, a couple of installment items taken care of, the interior of their house painted where it needed it, a television set acquired, a nest egg put aside for Georges’s university, a few new clothes for Simone and himself—ah, mental ease! Simply freedom from anxiety! He thought of one—maybe two Mafia figures—burly, dark-haired thugs exploding in death, arms flailing, their bodies falling. What Jonathan was incapable of imagining, as his spade sank into the earth of his garden, was himself pulling a trigger, having aimed a gun at a man’s back, perhaps. More interesting, more mysterious, more dangerous was how Wister had got hold of his name. There was a plot against him in Fontainebleau, and it had somehow got to Hamburg. Impossible that Wister had him mixed up with someone else, because even Wister had spoken of his illness, of his wife and small son. Someone, Jonathan thought, whom he considered a friend, or at least a friendly acquaintance, was not friendly at all toward him.

Wister would probably leave Fontainebleau around five this afternoon, Jonathan thought. By three, Jonathan had eaten his lunch, and had tidied up papers and old receipts in the catchall drawer of the round table in the center of the living room. Then—he was happily aware that he was not tired at all—he tackled with broom and dustpan the exterior of the pipes and the floor around their oil furnace.

A little after five, as Jonathan was scrubbing soot from his hands at the kitchen sink, Simone arrived with Georges, her brother Gerard, and his wife Yvonne, and they all had a drink in the kitchen. Georges had been presented by his grandparents with a round box of Easter goodies, including an egg wrapped in gold foil, a chocolate rabbit, and colored gumdrops—all under yellow cellophane and as yet unopened because Simone had forbade him to open it, in view of the other sweets he had eaten in Nemours. Georges went with the Foussadier children into the garden.

“Don’t step on the soft part, Georges!” Jonathan shouted. He had raked the turned ground smooth, but left the pebbles for Georges to pick up. Georges would probably get his two friends to help him fill the red wagon. Jonathan gave him fifty centimes for a wagonful of pebbles—not ever full, but full enough to cover the bottom.

It was starting to rain. Jonathan had brought the laundry in a few minutes ago.

“The garden looks marvelous!” Simone said. “Look, Gérard!” She beckoned her brother onto the little back porch.

By now, Jonathan thought, Wister was probably on a train from Fontainebleau to Paris, or maybe he’d taken a taxi from Fontainebleau to Orly, considering the money he seemed to have. Maybe he was already in the air, en route to Hamburg. Simone’s presence, the voices of Gerard and Yvonne seemed to erase Wister from the Hotel de L’Aigle Noir, seemed to turn Wister almost into a quirk of Jonathan’s imagination. Jonathan felt a mild triumph in the fact that he had not telephoned Wister, as if by not telephoning him he had successfully resisted some kind of temptation.

Gérard Foussadier, an electrician, was a neat, serious man a little older than Simone, with fairer hair than hers, and a carefully clipped brown mustache. His hobby was naval history, and he made model nineteenth-century and eighteenth-century frigates in which he installed miniature electric lights that he could put completely or partially on by a switch in his living room. Gérard himself laughed at the anachronism of electric lights in his frigates, but the effect was beautiful when all the other lights in the house were turned out and eight or ten ships seemed to be sailing on a dark sea around the living room.

“Simone said you were a little worried—as to your health, Jon,” Gérard said earnestly. “I am sorry.”

“Not particularly. Just another checkup,” Jonathan said. “The report’s about the same.” Jonathan was used to these clichés, which were like saying, “Very well, thank you,” when someone asked you how you felt. What Jonathan said seemed to satisfy Gerard, so evidently Simone had not said much.

Yvonne and Simone were talking about linoleum. The kitchen linoleum was wearing out in front of the stove and the sink. It hadn’t been new when they bought the house.

“You’re really feeling all right, darling?” Simone asked Jonathan when the Foussadiers had left.

“Better than all right. I even attacked the boiler room. The soot.” Jonathan smiled.

“You are mad. … Tonight you’ll have a decent dinner, at least. Mama insisted that I bring home three paupiettes from lunch and they’re delicious!”

