Hammett (Crime Masterworks) (6 page)

Hell with that. He hadn’t even checked the mail he’d grabbed off the hall table on the first floor. He ought to be getting the check from Cap Shaw for those two stories . . .

Hammett felt the blood rush to his face. He was staring down, not at a check, but at a 9 X 12 manila envelope from
Black Mask
that could only contain his Continental Op stories. Rejected. He sat down on the wooden chair he used as a typing chair, and held the stories loosely in his lap.

Rejected!
The goddamn magazine hadn’t rejected anything of his in four years, not since . . .

Phrases jumped out at him from the cover letter:
not up to usual standard . . . Op says in ‘The Gutting of Couffignal’ that he’s a detective because he enjoys the work . . . not sure you enjoyed writing . . . stories . . . much as you looked forward to cashing check
. . .

He wanted to be sore. He wanted to boil with rage, tear up the letter, go off on a toot. But . . .

But goddammit, Cap was right. He was on his feet again, pacing again, still holding the manuscripts in his hand. Finally he dropped them aside, unnoticed. Hell, admit it, Hammett: You wrote them only because you were worried about the landlord. You used the Op as a meal ticket, and he deserved better.

He stopped dead in his tracks at the typing table. There was another envelope he hadn’t seen. From Alfred A. Knopf, the New York publisher who would be doing his first book in
February. Just telling him when he could expect the
Red Harvest
galley proofs? He picked it up and gutted it with a hooked forefinger that tremored slightly.

But it was from Harry Bloch. About
The Dain Curse
, which
Black Mask
would be running as four separate novelettes in a few months. Harry was . . . God, was enthusiastic!

Biggest problem Harry and Mrs Knopf saw was Gabrielle’s slight physical deformities, which surprised Hammett. Didn’t she need them to explain her mental kinks? Also, he wanted her to be slightly . . . what?
Distasteful
at first, so the reader could be
lured
into sympathy with her, a step at a time, almost against his will.

Also, Harry saw the story as overly episodic for novel form, but hell, Hammett knew
that
.

He was pacing again. Felix Weber and his damned Primrose Hotel, that was the trouble. Felix had to go. But who – or what – would replace him, fill his function in the story? Hey! Translate him into someone entirely new, maybe. An ex-con like Tokzek wasn’t essential to . . .

He stopped in the middle of the little room to burst out laughing. Not Egan Tokzek! Felix Weber. Why had the rapist shot dead by Preacher Laverty leaped to mind when he was thinking of the fictional Weber? Was Tokzek maybe an ex-con Hammett had helped send up? Why did that name have a tantalizing familiarity?

Rumrunner, according to This Reporter on the
Chronicle
. Suggest that Vic find out which bootlegger he’d been running rum for, lean on the ’legger a bit? But why, exactly? Tokzek had nothing to do with . . .

Hammett grimaced angrily. He didn’t want to dig out connections, form hypotheses, remember details about real felons like Egan Tokzek anymore. Only about fictional ones like Felix Weber.

And nothing Vic Atkinson or anyone else could do was going to change that.

‘T
his burg is full of rotgut whiskey,’ said Vic Atkinson.

The cabbie pulled up in front of darkened Pier Fourteen with a shrug. ‘Nobody makes you drink it.’

‘Why didn’t I think of that?’

Atkinson stood on rubbery legs beside the Yellow’s open window, muttering to himself as he handed over a single and waved away the change.

‘There any action around here, cabbie? Girls? Booze? A little game—’

‘This here’s a Yellow, mister, not a White Top.’

Atkinson peered blearily after the retreating taillight. A few feet away, below the edge of the heavy timber dock, dark water lapped around iron-bound pilings. He could smell clean salt air. Beyond the dark blot of Goat Island were the scattered pinpricks marking Point Richmond. It was well after midnight and such a still night he could hear the purl of water against the prow of a brightly lit late boat nosing into the Ferry Building slips from Oakland.

Pronzini. That was the word he’d picked up at the Chapeau Rouge on Powell and Francisco. Somewhere here at the foot of Mission Street was supposed to be a speakie run by Dom Pronzini, who had a lock on the illicit booze making its way down from British Columbia.

He crossed The Embarcadero to the cigar store next to the Hotel Commodore. His steps became exaggerated, his eyelids fractionally drooped, a button of his shirt had come open. His shoulder struck the door frame, so he had to grab the edge of the glass countertop to keep from falling on the floor.

‘Gimme some Van Camps.’

‘“A taste of its own,”’ quoted the clench-faced old man getting out the cigars.

