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.
His compartment mate looked up, not particularly friendly. Babe tried to figure him, and he tried to figure Babe. Or maybe he had already.
“Howja find it?” he said finally. Just that. Meaning he knew Babe had been working Paris in one way or another. Babe got it.
“I don’t have to talk to you!” he snarled. “Whaddya think y’are, an income tax blank?”
“Tell you what I am, a clairvoyant; read the future. First night out you’ll be drumming up a friendly little game — with your own deck of cards. Nickels and dimes, just to make it interesting.” He made a noise with his lips that was the height of vulgarity. “Lone wolf, I notice, though. Matter, Sûreté get your shill?”
Babe balled a fist, held it back by sheer will power. “Read your own future.” He slapped himself on the shoulder with his other hand. “Find out about the roundhouse waiting for you up in here.”
The other guy went back to his Paris Herald contemptuously. He must have known he’d hit it right the first time, or Babe wouldn’t have taken it from him. “You know where to find me,” he muttered. “Now or after we’re aboard. I’ll be in 42-A.”
The label on that wardrobe trunk of his outside flashed before Babe’s mind. He took a deep breath, that was almost a curse in itself, and closed his eyes. He shut up, didn’t say another word. When he opened his eyes again a minute later, they were focused for a second down at the feet of the guy opposite him. Very flat, that pair of shoes looked, big — and very flat.
The motion of the train seemed to sicken him for a moment. But this guy was going back alone. A muffed assignment? Or just a vacation? They didn’t take 3,000-mile jaunts for vacations. They didn’t take vacations at all! Maybe the assignment hadn’t had a human quarry — just data or evidence from one of the European police files?
The irises of the other man’s eyes weren’t on him at all, were boring into the paper between his fists — which probably meant he could have read the laundry mark on the inside of Babe’s collar at the moment, if he’d been called on to do so. Federal or city? Babe couldn’t figure. Didn’t look government, though. The dick showed too plainly all over him — the gentleman with the whiskers didn’t use types that gave themselves away to their quarry that easy.
“So I not only ride the waves with a corpse in my cabin with me, but with a dick in the next bunk! Oh, lovely tie-up!” He got up and went outside to take a look at his trunk. Looked back through the glass after he’d shut the door; the guy’s eyes hadn’t budged from his paper. There’s such a thing as underdoing a thing; there’s also such a thing as overdoing it, Babe told himself knowingly. The average human glances up when someone leaves the room he’s in. “You’re good,” he cursed him, “but so am I!”
The trunk was okay. He hung around it for a while, smoking a cigarette. The train rushed northwestward through France, with dead Manon and her killer not a foot away from one another, and the ashes of a cigarette were the only obsequies she was getting. They were probably missing her by now at the jewelry shop on the Rue de la Paix, phoning to her place to find out why she hadn’t showed. Maybe a customer would come in today and want to be shown that pearly necklace, number twenty-nine; maybe no one would ask to see it for a week or a month.
He went back in again, cleaned his nails with a pocket-knife. Got up and went out to look, in another half-hour. Came back in again. Gee, Cherbourg was far away! At the third inspection, after another half-hour, he got a bad jolt. A fresh little flapper was sitting perched up on top of it, legs crossed, munching a sandwich! The train motion gave him a little qualm again. He slouched up to her. She gave him a smile, but he didn’t give her one back. She was just a kid, harmless, but he couldn’t bear the sight.
“Get off it, Susie,” he said in a muffled voice, and swept his hand at her vaguely. “Get crumbs all over it, it ain’t a counter.”
She landed on her heels. “Oh, purrdon me!” she said freshly. “We’ve got the President with us!” Then she took a second look at his face. He could tell she was going mushy on him in another minute, so he went back in again. The flatfoot — if he was one — was preferable to that, the way he felt right now.
Cherbourg showed about one, and he’d already been out there in the vestibule with it ten minutes before they started slowing up. The train ran right out onto the new double-decker pier the French had put up, broadside to the boat; all you had to do was step up the companionway.
His friend the conductor brushed by, gave him the office, accomplished the stupendous feat of not seeing the huge trunk there, and went ahead to the next vestibule. The thing stopped. Babe stuck his head out. Then he found out he wouldn’t even need a French middleman, the ship’s stewards were lined up in a row on the platform to take on the hand-luggage for the passengers. One of them came jumping over. “Stand by,” Babe said. The passengers had right of way first, of course. They all cleared out — but not the wise guy. Maybe he’d taken the door at the other end of the coach, though.
Then the third hurdle reared — sky-high. “In the stateroom?” the steward gasped respectfully. “That’s out of the question, sir — a thing that size! That has to go in the hold!”
About seven minutes of this, two more stewards and one of the ship’s officers — and he wasn’t getting anywhere. “Tell you what,” he said finally, groggy with what he was going through, “just lemme have it with me the first day, till I can get it emptied a little and sorted out. Then you can take it down the hold.” He was lighting one cigarette from another and throwing them away half-smoked, his eyebrows were beaded with sweat, the quay was just a blur in front of him...
“We can’t do that, man!” the officer snapped. “The hold’s loaded through the lower hatches. We can’t transfer things from above down there, once we’re out at sea!”
Behind Babe a voice said gruffly: “Lissen, I’m in there with him and I got something to say — or haven’t I? Your objection is that it’ll take up too much room in there, cramp the party sharing the cabin with him, right? Well, cut out this bellyaching, the lot of you, and put it where the guy wants it to go! It’s all right with me, I waive my rights—”
4
Babe didn’t turn around. He knew what had just happened behind him though, knew by the way their opposition flattened out. Not another word was said. He knew as well as if he’d seen it with his own eyes: the guy had palmed his badge at them behind his back!
He would have given anything to have it go into the hold now, instead, but it was too late! He swallowed chokedly, still didn’t turn, didn’t say thanks. He felt like someone who has just had a rattlesnake dropped down the back of his neck while he’s tied hand and foot.
He got down from the car, and they hopped in to get it. He didn’t give it another look. He headed slowly toward the companionway he’d been directed to, to show his ticket, and was aware of the other man strolling along at his elbow. “What’s your game?” he said, out of the corner of his mouth, eyes straight ahead.
There was mockery in the slurring answer. “Just big-hearted. Might even help you make out your customs’ declaration on what y’got in it—”
Babe stumbled over something on the ground before him that wasn’t there at all, stiff-armed himself against a post, went trudging on. He didn’t have anything in his shoulder for this guy before. He had something in his heart for him now — death.
He looked up at the triple row of decks above him while an officer was checking his ticket and passport at the foot of the companionway. It was called the American Statesman. “You’re going to be one short when you make the Narrows seven days from now!” he told it silently. “This copper’s never going to leave you alive.”