A Dog's Ransom (26 page)

“. . . going! Keep going! Are you going to talk for me?”

Now a punch in the stomach. The man was suddenly right in front of him. Clarence blinked, hurting.

“The time-wasting! For Christ’s sake, give it! . . . Save yourself . . .”

Clarence asked to go to the toilet. He realized he was mumbling. Exasperated, the man accompanied him, asking him to leave the door open so he could see him, just as Morrissey had done. There was a basin. Clarence wet his head, drank out of his hands water that tasted of the liquid soap he had washed with. When they came back into the room, Clarence went to the chair and sat down on his coat.

“Get up!”

Clarence got up. “I am not saying anything else tonight, not to you or anyone.” Now he was weaving a little, and his feet felt damp with sweat. But he was chilly now, not warm.

The dark man, angry, started to say something and didn’t. His lips had started to form words. Then he went to the telephone. Clarence didn’t bother listening. The conversation seemed to go on for five minutes or more. Clarence looked at his watch, with difficulty focused his eyes, and saw that the watch said 3:22. He felt the knob of the watch to see if it had pulled out and caused the time to be wrong, but it hadn’t. It was 3:22 a.m. Monday.

“Do you want this to go on and on?” asked the dark man who had hung up. “Tomorrow and the next day? Let’s have it now! . . . We can give you a shot . . .”

A shot to keep him awake or to make him talk? Clarence was wilting again. His eyes stung.

The man went again to the telephone and yanked it up, pressed a button. He had loosened his collar and tie, and looked quite a different person from the one who had arrived several hours ago.

“I dunno if I need any help here or not . . . No, no, not that.” He was muttering, sullenly.

Clarence turned off his voice as if it were a language he couldn’t understand. Let them bring up reinforcements, fine! Let them give him shots to pick him up, bennies so he couldn’t sleep for days! He wasn’t going to talk for them. They could kill him, and he still wouldn’t talk. As torture went, what he was going through now was nothing, and Clarence didn’t feel sorry for himself. He felt brave. It was exhilarating.

“Let’s
go
, I said!” yelled the dark man.

Clarence turned around.

The man was walking towards the door, jerking his thumb. “Get your coat.”

Clarence supposed that they were going to another room. They climbed the stairs, walked down the hall towards the front door. Out into the cool air. There was a taxi, evidently summoned by the patrolman on the pavement.

The dark-haired man opened the door and said, “You’re going home. Nineteenth, isn’t it? . . . Don’t try to go anywhere else. We can always find you.”

The taxi door slammed. The driver had the address.

Clarence got up his stairs. He took off his tennis shoes and his trousers, washed his hands and face perfunctorily, and fell into bed. It was very dark. His ears rang in a pulsing way. Minutes later, he woke up with a terrible sense of falling, and sat up in bed. He fell back on the pillow again, tense, and not at all sleepy now. His brain was spinning. Morrissey, Marylyn, Ed Reynolds, Greta. They were not doing or saying anything, only whizzing . . . And there was a ringing.

The ringing was real. Clarence groped for his telephone, then realized it was his doorbell. Who was it? Marylyn maybe? No, the cops, certainly, making sure he was home. Clarence didn’t want to let them in, but they’d break in if he didn’t, he supposed. He found a light, and pushed the release button. Then he opened his door a little. He heard a single pair of feet on the stairs, not climbing fast, a man’s tread.

There was a dim light in the stairwell, and Manzoni’s figure came into view. Clarence started to shut the door, then hesitated. Manzoni smiled a little, seeing Clarence.

“Hyah,” Manzoni said. “Just checking. Can I come in?”

“No. Checking on what?”

Manzoni, stocky and determined, smilingly pushed the door wider and came in. “That you’re here. I heard you’re very tired but you didn’t talk yet.”

“Piss off, Pete.” Clarence picked up his trousers from a chair and put them on, keeping an eye on Manzoni.

Manzoni had lit a cigarette. He was hatless, his coat unbuttoned now. Clarence thought he might have his gun with him. Clarence looked at his watch. It was twelve minutes to six.