Then close to eleven, as they were about to go to bed, Jonathan felt a sudden depression, as if his legs, his whole body had sunk into something viscous, as if he were walking hip-deep in mud. Was he simply tired? But it seemed more mental than physical. He was glad when the light was turned out, when he could relax with his arms around Simone, her arms around him, as they always lay when they fell asleep. He thought of Stephen Wister (was that his real name?) maybe flying eastward now, his thin figure stretched out in an airplane seat. Jonathan imagined Wister’s face with the pinkish scar, puzzled, tense; but Wister would no longer be thinking of Jonathan Trevanny. He’d be thinking of someone else. He must have two or three more prospects, Jonathan thought.

The morning was chill and foggy. Just after eight, Simone went off with Georges to the École Maternelle, and Jonathan stood in the kitchen, warming his fingers on a second bowl of cafe au lait. The heating system wasn’t adequate. They’d got rather uncomfortably through another winter, and even now in spring the house was chilly in the morning. The furnace had been in the house when they bought it, adequate for the five radiators downstairs, but not for the other five upstairs which they had hopefully installed. They’d been warned, Jonathan remembered, but a bigger furnace would have cost three thousand new francs, and they hadn’t had the money.

Three letters had fallen through the slot in the front door. One was an electricity bill. Jonathan turned a square white envelope over and saw “Hôtel de L’Aigle Noir” on its back. He opened the envelope. A business card fell out and dropped. Jonathan picked it up and read “Stephen Wister chez,” which had been written above:

REEVES MINOT

159 AGNESSTRASSE

WINTERHUDE (ALSTER)

HAMBURG 56

629-6757

There was also a letter.

April 1st

Dear Mr. Trevanny,

I was sorry not to hear from you this morning, or so far this afternoon. In case you change your mind, I enclose a card with my address in Hamburg. If you have second thoughts about my proposition, please telephone me collect at any hour. Or come to talk to me in Hamburg. Your round-trip transportation can be wired to you at once if I hear from you. In fact, wouldn’t it be a good idea to see a Hamburg specialist about your blood condition and get another opinion? This might make you feel more comfortable.

I am returning to Hamburg Sunday night.

Yours sincerely,

Stephen Wister

Jonathan was surprised, amused, annoyed all at once. More comfortable. That was a bit funny, since Wister was sure he was going to die soon. If a Hamburg specialist said, “Ach, ja, you have just one or two more months,” would that make him feel more comfortable? Jonathan pushed the letter and the card into a back pocket of his trousers. A return trip to Hamburg gratis. Wister was thinking of every enticement. Interesting that he’d sent the letter Saturday afternoon, so that he would receive it early Monday, though Jonathan might have rung him at any time Sunday. There was no mailbox collection on Sunday.

It was 8:52 A.M. Jonathan thought of what he had to do. He needed more mat paper from a firm in Melun. There were at least two clients he should write a postcard to, because their pictures had been ready for more than a week. Jonathan usually went to his shop on Mondays and spent his time doing odds and ends, though the shop was not open since it was against French law to be open six days a week.

Jonathan got to his shop at nine-fifteen, drew the green shade of the door, and locked the door again, leaving the FERMÉ sign on it. He puttered about, still thinking about Hamburg. The opinion of a German specialist might be a good thing. Suppose he accepted Wister’s offer of a round trip? (Jonathan was copying an address onto a postcard.) But then he’d be beholden to Wister. Jonathan realized he was toying with the idea of killing someone for Wister—not for Wister, but for the money. A Mafia member. They were all criminals themselves, weren’t they? Of course, Jonathan reminded himself, he could always pay Wister back if he accepted his round-trip fare. The point was, Jonathan couldn’t pay for the trip himself just now; there wasn’t enough money in the bank. If he really wanted to make sure of his condition, Germany (or Switzerland, for that matter) could tell him. They still had the best doctors in the world, hadn’t they? Jonathan put the card of the paper supplier of Melun beside his telephone to remind him to call tomorrow, because the paper place wasn’t open today either. And who knew, mightn’t Stephen Wister’s proposal be feasible? For an instant, Jonathan saw himself blown to bits by the crossfire of German police officers: they’d caught him just after he fired on the Italian. But even if he was dead, Simone and Georges would get the forty thousand quid. Jonathan came back to reality. He wasn’t going to kill anybody, no. But Hamburg—going to Hamburg seemed a lark, a break, even if he learned some bad news. He’d learn facts, anyway. And if Wister paid now, Jonathan could pay him back in a matter of three months, if he scrimped, didn’t buy any clothes—not even a beer in a café. Jonathan rather dreaded telling Simone, though she’d agree, of course, since it had to do with seeing another doctor, presumably an excellent doctor. The scrimping would come out of Jonathan’s own pocket.

