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 whole first floor had been opened; all partitioning walls were down. There was a big chandelier with hundred-watters in it. There were plenty of hundred-watters in wall brackets. It was bright — hard on women customers and their complexions, hard on the dirty walls, but you could see what went on when the dice bounced and the cards flipped.
There were three blackjack tables, a chuck-a-luck layout, two wheels and a battery of big slot-machines.
“Craps and poker on the second floor,” said Hellman.
“I gotta blackjack sys’em works ev’ time,” said his friend, starting for the tables. Hellman hurried after him and I let him hurry.
There were about thirty women there and about twenty men. I could tell the two house men circulating gently around the room. They were big and looked darkly southern. They were watching the dealers and stickmen as closely as they watched the customers.
I left my coat and hat at the check stand, which was operated by the big bruiser who doubled as receptionist. He tripled as cashier, too, slapping down a stack of silver dollars on the counter.
“Twenty for a starter, Mr. McCowan?” he suggested.
“Forty,” I said. He doubled the stack and took my two bills. The cartwheels made an awful bulge in my pocket. After ten minutes at the roulette wheel the bulge wasn’t there anymore. I bought forty again and ran them up to forty-two in an hour at the chuck-a-luck cage.
I started upstairs to the crap games. A bulky, dark man drifted from nowhere to murmur: “Sorry, sir, no silver used on the second floor. Please change your money if you wish to go up.”
Upstairs not even a stab had been made at decorating. There were three poker tables, three craps layouts and shoulder-high screens between them. There was a twin-tube fluorescent fixture hanging over each stand.
A dark little man standing at the head of the stairs said: “Sir?”
“Craps,” I said. “High table.”
I watched the roll until I got the gun, then shot twenty and made it with a four-three.
I let it ride and rolled a five, a nine, another nine, a six and a five.
I took off thirty, rolled and crapped out with a two. The gun moved left, my fifty said he wouldn’t. He didn’t. I took off fifty, bet wrong again and collected again. I bet a hundred right on the next gunner and lost, fifty wrong on the next and won.
I got the gun and shot the hundred. I eighted the hard way and made it with a six-two on the second roll. I shot the two hundred and rolled six-five.
Shoot the four, something told me.
“Shoot the four,” I said.
The stickman didn’t flick the dice at me.
“I thought this was the high table!”
“Let him shoot the four,” said a little, dark man who had joined us.
“Yes, Mr. Morgan,” said the stickman. The dice rolled into my cupped hand.
“Nice place you have, Mr. Morgan,” I said, cackling the dice.
“We like it,” said Morgan. Only his name wasn’t Morgan, or hadn’t been long. Morgan’s a Welsh name, and Welshmen aren’t olive-skinned little men with small hands and white teeth. Welshmen don’t use perfume either.
There was something about Mr. Morgan, something just outside my reach—
“Four hundred!” I breathed, and rolled. It was a four-three again. Everybody at the table sighed.
Morgan — what was there about that guy? — counted out four C-notes and said: “Good for you, Mr. McCowan. Try again?”
“Shoot twenty,” I said. I rolled a six, a three, a nine and sevened out.
Somebody else came up from the first floor and started to the third. It was Maxie, the little peterman. I turned my back, but he recognized me. The house man at the head of the stairs saw that something was up, though Maxie had started climbing again, looking innocent and virtuous. He started after him and I heard them talk in an undertone, his voice gentle and Maxie’s nervous. I slipped down the stairs, left unguarded. I heard a buzzer somewhere.
When I turned at the landing I saw the two house men of the first floor and another I hadn’t spotted standing there at the foot of the stairs.
I stopped. The second-floor man came down the steps and frisked me lightly. He took out the flashy cigarette case, looked in it and put it back.
“Will you come upstairs, sir?” he asked.
“You bet I will,” I said.
We went up to the third floor. I was politely ushered through a door that clicked behind me. It was a nice little waiting room with three chairs. Maxie was sitting in one of them as if it were the hot seat.
“How’s the gut?” I asked him politely. It was a very courteous place.
He stared at me. “What did you come here for?”
“Why didn’t you blow town after you bungled the job?”
“I was going to bluff. After Morgan paid me I was going to blow.”
“Looks like you’re going to get paid,” I said.
I pointed to a door where one of the house men was silently standing. He beckoned to Maxie. Maxie went with him. There was a look of doom on his face.
The door opened again after a couple of minutes. The man beckoned to me. I went with him.
I wondered what my face looked like then.
I wondered what it would look like in a couple of hours.
The man took me through a corridor to the back of the house. He knocked on a door and opened it. I went through and he followed me.
There was a table, four chairs, a couple of pictures. Morgan was sitting behind the table.
“Sit down, Skeat,” he said. “Maxie told me you were here. I want to know what happened.”
I flipped the tails of my coat into my lap. “You have a secret, Mr. Morgan.”
“That’s right,” he agreed, smiling. I stared at the smile until he relaxed and waited. What was there about this little guy?
I went on: “A grifter named English found out what it was. He tried to peddle it to me. I didn’t want it, but you didn’t know that. You had English killed and you sent a boy to kill me. After I was killed Maxie was supposed to show up, open my safe and destroy the secret if I had it in writing. But I got the drop on your boy and I beat hell out of Maxie until I got the story.”
“Does Maxie know my — secret?” he asked, his face growing wintry.
“No. He’s scared of it. I’m scared of it too. I didn’t know it and I didn’t want to know it. I came here to look over your layout, maybe say hello and tell you I didn’t know what you’re covering up.”
Something clicked.
I said slowly and carefully: “Only now that I take a good, long look at you, I do know what you’re covering up.”
“You’re crazy to tell me that, Skeat. It means you die.”
I grinned, sweating. “Send your men away or I’ll yell what I know so loud they’ll all hear it. Can you kill them all?”
Morgan waved at the house man in a tired way. “Leave him to me,” he said. “I don’t want anybody else on this floor for a half hour.”
The man left silently.
Morgan leaned earnestly over the table and nodded at me. “It must sound crazy to you,” he said.
“People over here don’t kill for that,” I said.
“I’m from over there...” His eyes clouded and he nodded his little nod. “You don’t know what it’s like,” he said. “All you crazy-rich Americans — the garbage you throw away after dinner would feed two of our families all day.
“It is because we have so little — a handful of stony soil, a few saucepans, a leaking little hut and the rags we wear. We have nothing, Skeat, nothing except our families to love and protect.
“My brother and I were orphaned when we were six and eight. Our father died with the bends — he was a sponge-diver. Very hard life. Our mother died because she could not live any longer. An uncle in America sent for us and raised us. We went two different ways. I’ve been crooked as hell since I was sixteen. He’s been straight as a die all his life.