Free Never Street by Loren D. Estleman Page A

reel while he shoveled books from the metal desk into an old briefcase. They were not textbooks, but dilapidated paperbacks with covers in tarnished primaries showing beetle-browed pugs in dirty trench coats watching blondes undress: two-bit potboilers from the heyday of the drugstore press. Teachers under Eisenhower had confiscated them by the case from students who smuggled them into class behind Understanding Trigonometry. Now they were study guides.
    “The real thing!” Portman put down his briefcase to shake my hand. “I wish you’d come earlier. I could have filled the class period comparing your experiences with those of the private eyes of fiction. Tell me, do you pack a rod?” His teeth shone in his beard. Up close he was older than he looked from the back of the room.
    “Every time I go fishing. Are all your classes this intimate?”
    “You mean small. Summer sessions are always tiny, but I never pack the place the way this type of course did in the sixties and seventies, when colleges were turning out Coppolas and Scorseses by the dozen. You know Lawrence Kasdan studied here.”
    I said I didn’t know.
    “That was the film school generation. They worshiped at the shrine of Welles and Godard and Kurosawa and Fellini. This new batch would rather clear a million on a splatter-fest, and don’t even talk to them about black-and-white. They’d colorize Whistler’s Mother.”
    “The man I’m looking for would probably agree with you.” I sketched out the case. He listened, staring at the blank screen in front of the blackboard as if the story were playing up there.
    “So his wife thinks he’s run off to play cops and robbers for real,” he said when I’d finished. “Not unusual, considering the medium. The cinema is the most visceral of all the arts. It passes through the cornea directly into the brain.”
    “A psychiatrist I spoke to said pure cases aren’t common.”
    He made a noise beneath the dignity of an educator. “Psychiatrists are frustrated plastic surgeons. By the time they find out they can’t stomach the sight of blood and bone splinters, they’ve spent too much on their education to back out. That’s when they opt for the couch and the bust of Jung. During the Depression, when most Americans couldn’t afford to buy bread, they laid down their nickels by the millions to see a movie once a week. Nikos Kazantzakis’ Last Temptation of Christ was in libraries and bookstores for years without a peep from the religious Right; Scorsese puts it on film and they pour out to protest it like nothing since the Great Schism. That’s the power of celluloid and safety stock. You can’t get to the heart of it lying on your back bitching about your poor toilet training.”
    I felt for a cigarette. “I must have one of those faces. Everyone’s giving me lectures.”
    “It is a lecture hall.” But he smiled apologetically. “What do you need?”
    “I dipped a toe in Dark Dreams at the library. Most books on noir are for buffs. The man I’m looking for went beyond that somewhere around the fifteenth time he saw Pitfall. Yours is the only book I found that takes on the psychology of the form. I thought you might translate the Latin.”
    He switched off the projector and removed the take-up reel. “It’s a simple enough fantasy, on the surface; which is as far as any film goes, whether the director is an auteur or a studio hack. It’s a two-dimensional medium after all. In many ways that’s its appeal, but we’ll get to that. We’ve always identified with gods and heroes. The allure of the noir protagonist to modern man is he’s more approachable than Beowulf or Sherlock Holmes. It takes a Superman to slash away at Grendl or to match intellects with Professor Moriarty, but this guy is an ordinary slob with tall troubles who usually comes out on top, even if it does kill him sometimes.”
    “Stiff price to pay for victory.”
    “But a price we feel the need to pay. Years ago we died