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.
Spade waved his cigar. “Not much, only what I can remember from history in school — Crusaders or something.”
“Very good. Now you don’t remember that Suleiman the Magnificent chased them out of Rhodes in 1523?”
“No.”
“Well, sir, he did, and they settled in Crete. And they stayed there for seven years, until 1530, when they persuaded the Emperor Charles V to give them” — Gutman held up three puffy fingers and counted them — “Malta, Gozo, and Tripoli.”
“Yes?”
“Yes, sir, but with these conditions: they were to pay the Emperor each year the tribute of one” — he held up a finger — “falcon in acknowledgment that Malta was still under Spain, and if they ever left the island it was to revert to Spain. Understand? He was giving it to them, but not unless they occupied it, and they couldn’t give it or sell it to anybody else.”
“Yes.”
The fat man looked over his shoulders at the three closed doors, hunched his chair a few inches closer to Spade’s, and reduced his voice to a husky whisper: “Have you any conception of the extreme, the immeasurable wealth of the Order at that time?”
“If I remember, they were pretty well fixed,” Spade said.
Gutman smiled indulgently.
“Pretty well, sir, is putting it mildly.” His whisper became lower and harsher. “They were rolling in wealth, sir. You’ve no idea. None of us has any idea. For years they had preyed on the Saracens, had taken God only knows what spoils in gems, precious metals, silks, ivories, the top-cream luxuries of the East. That is history, sir. We all know that the Holy Wars to them, as to the Templars, were largely a matter of loot.
“Well, now, the Emperor Charles had given them Malta, and all the rent he asks is one insignificant bird per annum, just as a matter of form. What could be more natural than for these immeasurably wealthy Knights to look around for some way of showing their gratitude? Well, sir, that’s exactly what they did, and they hit on the happy thought of sending Charles, for the first year’s tribute, not an insignificant live bird, but a glorious falcon encrusted from head to foot with the finest jewels in their coffers. And, remember, they had fine ones, the finest out of Asia.”
Gutman stopped whispering. His sleek dark eyes examined Spade’s face, which was placid. The fat man asked: “Well, sir, what do you think of that?”
“I don’t know.”
The fat man smiled.
“These are facts, historical facts; not schoolbook history, not Mr. Well’s history, but history nonetheless.” He leaned forward. “The archives of the Order from the twelfth century on are still at Malta. They are not intact, but what is there holds no less than three” — he held up three fingers — “references that can’t be to anything else but this jeweled falcon. In J. Delaville Le Roulx’s Les Archives de l’Ordre de Saint-Jean there is a reference to it, oblique to be sure, but still a reference. And the unpublished, because unfinished at the time of his death, supplement to Paoli’s Dell’ origine ed instituto del sacro militar ordine has a clear and unmistakable statement of these facts I am telling you.”
“All right,” Spade said.
“All right. Grand Master Villiers de l’Isle d’Adam had this foot-high jeweled bird made by Turkish slaves in the castle of St. Angelo, and sent it to Charles, who was in Spain. He sent it in a galley commanded by a French Knight named Cormier or Corvere, a member of the Order.” His voice dropped to a whisper again. “It never reached Spain.” He smiled with compressed lips and asked: “You know of Barbarossa, Redbeard, Khair-ed Din?”
“No.”
“A famous admiral of buccaneers sailing out of Algiers then. Well, sir, he took the Knight’s galley, and he took the bird. The bird went to Algiers. That’s a fact. It’s a fact that the French historian Pierre Dan put in one of his letters from Algiers. He wrote that the bird had been there for more than a hundred years, and that it had been carried away by Sir Francis Verney, an English adventurer who was with the Algerian buccaneers for a while, when he left Algiers. Maybe it wasn’t, but Pierre Dan believed it, and that’s good enough for me.
“There’s nothing said about the bird in Lady Frances Verney’s Memoirs of the Verney Family during the Seventeenth Century. I looked. And it’s pretty certain that Sir Francis didn’t have the bird when he died in a Messina hospital in 1615. He was stone broke. But, sir, there’s no denying that the falcon did go to Sicily. It was there and it came into the possession of Victor Amadeus II some time after he became king in 1713, and it was one of his gifts to his wife when he married in Chambery after abdicating. That is a fact, sir. Carutti, the author of Storia del Regno di Vittorio Amadeo II, vouched for it.
“Maybe they — he and his wife — took it along with them to Turin when he tried to revoke his abdication. Anyhow, it turned up next in the possession of a Spaniard who had been with the army that took Naples in 1734, the father of Don Jose Monino y Redondo, Count of Floridablanca, who was Charles III’s chief minister. There’s nothing to show that it didn’t stay in the same family until the end of the Carlist War in 1840. Then it showed up in Paris at just about the time that Paris was full of Carlists who had had to get out of Spain. One of them must have brought it with him, but whoever he was, he didn’t know anything about its value. It had been painted or enameled over, the chances are during the Carlist trouble in Spain, to look like nothing more than a fairly interesting black statuette. And in that disguise, sir, it was kicked around Paris for seventy years, by private owners and dealers too stupid to see what it was under its skin.
“For seventy years, sir, this marvelous item was, as you might say, a football in the gutters of Paris, until in 1911, a Greek dealer named Charilaos Konstantinides found it in a curio shop. It didn’t take Charilaos long to discover what it was, and to acquire it. No thickness of enamel could conceal value from either his eyes or nose. Well, sir, Charilaos was the man who traced most of its history, who identified it as what it is. I got wind of it, and finally got most of the story out of him, though I have been able to add a few details since.
“Charilaos was in no hurry to convert it into money at once. He knew that, enormous as its intrinsic value was, a far higher, a terrific, price could be obtained for it once its authenticity was established beyond doubt. Possibly he planned to do business with one of the modern descendants of the old order. There are, or were at that time, severaclass="underline" the English Order of St. John of Jerusalem, the Prussian Johanniterorden, and the Italian and German Iangues of the Sovereign Order of Malta.”
The fat man raised his glass, smiled at its emptiness, and rose to fill it and Spade’s.
“You begin to believe me a little?” he asked as he worked the siphon.
“I haven’t said I didn’t.”
“No.” Gutman chuckled. “But how you looked.” He sat down, drank generously, and patted his mouth with a white handkerchief. “Well, sir, to keep it safe while pursuing his researches into its history, Charilaos had re-enameled the bird, apparently just as it is now. One year to the very day after he had acquired it — that was perhaps three months after he had admitted his find to me — I picked up the Times in London and read that his establishment had been burglarized and him murdered. I was in Paris the next day.” He shook his head sorrowfully. “The bird was gone. By Gad, sir, I was wild. I didn’t believe anybody else knew about it. I didn’t believe he had told anybody but me. A great quantity of stuff had been taken, which made me think that the thief had simply taken the falcon along with the rest of his plunder, not knowing what it was. Because I assure you that a thief who knew its value would not burden himself with anything else. No, sir, at least not anything less than crown jewels.”