The Boy Who Followed Ripley Read Online Free PDF Page A

happier she was, and Tom had no complaint about the drinks she made for him.
    “You had a harpsichord lesson today?” Billy had noticed the music books on the open harpsichord.
    Tom said yes, Scarlatti, and for his wife a Bach Invention. “Much more fun than playing bridge in the afternoon.” Tom was grateful that Billy did not suggest that he play something. “Now your Paris trip—our four-footed friends.”
    “Yes,” said Billy, tilting his head back as if he were thinking carefully before beginning. “I spent Wednesday morning making sure the Auberge really didn’t exist. I asked in a café, also at a garage which said they’d had a couple of people asking too—and I even asked the police in Veneux. They said they’d never heard of it, and they couldn’t find it on a detailed map. Then I asked at a big hotel there, and they’d never heard of it.”
    Tom knew, the Hotel Grand Veneux, probably, a name which had always made Tom think of “the big venery,” suggesting a huge letch of some kind. Tom winced at his own thoughts. “You were pretty busy Wednesday morning, it seems.”
    “Yes, and of course I worked Wednesday afternoon, because I do put in five or six hours a day for Madame Boutin.” He took a gulp of beer from his glass. “Then Thursday yesterday I went to Paris, to the eighteenth arrondissement starting with Les Abbesses Metro stop. Then Place Pigalle. I went to their post offices and asked about box two hundred and eighty-seven. That was not information for the public, they said. I asked the name of the person who was collecting, you see.” Billy smiled a little. “I was in my work clothes, and I said I wanted to give ten francs to an animal fund, and wasn’t that box number an animal fund. You’d have thought I was a crook, the way they looked at me!”
    “But do you think you asked at the right post office?”
    “I couldn’t tell, because all the post offices in the eighteenth—or four of them—refused to say if they had a box two eighty-seven. So I did the next best thing—the logical thing, I thought,” Billy said, looking at Tom as if he expected him to guess what he had done.
    Tom couldn’t, at the moment. “What?”
    “I bought some paper and a stamp, went to the next café, and wrote a letter to the Auberge saying, ‘Dear Auberge et cetera, your mimeographed establishment does not exist. I am one of the many duped— trompés , you know—’ ”
    Tom nodded appreciatively.
    “ ‘—and I have allied myself with other well-meaning friends of your charitable— fraud . Therefore be prepared for an invasion by the legal authorities.’ ” Billy sat forward, and there seemed to be a struggle going on in his face or mind, between amusement and righteous indignation. His cheeks had pinkened, he smiled and frowned at the same time. “I said their post box would be watched.”
    “Excellent,” said Tom. “I hope they’re squirming.”
    “I did hang around one promising post office, hoping.— I said to a girl behind the window, how often do they come to collect? She wouldn’t tell me. That’s typically French, of course. Not that she was trying to protect anybody necessarily.”
    Tom knew. “How is it you know so much about the French? And you speak a pretty good French too, don’t you?”
    “Oh—we had it in school, of course. Then—a couple of years ago I—my family spent a summer in France. Down south.”
    Tom had the feeling the boy had been brought several times to France, maybe starting at the early age of five. No one learned decent French in an ordinary American high school. Tom opened another Heineken at the bar cart and brought it to the coffee table. He had decided to plunge in. “Did you read about the death of the American John Pierson—about a month ago?”
    Surprise showed in the boy’s eyes for an instant, then he seemed to be trying to remember. “I think I heard something—somewhere.”
    Tom waited, then said, “One of the two boys in the