Not a pastiche, definitely not a pastiche.
A piece of Dublin Noir
Homage
I am flat broke, hungry,
friendless and about as happy as I’ve ever felt.
As I pass a pack of dogs cower
before slinking up alleys to restore their pride tormenting whiskey-reeking
bundles of rags that once were men, an old woman blesses herself before placing
a cadaverous hand protectively across her mottled throat and a kid snivels in
fear before burying his snot-nose into the soft furred hem of his mother’s
winter coat.
I may be smiling.
I snaffle my reflection in the
moral pub’s window and validate my hypothesis. My hairless head is a transparent
moon inhabited by reflected patrons. Space pioneers drink Guinness!
I filter them out and search
my face unencumbered. I see the damage inflicted. My eyes are yellowed specks at
the bottom of mine shafts deep and dark as an old fairy-tale. My red-ribboned cheeks
are Asian river deltas as seen from space. I trace my finger along the fresh
scar that is the main trunk. It’s fitting right in, making friendly with its
new neighbours. My lips are freshly swollen and curl up on one side, Elvis-like
and unnatural. I’ll heal, Elvis only hurt. Courtesy of a surgical fist, my nose
signals a permanent left.
I’ve looked better.
Maybe.
The glass echoes a movement to
my right. A small guy, twenty-something, with a face that’s proof God works
early Mondays, is mincing his way toward me. I step from the doorway and into
his life. If he resents the intrusion he has the manners not to show it, much.
I peddle the truth. I tell him
I’m hungry and dependent on the kindness of strangers happening by - small
males preferred - to help me out.
He swallows something which
might be his tongue and, as smart as he is ugly, reaches for his wallet and not
for his pocket where worthless coins anxiously await new homes in bums’ greasy
palms.
The guy’s more talented than
Gerry Ford. He does two things at once, offers me a ten and a hopeful look.
I smile and he shrugs for
trying. Hands twinkle like a street magician’s and the ten is a fifty.
I accept.
I palm the note and solemnly
release him back into society.
Minutes later I step into
Al’s steakhouse. There is not and never has been an Al. Starting out the
cheapskate owner hired a sign-writer who charged by the letter. As with the
sign, so with the food. I take a seat some bug-eyed guy who’s late for an
appointment donates me, push his half-eaten meal to one side and sit and wait
for service that is as slow in coming as a high-strung lady I’d banged years
back. Quieter too.
Other than the décor, the
staff and the menu the place hasn’t changed a bit. It feels like home. It’s
quiet. The patrons do little other than sneak looks my way, as if trying to
place me. I’m used to it. I ignore them.
As I wait, I think.
Of late I’ve let things slip.
I know hustling strangers isn’t the smart way to seed a pension. I know I’ve
got to get back into the game. I tell myself I need a case and a client, quick.
I understand also that I need the action as much as the dough.
I think about me.
Right back to the beginning.
I discovered Chandler and
Hammett my last year in school. I quit, devoted my life to them and the detectives
they wrote about, Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. I wanted to be, I have become, them,
both of them. Sam Marlowe. My name chose itself since Marlowe hadn’t liked his nancy-boy
first name and I don’t like jazz. I model everything in my life on these, my
heroes, which means among other things that my eel juice of choice is Bourbon,
straight up. I only drink on special occasions. Whenever I have a bottle.
I’ve stripped back everything
until my life is as sparse as the writers’ prose. I’ve studied their idioms and
copied their accents the way I imagined them to be. I know their methods better
than the detectives themselves. I have the advantage. They’d had to play it as
it came, I have their body of work to study, imbibe, inhale and, if it were possible,
inject. I know “The Books” well enough to read them with my fingerprints.
I am slipping.
I don’t have any of The Books
with me. Not one.
Strange!
I tolerate the movie treatments
but spurn their portrayals in favour of The Books the way a true believer trusts
the bible and not some corrupted priest’s flawed interpretation. My life is
homage to the two greatest detectives who ever lived. They did live. I know for
a fact that Hammett and Chandler were their biographers and not their creators.
How do I know? In the same way that true believers know Elvis is still alive - through
unbending unbreakable faith. It’s the only rational explanation. Marlowe and
Spade are too perfect and too real to only have lived in the imaginations of
two dypsos.
I apologise.
I should not disrespect
Hammett and Chandler like that.
Even if that is what they
were.
