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 had found some wine, and at midnight, Anna still sat in the room, feeling no glow but only half sick from the too sweet wine. She sat facing a desk full of papers, important documents with fancy seals, plans, blueprints, messages in French and German, even some in Chinese. Anna knew all about Rita Turner now. She knew what she hadn’t known.
Rita Turner had been an international spy.
That meant only one thing: Anna, in taking over Rita Turner’s name and identity, would have to pretend to be that same spy.
Anna’s course had been clear, she had planned each last detail. She was to put the corpse in a steamer trunk and then send for the Chinese boys to come and get it with the other baggage; and later at sea she would put the corpse into a navy sea-bag and during the night drag it to the side of the ship and dump it over. There would be no trace of murder: only the living, breathing, the new Rita Turner.
But this new complication frightened and confused Anna. She knew no way in which to turn. If she fled the hotel and left the corpse here she still could not escape the city and murder would catch up with her. They would find her in Shanghai sooner or later, perhaps shivering in a hovel, and then for the murder they would put a gun to the back of her head and blow out her life.
She must make the transport with the corpse in the steamer trunk. But how? As a spy Rita Turner had definite orders to deliver some papers before her departure from the city, and even though Anna knew little about espionage she was aware that counter-spies checked on the activities of a spy; that people ordered to contact Rita Turner would be on the look-out for her. There was this alone, even if she didn’t think about the risk of being captured as Rita, as the spy, and being punished in the ruthless manner of war.
To go straight to the boat was impossible. She must board it just before it sailed, and keep entirely to herself in case someone on board should know the real Rita Turner. Meanwhile there was the chance that she would be recognized as an impostor by other members of the espionage ring by which Rita Turner had been employed.
Anna poured herself a drink. She took it down, then she lighted a cigarette and got up and moved over to the window. She looked down at the street seething with torch-light.
She heard the music of the radio and she thought of her nightclub back on the Bund and wished that she was back in it — even what was left of it. There had been happiness there, a hard kind. Sailors saying: “Listen, babe, you’re a tramp, but I’d die for you; a guy’s gotta have someone to love, and when he loves he wants to make believe it’s the real thing.”
She remembered that now, those words, and other words; the quaint, tough, laughing Shanghai she had known before the invasion. But all of that had gone past her, and she was alone here with the body of a woman she had murdered — a woman who by dying had put her problems on Anna. The sailors were gone, and her girl friends were gone, even Olga, who was her closest.
Anna dropped the cigarette and rubbed her foot over it.
The telephone rang.
She stood and looked at it, petrified, feeling fear crawl up into her, making her sick. She held her hands out and watched them tremble; and the phone rang again. She moved toward it, only a foot, and it rang for the third time.
Then suddenly she leapt over and snatched up the instrument. She had dared herself, and now she had plunged.
“Hello?” She tried to remember the sound of Rita Turner’s voice.
“Rita?”
“Yes.”
It was a man’s voice and went on now: “I know I shouldn’t call at the hotel like this, but we had an appointment to — ah, go dancing. Have you forgotten? I’ve been waiting here quite a long time.”
“I’m awfully sorry,” said Anna. “Where have you been waiting?”
“You know where.”
Anna laughed. “Oh yes, of course. I will be there at once.”
“Will you? Nothing’s gone wrong, has it? You weren’t going to sail without your packet — ah, that packet of...” The voice trailed off.
Anna was quick on the up-take; her voice caught: “Oh, you mean that money you drew from the bank for me.” She laughed gaily. “Oh yes, I get that tonight for... for—”
“Careful,” said the man. “Ah — I’ll be glad to get to meet you.”
Anna took a chance: “How will I know you?”
“I’ll be by the telephone booth,” he said promptly. “It was prearranged.” He sounded a trifle irritated. “Don’t you remember anything? Frenchie’s isn’t so difficult to reach, I mean—”
“If anybody was listening in,” said Anna, “they’ve had an earful by now.” She had an earful herself. “I’ll see you later,” she finished.
“All right,” the man replied.
She hung up and her blood tingled. Money. They were paying Rita Turner off before sailing. Money! Hers, to have and to spend. So easy! What had seemed a difficult situation was turning into a paying adventure. She had imagined espionage work was like this: Agents, strangers to one another, contacting each other. Nor was spying the highly clever profession she had been given to believe, for, fortunately for her, the man had even tipped his position over the phone: Frenchie’s.
Anna had now but to send the baggage, with the corpse in the trunk, to the boat; and then contact this man and turn over Rita’s papers to him — for money. After that, praise the great St. Peter, she would be free; possibly rich!
She gathered all of Rita’s spy papers, put them down her dress. Then she looked down at the corpse of Rita Turner, which she had dragged to a corner, and now for the first time a shiver ran through her. She remembered that she had committed murder; she had never once forgotten, but now her conscience remembered, and she tried to laugh.
She remembered once a French sailor coming into the nightclub bragging that he had just stabbed a man. He had laughed; he had been so hard and carefree. Murder was really nothing. Not when there was a war going on, and people dying.
She was a fool to even think of it. She should laugh like the Frenchman. So she did laugh. She would kill twenty Rita Turners if she herself could escape with the living.
She set about to put the corpse in the trunk and to do hastily all the other things she had to do.
It was almost forty minutes before Anna could leave the hotel. A tenseness had come to her again. She had sent the baggage out without arousing suspicion because she had used Rita Turner’s money to give the boys big tips so that the baggage would not have to go through the routine of being checked.
She knew that in this skelter of evacuation there would be no customs at the boat, for the boat was going first to Hong Kong. What she feared was trouble with the desk, though ordinarily there should be none. If anybody was curious, she had been visiting Rita Turner.
The elevator door swung open and she alighted on the main floor. It was crowded with people and she saw now that her escape, the escape from the hotel people, would be easy.
What she did not see at once was the man whose coat collar had been turned up — the man who had been following her. He was sitting in a leather chair in the lobby, waiting for her.
His coat collar was down now, and she could see his face clearly. It was white and looked very frightened. She stopped, straining to remember where she had known him. Surely, she had known him sometime in the past. Perhaps in the nightclub, but then she had known so many... Why had he followed her?
He saw her, and rising, came toward her. Panic seized her. There could be no scene here. She must get to the street and away from him. She must talk to no one except the man who waited at the telephone booth in Frenchie’s — perhaps with money, but certainly she must see him so that counter-spies would not trail the new Rita Turner from Shanghai.