Ripley Under Ground Read Free

operator in an annoyed tone, as if Tom had got her out of bed to do him a favor. Tom gave the number of Jeff’s studio, which he had in an address book by the telephone. Tom was rather lucky, and the call came through in five minutes. He pulled his third cup of filthy tea nearer the telephone.
    “Hello, Jeff. Tom. How are things?”
    “Not any better. Ed’s here. We were just thinking of ringing you. Are you coming over?”
    “Yes, and I have a better idea. How about my playing—our missing friend—for a few hours, anyway?”
    Jeff took an instant to comprehend. “Oh, Tom, great! Can you be here for Tuesday?”
    “Yes, sure.”
    “Can you make it Monday. The day after tomorrow?”
    “I don’t think I can. But Tuesday, yes. Now listen, Jeff, the makeup—it’s got to be good.”
    “Don’t worry! Just a sec!” He left off to speak with Ed, then returned. “Ed says he has a source—of supply.”
    “Don’t announce it to the public,” Tom continued in his calm voice, because Jeff sounded as if he were leaping off his feet with joy. “And another thing, if it doesn’t work, if I fail—we must say it’s a joke a friend of yours dreamed up—me. That it has nothing to do with—you know.” Tom meant with validating Murchison’s forgery, but Jeff grasped this at once.
    “Ed wants to say a word.”
    “Hello, Tom,” Ed’s deeper voice said. “We’re delighted you’re coming over. It’s a marvelous idea. And you know—Bernard’s got some of his clothes and things.”
    “I’ll leave that to you.” Tom felt suddenly alarmed. “The clothes are the least. It’s the face. Get cracking, will you?”
    “Right you are. Bless you.”
    They hung up. Then Tom slumped back on the sofa and relaxed, almost horizontal. No, he wouldn’t go to London too soon. Go on stage at the last moment, with dash and momentum. Too much briefing and rehearsal could be a bad thing.
    Tom got up with the cold cup of tea. It would be amusing and funny if he could bring it off, he thought, as he stared at the Derwatt over his fireplace. This was a pinkish picture of a man in a chair, a man with several outlines, so it seemed one was looking at the picture through someone else’s distorting eyeglasses. Some people said Derwatts hurt their eyes. But from a distance of three or four yards, they didn’t. This was not a genuine Derwatt, but an early Bernard Tufts forgery. Across the room hung a genuine Derwatt, “The Red Chairs.” Two little girls sat side by side, looking terrified, as if it were their first day in school, or as if they were listening to something frightening in church. “The Red Chairs” was eight or nine years old. Behind the little girls, wherever they were sitting, the whole place was on fire. Yellow and red flames leapt about, hazed by touches of white, so that the fire didn’t immediately catch the attention of the beholder. But when it did, the emotional effect was shattering. Tom loved both pictures. But now he had almost forgotten to remember, when he looked at them, that one was a forgery and the other genuine.
    Tom recalled the early amorphous days of what was now Derwatt Ltd. Tom had met Jeffrey Constant and Bernard Tufts in London just after Derwatt had drowned—presumably intentionally—in Greece. Tom had just returned from Greece himself; it was not long after Dickie Greenleaf’s death. Derwatt’s body had never been found, but some fishermen of the village said they had seen him go swimming one morning, and had not seen him return. Derwatt’s friends—and Tom had met Cynthia Gradnor on the same visit—had been profoundly disturbed, affected in a way that Tom had never seen after a death, not even in a family. Jeff, Ed, Cynthia, Bernard had been dazed. They had spoken dreamily, passionately, of Derwatt not only as an artist but as a friend, and as a human being. He had lived simply, in Islington, eating badly at times, but he had always been generous to others. Children in his