The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Original)

by Unknown

  “Those Catrini” was published in the February 1933 issue.

  Those Catrini

  Norvell Page

  Jules Tremaine promises to be a notable addition to the Black Mask character group. Himself, his mission, are both a little mysterious. He walks boldly where one without courage would scarcely venture. He appears at odds with an established order of ruthless political power and of wealth drawn from such sordid source. At times he is as soft-spoken and sympathetic as a woman; at others, he is dynamite unleashed.

  JULES TREMAINE STOOD erectly on the curb of Mulberry Street, facing a row of dirty red tenements, and plucked three preliminary chords from his black guitar. He began to sing M’appari.

  Before and behind him carnival crowds pushed and gabbled. To each side stood a pushcart odorous with high stacks of clams. It was the festa of Santo Gennaro and the September night was soft. Women leaned from windows shouting at children who scrambled in the street under the arches of blue and red and yellow lights.

  Jules threw back his head and his full voice soared. Before him a girl stopped. She was fifteen. Her breasts pressed roundly against the flamboyant pink of her dress. Her eyes were dark and liquid and they regarded the street singer somberly.

  Jules sent the last note of the aria vaulting above the babble of the street, plucked an ultimate vibrant chord and bowed to her, a vital figure of a man just over five feet five and dapper in a modeled suit of dark gray. He swept off a black felt hat.

  “Ah, bella mia,” he said, laughter behind his eyes. “You have tonight the face of a very, very tired madonna.”

  The girl’s lips parted slightly, showing white teeth.

  “Every time I try to sit down the floorwalker gets nasty,” she explained.

  Jules clapped his hat back on his head and made a wringing motion with his two hands. His voice threatened. “If I ever get my hands on that floorwalker, I’ll …”

  His wide teeth flashed beneath the black of his small mustache. Angela’s lips curved. She threw back her head so that her throat was a sweet white line and laughed three contralto bell notes.

  “That is better,” said Jules. “Now what is it that makes these dark shadows under your pretty eyes?”

  The girl’s smile diminished but still quivered at her mouth corners. She nodded her head gravely.

  “I’m worried, Mr. Tremaine,” she said.

  Jules pursed his lips. When he did that the militant points of his mustache moved forward slightly. His blue eyes stared beyond the girl into the dingy bricks of a tenement front.

  “I suppose it’s that lazy Antonio again,” he said, his syllables short.

  Angela clasped her hands and watched her long, tapered fingers as she moved them slowly.

  “What’s your brother up to now?” Jules demanded.

  The girl drew a deep breath so that her breasts strained against the sleazy silk. Her eyes remained stubbornly on her hands.

  “He has not done anything, Mr. Tremaine,” she protested. “It is those Catrini. They say they will do something because Tony drives his beer truck into their part of town.…”

  Her words accelerated. She unclasped her hands and gestured with them. Her wide eyes, dark and frightened, met Tremaine’s directly.

  “—if Antonio works he must drive where his boss tells him. If he does not work we cannot eat. Ah, those Catrini …”

  She raised her right hand with the thumb uppermost, the fingers spread, and clicked the nail of the thumb on her upper teeth with an outward gesture. For the moment her eyes were bright and narrow.

  “I know those Catrini,” said Jules softly.

  The girl’s body lost its tension and became supplicant. Her hands, palms upward, the slim, tapering fingers bent outward, pleaded with Tremaine. There was a pucker between the black, straight brows, between the dark, questioning eyes.

  “What can I do?” she asked. “What can I do!”

  Tremaine looked down at his guitar and plucked the G string, turned a white ivory peg, cocked his head to the side and touched the string again. He looked up at the girl.

  “Go home, Angela,” he said. “I will sing three more songs, then come to talk with you and Antonio.”

  Angela spun on her heel, whirling out the thin silk of her skirt. A boy with a laughing mouth showered confetti over her and she threw back her head and laughed and snatched at the colored snow with quick hands. Three white pieces of paper and a star-shaped pink one settled on her black hair. She turned and looked gravely into Tremaine’s round blue eyes.

  “I know you will make everything all right,” she said. “I am so happy I could dance.”

  She spun completely around on her heel and walked with little skipping steps three doors down the street. She waved to Jules before she went into the darkness of the tenement.

  hose Catrini! Jules Tremaine looked down at his guitar and his lips smiled with little mirth. His fingers touched the strings soundlessly, then twanged a chord and two more and he threw back his head and began to sing La donna e mobile. His fingers were lean and white. They had squared ends.

  Behind him in a vacant lot across the street, a fireworks cannon made a muffled concussion. Children screamed and squirmed between the pushcarts, hurrying to get nearer. A whirling spark soared, hesitated and burst into a jagged splotch of yellow fire. Spider legs of light spanned out from it and at their ends bombs burst in dazzling streaks of white. The explosions tortured the ear drums.

  Jules shrugged and stopped singing. He drew the black guitar down under his arm and up on his back so that it hung suspended from his shoulder by a crimson braided cord. He looked over the crowd and laden pushcarts and moved slowly down the street, a short man but with power in the square set of his shoulders, the erect poised arrogance of the head.

