Nightmare Town

by Dashiell Hammett

  Margaret’s throat had some swollen thing in it. Fog blurred everything but the charging red face. An unvoiced whimper shook her breast. She wanted to run to him as to a lover. She wanted to run from him as from a ravisher. She stood very still in her doorway, smiling demurely with dry, hot mouth.

  His feet padded on steps, on porch. Bags fell away from him. Thick arms reached for her.

  The odors of alcohol, sweat, brine, tobacco cut her nostrils. Bearded flesh scrubbed her cheek. She lost foothold, breath, was folded into him, crushed, bruised, bludgeoned by hard lips. Eyes clenched against the pain in them, she clung hard to him who alone was firmly planted in a whirling universe. Foul endearments, profane love names rumbled in her ear. Another sound was even nearer—a throaty cooing. She was laughing.

  Guy was home.

  —

  THE EVENING was old before Margaret remembered Leonidas Doucas.

  She was sitting on her husband’s knees, leaning forward to look at the trinkets, Ceylonese spoils, heaped on the table before her. Cockleshell earrings half hid her ears, heavy gold incongruities above the starched primness of her housedress.

  Guy—bathed, shaved, and all in fresh white—tugged beneath his shirt with his one free hand. A moneybelt came sluggishly away from his body, thudded on the table, and lay there thick and apathetic as an overfed snake. Guy’s freckled fingers worked at the belt’s pockets. Green banknotes slid out, coins rolled out to be bogged by the paper, green notes rustled out to bury the coins.

  “Oh, Guy!” she gasped. “All that?”

  He chuckled, jiggling her on his knees, and fluttered the green notes up from the table like a child playing with fallen leaves.

  “All that. And every one of ’em cost a pint of somebody’s pink blood. Maybe they look cool and green to you, but I’m telling you every last one of ’em is as hot a red as the streets of Colombo, if you could only see it.”

  She refused to shudder under the laugh in his red-veined eyes, laughed, and stretched a tentative finger to the nearest note.

  “How much is there, Guy?”

  “I don’t know. I took ’em moving,” he boasted. “No time for bookkeeping. It was bing, bang, get clear and step in again. We dyed the Yoda-ela red that one night. Mud under, darkness over, rain everywhere, with a brown devil for every raindrop. A pith helmet hunting for us with a flashlight that never found anything but a stiff-necked Buddha up on a rock before we put it out of business.”

  The “stiff-necked Buddha” brought Doucas’s face to Margaret.

  “Oh! There was a man here to see you last week. He’s waiting to see you at the hotel. His name is Doucas, a very stout man with—”

  “The Greek!”

  Guy Tharp put his wife off his knees. He put her off neither hastily nor roughly, but with that deliberate withdrawal of attention which is the toy’s lot when serious work is at hand.

  “What else did he have to say?”

  “That was all, except that he was a friend of yours. It was early in the morning, and I found him in the kitchen, and I know he had been upstairs. Who is he, Guy?”

  “A fellow,” her husband said vaguely around the knuckle he bit. He seemed to attach no importance to, not even be interested by, the news that Doucas had come furtively into his house. “Seen him since then?”

  “Not to talk to, but I see him every time I pass the hotel.”

  Guy took the knuckle from between his teeth, rubbed his chin with a thumb, hunched his thick shoulders, let them fall lax, and reached for Margaret. Slumped comfortably in his chair, holding her tight to him with hard arms, he fell to laughing, teasing, boasting again, his voice a mellow, deep-bodied rumble under her head. But his eyes did not pale to their normal sapphire. Behind jest and chuckle an aloof thoughtfulness seemed to stand.

  Asleep that night, he slept with the soundness of child or animal, but she knew he had been long going to sleep.

  Just before daylight she crept out of bed and carried the money into another room to count it. Twelve thousand dollars were there.

  In the morning Guy was merry, full of laughter and words that had no alien seriousness behind them. He had stories to tell of a brawl in a Madras street, or another in a gaming house in Saigon; of a Finn, met in the Queen’s Hotel in Kandy, who was having a giant raft towed to a spot in mid-Pacific where he thought he could live with least annoyance from the noise of the earth’s spinning.

