Small g by Patricia Highsmith Page A

have seen a figure on the doorstep, because a high bush concealed anything there. Rickie’s old building had no speaker, so he put on a dressing gown and went into the hall.
    “Who is it?” he asked at the locked door.
    Seconds of silence, then, “Police. Open up.”
    Rickie curled up inside. More queries, and he’d just had a nip, and he felt vulnerable in pajamas and dressing gown. Rickie opened.
    A short, blondish man smiled at him. He was the cop who had just given Rickie a ticket, but now he wore ordinary clothes. “Hi. Can I come in?”
    What was this? But Rickie had begun to suspect. He was still cautious, polite. “This way,” Rickie said softly, leading the way to his flat door, which was ajar.
    “Nice big place,” the cop remarked on entering. “My name is Freddie.” He was still smiling. He looked about thirty-five, certainly not handsome, just ordinary.
    “Freddie,” Rickie repeated.
    Lulu gazed, silent, from her pillow bed on the floor.
    “I think you like boys. What else were you doing in that area, eh?” The cop was certainly getting down to business. He pulled a folded paper from the back pocket of his blue trousers and tore it up, smiling. “Your ticket. Hee-hee! Hah!” He seemed genuinely amused. “Well—do you feel like it?” He walked toward Rickie, arms open.
    Rickie thought, tried to. It wasn’t a frame-up, because he could report the cop, thanks to the ticket in his own jacket pocket. What else was he doing tonight? The cop was here , the man. “One thing—I’m HIV positive—so I—”
    “Me too.”
    “I use condoms, though.”
    “So do I.”
    Less than ten minutes later, they were horizontal, with unfinished vodka and sodas on the floor beside Rickie’s large bed. Rickie considered a low bed sexier. Freddie left around half-past two, after a second shower. He had written his name and two telephone numbers on a piece of paper, in case Rickie was ever in a bit of trouble.
    “Small trouble,” Freddie had qualified with a smile.
    His name was Freddie Schimmelmann and he lived in the Oerlikon direction, in Zurich.
    O N SATURDAY , Rickie pottered in his studio, putting stacks of paper in order, throwing things out. Finally he had a meter-high stack of cardboard, newspapers and outsized publicity material on the floor inside his door. He took a length of sturdy twine and tied it up. This was for recycling, to be stored in his garage till paper-collection day in about a week. Ah, the tidy, thrifty, law-abiding Swiss! Uptight. Why else did the Swiss have the highest drug-abuse rate per capita in the drug-abusing world—meaning the world? Too uptight. Rickie finally swept even the corners of his studio.
    Three P.M. now. He had been to the supermarket with the Merc that morning, laying in the usual, tonic water, beer, milk, dog food, orange juice, coffee, heads of lettuce, a couple of fillets of beef, fresh spinach, and from a good bakery an apple tart.
    Rickie thought hardly at all of Freddie. He had had such encounters before, he reminded himself, more than he could reckon up. But none since Petey. Therefore Freddie was different, and in a way memorable. But by no means a marker, in his experience. Freddie had a wife, he had told Rickie, volunteering this information as if to discourage Rickie from getting too deeply involved with him—not Rickie’s intention. Was he worried about what his wife might think? Maybe he’d ring Freddie some day, but probably he wouldn’t.
    Rickie was about to leave, when his telephone rang.
    “Hello?”
    “Hello, Rickie,” said his sister Dorothea’s voice. “Working this afternoon?”
    “No-o, I am dreaming, sweeping—tidying here. Ha-ha!”
    “Tried to get you at home. You didn’t phone after Mum’s—you know.”
    Mum’s birthday. “I did send flowers. And I phoned her. Maybe I phoned the day afterward.”
    Such was the case. Dorothea told him that she and Robbie had driven up to Lausanne, but daughter Elise had not come with them,