  The pyrotechnic display faded momentarily; there was another muffled concussion, then clear and high a girl’s scream tore the night. Jules whirled, staring up at the third-floor windows where Angela and her brother had rooms. A succession of deadened explosions that were not fireworks beat on the air, then every sound was drowned in the ripping burst of more bombs.

  On the walk where Jules stood people no longer stared at the colored fire in the sky. They faced the door of the tenement where that scream had sounded. A handful of children gathered silently. A fat man with wide red silk bands holding up too long sleeves waded through them. He entered the door. He staggered back, fell down the one step and sprawled supine. His feet jerked up and his heels thumped on the pavement.

  Three men boiled out of the doorway. They had guns in their hands. Two raced down the street and separated. The third ran past Jules. He was a short and broad man. As he lifted and flung down his feet heavily Jules saw that the right shoulder was twisted so that it was at least three inches higher than the left. The man whirled about the corner.

  Jules strode towards the door from which the three had come. The fat man who had been hurled to the street sat up and held his head in his hands. For five seconds he sat there, then reeled to his feet. His fat quivered with the speed of his flight. A boy bounded out of his way, staggering blindly towards Tremaine. Jules caught the boy with one arm and set him gently aside. He did not stop. His lips were pressed in a thin hard line, and a path opened before him among the thickening crowd. He entered the dark doorway.

  Halfway to the second floor he was taking the steps two at a time. On the third floor he thrust through an open door and stopped and stood, his right hand gripping the end of the keyboard and holding in place the guitar on his back. The air was acrid with burned gunpowder. A single yellow light bulb dangled from the center of the ceiling by a twisted wire. It threw a glare on walls that had been scrubbed until they were streaked gray. Jules kept his eyes on them for a moment; then he looked down.

  There were two bodies on the floor. One had crumpled near him, a knee drawn up towards its belly. That was Antonio. From under him a dark liquid pool spread. Angela lay over by a door beyond which the kitchen gleamed.
She lay on her back, hurled close against the wall by the six-hundred-foot-pound impact of .45-calibre bullets. Her head was thrown back and her throat was a white sweet line and there was a blue hole between her wide, frightened eyes. Jules saw there were two pieces of confetti in her hair, one white and square, the other a pink star shape.

  Jules’ right hand was on the keyboard of his guitar. There was a snap as a white ivory peg broke and he stooped slowly and picked it up and looked at it. The peg was smooth and cold in his fingers and it had broken off just under the head. In the street a brassy whistle skirled. Jules dropped the peg in his pocket and the right corner of his mouth twisted so that a single sharp incisor showed. Heavy feet pounded on the stairs and mounted swiftly. Jules shook his head sharply, glanced once around the room, then plunged through the door. He saw the policeman at the head of the stairs, and ran for the dark back hall.

  “Halt!” the policeman shouted. “I’ll shoot!”

  A pistol glinted in the dim light.

  Jules moved slowly towards the policeman, his hands raised well above his head and the guitar bumping against his right side. His eyes were narrowed, watchful.

  “I’m just a street singer,” he said. “I heard the shooting and came to see if Angela and Antonio were all right. They were friends of mine, and—”

  “Shut up!” the cop ordered.

  His heavy fingers clamped on Jules’ shoulder and whirled him about and he patted his hips and sides and under his arms.

  “Threw your gun away, did you?” he said. “That won’t do you no good.”

  Jules allowed himself to be shoved back into the room where Angela and Antonio lay.

  “You louse!” the cop rasped. “You shot the girl, too!”

  Lights blazed before Jules’ eyes and blackness followed.

  Tremaine had only partly recovered his senses when he was roughed into the patrol wagon. The rush of air as it sped with a softly whining siren back to the station-house largely restored him, but he staggered as he was booted into the white square office of the captain. The breath of his captor was harsh and fingers vised on his shoulder.

  Jules measured the captain under heavy lids. The man was fat and his white hair was pomaded into a smooth pompadour. He ran a hand over it.

  “Well, well, what have we here?” he asked, and his voice was fat and oily.

  “O’Reilly caught him running away after them two was bumped,” said the patrolman, his hand still on Jules’ shoulder. “He’d throwed his gun away.”

  “Running away, eh?”

  The captain was seated in a swivel-chair tilted back before his desk. He leaned forward and rubbed white, puffy hands up and down his thighs. Then his mouth opened in a little pink “O” of surprise; his small black eyes went flat.

  “——!” he said. “It’s Jules Tremaine!”

  The captain straightened, stumbled to his feet and slid a chair out from the wall.

  “Sit down, Mr. Tremaine,” he said. “I’m sorry about this. O’Reilly didn’t know you.”

  Jules heard the patrolman behind him gulp and the hand flinched away from his shoulder.

  “Jeeze, Cap’n, did we pull a boner?” the man asked.

  “Get out!” the captain yelled, and the door opened and closed quickly. The fat man in the dark blue suit looked at Tremaine and smoothed his pomaded hair and blinked.

  “I’m sorry about this,” he said.

