Blowback (The Nameless Detective)

by Bill Pronzini

  Terms with my own mortality.

  A thing like that is not easy to translate into words, but it was as if the confrontation with Harry had taken the form of a final battle in a long series of battles with death—inside my head, and outside it with Terzian and Bascomb and Jerrold and the ordeal in the mine shaft. And death had lost, I had beaten it, because it had let me get too close, let me see it too vividly in that brief and awful glimpse into Hairy Burroughs' soul.

  Death was a state of mind as well as a physical fact; you could be dead while you were still alive, or you could be dying and too full of life to let death inside you. What Harry had allowed to happen to himself—what I had been allowing to happen to myself in a different way—was the true essence of death, far more terrible than any potential void, any uncertain afterlife. Terminal lung cancer or not, I could not and would not wrap my own soul in that kind of blackness.

  I took the Fremont exit off the bridge, and the Embarcadero Freeway, and got off at Front Street. Traffic was thick in the Financial District, and when I crawled past Sansome Street on my way to Grant I found myself thinking of Erika, who had been working in a building on Sansome the last time I saw her five years ago.

  Erika. I remembered again her sharp words, her claim that the life and the profession I had chosen for myself were a lie. But I had reached an understanding with myself about that too.

  Maybe I was not much of a detective, and maybe my work and my life had no real importance or significance in the scheme of things, and maybe I had patterned myself in the mold of fictional creations who were far greater in their world than I could ever be in mine—but none of that was a lie. A lie was something that hurt other people, like Harry's love and Harry's friendship, or had a conscious basis in pain or deceit or hypocrisy; there was none of that kind of blackness in my soul either. If I was a pulp private eye, at least in spirit, then so be it. It was nothing to apologize for, nothing to feel ashamed about, because it was an honest thing to be, and a decent one.

  I wish I'd been able to tell all that to Erika, I thought.

  Then I thought: I wonder if she's still here in San Francisco, still free of attachments? And if she is, would she want to see me after all these years? Well, it might be worth the effort to find out. I've got the perfect reason to call her, after all—tomorrow I'll be fifty years old, and no man should have to spend his fiftieth birthday alone.

  Maybe I would try to call her, then. Maybe I would.

  And I turned off Grant onto Geary, parked illegally in a bus zone in front of the building where Dr. White had his offices, and went in to find out at last if the lesion was malignant or benign …