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 creases about the mouth deepened; the head tilted back so that black smudges of shadow from the low desk lamp erased all the upper part of the face and made teeth gleam. The laughter was a faint roughened breathing, nearly soundless. When it stopped the face looked down again.
“My charming brother!” the man articulated. The creases smoothed themselves and the lips pursed. “The captain’s name is Jimson.”
The man stood and the shadows smudged his face again; the light revealed his length and the powerful sweep of his shoulders. Jules had to look up to meet his eyes. He smiled slightly and his mustache pointed forward a fraction of an inch. He bowed ceremoniously.
“My dear brother,” he said, then swung about. The hall echoed the regular beat of his feet.
The room he entered was all gray and nearly barren. He laid his guitar face down on a couch bed and took a screwdriver from the top drawer of a Sheraton chest. He looked across at his guitar and smiled.
It was after ten the next morning when Jules slid out of white silk pajamas and stepped into his shower. His stomach sucked in and the muscles of his chest and upper arms flexed and jumped under its cold pelting; then he dodged out from under and punished his tight lean body with a rough towel. As he bent forward his abdomen tensed into six ridges of muscle. He dusted himself with bath powder and hummed M’appari. He cut it short in the middle with a small tightening of mouth corners. A pulse throbbed in his throat.
A polite tap at the door caught Jules with his trousers just belted. He grunted: “Come in.”
His brother, in striped morning trousers and cutaway, bowed himself in, clicked the door shut. Jules glanced at the domed forehead.
“I keep hoping those six hairs won’t be exactly parallel.” He sighed.
The mouth corner creases deepened in his brother’s cadaverous face but the thin lips did not part. Blue eyes were sardonic. Jules drew on a linen shirt, thrust the tails into his dark gray trousers and plucked a heavy silk tie, gray, too, from a rack on the closet door. The taller man continued silent and Jules eventually toed about and faced him, his eyes half shut.
“Yes, my dear brother?” he queried.
“You aren’t going back to Little Italy today, Jules?”
Jules brushed his left mustache with his right thumbnail. His still veiled eyes were amused. His voice was gentle.
“Surely, Andrew, you aren’t at some thirty-and-six years of age beginning to worry about your younger brother?”
Andrew cursed in mild tones. He said with relish: “Some day you are going to get your well-muscled abdomen shot full of messy holes. Those Catrini—”
Jules lifted his right shoulder fractionally, moved deliberately to the closet. He tipped a vest off a hanger and drew it on. Buttoning it with lean, square-tipped fingers, he opened his eyes wide and focused their round blue gaze on his brother.
“Catrini?” he mouthed slowly. “Catrini? No, I don’t believe I know anyone by that name.”
Andrew smiled like a politician about to kiss a baby.
“I think I’ll tell Captain Jimson I don’t mind if you are picked up for those murders,” he said, and added as an afterthought: “You louse.”
Jules’ lids drooped over his eyes again.
“Tell my dear friend Jimson,” he said, “to have O’Reilly do the picking up, will you, Andrew?”
The eyes of the two brothers locked like slithering rapiers. The elder’s tone was like May.
“Dear Jules! Don’t tell me you’re up to something?”
Jules laid the spread fingers of both hands on his chest, his eyebrows crawling up.
“I? My charming brother!” he exclaimed, shocked surprise vibrant in his words. “You can’t mean your younger brother?”
Andrew’s right hand, tense and straight as a knife, sliced across the air before him. He rasped a single monosyllabic obscenity and followed it with the word “you” and jerked open the door and slammed it shut behind him. Jules threw back his head and laughed with little sound. He shrugged into his coat, adjusting his black hat jauntily on his head, and turned towards his guitar. The door again swept open. Jules continued towards his guitar.
“Jules” — Andrew’s voice was incisive — “you’re probably as hard up for money as usual. I’ll pay you to quit this stuff.”
Jules lifted the guitar with both hands, then with one passed the red cord over his head, shoved his right arm through the loop. He turned slowly, eyes on his brother’s lean, hollow-cheeked face, and said nothing.
Andrew thrust a bony hand into an inner pocket of his coat and drew out a black leather wallet with gold corner pieces. He fingered out five yellow-backed bills with 1000 in each corner and spread them out like a poker hand and held them towards Jules. “Lay off this comic opera stuff, will you? You’re hunting trouble and I can’t afford to have the name mixed up in anything so near election.”
Jules eased the guitar under his right arm and up against his back, where he held it with a hand pressed against the end of the keyboard. The red cord was across his chest like an ambassador’s riband. He bowed, his mouth corners depressed.
“My dear brother, you ask too much. Always I have long’ to seeng een the streets. I make of eet my buseeness.”
“Horsefeathers!” said Andrew. He put the money carefully back into the black wallet and restored that to his pocket. “You began this street singing to queer me with the party. You’ve always hated me. When you first started I figured you’d get tired of it. But you are a persistent louse. It may be that I shall have to take steps.”
His face was wooden, but there were malevolent sparks in the depths of his eyes. Jules’ face did not lose its mocking smile, but his eyes went flat and hard. He strode forward three paces until he stood within two feet of the taller brother, looking up into the cadaverous mask. A pulse throbbed in his throat.
“The truth is, Andrew,” he said softly, “that I first sang in the streets for a lark. I was half tight and somebody made a bet. The wops were decent to me. They cheered when I sang. If it was sad, they wept. I like people like that, people who aren’t afraid to have emotions. You and your politicians, friends and hirelings, can’t figure that any man does a thing for the obvious reason. You always see intrigue.
“That’s the truth of the matter, but if my street singing annoys you, I’m glad. I won’t stop. Now get the hell out of my way.”
A pall of white roses ornamented the weathered doorway of the tenement where Angela had lived. A baby of three stood and stared at it with grave eyes. As Jules walked slowly by he caught the faint sweetish odor of the flowers. Children scampered and cried. Tremaine stopped a half square away and stood on the curb with his back to Mulberry Street. His black hat sat at an angle. He touched his mustache with his thumbnail, considered a moment and struck a chord from his guitar that had curiously little resonance.
A fat man, his sleeves held up by red bands, sat on a chair on the walk. He heaved up and padded across to Jules.
“A man was here looking for you,” he said.
Tremaine struck another slow chord.
“He say you come to Joe’s place on Tenth Street he get you a job regular.”
Jules showed his white teeth under the black militant points of his mustache. He said nothing, began to sing softly, plucking out a twanging bass accompaniment. He stopped and put his hand flat on the strings.
“What did this man look like?” he asked. “He was short and broad, eh? His right shoulder” — Jules hunched his own forward and upward three inches — “it rides like this, eh?”