I know that to be them I need
to think and act like them. I don’t and can’t look like them. I know that, in
any case, Chandler and Hammett had described them inaccurately to protect their
true identities. It is the smart play, the deal I’d go for, if ever I chose a
sidekick to be my Watson or my Boswell.
I don’t need to recreate. I
don’t need to move to LA or back in time. I live in a Dublin that’s the
spiritual heir to L.A. at the time of writing.
Dublin’s a conflation of
Double Sin. Spade and Marlowe would have fitted right in.
Like thirties LA it too
expands at the speed of money – fast. The city’s awash with easy cash endlessly
emerging from the vacuous consciences of two-bit politicos. It is louche and
loathsome. Its manners, like its endless new buildings, are high-risible. It is
a dark hole sucking in goodness and dreams. It is a city so defiantly proud of
its image that its streets are ornately paved with credit card slips entombed
in vomit like insects in amber.
Its crime lords sport Armani while
killing hope and, sometimes, each other. Its politicians and their police
protectors here and now are as corrupt and allergic to truth as they were there
and then. They are untouchable, hiding behind the inarguable defence of their own
incompetence and societal greed. You get what you bribe for.
Marlowe’s Hollywood had real
actors. In Dublin everyone’s acting a part someone else has written for them.
They’re wannabes and wanna-anythings. Everyone’s living ‘The Life’ swapping their
happi-ness for hype-ness with the smoothness of a crack mother selling her baby
for a score. They sell their souls, build their stake and trade their smiles and
their shamrocks for Cecil, Sin and Sex.
Ten years of depravity have undone
a thousand years of piety. Jesus is not risen here. The Pope’s visa’s been
revoked. The law is the engine of change, money its fuel. Gambling, erotica and
divorce are no longer denied. They are compulsory.
Dublin is the Capital of
consumerism, corruption, crack, craziness and crime.
I love it.
My meal arrives. Steak rare,
greens and a baked potato, coffee black.
The girl who serves it has confused
craic and crack for the same lifestyle choice, her smile as heartfelt and
genuine as a paedophilic priest’s vocation. She’s learned to her cost that the
Irish are truly the friendliest of people, our friendly pushers the friendliest
of all. She is thin, tall, thirtyish, Eastern European and so pale you can tell
she’s snorted away her place in the sun. Her hair is long, brown and lank and
as filthy as the frayed apron that adorns her threadbare body. Beneath the
apron she wears an old and tattered pink woollen top and drab navy skirt that are
the latest in back-alley-skip prêt-a-porter. She is the epitome of heroin chic.
She is nervous, fidgety and craves her fix.
From her delicate hands my saucered
cup crash lands onto the table like a poorly piloted UFO that’s shed half its
load en-route. Head to the floor she follows the spilt coffee’s guiding trail
back to the kitchen as if that were its purpose.
I’m not sure why but I’ve not
been here for a while.
It is as good and as bad as I
remember.
I finish my meal. The ghost girl
brings the check. Either I haven’t paid much attention to prices lately or the
sign needs repainting. I leave the fifty on the table. It’s not that she’s earned
it or that I’m a big tipper, the suit I’m wearing is an avant-garde two-piece absent pockets. The
girl misreads the gesture and flicks her eyes toward the storeroom out back as
if she’s never earned this much money upright. I shake my head. It’s all yours
babe. Her eyes plead insistent. She’s so desperate for a sugar daddy she’s
considering me! A dame, especially this one, would cramp my style. I crack a
smile and break her heart.
I stand and filch a look at
my neighbour’s newspaper. Like the city, the papers have regressed to the style
extant L.A. in the thirties.
The headline screams like a
tortured blonde in a darkened mansion. “Madman Escapes. Police Issue
Warning”.
On instinct I grab the paper.
The man seems to be choking on something he’s eaten. He waves his hands wildly
and I take this as permission to tuck the paper under my arm. I walk out of
Al’s.
I head for a small park
nearby - a city centre oasis of green beloved of worthless old people with no
say - that is some shyster developer’s bastard offspring’s trust fund. I sit on
a bench and read. The headline is truly a throwback. There are no longer any
madmen. They were all wiped out in the great political correctness plague that
swept through in the eighties and now there are only psychotics, schizophrenics
and bipolar manic depressives.
The article is less
hysterical than the headline. The madman escaped custody this morning en-route to
court to answer to a murder rap. Seems in the nuthouse he’d killed a warder/nurse
who’d been using him for punch-bag practice. I touch my recent scar sympathetic.
