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.
“No, I don’t know it.” He patted the hand that was twisting the button. “My asking for reasons why I should trust you brought us here. Don’t let’s get ourselves confused. You don’t have to trust me, anyway, as long as you can persuade me to trust you.”
She studied his face. Her nostrils quivered.
Spade laughed. He patted her hand again and said:
“Don’t worry about that now. He’ll be here in a moment. Get your business with him over, and then we’ll see how we stand.”
“And you’ll let me go about it in my own way?”
“Of course.”
She turned her hand under his so that her fingers pressed his. She said softly: “You’re a God-send.”
Spade said: “Don’t overdo it.”
She looked reproachfully at him, though smiling, and returned to the padded rocker.
Joel Cairo was excited. His dark eyes seemed all irides, and his high-pitched thin-voiced words were tumbling out before Spade had got the door half open.
“That boy is out there watching the house, Mr. Spade, that boy you showed me, or to whom you showed me, in front of the theater. What am I to understand from that, Mr. Spade? I came here in good faith, with no thought of tricks or traps.”
“You were asked in good faith.” Spade frowned thoughtfully. “But I ought to’ve guessed that he might show up. He saw you come in?”
“Naturally. I could have gone on, but that seemed pointless, since you had already let him see us together.”
Brigid O’Shaughnessy came into the passageway behind Spade and asked anxiously: “What boy? What is it?”
Cairo removed his black hat from his head, bowed stiffly, and said in a prim voice: “If you do not know, ask Mr. Spade. I know nothing about it except through him.”
“A kid who’s been trying to tail me around town all evening.” Spade spoke carelessly over his shoulder, not turning to face the girl. “Come on in, Cairo. There’s no use standing here talking for all the neighbors.”
Brigid O’Shaughnessy grasped Spade’s arm above the elbow and demanded: “Did he follow you to my apartment?”
“No. I shook him before that. Then I suppose he came back here to try to pick me up again.”
Cairo, holding his black hat to his belly with both hands, had come into the passageway. Spade shut the corridor door behind him, and they went into the living-room. There Cairo bowed stiffly over his hat once more and said: “I am delighted to see you again, Miss O’Shaughnessy.”
“I was sure you would be, Joe,” she replied, giving him her hand.
He made a formal bow over it and released it quickly.
She sat in the padded rocker she had occupied before. Cairo sat in the armchair by the table. Spade, when he had hung Cairo’s hat and coat in the closet, sat on an end of the sofa in front of the windows and began to roll a cigarette.
Brigid O’Shaughnessy said to Cairo:
“Sam told me about your offer for the falcon. How soon can you have the money ready?”
Cairo’s eyebrows twitched. He smiled. “It is ready.” He continued to smile at the girl for a little while after he had spoken, and then looked at Spade.
Spade was lighting his cigarette. His face was placid.
“In cash?” she asked.
“Oh, yes,” Cairo replied.
She frowned, put her tongue between her lips, withdrew it, and asked: “You are ready to pay us five thousand dollars, now, if we give you the falcon?”
Cairo held up a wriggling white hand.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I expressed myself badly. I did not mean to say I have the money in my pocket, but that I am prepared to get it on a very few minutes’ notice at any time during banking hours.”
“Oh.” She looked significantly at Spade.
Spade blew cigarette smoke down the front of his vest and said:
“That’s probably right. He had only a few hundred in his pockets when I frisked them this afternoon.”
When her eyes opened round and wide he grinned.
Cairo bent forward in his chair. He barely failed to keep eagerness from showing in his eyes and voice.
“I can be quite prepared to give you the money at, say, half past ten in the morning. Eh?”
Brigid O’Shaughnessy smiled at him and said:
“But I haven’t got the falcon.”
Cairo’s face was darkened by a flush of annoyance. He put an ugly white hand on either arm of the chair, holding his small-boned body erect and stiff between them. His dark eyes were angry. He did not say anything.
The girl made a mock-placatory face at him.
“I’ll have it in a week at the most, though,” she said.
“Where is it?” Cairo used politeness of mein to express skepticism.
“Where Floyd hid it.”
“Floyd? Thursby?”
She nodded.
“And you know where that is?” he asked.
“I think I do.”
“Then why must we wait a week?”
“Perhaps not a whole week. Whom are you buying it for, Joe?”
Cairo raised his eyebrows. “I told Mr. Spade. For its owner.”
Surprise illuminated the girl’s face. “So you went back to him?”
“Naturally.”
She laughed softly in her throat and said: “I should have liked to have seen that.”
Cairo shrugged. “That was the natural, the logical development.” He rubbed the back of one hand with the palm of the other. His upper lids came down to shade his eyes. “Why, if I in turn may ask a question, are you willing to sell it to me, Brigid?”
“I’m afraid,” she said simply, “after what happened to Floyd. That’s why I haven’t got it now. I’m afraid to touch it except to turn it over to someone else right away.”
Spade, propped on an elbow on the sofa, looked at and listened to them impartially. In the comfortable slackness of his body, in the easy stillness of his features, there was no indication of either curiosity or impatience.
“Exactly what,” Cairo asked in a low voice, “happened to Floyd?”
The tip of her right forefinger traced a swift G in the air.
Cairo said, “I see,” but there was something of doubtfulness in his smile. “Is he here?”
“I don’t know.” She spoke impatiently. “What difference does that make?”
The doubt in Cairo’s smile deepened. “It might make a difference,” he said, and rearranged his hands in his lap so that, intentionally or not, a blunt forefinger pointed at Spade.
The girl glanced at the finger and made an impatient motion with her head.
“Or me,” she said, “or you.”
“Exactly. And shall we include, with more certainty, the boy outside?”
“Yes,” she agreed and laughed. “Yes, unless he’s the one you had in Constantinople.”
Sudden blood mottled Cairo’s face. In a shrill enraged voice he spoke a dozen words that were neither English, French, German nor Spanish.
Brigid O’Shaughnessy jumped up from her chair. Her lower lip was between her teeth. Her eyes were dark and wide in a tense white face. She took two quick steps toward Cairo. He started to rise. Her right hand went out and cracked sharply against his cheek, leaving the imprint of its fingers there.
Cairo grunted and slapped her cheek, staggering her sidewise, bringing from her a brief muffled scream.
Spade, wooden of face, was up from the sofa and close to them by then. He caught Cairo by the throat and shook him. Cairo gurgled and put a hand inside his coat. Spade grasped the smaller man’s wrist, wrenched it away from the coat, forced it straight out to the side, and twisted it until the clumsy white fingers opened to let the black pistol fall down on the rug.
Brigid O’Shaughnessy quickly picked up the pistol.
Cairo, speaking with difficulty because of the fingers on his throat, said: “This is the second time you’ve put your hands on me.” His eyes, for all that the throttling pressure on his throat made them bulge, were cold and menacing.