Robert Coover - Noir

The smugglers’ route is a series of interlinked cellars, some with nothing but a locked door between them, opened with the passkey Flame gave you, others requiring a crawl on your pinstripes through dark damp tunnels. You travel mostly by night, curling up behind furnaces by day, snaking your way to the docklands. What are you going to do when you get there? Can’t stay underground forever. Somehow you have to find out who really killed the Creep. Why Fingers bought it. Whose was the heap that ran him down. What Rats was trying to tell you. You decide to check in with your man Snark, get the latest rumble. Which means going topside to find a phone booth, risk getting caught. Chance you have to take. You’re in an expansive basement broken up into a warren of changing and makeup rooms. Theater of some kind. Pinned-up pix suggest a burlesque house. You don’t recognize the dancers, but it has been awhile. There’s a back stairs to the stage door, but no phone booth outside. Just a wet dirty side street, lit only by the red light over the door. You have better luck at the corner: phone box under a streetlamp about a block away. Misty streets eerily deserted. Your tattoo is itching, reminding you someone’s on your ass, and you sense him there as though he’d been waiting here for you to bubble up out of the concrete. If it’s one of Blue’s cops, why doesn’t he just nab you? Ergo, it’s not one of Blue’s cops. Some guy who works for Mister Big? The gorilla who tried to kill you down at the docks, then accosted you behind your office?

It’s after midnight, Snark is not happy you’ve called. Ring me back some other fucking time, Noir. I’m eating a pretzel, as you might say.

Sorry, can’t do that, Snark. I’m on the run and being followed. I just want you to know I didn’t kill that guy.

Which guy are you talking about?

The morgue attendant. There’s more than one?

Some beef in a suit seen hanging around outside the alley door of your office building has been found shot dead in another part of the alley.

The Hammer? The guy who tried to kill me down at pier four. I think I saw him get taken out. Two guys. One with a squeaky voice.

He’d been shot in the head several times with your.22.

That’s because I’d kayoed the poor sonuvabitch on my back stairs and switched rods. I’m packing his.45.

Well. Blue might buy that, might not.

SO IT CAN’T BE THE HAMMER WHO’S TAILING YOU. Maybe Fat Agnes? When you told Blanche the next day about chasing the fat man in the white suit who turned into a kind of will-o’-the-wisp and led you into a mazy death trap, she said: Ignis fatuus. What? Will-o’-the-wisp. Ignis fatuus. Like those black seams you used to chase. Thus, Fat Agnes. You realized you’d glimpsed him often. In Loui’s, outside your office on the street below, standing on a bridge overlooking the docklands, at the Chinese buffet (closed down shortly after), in line at the post office, at the fights. Someone you spotted out of the corner of your eye when distracted with something or someone else, but who wasn’t there when you were able to turn and look, nothing left but maybe a trace of his sweet cigar smoke. Was it just a coincidence he was so often somewhere in the picture? You didn’t think so. Blanche went on running the toy soldiers ad, tabulating the inquiries, sending out photos to some, waiting for the call from Mister Big, and one day Blanche gave you a thumbs-up signal and handed you the phone. Some guy named Marle who said he represented a bigtime buyer and wanted you to meet him in the Vendome Café, bring along a few of the figures. You said you’d bring photos. There was a hesitation before he agreed. Was he muttering to someone? You decided to go armed.

The Vendome Café was a dimly lit joint near the arena where the scalpers hung out, offering straight sales or a poker game at the back with tickets as their stakes. As soon as you stepped into the place, you smelled the cigar. And there he was, poised serenely at a back table in his white three-piece suit and fob watch chain, his panama on the table alongside a teacup like a signboard. Fat Agnes. As you drew near, you were struck by the way his little cleft chin sat like a bauble in the middle of his neck folds. No jaw line. Sad blue eyes. Button nose. A few strands of colorless hair combed across the top of his dome. He looked startled as you approached him as if about to grab up his panama and run. Hey, mister, are you Noir? some guy asked at the table you’d just passed. It was Marle. You were mistaken. When you looked back, Fat Agnes was gone. Just a cigar butt in an ashtray, still smoldering.

Marle affected a goatee and granny glasses, a leather jacket, black string tie. You showed him the photos with your left hand, ready to draw with your right. He glanced at them cursorily, said he’d have to see the miniatures themselves. You said you’d show them only to the buyer he represented. There were four other leather-jacketed guys at different tables all watching you. You figured they were together. You also figured you were zoning in on your target. You nodded at them all and left. It was the closest you ever got to Fat Agnes, but you heard from Marle again.

BEFORE YOU HANG UP (YOU SKIP THE BREAK-IN, YOUR visit to the Shed) you book a bill-dipping meet with Snark at the Star Diner, hoping you can make it, there are a lot of things you’ve got to talk about, then you hurry back through the misty night to the burlesque house. But there’s no red light, no stage door. You must have taken a wrong turning. You double back to get your bearings, cannot find the phone booth. Probably you’ve been winding your way through the smugglers’ burrows too long, you’re disoriented. You spy just a brief flicker of white at the far end of the street like a butterfly wing. Then darkness again. You know that a shot could ring out in the night, the last thing you’d hear. You press up against the wall of a building, eyes alert in all directions, and sidle along warily, sniffing the wet night air. You might be able to find the docklands by nose alone.

You reach a corner and, drawing the.45, throw yourself around it, crashing into a young girl in fancy but disheveled duds staggering your way on the lonely street. If the collision hadn’t knocked the gun out of your hand, you might have shot her. A kid still in her teens. She has been drinking but that’s probably the least of it. She stands there, weaving confusedly, trying to focus on you, a stray black curl swaying prettily on her forehead, then she falls into your arms. Take me home? she pleads wispily.

A lone cab rolls by out of the night and you hail it. The address she gives the cabbie is in a spiffy part of town. In the cab, she collapses against your shoulder and drops off, her childish hand falling, as if by accident, between your legs. Knowing winks and grimaces from the pug-faced cabbie in the rearview mirror. You wonder if you’ve seen him somewhere before. The dozing kid, snoring softly, nuzzles in under your chin, her hand absently stroking your crotch as it might a cat. You take it away from there, wrap it around your waist and she moans in her sleep. Wayward offspring of the decadent rich, you’ve known her type, been burned before.

When you arrive, she mutters drowsily: My purse? All her sentences are questions. The purse is full of loose money, big bills, too big to hand the cabbie. You pay him double out of your own pocket, but he still calls you a cheap bastard (or maybe a cheating bastard, you’re not sure; true, you’ve pocketed one of the big bills in exchange, he’s seen that), raising a finger at you. You try to grab it to break it, but he’s gone and you’re left clutching at night air. Then silence. This part of town is dead still.