by Kim Newman
Contents
Cover
Also by Kim Newman
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Part I: Get Richie Quick
1
2
3
4
5
6
Part II: The Bard of the Boulevard
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
Part III: Lady in the Dark
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
Part IV: Darkest Before Dawn
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
…And Other Stories
Dreamers
Patricia’s Profession
Twitch Technicolor
Pamela’s Pursuit
About the Author
Also Available from Titan Books
ALSO BY KIM NEWMAN AND AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS
Anno Dracula
Anno Dracula: The Bloody Red Baron
Anno Dracula: Dracula Cha Cha Cha
Anno Dracula: Johnny Alucard
Professor Moriarty: Hound of the D’Urbervilles
Jago
The Quorum
Life’s Lottery
An English Ghost Story
Bad Dreams
COMING SOON
The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School
THE NIGHT MAYOR
Print edition ISBN: 9781781165669
E-book edition ISBN: 9781781165676
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
First Titan Books edition: April 2015
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Kim Newman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
Copyright © 1989, 2015 Kim Newman
‘Dreamers’ ©1985, 2015
‘Patricia’s Profession’ ©1985, 2015
‘Twitch Technicolor’ ©1989, 2015
‘Pamela’s Pursuit’ ©1989, 2015
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
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For Fiona Ferguson, Saskia Baron and Amanda Lipman, Hellcat Film Editors
And above all, shadow upon shadow upon shadow… Lee Garmes, Tony Gaudio, Lucien Ballard, Sol Polito, Ernest Haller, James Wong Howe, John F. Seitz and the other great cameramen of the era pitched every shot in glistening low-key, so that rain always glittered across windows and windscreens like quicksilver, furs shone with a faint halo, faces were barred deeply with those shadows that faintly symbolised some imprisonment of body or soul. The visual mode was intensely romantic, and its precise matching to the stories of fatal women and desperate men – straight out of The Romantic Agony – gave Forties film noir its completeness as a genre. A world was created, as sealed off from reality as the world of musicals and of Paramount sophisticated comedies, yet in its way more delectable than either.
CHARLES HIGHAM AND JOEL GREENBERG, Hollywood in the Forties
PART I
GET RICHIE QUICK
1
It was two thirty in the morning, and raining. In the City, it was always two thirty in the morning and raining.
Streets away, in the Kit Kat Klub, Nat King Cole was singing. I heard him under the permanent hiss of the rain and the sizzle of water on neon. In the distance, someone was shouting. There were three gunshots in swift succession, and the someone wasn’t shouting any more. A siren wailed, cutting into Nat’s plaintive purr, fading out as he hit the final verse. There was more gunfire, indiscriminate this time, and a car careered down the road, throwing up a splash of gutter water that fell just short of my shoes. I couldn’t see who was driving, but there was an interesting pattern of bullet dents in the vehicle’s rear, and the back window was white sugar, holed and dissolving. A police car, screeching like Mario Lanza trying for a note just out of his reach, came by in pursuit. The cars, bound together by a story I could only guess at, disappeared around a corner. Soon, even their noise was gone.
There are eight million stories in the City. The trick is to keep to your own, and not be distracted. All the others twine their plot lines around you like strangler’s spaghetti.
Back in the world, they had warned me about going crazy. I had almost laughed at them. It wasn’t so funny now it was my head in the mangle.
All of a sudden, hunched against a wall, I felt very old, very tired. Mine is a cold, wet, late-at-night profession, but just now life was colder, wetter and later than even I normally care for. Nat had finished his set now, and Judy Garland was on, singing ‘Over the Rainbow’ as if there were another world beyond the City limits where troubles melt like lemon drops. In the alley behind me, hunched down among the garbage cans, something shifted and laughed. I turned my back on it, more exhausted than brave.
I looked down at the gutter. An attenuated ghost rippled darkly in the stream. I recognised myself, but only just. There was a haunted quality about my eyes that I didn’t want to acknowledge. I was wearing my dark-grey fedora, rain-silver trench coat, powder-grey suit, white shirt, black knit tie, black patent-leather shoes and dark-grey socks with light-grey clocks. I was sheltering under the elevated railway, sucking on a soggy cigarette, waiting for the lead that was supposed to bust my case wide open.
The lead was several reels overdue.
Already, I had sleepwalked through a montage of fruitless searching. Blinking white signs, each with one letter missing: Cocacaba a Cabin, Mild ed’s, The Blue Pa rot, Grea y Joe’s Diner. Unhelpful extras expressively turning away from silent questions. My feet pounding the shimmering sidewalk, soaked trouser cuffs whipping chilled ankles. Cruising taxicabs, waving windscreen wipers, and the abstract shapes of rain on glass. Bit players lying, denying all knowledge of the man I was after. Through it all the orchestral swell of my music, a purposeful yet melancholy jazz. And, in the end, nothing to show for it.
All I had was a name. A name that closed doors and emptied bars. A name that, spoken aloud, invoked sewn-shut lips, pulled-down shades, drink-up-and-get-out looks, hastily remembered appointments and muttered warnings. Just a name.