Around eleven, Jonathan put in a call to Wister’s number in Hamburg, direct, not collect. Three or four minutes later, his telephone rang, and Jonathan had a clear connection, much better than the one to Paris usually sounded.

“ …Yes, this is Wister,” Wister said, in his light, tense voice.

“I had your letter this morning,” Jonathan began. “The idea of going to Hamburg—”

“Yes, why not?” said Wister casually.

“But I mean the idea of seeing a specialist—”

“I’ll cable you the money right away. You can pick it up at the Fontainebleau post office. It should be there in a couple of hours.”

“That’s—that’s kind of you. Once I’m there, I can—”

“Can you come today? This evening? There’s room here for you to stay.”

“I don’t know about today.” And yet why not?

“Call me again when you’ve got your ticket. Tell me what time you’re coming in. I’ll be in all day.”

Jonathan’s heart was beating a little fast when he hung up.

At home during lunchtime, Jonathan went upstairs to the bedroom to see if his suitcase was handy. It was, on top of the wardrobe where it had been since their last holiday, nearly a year ago, in Arles.

He said to Simone, “Darling, something important. I’ve decided to go to Hamburg and see a specialist.”

“Oh, yes? … Perier suggested it?”

“Well—in fact, no. My idea. I wouldn’t mind having a German doctor’s opinion. I know it’s an expense.”

“Oh, Jon! Expense! …Did you have any news this morning? The laboratory report comes tomorrow, doesn’t it?”

“Yes. What they say is always the same, darling. I want a fresh opinion.”

“When do you want to go?”

“Soon. This week.”

Just before five, Jonathan called at the Fontainebleau post office. The money had arrived. Jonathan presented his carte d’identite and received six hundred francs. He went from the post office to the Syndicate d’Initiative in the Avenue Franklin Roosevelt, just a couple of streets away, and bought a round-trip ticket to Hamburg on a plane that left Orly airport at 9:25 P.M. that evening. He would have to hurry, he realized, and he liked that, because it precluded thinking, hesitating. He went to his shop and telephoned Hamburg, this time collect.

Wister again answered. “Oh, that’s fine. At eleven fifty-five, right. Take the airport bus to the city terminus, would you? I’ll meet you there.”

Then Jonathan made a telephone call to a client who had an important picture to pick up, and said that he would be closed Tuesday and Wednesday for “family reasons,” a common excuse. He’d have to leave a sign to that effect in his door for a couple of days. Not a very unusual matter, Jonathan thought, since shopkeepers in town frequently closed for a few days for one reason or another. Jonathan had once seen a sign saying, “Closed because of hangover.”

Jonathan shut up shop and went home to pack. It would be a two-day stay at most, he thought, unless the Hamburg hospital or whatever insisted that he stay longer for tests. He had checked the trains to Paris, and there was one around 7 P.M. that would do nicely. He had to get to Paris, then to Les Invalides for a bus to Orly. When Simone came home with Georges, Jonathan had his suitcase downstairs.

“Tonight?” Simone said.

“The sooner the better, darling. I had an impulse. I’ll be back Wednesday, maybe even tomorrow night.”

“But—where can I reach you? You arranged for a hotel?”

“No. I’ll have to telegraph you, darling. Don’t worry.”

“You’ve got everything arranged with the doctor? Who is the doctor?”

“I don’t know yet. I only know the hospital.” Jonathan dropped his passport as he tried to stick it into the inside pocket of his jacket.

“I never saw you like this,” said Simone.

Jonathan smiled at her. “At least—I’m not collapsing!”

Simone wanted to go with him to the Fontainebleau-Avon station, and take the bus back, but Jonathan begged her not to.

“I’ll telegraph right away,” Jonathan said.

“Where is Hamburg?” Georges demanded for the second time.

“Allemagne! Germany!” Jonathan said.

Jonathan found a taxi in the Rue de France luckily. The train was pulling into the Fontainebleau-Avon station as he arrived, and he barely had time to buy his ticket and hop on. He took a taxi from the Gare de Lyon to Les Invalides. Jonathan had some money left from the six hundred francs. For a while, he was not going to worry about money.