The mad bastard killed his two escorts with his bare hands, battering them to
death with his fists and horribly disfiguring them in the process.
I bin the paper excited. I’ve
taken cases like this. When I’d run low on money and clients I’d search for a
case, something that offered an angle. I’d investigate on my own slate and tap
whoever I could later. It’s a hard way to make an easy living but I am only
doing my job, just following my vocation, just being Sam Marlowe.
Sam Spade and particularly
Marlowe had integrity. I struggle every day to be worthy of their name. They weren’t
just tough men who took a beating on one page and wisecracked through their
pain on the next. They turned their pain to their advantage; used it as a
ladder to scale the moral heights and laugh down at the bad guys. They only hit
men, never women. They took their beatings like the ring champions they could
have been in another life. They never backed off.
They did what they did not
because they were heroes but because they were men. Good men. Honest men. Men
who wouldn’t take a nickel unless they had earned it…or were starving.
They were men who drank so
much not because they had to but because they understood that it was only by being
down in the gutter that you can appreciate being up with the angels.
They did what needed doing in
the interests of justice. They would have taken this case. I’d take this case.
I’d worry about payment later.
I tune my mind fully into my
case. From long experience I know that to catch this guy I’ll have to think
like him. The cops are wasting their time and manpower watching everywhere a
man could be and issuing pointless warnings to a strung-out self-obsessed uncaring
populace.
Hell, the guy could be
walking around in full view and no one would notice him!
I’ll take a different
approach. Since it is news that he has escaped I reason there will be old reports
on how he’d been caught, and for what.
I hit the local library thinking
it’s a safe thing to do. I’ve done it before and it’s never hit back. Until
today.
I like to read though mostly
I stick with the Authors. One time I read Ellroy and ended up in hospital. The
way he laid the words down on the page hurt me. His words were nails driven
into my skull, from the inside. He’d surprised and impressed as well as
terrified me since I knew that he’d had to write with second-hand words normally
dulled in the recycling process. I’d pictured him sharpening them one by one
before firing them, ratatatatat, onto the page.
I’d checked myself out when the
Doc convinced me he wasn’t firing them at me.
More crack whore than Miss
Maples, the librarian’s pornographic proof that the world grows ever weirder.
The joint is jumping, quietly, and she’s the main event. Around her, erectile
men sit awkward and uncomfortable or stand swapping feet trying to pretend they’re
not holding a number to a gang bang. The guy at the front wears the widest
smile, the guy at the end frowns resigned like he knows his turn will be messy
but worth it. I blank her silent offer of a place in the queue.
The librarian likes a
challenge even when the prize is me. She pops a button on her shirt and leans
forward across the desk determined. I sense the presence of The Books on nearby
shelves. She misreads my look of devotion and homes in for the kill. She runs
her long curved tongue along slightly-parted blow-job lips. I ignore the gasps
behind me and her beautiful exposed breasts, and, for the first time since
puberty, a man looks her in the eye. I drop a line and haul my eyes out of
their shafts. I stare a stare of humbling rejection and with the merest shake
of my massive head let her know I’m shutting her game down. She catches the
look in my eye damascene and sits bolt upright. In rapid lust-killing motions
she puts on glasses and ties her hair quickly into a bun. She closes the
buttons of her blouse mumbling a vow of chastity I know won’t last. Like the
waitress in Al’s she’s hooked on her sport. I’ve just moved her off her pitch for now.
I ask about using a PC. She shoots
me a look of pure hate that tells me she thinks I’ll use it to dismantle her
porn site and points to a vacant chair. I grunt to let her know that I’ll be
back if she regresses.
I walk a gauntlet of hatred
and jealous frustration and fold myself into a chair in front of a PC sat along
a side wall. In minutes I’ve printed out a dozen articles about the madman’s original
crime and, as I leave, I thank the student at the next PC for volunteering to
pay the small printing charge I’ve clocked up. Seems the librarian doesn’t give
everything away for free.
I go outside and find, to my
relief, that the park is still a park and not yet a mall. I retake my bench and
read the articles. There isn’t much to them. I like that. Keeping things simple
is a key to success in my game.
The guy had been caught after
an extensive manhunt, not unlike the current one. He’d quickly let himself into
a house and slowly butchered the occupant. No motive for the killing had been
established or imagined. The madman had had no relationship with, had never met
or talked to the victim before dispatching him to the great hereafter in small
pieces as if he was only worth sending there by regular post and not bulk mail.
