The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories

Stephen (Gould) Fisher (1912–1980) served in the U.S. Navy for four years from the age of sixteen, then settled in New York City to write full-time, becoming one of the most prolific and successful authors of his time, with hundreds of stories sold to both the pulps and the slicks, twenty novels, and more than one hundred scripts for motion pictures and television series.

His classic noir novel I Wake Up Screaming (1940) was his breakthrough when it was made into what is generally regarded as Hollywood’s first film noir. The 1941 movie starred Victor Mature, Betty Grable, Carole Landis, and Laird Cregar; it was remade in 1953 as Vicki, with Jeanne Crain, Elliott Reid, Jean Peters, and Richard Boone. Fisher was the screenwriter for numerous mystery films in the 1940s, including the uncharacteristically dark final film in the popular Thin Man series, Song of the Thin Man (1947), Johnny Angel (1945, with George Raft, based on a Charles G. Booth novel, Mr. Angel Comes Aboard), Lady in the Lake (1947, based on Raymond Chandler’s novel), I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes (1948, based on a Cornell Woolrich story), Berlin Correspondent (1942, an anti-Nazi thriller), and Dead Reckoning (1947), a classic crime tale starring Humphrey Bogart and Lizabeth Scott. His early navy background lent authenticity to such war film screenplays as Destination Tokyo (1943, starring Cary Grant) and the aircraft carrier film Flat Top (1952); his other great war movie is To the Shores of Tripoli (1942).

“Wait for Me” was published in the May 1938 issue.

A murdered spy evokes Death in Shanghai.

Her name was Anna, and she was beautiful, with golden blond hair that came to her shoulders and turned under at the ends, and a face like an angel, soft and aglow with color; gray-green eyes, and the slim traces of sunlight that were eyebrows.

She knelt there in the Shanghai street, and bowed her head, so that her hair fell a little forward, and like that, kneeling, there was both grace and divinity in her.

The sunset drifted across her red jacket and the shadow of her slim figure fell across the cobblestone street, causing even the fleeing Chinese to stop and turn and look, though they did not pause long. Now and again a white man stopped, and glanced at her, then went on when he recognized that she was Russian.

Anna leaned down and kissed the bleeding girl, kissed her cooling cheeks, and said softly:

“We will have no more sailors together, eh, Olga? Drink no more vodka.” She smiled faintly, and shrugged, for Olga was gone, like yesterday’s breath. Gone, Anna thought, quite fortunately and painlessly. A merciful stray bullet — and who to tell if Jap or Chinese? — had ended her troubles. But Anna, living, must go on.

She looked around, looked through the streets for the man who had been following her, but she did not see him, and by now had forgotten the corpse of the girl.

She rose, and moved on, gracefully, her feet accustomed to the cobblestones, her face and eyes dry. She paused at each corner and looked up and down the street. Mostly she was looking for the man who had followed her from her apartment. She did not know who he was. He was wearing a coat with its collar turned up around his face, a white face with bleak, desperate eyes. He had called after her and she had run, losing herself in the fleeing crowd. She was terrified. Everything terrified her.

Since the evacuation order had come through to send all foreign white women to Hong Kong, and from there to their own countries, Anna felt that her time to die would come at any moment.

There was no escape for Russian exiles. There was nowhere they could run to get away from war. No passports would be issued to them; no country wanted them. Russian women were at the mercy of the mob, of the armies, of every band of men that came along. The evacuation order clearing white women had come two hours ago; in another sixteen hours huge transports would sail away with all those women, except the Russians...

Ah, the Russians. Anna laughed into the clatter of the frightened street; and then she clenched her teeth and fled on, shadows and torch-light beating against her running figure. It was quieter in the International settlement. She did not slacken her pace, though she was breathing harder.

When she came to the hotel she swept inside the doors, and in that instant she saw the man who had been following her, the man whose coat collar was turned up. She saw him running past, and, not waiting to see if he would miss her, then stop and come back, she went to the desk.

“I wish to see Mrs. Turner.”

The clerk bowed. “You may call her on the house phone, madam.”

Anna moved nervously to the house phone and picked it up. When Rita Turner’s silky voice came on the wire, Anna said: “I have a message from your husband. It is very important and most confidential.”

Except in highly excitable moments Anna could speak English without an accent, for her finishing school had been a nightclub called the Navy Sport Palace, which was little more than third rate, and located on the Bund. There she had learned all the American and English and French slang; and she had learned other things too: how to darken her eyes, and redden her mouth, and wink her eye, and toss her head; how to drink without becoming drunk; how to muffle her sobs with laughter; the art of light love with a deep touch.

