Brooklyn Noir [2] The Classics

by Tim McLoughlin

  This collection is comprised of works of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Akashic Books

  ©2005 Tim McLoughlin

  Brooklyn map by Sohrab Habibion

  ISBN-13: 978-1-888451-76-4

  e-ISBN: 9781617752124

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2004115735

  All rights reserved

  Second printing

  AKASHIC BOOKS

  PO Box 1456, New York, NY 10009

  info@akashicbooks.com, www.akashicbooks.com

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the stories in this anthology. “The Best-Friend Murder” by Donald E. Westlake was originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine (December 1959), © 1959 by Donald E. Westlake; “Luck Be a Lady” by Maggie Estep was originally published on Nerve.com (2004); “By the Dawn’s Early Light” by Lawrence Block was originally published in Playboy Magazine (August 1984); “The Horror at Red Hook” by H.P. Lovecraft was originally published in Weird Tales Volume #9 (January 1927), reprinted by permission of Arkham House Publishers, Inc. and Arkham House’s agent, JABberwocky Literary Agency; “Tralala” by Hubert Selby, Jr. was originally published in Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby, Jr. (Grove Press, 1957), © 1957 by Hubert Selby, Jr., reprinted by permission of SLL/Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc.; “The Boys of Bensonhurst” by Salvatore La Puma was originally published in The Boys of Bensonhurst by Salvatore La Puma (University of Georgia Press, 1987), © 1987 by Salvatore La Puma; “Borough of Cemeteries” by Irwin Shaw was originally published in the New Yorker (August 13, 1938), © 1938 by Irwin Shaw; “Steelwork” is an excerpt from Steelwork by Gilbert Sorrentino, orginally published in 1970 by Pantheon Books, © 1970 by Gilbert Sorrentino; “Men in Black Raincoats” by Pete Hamill was originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (December 1977), © 1977 by Pete Hamill, reprinted by permission of the author.

  It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,

  The dark threw its patches down upon me also

  —Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  PART I: OLD SCHOOL BROOKLYN

  H.P. LOVECRAFT Red Hook

  The Horror at Red Hook

  IRWIN SHAW Brownsville

  Borough of Cemeteries

  MAGGIE ESTEP Kensington

  Luck Be a Lady

  PART II: COPS & ROBBERS

  LAWRENCE BLOCK Sunset Park

  By the Dawn’s Early Light

  DONALD E. WESTLAKE Park Slope

  The Best-Friend Murder

  PETE HAMILL South Slope

  The Men in Black Raincoats

  PART III: WARTIME BROOKLYN

  HUBERT SELBY, JR. South Brooklyn

  Tralala

  SALVATORE LA PUMA Bensonhurst

  The Boys of Bensonhurst

  GILBERT SORRENTINO Bay Ridge

  Steelwork

  About the Contributors

  INTRODUCTION

  SHAKEN, NOT STIRRED

  When I first proposed what ultimately became the crime-fiction anthology Brooklyn Noir to my publisher, Johnny Temple, he seemed intrigued, and asked a series of questions for which I was not prepared. How do you see it coming together? New stories or reprints? Strictly conventional crime? How would you pick the neighborhoods where the stories would be set?

  I’d presented the concept as it popped into my head, in a fairly offhanded manner, and frankly, I didn’t have the answers. As I riffed and winged it, as he embraced some ideas and rejected others, the book began to take shape. We batted these and more questions around over the next few weeks, and compiled a dream list of contributors. After the first few writers agreed to craft original stories for the book, we decided that we would request new stories from all participants, written specifically for the volume. To me the book grew, almost organically, from there. A number of names from the list signed on, other writers heard about the anthology and submitted work, and I was able to include four stories from writers who had not been previously published. It became exactly the book I’d dreamed of when I pitched it, half-formed in my mind’s eye.

  But. There was a price to pay. By going with original pieces, I lost all the great stories that had given me the idea for such a book in the first place. I still wanted to collect tales that I felt had fallen between the cracks of time, or had never been grouped geographically, to paint the ominous portrait that I saw lurking behind every laundromat, nail salon, and Starbucks.

