Creeping Siamese and Other Stories

by Dashiell Hammett

  “Come on, Red!” Jack Counihan yelped, taking a step forward, his gun out.

  Bluepoint Vance’s hand flashed to the V of his coat. Jack’s gun snapped at him. Bluepoint had thrown himself down before the boy’s trigger was yanked. The bullet went wide, but Vance’s draw was gummed.

  Red scooped the girl up with his left arm. A big automatic blossomed in his right fist. I didn’t pay much attention to him after that. I was busy.

  Larrouy’s home was pregnant with weapons—guns, knives, saps, knucks, club-swung chairs and bottles, miscellaneous implements of destruction. Men brought their weapons over to mingle with me. The game was to nudge me away from my door. O’Leary would have liked it. But I was no fire-haired young rowdy. I was pushing forty, and I was twenty pounds overweight. I had the liking for ease that goes with that age and weight. Little ease I got.

  A squint-eyed Portuguese slashed at my neck with a knife that spoiled my necktie. I caught him over the ear with the side of my gun before he could get away, saw the ear tear loose. A grinning kid of twenty went down for my legs—football stuff. I felt his teeth in the knee I pumped up, and felt them break. A pock-marked mulatto pushed a gun-barrel over the shoulder of the man in front of him. My blackjack crunched the arm of the man in front. He winced sidewise as the mulatto pulled the trigger—and had the side of his face blown away.

  I fired twice—once when a gun was leveled within a foot of my middle, once when I discovered a man standing on a table not far off taking careful aim at my head. For the rest I trusted to my arms and legs, and saved bullets. The night was young and I had only a dozen pills—six in the gun, six my pocket.

  It was a swell bag of nails. Swing right, swing left, kick, swing right, swing left, kick. Don’t hesitate, don’t look for targets. God will see that there’s always a mug there for your gun or blackjack to sock, a belly for your foot.

  A bottle came through and found my forehead. My hat saved me some, but the crack didn’t do me any good. I swayed and broke a nose where I should have smashed a skull. The room seemed stuffy, poorly ventilated. Somebody ought to tell Larrouy about it. How do you like that lead-and-leather pat on the temple, blondy? This rat on my left is getting too close. I’ll draw him in by bending to the right to poke the mulatto, and then I’ll lean back into him and let him have it. Not bad! But I can’t keep this up all night. Where are Red and Jack? Standing off watching me?

  Somebody socked me in the shoulder with something—a piano from the feel of it. A bleary-eyed Greek put his face where I couldn’t miss it. Another thrown bottle took my hat and part of my scalp. Red O’Leary and Jack Counihan smashed through, dragging the girl between them.

  X

  While Jack put the girl through the door, Red and I cleared a little space in front of us. He was good at that. When he chucked them back they went back. I didn’t dog it on him, but I did let him get all the exercise he wanted.

  “All right!” Jack called.

  Red and I went through the door, slammed it shut. It wouldn’t hold even if locked. O’Leary sent three slugs through it to give the boys something to think about, and our retreat got under way.

  We were in a narrow passageway lighted by a fairly bright light. At the other end was a closed door. Halfway down, to the right, steps led up.

  “Straight ahead?” asked Jack, who was in front.

  O’Leary said, “Yes.” and I said, “No. Vance will have that blocked by now if the bulls haven’t. Upstairs—the roof.”

  We reached the stairs. The door behind us burst open. The light went out. The door at the other end of the passage slammed open. No light came through either door. Vance would want light. Larrouy must have pulled the switch, trying to keep his dump from being torn to toothpicks.

  Tumult boiled in the dark passage as we climbed the stairs by the touch system. Whoever had come through the back door was mixing it with those who had followed us—mixing it with blows, curses and an occasional shot. More power to them! We climbed, Jack leading, the girl next, then me, and last of all, O’Leary.

  Jack was gallantly reading road-signs to the girl: “Careful of the landing, half a turn to the left now, put your right hand on the wall and—”

  “Shut up!” I growled at him. “It’s better to have her falling down than to have everybody in the drum fall on us.”