Truro Daine.
Back in the world, the name of Truro Daine had plenty of associations. Murderer, arsonist, dope peddler, pornographer, blackmailer, flamboyant thief and a lot of other things,
all unhealthy. Now, he was the last of the escaped convicts. My clients wanted him found, and dragged back to his prison of permanent steel and perishable flesh.
Sounds simple, huh?
There was a catch. The prince of catches. It would floor Dempsey in the first round, keep John Wayne off the beaches of Iwo Jima. The City belonged to Daine. Not just the Mayor and the cops and the courts… the City. Every rainwashed alley, Art Nouveau penthouse, backstreet gin joint and deserted warehouse was his personal property.
Out there in formless dark, where the sidewalk ends, Truro Daine was waiting, a coal-eyed panther in the asphalt jungle. I cupped a palm around the dying end of my smoke, snatching the warmth while it was there. I couldn’t taste tobacco any more. Taste was just one of the senses that had started to let me down.
Earlier, the rain had been heavy, a constant sheet that soaked through my hat and coat, trickling down the back of my neck. Now, it was a fine drizzle, almost invisible, pricking my exposed hand. For some stupid reason, I didn’t have gloves. My hand looked white and dead in the lamplight, smudged only from constant smoking, and felt like a shrivelled skin glove on my aching fingerbones.
A newspaper, folded headline out, slid past in the gutter. It was the Inquirer. G-MEN BUST AXIS SPY RING: VEIDT, SANDERS, ZUCCO INDICTED. Untrustworthy faces peered out from mug shots. Yesterday’s news.
A train shrieked overhead, lights raking the street. It was on schedule, spotlighting rickety fire escapes. In one of the apartments, Edward G. Robinson was strangling a girl. The passing train pixelated the murder. The girl was obviously a cheap floozy. Joan Bennett? She bent backwards out of the window, unable to do more than kick and gurgle. Edward G. was twisting a string of pearls into her throat. The girl lashed out with the last of her strength, knocking over a lamp. A bare wall whitened behind struggling silhouettes.
The train clickiticlicked on, empty as always.
The string broke, and pearls showered past the El, shining like freshly pulled teeth. Edward G. scrambled over the corpse and squeezed onto the fire escape. Rain streamed over his horror-struck, flabby face. His music swelled, faintly audible from the street. He crawled into the clattering cobweb of iron ladders and landings, descending with monkey-like agility.
Dropping the last ten feet, he landed across the alley from me. He was without an overcoat and hat, and his disarrayed suit instantly two-toned with the cascade that fell from the shaking fire escape. He looked at me, panic shivering his jowls. I looked at him. My cigarette went out, and I threw it dead into the water. Edward G. turned and vanished into the night. Two flights up, the rain was falling into the open eyes of the dead girl.
Death. It’s never pretty. Except for Greta Garbo, luminous with consumption.
But this wasn’t my case. The cops could handle it. It wouldn’t be difficult. Either a merciless investigator would badger the apparently harmless Robinson into a confession, harping endlessly on alibis and clues and motives. Or the murderer would be tormented by a nightmare tangle of memories and break down just as they were ready to file the killing under ‘unsolved’. Either way, Eddie G. was already on the last mile. Some things were predictable.
I waited, still wondering where my lead was.
After an age, a limousine slid out of the night, its surfaces rain-blobbed ebony mirrors. I saw myself broken into a million wobbling pieces and had the uncomfortable impression that might be a prophetic image. The headlights flashed as the car turned, dazzling as the naked sun. The giant was impatient, confined to a labyrinth of narrow streets, a raging beast tethered to a steady ten miles an hour. It stopped dead beside me, and growled. The windows were a flat black, the interior as dark as the devil’s heart, except for the rat-like eyes of the man-shape looking out from the back seat.
The front passenger door opened, and Mike Mazurki got out. With his gorilla shoulders crammed into a double-breasted jacket, he looked ready to go fifteen rounds with an enraged moose. His fingers were a bunch of fat white bananas. I had to look twice before noticing the automatic stuck like a child’s toy in his giant fist. He didn’t have any dialogue, but the gun said ‘get into the car’ in fifteen different languages. The back door swung open, and the rat eyes leaned forward into the light. I recognised Dan Duryea. He flashed a smile as full of teeth as a piranha’s.
Mazurki prodded me from behind, and I wound up in the back seat, wedged between the two hoodlums. The gun was still talking, holding a close-up, intimate conversation with my ribcage. I could get to dislike that.
Marc Lawrence was driving. We took the scenic route. Thunder Road, 711 Ocean Drive, 99 River Street, Nightmare Alley, Scarlet Street, the Street of Chance, the House on Telegraph Hill, Flamingo Road…
When we went under streetlamps, Duryea’s slicked-back hair shone. He fancied himself as a sharpie, and wore a thin-striped suit. He was pleased with himself, but everyone in the car knew he had made a wrong decision buying cologne.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked. ‘Will we be long? I promised to take my kid sister to the Philharmonic.’