  Guy talked, laughed, and ate breakfast with the heartiness of one who does not ordinarily know when he will eat again. The meal done, he lit a black cigar and stood up. “Reckon I’ll trot down the hill for a visit with your friend Leonidas, and see what’s on his mind.”

  When he mauled her to his chest to kiss her, she felt the bulk of a revolver holstered under his coat. She went to a front window to watch him go away from the house. He swaggered carelessly down the hill, shoulders swinging, whistling, “Bang Away, My Lulu.”

  Back in the kitchen, Margaret made a great to-do with the breakfast dishes, setting about cleaning them as if it were a difficult task attempted for the first time. Water splashed on her apron, twice the soap slipped from her hand to the floor, a cup’s handle came away in her fingers. Then dishwashing became accustomed work, no longer an occupation to banish unwanted thoughts. The thoughts came, of Guy’s uneasiness last night, of his laughter that had lacked honesty.

  She fashioned a song that compared a fleshbound house dog with a red wolf; a man to whom violence was no more than addition to a bookkeeper, with a perfumed, asthmatic fat man. Repetition gave the unspoken chant rhythm, rhythm soothed her, took her mind from what might be happening in the hotel down the hill.

  She had finished the dishes and was scouring the sink when Guy came back. She looked a brief smile up at him and bent her face to her work again, to hide the questions she knew her eyes held.

  He stood in the doorway watching her.

  “Changed my mind,” he said presently. “I’ll let him write his own ticket. If he wants to see me, he knows the way. It’s up to him.”

  He moved away from the door. She heard him going upstairs.

  Her hands rested on idle palms in the sink. The white porcelain of the sink was white ice. Its chill went through her arms into her body.

  An hour later, when Margaret went upstairs, Guy was sitting on the side of the bed running a cloth through the barrel of his black revolver. She fidgeted around the room, pretending to be busy with this and that, hoping he would answer the questions she could not ask. But he talked of unrelated things. He cleaned and greased the revolver with the slow, fondling thoroughness of a chronic whittler sharpening his knife, and talked of matters that had no bearing on Leonidas Doucas.

  The rest of the day he spent indoors, smoking and drinking the afternoon through in the living-room. When he leaned back, the revolver made a lump under his left armpit. He was merry and profane and boastful. For the first time Margaret saw his thirty-five years in his eyes, and in the individual clearness of each thick facial muscle.

  After dinner they sat in the dining-room with no illumination but the light of fading day. When that was gone neither of them got up to press the electric button beside the portiered hall door. He was as garrulous as ever. She found speech difficult, but he did not seem to notice that. She was never especially articulate with him.

  They were sitting in complete darkness when the doorbell rang.

  “If that’s Doucas, show him in,” Guy said. “And then you’d better get upstairs out of the way.”

  Margaret turned on the lights before she left the room, and looked back at her husband. He was putting down the cold cigar stub he had been chewing. He grinned mockingly at her.

  “And if you hear a racket,” he suggested, “you’d better stick your head under the covers and think up the best way to get blood out of rugs.”

  She held herself very erect going to the door and opening it.

  Doucas’s round black hat came off to move with his shoulders in a counterfe
it bow that swept the odor of magnolia to her.

  “Your—husband—is—in.”

  “Yes.” Her chin was uptilted so she could seem to smile on him, though he stood a head taller than she, and she tried to make her smile very sweetly gentle. “Come in. He is expecting you.”

  Guy, sitting where she had left him, fresh cigar alight, did not get up to greet Doucas. He took the cigar from his mouth and let smoke leak between his teeth to garnish the good-natured insolence of his smile.

  “Welcome to our side of the world,” he said.

  The Greek said nothing, standing just inside the portiere.

  Margaret left them thus, going through the room and up the back stairs. Her husband’s voice came up the steps behind her in a rumble of which she could pick no words. If Doucas spoke she did not hear him.

