Noir (4 page)

WHILE BLANCHE CHASED DOWN THE WILL AND INSURance policy, you stretched out on the office sofa to think things out. You seemed to be following clues that led nowhere. Which became the pursuit of a criminal with five legs, only three of them human. When you woke up it was dark and you didn’t know where you were. The blinking neon light outside the window, however, was a useful hint. It had a short and made a stuttery buzzing sound like bugs hitting an electric screen. Electrocution. Pest control. Once you woke up in an electrocution chamber. This was a different case. A member of the mob who was electrocuted for murder later turned up on the streets. About that same time, the warden left for Brazil. The hood killed some people but they said he couldn’t be prosecuted because he was already dead. A double? Or funny business at the death house? A rival mobster hired you to find out. You snuck in to check the circuits. Hit the wrong wire.

So, alone in your darkened office, that’s where you were. Where you feel most at home. You have a bedsit somewhere, but mostly you eat and sleep here when you’re not being entertained by some dame. It’s a place where you can pick your nose, scratch your itches, fart your farts. Which, on the occasion, stretched out there in the dark after a daylong nap, you did. You lifted your butt off the cushions and let fly. That’s better, you said aloud.

I’m sure it is.

You were not alone. There was someone sitting in the shadows. Your client, the generous widow. You didn’t know whether to apologize, let another, or change the subject. Tell me about your father, you said.

Well, that’s what I came to talk about, Mr. Noir. There was something I didn’t tell you. Although my father was a loving father who doted on my mother, my brother, and me, he could be hard on us when we misbehaved. Like many in our little town, he had a rather pure Biblical notion of obedience, which was sometimes difficult for us to live up to. I was his favorite and fared better than my brother who was, I must say, quite terrified of him. And as we were obliged to witness each other’s punishment as a kind of deterrent, I quite understood his terror and, on his behalf, shared it. But after you received your due and thanked him for it, he was always forgiving and hugged you tenderly to his bosom and gave you candy from the drugstore, making you promise not to disappoint him again. But of course we always did. In the town park, they sold popcorn and cotton candy on Sundays; he often took us there, it was so nice. And one day, when I was a little girl, walking past the wooden bandstand with him, I saw a thin pale rubbery thing like a dead worm. Or, rather, what appeared to be the empty skin of a worm like the skins molted by snakes. I let go his hand and reached down and picked it up, and my father slapped it fiercely out of my hands and smacked the side of my head so hard I flew against the side of the bandstand. When the tears flowed, he cuddled me and apologized and promised to show me a clean one and what they were really for. And it turned out they were in fact a little as I had imagined.

Aha. I have it, you said. When he threw you out, it was not out of righteous anger. He was jealous. Your father was your first lover.

Of course not! You have an evil imagination, Mr. Noir!

Not really. I just borrowed it.

You sat up and yawned and tapped out a fag. And your brother?

But she was gone. You worried you’d just lost another client. But there was another roll of bills on your desk, with the note:
Are you protecting me, Mr. Noir?

YOU WERE NOT. IT WAS TIME TO FACE UP TO MISTER BIG. But if you found him, tailed him, uncovered a plot, what? No way to reach the widow, you’d failed to ask for an address or phone number. Your notorious impatience with details. It’s why you need Blanche. Rats had told you her name, you’d paid him for it, but you had forgotten it. All you could remember was the butt ground under Rats’ three-inch heel and Flame’s deicer. That kind of night.

You phoned your pal Snark, your inside feed in Blue’s unit, and asked him to meet you at the Star Diner. The Diner doesn’t have a liquor license, but for those in the know, they keep whiskey in the milk dispenser. Snark is a heavy drinker and usually after five or six mugfuls he starts opening up. The trick is to keep up with him. Waiting for him, you ordered up a bowl of chili, a fresh doughnut, and a mug of black coffee. If pressed, you’d have to admit you prefer the cooking in here to the fancy spread at Loui’s. You’d just got paid. You could have two doughnuts. One of them jelly-filled. Another of Snark’s soft spots, you could share it with him. He likes to dip them in his whiskey. You also ordered up several glasses of ice water and put them down as fortification for the night ahead.

When he arrived, you got him jawing about his family, station gossip (Blue was suffering a violent case of redhot hemorrhoids and was making life hell for everyone), tips on the horses, and recent crimes, mostly of the gory sort, Snark’s particular métier. Snark has an unusual family. A pair of Siamese twins for kids and a wife who’s a professional contortionist. She was working up an nightclub act with the twins that Snark said he hoped would be big enough to allow him to retire from the force. When he’s tanked enough, Snark will describe all the positions his wife can get into. Snark himself can’t touch his toes, even with his knees bent.

