Noir

by Robert Coover

  ONE THING YOU’VE DETERMINED NOT TO DO TONIGHT IS follow the panhandler on his dark drizzly route, but that is what you are doing. Trenchcoat collar turned up, fedora brim tipped toward your nose, a wet fag in your mouth, your fried head a bundle of confusions. You sidle along walls to be sure no one’s behind you, doing a sequence of spiraling 360s when crossing streets, which probably gives the impression of being staggering drunk, which you are. Blitzed. Smoked. Damn that bottomless Snark. The panhandler continues on his rounds oblivious to your boozy dance behind him, clutching his frosted doughnut. Looking for a bin to put it in maybe; trade it in for some brown lettuce or an old sock. Except for his lifting and lowering of trashcan lids, his soggy shuffle and yours are all that can be heard in the dense clammy night. The tattoo on your butt is itching but that may be because, with all your looping turns, you are in effect following yourself.

  No light but for the dull yellow puddles spilled by streetlamps, the cheap rainbow glitter under stuttering neon signs advertising refuges long since shut down. Even when the sun is allegedly out, it never seems to reach back into these claustrophobic back streets, your streets, where you’ve so long plied your trade that sunnier ones now seem alien to you. You used to spend a lot of time, even when not on a case, chasing the black seam on the back of women’s stockinged legs through these streets, these streets and any others where they might lead you. Sometimes up creaky unswept stairwells into sad little adventures that rarely ended well. That was back when you were young and everything was interesting. Some days you would be so focused that all but the legs would disappear, and then they’d be gone, too, just the black seams scissoring along. When you told Blanche about this and asked if you were going crazy, she said, no, you were just a foolish man pursuing your perverse and wayward dreams, an occupational hazard that could lead to a bad ending and jeopardize your career. She recommended that, whenever it started to happen, you should stop in the nearest cafeteria and have a glass of warm milk. You told her you always drank a lot of milk at the Star Diner and it didn’t seem to do any good. Blanche’s stockings, you assumed, were probably woolly and seamless, but you never looked.

  One day, when the seams scissored around a corner and you chased after, you crashed into the dolly who had been sporting them. You have been following me, she said, as though solving a case.

  It’s my job, lady, you said back, picking yourself up and brushing yourself off. Private eye.

  Has someone hired you to do this, Mr. Eye?

  Noir, ma’am. No, just practicing as you might say. Keeping my hand in.

  Your hand in where?

  Wherever I can keep it warm.

  But why me, Private Noir?

  Just call me Phil, sister. What can I say? I like your legs.

  My legs?

  That’s right, sweetheart. Both of them. And everything in between.

  Best you could remember, you’d never said these words before, but it felt like you had. Some kind of catechism, learned before learning. So when she shrugged and said all right, Mr. Sister, I see, if that’s what you want, and started taking off her clothes, you were not entirely surprised. This was happening at a busy intersection, the sun doing its strange blazing thing, with café tables set out on the sidewalk like in moviehouse travelogues of island resorts. She stepped out of her underpants and stretched out on one of the tables like the dish of the day. She was gorgeous, the girl of your dreams, and you knew you were suddenly and crazily in love, but out here in the middle of traffic and pedestrians, you weren’t sure you could penetrate whipped cream. Worse, you feared that’s what it would feel like. Something airy and not quite there. But, hey, life’s a mystery, what the hell. You dropped your pants and Blue, chancing by, arrested you for indecent exposure. Wait a minute, what about her? you asked, but the dame had vanished, taking her clothes with her. You seemed to remember her perfect butt, flashing in the sunshine (it had already started to rain again), but maybe you just made that part up in your head and then went on believing it, the way that hoods and killers make up their innocence and never after doubt it. Blue was still slapping you around when Blanche turned up with the bail money and a habeas corpus writ and what you wanted to know was why it took her so long.

