The Best American Mystery Stories 2005
- Автор: Хиггинс Джордж, Камински Стюарт Мелвин
- Год: 2005
- Язык: английский
- Год: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- ISBN: 978-0-618-51744-2
- Жанр: Другие детективы
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The man said that his client Warren Wolde had left a package for me, which I asked him to send in the mail. When the package arrived, addressed in an awkward script that certainly could have been Wolde’s, I opened the box immediately. Inside were hundreds upon hundreds of wadded bills of assorted denominations, and of course I recognized their folded pattern as identical to the bills that had turned up for me all through my childhood. I could perhaps believe that the money gifts and the legacy were only marks of sympathy for the tragic star of my past and, later, gratitude for what I’d done. I might be inclined to think that, were it not for the first few times I had come to treat Wolde, when he reared from me in a horror that seemed so personal. There had been something of a recalled nightmare in his face, I’d thought it even then, and I was not touched later on by the remarkable change in his character. On the contrary, it chilled me to sickness.
Those of you who have faithfully subscribed to this newsletter know that our dwindling subscription list has made it necessary to reduce the length of our articles. So I must end here. But it appears, anyway, that since only the society’s treasurer, Neve Harp, and I have convened to make any decisions at all regarding the preservation and upkeep of our little collection, and as only the two of us are left to contribute more material to this record, and as we have nothing left to say, our membership is now closed. We declare our society defunct. I shall, at least, keep walking the perimeter of Pluto until my footsteps wear my orbit into the earth. My last act as the president of Pluto’s historical society is this: I would like to declare a town holiday to commemorate the year I saved the life of my family’s murderer. The wind will blow. The devils rise. All who celebrate it shall be ghosts. And there will be nothing but eternal dancing, dust on dust, everywhere you look.
Oh my, too apocalyptic, I think as I leave my house to walk over to Neve’s to help her cope with her sleepless night. She will soon move to Fargo. She’ll have the money to do it. Dust on dust! There are very few towns where old women can go out at night and enjoy the breeze, so there is that about Pluto. I take my cane to feel the way, for the air is so black I think already I am invisible.
Daniel Handler
Delmonico
From McSweeney’s Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories
“What’s a Delmonico?”
The two gentlemen had scarcely entered the place. From where I was sitting they were only silhouettes in the shiny doorway, blaring with rude sun. It was after six but dead summer, so the sun hadn’t set. I don’t drink in the daytime, but if it’s after six you’ll probably find me at the Slow Night. It’s been remarked to me that my regular spot at the bar isn’t the best one, as I have to whirl around whenever somebody walks in, just to see who it is. I Suppose that’s true, that I could choose a better bar stool if I wanted a better view of the outside world. But that’s not what I like to look at when I come in.
Davis was at the cash register, her back to the door, holding two or three dollars in her palm. She was about to give them to a guy, as change for the drinks she made for him and his girlfriend. Then the guy was going to hand them back to Davis. This is how it went with Davis as long as I’d ever seen it. Davis was gorgeous, is what she was, gorgeous not in the way she looked but in the way she was. When she mixed you a drink and handed back your change you’d hand it over to her no matter what you paid and what you ordered. It wouldn’t matter if you had your girl with you, waiting at one of the tables with a high-heeled foot tapping on the carpet. You’d give it back, all your puny dollars, and still you’d feel like you hadn’t forked it over fast enough. “Delmonico?” Davis said, and looked back at the gentlemen. She cocked her head, but not like she was thinking, more like she was considering whether these guys deserved the real answer. They didn’t move. I tried to look at them myself but the sunlight still made them nothing but shadows. All I could notice was that one was taller than the other. Davis had probably noticed six or seven things more, and she’d just that second turned around from the register. “Delmonico,” she said again. “Gin, vermouth, brandy. A dash of bitters.”
The shorter gentleman gave his friend a little tap with his hand. “I told you she was smart,” he said, and then the two of them stepped inside and let the door shut behind them. Davis put her hands on her hips like this offhand compliment wasn’t nearly enough. The guy slid his money back to Davis and took his seat. Time and time I want to tell Davis that I love her, but she’s so smart there’s no way she hasn’t figured it out already.
The Slow Night is on a fairly main drag, more or less half a block away from two other bars and just about across the street from another. These bars are called Mary’s, and O’Malley’s, and The something. I’ve never been inside them and never intend to. One of them — Mary’s, I think — has those little flags all over the ceiling, fluttering like a used-car lot. You can see it from the street because they prop the door open. All of them have the neon in the window and even on a quick walk-by you can hear the roar of music and laughing and the little earthquakes of bottle caps falling to the floor. The bars are full in the evenings, because I guess there are lots of people in the world who like to have a pitcher of something, and sit underneath a TV yelling at each other. In the daytime they’re dead like anyplace, with just a few puttering around. One of them has a pool table and people gather for that, with the chattering of the balls like teeth on a chilly day. I don’t wish any of these people any harm and am grateful that these other bars take them away. The Slow Night looks closed from the outside, with heavy draperies on the windows and no real sign, just the name fading away over the entrance. The doors are closed except when someone is walking through them. From the doorway are two steps down into the bar — mostly for show, I think, because it’s not a basement place. Inside, all the furniture’s realreal bar stools, real tables and chairs, and a real jukebox giving the world the music of the lonely, with Julie London and Hank Williams, and some quieter jazz things I never can determine. They don’t serve food although sometimes a bowl of nuts might appear from someplace, and the only thing one might call entertainment is a few sections of the day’s paper stacked up at the very end of the bar, in case one needs to check on something outside. Nowhere is there any advertisement of any sort, except the clock which says Quill, right in the middle of the face. Davis doesn’t know what that is. It came with the place.
The bar has something of it reputation, in guidebooks fools buy and read. “Don’t let the exterior fool you,” is the sort of thing that passes as praise, “the Slow Night is the real deal — the sort of place in which your parents might have met, with real leather booths and a lady behind the counter who will mix you any poison you can dream up.” But these lazy lies — no booths, you don’t dream up cocktails — aren’t really the thing. Below the surface of the city, murmured between I don’t know who, is the story that Davis is very smart. Not smart like a bartender who knows his World Series, but smart, like if you have a problem you can bring it up after you’ve ordered a drink and she will likely solve it for you. I’ve seen this in action — actually seen it happen. Divorce lawyers. Grad students. Geological survey men. She fixes their puzzles, although they’re no less puzzled, really, when they leave. The gentlemen must have known this too, although the tall one had to ask his quiz master question before he believed it. They took off their hats and sat down.
“Holy—” the guy said from the table, but his girlfriend shushed him. The tall gentleman gave the guy a real angry look, and the guy lowered his eyes and took a long, long sip from his drink. Martinis, both of them, the guy and the girl both. That’s the kind of couple that stays together.