On the plane, he half slept, with a magazine in his lap. He was imagining being another person. The rush of the plane seemed to be rushing this new person away from the man left behind in the dark gray house in the Rue Saint-Merry. He imagined another Jonathan helping Simone with the dishes at this moment, chatting about boring things such as the price of linoleum for the kitchen floor.

The plane touched down. The air was sharp and much colder. There was a long lighted speedway, then the city’s streets, massive buildings looming up into the night sky, streetlights of different color and shape from those of France.

And there was Wister smiling, walking toward him with his right hand extended. “Welcome, Mr. Trevanny! Have a good trip? …My car is just outside. Hope you didn’t mind coming to the terminus. My driver—not my driver but one I use sometimes—was tied up till just a few minutes ago.”

They were walking out to the curb. Wister droned on in his American accent. Except for his scar, nothing about Wister suggested violence. He was, Jonathan decided, overly calm, which from a psychiatric point of view might be ominous. Or was he merely nursing an ulcer? Wister stopped beside a well-polished black Mercedes-Benz. An older man, wearing no cap, took care of Jonathan’s medium-sized suitcase and held the door for him and Wister.

“This is Karl,” Wister said.

“Evening,” Jonathan said.

Karl smiled, and murmured something in German.

It was quite a long drive. Wister pointed out the Rathaus, “the oldest in all Europe, and the bombs didn’t get it,” and a great church or cathedral whose name Jonathan didn’t catch. He and Wister were sitting together in the back. They entered a part of town with a more country-like atmosphere, went over a bridge, and onto a darker road.

“Here we are,” Wister said. “My place.”

The car had turned onto a climbing driveway and stopped beside a large house with a few lighted windows and a lighted, well-kept entrance.

“It’s an old house with four flats, and I have one,” Wister explained. “Lots of such houses in Hamburg. Reconverted. Here I have a nice view of the Alster. It’s the Aussenalster, the big one. You’ll see more tomorrow.”

They rode up in a modern lift, Karl taking Jonathan’s suitcase. Karl pressed a bell, and a middle-aged woman in a black dress and white apron opened the door, smiling.

“This is Gaby,” said Wister to Jonathan. “My part-time housekeeper. She works for another family in the house and sleeps with them, but I told her we might want some food tonight. Gaby, Herr Trevanny aus Frankreich.”

The woman greeted Jonathan pleasantly and took his coat. She had a round, pudding-like face, and looked the soul of good will.

“Wash up in here, if you like,” said Wister, gesturing to a bathroom whose light was already on. “I’ll get you a Scotch. Are you hungry?”

When Jonathan came out of the bathroom, the lights—four lamps—were on in the big square living room. Wister was sitting on a green sofa, smoking a cigar. Two Scotches stood on the coffee table in front of him. Gaby came in at once with a tray of sandwiches and a round pale yellow cheese.

“Ah, thank you, Gaby.” Wister said to Jonathan, “It’s late for Gaby, but when I told her I had a guest coming, she insisted on staying up to serve the sandwiches.” Wister, though making a cheerful remark, didn’t smile. In fact his straight eyebrows drew together anxiously as Gaby arranged the plates and the silverware. When she departed, he said, “You’re feeling all right? Now, the main thing is—the visit to the specialist. I have a good man in mind, Dr. Heinrich Wentzel, a hematologist at the Eppendorfer Krankenhaus, which is the principal hospital here. World famous. I’ve made an appointment for you for tomorrow at two, if that’s agreeable.”

“Certainly. Thank you,” Jonathan said.

“That gives you a chance to catch up on your sleep. Your wife didn’t mind your taking off on such short notice, I hope? … After all, it’s only intelligent to consult more than one doctor about a serious ailment.”