‘You ask a lot of questions, shamus,’ said Duryea.
I don’t like being called ‘shamus’. It sounds stupid. I also don’t like being called ‘gumshoe’, ‘flatfoot’, ‘dick’, ‘tec’, ‘snooper’, ‘peeper’, ‘cheapie’, ‘the perpetrator’, ‘dead meat’ or ‘Elihu J. Stemwaller’ for related reasons.
‘I have an enquiring mind. A handy thing in my line of work.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Mr Daine don’t like questions so much.’
I refrained from commenting on his grammar. ‘Why not? Doesn’t he have any answers?’
Mazurki held my shoulder. ‘You a wise guy?’
My shoulder hurt. ‘I wasn’t always a detective. I started as a gag writer for Bob Hope. Now I can’t kick the habit.’
‘Funny, huh?’
‘No, not particularly. That’s why I got into this business. The pay’s lousy, the hours stink, you get beaten up every day of the week with an “a” in it, but at least there’s no pressure on you to make jokes all the time.’
‘Wise guy.’
Mazurki disgustedly took his hand away, and my shoulder hurt some more. Duryea giggled, like ice cubes cracking in blood. Maybe Daine had him mixed up with the young Richard Widmark. It’s an easy mistake.
I was tired. That’s the way I tend to feel at half past two in the morning if I’ve been out in the rain for hours and get abducted.
And in the City it was two thirty a.m. for ever. That was late, no matter how I looked at it. I felt like a hungover zombie.
The situation demanded Bogart, but the best I could manage was Boris Karloff. Stretched out on a slab. A few bolts of lightning and I’d be okay, but right now the torch-carrying villagers would have nothing to worry about. I practiced curling my upper lip back in a Bogartian sneer, but couldn’t carry it off.
I looked out the window. Cagney was dying in a gutter, holding his insides in. Glenda Farrell was kneeling by him, explaining to a caped cop with a smoking tommy gun. I couldn’t hear the words, but I recited her dialogue along with her. ‘He used to be a big shot.’ Kiss tomorrow goodbye, Jimmy.
Shit, I thought. But I couldn’t say anything stronger than ‘hell’. The City was getting to me. The Hays Code was invading my mind. I shut my eyes. Sleep was tempting, but I had the feeling the Body Snatchers were in the neighbourhood. My guess was that if 1 were to sleep, I’d wake up changed.
Of course, unless I got to Daine soon, I’d be changed anyway. I had figured that out for myself, without any help from the governor of Princetown. After a few more spins with this crazy croupier, I’d bet away my independence. I’d be a permanent resident. It didn’t appeal as an afterlife: a possible eternity as a private eye in the City. Slugged with blackjacks, kicking in doors, finding icepick-stuck corpses, betrayed by black-lipped blondes. Being beat up, locked up, busted, mistrusted, got at, shot at, framed, maimed, frayed, mislaid and underpaid.
An important lesson: just because it isn’t real doesn’t mean it can’t kill you.
Or worse.
‘You been taking an undue interest in Mr Daine’s affairs, shamus,’ said Duryea. ‘He will be most displeased.’
‘Shamus, shamus, what’s with this “shamus”?’ I snapped back. ‘How would you feel if I kept calling you “torpedo”, “mobster”, “thug”, “gnat-brains”, “gunsel” or “chiseller”?’
‘I wouldn’t like it.’
‘Well, just imagine how I feel.’
‘Ah, but there’s a difference between us.’
‘Which is?’
‘I’m not sitting next to a 200-pound professional wrestler with an automatic held to my kidneys.’
‘You know, Danny, that makes a lot of sense.’
The limousine faded out along Main Street. A fade-out is like hyperspace. It’s supposed to cut out the journey, but really it just rips off a few hours of your life and gives you a skull-cracker of a headache. Me, I’d rather ride the streetcar, but I don’t make the rules.
During the fade, it wasn’t just night outside the car, it was the total darkness of the blind, an endless absence of anything. The sound cut out, but I still had vision. Duryea and Mazurki grinned at each other. Their mouths opened too wide, and their faces distorted like scary clowns. I told myself it wasn’t real. But even if it wasn’t, it felt as if it was. The city demanded you take it seriously, play by the house rules. Otherwise, you could be due for an extended vacation in the Snake Pit. I concentrated on the back of Lawrence’s head, and tried to ignore the deep space beyond the still-waving wipers. The dandruff on the driver’s collar wasn’t very interesting, but at least it wasn’t a threat.
Lawrence took his hands off the wheel and reached behind him, to scratch the back of his head with both hands. His thinning hair parted under his fingers, and a diseased eye winked at me from his scalp.
Cheap trick, I tried to say. But there was no sound.
The limo faded in. The engine and the rain were momentarily deafening.
‘…ick!’ came out of me. Lawrence looked round, sad-eyed, a waxed failure of a moustache clinging to his upper lip, hands back on the wheel. A cigarette dripped from the corner of his mouth.