Joe Gores: Hammett

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.’