Noir

by Robert Coover

  Outside the window, the buzzing neon light blinked eerily. Wheeling police car lights flickered on the ceiling like some kind of primitive motion picture machine showing a film whose images time had dissolved. You were trying to see there what the brother saw. And the lover? you asked. What happened to him? In the darkness, her hands had faded away. You felt like you were talking to a dark shadow on the dark couch. Hello? You were talking to a shadow. There being no objection, you lay down with it.

  SLEEPING WITH SHADOWS. IF LIFE IS AT BEST A SHADOW play, with what or whom else do we ever sleep, in spite of the fleshy illusions of the moment? Such was the principal burden of the Case of the Severed Hand. The hand was waiting outside your office door one morning as if it had strolled there on its fingertips. Had it been left there as a warning? An appeal for help? Did you know its former owner? Severed body parts are commonplace in the workaday life of a private dick. You picked it up and carried it into your office and tossed it in the in-box.

  At the time you were on well-paid assignment from a humorless crook-backed old hock shop owner and fence for stolen goods named Crabbe. According to his story, some goods belonging to a murder victim had passed through his hands and he was being blackmailed by a bent cop who threatened to hang the murder on him if he didn’t pay up. I’m just a businessman, he growled. I have no idea what fucking murder he’s talking about, one forgettable rich bastard or another, but I know my situation ain’t good. Crabbe figured the cop was working for the mayor, known for his shake-down rackets, so he couldn’t go to the guy’s superiors. He knew you as one who took no shit from city hall and bore the scars to prove it and believed he could count on you. As Blanche, cleaning your office, liked to say: Your horror of gratuities from officialdom, Mr. Noir, is matched only by your horror of cleanliness. The cop was on his tail and your job was to tail the tail and log his movements. Presumably so Crabbe could steer clear of him and look for ways to put the blackmailer on the defensive.

  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.

  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 yo
u 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.

  The girl is unable to walk, you’re going to have to carry her up to the house. Which is one of those glitzy four-story suburban mansions with turrets and balconies sitting on an acre of sloping manicured lawn. It’s a long hike up to the front door with a hundred pounds in your arms and you’re pooped when you reach it, though you’ve been entertained by the pretty sight as her skirt fell away when you picked her up. Little bunny rabbits down there. It’s your intention to dump her and drift off into the night, but she’s completely out. You lay her on an ornamental bench, search her purse for the house key, accept another bill for expenses. Carrying charges. No key. The door’s locked. May have to break in through a window. Which are mostly barred at ground level and of the leaded-glass sort. It’s a shot in the dark, but you try your smugglers’ route passkey. It works.