Robert Coover - Noir

Gazing morosely out at the crumpled body in the holding cell from your disheartening squat over the seatless crapper, you notice the black-on-black door with its silver lock at the back of the cell, and now, after wiping yourself with the crime reports nailed to the wall for the purpose, you pull up your pants and stride toward it, wary eye on the card players. Who are in a distracting row about an extra ace on the table, fingers pointed at Snark. Any stupid beast on the run knows better than to step into a cage with a lure at the back, but it’s your only shot, and when the cell door does not spring shut behind you, you’re figuring you just might make it. Until the prisoner on the floor of the cell grabs your ankle, making you nearly drop the key. You kick free, cursing him silently, but see then it’s your old chum Rats. The poor sonuvabitch is still wearing his special shoe but they have rammed it onto the wrong foot. Since you got Flame’s note, taped to the manikin, you’ve worried that you might have been set up, used as a decoy by the cops to nab both of you in one swoop. Why else did Blue let you go? You know trying to carry Rats out with you will break the invisibility spell in here, but he’s a pal and you owe him one, what can you do. You unlock the black door with your passkey (yes, it works!), prop it open, and step behind it for a moment, take a deep breath, then dash back and grab up the lifeless backstreet merchant, toss him over your shoulder. You hear a phone ring somewhere. And then the bullets start flying, ricocheting off the bars, whizzing past your head. You pocketed some of the manikin stash and now throw loose bills and a bunch of bags and bindles out the door as you duck back into it to keep the avaricious fuckers busy while you make your getaway.

Mankind’s absurd fate, you are reminded as you stagger along, pushing deeper into the smugglers’ passage, the shooting and footsteps behind you dying away, is slow suffocation on a sick and dying planet: the tunnel is apparently linking up to the city’s sewer system and the air is getting decidedly pungent. The species of which you are a dissolute member does not live, it endures, and this is what it smells like. Rats weighs a ton and you wonder if they, literally, pumped him full of lead. Where the tunnel opens up into the sewers, you have a choice: which direction? Old rule: follow the flow. But further downstream, you run into multiple branches. It may be just glitter off the wet walls, but you seem to catch a glimpse of Fat Agnes and you start to splash along behind him, but at the fork you spy an old tennis ball, speared by a swizzle stick, in the mouth of the other branch. It’s your princess of the alley. Someone still loves you. The teasing will-o’-the-wisp glow of Fat Agnes continues to appear down one cloacal channel or another as you proceed, but Mad Meg’s buttons, shoelaces, tennis balls, and candy wrappers lead you out at last.

You emerge from the pipe through which the city’s sewage is dumped into the sea. You drop Rats on a pile of stones and concrete chunks and wade out into the water to wash the sludge off your shoes and pantlegs. Out here, the air stinks of rotting fish and rusting metal, but it’s a relatively sweet stink and you suck it in. The gulls are squawking, protesting at your walking through their dinner. It’s some dark time of day which around here could be noon. You can hear the rhythmic growl of unseen traffic, an echoey medley of sirens, horns. The way they sound off the water: early evening maybe. There’s a ferry parked nearby, its carport open. You’ve seen that before, know where you are. Skipper’s lowlife hooch house is not far away. Place to lie low for a time. First, you put Rats’ shoe with the three-inch heel on the right foot, and while you’re doing that he comes around. His scarred lips move. He seems to be trying to tell you something. You lean close. Flame, he whispers. Flame? He’s out again.

You heave the old grifter back up on your shoulders and trudge toward Skipper’s, planning to use what’s left of your manikin stash as currency to hole out there until this blows over, even if you have to wait until Blue retires from the force. On the way, you pass the place where the body was found. The trigger for the mess you’re in. The chalk drawing has washed away, replaced by a crude sketch of a naked guy with a big pistol for a dick, firing away at a disembodied cunny hanging in the air like a worm-eaten apple. Nothing left of the original crime scene portrait but a pale colored smudge underneath the pistol. You gaze down at it, trying to remember how it was when you first saw it. You do remember. Oh man. Who can you trust? You drop Rats off at Skipper’s with a packet of the smugglers’ C-notes, pick up some fags, and, head buried in your turned-up collar, head for Loui’s.

ALL OVER TOWN AS YOU WALK THROUGH IT, YOUR MUG glowers darkly on WANTED posters. They’ll never recognize you. You’re prettier than that. Something wrong with the picture, though. What is it? You put yourself in Blanche’s shoes. Well, for one thing, you’re wearing a fedora on the poster, Mr. Noir, and you don’t have that any more. And there’s no folded handkerchief in your jacket breast pocket. That’s not even your pinstripe suit. Blanche thinks you’re too unobservant for a private dick. She likes to set little tests for you, moves things around in the office, adds an ornament to your desk, hangs a new picture, paints the walls a different color, then asks you what’s changed. The only thing you ever notice is if she moves the sofa because when you go to lie down on it you hit the floor. You use the forest-and-trees argument: when you’re on a case, you’re focused, see what’s important, but too many details are irrelevant and clutter your vision. She says there are no forests, that’s a false and undefinable category, there are only trees. When you described the chalk drawing to her, she wanted to know if you could see the victim’s ears. You didn’t remember but said probably not, why did she ask? The outlined body you described, Mr. Noir, was a naked one. Your client was never naked, but men like to draw women that way. So, unless it was somebody else like one of your waterfront floozies, you can ignore everything about the drawing from the neck down. But men are never interested in women’s heads and would just draw what they saw. So, was the dead body wearing a widow’s hat and veil or was her head bare? That would be the clue. If you’d only been paying attention.

Well, there was a clue, but you didn’t recognize it as one at the time and didn’t tell her about it.

You met Flame on the same day you first met the rich widow. Coincidence? You told her the widow’s story, she had a different version, seemed to know a lot about it. Or maybe she was just guessing. Making conversation, wanting to make out. You were carrying some pedigree nose candy from Rats, she wanted to share some of it. You were there every couple of nights after that. Eased into the dark by her sultry lullabies. The night they found the body and you first saw that drawing, you dropped by Loui’s for a requiem drink and she tried to lure you into staying (Hey, if we are what we eat, baby, I could be you by tomorrow morning. .), but, still grieving, you went to the Shed instead. Bad choice. She knew that? You were back at Loui’s the next night, though, and she was waiting for you. Love? You don’t believe in love, victim of it though you too often are, so scratch that. Flame’s a working girl. Her job? She tried to tell you a story a few nights ago, but you fell asleep on it. Or were drugged. It was about twin brothers on opposite sides of the law with her in the middle, gun in hand. A gun that went “spat.” She seemed to be trying to tell you she was both guilty and innocent of something. Something she couldn’t have helped, either way. The cop was using her, but so was the badboy lover. A commonplace tale maybe of love and betrayal, doubled and redoubled, but what you want to know is, who was the cop?