I shudder. At times the world
can be, as The Books teach and my inner voice often reminds me, a very sick
place. I read the details of the perp’s background but there is nothing germane
beyond the coincidence that we share the same neighbourhood. I learnt early to
ignore such coincidences; all too often they lead to a dead end.
I figure that this has not
been a motiveless crime. Something has driven the madman to it. The police and
the prosecution have been too quick to close the book and not fully unearth why.
I reason that the cause must lie with the victim. I consign the victim’s name
to memory and, binning the pages, return to the library.
The crack whore’s vow is
holding, just. A tear forms in her eye as one by one her beaus slip away to check
out the rumour that’s spreading that the slut in the job centre is back from
the clinic. Cured.
My old seat is taken but my student
friend celebrates my return by leaving his and hurries joyously out of the
building. I sit down on his still warm seat. It’s a sensation I’ve always
enjoyed - the vicarious warmth of another person without threat of alimony.
I invest the victim’s name
into an internet search engine and receive the usual fixed rate return, ninety-nine
percent junk and one percent gold dust. It is the dust that I gag on. I realise
I’ve read this guy’s carcinogenic biog in the past but dumped it from memory
before it became a malign tumour on my soul. As it had the first time, reading about
his heresies makes me feel physically sick. I hurry out of the building dry
retching in disgust.
My mouth in rictus with horror
I lurch back to my park bench like a cripple test-walking a new pair of legs.
As I reach it, a little old lady jumps up in horrified recollection of having
left the stove on. I have the bench to myself. I silently thank her and stretch
out to think.
After a few minutes of
panicked breathing I calm down enough to start to make sense of it all. I do
what I always do. I ask myself The Question. What would Marlowe and Spade do?
I sit up and look round. The small
park is empty except for the unlikely coalition of a couple of agitated people looking
in my direction.
The student’s friendly with a
cop.
I stand and leave through the
gate opposite. I fume frustrated. I have no classic outs. There is no one to wise
crack with, no bored cigarette girl to flirt with, no dead lady faking it in a
lake, no little sister’s sister’s twisted motives to unravel.
There is just me.
Me, and Sam and Marlowe.
Me, Sam Marlowe.
I walk directionless, struggling
to identify my move. Do I have one?
Spade and Marlowe sought
justice, moral justice - not the law’s flawed version, not the equivocations of
deceitful statutes or the skewed precedents of corrupted judges - but justice.
Moral justice, the biblical
idea that a man must receive his just rewards.
They bypassed officialdom
when it lacked the fervour needed to seek real justice or the moral purity
required to recognise it. I must let them guide me. They have never failed me
yet.
I walk slowly, sparring
quietly with my inner voice as it works through the options with me. I, we,
need more information.
My head clears and I stop to
get my bearings. On instinct I have been walking in the direction of my house. I
am about to step onto my street when my inner voice yells a warning. I press
myself against the brick wall and sneak a look round the last corner.
Cops!
Outside my house!
I double back and use a
nearby alley to get close enough to check them out without revealing myself. Snipers
on nearby roofs. Three big lumps in one car. In another, four urbane types,
detectives, armed I am sure. The three thick micks have been excused their
uniforms for the day to join the manhunt.
This is serious.
I know they are waiting for
me and not a neighbour as I have none. Sometimes the evidence is that easy to read.
I clench and unclench my
fists in annoyance, surprised how much my knuckles hurt when I do so.
I take deep breaths and ask
myself the obvious question. What do the cops want with me?
I go over the facts - what I
learned in the library, the cops’ presence here, my personae and profession.
Hammett and Chandler.
Spade and Marlowe.
The original victim.
Of course. They’re here
because of my known reverence for The Books and his blaspheming of them. I
curse the writer afresh. The dumb cops have mistakenly linked me with him and,
through him, to his murderer. I’ll have to lie low for a while, to work things
through. Drop the case even. I’ll have to wait until they catch the madman and
have him safely under lock and key. Or shoot him. Yeah, he’s killed one of
their own, in the van, on the way to the hospital. They’ll shoot him out of
hand like the rabid dog they think he is. If I ever start feeling sorry for
people I’ll put him on my list. In memoriam.