Rita Turner said nervously: “Please come up.”

Anna moved gracefully into the elevator. She sighed as the doors slid quietly closed. Though she had been too young to remember Moscow, she thought it might be like this; the comfort and ease the White Russians had known; the old lost life about which she had heard her parents talk.

When she arrived on the fourth floor she walked down the heavily padded hall and stopped in front of the room number Rita Turner had given her. She knocked, and the door was immediately opened.

A tall, dark girl, her hair in a heavy roll on her neck, her skin pale, and her eyes bright and black and vivid, stood there, then stepped back. Anna walked in.

It was a beautiful apartment. A radio tuned to Hong Kong was playing “The Lady Is a Tramp”; from the window there was a magnificent scene of fire sweeping across the eastern section of Shanghai, and it was so vivid Anna almost thought she could hear the shrill despair of the screams beneath the flame.

The rug in the room was Oriental, the furniture quietly rich. Three bags lay open, light plane baggage, brown and smart and new. They were half packed. Women’s clothes were strewn everywhere.

Anna turned slowly, as though she wished to take her time and enjoy this setting slowly without rush and hustle.

Rita Turner said, “What is the message, please? And who are you?” She was impatient.

Anna smiled with her teeth. “Your husband has been sent up the Yangtze?”

The dark-haired girl nodded.

“He will not return for three days?”

“That’s right,” answered Rita Turner, “but we’re wasting time. What is the message?”

Anna flopped down on the divan and reached for a cigarette. She put it in her mouth and lit it.

“Your husband is an army officer,” she went on, “and you have been ordered to evacuate? Is that not right?”

“Of course it’s right.”

Anna, only three puffs into the cigarette, snuffed it out. “I got the information from a man who sells such information to White Russians.” She smiled again. “I will tell you that it cost me all I had been able to save during these meager years in Shanghai. Four hundred mex.”

“Just what are you getting at?”

Anna rose. “It is easy, isn’t it? The obvious thing. I kill you and transfer my picture to your passport. Then I can escape Shanghai.” She raised one eyebrow. “Otherwise, I shall be left.”

Rita Turner stared at her for a moment, then she dove for one of her bags. But a gun glittered in Anna’s slim hand. Rita Turner saw the weapon and paused, terror draining her pale skin. Her eyes widened, and then she continued for the bag, stooping, fumbling with a large automatic, turning toward Anna.

The sound of Anna’s shots did not penetrate the soundproof walls.

Rita Turner stood very still for a moment. Then the heavy gun slipped from between her slim fingers. Her lips twisted, as though she were about to laugh; and then blood welled from a hole just below her neck, and she crumpled, her figure like a question mark.

Anna looked down at her, neither pity nor compassion on her face, though it was the first person she had ever killed. Perhaps seeing so many dead and suffering had made her hard like this. She thought only: I will not be trapped here and die like the others. I will escape. I will have an evacuation order, and I will go aboard one of the big transports, and be taken to Hong Kong, and then to the United States. Freedom, peace! Murder has given me wings!

She was lucky, she thought, that the man who had sold her this information about an army wife whose husband was up the Yangtze River had not tricked her; for false information was sold for prices as great as the genuine. But then she had been “good” to her informant, plus the four hundred mex. He had known she would have to steal another woman’s passport to escape the horror that was Shanghai. All he had done was supply the name of a woman — a woman who would surely be alone when Anna went to see her...

Anna must change that passport now, put her picture in, and get the sailing orders. She must do a million and one things; she must go through all of Rita Turner’s papers and learn everything about her.

Last of all, least of all, she had but to take the bags and get aboard the transport. Murder was easy!

She had found some wine, and at midnight, Anna still sat in the room, feeling no glow but only half sick from the too sweet wine. She sat facing a desk full of papers, important documents with fancy seals, plans, blueprints, messages in French and German, even some in Chinese. Anna knew all about Rita Turner now. She knew what she hadn’t known.

Rita Turner had been an international spy.

That meant only one thing: Anna, in taking over Rita Turner’s name and identity, would have to pretend to be that same spy.

Anna’s course had been clear, she had planned each last detail. She was to put the corpse in a steamer trunk and then send for the Chinese boys to come and get it with the other baggage; and later at sea she would put the corpse into a navy sea-bag and during the night drag it to the side of the ship and dump it over. There would be no trace of murder: only the living, breathing, the new Rita Turner.

But this new complication frightened and confused Anna. She knew no way in which to turn. If she fled the hotel and left the corpse here she still could not escape the city and murder would catch up with her. They would find her in Shanghai sooner or later, perhaps shivering in a hovel, and then for the murder they would put a gun to the back of her head and blow out her life.

