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.
The guy Rocco said, “Two rolls, no coffee,” to oftenest was a fellow named Perino. “Patsy” Perino they used to call him. Rocco made that nickname up because he said Perino was the biggest Patsy that ever was, and the tag sort of stuck. As far as I know, nobody ever called Patsy by his right name; in fact, nobody seemed to know what his square name might be. But everybody used to just call him Patsy and it made him furious.
Patsy was convinced of two things in this world. First of all, he was convinced that he was the unluckiest gambler that ever drew breath, and I must say I can see where he got that idea, because he bucked Rocco’s crap table every payday from 1933 to 1940 and I don’t think he went away winner more than once. That once was close to Christmas, and I knew Patsy hadn’t saved anything out of his pay up at the mill — which was about twenty bucks a week — and I figured he’d have to buy his girl a present, so I sort of let him win a hundred and forty bucks, figuring we’d get it back after the holidays. Rocco gave me hell for it and told me if it ever happened again it would come out of my pay, and, believe me, mister, it never happened again. The other thing Patsy believed was that some day his luck would turn and that when that happened he’d beat that crap table out of every cent he’d poured into it, and more, too.
Well, like I said, Patsy dropped every cent he could get his hands on into that crap game from 1933 to 1940, and when he stopped coming around, Rocco was worried about him. Not that Rocco gave a damn about Patsy, really. He just thought of Patsy as a kind of agent who had to work all week at a heavy machine and then bring his money to Rocco, and he was sore when Patsy didn’t show up, same as a father might be if sonny boy failed to pony up the weekly check.
The upshot of it all was that he sent me up to Patsy’s end of town to look around for him. It was along about November 1940 that I went wandering up to the bunch of little houses back of the mill where I figured Patsy must live. It’s funny, but I’d never been up that way before; working late nights, I’d always had a room near Rocco’s place, and when I wasn’t working or sleeping I’d usually drop down here for a drink. Well, the first person I ran into was Patsy’s girl. Real pretty she was, too, which is kind of surprising when you figure Patsy wasn’t much of a catch, being just another guy who worked in the mill, and not even one of the steady ones who’d bring home a full envelope every Friday, but a born gambler who’d never have a nickel. But everybody’s always known that Louise was Patsy’s girl and that was that. I guess she started going with him in high school, before he’d really begun gambling, and when the dice bug bit him she figured she ought to stick with him, same as if he was sick or something, which, in a manner of speaking, he was.
Well, I gave Louise a big smile and an extra cheerful hello, and she just sort of froze up and went on up the street without a word. I followed her, and finally she went into a grocery store, and so did I. Once I’d told her that we were just curious about why Patsy hadn’t been around to Rocco’s in so long, that he didn’t owe us any money or anything, she unfroze a little, and told me that Patsy was in the Army and that he wouldn’t be back for a year; not, she was quick to add, that it was any of my business. Well, having nothing better to do, I walked her home, and when we got there, she asked me in, just out of politeness, I guess. Louise is about the politest girl there is. We talked of this and that, mostly about Patsy, and I could see that she didn’t hold Patsy’s failings against me, which was only right, after all. She told me about how Patsy had quit the dice time and time again, and how they were always figuring on getting married as soon as he’d saved up enough money, but how he’d always break down as soon as he got his hands on his pay chit and go down to Rocco’s and blow it in. Of course, like I said, it wasn’t any of my fault, the whole thing, but listening to her tell it, I was almost ashamed of myself. I got Patsy’s address from her, which was Camp Carson, Colorado, and wished her luck, and went back to Rocco’s.
Well, Patsy turned out to be only the first of a lot of guys to go into the Army from our town, and eventually it got so the place was mainly populated by overage bankers, school-kids, and women. The guys who weren’t drafted, it seems they all took off for the other towns chasing after the war-plants and the big money. Maybe for a lot of guys the war was a time for big money, but not for Rocco and me. We kept the house going as long as we could, even put in slot machines and let the women in, but it was no use. We started booking horses, and the horses stopped running. So what we wound up doing was the best we could, like the fellow says, and take my word for it, mister, it was no good. We liked to starve to death before the war was over.
Well, when it finally did end, the boys started coming back, and the dice started to roll again. Not just small-time stuff like before, real big-time, big money, games. The boys were all loaded from the shipyards and the airplane factories, and wages were way up at the mill, and what with one thing and another we raised the minimum bet at the crap table from half a buck to half a pound, and Rocco raised me from a hundred and a quarter to two-and-a-half. Things were really great; only one more thing we needed: Patsy. He didn’t show up with the rest of the boys, and I was beginning to think that maybe he was as unhandy a soldier as he was a dice-shooter, and in that case he sure never would be back.
Then one night, after closing time at Rocco’s, I was sitting right in here having a drink, not behind the bar like now, but over there at one of those little tables, when who should come strolling through the front door? That’s right, chum, Patsy himself.
“Hiya, Patsy!” I said. I was really glad to see him — not just because of business, you know. He was like an old friend, even if I never knew him except as another guy to slide the dice to.
He looked at me kind of funny. “Name’s John, Tony,” he said. “Not Patsy. I learned a lot in the Army, Tony.”
He came over and sat down and started to talk. He told me how he’d been overseas, in Italy with the ski troops, and how he’d seen a lot of killing and done a little himself. But he’d been careful. Real careful. “You know why I was so careful, Tony?” he asked me. I just looked at him. “I was careful, Tony, because I wanted to get back to this town. I wanted to go up to Rocco’s and get hunk with that damn dice game of his. When you see him, Tony, you tell him I’m in town and I’ve got money and I’m coming up tomorrow night” — he glanced at his watch — “make that tonight, and give his dice game a real going-over.”
Well, when he said that, I knew he hadn’t learned as much in the Army as he thought. A man going duck hunting doesn’t tell the ducks. It gives them a chance to get set.
Rocco and I got set, O.K. We checked over our board and our dice, and we went over to the bank and got a great big stack of crisp, fresh-looking hundreds, because in a big game it helps if the house has a lot of cash money to flash around.
When we opened for business that night, I could tell something was up. All the boys from the mill were there, and we figured Patsy had been telling them his big plans. Some of the lads came over to the dice table and started shooting, five bucks at a time, but you could tell they were just killing time. Rocco was walking around between the roulette wheel and the craps setup with an expression on his face like a cat that figures to eat a canary.
About ten o’clock Patsy walked in, and the whole crowd, as if it was a signal, moved over to the dice table. They were standing about four deep around it. The boy who was shooting made his point and picked his saw off the pass line. Then, instead of putting down some more money and shooting again, he set the dice down on the edge of the table. In any language in the world that means the shooter passes the dice.