The Paul Cain Omnibus (65 page)

Borg climbed in behind him, closed the door.

Granquist threw her arms around Kells suddenly and pressed his head close against her shoulder. Her eyes were wide, stricken; her lower lip was caught between her teeth—she almost screamed: “Gerry—darling—for God’s sake, say something!”

Borg was looking back through the side window at the dark archway that led to the stairs.

He said: “Let’s get going.”

Kells raised his head and opened his eyes. He waved an arm in the general direction of the car across the street—the car they had followed from Larson’s.

Borg said: “We ain’t got time to jim it up—besides, they got a flock of cars.” He reached in front of Kells, shook Granquist, shouted: “Let’s go!”

She looked up blankly, then she mechanically took her left arm from around Kells and grasped the wheel. She let the clutch in and the big coupé slid away from the curb.

“Duck down Gardner.” Borg snapped on the dashlight, pulled Kells’ overcoat and suit coat off his shoulder, ripped his shirt open and looked at the wound on the outer muscle of his left arm. “Just a crease,” he said. Then he glanced through the rear window and went on: “Turn right, here—no—the next one. This one’s full of holes.”

Granquist was bent over the wheel, staring intently through the dripping windshield. She jerked her head at Kells and asked: “Why’s he coughing blood?” She spoke in a small, harsh, breathless voice.

Borg shrugged, went on examining Kells.

He glanced again through the rear window, said: “Here they come—give it everything.”

They swung around a corner and the car leaped ahead, the engine throbbed, thundered. When Borg looked back again the headlights that marked the pursuing car were almost three blocks behind them.

He had bent Kells forward, was examining his back. He said: “God! He’s bleeding like a stuck pig from a little hole in his back. Wha’ d’ya suppose done that?”

Kells straightened suddenly, sat up, struggled into his coat. He looked at Granquist, smiled faintly and put up one hand and rubbed it down over his face. He said: “I guess I passed out—where we going?”

“Doctor’s.”

Kells said: “Don’t be silly. We’re going north—fast.” He started coughing again, took out a handkerchief and held it to his mouth.

Borg said slowly: “I thought south—I guess I’m a lousy guesser.”

“I told the cab driver who turned us in north—they’ll probably figure us for south—the Border.” Kells spoke hoarsely, with a curious halting lisp. He leaned forward and began coughing again.

Granquist swung the car right, around another corner.

Borg was looking back. After a couple of blocks, he said: “I think we’ve lost ’em.”

Kells sat up again as Granquist turned east on Sunset Boulevard. He said: “The other way, baby—the other way.”

“We’re going to a doctor’s.” She was almost crying.

Kells put his two hands forward and pulled the emergency brake back hard. The car skidded, turned half around, stopped.

Kells said, “Drive, Fat,” wearily. He looked down at Granquist and went on patiently: “Listen. We’ve got one chance in a hundred of getting away. Every police car and highway patrol in the county is looking for us by now….”

Borg had opened the door, jumped out. He ran around the car and opened the other door and climbed in. Granquist and Kells moved over to make room for him.

Then, before Borg could close the door, a car bore down on them on Borg’s side—a car without lights. Yellow-orange flame spurted from its side as it swerved sharply to avoid hitting them—Borg sank slowly forward over the wheel, sank slowly sideways, fell out the door into the street. The car was going too fast to stop suddenly—it went on towards the next corner, slowing. Flame spurted from its rear window; the windshield shattered and showered Kells and Granquist with glass.

Kells moved very swiftly. He crawled across Granquist, slammed the door shut, had flipped off the emergency and was headed west, in a second, before the other car had turned around. He shifted to high, pressed the throttle to the floor.

Granquist was slumped low in the seat.

Kells glanced at her, asked: “You all right, baby?”

“Uh-huh.” She pressed close against him.

They went out Sunset at around seventy miles an hour, went on through Beverly Hills, out Beverly Boulevard. At the ocean they turned north. The road was being repaired for a half-mile or so; Kells slowed to forty.

Granquist had been watching through the rear window, had seen no sign of the other car. She was close against Kells, her arm around his shoulders. Her eyes were wide, excited.

She kept saying: “Maybe we’ll make it, darling—maybe we’ll make it.”

