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 man followed her, however, and at the door he caught her arm, turning her half-way around. She looked again into his face, and for a moment his name, or his place in her past, was on the tip of her tongue; but it escaped her.
“Please,” she said, “please, don’t touch me.”
“But listen, I—”
“Please!”
She jerked away from him, and in a moment she was in the street. He followed her out the door. She ran, and turned a corner. She could hear him chasing.
Her heart shoved against her side, and sharp pains from running came so that it was difficult for her to breathe. The man would kill her perhaps. No one meant any good in this mess. Her flight was instinctive. She heard him call out — then she was flinging herself out through the gates of the International settlement, climbing into a rickshaw.
“Frenchie’s,” she said.
There was no other conveyance, and when she looked back she saw the man standing there, waving at her to come back. Then, in the flare of a torch, she saw that he had begun running; he meant to follow the rickshaw. She heard him yell, “Wait for me! Wait!”
The wooden wheels of her cart clattered over the road, putting murder and the unknown man behind her. But she saw presently that the coolie was running like a fool with no sense of direction. She called at him to stop. Her voice grew frantic. The coolie kept running. She was terrified lest this be a trap of some kind, and yet common sense told her that it could not be that.
They turned up a street that was a tumult of noise and light, and then suddenly she saw that the crazed coolie was running right into the middle of a company of marching Japanese. She held on to the side and waited. The crash came. She saw a bayonet flash, and then she saw the blade sever the coolie’s head so that it fell off, easily, like the loose knob on a door.
Then she was on the ground, struggling to escape. Desperate, like a rabbit, and somehow she squirmed away from them, shouting all the time: “I am English! I am English! You don’t dare touch me! I’m English!”
She was running again, then telling herself she must keep her mind or be lost in this confusion.
She found herself on an open street, and somehow she had stopped and was looking up. She didn’t know at first why she had done this; she didn’t know until she heard the throbbing of giant plane engines, and saw the bright lights, and the wings that seemed to descend on her. She thought then that it was all over.
But it wasn’t. It had just begun. A store, across from her, rose in a ball of streaked fire, and then Anna was crouching, holding her hands over her head, and the débris was coming down everywhere.
Just ahead of her she saw another bomb tear out the street and shower bricks everywhere. She could hear the bricks falling, one by one, like drops from a monster hail storm. And through all this, an ear-splitting roar of plane motors, and bursting bombs.
Anna could hear the steady, never-ending blend of screaming people... people dying... people lying all around her, some of them resignedly holding their arms in their laps.
She got up, and stumbled, kept trying to run. She saw a little baby sitting in a pool of blood, crying. She saw two little girls running and crying and dragging the corpse of an old Chinese woman.
She told herself she must keep sanity, she must keep going. Her murder — the murder she had committed — must not converge upon her. This couldn’t be her punishment. Men died with guns in the backs of their necks, not from the débris of bombs, when they committed murder.
She must not die! What she must do was escape Shanghai. Escape war!
She ran into someone, suddenly. She looked up and saw the man who had followed her from the hotel. She didn’t care now who he was. She threw herself into his arms; she pressed her shuddering body against his protecting one and waited for the noise and the death that was everywhere.
“We must escape. We must get away from here!” shouted the man.
“Frenchie’s,” she shouted back. “Frenchie’s! We must go there.”
“Kid,” said the man, “I—”
“Don’t talk. We must get to Frenchie’s!”
“Anna!” he said. She looked up, terrified; so he knew her. Oh, good sweet God, that was funny, because she didn’t know him from Adam.
“Don’t talk,” she said. “Frenchie’s! Take me there.” She was used to the easy companionship for men, and this did not seem strange, that she should make this request of him; he was here to use.
He started to talk to her again, but another bomb exploded, and he picked her up and began running with her. She knew it was only a thousand-to-one chance that they would get through, get off this street alive.
But they did.
Anna did not know how much longer it was, nor how many blocks they had come. She knew only that when the stranger who knew her set her down, it was in front of Frenchie’s. He was sweating, and there wasn’t much left of his suit. He was laughing, and half crying, and that way he looked much more familiar. He was saying:
“Babe, I love you like seven hundred dollars on Christmas day, and—”
“I must go in here,” she said; “wait for me until I come out. I won’t be long.” She realized he could help her get to the transport; he was big and he was strong, and like so many men at many times, he loved her.
“Anything you say, babe, but you will come out?”
“Of course I will.” She was a bit impatient. It did not occur to her to thank him for saving her life.
“You know why I’m here?”
“No,” she said, “I don’t know.”
“Because I love you,” he said.
She laughed, bitterly. “How very nice! But I must go in here now—”
“I’m A.W.O.L.,” he went on, “and I’ll get socked behind the eight ball for two months for this, but, geez, a guy—”
“So you’re a sailor?”
“Of course,” he said.
“Why didn’t you tell me? Why are you wearing those clothes?”
He laughed. “How long do you think I’d last on the streets in uniform? They’d pick me up before I could move.”
“And you risked all this to tell me you loved me?”
“Of course. You must have known how I’ve felt that time in—”
“I knew you at the Navy Sport Palace?”
“Sure. Aw, come on, baby, don’t tell me you’ve forgotten. You’re not that hard.”
“Aren’t I?” she thought; but what she said was: “Of course I didn’t forget you, darling. Now wait for me. Wait here for me.”
She turned and went inside, and the last she heard from him was when he leaned back against the building and began to whistle. She had heard the tune earlier this evening and it gave her a start. It was “The Lady Is a Tramp.”
She looked a wreck and she knew it, but she was past caring. She moved from table to table, went to the back of Frenchie’s where there was the bar. She stopped here and had a stiff drink. It made her feel better.
She heard soft muted music, and she saw people who were still trying to look gay. You’d never know there was a war; or that ten minutes ago bombs were raising merry hell, she thought. Human beings can play the damnedest games, and keep their nerve, or what looks like nerve from the ivory polish surface of their skin.
She went at last to the telephone booths. She spotted the contact man almost at once. He was tall and had iron-gray hair. He was wearing a white mess jacket, and highly polished black shoes. She could not distinguish his nationality; he looked cosmopolitan, smooth. He smiled when he saw her: one of her own kind of smiles — with his teeth.
“Ah, my dear,” he said.