The Blunderer (34 page)

He imagined he heard Ellie's voice saying very distinctly, “I love you, Walter.” Walter stopped suddenly, listening. How many times had she said that? And what did it mean? It did not seem to mean half so much as Clara's saying it, and Clara had said it, and in her way she had meant it. He began walking again, but almost immediately he stopped and looked behind him.

He had heard the sound of a shoe stubbing on a rock.

He stared into the blackness below him. He heard nothing now. He glanced around for a path. He did not know where he was. He kept on in the direction he had been going. Perhaps he had imagined the sound. But for an instant, he had been absurdly frightened, imagining Kimmel behind him, puffing up the hill, angry, looking for him. Walter made himself walk in long slow paces. The ground began to slope downward.

A twig snapped behind him.

Walter took the rest of the slope in leaping strides, and jumped finally down a rock face onto a path. He stepped quickly into the shadows of an overhanging tree. The path was only dimly lighted by a lamp several yards away, but Walter could see distinctly the high rock he had jumped down, and the gentler slope of ground on the other side of it, down to the path.

Now he could hear steps.

He saw Kimmel come to the edge of light above the rock, look all around him, then descend by the gentler slope. Walter saw Kimmel look in both directions on the path, then walk towards him. Walter pressed himself against the sloping rock face of the hill. Kimmel's huge face turned to right and left as he walked. He held his right hand in a strange way, as if he carried an open knife whose blade he kept hidden in his sleeve. Walter stared at the hand, trying to see, after Kimmel passed him.

Kimmel must have followed him from the apartment, Walter thought, must have been watching the building.

Walter waited until Kimmel was too far away to hear his footsteps when he moved, and then he stepped out on the path and walked in the other direction. He took several steps before he looked behind him, but just as he looked, Kimmel turned around: Walter could see him very clearly in the light from the lamp post, and in the second that Walter stood still he thought that Kimmel saw him, because Kimmel started quickly towards him.

Walter ran. He ran as if he were panicked, but his mind seemed to walk calmly and logically, asking:
What are you running for? You wanted a chance to fight it out with Kimmel. This is it.
He even thought: Kimmel probably hasn't even seen me, because he's near-sighted. But Kimmel was running now. Walter could hear the heavy ringing steps in the cement-paved tunnel he had just come through.

Walter had no idea where he was. He glanced for a building that would orient him. He saw none. He climbed a hill off the path, clutching at bushes to pull himself up. He wanted to hide himself and he also wanted to see, if he could, where to get out of the park. The hill was not high enough to reveal any buildings above the dark wall of trees. Walter stopped, listening.

Kimmel went by at a trot on the path below. Walter saw him, a huge dark shadow, through the leafless branches of a tree. Walter waited until he thought three or four minutes had passed, then he began to descend the slope. He felt suddenly spent, and more out of breath now than when he had been running.

He heard Kimmel coming back. Walter was almost down the slope. He clung to the branch of a tree for a moment, his shoes sliding, listening to the steps that were coming straight towards him, only a few paces away, and he knew there was no hiding now, that Kimmel would surely see his feet, or hear him if he started climbing again. Walter cursed: why hadn't he kept on going across the hill? He tensed himself, ready to spring on Kimmel, and when he saw the dark figure just below and in front of him, Walter jumped.

They both crumpled with the impact and fell. Walter hit with all his strength. Half kneeling on him, Walter hit his face as fast and as hard as he could, then lunged for the throat and held it. He was winning. He felt intensely strong, felt that his arms were strong as iron and that his thumbs were driving into the throat as deep and hard as bullets. Walter lifted the heavy head and banged it again and again on the cement path. He lifted and threw down the head until his arms began to ache and his movements grew slower and slower and there was a pain in his chest so sharp he could hardly breathe. He flung the head down for the last time and sat back on his heels, taking slow gulps of air.

He heard a step and staggered to his feet, prepared to run. But he stood without moving as the tall figure approached him.

It was Kimmel.

A wave of sickness and terror broke over him. He took a step back, but could not make himself run as Kimmel came towards him, lifting his huge right arm to strike him.

