Free Noir by Robert Coover Page A

were sorry to see it go. I was hoping to keep it around as a back scratcher, you said. By the way, what does that Arabic inscription on the ring say?
    It’s Persian. Guy who read it for me said it was a racing tip. Something like put ten on number three in the fifth.

    WHICH, PASSING THROUGH THE BOOKIES’ BASEMENT, taking the smugglers’ route to the docks, is what you do now, just as you’ve done every week for years now. Ten on number three in the fifth. Yet another futile romantic gesture. Your one-handed green-eyed love withdrew from your dreams when Snark took the severed hand away, although once, a year or so later, you found yourself in a horse race with the hand as your tottering mount, your dick ringed with the intertwined serpents and urging the hand on, she waiting in vain for you at the distant finish line, too far away even for disembodied dream hands to reach. What did that dream mean? You never ask.
    The smugglers’ route is a series of interlinked cellars, some with nothing but a locked door between them, opened with the passkey Flame gave you, others requiring a crawl on your pinstripes through dark damp tunnels. You travel mostly by night, curling up behind furnaces by day, snaking your way to the docklands. What are you going to do when you get there? Can’t stay underground forever. Somehow you have to find out who really killed the Creep. Why Fingers bought it. Whose was the heap that ran him down. What Rats was trying to tell you. You decide to check in with your man Snark, get the latest rumble. Which means going topside to find a phone booth, risk getting caught. Chance you have to take. You’re in an expansive basement broken up into a warren of changing and makeup rooms. Theater of some kind. Pinned-up pix suggest a burlesque house. You don’t recognize the dancers, but it has been awhile. There’s a back stairs to the stage door, but no phone booth outside. Just a wet dirty side street, lit only by the red light over the door. You have better luck at the corner: phone box under a streetlamp about a block away. Misty streets eerily deserted. Your tattoo is itching, reminding you someone’s on your ass, and you sense him there as though he’d been waiting here for you to bubble up out of the concrete. If it’s one of Blue’s cops, why doesn’t he just nab you? Ergo, it’s not one of Blue’s cops. Some guy who works for Mister Big? The gorilla who tried to kill you down at the docks, then accosted you behind your office?
    It’s after midnight, Snark is not happy you’ve called. Ring me back some other fucking time, Noir. I’m eating a pretzel, as you might say.
    Sorry, can’t do that, Snark. I’m on the run and being followed. I just want you to know I didn’t kill that guy.
    Which guy are you talking about?
    The morgue attendant. There’s more than one?
    Some beef in a suit seen hanging around outside the alley door of your office building has been found shot dead in another part of the alley.
    The Hammer? The guy who tried to kill me down at pier four. I think I saw him get taken out. Two guys. One with a squeaky voice.
    He’d been shot in the head several times with your .22.
    That’s because I’d kayoed the poor sonuvabitch on my back stairs and switched rods. I’m packing his .45.
    Well. Blue might buy that, might not.

    SO IT CAN’T BE THE HAMMER WHO’S TAILING YOU. Maybe Fat Agnes? When you told Blanche the next day about chasing the fat man in the white suit who turned into a kind of will-o’-the-wisp and led you into a mazy death trap, she said: Ignis fatuus. What? Will-o’-the-wisp. Ignis fatuus. Like those black seams you used to chase. Thus, Fat Agnes. You realized you’d glimpsed him often. In Loui’s, outside your office on the street below, standing on a bridge overlooking the docklands, at the Chinese buffet (closed down shortly after), in line at the post office, at the fights. Someone you spotted out of the corner of your eye when distracted with