  WHILE YOU’VE BEEN AROUSING YOURSELF WITH THESE technicolor reveries, you have lost sight of the old panhandler. Maybe one of your 360s was only a 180. You pick yourself up from the running gutter where you’ve fallen and stumble into a doorway’s shadow, head spinning from your drunken revolutions, and consider your options. Also your fate. You consider your fate. It has a flophouse look about it. You take the folded handkerchief out of your lapel pocket and blow your nose in it. Fuck it, you think. You’re getting too old for this shit. Back to the office. The sofa. A friendly bottle to suck. Sanctuary. You step out, step back again. Police car. Rolling through the watery street, light wheeling. But in dead silence. As if floating an inch or two above the puddles. No, that’s right, can’t go back to the office. Blue will have it staked out. What’s that sonuvabitch up to anyway? Did he invent a body and send you off chasing phantoms, just to land you in trouble? Probably. But then what really happened to the widow? Or her remains? You wish you could talk to her again. She was afraid, seemed drawn to you. You were so slow to apprehend. Yet any move you made got you nowhere. And what does all of this have to do with Mister Big? Her dead hubby’s partner. His murderer maybe. Hers. And Blue: does he, like everybody else in this fucked-up city, work for Big? Big knows you’re after him, so Blue gets sent to nail your ass. But then, Blue has always been out to nail your ass. Is Blue Mister Big himself? Your head is aching with these insane ideas. Should just get the hell out of this pestilential hellhole, disappear into some primeval forest somewhere. But what would you do there except die? Sweating like a sick pig in your woolly pinstripes and spotted tie. No, no way out of here, not for you, mister sister. You were born in the city and are destined to live out your life in it. What’s left of it. Too little, you suppose. When you told the story in Loui’s that night of the crazy broad on the sidewalk café table, Joe the bartender said, yeah, he knew the twist, she’s happened to a lot of mugs, and so far as he ever heard, it always ends the same way. Dangerous dame. Scary. So, what would you do if she and her black seams turned up again? Same goddamned thing.

  You don’t have to go on chasing the panhandler, though. You gave him the doughnut, he gummed a bite, told you a story, and shambled off, you on his tail as though you had no choice. Now you’ve lost him. Good. You’re free. So what next? You can smell the waterfront. You could follow your nose and hole out in a back room at Skipper’s. But before you can lean out in that general direction, the old panhandler shuffles by like a silent rerun, bearded chin on his sunken chest, long white hair cascading down past his face and over his shoulders, rainwater dripping from his tattered fedora brim. He clutches his plastic bag to his sunken midriff with both arms, his topcoat tails dragging through the wet street. You lose him momentarily when he turns a corner, and when you catch up to him, he is dead. Sprawled in front of an open bin, strangled, his milky blue eyes glazed and popping. A dirty yellow necktie with purple polkadots knotted around his scrawny throat. You used to have a tie like that, but Blanche made you throw it away. When you gave him the doughnut tonight, he replied as usual with a story. They was this lady walkin’ backwards wavin’ at somebody and dropped down a manhole, he said. She never come back up and nobody seen it but me, so I reckon she’s down there still. He stared up at you. That’s purty funny, mister. And you ain’t even grinnin’. He spat in disgust past the tooth in his mouth and walked away. Now you wish you’d laughed at his story, cheered the old fellow up once more before he bought it. If you’d not been so blotto, you might have. Reminded you of the old joke: Watch out for the cliff! What cli-i-i-i-ifff-ff . . . ? Worth at least a nod and a grimace, and you let him down. But what does it matter? Dead’s dead, no residue, all’s as if it never was. The oldtimer is still clutching the doughnut with the half circle g
ummed out of it. Not to waste it, you pry it out of his grip and take a bite. As you do, you get a whiff of that special fragrance. Can’t place it. But you know what comes next.

  NO DREAM THIS TIME. UNLESS YOU COUNT THE THOUGHT you had in the split second between fragrance and blow, which you seemed to go on thinking after being sapped: in short, that the city was as bounded as a gameboard, no place to hide in it, no way but one to leave it, you alone and defenseless in it, your moves not even your own. Not much of a thought. A split second was more than enough time for it.

  YOU COME AROUND WITH A HALF-CHEWED BITE OF PEPpery doughnut in your jaws and a busted head. You know where you are without opening your eyes. Call it a private dick’s hunch. There will be glass cases full of toy soldiers and a pedicurist’s chair. Welcome, Mr. Noir, says a voice. They said you wished to see me.

