Noir by Robert Coover Read Free Book Online Page B

real home to be away from, but you know it well. You’ve spent serious time in it. Have been mugged, chased, blown, asked for a light, beaten up, paid off, conned, dumped, supplied, scared shitless, given hot tips, shortchanged, shot at in here. You say, here. The alley is not on any streetmap. It is under it somewhere. Or behind it. It is negotiated intuitively; maps are useless, maybe even deceptive. Even in the rain, its scabrous brick walls are layered with shadows, worn like old rags. It is not uninhabited. It has its pimps and dealers, street tramps, smalltime grifters, misnamed homeless (they know where their home is better than you do), muggers, psychopaths, deviants. Not unlike City Hall, in short, or any church or company boardroom. You have to keep your eye out for one of them in particular. Known as Mad Meg, she likes to leap out of the shadows and stab people with her rusty kitchen knife. Once an honest stripper, but misused by a sadistic sugar daddy who pumped her full of brain-burning opiates, thrown out on the streets when her mind went and her body bagged, now the hidden princess of the alley. Like the alley, she’s treacherously complex yet rough on the surface and without façade, oddly innocent or at least neutrally unmotivated even as she lunges at her victims, somewhat pestilential, smelling of urine and half-blind, the indecorous backside of the human condition, the poxy dead end we all try to avoid. She’s a friend of yours though she doesn’t always remember that. You bring her things that she collects like coat buttons, swizzle sticks, shoelaces, candy wrappers, and old tennis balls, and once she got you out of a scrape by attacking the killer who was attacking you, though that may have just been the luck of who was on top. You have nothing to give her today except Blanche’s lotion or your own laces, but no need, she remains hidden.
    Not that your route to Loui’s is without incident. You witness a murder for one thing. You’ve just stepped into an abandoned bicycle shed to get out of the downpour when you see two figures at the other end of the alley dragging a third, mere shadowy outlines as though the rain were a drawn blind between you with dim silhouettes playing on it. Through the rain’s rattle you can hear one of them giving orders, the other whining in reply in a squeaky voice. The guy giving the orders does not sound like a street mug. He turns to go, but Squeaky returns and pumps a round of bullets into the victim’s head. Psycho. The boss scolds him in a father-to-son way and leads him off. Sirens sound. Can’t stay. Who was it? Never know. One of life’s little mysteries.

    ONE WET DAY’S END YOU WERE TAILING A GUY THROUGH here who you thought might be Mister Big. This was after you’d delivered your illustrated classified ad for the toy soldiers to the city newsrag. Through a friendly dealer, Blanche had learned of a private collector who owned a unique set of figures from the Battle of Agincourt with brigandines made out of mouse leather and bascinets of silver with hinged visors, stuffed and quilted gambesons on the French crossbowmen, knee-length hauberks of silver chain mail on the English archers, beards and horse tails of real hair with brass and leather trappings for the horses, honed steel swords, velvet surcoats, and silken jupons (see what you learn in this racket), and she was able to get permission to photograph some of the figures for a philosophical journal she claimed to edit, though insurance for the day cost half the widow’s roll. The ad promised a private showing to genuine collectors only, and the newspapers had not even hit the streets before the calls started coming in.
    You left Blanche to fend off the queries, waiting for the one phone call that mattered, and went out for a beer. Several actually, ending up at Loui’s talking with Joe the bartender about the meaning of life, having by now switched to the hard stuff. Joe’s view in sum was that