  We reached the second floor. It was black as black. There were three stories to the building.

  “I’ve mislaid the blooming stairs,” Jack complained.

  We poked around in the dark, hunting for the flight that should lead up toward our roof. We didn’t find it. The riot downstairs was quieting. Vance’s voice was telling his push that they were mixing it with each other, asking where we had gone. Nobody seemed to know. We didn’t know, either.

  “Come on,” I grumbled, leading the way down the dark hall toward the back of the building. “We’ve got to go somewhere.”

  There was still noise downstairs, but no more fighting. Men were talking about getting lights. I stumbled into a door at the end of the hall, pushed it open. A room with two windows through which came a pale glow from the street lights. It seemed brilliant after the hall. My little flock followed me in and we closed the door.

  Red O’Leary was across the room, his noodle to an open window.

  “Back street,” he whispered. “No way down unless we drop.”

  “Anybody in sight?” I asked.

  “Don’t see any.”

  I looked around the room—bed, couple of chairs, chest of drawers, and a table.

  “The table will go through the window,” I said. “We’ll chuck it as far as we can and hope the racket will lead ’em out there before they decide to look up here.”

  Red and the girl were assuring each other that each was still all in one piece. He broke away from her to help me with the table. We balanced it, swung it, let it go. It did nicely, crashing into the wall of the building opposite, dropping down into a backyard to clang and clatter on a pile of tin, or a collection of garbage cans, or something beautifully noisy. You couldn’t have heard it more than a block and a half away.

  We got away from the window as men bubbled out of Larrouy’s back door.

  The girl, unable to find any wounds on O’Leary, had turned to Jack Counihan. He had a cut cheek. She was monkeying with it and a handkerchief.

  “When you finish that,” Jack was telling her, “I’m going out and get one on the other side.”

  “I’ll never finish if you keep talking—you jiggle your cheek.”

  “That’s a swell idea,” he exclaimed. “San Francisco is the second largest city in California. Sacramento is the state capital. Do you like geography? Shall I tell you about Java? I’ve never been there, but I drink their coffee. If—”

  “Silly!” she said, laughing. “If you don’t hold still I’ll stop now.”

  “Not so good,” he said. “I’ll be still.”

  She wasn’t doing anything except wiping blood off his cheek, blood that had better been let dry there. When she finished this perfectly useless surgery, she took her hand away slowly, surveying the hardly noticeable results with pride. As her hand came on a level with his mouth, Jack jerked his head forward to kiss the tip of one passing finger.

  “Silly!” she said again, snatching her hand away.

  “Lay off that,” said Red O’Leary, “or I’ll knock you off.”

  “Pull in your neck,” said Jack Counihan.

  “Reddy!” the girl cried, too late.

  The O’Leary right looped out. Jack took the punch on the button, and went to sleep on the floor. The big red-head spun on the balls of his feet to loom over me.

  “Got anything to say?” he asked.

  I grinned down at Jack, up at Red.

  “I’m ashamed of him,” I said. “Letting himself be stopped by a paluka who leads with his right.”
>
  “You want to try it?”

  “Reddy! Reddy!” the girl pleaded, but nobody was listening to her.

  “If you’ll lead with your right,” I said.

  “I will,” he promised, and did.

  I grandstanded, slipping my head out of the way, laying a forefinger on his chin.

  “That could have been a knuckle,” I said.

  “Yes? This one is.”

  I managed to get under his left, taking the forearm across the back of my neck. But that about played out the acrobatics. It looked as if I would have to see what I could do to him, if any. The girl grabbed his arm and hung on.

  “Reddy, darling, haven’t you had enough fighting for one night? Can’t you be sensible, even if you are Irish?”

  I was tempted to paste the big chaw while his playmate had him tied up.

  He laughed down at her, ducked his head to kiss her mouth, and grinned at me.

  “There’s always some other time,” he said good-naturedly.