  Not they, you say. She. When you open your eyes, you’ll finally see Mister Big. You’re not sure you want to see Mister Big. You are mad as hell. At him, at the dead widow who got you into this, at the sick city, sick world, your own meaningless fucked-up life. Your head hurts so, you almost can’t think. You’d like to kill somebody. A client, you add bitterly, spitting doughnut. Late lamented. Whose corpus delicti has gone missing. How do you explain that?

  I have no idea, Mr. Noir. Is this a riddle?

  Yeah. And the answer is murder. You open your eyes to see at last Mister Big himself. But: not himself. Yourself. You’re Mister Big. Gazing at you from across the room. You refuse to be surprised by anything. But you’re surprised. Mister Big looks surprised, too. You thought (whiff of cigar smoke?) you caught a glimpse, out of the corner of your eye, of Fat Agnes in his white linen suit fleeing the scene. By way of the window. Right through the heavy drawn curtains as if they weren’t there. Maybe they aren’t there. Maybe this is the dream you didn’t have.

  In that case, you would seem to be the answer’s answer, says Mister Big; your other you over there. Looking surly. They tell me you’ve been on something of a spree. He speaks without moving his lips, tough-guy style. You yourself talk that way. Why do you dicks all have that granite look? a client once asked you. Do you take injections? Not only have you apparently done away with a lot of people, he says, but you’re also wanted as a thief, pederast, trafficker, and counterfeiter. The sonuvabitch looks sicker than you expected. He’s wearing a crushed fedora down over his ears. Ugly scowl on his unshaved pan, doughnut crumbs on his chin. He has stolen your chili-stained tie. There’s a twitchy flat-faced mug with a gat standing behind him, and behind the mug a painted hide of some kind in a carved wooden frame. You have the feeling there’s a mug behind you. Also twitchy. It’s like looking in a mirror. Wait a minute. You see now the backwards “4” on the hide. You are looking in a mirror.

  Mister Big steps out from behind it. Stringy white hair and beard, watery blue eyes, old pants held up with a sashweight cord: the panhandler. There’s something wrong about this, but your head hurts too much to think what it is. They was this here feller come round, he says, lookin’ for a body. What’s wrong with the one you got? I ast. The feller laughed him a nasty laugh, and says, it ain’t got what I need right now, y’ole coot. He was a feller liked to talk mean and live hard and I seen he was headin’ for a bad end. His beezer was broke in so many places, if somebody’d tole him to folla his nose, he wouldn’ta knowed which way to go. He was carryin’ a filthy darkness round insida him like a canker and he was a chump for the femmes. He talked hardboiled but was really a soft egg and easy to crack. And what mostly made that feller a loser was he didn’t want nuthin’ bad enough.

  You recognize now the twitchy thug with the punched-in kisser in the mirror, the one behind you with the popper pointed at your hatband. The taxi driver. Fingers’ ugly sideman. Pug. The .22 he’s holding could be yours. Things are beginning to fall into place. On the wall behind him, behind you, Michiko’s flayed hide, spread out like a mercator projection, is emitting its own messages, as if making a last effort to help Phil-san. Not easy to read. Besides the mirrored “4,” only the equator (the raccoon-dog, the bull’s eye) is at all legible from where you sit. That whiff of cigar smoke earlier: probably just stale body powder. You can smell it now. Maybe that is the message. If you wept, you might weep for Michiko, but what the hell, it’s not the worst end. Everyone croaks. The rest of us end up ash, she’s a work of art. It’s a glitzy joint with a lot of fat furniture, mahogany tables, framed paint blotches on the walls, layers of exotic rugs, figurines on the fireplace mantel, vases, pots of flowers, and glass cases full of toy soldiers. You recognize the ones you photographed. Maybe the ones. Maybe not. What do you know? If Blanche were here, she could tell you. But the light’s odd. Striped as if coming through venetian blinds. But there are no venetian blinds. Hard to focus on anything. The old scarecrow of a panhandler, as out of place in here as a ketchup stain on a tuxedo shirt—or a pearl onion on a banana split, as someone has said—seems sliced up by the light, coming apart and reassembling himself as he shuffles through it.

