Hell (5 page)

Hatcher laughs a sharp, ironic laugh at this and takes the cigarette.

Bogey strikes another match. “I don’t expect much from her either,” he says, understanding the laugh in a way that Hatcher now also understands. What can this dame have to say?

Bogey holds the flame to the tip of Hatcher’s cigarette. Hatcher inhales. As with all the everyday earthly physical pleasures, in Hell there is only a niggling disappointment, though occasionally there is, of course, searing pain of one sort or another. With this drag on a cigarette, for Hatcher there is niggling disappointment. Followed by the brief searing pain of feeling like a teenager.

“Let me do the talking,” Bogey says.

Hatcher is suddenly all right. He nips with his thumb and forefinger at the tip of his snap brim. “Right,” he says.

The two men climb the stairs. The light at the landing draws the shadow of the banister posts across their bodies first one way and then, when they turn, the other way, as if they are pacing in their jail cell.

At the fourth floor, their two fedoras come up from the light below and into the dark at the top of the stairs. Hatcher and Bogart stop on the threadbare runner that trails down the center of the corridor. At the far end is a thin slice of light at the bottom of a doorway. Bogey nods toward it. They move to the door and Bogey knocks.

From inside, a woman’s voice says, “Come in.” It’s a high, thin, nasally voice.

Bogey draws a sharp breath. Hatcher looks at him, but his face is a mask of black in the dark corridor. Bogey pushes the door open.

The tenement apartment is one room, simple and seedy, as simple and seedy as a cheap hotel room in some dirty little working-class burg. A sagging couch, a desk, a few chairs, a blank wall where the Murphy bed hides, all of it in colors that don’t even deserve the name “color.” Dingy grays and tans. And rising from a chair in the center of all this is the dame. A tiny body, fragile, chiseled features and dark, feverish eyes. Her lips are scarlet, painted large, like Satan’s own butterfly.

Hatcher and Bogey are standing before the dame and she’s looking at the two of them, one at a time, back and forth, like she’s trying to figure out which one of them is going to throw her over his shoulder and carry her out of a burning building.

Hatcher waits for Bogey to do the talking, but his partner isn’t saying a word. He looks at Bogey, whose face is lambent with repressed anguish, though nobody in the room would know what “lambent” means, even Hatcher at that moment, who is now very much Bogey’s fellow private eye. Hatcher lifts an eyebrow and rolls his shoulders in his wide-lapeled suit, wondering what’s going through his partner’s mind. Bogey doesn’t act like this around dames.

Finally Bogey speaks. “You’re not who you said you were.”

“Who’d I say I was?”

Bogey hesitates. “Nobody.”

“That’s me,” she says.

“You’re not who I thought.”

“I got no control over what you think.”

Abruptly Bogey turns to Hatcher. “You talk to her.” And Bogey heads for the window, which looks out into utter darkness. “I thought she’d be someone else,” he says, low.

Hatcher looks at the dame. She looks at him. She’s wearing a flimsy little flower-print button-front dress, and the buttons are big and dazzling white, just asking to be undone.

Hatcher still doesn’t know his lines, but he’s catching on.

He takes a drag on his cigarette, and being a gentleman, he turns his head slightly, blowing the smoke just past the dame’s right ear. He flips his head at the chair behind her, and she does what she’s told. She sits. Hatcher stands over her, but he parks his Camel in the corner of his mouth, casually brushes his suit coat open, and eases his hands into his trouser pockets. Just to put her a little at ease.

“So?” he says. The cigarette loosens and starts to fall from his mouth.

Hatcher grabs for it.