  The success of Brooklyn Noir, launched in the summer of 2004, surpassed all expectations, I’m pleased to say. One story from the collection received an Edgar Award nomination, another was a Pushcart Prize finalist, and yet another won the Mystery Writers of America’s Robert L. Fish Memorial Award. Two more were selected for inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories 2005. With my head properly swelled, I found myself once again on the phone with Johnny, riffing and winging it. So, here we are.

  Working on this volume has been a different task than the first, in that there was little interaction, from an editorial point of view, with the writers, some of whom are deceased. This time I felt more like an archeologist, mining volumes old and new, looking for treasure. The rule for the first Brooklyn Noir had been that each story had to be previously unpublished. Here, just the opposite. Brooklyn Noir 2 stories had to have been printed somewhere else before they hit the doorstep. That was about the only difference. I tried again to capture the special dread, tension, and solid writing that good dark fiction possesses. The scary feeling of watching the average Joe getting in over his head, or accidentally brushing up against something sinister on the way to work.

  Figuring how to order the stories was an issue that resolved itself almost immediately. When I scanned the contents page in manuscript form, I was surprised to see that the first three categories from the original Brooklyn Noir applied, and the pieces were easy to assign accordingly. The fourth and final section in the first volume was “Backwater Brooklyn”—overlooked or forgotten neighborhoods. This time around, the stories in the last section all fall under the ominous shadow of World War II–era America. The image of a Brooklyn soldier—always a great dancer; often reading his love letters aloud to the rest of the company—was ubiquitous in classic war movies. My mother, a teenager during the war, told me that every block in her neighborhood, Sunset Park, had at least one “gold-star” family with a banner hanging in their window signifying a child lost in combat. It wasn’t unusual to have three or more gold stars on a single street.

  In the introduction to the first Brooklyn Noir, I said that what the writers captured brilliantly was the language of the borough, and that goes for this volume as well. Each story is a slice of neighborhood that rings true, whether the time machine has taken you back one year or eight decades. And, as in the first book, the tales cross all boundaries of past and present, well-known and unknown neighborhoods, literary and genre traditions. It all goes into that great cocktail shaker that is Brooklyn. As editor, I have the pleasure of picking the ingredients, mixing them, and serving them to you. And that makes me the luckiest bartender in the world. Enjoy.

  Tim McLoughlin

  Brooklyn, New York

  May 2005

  PART I

  OLD SCHOOL BROOKLYN

  THE HORROR AT RED HOOK

  BY

  H.P. LOVECRAFT

  Red Hook

  (Originally published in 1927)

 
There are sacraments of evil as well as of good about us, and we live and move to my belief in an unknown world, a place where there are caves and shadows and dwellers in twilight. It is possible that man may sometimes return on the track of evolution, and it is my belief that an awful lore is not yet dead.

  —Arthur Machen

  I

  Not many weeks ago, on a street corner in the village of Pascoag, Rhode Island, a tall, heavily built, and wholesome-looking pedestrian furnished much speculation by a singular lapse of behaviour. He had, it appears, been descending the hill by the road from Chepachet; and encountering the compact section, had turned to his left into the main thoroughfare where several modest business blocks convey a touch of the urban. At this point, without visible provocation, he committed his astonishing lapse; staring queerly for a second at the tallest of the buildings before him, and then, with a series of terrified, hysterical shrieks, breaking into a frantic run which ended in a stumble and fall at the next crossing. Picked up and dusted off by ready hands, he was found to be conscious, organically unhurt, and evidently cured of his sudden nervous attack. He muttered some shamefaced explanations involving a strain he had undergone, and with downcast glance turned back up the Chepachet road, trudging out of sight without once looking behind him. It was a strange incident to befall so large, robust, normal-featured, and capable-looking a man, and the strangeness was not lessened by the remarks of a bystander who had recognised him as the boarder of a well-known dairyman on the outskirts of Chepachet.

