Playback (Philip Marlowe, #7)

by Raymond Chandler

“Sorry, Mr. Umney. But I’m not a young man. I’m old, tired and full of no coffee. What can I do for you, sir?”

I was doing a cheap sneaky job for people I didn’t like, but—that’s what you hire out for, chum. They pay the bills, you dig the dirt. Only this time I could taste it. She didn’t look like a tramp and she didn’t look like a crook. Which meant only that she could be both with more success than if she had.

“You in show business?” “Just the opposite of show business. I’m in the hide-and-seek business. My name is Philip Marlowe. You’ve seen me before.”

“Guns never settle anything,” I said. “They are just a fast curtain to a bad second act.”

“Well, what do you know,” she drawled. “A dick with scruples. Tell it to the seagulls, buster. On me it’s just confetti. Run along now, Mr. PI Marlowe, and make that little old phone call you’re so anxious about. I’m not restraining you.”

The first sensation was that if anybody spoke harshly to me I should burst out crying. The second, that the room was too small for my head. The front of the head was a long way from the back, the sides were an enormous distance apart, in spite of which a dull throbbing beat from temple to temple. Distance means nothing nowadays.

On the dance floor half a dozen couples were throwing themselves around with the reckless abandon of a night watchman with arthritis.

I wouldn’t say she looked exactly wistful, but neither did she look as hard to get as a controlling interest in General Motors.

“I guess it’s not raining tonight, is it? There was something we might have discussed over a drink, if it had been a rainy night. And if you had not been too busy.”

How strange it is that man’s finest aspirations, dirty little animal that he is, his finest actions also, his great and unselfish heroism, his constant daily courage in a harsh world—how strange that these things should be so much finer than his fate on this earth.

“You’re my client. I’m trying to protect you. Maybe on my seventieth birthday someone will tell me why.” “I didn’t ask you to protect me. I’m not your client. Why don’t you go home—if you have a home—and stop annoying people?” “You’re my client—five thousand dollars worth. I have to do something for it—even if it’s no more than growing a mustache.”

“All right. Kiss me, if it’s any satisfaction to you. I suppose you would rather have this happen where there was a bed.” “I’m human.” “Don’t kid yourself. You’re a dirty low-down detective. Kiss me.”

There are things that are facts, in a statistical sense, on paper, on a tape recorder, in evidence. And there are things that are facts because they have to be facts, because nothing makes any sense otherwise.

It is like a sudden scream in the night, but there is no sound. Almost always at night, because the dark hours are the hours of danger. But it has happened to me also in broad daylight—that strange, clarified moment when I suddenly know something I have no reason for knowing. Unless out of the long years and the long tensions, and in the present case, the abrupt certainty that what bullfighters call “the moment of truth” is here.

“How can such a hard man be so gentle?” she asked wonderingly. “If I wasn’t hard, I wouldn’t be alive. If I couldn’t ever be gentle, I wouldn’t deserve to be alive.”

The gunman was ready to kill me. Could you really love a man like that?” “A woman loves a man. Not what he is. And he may not have meant it.” “Goodbye, Betty. I gave it what I had, but it wasn’t enough.”

Well, I’ll take myself out of your hair now. Like I said—I want to get back to Los Angeles. Somebody might offer me a cheap job. I have to live, or do I?”

“I try to protect the hotel. Who do you try to protect?” “I never know. Often, when I do know, I don’t know how. I just fumble around and make a nuisance of myself. Often I’m pretty inadequate.”

Wherever I went, whatever I did, this was what I would come back to. A blank wall in a meaningless room in a meaningless house. I put the drink down on a side table without touching it. Alcohol was no cure for this. Nothing was any cure but the hard inner heart that asked for nothing from anyone.