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.
“I let him hit me, didn’t I?”
“Oh, yes, but a police official.”
“It wasn’t that,” Spade explained. “It was that in losing his head and slugging me he overplayed his hand. If I’d mixed it with him he couldn’t’ve backed down. He’d’ve had to go through with it, and we’d’ve had to tell that goofy story at headquarters.” He stared thoughtfully at the girl, and then asked: “What did you do to Cairo?”
“Nothing.” Her face flushed. “I tried to frighten him into keeping quiet until they had gone, and he either got too frightened or stubborn and yelled.”
“And then you beaned him with the gun?”
“I had to. He attacked me.”
“You don’t know what you’re doing.” Spade’s smile did not quite succeed in concealing annoyance. “It’s just what I told you: you’re fumbling along by guess and by God.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, face and voice soft with contrition, “Sam.”
“Sure you are,” he said, no longer showing annoyance. He took tobacco and papers from his pocket and began to make a cigarette. “Now you’ve had your talk with Cairo. Now you can talk to me.”
She put a finger-tip to her mouth, staring across the room at nothing with widened eyes, and then, with narrower eyes, glanced quickly at Spade. He was engrossed in the making of his cigarette.
“Oh, yes,” she began, “of course—” She took the finger away from her mouth and smoothed her blue dress over her knees. She frowned at her knees.
Spade licked his cigarette, sealed it, and asked, “Well?” while he felt for his lighter.
“But I didn’t,” she said, with short pauses between words as if she were selecting them with great care, “have time to finish talking to him.” She stopped frowning at her knees and looked at Spade with clear candid eyes. “We were interrupted almost before we had begun.”
Spade lighted his cigarette and laughed his mouth empty of smoke.
“Want me to call him up and ask him to come back?”
She shook her head without smiling. Her eyes moved back and forth between her lids as she shook her head, maintaining their focus on Spade’s face. Her eyes were inquisitive.
Spade put an arm across her back, cupping his hand over the smooth bare white shoulder farthest from him. She leaned back a little into the bend of his arm.
He said: “Well, I’m listening.”
She twisted her face around to smile up at him with friendly insolence, asking: “Do you need your arm there for that?”
“No.” He removed his hand from her shoulder, dropping it to the sofa behind her.
“You’re altogether unpredictable,” she murmured.
He nodded and said amiably: “I’m still listening.”
“Look at the time,” she exclaimed, wriggling a finger at the alarm clock perched atop Celebrated Criminal Cases of America, saying with its clumsily shaped hands, two-fifty a.m.
“Uh-huh. It’s been a busy evening.”
“I must go.” She jumped up from the sofa. “This is terrible.”
Spade did not get up. He shook his head and said: “Not until you’ve told me about it.”
“But look at the time,” she protested, “and it would take me hours to tell you.”
“It’ll have to take them then.”
“Am I a prisoner?” she asked gaily.
“Besides, there’s the kid outside. Maybe he hasn’t gone home to sleep yet.”
Her gaiety vanished.
“Do you think he’s still there?”
“It’s likely.”
She shivered. “Could you find out?”
“I could go down and see.”
“Oh, that’s — will you?”
Spade studied her anxious face for a moment and then rose from the sofa saying: “Sure.” He got a hat and overcoat from the passageway closet. “I’ll be gone about ten minutes.”
“Do be careful,” she begged as she followed him to the corridor door.
He said, “I will,” and went out.
Post Street was empty when Spade issued into it. He walked east a block, crossed the street, walked west two blocks on the other side, recrossed it, and returned to his building without having seen anyone except two mechanics working on a car in a garage.
When he opened his apartment door Brigid O’Shaughnessy was standing at the bend in the passageway, holding Cairo’s pistol straight down at her side.
“He’s still there,” Spade replied to the question her face asked.
She bit the inside of her lip slowly, going back into the living-room. Spade followed her in, put his hat and overcoat on a chair, said, “So, we’ll have time to talk,” and went into the kitchen.
He had put the coffee pot on the stove when she came to the door, and was slicing a slender loaf of French bread. She stood in the doorway and watched him with preoccupied eyes. The fingers of her left hand idly caressed the body and barrel of the pistol her right hand still held.
“The table cloth’s in there,” he said, pointing the bread knife at a cupboard that was one breakfast nook partition.
She set up the table while he spread liverwurst on, or put cold corned beef between, the small ovals of bread he had sliced. Then he poured the coffee, added to it Bacardi from a tall bottle, and they sat at the table. They sat side by side on one of the benches. She put the pistol on the end of the bench nearer her.
“You can start now, between bites,” he said.
She made a face at him, complained, “You’re the most insistent person,” and bit a sandwich.
“Yes, and wild and unpredictable. What’s this bird, this falcon, that everybody’s steamed up about?”
She chewed the beef and bread in her mouth, swallowed it, looked attentively at the small crescent its removal had made in the sandwich’s rim, and asked: “Suppose I would not tell you. Suppose I wouldn’t tell you anything at all about it. What would you do?”
“You mean about the bird?”
“I mean about the whole thing.”
“I wouldn’t be too surprised,” he told her, grinning so that the edges of his jaw teeth were visible, “to know what to do next.”
“And what would that be?” She transferred her attention from the sandwich to his face. “That’s what I wanted to know: what would you do next?”
He shook his head.
Mockery rippled in a smile on her face. “Something wild and unpredictable?”
“Maybe, but I don’t see what you’ve got to gain by covering up now. It’s coming out bit by bit anyhow. There’s a lot of it that I don’t know, but there’s some that I do, and some more that I can guess at, and give me another day like this and I’ll be knowing things about it that you don’t know.”
“I suppose you do now,” she said, looking at her sandwich again, her face serious. “But — oh, I’m so tired of it, and I do so hate having to talk about it. Wouldn’t it — wouldn’t it be just as well to wait and let you learn about it as you say you will?”
Spade laughed. “I don’t know. You’ll have to figure that out for yourself. My way of learning is to heave a wild and unpredictable monkey-wrench into the machinery. It’s all right with me, if you’re sure none of the flying pieces will hurt you.”
She moved her bare shoulders uneasily, but said nothing. For several minutes they ate in silence, he phlegmatically, she thoughtfully. Then she said in a barely audible voice: “I’m afraid of you, and that’s the truth.”
He said: “That’s not the truth.”
“It is,” she insisted in the same low voice. “I know two men I’m afraid of, and I’ve seen them both tonight.”
“I can understand your being afraid of Cairo,” Spade said. “He’s out of your reach.”
“And you aren’t?”
“Not that way,” he said and grinned.