Kells started coughing again—Granquist held the wheel while he leaned against the door, coughed terribly, as if his lungs were being torn apart.

Rain swept in through the broken windshield.

Kells took the wheel again, said in a choked whisper: “I’ll get a doctor in Ventura—if we get through.” He stepped on the throttle until the needle of the speedometer quivered around seventy again.

There were very few cars on the road.

A little way beyond Topanga Canyon, Kells threw the car out of gear, jerked on the brake.

He said: “I guess you’d better drive….”

Granquist helped him slide over in the seat, crawled across him to the wheel—they started again.

Kells leaned back in the corner, was silent.

As they neared the bridge south of Malibu, Granquist slowed a little. There was someone swinging a red lantern in the middle of the road. Then she pressed the throttle far down, veered sharply to the left past a car that was parked across the road.

She glanced back in a little while and saw its lights behind her, pressed the throttle to the floor.

The road curved a great deal. Granquist was bent forward over the wheel and the rain beat against her face; her eyes were narrowed to slits against the wind and the rain.

There was the faint sound of a shot, two, behind them, a metallic thud as a bullet buried itself somewhere in the body of the car.

Kells opened his eyes, turned to look back. He grinned at Granquist and his face was whiter than anything she had ever seen. He glanced ahead, said: “Give it hell, baby.” Then he groped in his pocket, pulled out the big automatic. He smashed the glass of the rear window with the muzzle and rested the barrel on his forearm. He sighted and fired.

He swore softly. “Missed,” he said.

He fired again, and as the car behind them swerved crazily off the road and stopped. “Bull’s-eye.” Kells laughed soundlessly.

They passed two cars going the other way. Kells, looking back, saw one of them stop and start to turn around. Then they went around a curve and he couldn’t see the car any more.

He glanced at the speedometer. “You’ll have to do a little better. I think there’s a fast one on our tail now.”

She said: “The curves….”

“I know, baby—you’re doing beautifully. Only a little faster.” He smiled.

Granquist asked: “How’s the cough?”

“Swell—I can’t feel it any more.” He patted his chest. “I feel a lot better.”

She braced herself and used the brake hard as they went around a sharp curve.

“There’s a pint of Bourbon in the side pocket. We got it from Jake back at the trick speakeasy….”

Kells said: “My God! Why didn’t you tell me about it before?” He reached for the bottle.

“I forgot….”

She jerked the wheel suddenly, hard, screamed between clenched teeth.

Kells felt the beginning of the skid; he looked outward, forward into blackness. They were in space, falling sidewise into blackness; there was grinding, tearing, crashing sound. Falling. Black.

There was a light somewhere. There was a voice.

Kells moved his arm an inch or so, dug his fingers deep in mud. The rain beat hard, cold on his face.

The voice come from somewhere above him, kept talking about light.

“I can’t get down any farther,” it said. “We got to have more light.”

Kells tried to roll over on his side. There was something heavy on his legs, he couldn’t move them, couldn’t feel them. But he twisted his body a little and opened his eyes. It was entirely dark.

He twisted his body the other way and saw the broad beam of a flashlight high above him in the darkness. The rain looked like snow in the light.

He pushed himself up slowly, leaned on one elbow, saw something white a little distance away. He got his legs, somehow, out of the dark sharp metal that imprisoned them and crawled slowly, painfully, towards the whiteness.

The whiteness was Granquist. She was dead.

Kells lay there awhile in the mud, on his belly, with his face close to Granquist’s face.

He could not think. He could feel the awful, barbed pain in his body; after a while, fear. He looked up at the light and a wave of panic swept suddenly over him, twisted his heart. He wanted to go into the darkness, away from the light. He wanted the darkness very much.

He kissed Granquist’s cold mouth and turned and crawled through the mud away from the light, away from the voices.

He wanted to be alone in the darkness; he wanted the light to please go away.

He whispered, “Please go away,” to himself, over and over.

The ground was rough; great rocks jutted out of the mud, and there were little gullies that the rain had made.

After a while he stopped and turned and looked back and he could not see the light any more. Still he crawled on, dragged his torn body over the broken earth.

In the partial shelter of a steep sloping rock he stopped, sank forward, down.

There, after a little while, life went away from him.

