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.
“We begin well, sir,” the fat man purred, turning with a proffered glass in his hand. “I distrust a man that says when. If he’s got to be careful not to drink too much it’s because he’s not to be trusted when he does.”
Spade took the glass and, still smiling, made the beginning of a bow over it.
The fat man raised his glass and held it against a window’s light. He nodded approvingly at the bubbles running upward in it. He said: “Well, sir, here’s to plain speaking and clear understanding.”
They drank, and lowered their glasses.
The fat man looked shrewdly at Spade and asked:
“You’re a close-mouthed man?”
Spade shook his head. “I like to talk.”
“Better and better!” the fat man exclaimed. “I distrust a close-mouthed man. He generally picks the wrong time to talk, and says the wrong things. Talking’s something you can’t do judiciously unless you keep in practice.” He beamed over his glass. “We’ll get along, sir, that we will.” He set his glass down on the table and held a box of Coronas del Ritz out to Spade. “A cigar, sir.”
Spade took, and trimmed the end of, and lighted, a cigar. Meanwhile the fat man pulled another green plush chair around to face Spade’s within convenient distance and pushed a smoking stand within reach of both chairs. Then he took his glass from the table, took a cigar from the box, and lowered himself into his chair. His bulbs stopped jouncing and settled into flabby rest. He sighed comfortably and said: “Now, sir, we’ll talk if you like. And I’ll tell you right out that I’m a man that likes talking with a man that likes to talk.”
“Swell. Will we talk about the black bird?”
The fat man laughed, and his bulbs rode up and down on his laughter.
“Will we?” he asked, and, “We will,” he replied. His pink face was shiny with delight. “You’re the man for me, sir, a man cut along my own lines. No beating about the bush, but right to the point. ‘Will we talk about the black bird?’ We will. I like that, sir. I like that way of doing business, sir. Let us talk about the black bird by all means, but first answer me a question, please, though maybe it’s an unnecessary one, so we’ll understand one another from the beginning. You’re here as Miss O’Shaughnessy’s representative?”
Spade blew smoke above the fat man’s head in a long slanting plume. He frowned thoughtfully at the ash-tipped end of his cigar. He replied deliberately: “I can’t say yes or no. There’s nothing certain about it either way, yet.” He looked up at the fat man and his frown faded. “It depends.”
“It depends on—?”
Spade shook his head. “If I knew what it depends on I could say yes or no.”
The fat man took a mouthful from his glass, swallowed it, and suggested: “Maybe it depends on Joel Cairo?”
Spade’s prompt, “Maybe,” was noncommittal. He drank.
The fat man leaned forward until his belly stopped him. His smile was ingratiating, and so was his purring voice: “You could say then that the question is which one of them you’ll represent?”
“You could put it that way.”
“It will be one or the other?”
“I didn’t say that.”
The fat man’s eyes glistened. His voice sank to a hoarse whisper, asking: “Who else is there?”
Spade pointed his cigar at his own chest.
“There’s me,” he said.
The fat man leaned back in his chair and let his body go flaccid. He blew his breath out in a long contented gust.
“That’s wonderful, sir,” he purred. “That’s wonderful. I do like a man that tells you right out he’s looking out for himself. Don’t we all? I don’t trust a man that says he’s not. And the man that’s telling the truth when he says he’s not I distrust most of all, because he’s an ass, and an ass that’s going contrary to the laws of nature.”
Spade exhaled smoke. His face was politely attentive. He said: “Uh-huh. Now let’s talk about the black bird.”
The fat man smiled benevolently at Spade.
“Let’s,” he said. He squinted so that fat puffs crowding together left nothing visible of his eyes except a dark gleam. “Mr. Spade, have you any conception of how much money can be made out of that black bird?”
“No.”
The fat man leaned forward and put a bloated pink hand on the arm of Spade’s chair.
“Well, sir, if I told you — if I told you half — you’d call me a liar.”
Spade smiled. “No,” he said, “not even if I thought it. But if you don’t want to take the risk, just tell me what it is and I’ll figure out the profit.”
The fat man laughed.
“You couldn’t. You couldn’t do it, sir. Nobody could do it that hadn’t had a world of experience with things of that sort, and” — he paused impressively — “there aren’t any other things of that sort.” His bulbs jostled one another as he laughed again. He stopped laughing, abruptly. His fleshy lips hung a little apart, as laughter had left them. He stared at Spade with an intentness that suggested myopia. He asked: “You mean you don’t know what it is?” Amazement took the throatiness out of his voice.
Spade made a careless gesture with his cigar.
“Oh, hell,” he said lightly, “I know what it’s supposed to look like. I know the value in life and money you people put on it. I don’t know what it is.”
“She didn’t tell you?”
“Miss O’Shaughnessy?”
“Yes. A lovely girl, sir.”
“Uh-huh. No.”
The fat man’s eyes were dark gleams in ambush behind pink puffs of flesh. He said indistinctly, “She must know,” and then, “And Cairo didn’t either?”
“Cairo is cagey. He’s willing to buy it, but he won’t risk telling me anything I don’t know already.”
The fat man moistened his lips with his tongue.
“How much is he willing to buy it for?” he asked.
“Ten thousand dollars.”
The fat man laughed scornfully. “Ten thousand. And dollars, mind you, not even pounds. That’s the Greek for you. Humph! And what did you say to that?”
“I said if I turned it over to him I’d expect the ten thousand.”
“Ah, yes, if. Nicely put, sir.” The fat man’s forehead squirmed in a flesh-blurred frown. “They must know,” he said only partly aloud, then: “Do they? Do they know what the bird is, sir? What is your impression?”
“I can’t help you there,” Spade confessed. “There’s not much to go by. Cairo didn’t say he did, and he didn’t say he didn’t. She said she didn’t, but I took it for granted that she was lying.”
“That was not an injudicious thing to do,” the fat man said, but his mind was obviously not on his words. He scratched his head. He frowned until his forehead was marked by raw red creases. He fidgeted in his chair as much as its size and his size permitted fidgeting. He shut his eyes, suddenly opened them wide, and said to Spade: “Maybe they don’t.” His bulbous pink face slowly lost its worried frown and then, more quickly, took on an expression of ineffable happiness. “If they don’t,” he cried, and again: “If they don’t, I’m the only one in the whole wide sweet world who does!”
Spade drew his lips back in a tight smile.
“I’m glad I came to the right place,” he said.
The fat man smiled too, but somewhat vaguely. Happiness had gone out of his face, though he continued to smile, and caution had come into his eyes. His face was a watchful-eyed smiling mask held up between his thoughts and Spade. His eyes, avoiding Spade’s, shifted to the glass at Spade’s elbow. His face brightened.
“By Gar, sir,” he said, “your glass is empty.”
He got up and went to the table, and clattered glasses and siphon and bottle mixing two drinks. Spade was immobile in his chair until the fat man, with a flourish and a bow and a jocular, “Ah, this kind of medicine will never hurt you,” had handed him his refilled glass.