“Y’know, Clarence, I talked with your two chums today, Marylyn and Reynolds. It’s only a matter of time till Marylyn’s going to tell the truth—and also Reynolds.”

Manzoni’s hesitation about Ed made Clarence not believe any of it. Marylyn wouldn’t help the cops, and certainly not Manzoni. Clarence had no doubt at all about Ed: Ed had given him his word, and besides Ed was sick of all of it. But the great thing was, it didn’t matter now to Clarence. And he was not afraid of Manzoni, even if Manzoni had a gun.

“Let’s have it straight, Clarence.” Manzoni sat down and grinned up at Clarence. “What’re you going to
do
when your ex-chums spill the beans on yuh?” He chuckled. “You’re finished already. So why don’t you just say it? You wasted that Rowinsk.”

Clarence lit a cigarette. Manzoni was here to scoop his “confession” after Homicide had worn him down. Manzoni wanted his promotion, wanted to be a detective! Manzoni had hoped to find him in a weak moment, Clarence supposed. Here was the stinking wop right in the middle of his apartment! The same bum who had infuriated and insulted Marylyn and made her break with him! “Just get out, Pete.” He took a step towards Manzoni.

“Oh, no.” Manzoni drew his head and shoulders back, and kept his seat. “I’ve got a gun here, so watch out.—Clarence,
I
found that Rowajinski when you let him go.
I
was the—”

Clarence pulled his fist back.

Just as quickly, Manzoni drew his gun and pointed it at Clarence. Manzoni was still seated.

“I’m not afraid of your gun. I said get out!”

“You oughta be afraid. I can plug you and say you put up a fight. You think anybody’s gonna worry about
your
life?”

Clarence smiled slightly.

The gun was just inches from him now, pointing at his stomach. Clarence advanced with an intention of knocking Manzoni off the chair.

Manzoni jumped up, and the straight chair went over backwards. In his dark, creased face was sudden terror, a fear for his life. Clarence saw the terror. Clarence took a step back.

Manzoni looked scared and puzzled.

I’ve won, Clarence was thinking, and it’s because I have nothing to lose. How simple! How obvious!

“Come on, take a walk,” Manzoni said, gesturing with his gun towards the door.

“A walk why?”

“I feel like it. S’matter? You scared?”

“I have no reason to take a walk. Just leave me.”

“I asked you to!”

Clarence felt well, very well, no longer tired. He had won over the little scum, and he knew he ought to let it go at that. It was crazy to take a walk—just so Manzoni could pull something on the street, a phony fight between them so Manzoni could use his gun. “I’ve been walking all day,” Clarence said. “No, thanks, Pete, just—”

The gun went off and Clarence felt a thin jolt in the stomach. He stared at Manzoni, who curiously looked just as frightened as he had a few minutes ago, but now there was anticipation and anxiety in his face also. Whether to fire another shot? Manzoni was waiting for him to drop. And Clarence wilted.

Clarence was on the floor. Manzoni was briskly departing but Clarence’s thoughts ran even faster. He was thinking Manzoni would say he had put up a fight—therefore in self-defense—That was, if Manzoni had to say anything. Any way you looked at it, Manzoni was safe. And he thought of Marylyn, a glimpse of the impossible, the unattainable. What a pity she had never understood, really, what it was all about. And Ed, and Greta—they never understood that he would practically have died for them.
I had wished for so much better
.

Manzoni’s brisk departure was achieved. A door closed.

A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

Born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, Patricia Highsmith spent much of her adult life in Switzerland and France. She was educated at Barnard College, where she studied English, Latin, and Greek. Her first novel,
Strangers on a Train
, published initially in 1950, proved to be a major commercial success and was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock. Despite this early recognition, Highsmith was unappreciated in the United States for the entire length of her career.

Writing under the pseudonym of Claire Morgan, she then published
The Price of Salt
in 1952, which had been turned down by her previous American publisher because of its frank exploration of homosexual themes. Her most popular literary creation was Tom Ripley, the dapper sociopath who first debuted in her 1955 novel,
The Talented Mr. Ripley
. She followed with four other Ripley novels. Posthumously made into a major motion picture,
The Talented Mr. Ripley
has helped bring about a renewed appreciation of Highsmith’s work in the United States as has the posthumous publication of
The Selected Stories
, which received widespread acclaim when it was published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2001.