‘Like my boots.’ He lit up, blew smoke across the counter, and leaned close. ‘’M in from Seattle, lookin’ for a little drinkie.’

‘’Gainst the law, mister.’

‘So’s spitting on the sidewalk.’

The old man gave a long-suffering sigh.

‘Next block over, Steuart Street. One thirteen. Back side of the d’Audiffred Building on the corner. Only building left standing on this side of East Street during—’

‘Pay phone,’ said Atkinson to stem the spate of words.

‘Down to the Army-Navy YMCA.’

Atkinson paused in the doorway. ‘Who sent me?’

‘It’s Maxie this week.’

The Army-Navy YMCA a short block away was a square gray granite building, eight stories high. Atkinson entered the ornate high-ceilinged lobby, his heavy workman boots slapping echoes from the terrazzo floor. A pimple-faced youth behind the registration desk pointed out the pay phone.

It rang a great many times before a girl’s sleep-tousled voice answered.

‘I want to talk with Dashiell Hammett,’ said Atkinson.

‘You’ – she broke it with a huge yawn – ‘you know . . . what time it . . .’

Atkinson put on his tough voice to growl around his cigar, ‘Hammett, sister. It’s important.’

Hammett’s voice was short and irritated.

‘Yeah?’

‘Dash!’ he exclaimed loudly. ‘How are you this bee-oo-tee-ful morning?’

‘Christ, I might have known. You bastard, I’m writing.’

‘And I’m walking the midnight streets, alone, drinking in cheap gin mills, alone, ogling pretty girls, alo—’

‘Goddammit, Vic, I’m writing!’

‘I’m at . . .’ He paused to read off the phone number in the dim light, wondering for the first time whether maybe he wasn’t a little bit drunk, after all. DAvenport seven-seven-eight-nine,
and . . .’ He got his mouth close to the receiver. ‘I’m in
danger
, Dash! Strange men . . .’

‘I hope they beat your goddamn head in!’

Atkinson rubbed his ringing ear thoughtfully, twitched his nose, wiggled his eyebrows, and checked his railroad watch. Going on one. He decided maybe it was a little thick, at that.

One thirteen Steuart Street was a bare white wooden door without any lettering on it, not even a knob. But when Atkinson pushed, it opened inward to a flight of wide stairs going straight back. He reached the second floor winded. Too damn many cheap cigars. A hallway took him back toward The Embarcadero; he checked each door for a peep-slot.

Two-thirds of the way along the hall he thumped a fist on a heavy hardwood panel that turned out to be sheet steel. After a moment the peep-slot slid open and an eye gleamed at him.

‘You’ll wake the baby.’

‘Maxie sent me over with the kid’s milk.’ Atkinson laid a five-dollar bill, folded longways, on the edge of the slot.

It disappeared. The door was opened by a man in a dark suit and shirt with a wide white tie. He was a head shorter than Atkinson, but fully as wide. He had dirty fingernails. He gestured.

‘Sorry, bo. House rules.’

‘You got a chill off?’ sneered Atkinson.

But he stood patiently for the frisk. It was for show, to impress high-rollers from uptown out for a night of slumming; it wouldn’t have turned up anything smaller than a cannon.

‘Through the door, bo,’ said the bouncer.

Atkinson stuffed the cigar back into his face and sauntered away. As his fingers touched the knob, the door opened with a short angry buzz. Interesting. If . . . Yeah. Three feet beyond it, a second door. Yep, hinges on the opposite side. Buzzed through. And beyond that the third, hinges again reversed.

No scrubbed-out stains, no scars in the wood. Again, just for show.

The third door admitted him to a blast of light and noise, and to a carbon copy of the man on the outside, except his chin was a little bluer and his fingernails a little cleaner. Or maybe it was just that the light was better.

‘Welcome to Dom’s Dump.’ His grin was as manufactured as his Brooklyn accent.

Atkinson jerked his thumb at the three-door arrangement. ‘I thought Big Al had a lock on those.’

‘Where’d you say you was from?’

‘I didn’t.’

Atkinson sauntered on. Dom’s Dump was a huge echoing high-ceilinged place with heavy plum curtains around all the walls to mask the windows and sop up the noise. The ornate hardwood bar ran the length of the right-hand wall; it had retained its old-fashioned brass rail, but the spittoons were gone. Too many ladies came to the speakies these days. The center of the room was open, the hardwood floor waxed but well-scuffed, ready for dancers. Tables were crowded around the dance floor, and the long wall across from the bar was lined with dark-varnished wooden booths with high backs.

