Joe Gores: Hammett

‘Yeah. Goddammit.’ Atkinson slammed a suddenly angry fist on the arm of his chair, hard enough so an inch of grey ash rolled down the front of his shirt. ‘They came down on Molly at just the wrong goddamn time. If I could have kept working on her-’

‘You mean you can’t anymore?’

‘Don’t you ever read them newspapers you carry around? Neither Molly nor the maid showed up for their arraignment.’ He brightened. ‘Maybe I can work a deal with Epstein, her attorney, to get at Molly. She talks to me instead of the DA-’

‘If Molly was your client, would you turn her up? With the Mulligans owning half the cops in town as a private police force?’

‘I’d furnish her protection,’ said Atkinson airily.

‘Sure you would.’

The big man was on his feet. ‘Anyway, my people will be in from LA the first of the week. I ain’t much of a detective if I can’t turn up Molly before then. I told the reform committee I was going back down south today, but I think I’ll stick around for a day and try to dig her out. Maybe make a round of the speaks tonight, see what I can get on which cops are being paid off. Want a pub-crawl?’

‘I said to count me out, Vic.’

Hammett brushed Vic’s cigar ash off the frayed tasseling of the venerable Coxwell he had inherited with the apartment, and sat down. He had a whole night at the typewriter ahead of him. He stood up again, went to stare out between dingy lace curtains at the stucco fascia across Post Street.

Dammit, Vic was going at it all wrong. Advertising his presence by going around to the speaks when he should be waiting until he had taps on the Mulligan Bros phones, and on the bookie joints, speaks and taxi houses with the solidest protection. Because the better the protection, the closer to the pipeline through which money moved up and favors moved down…

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.

‘This 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…’