After a few (it was getting ugly, he was talking about the positions the twins could get into), you told him the widow’s tale and showed him the piece of paper.

That’s deep shit, he said, and took another slug from his mug of whiskey. Outside, an old panhandler with long white hair and beard was pressing his bulbous nose against the window, gazing hauntingly in upon your conversation. You’d often seen him out there, he was part of the scenery in his old weathered topcoat and rumpled fedora, unwashed gray-black clothing held together with frayed sashweight cord. Hunched shoulders, caved-in chest, his limp beard down to his belt, plastic bags full of dustbin debris, a living piece of the inner city. More or less living. He often had something poetical to say, like I got the city inside me, mister, it’s weighin’ me down and suckin’ up all my brain juice, or I seen a bird today with a broken wing and a cat et it and a car hit the cat. Who is this broad? Snark asked.

Her name? I don’t know. I learned it and then I unlearned it. You tapped your own whiskey mug in explanation. You realized you’d spotted your tie with the chili. Not the first time. It’s why you wear patterned ties. Her husband killed himself. Or was killed.

I think I know the case. He drowned himself. With his feet in concrete.

I think it was a shooting.

Well, maybe he drowned himself, and
then
shot himself. Or vice versa. I’m sure it was him.

What I need to know, Snark, you said, scraping at your tie, is how do I get to Mister Big?

Well, he has a weakness for pedicures.

I don’t do toenails.

Also toy soldiers.

Toy soldiers?

Yeah, they tell me his office walls are lined with glass cases full of them. He dresses up and plays out battles on his billiard table.

Hmm. Any specialty?

Medieval. He digs the Dark Ages.

WHEN SNARK LEFT, YOU BOUGHT A DOUGHNUT DIPPED IN pink sugar and took it out to the old panhandler. He tipped his crumpled fedora and, staring up at you with watery blue eyes curtained by long strands of dirty white hair, said: They was a woman had a dog that done tricks. The dog got sick and died and the woman got sick and died. Don’t know which come first. But no one remembers the tricks the dog done. Just me. If you ever need to know, mister, just ask me. He put the pink doughnut in one of his plastic bags and shuffled away. Was he going to eat the doughnut? Sell it? Bury it? Where was he going? What else was in his bags? On a hunch, you followed him. What were you thinking? That he might reveal something about the city that you didn’t know. Something that would be a kind of clue. On the principle that opposites attract, you thought, he might even lead you to Mister Big. Why not. Besides, you were restless. You’d slept all day, drunk too much, needed to walk it off. Snark was heavy duty.

The old panhandler’s route was a twisty one down bleak abandoned streets, ever narrower, darker, and more labyrinthine. A wind was blowing down them, chasing scraps of rag and newspaper, causing signs and hanging lamps to squeal and sway. Sometimes all you could see were the blown newspapers and the panhandler’s long white hair and beard flowing along in the shadows. There seemed no pattern to his wanderings, though he stopped at each trashbin and poked around, so maybe he was making his nightly rounds. Doing his collections, straightening up the city, he the only feeble sign of life within it. You’d been trailing along and no longer knew where you were. Didn’t matter. Though you wished you’d remembered to pack heat, you were at home nowhere and anywhere. And there was something about these dark nameless streets going nowhere that resonated with your inner being. The desolation. The bitterness. The repugnant underbelly of existence. Well, you’d eaten too fast. The doughnuts and chili hadn’t settled well. As the old fellow stooped over some gutter refuse, you stepped into a doorway, cupped your hands around a struck match, lit up. You smelled something familiar. And then the lights went out.

THE CITY AS BELLYACHE. THE URBAN NIGHTMARE AS AN expression of the vile bleak life of the inner organs. The sinister rumblings of the gut. Why we build cities the way we do. Why we love them the way they are even when they’re dirty.
Because
they’re dirty. Pissed upon, spat upon. Meaningless and deadly. We can relate to that. Here’s a principle: The body is always sick. Even when it’s well, or thinks it is. Cells are eating cells. It’s all about digestion. Or indigestion. What in the city we call corruption. Eaters eating the eaten. Mostly in the tumultuous dark. It’s a nasty fight to the finish and everybody loses. Cities laid out on grids? The grid’s just an overlay. Like graph paper. The city itself, inside, is all roiling loops and curves. Bubbling with a violent emptiness. You have often pondered this, especially after suppers at the Star Diner. You were pondering it that night when some semblance of consciousness returned. Pondering is not the word. Your buffeted mind, its shell sapped, was incapable of pondering. It was more like an imageless dream about pain and the city. Almost imageless. You were being dragged through an old film projector. Your mazy crime-ridden gut was on view somewhere. Your sprocket holes were catching, tearing. Your head was caught in the mechanism. Fade out.