  Jules continued to stand. He balanced his guitar carefully on the chair, eased off his black felt hat and fingered the back of his head. He winced and his lips pressed hard together.

  “I think you said O’Reilly was the cop’s name?” he asked softly.

  “He’s just a dumb flatfoot,” the captain spoke hurriedly. “He don’t know no better. I’ll take it out of him.”

  “Don’t bother, Captain,” said Jules gently. “Don’t you bother at all.”

  He placed his hat on the chair beside his guitar and looked about the office slowly.

  “I want to wash up a bit,” he said.

  The captain skipped his fat sides across the room, swung open a door with a flourish and revealed gleaming white tile. Jules doffed his coat and doused his face and head with cold water. The welt left by the cop’s gun on his scalp stung. Jules cursed softly as he stroked his black hair to smoothness with a thin comb from his pocket. He pointed his mustache, shrugged into his coat and strolled back into the office. He adjusted his hat jauntily and slung the guitar over his shoulder.

  The captain regarded him with troubled eyes. He opened his mouth and closed it again like a goldfish drinking air. He said: “You didn’t see anything up there, did you, Mr. Tremaine?”

  Jules revolved on his heel and looked up into the small black eyes. The captain shoved a puffy hand over his hair.

  “I saw a boy and a girl had been murdered,” he said, biting off the words. “Then O’Reilly slammed me over the head with his gun.”

  The captain frowned at his fingernails, though they were perfectly polished.

  “You know how these young cops are,” he murmured.

  “Yes, I know,” said Jules, and left.

  A taxi weaved uptown with him and stopped at an address in the East Fifties where a dead-pan butler opened the door. Tremaine surrendered a gingerly removed hat but held on to the guitar, padding deliberately up the deep carpeted steps.

  “That you, Jules?” a resonant voice boomed.

  Jules retraced his way without answering, walked back through the dim, dusty-smelling hall and at its end entered a door to the right. The room was ten feet square and its walls were shelves of brown-backed law books. In its center was a desk, a reading lamp and a face that had the curious effect of floating disembodied in the air. Presently Jules could make out the spread shoulders of the man seated at the desk.

  “Ah, it is you, Jules,” came the resonant, slightly mocking voice.

  Jules’ face was expressionless as he studied the cadaverous countenance. A few strands of black hair had been oiled and laid carefully side by side across a bald dome-like forehead that lengthened the thin face extraordinarily.

  “Who’s the captain at the Houston Street station?” Jules asked.

  The mouth corners of the man’s face made creases like parentheses and strong white teeth showed momentarily.

  “Going to use my influence at last?”

  “No. The louse recognized me as a Tremaine. I was afraid I was beginning to look like you. My fears, I see, were groundless.”

  The creases about the mouth deepened; the head tilted back so that black smudges of shadow from the low desk lamp erased all the upper part of the face and made teeth gleam. The laughter was a faint roughened breathing, nearly soundless. When it stopped the face looked down again.

  “My charming brother!” the man articulated. The creases smoothed themselves and the lips pursed. “The captain’s name is Jimson.”

  The man stood and the shadows smudged his face again; the light revealed his length and the powerful sweep of his shoulders. Jules had to look up to meet his eyes. He smiled slightly and his mustache pointed forward a fraction of an inch. He bowed ceremoniously.

  “My dear brother,” he said, then swung about. The hall echoed the regular beat of his feet.

  The room he entered was all gray and nearly barren. He laid his guitar face down on a couch bed and took a screwdriver from the top drawer of a Sheraton chest. He looked across at his guitar and smiled.

  t was after ten the next morning when Jules slid out of white silk pajamas and stepped into his shower. His stomach sucked in and the muscles of his chest and upper arms flexed and jumped under its cold pelting; then he dodged out from under and punished his tight lean body with a rough towel. As he bent forward his abdomen tensed into six ridges of muscle. He dusted himself with bath powder and hummed M’appari. He cut it short in the middle with a small tightening of mouth corners. A pulse throbbed in his throat.

  A polite tap at the door caught Jules with his trousers
just belted. He grunted: “Come in.”

  His brother, in striped morning trousers and cutaway, bowed himself in, clicked the door shut. Jules glanced at the domed forehead.

  “I keep hoping those six hairs won’t be exactly parallel.” He sighed.

  The mouth corner creases deepened in his brother’s cadaverous face but the thin lips did not part. Blue eyes were sardonic. Jules drew on a linen shirt, thrust the tails into his dark gray trousers and plucked a heavy silk tie, gray, too, from a rack on the closet door. The taller man continued silent and Jules eventually toed about and faced him, his eyes half shut.

  “Yes, my dear brother?” he queried.

  “You aren’t going back to Little Italy today, Jules?”

  Jules brushed his left mustache with his right thumbnail. His still veiled eyes were amused. His voice was gentle.

  “Surely, Andrew, you aren’t at some thirty-and-six years of age beginning to worry about your younger brother?”

  Andrew cursed in mild tones. He said with relish: “Some day you are going to get your well-muscled abdomen shot full of messy holes. Those Catrini—”