Meanwhile, Bogey stares into the nothing out the window as if it was something, and the voice in his head speaks:
I thought it was going to be her. I don’t have any reason in this forsaken town to expect anything to turn out right, but somehow I thought it was going to be Baby at last. What a sap I am. Of course this is the way it ends up. You drink a lot. You crack some heads. Even to get her, there was the price of running out on your wife, and then maybe you even run around a little on her, out in the middle of the ocean heading for Catalina. You wouldn’t have done that except for Baby getting seasick and never being able to go with you on the ocean in the boat you enjoy so much. Even if it’s a little screwy, you try to keep a kind of a code about things. And you try to do your job straight. And you’re true to your friends. You give away your last two fingers of bourbon. But you find yourself running into a brick wall. The thing they call your flawed humanity. So you end up in a cheap room in a hot climate and your cigarettes all taste like dust and it looks like you’ve got an extended booking. Still, I wanted it to be Baby real bad. I wanted her to have her back to me when I came through the door and there’s just that thin long body and the rip curls of her dirty blond hair and she waits a beat or two before turning. Baby is Bacall, after all. She has a swell sense of timing. So she turns, and the hair falls a little over her face but you can see both her beautiful eyes, those wide-set eyes, and she gives me that little half smile and we’re together again. That’s what I wanted real bad. I may be a sap but I’m not stupid. I know what I’m wishing for. That Baby is spending eternity in Hell. I should be wanting real bad never to see her again. I should want her to be in Heaven playing a harp and looking swell in a white gown and wings. But I don’t want that. I want her with me. Which probably is why I’m here.

And Hatcher has caught his falling cigarette. But it has tumbled around and the tip of it touches his palm and the fire sears through his eternal skin and into his eternal capitate bone. Hatcher drops the cigarette and grits his teeth against the pain and tries not to cry out. He knows it would ruin the scene. He stays quiet. He’s a trooper. Then abruptly the pain stops, and he’s panting. But the dame doesn’t seem to notice. He takes a deep breath and stubs the cigarette out with the toe of his wing tip brogue.

He starts over. “So?”

The dame shrugs. “You already said that.”

Hatcher shoots his cuffs. “Listen, babe, you got something to say, say it.”

“I need your help,” she says.

“Everybody needs help in this town.”

“I want to get out.”

Hatcher answers her with a short guttural laugh, like hawking up phlegm from the back of the throat.

“Go ahead and laugh, wise guy,” she says. “But there’s a way out.”

“Yeah? Who told you that?”

“My ex-boyfriend.”

“And how does he know?”

“He did it once.”

“So he’s gone?”

“No. He’s back.”

“Why doesn’t he go out again?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he forgot how. Memories are short around here.”

“And there are plenty of liars.”

She shrugs. “That’s why you private dicks stay in business. To sort out the lies.”

“So where is he now?”

“I don’t know. I try to avoid him.”

“I’d think you’d want to stay close. In case he breaks out again.”

“I avoid him.”

“Why?”

“Because whenever I get near him, I have to reach into his chest and pull out his heart, and it bursts into flames, and when it’s done burning, I eat it.”

For a moment, not surprisingly, what film theorists call the “aesthetic distance” has been broken for Hatcher. This is, after all, still Hell.

But before Hatcher can think further about this, Bogey is beside him again. “So you’re that kind of dame, are you?” he says.

The dame rolls her thin shoulders, which makes Hatcher reach inside his coat pocket and pull out a pack of cigarettes. “I guess I am,” she says.

Somewhere far off a police siren wails.

Hatcher pops a cigarette, puts it in his mouth, stuffs the pack—his brand is Lucky Strikes—back into his coat, and he finds matches in a side pocket. He strikes one. He lifts the flame to the tip of his cigarette, and he realizes the conversation has stopped. Both Bogey and the dame are watching him. Hatcher takes the cigarette out of his mouth and turns it around, elegantly, and offers it to the dame. She opens her mouth slightly. Gently he puts the sucking end between her lips. She closes them on the cigarette, and they brush the tip of his finger. He draws his hand away slowly.

“Thanks,” she says, real low.

Hatcher feels a hot tidal wave of unfocused regret wash over him. He aches.

Bogey says, “So you want us to locate this boyfriend and find out what he knows.”

“I just want out,” the dame says, lifting her face and blowing a thin plume of smoke into the shadows above her. “You figure out how.”

“It won’t be easy,” Bogey says.

“If it was easy I’d do it myself,” she says.

“This town,” Bogey says.

“Yeah,” she says.

“The walls have ears,” he says.

“Don’t I know it,” she says.

“So you have to figure somebody already knows you’re trying to blow the joint.”

