The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps
- Автор: Anderson Lars, Barr Randolph
- Год: 2007
- Язык: английский
- Год: Vintage Books
- ISBN: 978-0-307-28048-0
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps». Краткое содержание книги:
Weighing in at over a thousand pages, containing over forty-seven stories and two novels, this book is big baby, bigger and more powerful than a freight train — a bullet couldn’t pass through it. Here are the best stories and every major writer who ever appeared in celebrated Pulps like Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, and more. These are the classic tales that created the genre and gave birth to hard-hitting detectives who smoke criminals like packs of cigarettes; sultry dames whose looks are as lethal as a dagger to the chest; and gin-soaked hideouts where conversations are just preludes to murder. This is crime fiction at its gritty best.
I think that he saw me but I can’t be sure. At least, he never looked straight at me. I stood my ground while he went over and knelt beside his brother. There was nothing to read in his hard cruel face, with the small nervous little eyes. But he didn’t have to worry if his brother was alive or dead. Already Eddie Gorgon was sitting up, and the curses died on his lips as he looked into the hard, unsympathetic face of his elder brother, Joe.
And that was all of that picture. Fingers fell upon my arm.
“Come, come—” said a soft, persuasive voice. “Don’t be mixing yourself up in some common brawl that don’t concern you. We don’t want to be overconspicuous here tonight. At least, not yet.”
I shrugged my shoulders and followed Rudolph Myer through the narrow hall, out into the cloak room, and so to the main dining room. It was a cinch he hadn’t seen the little byplay. And it was a cinch I wasn’t going to mention it to him. He might be of a nervous temperament, and consider it not altogether conducive to a long life and the pursuit of happiness.
Chapter II
At the Golden Dog
“Mussy bit of a row inside,” Rudolph Myer jerked his thumb back toward the bar when we had taken seats in the almost deserted dining room. “Looked like big Joe Gorgon crossing the—. But, there — I’ve got a job for you.”
“Never mind that yet, Myer.” I dismissed that topic for the time being. “What’s new of The Flame? Still going straight?”
“Still — an hour ago, anyway. But she don’t fancy the ‘honesty is the best policy’ racket, I guess. I don’t think it’s the money, Race; the drudgery of the work; the law stepping in and tipping her boss off that she’s got a record, every time she lands a job. The girl’s got the stuff in her. I think it’s the excitement; the lure of danger; the control of men, she misses. Imagine her keen, active, if criminal, mind now solving the length of a bolt of silk! Though — damn it — the cheapness of her rooms, after being used to every luxury in life, should be enough to throw her. It’s like me, Race. Maybe I wouldn’t be honest if—. What are you grinning at?” He broke off suddenly.
I didn’t tell him. Rudolph Myer was a queer duck and the crookedest lawyer in the city. Which is some record, no matter how you look on lawyers. But I dismissed the “honest,” knowing how touchy he was on that subject. After all, honest lawyers are useless lawyers — at least, in the underworld. And Rudolph Myer was anything but useless. So I took the talk back to The Flame again.
“How about her estate — her mother’s end of it, after her stepfather, Lu Roper, died?”
“Look here!” Rudolph Myer let the fingers of both his hands meet at the tips as he placed his elbows on the table. “I’ve done a bit of legal work for you, Race. We’ve been friends, and — listen. What do you really know about The Flame — Florence Drummond? Oh, I only did what you’ve asked me to do — helped her get jobs so that she could live honest — but as a lawyer of course I learned things. I had to, in trying to get her a bit of Mrs. Drummond’s money in Philadelphia. But Mrs. Drummond wasn’t her mother, Race. Mrs. Drummond simply adopted The Flame a great many years ago from an orphanage outside of Harrisburg. Things were sort of sloppy in those days. The legal papers for adoption never went through properly. Besides which, Lu Roper, her guardian, used what he could get his hands on. But he was a gangster and a killer, and got shot before they could roast him. No, there was little money for The Flame — besides which, she didn’t even fancy my taking an interest in her. At least, lately.” He looked toward the ceiling.
“Well—” I stroked my chin and feigned an indifference concerning The Flame I did not feel, “she’s a good kid, Myer. She did me a good turn. Get her another job — good pay. Make it look natural. I’ll foot the bills.”
“Yeah—” His shrewd, sharp eyes danced. “You should know her best, Race. Yet you seem to be the only man who ever knew her who thinks she’s feeble minded. I warned you it wouldn’t work.”
“What? She knows that I—”
“Maybe.” He shrugged. “Read that.” He shoved a note across to me. It was not sealed. I took out the single folded sheet. It read simply enough.
Race —
You must see me tonight. This is not a plea. Perhaps you owe me that much. I’ll expect you at one o’clock exactly. Climb four flights — second door left — rear. Apt. 5-C.
I am halfway between the girl and the woman you knew.
THE FLAME.
“I am halfway between the girl and the woman you knew.”
That final line was perfectly clear to me. I thought back to my first meeting with Florence Drummond. The wistful, child-like girl who might have been just out of boarding school. And then the times when she was the hard, cruel woman of the world, taking on ten years — her mind shrewd, her every action alert, her face stony and cold — a leader and organizer of criminals. The death of Lu Roper in the Pennsylvania station, back in the Tags of Death affair! The steady hand as she killed the man to save my life; her fight in the underworld, against the distorted brain of the man known as The Angel of the Underworld, in his mad, fantastic, yet almost real grasping for a single Power. Of the night she destroyed that collection of evidence that would set the streets of the lower city allow with blood; of her disappearance into the maelstrom of a great city; her fight now to go straight.
I looked up at Rudolph Myer, and in my mind was the question: When The Flame wrote that note to me, did she love me — or did she hate me? And I—. Well— The Flame was her name. Given to her because men were attracted to her as the moth to a flame. And again my knowledge that to love The Flame — for a man to hold The Flame in his arms — was to die. Call it superstition if you like. But those who had held her had died. As well to call it a superstition to believe that if you look down the loaded end of a six-gun and press the trigger you’re apt to be amazed at the results.
“You read this?” I asked, for Rudolph Myer was watching me closely.
“Why not?” he said. “It was open. A confidence between lawyer and client. And if you seek legal advice, it is— Don’t go.”
“Why?”
“Because,” he said very slowly, as he lit a cigar, “The Flame is a very remarkable woman. You will either hold her in your arms and die, or—” He shrugged his shoulders. “But after all that might be the way. A lovely woman! I am sometimes glad that the lure of the flesh does not appeal to me.”
“And how does she stand toward me now?” I wasn’t paying much attention to Rudolph’s chatter. Greed, I believed, was his single passion.
“I think — as she writes. Halfway between love and hate, with your presence there tonight to decide. But I’ve got something more important for you — or at least, something that may be important. Look here!” He placed his hand in his pocket, drew forth a long thick envelope and handed it across the table to me.
This time I had to break the seal. And inside the envelope were five one hundred dollar bills.
“From a client,” said Rudolph Myer. “The fee for keeping a closed mouth and escorting an individual from — from one destination to another.”
“And the client?” I fingered the bills. They were new and fresh.
“Proposes to remain incognito.” The shoulders hunched again. “But if you recognize his features — I can not prevent that. I might add,” he winked broadly at me, “that I knew him at once. And to miss this opportunity might be the mistake of your life.”