The Boy Who Followed Ripley (13 page)

“Aren’t the birches great! I love birches!” Frank said.

Speckled birches stood everywhere, of all sizes, among pine trees and the occasional oak.

“Somewhere—there’s the sector for the military. Barbed wire fences around it, red warning signs, I remember.” But Tom was feeling vague, not like talking, about anything. He sensed a sadness in the boy.

Around this time tomorrow Frank would be flying westward toward New York. And what would he be going back to? A girl he was not quite sure of, and a mother who had once asked him if he had killed his father—and had seemed to believe him when he had said no. And would anything in America have changed? New evidence come up against Frank? Maybe. Tom couldn’t guess how, but he supposed there was a possibility of new evidence. Had Frank really killed his father, or was it a fantasy of Frank’s? It was not the first time Tom had wondered about that. Was it because the sunlit woods were so beautiful, the day so pleasant, that he didn’t want to believe the boy had killed anyone? Tom noticed a big fallen tree on their left. Tom motioned toward it, and the boy followed him.

Tom leaned against the tree, which he now saw had been felled, lit a cigarette, and glanced at his watch: thirteen minutes to four. Tom felt like turning back toward the Trümmerberg, where he knew there were a few cars and a chance of a taxi. It would be easy to get lost if they wandered farther. “Cigarette?” Tom asked. Last evening the boy had smoked one.

“No thanks. Excuse me a minute. Got to pee.”

Tom pushed himself from the tree as the boy walked past him. “I’ll be around here.” He gestured toward the lane they had just come from. Tom was thinking that he could go back to Paris tomorrow afternoon, unless he decided to look up Eric Lanz, and perhaps spend the evening with him. That might be amusing, to see what kind of apartment Eric had here in Berlin, what kind of life he led. It would also give him time to buy Heloise a present, something nice from the Ku’damm, a handbag, for instance. Tom glanced to his right, thinking he had heard something, maybe voices. He looked for the boy. “Ben?” he called. Tom went back a few paces. “Hey, Ben, are you lost? This way!” Tom walked back to the tree they had been leaning against. “
Ben!
” Did he hear a crackling of underbrush far ahead in the woods, or was it the wind?

Frank was playing a trick again, Tom supposed, as he had on the little road near Belle Ombre. Waiting for Tom to find him. Tom didn’t fancy walking through the scruff, the bushes that would tear his trousers cuffs. He knew the boy was within hearing, so he yelled, “Okay, Ben! Stop the kidding! Let’s go!”

Silence.

Tom swallowed, with sudden difficulty. What was he worried about? Tom wasn’t quite sure.

Suddenly Tom broke into a run for the area ahead of him and slightly on his left, where he thought he had heard some rustling of branches. “
Ben!
”

No answer, and Tom plunged on—paused only once to look back into empty, dense forest—then ran again. “
Ben?
”

Abruptly he came to a dirt road and took it, going still left. The road soon bent to the right. Should he keep going or turn back? Tom was curious enough to keep going, trotting now, at the same time deciding that if he didn’t see the boy in another thirty yards, he would turn back and try the woods again. Was the boy running away again? That would be too stupid, Tom thought, for Frank to do, and where would he get without his passport which was at the hotel? Or had Frank been nabbed?

Ahead of him, on a lower level than the road and in a small clearing, Tom suddenly had that answer before him: a dark blue car faced Tom with both its front doors open. The driver at that moment started the engine with a zoom, and banged his door shut. Another man ran from behind the car, started to jump into the passenger’s seat, but saw Tom and stopped with one hand on the door, while his other hand reached for something inside his jacket.

They had Frank, Tom was sure. Tom advanced. “What the hell are you—”

Tom found himself looking at a black pistol pointed straight at him, perhaps five yards away. The man held the gun with both hands. Then the man slipped into the car, closed the door, and the car backed. B-RW-778 the registration plate read. The driver was blondish, the man who had jumped in was a heavy fellow with straight black hair and a mustache. And they had seen him clearly, Tom realized.

The car moved away, not even going very fast now. Tom could have sprinted after it, but for what? To get a bullet in his stomach? What would a little thing like the death of Tom Ripley matter compared to a boy worth a few million dollars? Was Frank in the trunk in back, gagged? Or hit over the head and unconscious? Hadn’t there been one more man, a third, in the back seat? Tom thought so.

This went through his head before the car, an Audi, rolled quite out of sight around the next curve in the woods.

Tom had a ballpoint pen, but finding no paper, pulled out his pack of Roth-Händle cigarettes, took off the cellophane, and wrote on the pink package the car’s license number while it was still in his head. They might abandon the car or change its plates, knowing he had had a glimpse, Tom thought. Or the car might have been stolen for this job.

