Дэшил Хэммет - The Collected Dashiell Hammett

Between moving arms and legs and bodies the cream of the Vauxhall showed. Men stood upon the automobile, using its height for vantage in the fight. Steve threw himself forward, swinging his stick against shin and thigh, toppling men from the machine. With his left hand he swept the girl around to his side. His body shook and rocked under the weight of blows from men who were packed too closely for any effectiveness except the smothering power of sheer weight.

His stick was suddenly gone from him. One instant he held and spun it; the next, he was holding up a clenched fist that was empty — the ebony had vanished as if in a puff of smoke. He swung the girl up over the car door, hammered her down into the car — jammed her down upon the legs of a man who stood there — heard a bone break, and saw the man go down. Hands gripped him everywhere; hands pounded him. He cried aloud with joy when he saw the girl, huddled on the floor of the car, working with ridiculously small hands at the car’s mechanism.

The machine began to move. Holding with his hands, he lashed both feet out behind. Got them back on the step. Struck over the girl’s head with a hand that had neither thought nor time to make a fist — struck stiff-fingered into a broad red face.

The car moved. One of the girl’s hands came up to grasp the wheel, holding the car straight along a street she could not see. A man fell on her. Steve pulled him off — tore pieces from him — tore hair and flesh. The car swerved, scraped a building; scraped one side clear of men. The hands that held Steve fell away from him, taking most of his clothing with them. He picked a man off the back of the seat, and pushed him down into the street that was flowing past them. Then he fell into the car beside the girl.

Pistols exploded behind them. From a house a little ahead a bitter-voiced rifle emptied itself at them, sieving a mudguard. Then the desert — white and smooth as a gigantic hospital bed — was around them. Whatever pursuit there had been was left far behind.

Presently the girl slowed down, stopped.

“Are you all right?” Steve asked.

“Yes; but you’re—”

“All in one piece,” he assured her. “Let me take the wheel.”

“No! No!” she protested. “You’re bleeding. You’re—”

“No! No!” he mocked her. “We’d better keep going until we hit something. We’re not far enough from Izzard yet to call ourselves safe.”

He was afraid that if she tried to patch him up he would fall apart in her hands. He felt like that.

She started the car, and they went on. A great sleepiness came to him. What a fight! What a fight!

“Look at the sky!” she exclaimed.

He opened his heavy eyes. Ahead of them, above them, the sky was lightening — from blue-black to violet, to mauve, to rose. He turned his head and looked back. Where they had left Izzard, a monstrous bonfire was burning, painting the sky with jeweled radiance.

“Goodbye, Izzard,” he said drowsily, and settled himself more comfortably in the seat.

He looked again at the glowing pink in the sky ahead.

“My mother has primroses in her garden in Delaware that look like that sometimes,” he said dreamily. “You’ll like ’em.”

His head slid over against her shoulder, and he went to sleep.

Experience, February 1925

Although convicted of Boardman Bowlby Bunce’s murder, I did kill him. I forget why; I dare say there was something about the man I disliked. That is not important; but I feel that the attentiveness with which the public has read the interviews I did not give and looked at photographs of photographers’ personal friends entitles that public to know why, here in the death cell, I have made a new will, giving my fortune to the fiction department of the Public Library. (Before starting that, however, I wish to state that while I do not object to having been born in any of the other houses pictured in various newspapers, I must, in justice to my parents, repudiate the ice-house shown in Wednesdays Examiner.)

To get on with my story: when I determined, for doubtless sufficient if not clearly remembered reasons, to kill Boardman Bowlby Bunce, I planned the murder with the most careful attention to every detail. A life-long reader of literature dealing with the gaudier illegalities, I flattered myself that I of all men was equipped to commit the perfect crime.

I went to his office in the middle of the afternoon, when I knew his employees would be all present. In the outer office I attracted their attention to my presence and to the exact time by arguing heatedly that the clock there was a minute fast. Then I went into Bunce’s private office. He was alone. Out of m\ pockets I took the hammer and nails I had bought the day before from a hardware dealer who knew me, and, paving no attention to the astonished Bunce, nailed every window and door securely shut.

That done, I spit out the lozenge with which I had prepared my voice, and yelled loudly at him: “I hate you! You should be killed! I shall injure you!”

The surprise on his face became even more complete.

“Sit still,” I ordered in a low voice, taking a revolver from my pocket — a silver-mounted revolver with my initials engraved in it in four places.

Walking around behind him, carefully keeping the weapon too far away to leave the powder-marks that might make the wound seem self-inflicted, I shot him in the back of the head. While the door was being broken in I busied myself with the ink-pad on his desk, putting the prints of my fingers neatly and clearly on the butt of the revolver, the handle of the hammer, Bunce’s white collar, and some convenient sheets of paper; and hurriedly stuffed the dead man’s fountain pen, watch and handkerchief into my pockets just as the door burst open.

After a while a detective came. I refused to answer his questions. Searching me, he found Bunce’s fountain pen, watch and handkerchief. He examined the room — doors and windows nailed on the inside with my hammer, my monogrammed revolver beside the dead man, my finger-prints everywhere. He questioned Bunce’s employees. They told of my entrance, my passing into the office where Bunce was alone, the sound of hammering, my voice shouting threats, and the shot.

And then — then the detective arrested me!

It came out later that this would-be sleuth whose salary the property holders were paying had never read a detective story in his life, and so had not even suspected that the evidence had been too solidly against me for me to be anything but innocent.

Sunset Magazine, March 1925; (aka: The Hairy One, 1947)

Say it happened on one of the Tawi Tawis. That would make Jeffol a Moro. It doesn’t really matter what he was. If lie had been a Maya or a Ghurka he would have laid Levison’s arm open with a machete or a kukri instead of a kris, but that would have made no difference in the end. Dinihari’s race matters as little. She was woman, complaisant woman, of the sort whose no always becomes yes between throat and teeth. You can find her in Nome, in Cape Town, and in Durham, and in skin of any shade; but, since the Tawi Tawis are the lower end of the Sulu Archipelago, she was brown this time.

She was a sleek brown woman with the knack of twisting a sarong around her hips so that it became a part of her — a trick a woman has with a potato sack or hasn’t with Japanese brocade. She was small and trimly fleshed, with proper pride in her flesh. She wasn’t exactly beautiful, but if you were alone with her you kept looking at her, and you wished she didn’t belong to a man you were afraid of. That was when she was Levison’s.

She was Jeffol’s first. I don’t know where he got her. Her dialect wasn’t that of the village, but you couldn’t tell from that. There are any number of dialects down there — jumbles of Malay, Tagalog, Portuguese, and what not. Her sarong was a gold-threaded kain sungkit, so no doubt he brought her over from Borneo. He was likely to return from a fishing trip with anything — except fish.