Роберт Беллем - Pulp Frictions

‘I’m the manager here,’ he said, standing so close that I could smell the piney stuff he used on his crisp dark hair. ‘You got anything to ask about the members of the staff, you ask me.’

‘Will I get an answer?’

‘Try me, bud.’

‘The name is Archer,’ I said. ‘I’m a private detective.’

‘Working for who?’

‘You wouldn’t be interested.’

‘I am, though, very much interested.’ The gun hopped forward like a toad into my stomach again, with the weight of his shoulder behind it. ‘Working for who did you say?’

I swallowed anger and nausea, estimating my chances of knocking the gun to one side and taking him bare-handed. The chances seemed pretty slim. He was heavier than I was, and he held the automatic as if it had grown out of the end of his arm. You’ve seen too many movies, I told myself. I told him: ‘A motel owner on the coast. A man was shot in one of his rooms last night. I happened to check in there a few minutes later. The old boy hired me to look into the shooting.’

‘Who was it got himself ventilated?’

‘He could be your brother,’ I said. ‘Do you have a brother?’

He lost his colour. The centre of his attention shifted from the gun to my face. The gun nodded. I knocked it up and sideways with a hard left uppercut. Its discharge burned the side of my face and drilled a hole in the wall. My right sank into his neck. The gun thumped the cork floor.

He went down but not out, his spread hand scrabbling for the gun, then closing on it. I stamped his wrist. He grunted but wouldn’t let go of it. I threw a rabbit punch at the short hairs on the back of his neck. He took it and came up under it with the gun, shaking his head from side to side like a bull.

‘Up with the hands now,’ he murmured. He was one of those men whose voices went soft and mild when they were in killing mood. He had the glassy impervious eyes of a killer. ‘Is Bart dead?’

‘Very dead. He was shot in the belly.’

‘Who shot him?’

‘That’s the question.’

‘Who shot him?’ he said in a quiet white-faced rage. The single eye of the gun stared emptily at my midriff. ‘It could happen to you, bud, here and now.’

‘A woman was with him. She took a quick powder after it happened.’

‘I heard you say a name to Alfie piano-player. Was it Fern?’

‘It could have been.’

‘What do you mean, it could have been?’

‘She was there in the room apparently. If you can give me a description of her?’

His hard brown eyes looked past me. ‘I can do better than that. There’s a picture of her on the wall behind you. Take a look at it. Keep those hands up high.’

I shifted my feet and turned uneasily. The wall was blank. I heard him draw a breath and move, and I tried to evade his blow. No use. It caught the back of my head. I pitched forward against the blank wall and slid down it into three dimensions of blankness.

The blankness coagulated into coloured shapes. The shapes were half human and half beast and they dissolved and reformed, dancing through the eaves of my mind to dream a mixture of both jive and nightmare music. A dead man with a furred breast climbed out of a hole and doubled and quadrupled. I ran away from them through a twisting tunnel which led to an echo chamber. Under the roaring surge of the nightmare music, a rasping tenor was saying:

‘I figure it like this. Vario’s tip was good. Bart found her in Acapulco, and he was bringing her back from there. She conned him into stopping off at this motel for the night. Bart always went for her.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ a dry old voice put in. ‘This is very interesting news about Bart and Fern. You should have told me before this. Then I would not have sent him for her and this would not have happened. Would it, Gino?’

My mind was still partly absent, wandering underground in the echoing caves. I couldn’t recall the voices, or who they were talking about. I had barely sense enough to keep my eyes closed and go on listening. I was lying on my back on a hard surface. The voices were above me.

The tenor said: ‘You can’t blame Bartolomeo. She’s the one, the dirty treacherous lying little bitch.’

‘Calm yourself, Gino. I blame nobody. But more than ever now, we want her back, isn’t that right?’

‘I’ll kill her,’ he said softly, almost wistfully.

‘Perhaps. It may not be necessary now. I dislike promiscuous killing—’

‘Since when, Angel?’

‘Don’t interrupt, it’s not polite. I learned to put first things first. Now what is the most important thing? Why did we want her back in the first place? I will tell you: to shut her mouth. The government heard she left me, they wanted her to testify about my income. We wanted to find her first and shut her mouth, isn’t that right?’

‘I know how to shut her mouth,’ the younger man said very quietly.

‘First we try a better way, my way. You learn when you’re as old as I am there is a use for everything, and not to be wasteful. Not even wasteful with somebody else’s blood. She shot your brother, right? So now we have something on her, strong enough to keep her mouth shut for good. She’d get off with second degree, with what she’s got, but even that is five to ten in Tehachapi. I think all I need to do is tell her that. First we have to find her, eh?’

‘I’ll find her. Bart didn’t have any trouble finding her.’

‘With Vario’s tip to help him, no. But I think I’ll keep you here with me, Gino. You’re too hot-blooded, you and your brother both. I want her alive. Then I can talk to her, and then we’ll see.’

‘You’re going soft in your old age, Angel.’

‘Am I?’ There was a light slapping sound, of a blow on flesh. ‘I have killed many men, for good reasons. So I think you will take that back.’

‘I take it back.’

‘And call me Mr Funk. If I am so old, you will treat my grey hairs with respect. Call me Mr Funk.’

‘Mr Funk.’

‘All right, your friend here, does he know where Fern is?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Mr Funk.’

‘Mr Funk.’ Gino’s voice was a whining snarl.

‘I think he is coming to. His eyelids fluttered.’

The toe of a shoe prodded my side. Somebody slapped my face a number of times. I opened my eyes and sat up. The back of my head was throbbing like an engine fuelled by pain. Gino rose from a squatting position and stood over me.

‘Stand up.’

I rose shakily to my feet. I was in a stone-walled room with a high beamed ceiling, sparsely furnished with stiff old black oak chairs and tables. The room and the furniture seemed to have been built for a race of giants.

The man behind Gino was small and old and weary. He might have been an unsuccessful grocer or a superannuated barkeep who had come to California for his health. Clearly his health was poor. Even in the stifling heat he looked pale and chilly, as if he had caught chronic death from one of his victims. He moved closer to me, his legs shuffling feebly in wrinkled blue trousers that bagged at the knees. His shrunken torso was swathed in a heavy blue turtleneck sweater. He had two days’ beard on his chin, like moth-eaten grey plush.

‘Gino informs me that you are investigating a shooting.’ His accent was Middle-European and very faint, as if he had forgotten his origins. ‘Where did this happen, exactly?’

‘I don’t think I’ll tell you that. You can read it in the papers tomorrow night if you are interested.’

‘I am not prepared to wait. I am impatient. Do you know where Fern is?’

‘I wouldn’t be here if I did.’

‘But you know where she was last night.’

‘I couldn’t be sure.’

‘Tell me anyway to the best of your knowledge.’