  She stood in her dark bedroom, clutching the foot of the bed with both hands, the trembling of her body making the bed tremble. Out of the night questions came to torment her, shadowy questions, tangling, knotting, raveling in too swiftly shifting a profusion for any to be clearly seen, but all having something to do with a pride that in eight years had become a very dear thing.

  They had to do with a pride in a man’s courage and hardihood, courage and hardihood that could make of thefts, of murder, of crimes dimly guessed, wrongs no more reprehensible than a boy’s apple-stealing. They had to do with the existence or nonexistence of this gilding courage, without which a rover might be no more than a shoplifter on a geographically larger scale, a sneak thief who crept into strangers’ lands instead of houses, a furtive, skulking figure with an aptitude for glamorous autobiography. Then pride would be silliness.

  Out of the floor came a murmur, all that distance and intervening carpentry left of words that were being said down in her tan-papered dining-room. The murmur drew her toward the dining-room, drew her physically, as the questions drove her.

  She left her slippers on the bedroom floor. Very softly, stockinged feet carried her down the dark front stairs, tread by tread. Skirts held high and tight against rustling, she crept down the black stairs toward the room where two men—equally strangers for the time—sat trafficking.

  Beneath the portiere, and from either side, yellow light came to lay a pale, crooked U on the hall floor. Guy’s voice came through.

  “…not there. We turned the island upside down from Dambulla all the way to the Kala-wewa, and got nothing. I told you it was a bust. Catch those limeys leaving that much sugar lay round under their noses!”

  “Dahl—said—it—was—there.”

  Doucas’s voice was soft with the infinitely patient softness of one whose patience is nearly at end.

  Creeping to the doorway, Margaret peeped around the curtain. The two men and the table between them came into the opening. Doucas’s over-coated shoulder was to her. He sat straight up, hands inert on fat thighs, cocked profile inert. Guy’s white-sleeved forearms were on the table. He leaned over them, veins showing in forehead and throat, smaller and more vivid around the blue-black of his eyes. The glass in front of him was empty; the one before Doucas still brimmed with dark liquor.

  “I don’t give a damn what Dahl says.” Guy’s voice was blunt, but somehow missed finality. “I’m telling you the stuff wasn’t there.”

  Doucas smiled. His lips bared white teeth and covered them again in a cumbersome grimace that held as little of humor as of spontaneity.

  “But—you—came—from—Ceylon—no—poorer—than—you—went.”

  Guy’s tongue-tip showed flat between his lips, vanished. He looked at his freckled hands on the table. He looked up at Doucas.

  “I didn’t. I brought fifteen thousand hard roundmen away with me, if it’s any of your business,” he said, and then robbed his statement of sincerity, made a weak blustering of it, with an explanation. “I did a thing a man needed done. It had nothing to do with our game. It was after that blew up.”

  “Yes. I—choose—to—doubt—it.”

  Soft, sigh-cushioned, the words had a concussive violence no shouted You lie! could have matched.

  Guy’s shoulders bunched up, teeth clicked, blood pulsed in the veins that welted his face. His eyes flared purplishly at the dark baked mask before him, flared until the held breath in Margaret’s chest became an agony.

  The flare went down in the purple eyes. The eyes went down. Guy scowled at his hands, at his knuckles that were round white knobs.

  “Suit yourself, brother,” he said, not distinctly.

  Margaret swayed behind her shielding curtain, reason barely checking the instinctive hand with which she clutched for steadiness at it. Her body was a cold damp shell around a vacancy that had been until to-day—until, despite awakening doubts, this very instant—eight years’ accumulation of pride. Tears wet her face, tears for the high-held pride that was now a ridiculous thing. She saw herself as a child going among adults, flaunting a Manila-paper bandeau, crying shrilly, “See my gold crown!”

  “We—waste—time. Dahl—said—half—a—million—rupees. Doubtless—it—was—less. But—most—surely—half—that—amount—would—be—there.” The pad of breath before and after each word became by never-varying repetition an altogether unnatural thing. Each word lost association with each other word, became a threatening symbol hung up in the room. “Not—regarding—odd—amounts—my—portion—would—be—say—seventy-five—thousand—dollars. I—will—take—that.”