  He was, it developed, a New York police detective named Thomas F. Malone, now on a long leave of absence under medical treatment after some disproportionately arduous work on a gruesome local case which accident had made dramatic. There had been a collapse of several old brick buildings during a raid in which he had shared, and something about the wholesale loss of life, both of prisoners and of his companions, had peculiarly appalled him. As a result, he had acquired an acute and anomalous horror of any buildings even remotely suggesting the ones which had fallen in, so that in the end mental specialists forbade him the sight of such things for an indefinite period. A police surgeon with relatives in Chepachet had put forward that quaint hamlet of wooden Colonial houses as an ideal spot for the psychological convalescence; and thither the sufferer had gone, promising never to venture among the brick-lined streets of larger villages till duly advised by the Woonsocket specialist with whom he was put in touch. This walk to Pascoag for magazines had been a mistake, and the patient had paid in fright, bruises, and humiliation for his disobedience.

  So much the gossips of Chepachet and Pascoag knew; and so much also, the most learned specialists believed. But Malone had at first told the specialists much more, ceasing only when he saw that utter incredulity was his portion. Thereafter, he held his peace, protesting not at all when it was generally agreed that the collapse of certain squalid brick houses in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, and the consequent death of many brave officers, had unseated his nervous equilibrium. He had worked too hard, all said, in trying to clean up those nests of disorder and violence; certain features were shocking enough, in all conscience, and the unexpected tragedy was the last straw. This was a simple explanation which everyone could understand, and because Malone was not a simple person, he perceived that he had better let if suffice. To hint to unimaginative people of a horror beyond all human conception—a horror of houses and blocks and cities leprous and cancerous with evil dragged from elder worlds—would be merely to invite a padded cell instead of a restful rustication, and Malone was a man of sense despite his mys-ticism. He had the Celt’s far vision of weird and hidden things, but the logician’s quick eye for the outwardly unconvincing; an amalgam which had led him far afield in the forty-two years of his life, and set him in strange places for a Dublin University man born in a Georgian villa near Phoenix Park.

  And now, as he reviewed the things he had seen and felt and apprehended, Malone was content to keep unshared the secret of what could reduce a dauntless fighter to a quivering neurotic; what could make old brick slums and seas of dark, subtle faces a thing of nightmare and eldritch portent. It would not be the first time his sensations had been forced to hide uninterpreted—for was not his very act of plunging into the polyglot abyss of New York’s underworld a freak beyond sensible explanation? What could he tell the prosaic of the antique witcheries and grotesque marvels discernible to sensitive eyes amidst the poison cauldron where all the varied dregs of unwholesome ages mix their venom and perpetuate their obscene terrors? He had seen the hellish green flame of secret wonder in this blatant, evasive welter of outward greed and inward blasphemy, and had smiled gently when all the New Yorkers he knew scoffed at his experiment in police work. They had been very witty and cynical, deriding his fantastic pursuit of unknowable mysteries and assuring him that in these days New York held nothing but cheapness and vulgarity. One of them had wagered him a heavy sum that he could not—despite many poignant things to his credit in the Dublin Review—even write a truly interesting story of New York low life; and now, looking back, he perceived that cosmic irony had justified the prophet’s words while secretly confuting their flippant meaning. The horror, as glimpsed at last, could not make a story—for like the book cited by Poe’s German authority, “es lasst sich nicht lesen—it does not permit itself to be read.”

  II

  To Malone the sense of latent mystery in existence was always present. In youth he had felt the hidden beauty and ecstasy of things, and had been a poet; but poverty and sorrow and exile had turned his gaze in darker directions, and he had thrilled at the imputations of evil in the world around. Daily life had for him come to be a phantasmagoria of macabre shadow-studies; now glittering and leering with concealed rottenness as in Beardsley’s best manner, now hinting terrors behind the commonest shapes and objects as in the subtler and less obvious work of Gustave Doré. He would often regard it as merciful that most persons of high intelligence jeer at the inmost mysteries; for, he argued, if superior minds were ever placed in fullest contact with the secrets preserved by ancient and lowly cults, the resultant abnormalities would soon not only wreck the world, but threaten the very integrity of the universe. All this reflection was no doubt morbid, but keen logic and a deep sense of humour ably offset it. Malone was satisfied to let his notions remain as half-spied and forbidden visions to be lightly played with; and hysteria came only when duty flung him into a hell of revelation too sudden and insidious to escape.