The author of more than twenty books, Highsmith has won the O. Henry Memorial Award, the Edgar Allan Poe Award, Le Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, and the Award of the Crime Writers’ Association of Great Britain. She died in Switzerland on February 4, 1995, and her literary archives are maintained in Berne.

P
RAISE
FOR
P
ATRICIA
H
IGHSMITH

“Highsmith’s writing is wicked . . . it puts a spell on you, after which you feel altered, even tainted. . . . A great American writer is back to stay.”

—
Entertainment Weekly

“Savage in the way of Rabelais or Swift.”

—Joyce Carol Oates,
New York Review of Books

“Highsmith’s gift as a suspense novelist is to show how this secret desire can bridge the normal and abnormal. . . . She seduces us with whisky-smooth surfaces only to lead us blindly into darker terrain.”

—
Commercial Appeal

“Patricia Highsmith’s novels are peerlessly disturbing . . . bad dreams that keep us thrashing for the rest of the night.”

—
The New Yorker

“A border zone of the macabre, the disturbing, the not quite accidental. . . . Highsmith achieves the effect of the occult without any recourse to supernatural machinery.”

—
New York Times Book Review

“Though Highsmith would no doubt disclaim any kinship with Jonathan Swift or Evelyn Waugh, the best of [her work] is in the same tradition. . . . It is Highsmith’s dark and sometimes savage humor and the intelligence that informs her precise and hard-edged prose which puts one in mind of those authors.”

—
Newsday

“Murder, in Patricia Highsmith’s hands, is made to occur almost as casually as the bumping of a fender or a bout of food poisoning. This downplaying of the dramatic . . . has been much praised, as has the ordinariness of the details with which she depicts the daily lives and mental processes of her psychopaths. Both undoubtedly contribute to the domestication of crime in her fiction, thereby implicating the reader further in the sordid fantasy that is being worked out.”

—Robert Towers,
New York Review of Books

“For eliciting the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings, there’s no one like Patricia Highsmith.”

—
Time

“The feeling of menace behind most Highsmith novels, the sense that ideas and attitudes alien to the reasonable everyday ordering of society are suggested, has made many readers uneasy. One closes most of her books with a feeling that the world is more dangerous than one had ever imagined.”

—Julian Symons,
New York Times Book Review

“Mesmerizing . . . not to be recommended for the weak-minded and impressionable.”

—
Washington Post Book World

“A writer who has created a world of her own—a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger. . . . Miss Highsmith is the poet of apprehension.”

—Graham Greene

“Patricia Highsmith is often called a mystery or crime writer, which is a bit like calling Picasso a draftsman.”

—
Cleveland Plain Dealer

“An atmosphere of nameless dread, of unspeakable foreboding, permeates every page of Patricia Highsmith, and there’s nothing quite like it.”

—
Boston Globe

“[Highsmith] has an uncanny feeling for the rhythms of terror.”

—
Times Literary Supplement

“To call Patricia Highsmith a thriller writer is true but not the whole truth: her books have stylistic texture, psychological depth, mesmeric readability.”

—
Sunday Times
(London)

“Highsmith is an exquisitely sardonic etcher of the casually treacherous personality.”

—
Newsday

“Highsmith’s novels skew your sense of literary justice, tilt your internal scales of right and wrong. The ethical order of things in the real world seems less stable [as she] deftly warps the moral sense of her readers.”

—
Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Highsmith . . . conveys a firm, unshakable belief in the existence of evil—personal, psychological, and political. . . . The genius of Highsmith’s writing is that it is at once deeply disturbing and exhilarating.”

—
Boston Phoenix

“Highsmith writes the verbal equivalent of a drug—easy to consume, darkly euphoric, totally addictive. . . . Highsmith belongs in the moody company of Dostoevsky or Angela Carter.”

—
Time Out

“Read [
The Selected Stories
] at your own risk, knowing that this is not everyone’s cup of poisoned tea.”

—Janet Maslin,
New York Times