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.
“When was this?”
“Round noon, Doc, because the heat was filthy the rest of the day. The trucks stayed there. I could hear them looking for me, but I hadn’t bled outside my clothes and there was no trail. When it got dark, I managed to get out the alley, into a cab. I came right to Dr. Wing’s place, because I figured he’d know where the colonel was. Then I heard they’d bumped off the colonel. That’s all.”
Nick shook his head. “Woolton,” he said, his face alive, “you’re terrific.”
“I’m dead tired,” Woolton said. He smiled. “Thanks, pal. It’s your show now. Make it a lulu and slip the sloe a slug from his pal Boitie.”
Chapter Five
The Men Behind the Rats
There was no time to waste. Nick was aware that Eddie Wing had been in the room with them for most of it, but had disappeared. Nick went downstairs to find Captain Malta in the hall with Wing, a Colt H-5 at his hip. “In a minute,” Nick said. “We can break it open if we’re not too late.” He picked up the telephone and called the Quarantine station in Honolulu. “This is Dr. Nicholas Adams of the Cardwell Institute,” he began formally, so that they would place him. He knew Dr. Jeremiah Riggs down there very well. He asked for Dr. Riggs, and they switched the call to Dr. Riggs’ home. It took some minutes, and Nick was in a nervous frenzy. “Hello, Riggs? This is Nick Adams! Yes, in Honolulu, but listen, Jerry, I haven’t time for amenities. I want you — please understand this, it’s most urgent — I want you to get together the fumigation equipment — yes, hydrocyanic gas and sulphur and anything you have, bring it all, I’m not sure what sort of situation there may be — to the Laboratories Limited on Bishop Street... I mean every word, Riggs, there’s a bubonic plague focus there. Thanks, Jerry, thanks very much.” He hung up.
Captain Malta said: “Bishop Street, Doctor? The shopping center?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll be damned!” said Captain Malta, his face red, and his eyebrows bristling. “Plague! This is out of my line, Adams!”
“No time to talk,” Nick said. “Let’s go. Do you have men?”
“Not with me.” Captain Malta telephoned headquarters. “Give me a company at once,” he said. “Laboratories Limited on Bishop Street. The men are to deploy with arms covering the entrance.”
“There’s a trucking exit in the rear,” Nick said. “That’s most important. Make certain the men who cover that section are protected on hands and legs from any flea bites. Make certain of that, Malta, or it may mean death for them.”
Malta relayed the information and received some in return. “He did?... I’ll leave word here then for him to follow. Yes, at once.” He hung up. “Sergeant Crowell brought in a prisoner at Central station and said that he had information for me. He’s on the way over. Dr. Wing, will you inform the sergeant that I’ve left with Dr. Adams for—”
“I imagine,” Dr. Wing said quietly, “your sergeant is just arriving. There is a car racing down the road.”
He was right. Sergeant Crowell was in the car, and he brought it to a roaring halt in front of the house behind Captain Malta’s car. Sergeant Crowell jumped out. Captain Malta said tersely: “Headquarters said you had important information for me.”
“Yes, Captain, I have. On that gunman — Mr. Sze, Doctor — I found these inter-island boat tickets for Lanai. He was taking the morning boat, two tickets.”
“He was to take me,” Nick said. “At least he said so.”
“Yes, sir, but it ain’t what I mean. Look here, on the other side is the address where the tickets were sent to him. Care of the Laboratories, Limited, Bishop Street. I thought—”
“Good job,” Malta snapped. “Fortunately, we’re a bit ahead of you, we already have the address. Let’s be going.”
Nick and Eddie Wing got in Malta’s car as the engine started. Nick shut out everything but the job. It came easily to him, he had done it often before when he had a patient. You could be thinking of a thousand important things, and suddenly you saw your patient, and in a twinkling, you had detached yourself from everything but the patient and your treatment of him. Oahu was the patient this night and, not unlike those distant days when he had interned at Lenox Hill in New York, he was answering an emergency call, and all that was lacking was the clanging bell of an ambulance.
“I can’t impress upon you the value of secrecy,” Nick Adams told Captain Malta, as they drove into town together. “I fully understand now why Venner was so mysterious. I don’t mind your knowing that we have bubonic plague in Oahu, Captain, and I pray to God we stamp it out before the night is over. Naturally Dr. Riggs and his disinfecting crew are going to know, too, and I suppose Intelligence will be informed. But other than that, I would hush any publicity on the matter, for it ought to be fairly plain to you that such a plot suggests itself again, or suggests others, and that isn’t so good. Also, the population might be too close to a panic line on any other incident, which may transpire, for war is war and other incidents will come along.”
“I understand thoroughly,” Captain Malta said. “I’m even inclined to think I would have acted as Colonel Venner did. It was just his own incredible bad luck in being murdered that prevented a successful conclusion to the thing, as he had planned it. Plague! I don’t know much of these things — that’s the one with rats?”
“Yes,” Nick said. “That’s the one with rats. That’s the one that wiped off half the population of Europe some centuries ago. That’s the one they worry about even in the United States at ports like Mobile or New Orleans or San Francisco.”
“Could it — really work?” Captain Malta asked, his voice awed. “It’s hard to think—”
“It may still work,” Nick said. “If they’ve loaded those trucks with infected rats to establish various foci at the naval base, at various barracks, at the docks, and in the Chinese quarter, not I nor twenty like me will stop the fire once it begins to burn!”
“But exactly how do the rats do it? Why is it so difficult? It’s easy enough to trap a rat.”
“The rat doesn’t do it. The rat is the carrier. There are two types of fleas that do it, they are infected, cheopis and asta. They climb onto a rat, live on him, infect him. When he dies, they hide in the dust and leap onto the next living thing that comes by. Since the long-tailed black mus rattus makes his home with man, he brings the flea into man’s quarters, and you have plague. In septicemic plague, there is a ninety percent mortality, and no treatment of any avail. The ten percent are just lucky. In pneumonic plague, man can then directly contaminate man by merely coughing! The possibilities are gruesome to look upon. As for trapping the rat, Captain, I will pay you a fine reward if you will find me the resting place of the rat. Like the elephant, the rodent burying ground has never been found. Think of it, there is one rat for every two persons in the world, and yet his tomb has never been found. A famous scientist connected with the Rockefeller Institute once spent much time in Manila, trying to find the rat’s grave, and never succeeded. It is most difficult to catch a dead rat, Captain, and in this case, it is the dead rat who is likely to have carried the sinister boarders who strike plague.”