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.
An undersized youth of twenty or twenty-one in a neat gray cap and overcoat was standing idly on the corner below Spade’s building.
Spade walked up Sutter Street to Kearney, where he went into a cigar store to buy two sacks of Bull Durham. When he came out the youth was one of the four people waiting for a street car on the opposite corner.
Spade went to Herbert’s Grill in Powell Street for dinner. When he left the grill, at a quarter to eight, the youth was looking into a nearby haberdasher’s window.
Spade went to the Hotel Belvedere, asking at the desk for Mr. Cairo. He was told that Mr. Cairo was not in. The youth sat in a chair in a far corner of the hotel lobby.
Spade went to the Geary Theater, failed to see Cairo in the lobby, and posted himself on the curb in front, facing the theater. The youth loitered with other loiterers before Marquard’s restaurant below.
At ten minutes past eight Joel Cairo appeared, walking up Geary Street with his little mincing, bobbing steps. Apparently he did not see Spade until the private detective touched his shoulder. He seemed moderately surprised for a moment, and then said: “Oh, yes, of course, you saw the ticket.”
“Uh-huh. I’ve got something I want to show you.” Spade drew Cairo back toward the curb a little away from the other waiting theater-goers. “The kid in the cap down by Marquard’s.”
Cairo murmured, “I’ll see,” and looked at his watch. He looked up Geary Street. He looked at a theater sign in front of him on which George Arliss was shown costumed as Shylock, and then his dark eyes crawled sideways in their sockets until they were looking at the kid in the cap, at his cool pale face with curling lashes hiding lowered eyes.
“Who is he?” Spade asked.
Cairo smiled up at Spade. “I do not know him.”
“He’s been tailing me around town.”
Cairo wet his lower lip with his tongue and asked:
“Do you think it was wise, then, to let him see us together?”
“How do I know?” Spade replied. “Anyway, it’s done.”
Cairo took off his hat and smoothed his hair with a gloved hand. Then he replaced his hat carefully and said with every appearance of candor: “I give you my word I do not know him, Mr. Spade. I give you my word I have nothing to do with him. I have asked nobody’s assistance except yours, on my word of honor.”
“Then he’s one of the others?”
“That may be.”
“I just wanted to know, because if he gets to be a nuisance I may have to hurt him.”
“Do as you think best. He is not a friend of mine.”
“That’s good. There goes the curtain. Good night,” Spade said, and crossed the street to board a westbound street car.
The youth in the cap boarded the same car.
Spade left the car at Hyde Street and went up to his apartment. His rooms were not greatly upset, but showed unmistakably that they had been searched. When Spade had washed and had put on a fresh shirt and collar he went out again, walked up to Sutter Street, and boarded a westbound car. The youth boarded it also.
Within half a dozen blocks of the Coronet Spade left the car and went into the vestibule of a tall brown apartment building. He pressed three fourth-floor buttons together. The street door lock buzzed. He entered, passed the elevator and stairs, went down a long yellow-walled corridor to the rear of the building, found a back door fastened with a Yale lock, and, leaving the lock unlatched, let himself out into a narrow court.
The court led to a dark back street, up which Spade walked for two blocks. Then he crossed over to California Street and went to the Coronet. It was not quite half past nine o’clock.
The eagerness with which Brigid O’Shaughnessy welcomed Spade suggested that she had not been entirely certain of his coming. She had put on a satin gown of the blue shade called Artoise that season, with chalcedony shoulder straps, and her stockings and slippers were Artoise.
The red and cream sitting-room had been brought to order and livened with flowers in squat pottery vases of black and silver. Three small rough-barked logs burned in the fireplace. Spade watched them burn while she put away his hat and coat.
“Do you bring me good news?” she asked when she came into the room again. Anxiety looked through her smile, and she held her breath.
“We won’t have to make anything public that hasn’t already been made public.”
“The police won’t have to know about me?”
“No.”
She sighed happily and sat on the walnut settee. Her face relaxed and her body relaxed. She smiled up at him with admiring eyes.
“However did you manage it?” she asked, more in wonder than in curiosity.
“Most things in San Francisco can be bought, or taken.”
“And you won’t get into trouble? Do sit down.” She made room for him on the settee.
“I don’t mind a reasonable amount of trouble,” he said with not too much complacence.
He stood beside the fireplace and looked at her with eyes that studied, weighed, judged her without pretense that they were not studying, weighing, judging her. She flushed slightly under the frankness of his scrutiny, but she seemed more sure of herself than before, though a becoming shyness had not left her eyes.
He stood there until it seemed plain that he meant to ignore her invitation to sit beside her, and then crossed to the settee.
“You aren’t,” he asked as he sat down, “exactly the sort of person you pretend to be, are you?”
“I’m not sure that I know what you mean,” she said in her hushed voice, looking at him with puzzled eyes.
“Schoolgirl manner,” he explained, “stammering, blushing, and all that.”
She blushed and replied hurriedly, not looking at him now:
“I told you this afternoon that I’ve been bad, worse than you could know.”
“That’s what I mean,” he said. “You told me that this afternoon in the same words, same tone. It’s a speech you’ve practiced.”
After a moment in which she seemed confused almost to the point of tears she laughed and said: “Very well, then, Mr. Spade. I’m not at all the sort of person I pretend to be. I’m eighty years old, incredibly wicked, and an iron-molder by trade. But if it’s a pose it’s one I’ve grown into, so you won’t expect me to drop it entirely, will you?”
“Oh, it’s all right,” he assured her. “Only it wouldn’t be all right if you were actually that innocent. We’d never get anywhere.”
“I won’t be innocent,” she promised with a hand on her heart.
“I saw Joel Cairo tonight,” he said in the manner of one making polite conversation.
Gaiety went out of her face. Her eyes, focused on his profile, became frightened, then cautious. He had stretched out his legs and was looking at his crossed feet. His face did not indicate that he was thinking about anything.
There was a long pause before she asked uneasily:
“You... you know him?”
“I saw him tonight.” Spade maintained his light conversational manner and did not look up from his feet. “He was going into the Geary to see George Arliss.”
“You mean you saw him to talk to?”
“Only for a few minutes, till the performance started.”
She got up from the settee and went to the fireplace to poke at the fire. Then she changed slightly the position of an ornament on the mantelpiece, crossed the room to get a box of cigarettes from a table in a corner, straightened a curtain, and returned to her seat. Her face was now smooth and unworried.
Spade grinned sidewise at her and said:
“You’re good. You’re very good.”
Her face didn’t change. She asked quietly: