The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories
- Автор: Adams Cleve F., Babcock Dwight V.
- Год: 2010
- Язык: английский
- Год: A Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
- ISBN: 978-0-307-45543-7
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories». Краткое содержание книги:
Black Mask was the apotheosis of noir. It was the magazine where the first hardboiled detective story, which was written by Carroll John Daly appeared. It was the slum in which such American literary titans like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler got their start, and it was the home of stories with titles like “Murder Is Bad Luck,” “Ten Carets of Lead,” and “Drop Dead Twice.” Collected here is best of the best, the hardest of the hardboiled, and the darkest of the dark of America’s finest crime fiction. This masterpiece collection represents a high watermark of America’s underbelly. Crime writing gets no better than this.
“Forgive, sah,” Mr. Sze said, eyes inflexible, “but that would be my pleasure.”
Nick raised his head. He dropped his eyes to the carton on the bed, the empty carton which the clerk had given him. He could just see the legend on the face of the box. The drug had a Cardwell Institute label on it, a number, and the words Haffkine Vaccine.
Five silent seconds passed while his brain absorbed the words. They transfixed him. He went rigid, his mouth agape, his eyes dilated, his face paling. It struck home, the whole rotten terrifying business hit into the pit of the stomach with force which stiffened his muscles and knotted a nausea in his throat. The realization welled up in his mind in a roaring crescendo, and he saw the past flit by in rapid succession, from the second century through the twentieth, in the twinkling of an eye. Here was a plot he would not have believed possible, a plot where artificiality was almost fantastic, and yet the simple legend on the carton, like a thunderbolt, declaimed the fact. All at once, the pieces fitted together, the entire jigsaw puzzle coincided its multitudinous parts perfectly.
In the lightning swift procession of the past, he saw Imperial Rome decimated, the houses filled with dead, the streets with funerals, the air with lamentations. He saw the Italian boot gripped in the thing, Genoa, Siena, Pisa prostrated, nearly all the population struck down, the city of Florence taken in storm, perishing in the twinkling of an eye. He saw the Channel crossed, and London blighted and seventy thousand men and women dying swiftly and terribly. He saw the red crosses on the doors of Drury Lane and the words Lord Have Mercy on Us inscribed thereon, as Samuel Pepys had seen. He saw the dancing rats, red-eyed, sick and dying, coming down the centuries, to Hong Kong, Manila, Bombay. He saw the flea, Pulex cheopis, and the cry echoed in his mind like the beat of a kettle drum: Plague, PLAGUE, PLAGUE!
All this from the simple legend on the carton. The two words Haffkine Vaccine explained so much. Back in time, recent enough to be called contemporary, a professor named W. M. Haffkine of Bombay had developed a vaccine for bubonic plague which aroused the immunity forces of an individual against the Black Death, although the time of immunity was extremely brief. Nick had used it often, injecting himself before going into plague foci to stamp out the pestilence. A man like Cameron, working in Honolulu where plague was not endemic, could never have had a sane reason for such an injection unless he was working with plague.
It raced through Nick’s mind, feverishly, as he sat on the bed, all in brief seconds, for Mr. Sze did not seem aware of any prolonged stalling. Disaster imminent in forty-eight hours. MacFerson must have been part of the plot, come down with the buboes, and in his dying terror, had blurted it all out to Colonel Venner.
It was madness, he would not have believed it could be handled artificially, and yet, of them all, it was the surest and most sweeping pestilence. It was the sort of thing which could decimate half of the entire garrison of the island, make the naval base almost uninhabitable, the crowded native sections a pyre of dead, wipe out the manpower in the military barracks. It was difficult to control when it erupted, naturally. Artificially begun, with varied and numerous foci, with thousands of rats and fleas — the image stunned him. The Black Death was omega; there was scarcely any survival if you were struck. You could bury a man in the morning and be buried yourself that evening.
