But they did, three young men, one of them behind and pulling her by the backpack straps so she fell down backward to the ground while another began cutting the straps to take off the backpack. A third, now that she was down, was on top of her and feeling her across her waist, where, from practice, he must have known most tourists still used money belts for their cash, credit cards, and passports.
“I’m a doctor!” she cried out. “I don’t have anything but medical supplies in the backpack!” And she aimed a fist at the nose of the young man on top of her, scoring such a hit the nose began to bleed, and Hastings Chiume, yelling in pain, felt to see if the slag had broken it, then took out his knife even while she kept yelling, “Listen, for God’s sake, you idiots, I’m a doctor, I’m here to help you people!”
But it wasn’t until he was trying to cut, then yank off the chained purse around her neck that he recognized the woman in her T-shirt and sunglasses as the bitchy doctor who ran the hospital in Chitipa, whom he had bumped into that day two weeks ago in the town. The stupid lady with the bulging purse in her pocket! Then the doctor, suddenly thrusting her head up as she tried to shake him off, said with surprise, “You’re the one who stole my purse!” and, flattered, Hastings wanted to say something boastful to her, like, Hey, Doktorama, you’d better learn not to carry purses and backpacks when I am around, because see what could happen.
But people were beginning to run out of the hotel and down the driveway, and a taxi driver, stopped to let someone off, got out of his car, so Hastings and his friends knew it was time to go. After a few more yanks and jabs with the knife until the chain came apart, Hastings and his friends ran off, the loot later distributed in the rented room they shared with two others.
Meanwhile Dr. Gaynor — arterial blood spurting out from Hastings’s knife cuts, blood she was trying to stem with her hands — kept calling out more and more feebly, “Help me, call an ambulance, for God’s sake! I’m bleeding to death! I can pay! I can pay!”
The next morning Hastings was at his stand at the huge outdoor Wall Market, a place filled with hundreds and hundreds of tables and stalls, around which people milled and bargained. Hastings was squeezed on his left by Mr. Swembe, a sing’anga or witch doctor from Tanzania who was selling bat’s blood as a cure for AIDS. On the other side was Mrs. Champire’s stall; she ironed items brought to her by customers from the secondhand clothes market, using one of her three flatirons kept heated over a charcoal brazier.
On this day Hastings had laid out on his small table, two crates put together, the profits from his gang’s raids the day before, which included wallets, purses, and Ray-Ban sunglasses, as well as a lot of capsule containers that the others gave Hastings because they had no use for them. He also got most of the stuff they got off Dr. Gaynor, who had really tried to hurt him. Let her suffer now like everyone else!
But she had been right. Her possessions were almost all practical and medical. He could sell the Band-Aid boxes and syringes, but maybe not the rolls of funny paper tape, because when he had tried using some of the tape for his bruised face, the tape broke too easily. There had also been bottles of pills that Hastings had never heard of before but decided to push as the newest brand to help men with problems down below.
Hastings was proud of his table, for he catered mostly to clients searching for things to make them feel better. He had a lot of stuff he got from the chemists’ shops, pills and cough medicines that had expired a long time ago, so they sold them cheap to vendors like him. Other wares came from tourists like the doctor. Tourists always carried a lot of pills on them to ward off death. Besides his medical supplies, Hastings also sold food cans — especially condensed milk cans whose expiration dates were long past — paperbacks either stolen or discarded by tourists, and stolen credit cards, which had to be used fast, before their owners reported the thefts.
A woman carrying a screaming baby on her back came and looked over Hastings’s wares. After a while Hastings couldn’t take it and asked her why was her baby yelling so, did it need to be fed? It wasn’t good for his business. Something had hurt her son on his head, the mother replied, unconcerned, examining the bottles, shaking one of them and watching it cloud up. So Hastings came out from his table and looked at the baby, who was trying to work himself out of the chitenge material holding him fast to his mother’s back. He could see the baby had been bitten by something on the head, causing a big ugly red abscess to fester above his left ear.
Hastings, who considered himself as knowledgeable as anyone about sicknesses, told the mother she should take the baby to see a doctor to have the abscess opened up and the poison let out. If a dog had bitten the baby, the mother should take it to the hospital to see if the baby had rabies, which would kill him and maybe her too if she didn’t act fast. Meanwhile he would use one of his powerful cleaning fluids on it, then bandage it with one of the new Band-Aids he had in stock. Some were Band-Aids for children and had little smiley faces on them.
“A doctor gave them to me to sell,” Hastings told the mother. “But I’ll let you have it free!” And as he painted the baby’s sore with the red stuff out of one of his bottles and put a yellow Band-Aid over the wound, he whistled cheerfully.
Let the Chitipa doctor see him now! I’m a doctor! Hastings mimicked to himself as the mother thanked him formally. Yes, God was good! No exceptions!
Later, did Hastings repent? Did he become a changed man, turn himself in, especially after the American Embassy offered a large reward of five thousand kwacha for information that led to the perpetrator or perpetrators of this unconscionable crime, the murder of Dr. Helen Gaynor?
Of course not. Hastings, after a year’s stay in Nairobi — until interest in the doctor’s death died down — moved on from his medicine table to a small pharmacy, then expanded to own several more, not just in Lilongwe but also in Blantyre, in the south. He married the daughter of a highly placed government official and had many children, for his life wasn’t some work of fiction. His life, and Dr. Gaynor’s, they were part of God’s great plan at work, as Dr. Gaynor’s former assistant Robinson said often and indignantly to the doubters, even back when he, with his now-dead boss’s office key finally in hand, swept and kept Dr. Gaynor’s office safe until the new doctor from Holland arrived.
Contributors’ Notes
Megan Abbott is the Edgar Award — winning author of seven novels, including Dare Me, The Fever, and her latest, You Will Know Me. Her stories have appeared in several collections, including Detroit Noir, The Best American Mystery Stories 2015, and Mississippi Noir. She is also the author of The Street Was Mine, a study of hardboiled fiction and film noir. She was the 2015 winner of the International Thriller Writers and Strand Critics awards for best novel. “The Little Men” was nominated for a 2016 Edgar Award. She lives in Queens, New York.
• The idea for “The Little Men” sprang from real life, a decades-old bit of Hollywood lore. Years ago I read about the sad fate of one of the most successful and charismatic booksellers of Tinseltown’s golden age. His untimely death in 1941 took place in his apartment in one of those lovely courtyard bungalows that loom so large in Hollywood tales, from In a Lonely Place to Day of the Locust to Mulholland Drive. Over the years I remained haunted by the real-life story, and I’m generally a sucker for Hollywood tales anyway — especially ones with dark twists. So when Otto Penzler asked me to set a story with a bookstore/bookseller focus, I finally had my chance to dive deep into that jacaranda-scented world of golden-age Hollywood where everything is beautiful and, quite possibly, deadly.