“Don’t move, sonny. Don’t move at all. And just let the gun drop.”
Cursing himself for not taking the time to check the results of a glancing blow, Terry let his fingers relax, felt the comforting touch of the gun slip down and away from them.
Over his shoulder, he saw the blood-smeared stone that was a servant’s face. Almost at the same time, catching the motion in the corner of his eye, he saw Liza reach for the neck of a bottle on the liquor cabinet. Following through, she burned it across the room in a sidearm delivery that really wasn’t half bad for a dame.
Terry dropped, and above him there was a blast of powder, and his head was wet with a bourbon shower. From the floor, he drove up and over the desk at Sebastian, leaving the hood-servant to bourbon and Liza and luck. And in his attack was all the leashed hate that was the product of eight servile months. Under his flailing fists, Sebastian’s face crumpled and altered in a red, wet sheen.
Turning from his completed job, he saw that Liza was in control. Sulla’s gun was in her hand, and the servant was quiet against the wall.
The man was clutching a hand from which blood welled brightly.
Across the space between them, which was really the space between the bad beginning long ago and the good beginning which might now be, Terry said softly, “Liza, baby!”
Her eyes closed on tears, and she said, “Terry, Terry.…”
Outside the room, the hall door banged open, and feet pounded down the asphalt tile.
HELL FOR HANNAH
Originally published in Dime Detective Magazine, August 1953.
Hannah and Ivan were dancing. The music was soft and sultry, the stuff of muted strings, and they moved to its Latin rhythms in a floating intimacy. Her head was back, her eyes were closed, and her lips stirred in a whisper of ecstasy. They were a beautiful pair.
When the music slopped, they returned to their table, and I got up and went over. I bowed to Ivan very politely and said, “May I have the next dance with my wife?” And he stood and returned the bow, also very politely, and said, “But of course, señor.” Then he turned and made another bow to Hannah, and she stood up with us, her face white and her eyes dark with sorrow. The sorrow was there because she didn’t like hurting her husband, but it would have been better for me if she had. It would have been better if she’d sneered nastily and spit in my eye.
The music started again, and she came into my arms, but not very far in. I tried my best, and I think she did, too, but it still wasn’t any good. It was like dancing with a wooden doll.
“I’m sorry, Carey,” she said.
I said, “Don’t be sorry. Be gay.”
“Please don’t be bitter. Don’t hate Ivan and me.”
“Who hates anyone? I love you, honey. I love Ivan, too. He’s a big, beautiful, Mexican god.”
“I tried to lick it, Carey. You know I tried. Remember how I asked you to take me away, back when it first started and there was still time? But you wouldn’t do it because you said there was no use running and you’d have to meet the competition where you found it.”
“Sure, I remember. Big, proud me.”
“I wanted our marriage to last. I wanted it to be forever.”
“Marriage!” I said brightly. A technicality, honey.”
Oh, yes, only a technicality. When the big passion comes, even though it’s late, all the intimate years and all the bright plans are reduced in an instant to the status of a dreary and bothersome technicality. Marriage, then, is a scrap of paper, the somewhat incredible ghost of a relationship that once existed.
We’d been on a kind of second honeymoon…Mexican honeymoon. It was something I’d promised her for a long time. After the novel’s published, I’d said. And now the novel was out, and quite a few people thought it was worth buying, and we had been on the second honeymoon. Everything had been wonderful and terribly intense, and then, all of a sudden, everything had been Ivan. The honeymoon was finished, I was finished, and there was no one but Ivan left in the world for Hannah. For me, there wasn’t even a world left. There was only sun and sand and a clutter of senseless stars.
I looked down at her now, and there was a kind of puzzled, rousing-from-a-dream look in her eyes, and I thought for a moment that the past was alive again and she was coming back my way. Then it was gone, and she was gone, and it was time to give up.
“I’ll go away tomorrow, Carey. Ivan and I. It’ll be easier then. You can forget all about me.”
“Sure,” I said, and it was like being knifed, hearing the way she said it. “Forgetting is an easy thing. Nothing to it. All these little synaptic connections and stuff that go to make up learning and remembering come equipped with little spigots. You want to quit thinking or remembering something, you just turn the right one off.”
“You’ll forget, after a while. I’ll get a divorce down here. Mexican divorces are quick. Maybe we’ll stay down, Ivan and I. Maybe we’ll go to Mexico City.”
The music picked that moment to stop, and we stood stiffly in the middle of the floor. I didn’t even have an excuse to keep my arm around her now.
“That’ll be nice and romantic,” I said. “I hope you’ll both be very happy. Which I don’t, of course. Really, I hope you’re very miserable and cry in your pillow every night remembering good old Carey.”
She looked up at me with fog in her eyes, and I knew I might as well have left the words unsaid. They never reached her.
“Tomorrow, Carey. We’ll leave in the morning. It was cruel of us to stay on so long. We’d have left sooner, but Ivan couldn’t leave. Some