Everything seemed clearer. Venner’s mentioning qualifications for the job, and speaking of his Cairo work. What the devil, he’d been in Cairo many times and done much work, but he knew now that Venner had meant his work in Cairo when he had hunted incessantly for the focus, found it and destroyed it. The greatest rat catcher in Egypt, they had called him.
Nick had never liked working on plague. It was hazardous, its mortality breathtaking. He remembered when he had stood in a Cairo cellar and seen his covered legs swarming with fleas from the dancing, dying rats in that black hole.
Mr. Sze said suddenly: “Forgive me, sah, time passes, and you must reach a decision.”
“Get me the glass of water and put in your chloral hydrate,” Nick said. He rubbed his hands against each other hard, thinking, watching Mr. Sze with caution.
Mr. Sze did not have to leave the room. He poured a glass of water from the Bombay cooler on the side table and dropped the two pills into the water, where they dissolved. He was standing fairly close to the bed. Nick shifted his weight forward so that his feet, curling under the bed, would be able to raise him quickly. Then Mr. Sze, gun in his right hand, glass of water in his left, said: “Forgive me, sah, your potion is ready, if you please.”
“Can it be,” Nick remarked casually, “that you have canine blood, Mr. Sze? Are you related then to the Ming dogs?”
“Forgive me, sah,” Mr. Sze replied, mouth hard, “is it a poor joke?”
“A poor joke,” Nick said, and then he drove it home. “I just happened to notice the flea on your leg.”
The glass of water dropped with a crash. For the first time in their acquaintanceship, Nick saw expression on the face of H. H. Sze. A gnarled pattern of intermingled terror and repugnance broke down the passive structure of the Chinese’s countenance, and he threw his head and eyes down, without any thought but of his own survival, to see the flea — in his mind the only flea — the plague flea.
Nick thought, coming up from the bed, that he took an eternity. He had been tensed, tuning his body for just that moment. He put all pressure on the balls of his feet and shot up from the bed, his right fist out like a ramrod. He had meant to catch Mr. Sze on the jaw, but he miscalculated and struck the Chinese square in the face with force which drove a sharp pain through his hand, and lifted the man over backwards to the floor.
Mr. Sze made no sound, but Nick could see the Chinese had not dropped the gun.
Nick kicked at the gun hand, caught the barrel of the pistol with his toe, sent the gun spinning across the room. It struck the wall a savage blow and detonated. The sound was sharp and frightening. He did not see where the bullet went. He ran across the room, imagining he heard Mr. Sze coming to, for possession of the pistol. Nick picked it up, breathless, and wheeled. But Mr. Sze lay on the floor, on his back, where he had first fallen, his nose bleeding profusely, his eyes closed.
I’ve killed him, Nick thought, appalled.
There was, however, a strong pulse. Holding the gun and watching the Chinese, Nick picked up the telephone. “I want a policeman,” he said. It was a classic phrase in the forepart of every American telephone directory. He supplemented it. “Page a Sergeant Crowell; he may be in the lobby. Then call Army Intelligence, Captain Malta; I’ve caught a gunman in my room.”
The desk clerk couldn’t say a word.
Nick hung up, his hands shaking from excitement. He couldn’t catch his breath. Good Lord, it was a mess. It was no time to be respectable, even though he gave his respectability a momentary thought worrying about it. Someone called him from the door. “Are you all right, sir? Open up in here!”
He opened the door. Sergeant Crowell strode in, his face screwed tight, a revolver in his hand. “Heard the shot,” he said.
“You heard the shot? Then you couldn’t have been downstairs.”
“I was in the lobby,” Sergeant Crowell said. “Sounded like a blasted cannon. Is that the one, the sloe-eyed — sir?”
“His name is H. H. Sze,” Nick replied. He gave Crowell the gun. “You can arrest him. I’ve no time to wait for details at this point. Please get in touch with Captain Malta and tell him to meet me at the home of Eddie Wing. Can you remember that? Wing’s home. And whatever you do, don’t let this man escape.”