Suspension of Mercy by Patricia Highsmith Read Free Book Online

in the guise of a plumber, and is quite amusing to look at. The butler at the Haight house insists that they didn’t send for a plumber, and The Whip insists just as firmly that they did. His workman’s accent is impeccable. The Whip is admitted, and is shown to the bathroom on first floor. Whip observes maid in milady’s boudoir. No matter, his kit contains chloroform, and his first victim is the butler, whom he conks with a spanner as the butler leaves bathroom. Maid comes to investigate reason for butler’s (slight) outcry, and The Whip steps from behind bathroom door with ready handkerchief full of chloroform which he claps over maid’s face. Maid swoons to ground. The Whip then takes his large kit, empty except for chloroform and
    “My, you’re going great guns this afternoon. A brainstorm?” Alicia stood in the doorway with a large bowl of strawberries.
    “Yep,” Sydney said over his shoulder, annoyed at being interrupted, but not as annoyed as usual.
    “Sorry I crashed in, but your door wasn’t shut, and Mrs. Lilybanks just brought these over. Isn’t that sweet of her? She got them in Fram. Want some now or wait till dinner?”
    Sydney stood up and smiled politely. He looked straight at Alicia, though he really didn’t see her. Even his eyes were still focused for the distance of the typewriter page. “Save them for after dinner. For me, anyway.”
    “Okay, darling. Sorry I bothered you.”
    Sydney worked until dinnertime, read his synopsis over, then took it to the post office in Roncy Noll, whence it wouldn’t get off till early tomorrow morning, but he wanted it in the post tonight. This was Tuesday, and Alex would get it in the early post Thursday. Sydney was pleased. The Whip had been taken by surprise by a man delivering wine, but had knocked him out on the way to the wine cellar. Then amused by three prostrate forms in the flat, The Whip had decided to make the robbery look like the work of a gang, and had soiled several glasses with beer and scotch, though without leaving fingerprints, and wadded a few linen napkins up on the kitchen table. Coolly he had walked out the front door with his bulging kit, entered a tube station, finally arrived at his own house. He had telephoned his fence, who came that evening, finding The Whip in dinner clothes, displaying his loot which presumably had come from someone else, and driving a good bargain. The Whip received a sizable sum, and the stolen jewelry and silver left the house via the fence.
    “Another Nicky Campbell?” Alicia asked.
    “No, something else,” Sydney answered. He was making the salad, rather hurriedly, as dinner was almost ready and it was soufflé tonight. Eggs were only one and six a dozen now in the country.
    “A new character? What kind?”
    “Well, just for luck—or superstition—maybe I shouldn’t talk about it. It’s so new. Born this afternoon at three o’clock.”
    “A serial?”
    “No, thank God. Complete episodes.” A crook this time, he started to say, but maybe it was bad luck to say even that much. “Anyway, Alex ought to be able to write the first story from what I sent him.”
    Then back again to The Planners , Sydney thought, which was going to have a plot now. He had never had much respect for plot, mainly because he thought in real life people were more separate than connected, and the connection of three or more people in a novel was an artifice of the author, who ruled out the rest of the world because it did not contribute. His first two books, however, had a bit of plot, he had to admit. Monkey’s Choice , his first, had gone into paperbacks, and he still occasionally got a royalty, like $4.19, from hard cover sales, as the book was only four years old. It was about his experiences in the Merchant Marine and involved some of the men he had met in the crew, but that was the kind of book one couldn’t repeat. His second, Shell Game , had to do with three married couples in Manhattan, all young, all