  He had for some time been detailed to the Butler Street station in Brooklyn when the Red Hook matter came to his notice. Red Hook is a maze of hybrid squalor near the ancient waterfront opposite Governor’s Island, with dirty highways climbing the hill from the wharves to that higher ground where the decayed lengths of Clinton and Court Streets lead off toward the Borough Hall. Its houses are mostly of brick, dating from the first quarter to the middle of the nineteenth century, and some of the obscurer alleys and byways have that alluring antique flavour which conventional reading leads us to call “Dickensian.” The population is a hopeless tangle and enigma; Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and negro elements impinging upon one another, and fragments of Scandinavian and American belts lying not far distant. It is a babel of sound and filth, and sends out strange cries to answer the lapping of oily waves at its grimy piers and the monstrous organ litanies of the harbour whistles. Here long ago a brighter picture dwelt, with clear-eyed mariners on the lower streets and homes of taste and substance where the larger houses line the hill. One can trace the relics of this former happiness in the trim shapes of the buildings, the occasional graceful churches, and the evidences of original art and background in bits of detail here and there—a worn flight of steps, a battered doorway, a wormy pair of decorative columns of pilasters, or a fragment of once green space with bent and rusted iron railing. The houses are generally in solid blocks, and now and then a many-windowed cupola arises to tell of days when the households of captains and ship-owners watched the sea.
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br />   From this tangle of material and spiritual putrescence the blasphemies of an hundred dialects assail the sky. Hordes of prowlers reel shouting and singing along the lanes and thoroughfares, occasional furtive hands suddenly extinguish lights and pull down curtains, and swarthy, sin-pitted faces disappear from windows when visitors pick their way through. Policemen despair of order or reform, and seek rather to erect barriers protecting the outside world from the contagion. The clang of the patrol is answered by a kind of spectral silence, and such prisoners as are taken are never communicative. Visible offences are as varied as the local dialects, and run the gamut from the smuggling of rum and prohibited aliens through diverse stages of lawlessness and obscure vice to murder and mutilation in their most abhorrent guises. That these visible affairs are not more frequent is not to the neighbourhood’s credit, unless the power of concealment be an art demanding credit. More people enter Red Hook than leave it—or at least, than leave it by the landwardside—and those who are not loquacious are the likeliest to leave.

  Malone found in this state of things a faint stench of secrets more terrible than any of the sins denounced by citizens and bemoaned by priests and philanthropists. He was conscious, as one who united imagination with scientific knowledge, that modern people under lawless conditions tend uncannily to repeat the darkest instinctive patterns of primitive half-ape savagery in their daily life and ritual observances; and he had often viewed with an anthropologist’s shudder the chanting, cursing processions of blear-eyed and pockmarked young men which wound their way along in the dark small hours of morning. One saw groups of these youths incessantly; sometimes in leering vigils on street corners, sometimes in doorways playing eerily on cheap instruments of music, sometimes in stupefied dozes or indecent dialogues around cafeteria tables near Borough Hall, and sometimes in whispering converse around dingy taxicabs drawn up at the high stoops of crumbling and closely shuttered old houses. They chilled and fascinated him more than he dared confess to his associates on the force, for he seemed to see in them some monstrous thread of secret continuity; some fiendish, cryptical, and ancient pattern utterly beyond and below the sordid mass of facts and habits and haunts listed with such conscientious technical care by the police. They must be, he felt inwardly, the heirs of some shocking and primordial tradition; the sharers of debased and broken scraps from cults and ceremonies older than mankind. Their coherence and definiteness suggested it, and it showed in the singular suspicion of order which lurked beneath their squalid disorder. He had not read in vain such treatises as Miss Murray’s Witch Cult in Western Europe; and knew that up to recent years there had certainly survived among peasants and furtive folk a frightful and clandestine system of assemblies and orgies descended from dark religions antedating the Aryan world, and appearing in popular legends as Black Masses and Witches’ Sabbaths. That these hellish vestiges of old Turanian–Asiatic magic and fertility-cults were even now wholly dead he could not for a moment suppose, and he frequently wondered how much older and how much blacker than the very worst of the muttered tales some of them might really be.