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
Электронная книга - «The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps». Краткое содержание книги:
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.
“You must go inside for a few moments. You must rest,” Benedetti said sharply. “I should have realized that you were not accustomed to heat. It might be fatal for you to drive back to the ship in this sun without a rest.”
Wylie, a look of concern on his face, took Vivian’s arm and helped her to her feet. Even then, with her vision blurred and an overpowering drowsiness creeping over her, the Lady from Hell did not realize that she had been drugged. It was not until she reached the threshold of the room to which she had been guided that the truth burst upon her dulled senses with the force of a thunderbolt.
Stacked neatly against the whitewashed walls of the room was the baggage she had left in her cabin on the steamer!
Dizzily, clutching at the door for support, she turned... just in time to see a short heavy club descend with stunning force on Wylie’s head. And then, even as her companion crumpled to the stone flooring, blackness flooded her brain.
Chapter III
Vivian Legrand Trapped
Dusk had fallen with tropic swiftness before Vivian awoke. She had not been conscious of her journey, wrapped in coco fiber matting from the house where she had been drugged, to Benedetti’s launch, nor of the subsequent trip to the man’s home on the Ille de Feral.
Now, anger smoldering in her greenish eyes, she faced him across the dining room table. In the dim room the table floated in a sea of amber candlelight. Barefooted black girls passed in and out, their voices keyed to the soft stillness, a thing of pauses and low voices. The whole thing, to Vivian, seemed to take on a character of unreality — a dream in which anything might happen.
She waited for Benedetti to speak after the slender black girl drew out her chair for her. But the man did not, so finally she broke the silence herself.
“What do you hope to gain by this?” she queried.
“Won’t you try your soup?” he said bitterly. “I am sure that you will find it very good.”
He halted as one of the girls stopped beside his chair and said something in Creole in a low voice. He rose to his feet.
“Will you pardon me?” he said. “There is someone outside, with a message. I shall be gone only a moment.”
He disappeared through the door beside the staircase, the door that Vivian imagined led to the rear of the house.
Swiftly she beckoned the black maid to her, slipped the glittering diamond from her finger, and folded the girl’s hand about it.
“Come to my room tonight,” she whispered tensely, “when it is safe. No one will ever know. And in Port-au-Prince or Cap St. Feral you can sell that ring for sufficient to live like a blanc millionaire for the rest of your days.”
The girl’s face paled to a dusky brown, she glanced furtively from the glittering jewel in her hand to the pale face of the woman who had given it to her. Vivian caught the hesitation.
“I have others in my room,” she urged desperately. “You shall choose from them what you want — two — three — when you sell them there will never have been another girl in Haiti as rich as you will be.”
“I will come,” the girl said in a whisper and stepped back against the wall. A moment later Benedetti returned.
“I regret to have been so poor a host as to leave you alone for even so short a time,” he said.
“Please,” Vivian said shortly, and there was in her manner no indication of the triumph that filled her breast. “Why dissemble. You’ve brought me here for a purpose. Why not tell me what it is?”
Already a scheme was forming in that agile mind of hers. When the girl came to her room that night she would persuade her to find weapons — guide Wylie and herself to a boat so that they might escape. But was Wylie still alive?
Benedetti’s answer interrupted her thoughts.
“It is not so much what I hope to gain, as what I hope to keep,” he said smoothly. He paused, and through the silence there came to her ears that queer rise and fall of notes from drums that had followed her ever since she arrived in Haiti — the drums of the Voodoo Moon, Benedetti had called it. He leaned forward.
“You might as well know now,” he said abruptly. “You have until tomorrow midnight to live.”
“Unless?” Vivian queried meaningly. She was very sure that she knew what the man meant.
Benedetti calmly placed the spoon in his plate and pushed it aside.
“There is no proviso. I know nothing of your personal life — of your finances. They are no concern of mine. You may be extremely rich, or completely poor — that does not enter into the matter at all. You have nothing that I care to buy. All I know is that you are young and extremely beautiful.” He studied her with a cold dispassionate interest, then sighed, a bit regretfully, it seemed. “That is the reason you must die tomorrow night.”
The thing was utterly fantastic. Vivian listened in amazed fascination. She could hardly bring herself to believe that she had heard correctly. So sure had she been that the man’s interest in her rose from the fact that he was attracted to her that the thought there might be another, more sinister motive behind the drugging and kidnaping had not occurred to her.
Her green eyes narrowed a trifle — only that, but there was the impression of a steel spring tightening. Then she said quietly:
“Why must I die?”
“Because,” he answered, “tomorrow night is the night of the Voodoo Moon — the night when the Papaloi and the Mamaloi present Ogoun Badagri, the Bloody One, with the Goat Without Horns.”
“The Goat Without Horns?” Vivian repeated, uncomprehendingly. “What is that?”
“You,” the man said tersely. “Tomorrow at midnight, when the Voodoo Moon is fullest, you will be offered as a sacrifice to Ogoun Badagri, the snake god.”
For a moment the Lady from Hell stared at him, a chill feeling clutching at her breast. Then an alert look came into her eyes, a look that she quickly veiled. She was listening intently.
“You’re not actually in earnest?” she asked quietly. Every nerve was strained to catch that sound again — the drone of an airplane engine that had come faintly to her ears. It was louder now. “You are trying to frighten me, to trap me into something. You will find that I am not easily frightened or trapped.”
The sound of the plane was louder now. She shot a furtive glance at Benedetti. Could aid be on the way? Could Benedetti’s plans have gone wrong, and a search be underway for them?
“I am very much in earnest,” the man opposite her said. “You see, that is the secret of my successful defiance of the sugar trust, the secret of why my laborers never leave me, the secret of why I can manufacture sugar at a cost that the sugar trust cannot possibly equal and still make a profit. Once a year I present the Papaloi and the Mamaloi, the high priest and priestess of Voodoo, with a human sacrifice — a white man or woman — and in turn these two guardians of the great snake see to it that my laborers do not leave, and are kept content with the lowest pay scale in the island of Haiti.”
He broke off and smiled.
“You may relax, Mrs. Legrand,” he said. “That plane that you hear will not land here. It is the marine mail plane that passes over the island every night between eleven thirty and twelve o’clock.”
Vivian looked at him blankly. “Plane?” she said vaguely. “Oh, yes, that is a plane, isn’t it? Quite honestly, I had not noticed the sound before you spoke.”
It was so well done that it fooled him. She picked up the slender silver fruit knife that lay on the table in front of her, twisting it so that it shone in her fingers, a pale, metallic splinter of light. She regarded him with eyes that had turned mysteriously dark, and leaned forward a little. Her voice, when she spoke, was very soft, and it held a quality of poignancy.