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.
She knelt there in the Shanghai street, and bowed her head, so that her hair fell a little forward, and like that, kneeling, there was both grace and divinity in her.
The sunset drifted across her red jacket and the shadow of her slim figure fell across the cobblestone street, causing even the fleeing Chinese to stop and turn and look, though they did not pause long. Now and again a white man stopped, and glanced at her, then went on when he recognized that she was Russian.
Anna leaned down and kissed the bleeding girl, kissed her cooling cheeks, and said softly:
“We will have no more sailors together, eh, Olga? Drink no more vodka.” She smiled faintly, and shrugged, for Olga was gone, like yesterday’s breath. Gone, Anna thought, quite fortunately and painlessly. A merciful stray bullet — and who to tell if Jap or Chinese? — had ended her troubles. But Anna, living, must go on.
She looked around, looked through the streets for the man who had been following her, but she did not see him, and by now had forgotten the corpse of the girl.
She rose, and moved on, gracefully, her feet accustomed to the cobblestones, her face and eyes dry. She paused at each corner and looked up and down the street. Mostly she was looking for the man who had followed her from her apartment. She did not know who he was. He was wearing a coat with its collar turned up around his face, a white face with bleak, desperate eyes. He had called after her and she had run, losing herself in the fleeing crowd. She was terrified. Everything terrified her.
Since the evacuation order had come through to send all foreign white women to Hong Kong, and from there to their own countries, Anna felt that her time to die would come at any moment.
There was no escape for Russian exiles. There was nowhere they could run to get away from war. No passports would be issued to them; no country wanted them. Russian women were at the mercy of the mob, of the armies, of every band of men that came along. The evacuation order clearing white women had come two hours ago; in another sixteen hours huge transports would sail away with all those women, except the Russians...
Ah, the Russians. Anna laughed into the clatter of the frightened street; and then she clenched her teeth and fled on, shadows and torch-light beating against her running figure. It was quieter in the International settlement. She did not slacken her pace, though she was breathing harder.
When she came to the hotel she swept inside the doors, and in that instant she saw the man who had been following her, the man whose coat collar was turned up. She saw him running past, and, not waiting to see if he would miss her, then stop and come back, she went to the desk.
“I wish to see Mrs. Turner.”
The clerk bowed. “You may call her on the house phone, madam.”
Anna moved nervously to the house phone and picked it up. When Rita Turner’s silky voice came on the wire, Anna said: “I have a message from your husband. It is very important and most confidential.”
Except in highly excitable moments Anna could speak English without an accent, for her finishing school had been a nightclub called the Navy Sport Palace, which was little more than third rate, and located on the Bund. There she had learned all the American and English and French slang; and she had learned other things too: how to darken her eyes, and redden her mouth, and wink her eye, and toss her head; how to drink without becoming drunk; how to muffle her sobs with laughter; the art of light love with a deep touch.
Rita Turner said nervously: “Please come up.”
Anna moved gracefully into the elevator. She sighed as the doors slid quietly closed. Though she had been too young to remember Moscow, she thought it might be like this; the comfort and ease the White Russians had known; the old lost life about which she had heard her parents talk.
When she arrived on the fourth floor she walked down the heavily padded hall and stopped in front of the room number Rita Turner had given her. She knocked, and the door was immediately opened.
A tall, dark girl, her hair in a heavy roll on her neck, her skin pale, and her eyes bright and black and vivid, stood there, then stepped back. Anna walked in.
It was a beautiful apartment. A radio tuned to Hong Kong was playing “The Lady Is a Tramp”; from the window there was a magnificent scene of fire sweeping across the eastern section of Shanghai, and it was so vivid Anna almost thought she could hear the shrill despair of the screams beneath the flame.
The rug in the room was Oriental, the furniture quietly rich. Three bags lay open, light plane baggage, brown and smart and new. They were half packed. Women’s clothes were strewn everywhere.
Anna turned slowly, as though she wished to take her time and enjoy this setting slowly without rush and hustle.
Rita Turner said, “What is the message, please? And who are you?” She was impatient.
Anna smiled with her teeth. “Your husband has been sent up the Yangtze?”
The dark-haired girl nodded.
“He will not return for three days?”
“That’s right,” answered Rita Turner, “but we’re wasting time. What is the message?”
Anna flopped down on the divan and reached for a cigarette. She put it in her mouth and lit it.
“Your husband is an army officer,” she went on, “and you have been ordered to evacuate? Is that not right?”
“Of course it’s right.”
Anna, only three puffs into the cigarette, snuffed it out. “I got the information from a man who sells such information to White Russians.” She smiled again. “I will tell you that it cost me all I had been able to save during these meager years in Shanghai. Four hundred mex.”
“Just what are you getting at?”
Anna rose. “It is easy, isn’t it? The obvious thing. I kill you and transfer my picture to your passport. Then I can escape Shanghai.” She raised one eyebrow. “Otherwise, I shall be left.”
Rita Turner stared at her for a moment, then she dove for one of her bags. But a gun glittered in Anna’s slim hand. Rita Turner saw the weapon and paused, terror draining her pale skin. Her eyes widened, and then she continued for the bag, stooping, fumbling with a large automatic, turning toward Anna.
The sound of Anna’s shots did not penetrate the soundproof walls.
Rita Turner stood very still for a moment. Then the heavy gun slipped from between her slim fingers. Her lips twisted, as though she were about to laugh; and then blood welled from a hole just below her neck, and she crumpled, her figure like a question mark.
Anna looked down at her, neither pity nor compassion on her face, though it was the first person she had ever killed. Perhaps seeing so many dead and suffering had made her hard like this. She thought only: I will not be trapped here and die like the others. I will escape. I will have an evacuation order, and I will go aboard one of the big transports, and be taken to Hong Kong, and then to the United States. Freedom, peace! Murder has given me wings!
She was lucky, she thought, that the man who had sold her this information about an army wife whose husband was up the Yangtze River had not tricked her; for false information was sold for prices as great as the genuine. But then she had been “good” to her informant, plus the four hundred mex. He had known she would have to steal another woman’s passport to escape the horror that was Shanghai. All he had done was supply the name of a woman — a woman who would surely be alone when Anna went to see her...
Anna must change that passport now, put her picture in, and get the sailing orders. She must do a million and one things; she must go through all of Rita Turner’s papers and learn everything about her.
Last of all, least of all, she had but to take the bags and get aboard the transport. Murder was easy!