There was also the uncomfortable possibility that they had recognized him as Tom Ripley. Maybe they had been following him and Frank since yesterday or so. Would it be useful for them to eliminate him? Fifty-fifty, Tom thought. He really couldn’t think clearly at the moment, and his hand had shaken when he wrote the license number. Of course he had heard voices in the woods! The kidnappers might have approached Frank with some harmless-sounding question.

Best for him not to stay one more day in Berlin. Tom plunged into the unpleasantly thick woods again, taking a shortcut to the path, because he was afraid the kidnappers might decide to come back along the road and have a shot at him.

11

T
om made his way back along the lane he had walked with Frank to the Trümmerberg, where he had an irritating wait of nearly twenty minutes for a taxi, and then one came only by accident as most visitors to Grunewald came in their own cars. Tom asked the driver to go to the Hotel Franke, Albrecht-Achillesstrasse.

Wouldn’t it be great, as Frank often said, if the boy were back in his hotel room, having played another trick, and if the people Tom had seen with the car and the gun had been up to some different mischief? But such wasn’t the case. Frank’s key hung on its hook at the hotel desk, as did Tom’s.

Tom took his key and went to his room, locked his door nervously on the inside, sat on his bed, and reached for the telephone directory. The police department’s numbers should be in the front, he thought, and so they were. He dialed the “emergency” number, and put the cigarette packet with the car number before him.

“I think I have seen a kidnapping,” Tom said. Then he answered the man’s questions. When? Where?

“Your name, please?”

“I do not wish to give my name. I took the license number of the car.” Tom proceeded to give it, and the color of the car, dark blue, an Audi.

“Who was the victim? Do you know the victim?”

“No,” Tom said. “A boy—he looked sixteen, seventeen. One of the men had a gun. May I telephone you again in a couple of hours to ask what you have found out?” Tom was going to phone, whatever the man said.

The man said “yes,” and with a brusque thank you hung up.

Tom had said the kidnapping took place about 4 p.m. in Grunewald not far from the Trümmerberg. It was now nearly half past five. He should get in touch with Frank’s mother, he thought, warn her that she might be presented with a ransom demand, though what good it would do to warn her, he didn’t know. Now that the Pierson detective had a real job to do, he was in Paris, and Tom didn’t know how to reach him. Mrs. Lily Pierson, however, would know.

Tom went down to the hotel desk, and asked for the key to Herr Andrews’s room. “My friend is out and he needs something.”

The key was handed to Tom without question.

Tom went up and entered Frank’s room. The bed was made, the room tidy. Tom glanced at the writing table for an address book, then thought of Johnny’s passport in Frank’s suitcase. Johnny’s address in the United States was a Park Avenue address in New York. His mother would probably be in Kennebunkport now, but the New York address was better than nothing, and Tom took note of it, and replaced the passport in the suitcase. Then in the pocket of the suitcase lid he found a little brown address book and opened it eagerly. Under Pierson there was only a Florida address and telephone number, the entry headed Pierson Sunfish. Tough luck. Most people, Tom supposed, didn’t write down their own addresses, because they knew them by heart, but with as many houses as the Piersons must have, Tom had had hopes.

Tom thought it best after all to go down to the desk for what he wanted—post offices being closed today, Sunday. But first he went back to his own room, dropped Frank’s key on his bed, took his sweater off, and wet a towel. He washed his face and his body down to his trousers tops, put his sweater back on, and tried to assume an air of calm. He realized that he was thoroughly shattered by the boy’s—rape, in the sense that he had been snatched away. Tom had never felt thus shaken by something that he himself had done, because in such cases in the past, he had been in control of things. Now he was anything but in control. He went out of his room and locked it, and took the stairs down.

At the hotel desk, he printed on some notepaper: John Pierson, Kennebunkport, Maine (Bangor). Tom thought Bangor was the closest big town, and might be able to provide the Kenne-bunkport number. “Could you ask information in Bangor, Maine, to give me the Pierson telephone number?” Tom asked the man behind the desk, who looked at what Tom had written and said, “Yes, right away,” and went at once to a girl on Tom’s right who sat at a switchboard.

The man came back to Tom and said, “Maybe two, three minutes. Do you wish to speak to a certain person?”

“No. First I’d like just to get the number, please.” Tom lingered in the lobby, wondering if the girl would succeed, if the American operator was going to say the number was unlisted and could not be given out?

“Herr Ripley, we have the number,” said the desk man, who had a paper in his hand.

Tom smiled. He copied it on another piece of paper. “Can you ring this? And I’ll take it in my room. Please don’t give my name. Just Berlin calling.”

“Very good, sir.”

Back in his room, Tom had hardly a minute’s wait before his telephone rang.

“This is Kennebunkport, May-yun,” said a female voice. “Am I speaking to Berlin, Germany?”

The Hotel Franke operator confirmed this.

“Go ahead, please,” said Maine.

“Good morning, Pierson residence,” said an Englishman’s voice.

“Hello,” said Tom. “May I speak with Mrs. Pierson, please?”

“May I ask who’s speaking?”

“This is in regard to her son Frank.” The formality at the other end gave Tom the cool that he needed.

“One moment, please.”

It was more than a moment that Tom had to wait, but at least it seemed that Frank’s mother was home. Tom heard a woman’s voice, a man’s also, as Lily Pierson perhaps approached the telephone accompanied by the butler whose name was Eugene, as Tom recalled.

“Hel-
lo-o
,” came the high-pitched voice.

“Hello.— Mrs. Pierson, can you tell me at what hotel your son Johnny and your private detective are staying? In Paris?”

“Why are you asking that? You’re an American?”

“Yes,” Tom said.

“May I ask your name?” She sounded cautious and frightened.

“That’s of no importance. It’s more important that—”

“Do you know where Frank
is
? He’s with
you
?”

“No, he is not with me. I would simply like to know how to reach your private detective in Paris. I’d like to know what hotel they’re in.”

“But I don’t know why you want to know that.” Her voice was becoming shriller. “Are you holding my son somewhere?”

“No, indeed, Mrs. Pierson. I can find out where your detective is, I think, by telephoning the French police. So can’t you tell me now and save me the trouble? It’s no secret, is it, where they’re staying in Paris?”

Slight hesitation. “They’re at the Hôtel Lutetia. But I’d like to know
why
you want to know.”

Tom had what he wanted. What he did not want was the police of Berlin to be alerted by Mrs. Pierson or by her detective. “Because I may have seen him in Paris,” Tom said, “but I’m not sure. Thank you, Mrs. Pierson.”

“Seen him where in Paris?”

Tom wanted to hang up. “In the American Drugstore, St. Germain-des-Près. I’ve just come from Paris. Good-bye, Mrs. Pierson.” Tom put the telephone down.

He began to pack. The Hotel Franke seemed suddenly a very unsafe place. The duet or trio who had Frank might well have followed him and Frank to the hotel at some time since Friday evening, and might think nothing of firing a shot at him as he left the hotel, or even of coming up to his room to do it. Tom picked up the telephone and told the desk that he would be leaving in a few minutes, and could they make up his bill and also the bill for Herr Andrews? Then Tom closed his suitcase, and went to Frank’s room with its key. He had thought a moment ago of ringing Eric Lanz. Eric might be willing to put him up, but if Eric couldn’t, then any hotel in Berlin was safer than this one. Tom packed Frank’s things, shoes from the floor, toothpaste and toothbrush from the bathroom, the Berlin bear, closed the suitcase, and went out with it, leaving the key in the lock. He took the suitcase to his own room, found Eric’s card in his jacket pocket still, and dialed the number.

A German voice, deeper than Eric’s, answered, and asked who was calling.

“Tom Ripley. I’m in Berlin.”

“Ach, Tom
Ripley
! Einen Moment, bitte! Eric ist im Bad!”

Tom smiled. Eric home and having a bath! After a few seconds, Eric came on.

“Hello, Tom! Welcome to Berlin! When can we see each other?”

“Now—if possible,” Tom said as calmly as he could. “Are you busy?”

“No-o. Where are you?”

Tom told him. “I’m about to check out of the hotel.”

“We can fetch you! Have you got some time?” Eric asked gaily. “Peter! Albrecht-Achillesstrasse, easy for us . . .” His voice faded away in German, then came back. “Tom! We shall see you in less than ten minutes!”

Tom put the telephone down, much comforted.

The desk man had not sounded surprised at Tom’s request for the bills, but might think it odd that he was leaving with the boy’s suitcase. Tom was prepared to say that Herr Andrews was waiting at the air terminus. Tom paid the two bills, plus the extra for his telephone calls, and no questions were asked. Fine. He might have been one of Frank’s kidnappers, Tom thought, or in cahoots with them, simply taking away Frank’s belongings.

“Have a good trip!” said the desk man, smiling.

“Thank you!” Then Tom saw Eric walking into the lobby.

