Robert Coover - Noir

While you’re lying there, Mister Big turns up, wanting to see the advertised camp followers, and, having nothing else to offer, you point up at the manikins. He laughs what seems to you a cruel laugh. You’re a sucker for dangerous dames, Noir, he says. He has brought along an army of antique mobsters. Knights, archers, crossbowmen. Or perhaps these are the miniature soldiers you are trying to sell him. Probably. Though they are not miniature, they are life-size, unless you and he are toy-size. They are blind and motionless, yet somehow threatening, like momentarily paralyzed zombies. You feel some elemental boundary has been breached. You cling to the widow for reassurance. But it is not the widow, she has disappeared again; the manikin lying beside you is naked and tattooed like Michiko and she has pushed her leg between your legs. It is snowing cocaine and diamonds from above. The stuff would seem to be leaking out from between the pink shiny thighs of the giant manikins, but this is a mystery, for there are no outlets there. Maybe this is what Big was laughing at. He has made a joke about plastic surgery while wielding an ice pick. You are trying to figure things out, Noir, he says, when there is nothing to figure. You try to look closely at him so you’ll remember his face, but he is never quite where you look. Out of the corner of your eye you see him trying on the bride’s gown. This excites the tattooed manikin beside you who has grabbed your dick with a cold dead claw. Which is how you wake up, spilling your seed into the widow manikin’s inflexible hand and scared shitless.

You need a john, can’t find one, use a hollow leg. The widow manikin lies on her back at your feet like a stiffened corpse, her hand held palm-up accusingly as if you might have killed her with your spunk. You need to get out of here. The only door in sight other than the one you came in by needs your passkey and leads back into the tunnels.

BY THE LIGHT OF DAY, SPEAKING LOOSELY (IT’S BUTTHOLE black in here), your dream makes depressing sense to you. After buying Cueball’s tip a couple of nights ago, just before you had to go underground, you headed straight for the fogged-in docklands and pier four. Your pockets were empty except for the widow’s veil and note, but you were holstered up with other tools of the trade. Marketing corpses was still illegal, far as you knew; you figured you could just lay claim to it, at gun-point if necessary, throw it over your shoulder and tote it away.

It was a dark damp night, the sort you’re most at home in, with a thick coiling fog that concealed movement and allowed only occasional glimpses of wet brick, swaying yellow lamps, occasional gray shadowy figures emerging out of and disappearing into the mist. Such fleeting glimpses (for a moment you caught sight of the sky-blue police building spectrally aglow as if lit from within, and then as quickly it was gone again) were like the sudden brief insights that cut through the fog of a case, and you were on the alert for anything that might help you solve the mystery of your client’s life and death and her hold on you. You were trying to fit the bits together, but they were invisible bits — it was like trying to work a jigsaw puzzle without the pieces. As you drew nearer to the piers, warning signs appeared saying WATCH YOUR STEP and DANGER — HIGH VOLTAGE, and it was as though they were posted there for you. Things Blanche might say. You could hear water slapping softly against something. The honk of unseen gulls. Must be close. But which was pier four? No idea. You heard heavy footfalls behind you and ducked behind a small white fishbait hut with shutters on the windows, a ramp at the door, a box outside with the sign: ICE. Which you read as: freeze! A burly mug in polished dogs stomped by, head down, muttering to himself. Big guy with big mitts. On a hunch, you let him pass, then stepped out into the fog and followed him. More by ear than eye.

At the water’s edge, you passed huge coils of black cable on massive bobbins like giant spools of thread, beached buoys and floats, old concrete gas tanks standing together like benumbed sentries, wreathed by wisps of fog as if they were smoking (you could have used one). You proceeded warily, stopping whenever the steps stopped. They backtracked sometimes, suggesting the guy you were following didn’t know where he was going either. Or maybe he had heard you behind him and was checking or else was just pacing. Forced you to flatten yourself against shed walls from time to time. Then their sound changed. They were walking on wood, growing fainter. Then they stopped. You crept forward, found the wooden pier, stepped out on it stealthily. Foghorns in the distance. The squawking gulls. Buoy bells. The black water lapping. Otherwise a thick misty silence. If the guy knew you were there, he could be on you before you could see him. Blackness at first, but then a hollow glow ahead, which eventually revealed itself as a ghostly white yacht, rearing up in the fog. There was something nightmarish about it, but you didn’t hesitate. You boarded it, 22 in hand.

Was there someone else on the yacht? There was. Through a small window, you could see a light moving about down in the main cabin. Probably that tough you were tailing. The light was picking out leather sofas, teak tables and cabinets, navigation charts, fish tackle, step boxes. And then he saw it, you saw it, in the adjoining bunkroom, half obscured by a bead curtain: a body. He moved toward it (there was something glinting in his free hand), and you moved toward the cabin door. It was ajar. As you slipped through it, the guy doused his flashlight and turned on the bedside lamp and you saw then who he was. The bum you’d met the night before in Loui’s. The suit. The Hammer. And by the hothouse aroma you knew whose body it was. It also belonged to someone you’d seen the night before. She’d helped you escape Blue’s goons at Skipper’s. You’d heard her scream. You thought about just backing out and leaving them to it, but then you saw the Hammer raise a knife, and you stepped quietly forward, tapped him on the shoulder, and when he spun around, met him with a roundhouse, gat in hand. He crumpled like a sack of shit. You grabbed up the shiv, tossed it out the porthole, and while he was still groggy, you lifted him by his collar and slugged him again. And again. Did this palooka work for Mister Big? Take that, Mister Big! Wham! Was he responsible for Michiko’s death? Take that— pow! — for Michiko. The widow’s disappearance? Biff! Bam! There was a telephone on the bedside table. You ripped it out of the wall and hit him over the head with it, then clobbered him with a brass telescope. You were having a great time. You lifted him for one last blow to the gut (his jaw was hurting your knuckles) and threw what was left of the rube to the floor, went over to kiss the “4” on Michiko’s cold forehead. Goodnight, sweetheart, you said. Phil-san gonna miss you, baby. You strode off the yacht, lighting up, feeling pretty good about yourself. Until he caught up with you.

YOU CAME AROUND, STRETCHED OUT IN YOUR BRUISED skin on your office sofa, Blanche applying ice packs and iodine and spooning in a bit of what she called cough medicine. Something you’d picked up from Rats for moments like this. There was nothing that did not hurt. Every time we get up, something comes along and knocks us on our ass again. As someone said. One of your clients maybe. Laughing probably. Just before he got knocked down for good.

Lift your leg, Mr. Noir.

Ow!

Now the other one.

Oh shit. What happened?