  XI

  “We’d better get out of here if we can,” I said. “You’ve made too much rumpus for it to be safe.”

  “Don’t get it up in your neck, little man,” he told me. “Hold on to my coat-tails and I’ll pull you out.”

  The big tramp. If it hadn’t been for Jack and me he wouldn’t have had any coat-tail by now.

  We moved to the door, listened there, heard nothing.

  “The stairs to the third floor must be up front,” I whispered. “We’ll try for them now.”

  We opened the door carefully. Enough light went past us into the hall to show a promise of emptiness. We crept down the hall, Red and I each holding one of the girl’s hands. I hoped Jack would come out all right, but he had put himself to sleep, and I had troubles of my own.

  I hadn’t known that Larrouy’s was large enough to have two miles of hallway. It did. It was an even mile in the darkness to the head of the stairs we had come up. We didn’t pause there to listen to the voices below. At the end of the next mile O’Leary’s foot found the bottom step of the flight leading up.

  Just then a yell broke out at the head of the other flight.

  “All up—they’re up here!”

  A white light beamed up on the yeller, and a brogue addressed him from below: “Come on down, ye windbag.” “The police,” Nancy Regan whispered, and we hustled up our new-found steps to the third floor.

  More darkness, just like that we’d left. We stood still at the top of the stairs. We didn’t seem to have any company.

  “The roof,” I said. “We’ll risk matches.”

  Back in a corner our feeble match-light found us a ladder nailed to the wall, leading to a trap in the ceiling. As little later as possible we were on Larrouy’s roof, the trap closed behind us.

  “All silk so far,” said O’Leary, “and if Vance’s rats and the bulls will play a couple of seconds longer—bingavast.”

  I led the way across the roofs. We dropped ten feet to the next building, climbed a bit to the next, and found on the other side of it a fire-escape that ran down to a narrow court with an opening into the back street.

  “This ought to do it,” I said, and went down.

  The girl came behind me, and then Red. The court into which we dropped was empty—a narrow cement passage between buildings. The bottom of the fire-escape creaked as it hinged down under my weight, but the noise didn’t stir anything. It was dark in the court, but not black.

  “When we hit the street, we split,” O’Leary told me, without a word of gratitude for my help—the help he didn’t seem to know he had needed. “You roll your hoop, we’ll roll ours.”

  “Uh-huh,” I agreed, chasing my brains around in my skull. “I’ll scout the alley first.”

  Carefully I picked my way down to the end of the court and risked the top of my hatless head to peep into the back street. It was quiet, but up at the corner, a quarter of a block above, two loafers seemed to be loafing attentively. They weren’t coppers. I stepped out into the back street and beckoned them down. They couldn’t recognize me at that distance, in that light, and there was no reason why they shouldn’t think me one of Vance’s crew, if they belonged to him.

  As they came toward me I stepped back into the court and hissed for Red. He wasn’t a boy you had to call twice to a row. He got to me just as they arrived. I took one. He took the other.

  Because I wanted a disturbance, I had to work like a mule to get it. These bimbos were a couple of lollipops for fair. There wouldn’t have been an ounce of fight in a ton of them. The one I had didn’t know what to make of my roughing him around. He had a gun, but he managed to drop it first thing, and in the wrestling it got kicked out of reach. He hung on while I sweated ink jockeying him around into position. The darkness helped, but even at that it was no cinch to pretend he was putting up a battle while I worked him around behind O’Leary, who wasn’t having any trouble at all with his man.

  Finally I made it. I was behind O’Leary, who had his man pinned against the wall with one hand, preparing to sock him again with the other. I clamped my left hand on my playmate’s wrist, twisted him to his knees, got my gun out, and shot O’Leary in the back, just below the right shoulder.

  Red swayed, jamming his man into the wall. I beaned mine with the gun-butt.

  “Did he get you, Red?” I asked, steadying him with an arm, knocking his prisoner across the noodle.

  “Yeah.”

  “Nancy,” I called.

  She ran to us.

  “Take his other side,” I told her. “Keep on your feet, Red, and we’ll make the sneak O.K.”

