Дэшил Хэммет - The Collected Dashiell Hammett

She smiled at me as if I were handing her Romeo and Juliet. “You’re a darling, Bugsy! How soon do you think my mouth will be all right?”

“It’ll never be all right till you stop that Bugsy stuff. Look at me. Did you really try to kill yourself, or was it just another act?”

She hung her head. “I... I... now don’t get mad — I don’t really know, Bugsy — Bugs, I mean. I thought I meant it, but I guess I did kind of spit it out. Maybe — at first I meant it, all right, but maybe after I started I thought it might he just as good if I didn’t actually — you know — die, if I–Listen, B-Bugs, now you tell me something. When you played that dirts trick — it was an awful dirty trick — on me, wasn’t it a little because you thought I liked Freddy and you liked me and you thought you could—”

“Don’t be a dope,” I said. “You were only a very small cog in the wheel. I was up to something that had nothing to do with you, then you got into this mess and I — God knows why — thought I ought to do something about it. I’m willing to give you a boost up, but get this straight: I’m not tangled up with you now, I’ve never been, and I’m never going to be.”

“You don’t have to be so nasty about it,” she said.

“I’m not being nasty, I’m being definite.”

“Will... will you kiss me?”

“What for? Sure, if you want.”

“Oh,” she said, “then that’ll be all right.”

“This Little Pig” is one of two stories for which I Hammett’s original typescript survives. When I examined the typescript to restore the story to its original form, I was delighted to discover that Hammett had written two different endings. His original ending is the one you just read. This one, marked “revised,” is the one used by Collier’s when it printed “This Little Pig” in 1934.

I had been in Santa Barbara eight clays when Ann telephoned me. She said, “Oh. Bugs, you’ve got to come down. Kitty Doran is dying in St. Martin’s Hospital.”

“What?”

“She committed suicide. Hurry, Bugs.”

I had a car that could do plenty and a chauffeur who could get plenty out of it, but that ride to Los Angeles seemed the longest I had ever made.

Kitty wasn’t dying. Her month was burned and her face was white and thin, but she raised her head a little and smiled painfully at me when I came into the hospital room.

“What the hell is this?” I asked. “Never mind. Don’t try to talk.”

“I can talk,” she said. “Bugs, they took all my stuff out of the picture and when I asked Freddy about it he was awfully nasty to me and he said Ann Meadows told him you meant them to.”

“Forget it. We’ll fix you up.”

“But did you?”

“I’m sorry. I’ll do my best to square it. Get well and I’ll see that you have another chance. I can make Max—”

“Will you? You’re a darling, Bugsy! I’ll—”

Ann came in.

Kitty sat up straight in bed and cried, “Make her go away. I told them not to let her in.”

Ann said, “I only came in to thank you.”

“Make her go away,” Kitty screamed. “Make her go away!”

I said “All right” and took Ann out into the corridor. “Now what?” I asked.

She leaned against the wall and laughed. “But I ought to thank her,” she said through her laughter. “I might’ve gone on and on being so silly.”

“This makes a lot of sense to me,” I growled.

“Don’t you see? When I phoned you — when I thought she had really tried to kill herself — it was you I was worried about — about your having it on your conscience that your trick had driven her to it, and I knew then that—”

“Didn’t she really try?”

“No. The doctor said she could’ve taken gallons of the stuff she took, and they found out she’d done the same thing twice before and knew it wouldn’t kill her. But I didn’t know that then and I found out it was you I— Honest, Bugs, I knew it even before Fred put the finishing touch to it.”

“What’s he up to?”

She laughed. “Not up — down. If he kept on in the same direction and at the same speed he’s in Panama by now. He lit out for Mexico as soon as he heard what she’d done.”

“And you’re sure you’re not just—”

She held her face up to me. “Aw, Bugs, don’t be as stupid as I was.”

I had my arms around her when the first slipper whizzed past our heads. The second one grazed my shoulder as we escaped around the nearest corner, leaving Kitty standing in her doorway screaming un-nice things about us.

“See how sick she is,” Ann said, “just like Tarzan, but just the same don’t let’s ever think up any more smart schemes.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “This one got out of hand for a while, but the result seems to be O. K.”

Province in Southern China bordering Myanmar (Burma), Laos, and Vietnam.

Ancient name for the people of Myanmar.