Atkinson put his back to the bar. He hooked his elbows over it, and one heel over the brass rail. He puffed blue smoke. Few people here this time of night on a Tuesday. Thursday through Monday would be their big play. Suspended over the dance floor was a giant ball covered with hundreds of bits of mirror. It was motionless, but on busy nights it would revolve and the colored spots trained on it from the corners of the high ceiling would cast shifting patterns of light and color across the dancers.

‘What’ll it be, sir?’ Atkinson looked back over his shoulder at the barkeep.

‘Antiquary, if it wasn’t cooked up this morning.’

Midforties. Black curly hair shot with gray, a pasta figure under his white apron. Too old by fifteen years for Pronzini, and he didn’t have the Capone air they all cultivated these days. The eternal hired hand.

‘Here you are, sir.’

Atkinson dropped the shot in a lump, shook his head, wheezed, and wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his lumberjack.

‘If that’s twenty years old, it’s been dead for nineteen. Lemme talk to the Ghee with the brass nuts.’

‘Dom?’

‘I don’t mean Lindy, sweetheart.’

Atkinson sipped his second Scotch and started the slow cremation of another cigar. He figured he wouldn’t have to wait long for Pronzini.

‘So who’s asking?’ demanded a voice at his elbow.

Pronzini was a heavy, darkly handsome man with thick black hair, heavy black brows, and heavy sideburns to the bottoms of his ears. He wore a tight chalk-striped double-breasted suit tailored for a Pronzini twenty pounds younger.

Atkinson jerked a head at the front door.

‘Last time I saw one of those was in a cathouse on the south side of Cicero, out near the Hawthorne racetrack. Button-operated. You get your man between doors, then lock all three electrically. The man on this side pumps a few rounds into the door, maybe, chest-high.’

There was a sneer in Pronzini’s voice. ‘You John Law?’

‘Two weeks after the place opened up, the inside door looked like Swiss cheese. Between doors looked like a slaughterhouse. Hymie Weiss and his boys burned it to the ground for a thousand bucks from a committee of reform. Now Hymie Weiss is dead.’ He added tonelessly, ‘No, I ain’t John Law.’

Pronzini gave a meaningless grunt and jerked his head.

‘Let’s barber.’

They took the end booth, next to a split in the drapes behind which Atkinson assumed would be a rear exit. Three tables away a very young man with a shock of blond wavy hair was talking with a petite girl in a bright red satin cocktail dress. The young man looked drunk and intense, the girl sober and bored.

Pronzini snapped his fingers at the bartender. To Atkinson,
he said, ‘What’s your grift? The eastern mobs don’t send nobody around ever since a couple of their boys went home in the baggage car.’

Atkinson relit his stogie.

‘How about one man with money to spend, and willing to play by the house rules?’

‘He might find some action,’ Pronzini admitted.

The bartender appeared at the table. Pronzini looked at Atkinson.

‘It was supposed to be Antiquary.’

‘Yeah. Tony, bring my friend here some of the real stuff. The real stuff, you got that?’ The bartender went away. Atkinson flicked ash on the floor. The darkly handsome bootlegger leaned forward confidingly.

‘Wait till you taste this Scotch. Smooth as a baby’s butt.’

‘Word I pick up around the speakies is that you gotta juice the cops in this town if you want to make connections.’

Pronzini chuckled complacently. ‘I ain’t saying you’re wrong.’

‘Anyone special who—’

Tony set down Pronzini’s beer and Atkinson’s Scotch. Prewar, right enough, rich smoky taste with an edge of bitterness that woke up the throat and nose. Pronzini was watching with delighted eyes.

‘Didn’t I tell you?’

‘I wouldn’t mind a couple of bottles to take—’

The golden-haired youth was on his feet, shouting at the girl in the red dress. As he shouted, he jerked greenbacks from his wallet and threw them on the floor.

‘Go ahead, take it, take the money!’ he cried, tears running down his face. ‘That’s all you’re after, isn’t it? Isn’t it? That’s all you’re after.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ grumbled Pronzini. The bartender and the bouncer were already converging on the table. ‘Ya gotta let him in, his daddy’s on the Board of Supes, but I tell ya, he gives the place a bad name. Can’t hold his liquor and can’t hold his dames.’

The girl was down on both knees like a washerwoman, scrabbling after the money. The boy threw the empty wallet at her head. The bouncer grabbed his arm from behind. The boy spun gracefully, yelling, and threw a right-hand lead at the blued jaws. The bouncer kneed him in the crotch. He fell on the floor. The girl was on her feet, backing away, her face composed and sullen.