Kimmel struck him across the side of the head, and Walter fell. The hard-shins of the dead man were under him, and Walter scrambled to roll away, but Kimmel crashed down on him and held him down like a black mountain.

“Idiot!” Kimmel said. “Murderer!”

Kimmel's fist smashed against his cheek. Walter could smell, like another complicated world in the cold air, the musty, sweetish smell of Kimmel's shop, Kimmel's clothes, Kimmel. Walter's arms twitched unavailingly, and he felt Kimmel's hand grappling for a grip on his throat, taking it. Walter tried to scream. He saw Kimmel's right hand rise, and then in his open mouth felt the sting of a knife blade through his tongue, felt the sting again in his cheek, and heard the blade's grate against his teeth. The hot pain in his throat spread down into his chest. This was dying. A thin coolness flashed across his forehead: the knife. He heard a roaring in his ears like a steady thunder: that was death and Kimmel's voice. Calling him murderer, idiot, blunderer, until the meaning of the words became a solid fact like a mountain sitting on top of him, and he no longer had the will to fight against it. Then he seemed to glide away like a bird, and he saw the little blue window he had seen with Ellie, bright and sun-filled, and just too small and too far away to escape through. He saw Clara turn her head and smile at him, a quick, soft smile of affection, as she had smiled in the first days he knew her.
I love you, Clara
, he heard himself say. Then the pain began to stop, swiftly, as if all the pain in the world were running out through a sieve, leaving him empty and pleasantly light.

Kimmel stood up, looking all around him, mashing his slippery knife clumsily shut, and trying to listen for sounds above the roar of his gasping. Then he faced the darker direction and began to walk. He did not know where he was going. He wanted only to go where it was dark. He felt extremely tired and contented, just as he had felt after Helen, he remembered. He recovered his breath carefully, still listening, though by now he had assured himself that no one was around him.

Two corpses! Kimmel almost laughed, because it was almost funny! Let them figure that one out!

There was Stackhouse, anyway! Enemy number one! Corby was next. Kimmel felt a surge of animosity go through him, and he thought, if Corby only were here, he would finish him off tonight, too.

Kimmel saw the lights of some windows in a building ahead of him.

“Kimmel?”

Kimmel turned around and saw about ten feet away the figure of a man, saw the dull shine on the barrel of a gun pointed at him. The man came closer. Kimmel did not move. He had never seen the man before, but he knew it was one of Corby's men: the paralysis had come over him already. In those seconds that the man advanced, he knew he would not move, and it was not because he was afraid of the gun or of death, it was something much deeper that he remembered from his childhood. It was a terror of an abstract power, of the power of a coordinated group, a terror of authority. Kimmel realized it intensely now, and he had realized it a thousand times before, and reasoned with himself that despite terror, he ought to act, but now he could not any more than at any other time. His hands raised automatically, and this Kimmel hated more than anything, but when the man came very close and motioned with the gun for him to turn and walk, Kimmel turned with absolute calm and with no personal fear at all, and began to walk. Kimmel thought: This time I am finished and I shall die, but he was not at all afraid of that, either, just as if it did not register. He was only ashamed of being physically so close to the smaller man beside him, and ashamed that they had any relationship.

P
RAISE FOR
P
ATRICIA
H
IGHSMITH

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

—
Time

“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.”

—
The 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

“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. The deadly games of pursuit played in [Highsmith's] novels dig down very deeply into the roots of personality…. She has produced work as serious in its implications and as subtle in its approach as anything being done in the novel today.”

—Julian Symons,
The New York Times Book Review

“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,
The New York Review of Books

“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

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

—
Newsday

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

—
The Sunday Times
(London)

“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

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

—
Cleveland Plain Dealer

“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 … Patricia Highsmith is the poet of apprehension.”

—
Graham Greene

Copyright 1954, © 1956, 1966 by Patricia Highsmith

First published as a Norton paperback 2001

Originally published in 1954 by Coward-McCann, New York.

First published in England in 1956 by William Heinemann Ltd.

All rights reserved

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W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

Born in Forth 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 Clare 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.

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 Britian. She died in Switzerland on February 4, 1995, and her literary archives are maintained in Berne.