Jonathan felt a bit dazed, and he was also distracted by the decor, by the fact that it was all supposed to be German, and that it was the first time he’d been in Germany. The furnishings were quite conventional and more modern than antique, though there was a handsome Biedermeier desk against the wall opposite Jonathan. There were low bookshelves along all the walls, long green curtains at the windows, and the lamps in the corners spread the light pleasantly. A purple wooden box lay open on the glass coffee table, presenting a variety of cigars and cigarettes in compartments. The white fireplace had brass accessories, but there was no fire now A rather interesting painting that looked like a Derwatt hung over the fireplace. And where was Reeves Minot? Wister was Minot, Jonathan supposed. Was Wister going to announce this, or assume that Jonathan realized it? It occurred to Jonathan that he and Simone ought to paint or paper their whole house white. He should discourage the idea of the art-nouveau wallpaper in the bedroom. If they wanted to achieve more light, white was the logical—

“ … You might’ve given some thought to the other proposition,” Wister was saying, in his soft voice. “The idea I was talking about in Fontainebleau.”

“I’m afraid I haven’t changed my mind about that,” Jonathan said. “And so this leads to—obviously I owe you six hundred francs.” Jonathan forced a smile. Already he felt the Scotch, and as soon as he realized this, he nervously drank a little more from his glass. “I can repay you within three months. The specialist is the essential thing for me now. … First things first.”

“Of course,” said Wister. “And you mustn’t think about repayment. That’s absurd.”

Jonathan didn’t want to argue, but he felt vaguely ashamed. More than anything, Jonathan felt odd, as if he were dreaming, or somehow not himself. It’s only the foreignness of everything, he thought.

“This Italian we want eliminated,” Wister said, folding his hands behind his head and looking up at the ceiling, “has a routine job. Ha! That’s funny! He only makes out that it’s a regular job with regular hours. He hangs around the clubs off the Reeperbahn, pretending he has a taste for gambling, just as he’s pretending he’s an oenologist. I’m sure he has a friend at the—whatever they call the wine factory here. He goes to the wine factory every afternoon, but he spends his evenings in one or another of the private clubs, playing the tables a little and seeing who he can meet. Mornings he sleeps because he’s up all night. Now, the point is,” Wister said, sitting up, “he takes the U-bahn every afternoon to get home, home being a rented flat. He’s got a six-month lease and a real six-month job with the wine place to make it look legitimate. … Have a sandwich!” Wister extended the plate as if he had just realized the sandwiches were there.

Jonathan took a tongue sandwich. There was also coleslaw and dill pickle.

“The important point is, he gets off the U-bahn at the Steinstrasse station every day around six-fifteen by himself, looking like any other businessman coming back from the office. That’s the time we want to get him.” Wister spread his bony hands palm downward. “The assassin fires once if you can get the middle of his back—twice for sure, maybe—drops the gun, and bob’s your uncle, as the English say, isn’t that right?”

The phrase was indeed familiar, out of the long-ago past. “If it’s so easy, why do you need me?” Jonathan managed a polite smile. “I’m an amateur, to say the least. I’d botch it.”

Wister might not have heard. “The crowd in the U-bahn may be rounded up. Some of them. Who can tell? Thirty, forty people, perhaps, if the cops get there fast enough. It’s a huge station, the station for the main railway terminus. They might look people over. But suppose they look you over?” Wister shrugged. “You’ll have dropped the gun. You’ll have used a thin stocking over your hand, and you’ll drop the stocking a few seconds after you fire. No powder marks on you, no fingerprints on the gun. You have no connection with the man who’s dead. Oh, it really won’t come to all that. But one look at your French identity card, the fact of your appointment with Dr. Wentzel—you’re in the clear. My point is—our point—we don’t want anyone connected with us or the clubs. …”

Jonathan listened and made no comment. On the day of the shooting, he was thinking, he would have to be in a hotel, he could hardly be a houseguest of Wister, in case a policeman asked him where he was staying. And what about Karl and the housekeeper? Did they know anything about this? Were they trustworthy? It’s all a lot of nonsense, Jonathan thought, and wanted to smile, but he wasn’t smiling.

“You’re tired,” Wister informed him. “Want to see your room? Gaby already took your suitcase in.”

Fifteen minutes later, Jonathan was in pajamas after a hot shower. His room had a window on the front of the house like the living room, which had two windows on the front, and Jonathan looked out on a body of water with white lights along the near shore, and some red and green from the tied-up boats. It looked dark, peaceful, and spacious. A searchlight’s beam swept protectively across the sky. His bed was a three-quarter width, neatly turned down. There was a glass of what looked like water on his bed table and a package of Gitanes maize, his brand, and an ashtray and matches. Jonathan took a sip from the glass and found that it was indeed water.