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.
“What did he say?”
“About what?”
She hesitated. “About me.”
“Nothing.” Spade turned to hold his lighter under the end of her cigarette. His eyes were shiny in a wooden Satan’s face.
“Well, what did he say?” she asked with half-playful petulance.
“He offered me five thousand dollars for the black bird.”
She jumped, her teeth tore the end of the cigarette, and her eyes, after a swift alarmed glance at Spade, turned away from him.
“You’re not going to poke at the fire and go around straightening the room again, are you?” he asked lazily.
She laughed a clear girlish laugh, dropped the mangled cigarette into a tray, and looked at him with clear merry eyes.
“I won’t,” she promised. “And what did you say?”
“Five thousand is a lot of money.”
She smiled as if she thought he was jesting, but when, instead of smiling, he looked gravely at her, her smile became confused, faint, and presently vanished. In its place came a hurt, bewildered look.
“Surely you’re not really considering it,” she said.
“Why not? Five thousand is a lot of money.”
“But, Mr. Spade, you promised to help me.” Her hands were on his arm. “I trusted you. You can’t—” She broke off, took her hands from his sleeve and worked them together.
Spade smiled gently into her troubled eyes.
“Don’t let’s try to figure out how much you’ve trusted me,” he said. “I promised to help you, but you didn’t tell me anything about a black bird.”
“But you must have known, or... or you wouldn’t have told me about it. You do know now. You won’t, you can’t, treat me that way.” Her eyes were cobalt blue prayers.
“Five thousand,” he said for the third time, “is a lot of money.”
She lifted her shoulders and hands and let them fall in a gesture that accepted defeat.
“It is,” she agreed in a small dull voice. “It is far more than I could ever offer you, if I must bid for your loyalty.”
Spade laughed. His laughter was brief and somewhat bitter.
“That is good,” he said, “coming from you. What have you given me besides money? Have you given me any of your confidence? Any of the truth? Any help in helping you? Haven’t you tried to buy my loyalty with money and nothing else? Well, if I’m peddling it, why shouldn’t I let it go to the highest bidder?”
“I’ve given you all the money I have.” Tears glistened in her white-ringed eyes. Her voice was hoarse, vibrant. “I’ve thrown myself on your mercy, told you that without your help I’m utterly lost. What else is there?” She suddenly moved close to him on the settee and cried angrily: “Can I buy you with my body?”
Their faces were a few inches apart.
Spade took her face between his hands and he kissed her mouth roughly and contemptuously.
Then he sat back and said: “I’ll think it over.” His face was hard and furious.
She sat still holding her numb face where his hands had left it.
He stood up and said: “—! There’s no sense to this.”
He took two steps toward the fireplace and stopped, glowering at the burning logs, grinding his teeth together.
She did not move.
He turned to face her. The two vertical lines over her nose were deep clefts between red welts.
“I don’t give a damn about your honesty,” he told her, trying to make himself speak calmly. “I don’t care what kind of tricks you’re up to, or what your secrets are. But I’ve got to have something to show that you know what you’re doing.”
“I do know. Please believe that I do, and that it’s all for the best, and—”
“Show me,” he ordered. “I’m willing to help you. I’ve done what I could so far. If necessary I’ll go ahead blindfolded, but I can’t do it without confidence in you. You’ve got to convince me that you know what it’s all about, that you’re not simply fiddling around by guess and by God, hoping it’ll come out all right somehow in the end.”
“Can’t you trust me just a little longer?”
“How much is a little? And what are you waiting for?”
She bit her lip and looked down.
“I must talk to Joel Cairo,” she said almost inaudibly.
“You can see him tonight,” Spade said, looking at his watch. “His show will be out in a little while. We can get him on the phone at his hotel.”
She raised her eyes, alarmed.
“But he can’t come here. I can’t let him know where I am. I’m afraid.”
“My place,” Spade suggested.
She hesitated, working her lips together, then asked:
“Do you think he’d come there?”
Spade nodded.
“All right,” she exclaimed, jumping up, her eyes large and bright. “Shall we go now?”
She went into the next room. Spade went to the table in the corner and silently pulled the drawer out. The drawer held two packs of playing cards, a pad of bridge score-cards, a brass screw, a piece of red string, and a gold pencil. He had closed the drawer and was lighting a cigarette when she returned wearing a small dark hat and gray kidskin coat, carrying his hat and coat.
Their taxicab drew up behind a dark sedan that stood directly in front of Spade’s street door. Iva Archer was alone in the sedan, sitting at the wheel. Spade lifted his hat to her and went indoors with Brigid O’Shaughnessy. In the lobby he halted beside one of the benches and asked: “Do you mind waiting here a moment? I won’t be long.”
“That’s perfectly all right,” Brigid O’Shaughnessy said, sitting down. “You needn’t hurry.”
Spade went out to the sedan.
When he had opened the sedan door Iva spoke rapidly:
“I’ve got to talk to you, Sam. Can’t I come in?” Her face was pale and nervous.
“Not now.”
Iva clicked her teeth together and asked sharply: “Who is she?”
“I’ve only a minute, Iva,” Spade said patiently. “What is it?”
“Who is she?” she repeated, nodding at the apartment building door.
He looked away from her, down the street. In front of a garage on the next corner an undersized youth of twenty or twenty-one in neat gray cap and overcoat loafed with his back against a wall. Spade frowned and returned his gaze to Iva’s insistent face.
“What is the matter?” he asked. “Has anything happened? You oughtn’t to be here at this time of night.”
“I’m beginning to believe that,” she complained. “You told me I oughtn’t to come to the office, and now I oughtn’t come here. Do you mean I oughtn’t chase after you? If that’s what you mean why don’t you say it right out?”
“Now, Iva, you’ve got no right to take that attitude.”
“I know I haven’t. I haven’t any rights at all, it seems, where you’re concerned. I thought I did. I thought your pretending to love me gave me some right, but—”
Spade said wearily:
“This is no time to be arguing about that, precious. What was it you wanted to see me about?”
“I can’t talk to you here, Sam. Can’t I come in?”
“Not now.”
“Why can’t I?”
Spade said nothing.
She made a thin line of her mouth, squirmed around straight behind the wheel, and started the engine, staring angrily ahead.
When the sedan began to move Spade said, “Good night, Iva,” closed the door, and stood at the curb with his hat in his hand until it had been driven away. Then he went indoors again.
Brigid O’Shaughnessy rose smiling cheerfully from the bench and they went up to his apartment.
Chapter VII
G in the Air
In his bedroom that was a living-room now the wall bed was up, Spade took Brigid O’Shaughnessy’s hat and coat, made her comfortable in a padded rocking chair, and, after looking up the number in the telephone directory, called the Hotel Belvedere. Cairo had not yet returned from the theater. Spade left his telephone number with the request that Cairo call him as soon as he came in.