The Boy Who Followed Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

Author:Patricia Highsmith
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Tags: Thrillers, (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯), Fiction
ISBN: 9780393344752
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2008-09-17T07:00:00+00:00

13

Eric and Tom drove off in Eric’s car for the Kreuzberg area of Berlin, which Eric said was less than fifteen minutes away. Peter had departed, promising to come to Eric’s apartment around 1 a.m. Tom had said to Peter that he would be grateful if they could get an early start for the Lübars rendezvous. Even Peter admitted that the driving, plus the finding of the place might take an hour.

Eric stopped in a dismal-looking street of reddish-brown, old four- or five-story apartment houses near a corner bar with an open front door. A couple of kids—the word urchins sprang to Tom’s mind—rushed up and begged pfennigs from them, and Eric fished in his pocket, saying if he didn’t give them some coins, they might do something to his car, though the boy looked only about eight years old, and the girl perhaps ten, with lipstick messily applied to her lips and rouge on her cheeks. She wore a pavement-length gown which looked as if it had been fashioned from a brownish-red and pinned-together window curtain to create something like a dress. Tom erased his first idea, that the girl was playing with her mother’s makeup and wardrobe: there was something more sinister going on here. The little boy had a thick mop of black hair which had been whacked in places by way of a haircut, and his dark eyes were glazed or maybe simply elusive. His projecting underlip seemed to indicate a fixed contempt for all the world around him. The boy had pocketed the money that Eric had given the girl.

“Boy’s a Turk,” said Eric, locking his car, keeping his voice low. Eric gestured toward a doorway they were supposed to enter. “They can’t read, you know? Puzzles everyone. They speak Turkish and German fluently, but can’t read anything!”

“And the girl? She looks German.” The little girl was blonde. The strange juvenile pair were watching them still, standing by Eric’s car.

“Oh, German, yes. Child prostitute. He’s her pimp—or he is trying to be.”

A buzz released the door and they went in. They climbed three flights of badly lit stairs. The hall windows were dirty, and let in almost no light. Eric knocked on a dark brown door, its paint scarred as if from kicks and blows. When clumping footsteps approached, Eric said, “Eric” at the door crack.

The door was unlocked, a tall, broad man beckoned them in, talking in mumbled German in a deep voice. Another Turk, Tom saw, with a swarthiness of face that not even dark-haired Germans ever achieved. Tom walked into a terrible smell of what he thought was stewing lamb mingled with cabbage. Worse, they were promptly ushered into the kitchen whence the smell originated. A couple of small children played on the linoleum floor, and an old woman with a tiny-looking head and fuzzy, thin gray hair stood at the stove, stirring a pot nervously. The grandmother, Tom supposed, and maybe German, as she didn’t look Turkish, but he couldn’t really tell.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.