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.
Gutman’s attempt to smile was not successful, but he kept the resultant grimace on his mottled face. He licked his dry lips with a dry tongue. His voice was too hoarse and gritty for the paternally admonishing tone it tried to achieve.
“Now, come, Wilmer,” he said, “we can’t have any of that. You shouldn’t let yourself attach so much importance to these things. You—”
The boy, not taking his eyes from Spade, spoke in a choked voice out the side of his mouth: “Make him lay off me, then. I’m going to plug him if he keeps it up, and there won’t be anything that will stop me from doing it.”
“Now, Wilmer,” Gutman said, and turned to Spade. His face and voice were under control. “Your plan is, sir, as I said in the first place, not at all practical. Let’s not say anything more about it.”
Spade looked from one of them to the other. He had stopped smiling. His face held no expression at all.
“I say what I please,” he told them.
“You certainly do,” Gutman said quickly, “and that’s one of the things I’ve always admired in you. But this matter is, as I say, not at all practical, so there’s not the least bit of use of our discussing it any further, as you can see for yourself.”
“I can’t see it for myself,” Spade argued, “and you haven’t made me see it.” He frowned at Gutman. “Let’s get this straight. Am I wasting time talking to you? I thought this was your show. Should I do my talking to the punk? I know how to do that.”
“No, sir,” Gutman replied, “you’re quite right in dealing with me.”
Spade said: “All right. Now I’ve got another suggestion. It’s not as good as the first one, but it’s better than nothing. Want to hear it?”
“Most assuredly.”
“Give them Cairo.”
Cairo hastily picked his pistol up from the table beside him. He held it tight in his lap with both hands. Its muzzle pointed at the floor a little to one side of the sofa. His face had become yellowish again. His black eyes darted their gaze from face to face. The opaqueness of his eyes made them seem flat, two-dimensional.
Gutman looked as if he did not believe he could have heard what he had heard. He asked: “Do what?”
“Give the police Cairo.”
Gutman seemed about to laugh, but he did not laugh. Finally he exclaimed: “Well, by God, sir!” in an uncertain voice.
“It’s not as good as giving them the punk,” Spade said. “Cairo’s not a gunman, and he carries a .38, while Jacobi and Thursby were cut down by larger bullets. That means we’ll have to go to some trouble framing him, but that’s better than giving the police nobody.”
Cairo cried in a voice shrill with indignation: “Suppose we give them you, Mr. Spade, or Miss O’Shaughnessy? How about that if you’re so set on giving them somebody?”
Spade smiled at the Levantine and answered him calmly:
“You people want the falcon. I’ve got it. I’m asking for a fall-guy as part of my price. As for Miss O’Shaughnessy” — his dispassionate glance moved to her white perplexed face for a moment and then back to Cairo, and his shoulders rose and fell a fraction of an inch — “if you think she can be rigged for the part I’m perfectly willing to talk it over with you.”
The girl put her hands to her throat, uttered a short, strangled cry, and edged away from him.
Cairo, his face and body twitching with excitement, exclaimed:
“You seem to forget that you are not in a position to insist on any price.”
Spade laughed, a harsh, derisive snort.
Gutman said, in a voice that tried to make firmness ingratiating: “Come, now, gentlemen, let’s keep our discussion on a friendly basis; but there certainly is” — he was addressing Spade — “something in what Mr. Cairo says. You must take into consideration the—”
“Like hell I must.” Spade flung his words out with a brutal sort of carelessness that gave them more weight than they could have got from dramatic emphasis or from loudness. “If you kill me, how are you going to get the bird? If I know you can’t afford to kill me till you have it, how are you going to scare me into giving it to you?”
Gutman cocked his head to the left and considered these questions. His eyes twinkled between puckered lids. Presently he gave his genial answer: “Well, sir, there are other means of persuasion besides killing or threatening to kill.”
“Sure,” Spade agreed, “but they’re not much good unless the threat of death is behind them to hold the victim down. See what I mean? If you try anything I don’t like, I won’t stand for it. I’ll make it a matter of your having to call it off or kill me, knowing you can’t afford to kill me.”
“I see what you mean.” Gutman chuckled. “That is an attitude, sir, that calls for the most delicate judgment on both sides, because, as you know, sir, men are likely to forget in the heat of action just what they can and can’t afford and let their emotions carry them away.”
Spade was all smiling blandness.
“That’s the trick, from my side,” he said, “to make my play strong enough that it ties you up, but not strong enough to make you mad enough to bump me off against your better judgment.”
Gutman said fondly: “By Gad, sir, you’re a character.”
Joel Cairo jumped up from his chair and went around behind the boy and behind Gutman’s chair. He bent over the back of Gutman’s chair and, screening his mouth and the fat man’s ear with his empty hand, whispered.
Gutman listened attentively, shutting his eyes.
Spade grinned at Brigid O’Shaughnessy. Her lips smiled feebly in response. There was no change in her eyes: they did not lose their numb, fearful stare.
Spade turned to the boy. “Two to one they’re selling you out, son.”
The boy did not say anything. A trembling in his knees began to shake the knees of his trousers.
Spade addressed Gutman: “I hope you’re not letting yourself be influenced by the guns these pocket-edition desperadoes are waving.”
Gutman opened his eyes. Cairo stopped whispering and stood erect behind the fat man’s chair.
Spade continued: “I’ve practiced taking them away from both of them, so there’ll be no trouble there. The punk is—”
In a voice choked horribly with emotion, the boy cried, “All right!” and jerked his pistol up in front of his chest.
Gutman flung a fat hand out at the boy’s wrist, caught the wrist, and bore it and the gun down while Gutman’s fat body was rising in haste from the rocking chair. Joel Cairo scurried around to the boy’s other side and grasped his other arm. They wrestled with the boy, forcing his arms down, holding them down, while his small wiry body writhed futilely against them.
Words came out of the squirming group: fragments of the boy’s incoherent speech — “right... go... — ...smoke” — Gutman’s, “Now, now, Wilmer!” repeated many times; Cairo’s, “No, please, don’t,” and “Don’t do that, Wilmer.”
Wooden-faced and dreamy-eyed, Spade got up from the sofa and went over to the group. The boy, unable to cope with the weight against him, had stopped struggling. Cairo stood partly in front of him, talking to him soothingly, still holding one of his arms.
Spade pushed Cairo aside, gently, and drove his left fist against the boy’s chin. The boy’s head snapped back as far as it could while his arms were held, and then sank forward. Gutman began a desperate, “Hey! Y—” Spade drove his right fist against the boy’s chin.
The boy collapsed against Gutman’s great round belly as Cairo dropped his other arm. Cairo sprang at Spade, clawing at his face with the curved stiff fingers of both hands.