  Guy did not look up from his hard white knuckles. His voice was sullen.

  “Where do you expect to find it?”

  The Greek’s shoulders moved the least fraction of an inch. Because he had for so long not moved at all that slight motion became a pronounced shrug.

  “You—will—give—it—to—me. You—would—not—have—a—word—dropped—to—the—British—consul—of—one—who—was—Tom—Berkey—in—Cairo—not—many—yesterdays—back.”

  Guy’s chair spun back from him. He lunged across the table.

  Margaret clapped a palm to her mouth to stop the cry her throat had no strength to voice.

  The Greek’s right hand danced jewels in Guy’s face. The Greek’s left hand materialized a compact pistol out of nothing.

  “Sit—down—my—friend.”

  Hanging over the table, Guy seemed to become abruptly smaller, as oncoming bodies do when stopped. For a moment he hung there. Then he grunted, regained his balance, picked up his chair, and sat down. His chest swelled and shrank slowly.

  “Listen, Doucas,” he said with great earnestness, “you’re all wrong. I’ve got maybe ten thousand dollars left. I got it myself, but if you think you’ve got a kick coming, I’ll do what’s right. You can have half of the ten thousand.”

  Margaret’s tears were gone. Pity for self had turned to hatred of the two men who sat in her dining-room making a foolish thing of her pride. She still trembled, but with anger now, and contempt for her boasted red wolf of a husband, trying to buy off the fat man who threatened him. The contempt she felt for her husband was great enough to include Doucas. She had a desire to step through the doorway, to show them that contempt. But nothing came of the impulse. She would not have known what to do, what to say to them. She was not of their world.

  Only her pride had been in her husband’s place in that world.

  “Five—thousand—dollars—is—nothing. Twenty—thousand—rupees—I—spent—preparing—Ceylon—for—you.”

  Margaret’s helplessness turned contempt in on herself. The very bitterness of that contempt drove her to attempt to justify, recapture some fragment of, her pride in Guy. After all, what knowledge had she of his world? What standards had she with which to compute its values? Could any man win every encounter? What else could Guy do under Doucas’s pistol?

  The futility of the self-posed questions angered her. The plain truth was she had never seen Guy as a man, but always as a half-fabulous being. The weakness of any defense she could contrive for him lay in his needing a defense. Not to be ash
amed of him was a sorry substitute for her exultance in him. To convince herself that he was not a coward still would leave vacant the place lately occupied by her joy in his daring.

  Beyond the curtain the two men bargained on across the table.

  “…every—cent. Men—do—not—profitably—betray—me.”

  She glared through the gap between portiere and frame, at fat Doucas with his pistol level on tabletop, at red Guy pretending to ignore the pistol. Rage filled her—weaponless, impotent rage. Or was it weaponless? The light-button was beside the door. Doucas and Guy were occupied with one another—

  Her hand moved before the motive impulse was full-formed inside her. The situation was intolerable; darkness would change the situation, however slightly, therefore darkness was desirable. Her hand moved between portiere and doorframe, bent to the side as if gifted with sight, drove her finger into the button.

  Roaring blackness was streaked by a thin bronze flame. Guy bellowed out, an animal noise without meaning. A chair slammed to the floor. Feet shuffled, stamped, scuffled. Grunts punctuated snarls.

  Concealed by night, the two men and what they did became for the first time real to Margaret, physically actual. They were no longer figures whose substance was in what they did to her pride. One was her husband, a man who could be maimed, killed. Doucas was a man who could be killed. They could die, either or both, because of a woman’s vanity. A woman, she, had flung them toward death rather than confess she could be less than a giant’s wife.

  Sobbing, she pushed past the portiere and with both hands hunted for the switch that had come so readily to her finger a moment ago. Her hands fumbled across a wall that shuddered when bodies crashed into it. Behind her, fleshed bone smacked on fleshed bone. Feet shuffled in time with hoarse breathing. Guy cursed. Her fingers fluttered back and forth, to and fro across wallpaper that was unbroken by electric fixture.