Chicago Noir [Anthology]

The regular crowd was in session when Carlos walked into Marty’s. He saw three guys conspiring around the bar toward the back, deep in conversation with a bartender leaning against a brightly pain'ted wooden mermaid. Shot and beer glasses had accumulated. One of the guys looked to be in his mid-sixties, with a long, confident face, like a neighborhood Kirk Douglas. The other guys, including the bartender, were around forty. Carlos went over to them. One of the younger guys, pudgy, short-haired, and excitable, was in the middle of a monologue.

“

A movie just isn’t a movie unless there’s a talking ape in it,” he was saying.

“When was the last great monkey movie, anyway?” said the other young guy, who had his blond hair tied back in a ponytail.

“Any of you work here?” Carlos asked.

“My name is Schultz,” said the pudgy guy. “I know nothing! Nothing!”

They broke up laughing. Carlos had no idea why. He pulled the card out of his pocket.

“I found this on the floor at Ginny’s,” he said. “You know this dude?”

The older guy, in his last year or two of distinguished handsomeness, took the card from Carlos. A severe look crawled across his face. He let out a puff of air.

“Ah,” he said. “Little Johnny Quinn. To sleep, perchance to dream.”

“The cops took his body away awhile ago,” said Carlos.

“Was yours the last face upon which he gazed?” the man inquired.

“I was behind the bar, and he just fell down,” Carlos said.

“A sadder day we haven'’t seen in these environs for some years,” the man said.

“What does this mean,” Carlos said, “Membership Expired ”?

Eyebrows raised at the bar.

“The game is afoot!” said the guy with the ponytail.

“Who is Keyser Soze?” said the monkey man.

“Monsieur Poirot,” said the older guy, “my name is Francis Carmody. We’ve been waiting for you!” He spoke to the rest of his fellowship. “Gentlemen,” he said, “this man has a suspicious nature. I suggest we repair to our hideout a little bit later to alleviate his concerns with libation!”

The guys all raised their beers. As one, they said, nearly whispered: “Aye! Aye! Aye and aye! We drink, we drink, we drink, or else we die!”

What the fuck, Carlos thought.

Francis Carmody lived in a split-level bungalow a few streets west of Clark, on a block that still housed many people who’d been consciously alive in the 1960s. He’d owned the place for more than forty years, and had the accumulated basement of newspapers, magazines, and lyric opera programs to show for his tenure. An ill-placed match could have burned down the neighborhood. A decade previous, the paper volume had reached critical mass, but rather than recycle—a habit which Mayor Daley, an unlikely environmentalist, encouraged in all Chicagoans—Francis did something wholly out of character: He built an addition onto his house. It was the only improvement he made in all his decades of living there.

Francis needed the addition because he collected films, and not DVDs, either. Francis didn'’t believe in digital images. One could possibly make the argument that celluloid was equally dishonest, but if one made that argument, Francis would shut down the spigot and you’d find yourself drinking alone.

At about 9:30 p.m. on that Wednesday, Carlos found himself walking through the back door of Francis Carmody’s 350-square-foot home theater. Carlos had been lured there with the promise of free booze. The last movie he’d seen was The Chronicles of Riddick, and then only because his date had a thing for Vin Diesel and Carlos hoped that little tingle might carry over into afterwards. So Francis’s collection of framed posters from Jean Harlow and Errol Flynn movies didn'’t mean anything to him. Carlos didn'’t remember Jessica Lange as King Kong’s girlfriend, much less Fay Wray. And when Francis announced that the evening would feature, after selected trailers and shorts, a double feature of The Informer and The Lady from Shanghai, to Carlos he might as well have been announcing lessons in medieval Catalan.

“These films were beloved by Johnny Quinn, blessed be his memory,” Francis said.

A bottle of high-end vodka had appeared. Carlos didn'’t see where it came from, but these guys had been buying him drinks for hours, and he was already close to hammered.

Francis Carmody poured little tumblers for them all. “We quaff sublimely for Johnny,” he said. “For he drank too wisely, and never from the well.”

“Indeed,” said the guy with the ponytail.

They took their seats on comfortable couches that smelled of two generations of cat, facing a screen that looked like it’d been rescued from a high school janitor’s closet. Francis stood behind them at a projector. Behind him was a wall of film canisters. He pulled one down and pressed a button on the wall to his left.

“Laura,” he said, “we’re ready for the boiled meats.”

On cue, a hunched woman in an unattractive housedress appeared, bearing a tray of flabby hot dogs, hydrogenated buns, and the appropriate condiments.

“My wife, Laura,” Francis said to Carlos. “The bulwark of my soul.”

She put the hot dogs on a table in front of the couches and shuffled out of the room without a word.

“A fine lady,” Francis said.

They watched a Carmen Miranda short, then one starring Esther Williams, followed by a Chuck Jones cartoon that made fun of Hitler. Francis poured the vodka between each reel. Francis showed The Lady from Shanghai, but the movie stopped after an hour, without an ending.

“Art is at its purest when unfinished,” Francis said. “I believe Johnny Quinn would agree.”

“Hear hear,” said the guy who liked monkey movies.

Finally, Carlos, who’d floated along on an existential sea all evening, oblivious from drink, said something.

“What are you talking about?” he said.

“Ah, the natural inquisitiveness of youth has surfaced at last,” Francis said. “Boys, shall we lift the veil of ignorance from his eyes?”

Francis stood in front of the screen, lecturing without a pointer.

“The only thing more intoxicating than the free flow of drink,” he said, “is the free flow of ideas. On the rare occasions that the two combine, it’s possible to know the face of God. Once, philosopher-kings who worked for a living, men who knew their way equally around a factory floor and a lecture hall, ruled Chicago. Their era was short but glorious. The city could barely build enough taverns to hold them all. They loved their learning and their drink, and the platonic joys of sophisticated male friendship. I was one of those men.

“So was Marty Halversen, the finest man I ever had the privilege of knowing, a scion of the Navy and a veteran of the slaughterhouse, and the holder of a degree in English literature from DePaul. He was a man truly worthy of the title tavern keeper, a great poet, a lover of women, and a friend to the neighborhood. I revered him more than my own father.

Much more.

“Marty believed above all things, as do I, in the enlightenment of the human soul. To that end, we chose the finest thinkers of all the fine thinkers we knew, and we formed Marty’s Drink or Die Club. We were young then, so the club’s idea seemed fanciful. There would come a time, we joked, when our doctors would tell us that we had to stop drinking or else we would die. But not to drink is, in essence, to die anyway. Therefore we made a pledge, forged at the bottom of a glass: If one of us received the Hippocratic word, then the rest of us were bound by fraternal duty to make it come true.”

At that, Francis held a glass as if for a toast, and everyone in the room drank on cue. He continued: “For twenty-five years, the club met happily. We formed a protective shell of ideas and camaraderie around ourselves, our intellects serving as a shield and a balm against the bitter shocks of the wider world. Then one day Marty came in the bar with his face ashen yet resigned.