“Maybe.”

“And he knows we’re supposed to help.”

“I don’t care. I’ll take that chance.”

“But will I?”

Hatcher looks at them. He understands that they’re talking about Satan. A chill passes through him, a physical reaction that’s rare in Hell. It occurs to him that perhaps this whole scene isn’t just another fleeting fabricated form of torture. Perhaps this is Bogey’s ongoing life here, and the dame’s. So why the chill? It’s the newsman’s chill, he realizes. As if there is a story. A big one. A way out. The young woman’s face is angled toward Bogey, partly eclipsed in dark shadow. “What’s your name?” Hatcher asks.

She turns to him, her full face flaring bright. She takes a long drag on the cigarette and blows the smoke out through her nose, never moving her dark eyes—as dark as Anne’s—off his. “Beatrice Portinari,” she says.

“You’re Dante’s girl,” Bogey says.

“In a manner of speaking,” she says.

Hatcher says, “He’s the guy who’s supposed to know a way out?”

“That’s right.”

“He lied,” Hatcher says. Maybe there’s not a story here after all.

Beatrice shrugs. “He’s a poet.”

“He made the whole inferno thing up.”

“But the lies were true,” she says.

Hatcher wags his head at this paradox he has never understood. “That’s why I hate interviewing writers.”

“Down here he’s trying to write a novel,” she says.

Inside Hatcher’s head, he is answering himself:
You understand the journalist’s paradox well enough. That truths can be put together to make a lie.

“Look,” Beatrice says. “He came and he went. You think his fourteenth century audience would have understood the real Hell? You should have seen this place when I arrived. Not that electric lights and the Internet haven’t made things just as bad in their own way. But back then it was a nightmare version of the same life we all already knew. You think Dante could have written about what really goes on? All of us huddled together in the long night in a walled city burning our filthiest rags soaked in animal fat from who knows where and everybody compulsively reciting bad poetry in broken meters. With the smell and the sound of that stuff filling you up, you’d just throw yourself in the Lake of Fire to clear your head. But back in Florence they would’ve laughed that off. That can’t be Hell. That’s just daily life in Siena. Dante gave them the tortures they could believe in. But it was still torture.”

Hatcher feels his newsman’s twitch again. Maybe Dante really knew something. And maybe even the neo-Harrowing thing is related. This little noir scene has quickened him to the possibility of the biggest story in Hell. And he knows to try to turn off his brain, though it may already be too late. Satan is listening.

The police siren is wailing louder now.

Beatrice closes her eyes and pinches her mouth and shakes her head. At first Hatcher thinks she’s just remembering Hell from the old days. But she stands up abruptly, turns, and moves to a door at the end of the room. She throws it open. Inside is a naked old man, his hands racing up and down his body scratching some terrible itch. He is howling like the police siren on about a 1941 Ford.

“Will you shut the fuck up?” Beatrice cries.

The man immediately shuts the fuck up, though his fingers continue to dig furiously at his body.

Beatrice slams the door and returns to her chair and sits.

She shakes her head in disgust. “He won’t say which one, but he claims he’s a pope. Boniface VIII is my guess.”

The room is absolutely silent. There isn’t even the buzz of a silent room in anyone’s ears. Hatcher can’t remember actual silence since he came to Hell. All three of them stir uncomfortably. They all three think they can hear Satan listening.

Then Bogey says, “Fuck you, Old Man.”

Beatrice and Hatcher brace themselves. That will do it. A whirlwind of flaming sulfur will rush through the window now and they’ll have to decompose and recompose in agony for a while and then get back to the old chaos. But the silence goes on. And on.

Beatrice whispers, “See?”

“What?” Hatcher says, low.

“They’d never have understood this.”

“I’m not sure I do either,” Bogey whispers.

Beatrice says, “We’re still alive.”

They all rustle around a little in their skin to verify that.

“So it seems,” Hatcher says.

“That’s the real torture,” Beatrice says. “Just that.”

Bogey says, “You’ve been eating too many flaming hearts, sister.”

“Get me out of here,” she says.

“We’ll do what we can,” Bogey says. He looks at Hatcher and nods toward the door.