The madman had gone mad but I
understand, sympathise even, with why he’d flipped first time round. The victim
had been a writer, a bad one. He’d made his bucks writing profane pastiches of God-like
writers’ work. Lawrence Block, James Ellroy, Elmore Leonard, he’d ripped them
all off but it was on back of The Books that he had committed his most
unforgivable crime.
His last book had been published
shortly before he died. It was reading a summary of it on the library PC that
made me nauseous. He’d defiled the two greatest authors of the twentieth
century - Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler - and the heroic men they wrote
about. He’d committed a terrible crime, and crimes exact justice. The madman
had given him his.
A summary of his noxious tome
showed it to be the work of a mindless literary thug, his book as limp and
revolting a desecration as a swastika spray painted across a Jew’s headstone. Set
in forties’ L.A. he’d teamed Spade with Marlowe and sent them running up blind
alleys they’d never have taken beaten unconscious and stapled to a truck.
His writing was a travesty of
The Books. Chandler wrote better notes to his milkman. He no more knew how to
write a sentence like them than I knew how to sweet-talk a nun into bed. He’d made
them quit smoking. He’d had them utter weak puns in lieu of immortal wisecracks.
The sick bastard had imputed homosexuality to Spade. He’d made them drink sherry.
Sherry! In the final chapter he’d even married Marlowe off.
I’m thankful I hadn’t read
the book. I’m thankful I hadn’t spotted it while browsing in my local bookstore
standing in perfidious proximity to The Books. I’m thankful I hadn’t taken it
home with me in stupefied disbelief to confirm how blasphemous it was. I’m thankful
I hadn’t read it in horror-fuelled fury all the way through to its sacrilegious
ending before ripping it to tiny pieces and flicking them one by one into my
fire.
I dread to think what effect
reading it would have had on my psyche. It’s likely that the madman too had
been a devotee of The Books and it is only someone like me who can come close
to understanding the awfulness of the writer’s crime and the insane act it had evoked.
If I had read it I too, like
the poor madman, could have gone over the edge.
I am relieved.
I know I’ve dodged a bullet.
In the park my mind had
wrestled with the central issues. Whose crime was the greater? The writer or
the madman? How was justice to be served? I’m sure the writer has received his proper
dues. The madman? All he’ll get is the law. What a sick and twisted world we
live in.
As for why the madman had
broken out. As for what had driven him to beat two poor payroll Joes to death
with his fists, who knew?
My inner voice, in that gentle
way it has, intercedes a thesis.
The guy’d been locked up in a
nuthouse, likely drugged into permanent baleful submissiveness. Strange, evil
and sudden things can happen there. Perhaps something had occurred; something
that caused a reduction in his meds, like an appointment with a visiting doc
that the screws couldn’t bring him to in his normal doped-up state.
Perhaps, in that window of
lucidity, things he desired but was long denied assumed unbearable dimensions
of importance. Perhaps he reverted to whoever he was before the writer’s book
had unhinged him. Perhaps, as he transitioned back to his normal self, he had snapped,
overwhelmed by his desire for something normal people take for granted,
something as mundane and simple as, say, one of Al’s steaks.
I swish the thesis around in
my brain like a sommelier sampling a wine. It looks right, it smells right and
it tastes right.
My excitement mounts. I know I
am on to something. Something that could break this case wide open. Something
that might take the cops forever to figure out since they lack my unique
insight into the victim’s crime and their prey’s mind.
I need this win. I need the
publicity helping the cops to catch this man will bring. I need to see my name
in headlines once more.
The queue of clients which
has dried up drastically of late for reasons I cannot remember will be restored.
Wan beautiful well-dressed women with anxious backward glances will once more
engage me to put their wrongs to rights. Secretive fat men will once more offer
me fortunes to find precious objects they have lost but never owned.
I’ve talked myself back into
the game. This is the opportunity I’ve been waiting for. I am compelled to take
it.
I step out of the alley in
front of the two parked cars with my hands raised in the air to show I am on
their side and call out in a strong voice “Don’t shoot. I’m here to help you.”
The passenger window of the
detectives’ car had been up. They haven’t heard me. Now it slides electronically
down. A gun-filled hand extends through it.
My inner voice, no, a strange
one I’ve heard only once before, this morning, for a second and last time issues
a command, strident and monosyllabic.
“Run.”
Extracted from"Queuing For Sex", available for download in (multiple) E-Book formats on Amazon, Apple's iBookstore and other online outlets.
