Дэшил Хэммет - The Collected Dashiell Hammett

Within the next two months he held up a small jewelry store and the office of a laundry company. He was sure of himself in his new role now, and he enlivened both banditries with copious quotations from the books he had read, and even extemporized a trifle. In the laundry office he was fortunate enough to encounter two girls who were addicted to the same sort of literature, and their appreciation of his manner was gratifying. And even more gratifying was the warmth with which the press accepted the girls’ stories, polishing them, gilding them, and setting them out at great length for the world to see. Itchy had column after column of type devoted to him now — even editorials.

The lobby of A theater just before the box office closed one night was the scene of the dress suit’s baptism. The top hat he had, of course, finally left at home; there was no use overdoing the thing. His grammar had improved by now until the double negative was rare, though tenses still puzzled him, and his accents were worth all the imitative labors they had cost him.

His light overcoat drooping to each side, exposing the full chiaroscuro of his immaculate costuming, he smiled at the girl behind the grille and wrought beautifully with what he knew of the graces of speech. And the girl, once she had become relatively accustomed to the sight of the pistol in his hand, enjoyed the robbery perhaps as much as he.

Nevertheless she gave the alarm as soon as he left.

It happened there were only two other men in dress clothes on the streets of San Francisco that night, and one of them was very old and the other was very tall. And thus, though the police went astray once at the corner of Powell and Geary Streets, and again, momentarily, at Mason and Sutter, they still arrived at Itchy’s quarters — he had an apartment now, on California Street — only a few minutes behind him.

There was a broken door, a bullet that went wild, a blow or two, and Itchy was taken.

In a barely furnished room in the Hall of Justice Itchy sat ringed by detectives.

“So, my pretty boy,” one of them grinned down at the slightly rumpled black and white of the prisoner’s clothes, “we got you.”

Itchy’s glance ran coolly along the circling line of faces until it rested upon the speakers, and there was utter nonchalance in the crossing of Itchy’s legs.

“I’m tired of you,” he said. “You weary me. You bore me. You exasperate me. You... you’re a big slob!”

Brief Stories, February 1924

He shouldn’t (he thought) have come. These four hours, if so applied, would have disposed all the incidentals to his departure tomorrow, sending him away with no loose ends to be taken care of later. But her voice had come over the wire so alluringly; and no doubt she really had missed him, not seeing him for two weeks. And to have excused himself tonight would have been to prolong that fortnight to nearly two months, since his trip would cover six weeks at the least. Perhaps he could leave an hour early, get away at eleven-thirty or forty-five without seeming anxious to go.

“You know I did, dear. If you had waited another ten minutes, or fifteen at the outside, I’d have been calling you up.”

He had almost called her “honey”: an endearment for which she professed aversion, finding it reminiscent, possibly, of some former lover who had been disappointing. Southerners, he believed, were addicted to the word; and she came from somewhere in the Carolinas.

“Not a thing except work.”

She didn’t look so well tonight. Her gown was less than becoming; and her hair, dressed in this new manner, was also at fault, accentuating the slenderness of her throat: a slenderness that was on the point of aging into scrawniness. She must be getting along in years. Even in this light, diluted and tinted to friendliness, she failed to appear quite young. Her figure, too, was less youthfully slim now than merely thin. Her eyes were good, though, and they saved her: she would never be unattractive while they held their beauty. If only she wouldn’t maneuver them with so little subtlety, with so obvious a consciousness: pulling them around like fat blue puppets beneath the heavy dark fringe of her lashes: lashes edging lids that slid down and up on occasion with all the smooth precision of well-handled drop-curtains.

“Sit still, baby, ill get them.”

If he didn’t light his cigarette, she would, and pass it to him limp and hot from the excessive draught she had applied, its end sodden with saliva, and he would have to smoke it with a pretense of extra enjoyment. Of course, that would happen once or twice before the evening was over; but by exercising a reasonable amount of alertness, and keeping the cigarettes near him, he could prevent its too frequent occurrence.

“I did. You know, or you should, without my telling you.”

It was peculiar, how he was invariably disappointed in her. It wasn’t, either, that he had any illusions. He would leave tonight — as he had left the last time and the several times before that — to hardly think of her again until he had an evening whose emptiness promised to be irksome, or until he heard from her. Such vagrant thoughts as came to him meanwhile would not draw him toward her. Yet, between the time when his engagements were made and the time for their keeping, he was somehow filled with inflated notions of her charm and appeal — an anticipation of vague ecstacies. Not consciously; but that he always experienced this disappointment testified to the existence of some such process of delusion.

“Yes, much nicer.”

It was nicer. The light at their feet, a mellow glow, tilted upward the shadows on her face, softened the texture of her skin, lent her an appearance of girlishness — almost. She was, for that matter, girlish, in a way. Arrested development you could call it if you liked, but it went well with her smallness; and, now that the only illumination came slanting up from the gas log, you could believe in her youngness, or very nearly.

“Utterly.”

He would be utterly comfortable if only she wouldn’t fidget so much, tickling his face with her hair; and if she wouldn’t call him “dearest” or that ridiculous “most beloved boy.” Superlatives were weak, almost cheap. Furthermore, superlatives carried with them the postulant that there were others in the speaker’s mind. To call him dearest was to think of one who was dear and another who was dearer; though it was unlikely that it worked out that way — that she had anyone else in her mind at the time. But the inference, the suggestion, was there. Not that he cared, really, how many others there might he; but it was nevertheless faulty technic. The pleasurableness of these evenings depended upon the maintenance of certain illusions whose very high artificiality made them delicate and all the more vulnerable to the least discordance.

“I wasn’t thinking at all. I don’t when I am with you. There’s nothing to think about. It’s all here. This afternoon there may have been a world — I’m not quite sure. Tomorrow there may be another, or even a continuation of the same one; with business and things in it, and scheming and conniving to he done. But now there’s nothing anywhere but you and me, and the aim of existence is to sit still, like this, close to you, doing nothing, neither remembering nor imagining — just sitting still with you.”

More than a hit silly, but it would at least keep her from jumping up and turning on that damned talking machine for a while. She needn’t, however, have received it with so much rapture. The Lord knew he had made the same speech, or one of its variants, often enough before. She would know by now that it didn’t have any particular meaning, that it was just one of the things you say. She did know it, of course, but she should also know that he was aware of her knowledge. Her antics threw a spotlight on the speech, gave it a prominence that was never meant for it and that made it seem sillier than ever. And why did women always want to know what you were thinking about? And if, as was probable, they didn’t, why did they ask? The sort of answers they got would become monotonous after a while.