Роберт Беллем - Pulp Frictions

But I didn’t have to. He knew it. I was holding the chips. I could find the money now. With his single quarter, Jagger had no chance.

This time the silence really spun out. A half-hour, an hour, forever. Eternity squared. My body was going numb with stiffness. Outside, the wind was tuning up, making it impossible to hear anything but rattling snow against the walls. It was very cold. My feet had left me long ago. Now my legs were beginning to feel like blocks of wood.

Then, around one-thirty, a ghostly stirring sound like crawling rats in the darkness. I stopped breathing. Somehow Jagger had got in. He was right in the middle of the room—

Then I got it. Rigor mortis , hurried by the cold, was rearranging Sarge for the last time. I relaxed a little.

That was when the door rammed open and Jagger charged through, ghostly and visible in a mantle of white snow, tall and loose and gangling. I let him have it and the bullet punched a hole through the side of his head. And in the brief gunflash, I saw that what I had holed was a scarecrow with no face, dressed in some farmer’s thrown-out pants and shirt. The burlap head fell off the broomstick neck as it hit the floor. Then Jagger was shooting at me.

He was holding a semi-automatic pistol, and the innards of the bathtub were like a great percussive hollow cymbal. Porcelain flew up, bounced off the wall, struck my face. Wood splinters rained on me.

Then he was charging, never letting up. He was going to shoot me in the tub like a fish in a barrel. I couldn’t even put my head up.

It was Sarge who saved me. Jagger stumbled over one big, dead foot, staggered, and pumped bullets into the floor instead of over my head. Then I was on my knees. I pretended I was Vida Blue. I pegged Barney’s big .45 at his head.

The gun hit him but didn’t stop him. I stumbled over the rim of the tub getting out to tackle him, and Jagger put two groggy shots to the left.

The faint silhouette that was Jagger stepped back, trying to get a bead, one hand holding his ear where the gun had hit him. He shot me through the wrist. The second bullet ripped a groove in my neck. Then, incredibly, he stumbled over Sarge’s feet again and fell backwards. He brought the gun up again and put one through the roof. It was his last chance. I kicked the gun out of his hand, hearing the wet wood sound of breaking bones. I kicked him in the groin, doubling him up. I kicked him again, this time in the back of the head, and his feet rattled a fast, unconscious tattoo on the floor. He was dead then, but I kicked him again and again, kicked him until there was nothing but pulp and strawberry jam, nothing no one could ever identify, not by teeth, not by anything. I kicked him until I couldn’t swing my leg any more, and my toes wouldn’t move.

I suddenly realised I was screaming and there was no one to hear me but dead men.

I wiped my mouth and knelt over Jagger’s body.

My heap was just where I had left it, around the block from Keenan’s house, but now it was just a ghostly hump of snow. I had left Sarge’s VW about a mile back. I hoped my heater was still working. I was numb all over.

I got the door open and winced a little as I sat down inside. The crease in my neck had already clotted over, but my wrist hurt like hell.

The starter worked for a long time, and the motor finally cranked over. The heater was working, and the one wiper cleared away the snow on the driver’s side. Jagger had been lying about his quarter, of course; it wasn’t on him, nor was it in the unobtrusive Studebaker Lark he had come in. But I had his wallet. And his address. If I needed it — and somehow I didn’t think I would. Sarge’s quarter was the one with the X.

I pulled out carefully. I was going to be careful for a long time. The Sarge had been right about one thing. Barney had been a dumb slob. The fact that he had also been my friend didn’t matter any more. The debt had been paid.

I had a lot to be careful for.

The phenomenal success of Quentin Tarantino’s movie, Pulp Fiction, released in 1994, has generated a whole new wave of interest in hardboiled fiction. The film, set among Los Angeles low-life, features the violent misadventures of two hitmen (John Travolta and Sam Jackson) in a trio of episodes which could easily have been taken from the pages of a pulp magazine. Tarantino, who wrote the script of the picture, introduces elements of violence, robbery, drugs, corruption and gun play into the plot which won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. It made the young director a cult hero and confirmed that his earlier movie, Reservoir Dogs (1992), a gangster thriller about the aftermath of an ill-fated bank raid, had been no flash in the pan. What Tarantino did in both movies was to take a number of the cliché plot lines that had become familiar in the hardboiled pulps and breathe new life into them. Together, the pictures have encouraged a whole new generation to discover the works of many of the writers represented in the pages of this book — just as their director, himself a long-time fan of noir fiction, had hoped they would.

Quentin Tarantino (1963-) was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, and named after the character Quint Asper, played by Burt Reynolds, in the popular Sixties TV show Gunsmoke. Moving to Los Angeles with his mother in 1965, he was apparently unhappy at school but became fascinated with crime and horror movies and decided he wanted to be an actor and writer. While still in his teens, he wrote his first screenplay, ‘Captain Peachfuzz and the Anchovy Bandit’, and appeared briefly in a movie, Golden Girls, impersonating Elvis Presley! His first script to be filmed was True Romance in 1991, to be followed by the notorious Natural Born Killers which Oliver Stone directed. At 27 he made his own directorial debut with Reservoir Dogs — and the rest is history. Tarantino’s work mirrors his interest in the crime and gangster stories of the Thirties onwards, while his dialogue brilliantly captures the brutalised lives of his contemporary characters. ‘The Watch ’ is a timeless piece of hardboiled fiction which, but for its Vietnam associations, might have been written at any time in the past half century yet is actually an episode from Pulp Fiction related by Captain Koons (Christopher Walken). It is yet another example of why the hardboiled genre is not only still flourishing, but surely destined to survive well beyond the century of its inception.

Hi, little man. Boy, I sure heard a bunch about you.

See, I was a good friend of your Daddy’s. We were in that Hanoi pit of hell over five years together.

Hopefully, you’ll never have to experience this yourself. But when two men are in a situation like me and your Daddy were, for as long as we were, you take on certain responsibilities for each other.

If it had been me who had not made it, your Daddy would be talkin’ right now to my son, Jim. But the way it worked out is I’m talkin’ to you, Butch.

I got somethin’ for ya.

This watch I got here was first purchased by your great-granddaddy. It was bought during the First World War in a little general store in Knoxville, Tennessee.

It was bought by Private Doughboy Ernie Coolidge the day he set sail for Paris. It was your great-granddaddy’s war watch, made by the first company ever to make wristwatches. You see, up until then, people just carried pocket watches.

Your great-granddaddy wore that watch every day he was in the war. Then when he had done his duty, he went home to your greatgrandmother, took the watch off his wrist and put it in an ol’ coffee can.