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.
“Whose dice?” I said.
Patsy shoved his way through the crowd just to the right of the boy who’d passed the dice and said: “I’ll take ’em, Tony. O.K.?”
“Well, Patsy—” I began.
“John.” He still didn’t sound mad. Just firm.
“John,” I said. “You’re supposed to let the dice come around to you once, but unless there’s some objection, they’re yours.”
Nobody objected. Patsy picked up the dice. Rocco came over and stood beside me to watch. There was an awful dead silence while Patsy rolled out. Every once in a while I’d say, “Pay the line,” or, “Pay the field,” but there weren’t any other bettors. Just Patsy. He was betting twenty bucks at a time, and Rocco and I just stood there and watched him make five points in a row, which put him a hundred ahead and was a little unusual, but nothing shocking. He was shooting with perfectly honest dice, of course; any time a man shoots only twenty bobs in Rocco’s he’ll get honest dice, the way I told you. I was starting to relax a little when it happened.
Patsy slapped down another twenty bucks and rolled two fours. Then, while the dice — perfectly honest dice, you understand — were still lying there on the table, down at my end way out of his reach, he turned to Rocco.
“Lay the odds, Rocco?” he asked, very quietly, like you might ask someone the time of day. This meant he wanted to bet some more that he’d make his eight before he rolled a seven, and that he wanted Rocco to give him the odds, which are six to five he won’t.
“For how much.” Rocco sounded disinterested, and his voice let everybody know he’d handle any bet a punk like Patsy could make.
“A thousand,” said Patsy.
“Laying twelve hundred to a thou,” said Rocco, looking down at my stick.
I tightened my fist around the head of my stick and spun the dice back to Patsy. He didn’t look at them, just picked them up in his right hand and shook them back and forth in his fist, holding them way over his head. He slipped his left hand into his pants pocket, hauled out his wallet, and tossed it on the table. “Tony,” he said, “get a thousand out of there and put it on the pass line.” I reached over, picked up the wallet, and glanced inside. There was a lot more than a thousand in there, at least a hundred C-notes, it looked like. I picked ten of them out and tossed them on the line. Rocco peeled twelve of his bills off the house stack and added them to the pile.
“Like to see what you’re shooting for,” Rocco said with that oily grin of his. I suddenly decided I didn’t care much for Rocco. For a second, I wished I could get another chance at stick-handling those dice so I could give Patsy the honest ones back again.
Patsy started shaking the dice again, and then brought his hand towards the table. Everybody craned to get a better look. Then, before he turned the dice loose, he stopped again, and put his hand, dice and all, back over his head, like a football player about to toss a pass. He looked over at Rocco like he’d just had an idea.
“Hey, Rocco,” he said, very casual, “how much money in that stack?”
“Come on, come on, fire your pistol!” Rocco came back, getting a little impatient. “You going to take all night for your lousy grand? There’s enough down there to cover any bet you want to make, Patsy.” He said “Patsy” like it was an insult, not like a nickname.
“Good,” said Patsy. Then he looked at me. “Tony,” he said, “would you please take ten thousand out of that wallet and put it on the ‘come.’ ”
Like the fellow says, my life started to flash through my head a little bit at a time and I started to get dizzy. What Patsy was doing was, well, he was betting he’d come. “Come” in a crap game means to make your point starting when you make your bet. I guess you’ve never shot craps, mac, so I won’t try and explain it to you; the important thing is, if you roll a seven, you’ve come, and you win. And Patsy was betting ten grand he’d win. And I’d just sticked him two dice that couldn’t come up any way but seven!
I just stood there, and the guys from the mills started to mutter and chatter among themselves. “What’s holding you back? You going to take all night for a lousy ten grand?” One of the mill guys gave a sort of nervous laugh. I looked at Rocco. He was just standing there with his mouth partways open, like he was seeing what was happening but he didn’t quite believe it.
Well, what could I do? I tossed Patsy’s ten grand over on the little kidney-shaped part of the layout marked “Come.” I closed my eyes while he threw the dice, and when I opened them up again, all the mill guys were cheering, and Patsy was helping himself to ten grand out of Rocco’s dough. When he had it all counted up and put away in his poke he turned to me and said: “I guess I lose my twenty, Tony. Two rolls, no coffee. Too bad.”
Then he turned away and walked out of Rocco’s place and you could tell he wasn’t coming back. The twenty, of course, was still on the table, and, like I was dreaming, I picked it up and put it in what was left of Rocco’s stack.
That wound up the crap shooting for that night, and I walked down here from Rocco’s not seeing much where I was going or who I bumped into. It was all a kind of bad dream, like I said.
Well, I’d got a week’s salary out of Rocco just the day before all this happened, and I had a kind of hunch it was going to be the last I’d ever get from him, so I sat down in here and drank most of it up. There was something in what Patsy’d done that didn’t add up, something that was familiar, vaguely familiar to me, like I’d been through it all before.
About halfway through my ninth bourbon, or maybe my tenth, it came to me. A story my old man used to tell me, about a sucker who’d cleaned out a crap game he knew was crooked, just the same way Patsy did. It had happened to my old man years ago, in San Remo, Italy. I put down what was left of my drink and started some heavy thinking, or as heavy as you can think on eight-and-a-half, or maybe nine-and-a-half, bourbons. Then I remembered that Camp Carson, where the ski troops trained, is not really so very far from Pikes Peak. A guy like Patsy, on a pass, might easily have gone into some gambling joint in, say, Colorado Springs, and maybe...
Say, I hope I haven’t been boring you, chum, but you know, bartenders are supposed to be a little gabby, and I’ve been a bartender ever since that night.
What’s that, bub? What did Patsy do with his ten grand? Well. I don’t know if I should tell you that. Your cigar’s gone out, though. Here, have a light. Keep ’em. They’re on the house. Courtesy of Patsy’s Bar and Grill.
Those Catrini
Norvell Page
Norvell (Wooten) Page (1904–1961) was raised in Richmond, Virginia, in a moderately wealthy family. He attended the College of William & Mary but at the age of eighteen was already working as a journalist, first for the Cincinnati Post, then the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, before moving to New York to work for the Herald Tribune, the Times, and the World Telegram. His family had been ruined in the stock market crash of 1929, so he began to supplement his newspaper income by writing stories for the pulps, mainly mysteries for Black Mask, Dime Mystery, Ten Detective Stories, and others. In 1933, he began to write novels for the hero pulp The Spider, under the house name Grant Stockbridge. The Spider was created by Harry Steeger for his Popular Publications to compete with The Shadow. The first two issues of the magazine were written by R. T. M. Scott, then it was turned over to the twenty-seven-year-old Page, who gave the ruthless and fearless vigilante a mask and a disguise (as a fang-toothed hunchback named Richard Wentworth). The first issue appeared in October 1933; Page’s first novel, Wings of the Black Death, ran in December. A series of horrific villains were hunted down and killed by Wentworth, who then branded his prey on the forehead with a seal of a spider. There were 118 Spider novels in all, as well as two movie serials starring Warren Hull, The Spider’s Web (1938) and The Spider Returns (1941). At his most prolific, Page wrote more than one hundred thousand words a month, half for the Spider novels and the rest for a wide range of fiction.