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.
Then he closed it a second time, locked it, tilted it this way and that. You couldn’t tell. He scanned his boat ticket, copied the stateroom number onto the baggage label the steamship company had given him: 42-A. And the label read: NEEDED IN STATEROOM. It couldn’t go into the hold, of course. Discovery would be inevitable in a day or two at the most. He moistened it, slapped it against the side of the trunk.
He gave a last look around. There wasn’t a drop of blood, nothing to give him away. The last thing he saw before he let the porter in was the hollow heel that had betrayed him to her, lying there. He picked it up and slipped it in his pocket, flat.
He opened the door and jerked his thumb. The blue-bloused porter straightened up boredly. “Allons!” Babe said. “This goes right in the taxi with me, understand?”
The man tested it, spit on his hands, grabbed it. “He’ll soak you an extra half-fare.”
“I’m paying,” Babe answered. He sat down on the edge of the bed and finished lacing his shoes. The porter bounced the trunk on its edges out of the room and down the passageway.
Babe caught up with him at the end of it. He wasn’t going to stay very far away from it, from now on. He was sweating a little under his hat band; otherwise he was okay. She hadn’t meant anything to him anyway, and he’d done so many lousy things before now...
He’d never trusted that birdcage French elevator from the beginning, and when he saw Jacques getting ready to tilt the trunk onto it, he had a bad half-minute. The stairs wouldn’t be any too good for it, either; it was a case of six of one, half a dozen of the other. “Will it hold?” he asked.
“Sure, if we don’t get on with it.” It wobbled like jelly, though, under it. Babe wiped his forehead with one finger. “Never dropped yet,” the porter added.
“It only has to once,” thought Babe. He deliberately crossed his middle and index fingers and kept them that way, slowly spiraling around the lethargic apparatus down the stair well.
Jacques closed the nutty-looking little wicket gate, reached over it to punch the bottom button, and then came after him. They’d gone half a flight before anything happened. Then there was a sort of groan, a shudder, and the thing belatedly started down after them.
It seemed to Babe as if they’d already been waiting half an hour, when it finally showed up down below. He’d been in and out and had a taxi sputtering at the door. The concierge was hanging around, and by looking at him, Babe could tell Manon had spoken the truth. He had been asleep until now, hadn’t seen her go up.
The porter lurched the trunk ahead of him down the hall, out onto the Rue l’Ecluse, and then a big row started right in. One of those big French rows that had always amused Sherman until now. It wasn’t funny this time.
The driver didn’t mind taking it, but he wanted it tied on in back, on top, or even at the side, with ropes. The porter, speaking for Babe, insisted that it go inside the body of the cab. It couldn’t go in front because it would have blocked his gears.
Sherman swore like a maniac. “Two fares!” he hollered. “Damn it, I’ll never make the North Station—” A baker and a scissors-grinder had joined in, taking opposite sides, and a gendarme was slouching up from the corner to find out what it was about. Before they got through, they were liable to, at that...
He finally got it in for two and a half fares; it just about made the side door, taking the paint off it plentifully. The gendarme changed his mind and turned back to his post at the crossing. Sherman got in with it, squeezed around it onto the seat, and banged the door. He slipped the porter a five-franc note. “Bon voyage!” the concierge yelled after him.
“Right back at ya!” he gritted. He took a deep breath that seemed to come up from his shoes, almost. “Hurdle number one,” he thought. “Another at the station, another at Cherbourg — and I’m in the clear!”
The one at the Gare du Nord was worse than the one before. This time it was a case of baggage car versus the compartment he was to occupy. It wasn’t that he was afraid to trust it to the baggage car, so much — five hours wouldn’t be very dangerous — it was that he was afraid if he let it go now, it would go right into the hold of the ship without his being able to stop it, and that was where the risk lay. He couldn’t get rid of her at sea once they put her in the hold.
The time element made his second hurdle bad, too; it had narrowed down to within a minute or two of train time. He couldn’t buy the whole compartment, as he had the extra taxi fare, because there was already somebody else in it, one of the bulldog-type Yanks who believed in standing up for his rights. The driver had made the Gare as only a Paris driver can make a destination, on two wheels, and “All aboard!” had already been shouted up and down the long platform. The station-master had one eye on his watch and one on his whistle. Once he tooted that, the thing would be off like a shot — the boat trains are the fastest things in Europe — and Sherman would be left there stranded, without further funds to get him out and with a death penalty crime and a “hot” pearly necklace on his hands...
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He kept running back and forth between his compartment and the stalled baggage hand-truck up front, sweating like a mule, waving his arms — the conductor on one side of him, the baggage-master on the other.
“Put it in the car aisle, outside my door,” he pleaded. “Stand it up in the vestibule for me, can’t you do that?”
“Against the regulations.” And then ominously, “Why is this trunk any different from all the others? Why does m’sieu insist on keeping it with him?”
“Because I lost one once that way,” was all Babe could think of.
The whistle piped shrilly, doors slammed, the thing started to move. The baggage-master dropped out. “Too late! It will have to be sent after you now!” He turned and ran back to his post.
Sherman took out his wallet, almost emptied it of napkin-size banknotes — what was left of Manon’s savings — about forty dollars in our money. His luck was he’d left that much unchanged yesterday, at the Express. “Don’t do this to me, Jacques! Don’t make it tough for me! It’ll miss my boat if I don’t get it on this train with me!” His voice was hoarse, cracked by now. The wheels were slowly gathering speed, his own car was coming up toward them. They’d been up nearer the baggage car.
The conductor took a quick look up and down the platform. The money vanished. He jerked his head at the waiting truck-man; the man came up alongside the track, started to run parallel to the train, loaded truck and all. Babe caught at the next vestibule hand-rail as it came abreast, swung himself in, the conductor after him. “Hold on to me!” the latter warned. Babe clasped him around the waist from behind. The conductor, leaning out, got a grip on the trunk from above. The truckman hoisted it from below, shoved it in on them. It went aboard as easily as a valise.
They got it up off the steps and parked it over in the farther corner of the vestibule. The conductor banged the car door shut. “I’ll lose my job if they get wise to this!”
“You don’t know anything about it,” Babe assured him. “I’ll get it off myself at Cherbourg. Just remember to look the other way.”
He saw the fellow counting over the palm-oil, so he handed him the last remaining banknote left in his wallet — just kept some silver for the dockhand at Cherbourg. “You’re a good guy, Jacques,” he told him wearily, slapped him on the back, and went down the car to his compartment. Hurdle number two! Only one more to go. But all this fuss and feathers wasn’t any too good, he realized somberly. It made him and trunk too conspicuous, too easily remembered later on. Well, the hell with it, as long as they couldn’t prove anything!