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.
Loud music was coming from the moonlight excursion boat at the south end of the City Yacht Basin, but a barker spoiled the effect of the music, if any. Two slot machines alongside the lunch stand at Pier Six ate sailor nickels and chugged away.
A hundred million dollars’ worth of yachts within a half-mile radius, the Miami publicity bureau said. Little Egyptian-silk-sail racing cutters that had cost a thousand a foot. A big three-hundred-foot Britisher, owned by Lady Something-or-other who only had officers with beards. And in-between sizes. Teak, mahogany, chromium, brass. Efficiency. Jap stewards as quiet as spooks. Blond Swede sailors. Skippers with leather faces, big hands and great calm.
The policeman pointed his flashlight beam at the boat tied to the end of the dock. The light showed the sloping masts, the black canvas covers over the sails, the black, neat, new-looking hull. Life preservers tied to the mainstays had Sail on them in gold leaf.
“What you call that kind of a boat?” the cop asked.
“Chesapeake five-log bugeye,” Sail said. “Her bottom is made out of five logs drifted together with Swedish iron rods. The masts on bugeyes always rake back like that. She’s thirty-four feet long in the water. You’ll have trouble beating a bugeye for knocking around shallow water, and they’re pretty fair sea—”
“Could it cross the ocean?”
“She has.”
“Yeah? My old man’s got the crazy idea he wants to go to the South Seas. He’s nuts about boats.”
“It gets you.”
“This one yours?”
“Yes,” Sail said.
“How old is it?”
“Sixty-eight years old.”
“T’hell it is! That’s older’n my old man. I don’t think he’d want it.”
“She’ll take you anywhere,” Sail defended.
“What’s she worth?”
“Seventy-five thousand dollars,” Sail said.
The policeman whistled. Then he laughed. He did not say anything.
Sail said, “There are some panels in the cabin, genuine hand carvings by Samuel McIntire of Salem. Probably they were once on a clipper ship. That’s what makes her price stiff.”
The cop did not answer. He switched off his light.
“All I can say is you let out a hell of a funny yell when you catch a fish,” he said.
He took pains to stamp his feet while he walked away. By the time Sail got the effects of the flashlight out of his eyes, the officer was out of sight.
Sail held his hands close to his chest, fingers spread, palms in. There was barely enough breeze to make coolness against one side of his face. The music on the moonlit sailboat stopped. The barker was silent. Over in the Bayfront Park outdoor auditorium a political speaker was viewing something with alarm. After he had felt his hands tremble for a while, Sail went to his boat.
The boat, Sail, rode spring lines at the dock end. She had a thirty-four-foot waterline. Twelve-foot beam, two-foot draft with centerboard up, seven with it down. She was rigged to be sailed by one man, all lines coming aft.
The interior was teak, with inset panels of red sanders, fustic and green ebony, all hand-carved by a man who had died in 1811. How Samuel McIntire panels came to be in the bugeye, Sail did not know, but he had been offered a thousand dollars for each year of age for the boat and was hungry broke when he turned it down. It was not a money matter. Some men love dogs.
Sail slapped the fish into a kettle in the galley and, hurrying, put most of his right arm through a porthole, grasped a line, took half hitches off a cleat, and let the line go. The line snaked quietly down into the water, following a sinking live-box and its contents of live fish and crawfish.
Sail looked out of the hatch.
The young policeman had come quietly back to where the fish had bled and was using his flashlight. He squatted. After a while, he approached the dock end, moseying. Too carefully. When his flashlight brightened the bugeye’s black masts and black sail covers, Sail was in the galley, making enough noise cutting up the fish to let the cop know where he was and what he was doing.
Sail waited four or five minutes before putting his head out of the hatch. The cop had gone somewhere silently.
Sail was still looking and listening for the policeman when he heard the man’s curse and the woman’s cry, short, sharp. The man’s curse was something of a bray of surprise. The sounds came out of Bayfront Park, between the waterfront yacht basin and Biscayne Boulevard. Sail, not stirring, but watching the park, saw a man running among the palms. Then the young policeman and his flashlight were also moving among the palms.
During the next five minutes, the policeman and his flash were not still long enough for him to have found anything.
Sail stripped naked, working fast once more. His body was rounding, the hair on it golden and long, but not thick. He looked at his belly as if he didn’t like it, slapped it and sucked it in. The act was more a habit than a thought. He put on black jersey swim trunks.
Standing in the companion looking around, Sail scratched his chest and tugged the hair on it. His fingers twisted a little rattail of the chest hair. No one was in sight. He got over the side without being too conspicuous about it.
The water had odor and the usual things floated in it. He swam under the dock, searching. The tide was high slack, almost, but still coming in just a little, so things in the water were not moving away.
The pier had been built stout because of the hurricanes. There was a net of cross timbers underneath, and anything falling off the south side of the dock would drift against them. Sail found what he was seeking on the third dive.
He kept in the dark places as he swam away with it.
The little island — artificial, put there when they dredged the harbor — was darkly silent when Sail swam laboriously toward it. Pine trees on the island had been bent by the hurricanes, and some torn up. The weeds did not seem to have been affected.
Sail tried not to splash as he shoved through the shallows to the sand beach. He towed the Greek underwater. Half a dozen crabs and some seaweed clung to the Greek when Sail carried him into the pines and weeds. The knife sticking in the Greek, and what it had done, did not help. The pines scratched and the weeds crunched under the Greek when Sail laid him down. It was very dark.
Pulpy skins in a billfold were probably greenbacks, and stiffer, smaller rectangles, business cards. Silver coins, a pocketknife, two clips for an automatic. The automatic holster empty under the Greek’s left armpit. From inside the Greek’s coat lining, another rectangle, four inches wide, five times as long, a quarter of an inch thick. It felt like hardwood. The Greek’s wristwatch still ticked.
Sail put the business cards and the object from the coat lining inside his swim trunks, and was down on his knees cleaning his hands in the sand when the situation got the best of him. By the time he finished being sick, he had sweated profusely.
The water felt cold as he swam back the way he had come — under the docks and close to the seawall — with the Greek.
Sail clung to Sail’s chain bobstay until all the water had run off him that wanted to run off, then swung aboard and moved along the deck, keeping below the wharf level, and dropped down the hatch. He started to take the bathing suit off, and the girl said, “Puh-lease.”
She swung her legs off the forward bunk. Light from the kerosene gimbal lamp did not reach all of her. The feet were small in dark blue sandals which showed red-enameled toenails. Her legs had not been shaved recently, but were nice.
Pink starting on Sail’s chest and spreading made his tan look dark and uncomfortable, and he chewed an imaginary something between his large white front teeth as he squinted at the girl. He seemed about to say something two or three different times, but didn’t, and went into the stateroom and got out of the swim trunks. The shadow-wrapped rest of her did not look bad as he passed. He tied a fish sinker to the trunks and dropped them through a porthole into the bay, which was dredged three fathoms deep here. He put on his scrubbed black clothes.