  I tole him they was plenny a live ones out there lookin’ for a sweetie, why was he chasin’ a dead one? She paid me, he says, showin’ how dumb he was, I owe her. Mostly, though, on accounta somebody don’t want me to. Well, sonny, says I, if that somebody’s who I spose it is, you’ll be beddin’ down tonight in cold mud.

  All the fleabags and flophouses I’ve bunked in, you say now, cold mud would be an upgrade. How about a fag?

  There’s a brief hesitation. The old panhandler lifts his head up off his chest for a moment in what might be a nod, and as Pug reaches down with a lit cigarette, you grab the .22, wrest it away, and bust him in the chops with it, turn it on the panhandler. Who is there and not there, drifting in and out of the ribboned light. Pug is snarling at your feet. You point the gun between his eyes. His snarl turns to a high-pitched whimper. You tell him to beat it. On the double. He’s out of there on all fours. Tough guy. You throw the bolt on the door. You’re alone with Mister Big.

  From somewhere, but not necessarily where the panhandler is, or isn’t, a voice says: There are at least a hundred men in the building, Noir. You’ll never get away.

  Maybe getting away isn’t the big deal it used to be, pal. We got something to sort out between us. There was this sweet country kid with a rocky past. Abusive father, garbage head for a mother. Came into the city, looking for a fresh start in life, got involved with you and her hubby, got a fresh death instead.

  Hard to get a bead on the drifting panhandler. Sonuvabitch never stays in the same place. In some part of your coshed brain, you understand this. And you remember what is wrong. The last time you saw the panhandler, he was dead.

  She came to me, you say, picking up the lit soldier on the floor not to waste it and tucking it into the corner of your mouth, because she figured you had brought an end to your business relations with her husband the way a butcher ends his relationship with a pig, and she was afraid it might be her turn to get suicided next. When I took up her case, you turned your stooge Blue on me and had him trump up a lot of phony charges and you even conned her vulnerable kid brother into trying to get rid of me, then bumped him off when he blew it.

  The panhandler has paused over near the fireplace where he’s poking about in it as if it were a trashbin. You fire a shot, shattering what turns out to be a mirror, and the fireplace disappears, revealing a billiard table behind it, the panhandler shuffling toward it. The fireplace is now seen to be opposite from where you thought it was. Maybe. Your reflection across from you looks confused. You straighten it up, switch on the hard guy again, take a drag, the butt dangling in your lips, smoke curling through your sinuses like a house burglar.

  But when you iced my client, you say, something went wrong, and you had to hide the body. You stole it out of the morgue before I could get there. Now, I want that body.

  Well, says the voice. The panhandler, over at the billiard table, is putting the balls into a plastic shopping bag in exchange for some rotten oranges and me
lon rinds. If you insist.

  A shot rings out, the .22 flies from your hand, and blood appears there on the trigger finger. It’s the widow. She fires again and your hat flies off. There is a lady in the room, Mr. Noir, she says.

  Yeah, well, I never was one for the niceties, you gasp, clutching your wounded hand, trying not to cry. I’ve been chasing a body around. Thought it was you.

  It was. I wasn’t dead, is all.

  So that’s how you disappeared from the morgue.

  That’s right. I walked out. The morgue attendant tried to tell you that in his vulgar way, sealing his own fate, I’m sorry to say.

  You remember this, the odd thing he said. So, you’ve known all along. Just weren’t conscious of your knowing. As she moves around through the harsh rhomboids of glare and shadow (the panhandler has vanished), she multiplies herself in the mirrors. You’re surrounded by black-veiled widows, scissored by striped light. Some of them are pointing the gun at you, some are aimed in other directions, which tells you something about which one’s the real one, but you’re tired now and don’t really want to think about it. Who knows, maybe they’re all real. Had you pegged from the start, sweetheart, you say, wrapping your bloodied finger in your lapel pocket handkerchief. A gold-digger working the street who struck on a john who wanted to knock off his rich wife. In collusion with your emasculated hometown pimp and your sinister old man, you supplied the murder weapon out of the family drug store in exchange for a marriage contract and a share of the loot. The old story.