The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps
- Автор: Anderson Lars, Barr Randolph
- Год: 2007
- Язык: английский
- Год: Vintage Books
- ISBN: 978-0-307-28048-0
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
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Weighing in at over a thousand pages, containing over forty-seven stories and two novels, this book is big baby, bigger and more powerful than a freight train — a bullet couldn’t pass through it. Here are the best stories and every major writer who ever appeared in celebrated Pulps like Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, and more. These are the classic tales that created the genre and gave birth to hard-hitting detectives who smoke criminals like packs of cigarettes; sultry dames whose looks are as lethal as a dagger to the chest; and gin-soaked hideouts where conversations are just preludes to murder. This is crime fiction at its gritty best.
A little smile formed on Vivian’s lips. Benedetti, she suspected, was accustomed to having his own way where women were concerned. And the Lady from Hell knew full well her own attractiveness as a woman.
But even the Lady from Hell, astute as she was, could not have fathomed the dark reason that lay behind Benedetti’s advances.
Chapter II
Danger’s Warning
The faint sound of drums somewhere in the distance; a regular, rhythmic beat, as though a gigantic heart, the heart of Black Haiti, were beating in the stillness of the blazing moon, hung over the little city of Cap St. Feral as the Lady from Hell, Wylie and Benedetti rode through the sun-washed streets.
The heat that hung about them like a tangible thing seemed to be intensified and crystallized by the monotonous beating of the lonely drums.
The Lady from Hell turned to Benedetti with a question, the brilliant sunlight through the trees overarching the road catching her hair and turning it into a halo of flame about her exquisitely lovely face.
“Voodoo drums,” he said. “The night of the Voodoo Moon is approaching. The drums will keep on sounding until the climax of the Snake Dance. They’re beating like this all over the island, even in Port-au-Prince. Worshipers in the cathedral can hear the sound of the drums from the hills outside the city drifting through the intoning of the mass. Then, almost as if they had been silenced by a gigantic hand, they will all stop at the same moment — the climax of the Snake Dance.”
Vivian stole another glance at the people along the roadside as their car passed. Voodoo. It was something out of a book to her, something a little unsettling to come so closely in contact with. And it seemed difficult to believe that the happy, smiling faces were the faces of people who had run mad through the streets of Port-au-Prince, so history said, tearing President Guillaume Sam to bloody bits while he still lived.
Benedetti caught the thought in her mind.
“You have not lived here, Mrs. Legrand,” he said quietly. “You cannot understand the place that Voodoo holds in these people’s lives; the grip it has upon them. And you are not familiar with the effect of rhythms upon the nerve centers. It does strange things to blacks, and to whites things stranger still.”
He leaned forward and flung a few words in Creole French at the driver — words that Vivian Legrand, fluent as her French was, could barely follow. The car stopped before a long, rambling structure, of gleaming white coquina, half hidden behind crimson hibiscus bushes.
“I brought you here for lunch,” he said. “It would be unbearably hot on the ship and there is no hotel at which you would want to eat, even if you could, in the town itself. This is a little house that I maintain, so that I may have a comfortable place to stay when necessity or business compels me to be in town. I took the liberty of assuming that Dr. Wylie and yourself would have lunch with me here.”
Vivian looked about her curiously as their host opened the little gate and ushered them into the flower garden that surrounded the house.
From the whitewashed, angular, stone walls of the old house, almost smothered in pink Flor de Amour, her eyes went to the table set beneath a flowering Y’lang-y’lang tree in the center of the close-cropped lawn. An old woman stood beside it, an ancient crone with more than a trace of white blood in her, one of those incredibly ancient people that only primitive races can produce. Her face was a myriad of tiny wrinkles and her parchment skin had the dull, leathery hue and look that is common in the aged of the Negro race.
The woman turned slowly as the trio approached and her eyes fastened on Vivian. In her cold, yellow eyes was a look almost of fear. Something that was like lurking terror coiled in the depths of those alert, flashing eyes and rendered them stony, glassy, shallow.
And then, as Benedetti and Wylie went on past her she made a gesture, an unmistakable gesture for Vivian to halt, and her voice, lowered until it was barely a sibilant whisper, came to Vivian’s ears in French.
“Do not stay here,” she said. “You must not stay.”
There was definite horror in her eyes, and fear also, as her glance flitted from Vivian toward Benedetti. Despite the whisper to which her voice had been lowered there was fear to be distinguished in her tones also.
Her face was impassive as she turned away. Only her eyes seemed alive. They were cold, deadly bits of emerald. The Lady from Hell abhorred the unknown. All through her criminal career the unsolved riddle, the unsolved personality, the unexplained situation, inflamed her imagination. She would worry over it as a dog worries a bone.
And how her mind hovered over this problem with relentless tenacity, her brain working swiftly, with smooth precision. Her intuition had been right, after all. The feeling of danger, of disquiet, of apprehension that had haunted her ever since the coast line of Haiti came in sight over the horizon had not been wrong. She knew now, beyond a shadow of doubt, that danger hovered over her like a vulture.
The fear that she had glimpsed in the old woman’s eyes, Vivian reasoned, was fear for herself should she be caught warning the white woman. But what was the danger against which she was warned, and why should this old woman, who had never seen her before, take what was obviously a risk to warn her against it?
Luncheon was just over when a long hoot sounded from the steamer.
“The warning whistle,” Benedetti told her. “A signal to the passengers that the steamer will sail in an hour.”
He turned to Vivian.
“My roses,” he said, “are so lovely that I took the liberty of requesting Lucilla to cut an armful of them for you to take back to the ship as a remembrance.”
There was a distinct warning in the old woman’s veiled eyes as Vivian stretched out her hands for the big bunch of pale yellow roses that Lucilla brought; not only warning, but that same terror and fear that had stood starkly in them a short time before. Instinctively Vivian stiffened and looked about her, her nerves tense. Was the danger, whatever it was, ready to spring? But the scene seemed peaceful enough.
“How lovely they are!” she exclaimed, and wondered if it could be her imagination that made the old woman seem reluctant to part with the flowers. Then she gave a little exclamation of pain as she took them from Lucilla. “Like many other lovely things, there are thorns,” she said ruefully, gazing at the long, thorny stems, still slightly damp from standing in water.
“That is true,” Benedetti said, and there seemed to be an expression of relief in his eyes. “Our Haitian roses are lovely, but there have longer and sharper thorns than any other roses I know.”
“Don’t you think we had better be leaving?” Vivian queried, glancing at her watch. The shimmering heat haze that covered everything seemed to have blurred her vision, and she had to peer closely at the little jewelled trinket to make out the time. “It’s a long drive back to the ship.”
“There is still plenty of time,” Benedetti assured her. “The warning whistle is supposed to sound an hour before sailing time, but it always is nearer two hours.” Then he gave a little exclamation of concern. “But you are ill,” he said as Vivian swayed a little.
“Just the heat,” she said. “I am not yet accustomed to it.”
The flowers she had been holding tumbled to the table and thence to the ground. The long-stemmed yellow blossoms gave no hint of the fact that from the moment Benedetti’s message had been delivered to the old woman until the moment before they had been placed in Vivian’s hands their stems and thorns had been soaking in a scum-covered fluid brewed by Lucilla herself.