The novel
Fast One
was originally serialized in
Black Mask
magazine in five episodes between March 1932 and September 1932. These five related tales attracted intense comment by both
Black Mask
magazine
readers, and by its
writers, all of whom recognized that these stories represented a kind of culmination of the hardboiled style upon which
Black Mask
’s fame rested.

In the years following the serialization of
Fast One
, especially in the wake of comments by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, the literary masters of the
Black Mask
narrative, Paul Cain’s achievement became recognized as something more than merely the toughest, most compact, and visceral example of
Black Mask
story-telling.

None of Cain’s contemporaries, however, was able to explain very specifically why
Fast One
cast such memorable power as a crime story narrative. Looking back after eighty years of refinement in the formulas of American popular entertainment, especially those tales of the rise of urban crime initiated by
Black Mask
writers, we can now see that Cain’s attitude, and the attitude of the protagonist couple who navigate all the corrupting forces of action in
Fast One
, foreshadow the detached, poised, and disengaged, self-reliant persona that has emerged in twentieth century American film, song, and popular fiction as the essential American hero, who faces death and corruption with poise in a morally compromised American society.

Fast One
is one of the first American novels in which the anti-hero exists on the edge of annihilation merely for the gamble and joy of living to the fullest in the present moment while all around him lesser characters lead lives of desperate greed and corrupt plotting. Though Cain’s novel has no moral center, and though all its characters are flawed, Cain’s anti-hero Kells is never greedy for personal, material gain, or for political power.

What the
Black Mask
crime story tradition had already established in American writing when Cain debuted with the first installment of
Fast One
was the violently corrupted urban landscape of major American cities under siege from many different outlaw forces of political and commercial crime.

What Cain brought to this tradition with
Fast One
and his other
Black Mask
tales, was a varied array of heroes and anti-heroes from hard-boiled detectives, stunt-men, and Hollywood studio trouble-shooters to grifters, goniffs, reporters, and even to an elegant retired judge who all exhibited a kind of amoral gambler’s grace in the face of the constant threat of moral and physical annihilation.

This disengaged, existential Cain hero is not a Carrol John Daly vigilante, nor a complex professional Dashiell Hammett lawman, nor an elegantly voiced Raymond Chandler romantic. These classic
Black Mask
models for hard-boiled heroes no longer easily serve today’s entertainments.

Perhaps the amoral vision that Cain presents in the casual death-defying behavior of his protagonists is the reason that some readers, and some critics, still find Cain’s crime writing disturbing. Perhaps not, since it is just this behavior, and thinking, that made the “deranged” and suicidal L.A.P.D. Sergeant Riggs, the lethal weapon of the eponymous 1987 film so appealing to a huge, contemporary audience.

That Cain could have entered crime writing “on his feet running” with his first published work is a stunning achievement.

That Cain immediately drew a kind of hushed and startled reaction from the then current
Black Mask
masters is even more amazing.

The fact that both
Fast One
and
Seven Slayers
, a selection of Cain’s
Black Mask
tales, have always been in print since their first publication (often in pirated editions of which there are more for Cain than any other
Black Mask
author), and that even now, so many years after its initial publication,
Fast One
remains an anomaly in tone and structure, and a disturbing mystery to many professional writers and devoted fans of detective fiction, is the best tribute to Cain’s enduring achievement.

While the classic hard-boiled mannerisms and rituals developed in
Black Mask
between the 1920s and 1940s have become so familiar that contemporary practitioners who wish to write in the hard-boiled tradition must struggle to avoid clichés and dated visions of nobility and morality, Cain used the forms and devices of the
Black Mask
school to create a work that remains forever modern (or postmodern) and – for many readers – a foreboding work that leaves the audience uncomfortable in the its unflinching look at the edge of morality, and over that edge into the abyss of oblivion.

The unromantic, startling ending to
Fast One
remains a problem for readers and critics who cannot accept and face the unknown in all gambles, nor accept the certainty that all bets end with death.

Those readers who have no sense of the gamble will always find something to be disturbed by in Cain’s writing. Gambling is the essential, recurring theme in Cain’s crime fiction, and the key to the central character’s motivation and appeal in the novel,
Fast One
.

Kells’ role as a gambler in
Fast One
determines how he operates as an existential anti-hero. He, and his companion Cain protagonists take their chances simply because that is how they live,