  The bullet was too freshly in him to slow him up yet, though his right arm was out of commission. We ran down the back street to the corner. We had pursuers before we made it. Curious faces looked at us in the street. A policeman a block away began to move our way. The girl helping O’Leary on one side, me on the other, we ran half a block away from the copper, to where I had left the automobile Jack and I had used. The street was active by the time I got the machinery grinding and the girl had Red stowed safely in the back seat. The copper sent a yell and a high bullet after us. We left the neighborhood.

  I didn’t have any special destination yet, so, after the necessary first burst of speed, I slowed up a little, went around lots of corners, and brought the bus to rest in a dark street beyond Van Ness Avenue.

  Red was drooping in one corner of the back, the girl holding him up, when I screwed around in my seat to look at them.

  “Where to?” I asked.

  “A hospital, a doctor, something!” the girl cried. “He’s dying!”

  I didn’t believe that. If he was, it was his own fault. If he had had enough gratitude to take me along with him as a friend I wouldn’t have had to shoot him so I could go along as nurse.

  “Where to, Red?” I asked him, prodding his knee with a finger.

  He spoke thickly, giving me the address of the Stockton Street hotel.

  “That’s no good,” I objected. “Everybody in town knows you bunk there, and if you go back, it’s lights out for yours. Where to?”

  “Hotel,” he repeated.

  I got up, knelt on the seat, and leaned back to work on him. He was weak. He couldn’t have much resistance left. Bulldozing a man who might after all be dying wasn’t gentlemanly, but I had invested a lot of trouble in this egg, trying to get him to lead me to his friends, and I wasn’t going to quit in the stretch. For a while it looked as if he wasn’t weak enough yet, as if I’d have to shoot him again. But the girl sided with me, and between us we finally convinced him that his only safe bet was to go somewhere where he could hide while he got the right kind of care. We didn’t actually convince him—we wore him out and he gave in because he was too weak to argue longer. He gave me an address out by Holly Park.

  Hoping for the best, I pointed
the machine thither.

  XII

  The house was a small one in a row of small houses. We took the big boy out of the car and between us to the door. He could just about make it with our help. The street was dark. No light showed from the house. I rang the bell.

  Nothing happened. I rang again, and then once more.

  “Who is it?” a harsh voice demanded from the inside.

  “Red’s been hurt,” I said.

  Silence for a while. Then the door opened half a foot. Through the opening a light came from the interior, enough light to show the flat face and bulging jaw-muscles of the skull-cracker who had been the Motsa Kid’s guardian and executioner.

  “What the hell?” he asked.

  “Red was jumped. They got him,” I explained, pushing the limp giant forward.

  We didn’t crash the gate that way. The skull-cracker held the door as it was.

  “You’ll wait,” he said, and shut the door in our faces. His voice sounded from within, “Flora.” That was all right—Red had brought us to the right place.

  When he opened the door again he opened it all the way, and Nancy Regan and I took our burden into the hall. Beside the skull-cracker stood a woman in a low-cut black silk gown—Big Flora, I supposed.

  She stood at least five feet ten in her high-heeled slippers. They were small slippers, and I noticed that her ringless hands were small. The rest of her wasn’t. She was broad-shouldered, deep-bosomed, thick-armed, with a pink throat which, for all its smoothness, was muscled like a wrestler’s. She was about my age—close to forty—with very curly and very yellow bobbed hair, very pink skin, and a handsome, brutal face. Her deep-set eyes were gray, her thick lips were well-shaped, her nose was just broad enough and curved enough to give her a look of strength, and she had chin enough to support it. From forehead to throat her pink skin was underlaid with smooth, thick, strong muscles.

  This Big Flora was no toy. She had the look and the poise of a woman who could have managed the looting and the double-crossing afterward. Unless her face and body lied, she had all the strength of physique, mind and will that would be needed, and some to spare. She was made of stronger stuff than either the ape-built bruiser at her side or the red-haired giant I was holding.