Robert Coover - Noir

You had spotted the guy, followed him for awhile. Big thuggish lout with a chain-smoking habit, a pocket flask from which he sucked freely, and a dark scowl. Mean-looking slow-moving sonuvabitch, well armed. But why would a blackmailer tail his victim, you wondered. The usual drill is to set payoff schedules and otherwise keep out of sight. You had to see Rats on a shopping trip, so you described the cop and Rats said he knew him, bruiser named Snark. Weird fuck but straight. Which meant that the old pawnbroker, running from the law, probably had a hit man ready to strike when you gave him the pattern of the cop’s movements.

So what now? Turn on your employer and squeal to the cops? Give Crabbe back his money (which you’d already spent) and drop out, letting the bodies fall where they may? Send in false data and risk getting taken out yourself? But weren’t you running that risk anyway? You were asking these questions out loud. You realized you’d been interrogating, not your glass of whiskey as is your habit, but the hand in your in-box. You took it out and set it on your desk on its thumb and rigid fingers like a pentapod and, taking a long slug, asked: And what about you, sweetheart? Where’d you come from? A woman’s hand, you felt certain. When, some time later, you first saw the widow’s hands in her lap you were somewhat reminded of it, but the severed hand had longer fingers, bonier knuckles, stubby fingertips like those of a professional pianist, a thin but sinewy wrist; it was well-tanned and bore three small rings, none of them a match for the widow’s rock. Curious, though: a lapis lazuli winged scarab with hieroglyphs, intertwined gold and white gold serpents with ruby eyes, and a carved bloodstone ring with some sort of Arabic inscription. So something of an exotic dame, a dancer maybe. Acrobat. Fortune teller. The long expressive fingers, hard unpainted nails, sharp knuckles suggested to you that she had long healthy bones, was tall, erect, lithe. Your type. One of them.

Thus, you assembled her from what the hand told you. It began as a lark, but became increasingly obsessive. You turned the hand over, examined the pads on her thumb and fingers, the flesh on her palm: Small breasts, you thought. Slender hips. You checked out her life and luck lines, what her palm said about her heart and head, her fate. You were no adept, they said nothing. That she’d had a misfortunate life you didn’t need her palm to tell you, the raw wound at the wrist said it all. By the fine hairs on the back of the hand, you figured she was auburn-haired. With brown eyes? Because of the bloodstone maybe, you guessed green. You saw a tall slender auburn-haired green-eyed beauty with a stub where the right hand should be. Wearing? The sequined briefs and halter of a circus aerialist maybe. Or gypsy silks. For the moment, nothing at all. Though she stood at some distance from you, an expression of ineffable longing (for you? for her hand?) on her high-boned face, she seemed at the same time to be exploring your body, opening up your trousers, crawling into them, and you realized that the hand was operating on its own. Or perhaps still belonged to her in some manner. Her other hand was between her thighs. Which were exquisitely beautiful. You ached to hold her and, by reaching out, though you couldn’t see your hands, that seemed possible, and as you wrapped your mitts around her amazing hams she began to quiver and twist, her jaw dropping open, her green eyes glazing over. And while you were holding her in that strange way, fascinated by her snaky writhings, the hand began crawling up your body toward your face. You tried to reach for it to push it away, but your hands were pasted to her behind. You understood immediately as it gripped your cheek bones and reached inside your mouth that it intended to screw off your head and you awoke in a sweat on your leather sofa, the hand resting on your face. You must have fallen asleep while studying it. Your pants were a mess. More work for poor Blanche.

Thereafter, she began to dampen your dreams incessantly with her erotic haunting and, with the help of Rats’ pharmaceuticals (the hand had succeeded), you slept as often as you could. A femme fatale, yes, but of an eerie sort. You showed the hand to a counterfeiter you knew, a pal of Rats, explaining that you were on a murder case, the hand your only clue, and asked him to do a sketch based on your description of what you called your scientific reconstruction of the whole from the part, a sketch you hung on the wall over your desk like the portrait of a president. Without pants. Something to stare at during those brief interludes between sleep. You’d lost interest in the Crabbe case, having gone the false data route, stalling for time, and might have forgotten about the snarling old pawnbroker entirely had he not shown up one rainy afternoon in your office, awakening you from a dream in which you were at sea, afloat in the cup of the upturned hand, tethered by your unseen hands to the hips of the green-eyed beauty swaying on the shore while the winged scarab fluttered in your crotch. Crabbe glanced up at the counterfeiter’s drawing, then at the hand perched on your desktop, turned white. How did you get this? he gasped. He grabbed up the hand, drew a gun, pointed it at your head. Which was when you met Snark. He called out from the doorway and when Crabbe spun to fire, you had a mortally wounded pawnbroker on your office floor with just enough life left in him for Snark to extract a full confession. It turned out Snark had been pursuing Crabbe for murder. No, he said, the body had both hands and looked nothing like the drawing, being more of the dippy overfed bleach-blond heiress sort, but Crabbe was probably feeling guilty and saw his victim everywhere. And why don’t you button up there, that’s a truly ugly sight. It wasn’t the hand that startled the pawnbroker, Snark went on to explain, picking up your phone to call in the meat wagon, but the rings, which had belonged to the victim and had been peddled by Crabbe to an undercover cop. Snark’s contortionist wife used an ancient mummified hand in a trick in which she seemed to swallow her arm, the hand appearing from an aperture lower down, though the highest part of her during the act. Fooled me the first time, Snark said and took a deep drink from the neck of your whiskey bottle. I was afraid to put my thing in there again for fear of the hand grabbing it and not letting go, until she showed me how the trick worked. He’d figured that mounting the stolen rings on the mummy’s hand and leaving it somewhere Crabbe was sure to see it might freak the murderer out and elicit an admission of guilt, as it did.

Yeah, but if you hadn’t turned up when you did, pal, I’d be fucking fly bait.

So what? We’d have caught him just the same and would’ve had two murders to pin on him instead of one.

Snark picked up the hand and stuffed it in a pocket. You were sorry to see it go. I was hoping to keep it around as a back scratcher, you said. By the way, what does that Arabic inscription on the ring say?

It’s Persian. Guy who read it for me said it was a racing tip. Something like put ten on number three in the fifth.

WHICH, PASSING THROUGH THE BOOKIES’ BASEMENT, taking the smugglers’ route to the docks, is what you do now, just as you’ve done every week for years now. Ten on number three in the fifth. Yet another futile romantic gesture. Your one-handed green-eyed love withdrew from your dreams when Snark took the severed hand away, although once, a year or so later, you found yourself in a horse race with the hand as your tottering mount, your dick ringed with the intertwined serpents and urging the hand on, she waiting in vain for you at the distant finish line, too far away even for disembodied dream hands to reach. What did that dream mean? You never ask.