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.
“In the funny papers I’d get to sit down,” I said, wiping my eyes.
“This isn’t the funny papers,” said Angonides flatly.
I took out a pack of cigarettes and somebody’s hand held my wrist while another hand took the pack out of my fingers.
“You don’t smoke when you’re being sweated,” said Angonides from the darkness. “Didn’t you know that?” I heard a match explode on somebody’s finger-nail and smelled the sulfur, then the reek of a cheap cigar. The smoke drifted into the cylinder of light.
I brought my watch up to my eyes. “Another day shot to hell,” I said. “How long do you keep this up, George?”
“How long do you, Skeat?” he asked.
“I’ll tell it again,” I said. “Turn off the damned light.”
“Nope.”
“Then I’ll tell it anyway. The character came into my office on Tuesday—” I finished the story. “Now turn off your damned light.” My eyes were streaming. When I wiped them they just got sorer.
“Nope. Not good enough.” He whispered something in the darkness and the two boys holding my arms held them tighter. Angonides’ face came between me and the light. He had a curious, thoughtful look — a couple of short, vertical wrinkles between the eyes. He was slowly wrapping a towel around his right hand.
“George, for God’s sake!” I yelled at him, sweating.
“Tell it again,” he said, drawing the towel tight and smooth, not leaving a wrinkle in it, tucking the end under.
I told it again, almost babbling.
He hit me just under my bottom rib, on the left side. It was a pile-driver. It jarred my guts and shot up and down my backbone like chain lightning.
He pounded me again. And again. And again. He wasn’t standing like a boxer but like a big-league batter, very square and steady. His right hand pumped forward and back at his hip level. There was silence in the room except for my breathing and his.
He stopped and said: “I can keep this up all night, Skeat. Can you?”
I tried to talk and found that I couldn’t. But I didn’t have anything to say that he hadn’t heard. So I nodded my head to say, Yes, I can keep this up all night, you brainy detective lieutenant.
He sighed and began again. He pounded me slowly and methodically and with all the steam he had, six times, twelve times, eighteen times, always in the same place, as if he were trying to chop down a tree with his fists. The tissues of the spot just under my bottom rib began to whimper, then to shriek at every blow. Finally the spot felt soft and ice-cold and hurt just as much between blows as when he landed.
Eighteen. Twenty. Twenty-five. He stopped.
“It’s seven-thirty, Skeat. How about some dinner?” he asked flatly. “You’re tying up some good men in this crummy basement. Open up and let’s all go home.”
I retched and shook my head for “no.”
Angonides felt the spot he’d been pounding and then wordlessly fired his fist into a new part of my hide, six inches to the right. He took his stance again and pounded, I don’t know how long. My body felt swollen and waves of pain swept over it. Between the waves the light seemed to dim. Then I slipped and began to speed down the longest, slickest, steepest toboggan slide in the world. The photo-flood bulb in the kid’s magic lantern went out.
The detective was shaking me. I tasted cheap whiskey on my tongue and felt it burn my lips. When my eyes opened things were blurred, but I saw Angonides’ big, serious face staring into mine.
“Skeat,” he said, “you won’t get anywhere if you try to put through a complaint. You understand that?”
“So what?” I asked thickly. “What happened?”
“You got tired and went to sleep. But you didn’t talk. The hell with you.”
“You shouldn’t have muscled me, George,” I said. He left his face blank. His boys silently led me out.
I found myself on the sidewalk outside 32 Center, rocky as a drunk at the end of a three-week bender. I walked to a subway trying not to swing my shoulders. They hurt. I hurt from the waist up — and down.
At the Russian Baths on Second Avenue I bought a cot for the night and went into the steam room. I sat on the top tier where it’s thickest and hottest. My skin became pink all over and then two pinker blotches appeared just under my bottom ribs. That was all. Angonides knew his stuff.
I told the rubber to take it easy. He was a big, gray man with knowing hands and an Eastern Europe accent. He touched the two faint bruises once and asked: “Mugs or cops?”
“Prunes,” I said. “That happens whenever I eat too many prunes.”
He grinned and shut up. A little later he began to talk about the Cossacks of the tsar and what they used to do to nihilists and liberals.
I asked him if the Cossacks ever used to shred liberals with beer-bottles. He left off the massaging and showed me page three of the Mirror: “SUSPECT HELD IN BOTTLE DEATH.” The story said a little less than nothing. My name wasn’t mentioned, though I suppose I was the suspect.
“Never heard of it.” I yawned. I was so sleepy he had to lead me to the cot.
“ ’Night, mister,” he said. “Lay off them prunes.”
The next morning I woke with ice-picks under my ribs, but in pretty good shape, considering. I had a barbershop shave and some coffee and wheat-cakes in a cafeteria. I went uptown to my office. It was only nine-thirty, but I had a visitor already in the little waiting-room I keep unlocked for the drop-in trade.
He was young and trained-looking. He was dressed in gray and had hot, dark eyes that wrinkled at the corners.
“ ’Morning,” I said. “I’m Tim Skeat. Is there anything—” I was unlocking the office door when I saw that he had a little gun out.
I locked my office door again and put the key in my inside breast pocket. “What’s the caper?” I asked.
He jerked the gun toward the office door. It was a short-barrel .32 revolver. He held it right, with his thumb horizontal along the frame.
One word came from his lips, in a gray, chilly monotone: “Open.”
“Not for you, punk.”
The cold monotone said again: “Open or I’ll shoot your guts out.” But his hand didn’t tighten on the gun.
“Nope. You aren’t coked up, so you won’t shoot. If you want the keys, come and get them. Only I don’t think you’re man enough.”
He didn’t waste words; he took two steps toward me, like a boxer — exactly like a boxer. He shuffled forward his left foot and didn’t bring the right up until it was planted. His left hand was out, the gun was in his right hand at waist level. If I grabbed for it his body would be in the way of my grab. If he fired my body would be in the way of his bullet.
He dipped the left hand into my jacket. His hot, dark eyes didn’t leave my left shoulder. That was the hand I’d have to grab with, and my shoulder would telegraph the grab.
His hand closed around the key-ring in the pocket.
“Your safety’s on,” I said, looking down.
His eyes flicked down.
My left hand went out, the thumb slipping under the hammer, the fingers clamping on the cylinder. The cylinder twitched but didn’t turn as he jerked the trigger and the hammer slammed my thumb-nail. As he yanked his hand out of my jacket pocket the ulnar surface of my right landed in his wind-pipe and then crunched on his right wrist. He dropped the gun and squared off like a manly little Golden Glover.
I back-handed him with my right and he jabbed me nicely in the nose. I apologized hastily to the Marquess of Queensbury and caught his wrist as his hand bounced back to the guard.
The Ito Soji doesn’t often work unless you practice daily, but this time it didn’t let me down. He went spinning through the air and fetched the office partition an awful smack.