“Hello, Tom!” said Eric, beaming. His dark hair looked still damp from his bath. “You are finished?” he asked with a glance at the desk. “I’ll take one suitcase, shall I?— By yourself?”

There was a bellhop, but he was lingering near another man who had three suitcases.

“Yes, just now. My friend’s waiting at the Flughafen,” Tom said in case the desk man or anyone else might be able to hear them.

Eric had Frank’s suitcase. “Come! Peter’s car is just here to the right. Mine’s at the garage till tomorrow. Temporarily
kaputt
. Ha!”

A pale green Opel sat at the curb not far away, and Eric introduced Tom to Peter Schubler, or so the name sounded, a tall slender man of about thirty, with a lantern jaw and black hair cut quite short as if from a fresh haircut. The luggage went easily on the backseat and floor. Eric insisted that Tom sit in front with Peter.

“Where is your friend? Really at the airport?” Eric leaned forward with interest as Peter started the car.

Eric didn’t know who his friend was, though he might suspect he was Frank Pierson, recipient of the passport Eric had brought for Tom to Paris. “No,” Tom said. “Tell you later. Can we possibly go to your house now, Eric, or is it awkward for you?” Tom spoke in English, not knowing if Peter understood.

“But of course! Yes, we go
home
, Peter!— Peter was going home anyway. We thought you might have a little time free.”

Tom was looking on either side of the street, as he had on coming out of the hotel, at the people on the pavement, even at cars parked at the curbs, but by the time they arrived at the Kur-fürstendamm, Tom was feeling easier.

“You’re with the boy?” Eric asked in English. “Where is he?”

“Taking a walk. I can reach him later,” Tom said casually, and suddenly felt sick and awful. He lowered his window all the way.

“My house is your house, as the Spanish say,” said Eric, pulling out a key-ring inside the front door of an old but refurbished apartment house. They were in Niebuhrstrasse, parallel with the Ku’damm.

The three of them rode up with the suitcases in a roomy elevator, and Eric opened another door. More words of welcome from Eric, and with Peter’s help Tom set the suitcases in a corner of the living room. It was a bachelor’s flat with no frills, substantial old furniture, and only a highly polished silver coffeepot flashed a bit of glitter from a sideboard. There were several nineteenth-century German landscapes and woodland paintings on the walls, which Tom recognized as valuable, but such paintings bored Tom to a degree.

“Excuse us a minute, Peter. Take a beer, if you like,” said Eric.

The taciturn Peter nodded, picked up a newspaper, and prepared to sit on a large black sofa under a lamp.

Eric beckoned Tom into an adjacent bedroom and closed the door. “Now what’s the matter?”

They did not sit down. Tom told his story quickly, including his telephone conversation with Lily Pierson. “It occurred to me that the kidnappers might like to get rid of me. It’s possible that they recognized me in Grunewald. Or they can get it out of the boy. So I’d be more than grateful, Eric, if you can put me up tonight.”

“Tonight? Two nights! More! What a happening,
mein Gott!
And now—the ransom request, I suppose? To the mother?”

“I suppose.” Tom drew on a cigarette, and shrugged.

“I doubt if they will try to get the boy
out
of West Berlin, you know. Too difficult. Every car searched thoroughly at the East borders.”

Tom could imagine. “I’d like to make two phone calls tonight, one to the police to ask if they found out anything about that Audi in Grunewald, and one to the hotel to ask if Frank possibly turned up. It occurred to me that the kidnappers might get cold feet and let the boy go. But I—”

“But?”

“I shall not give your phone number or address to anybody. That’s not necessary.”

“Thank you, not to the police anyway. Important.”

“I could even ring from outside, if you’d prefer.”

“My telephone!” Eric waved a hand. “Your calls are innocent compared to what goes on here! Often in code, I will admit! Go ahead, Tom, and ask Peter to do it for you!” Eric sounded sure of himself. “For the moment, Peter is my chauffeur, secretary, bodyguard—all! Come out and have a drink!” He pulled Tom’s arm.

“You trust Peter.”

Eric whispered. “Peter escaped from East Berlin. The second attempt he made it. I should say, they threw him out. The first attempt, they threw him in prison, where he made himself such a nuisance, they couldn’t stand him. Peter—he looks
mild und leise
, but he has—um—guts.”

They went into the living room where Eric poured whiskeys, and Peter went at once to the kitchen to fetch ice. It was almost eight now.

“I shall ask Peter to ring the Hotel Franke and ask if there has been a message from— What was his name?”

“Benjamin Andrews.”

“Ah, yes.” Eric looked Tom up and down. “You are nervous, Tom. Sit down.”