She must make the transport with the corpse in the steamer trunk. But how? As a spy Rita Turner had definite orders to deliver some papers before her departure from the city, and even though Anna knew little about espionage she was aware that counter-spies checked on the activities of a spy; that people ordered to contact Rita Turner would be on the look-out for her. There was this alone, even if she didn’t think about the risk of being captured as Rita, as the spy, and being punished in the ruthless manner of war.

To go straight to the boat was impossible. She must board it just before it sailed, and keep entirely to herself in case someone on board should know the real Rita Turner. Meanwhile there was the chance that she would be recognized as an impostor by other members of the espionage ring by which Rita Turner had been employed.

Anna poured herself a drink. She took it down, then she lighted a cigarette and got up and moved over to the window. She looked down at the street seething with torch-light.

She heard the music of the radio and she thought of her nightclub back on the Bund and wished that she was back in it — even what was left of it. There had been happiness there, a hard kind. Sailors saying: “Listen, babe, you’re a tramp, but I’d die for you; a guy’s gotta have someone to love, and when he loves he wants to make believe it’s the real thing.”

She remembered that now, those words, and other words; the quaint, tough, laughing Shanghai she had known before the invasion. But all of that had gone past her, and she was alone here with the body of a woman she had murdered — a woman who by dying had put her problems on Anna. The sailors were gone, and her girl friends were gone, even Olga, who was her closest.

Anna dropped the cigarette and rubbed her foot over it.

The telephone rang.

She stood and looked at it, petrified, feeling fear crawl up into her, making her sick. She held her hands out and watched them tremble; and the phone rang again. She moved toward it, only a foot, and it rang for the third time.

Then suddenly she leapt over and snatched up the instrument. She had dared herself, and now she had plunged.

“Hello?” She tried to remember the sound of Rita Turner’s voice.

“Rita?”

“Yes.”

It was a man’s voice and went on now: “I know I shouldn’t call at the hotel like this, but we had an appointment to — ah, go dancing. Have you forgotten? I’ve been waiting here quite a long time.”

“I’m awfully sorry,” said Anna. “Where have you been waiting?”

“You know where.”

Anna laughed. “Oh yes, of course. I will be there at once.”

“Will you? Nothing’s gone wrong, has it? You weren’t going to sail without your packet — ah, that packet of...” The voice trailed off.

Anna was quick on the up-take; her voice caught: “Oh, you mean that money you drew from the bank for me.” She laughed gaily. “Oh yes, I get that tonight for... for—”

“Careful,” said the man. “Ah — I’ll be glad to get to meet you.”

Anna took a chance: “How will I know you?”

“I’ll be by the telephone booth,” he said promptly. “It was prearranged.” He sounded a trifle irritated. “Don’t you remember anything? Frenchie’s isn’t so difficult to reach, I mean—”

“If anybody was listening in,” said Anna, “they’ve had an earful by now.” She had an earful herself. “I’ll see you later,” she finished.

“All right,” the man replied.

She hung up and her blood tingled. Money. They were paying Rita Turner off before sailing. Money! Hers, to have and to spend. So easy! What had seemed a difficult situation was turning into a paying adventure. She had imagined espionage work was like this: Agents, strangers to one another, contacting each other. Nor was spying the highly clever profession she had been given to believe, for, fortunately for her, the man had even tipped his position over the phone: Frenchie’s.

Anna had now but to send the baggage, with the corpse in the trunk, to the boat; and then contact this man and turn over Rita’s papers to him — for money. After that, praise the great St. Peter, she would be free; possibly rich!

She gathered all of Rita’s spy papers, put them down her dress. Then she looked down at the corpse of Rita Turner, which she had dragged to a corner, and now for the first time a shiver ran through her. She remembered that she had committed murder; she had never once forgotten, but now her conscience remembered, and she tried to laugh.

She remembered once a French sailor coming into the nightclub bragging that he had just stabbed a man. He had laughed; he had been so hard and carefree. Murder was really nothing. Not when there was a war going on, and people dying.

She was a fool to even think of it. She should laugh like the Frenchman. So she did laugh. She would kill twenty Rita Turners if she herself could escape with the living.

She set about to put the corpse in the trunk and to do hastily all the other things she had to do.

It was almost forty minutes before Anna could leave the hotel. A tenseness had come to her again. She had sent the baggage out without arousing suspicion because she had used Rita Turner’s money to give the boys big tips so that the baggage would not have to go through the routine of being checked.

She knew that in this skelter of evacuation there would be no customs at the boat, for the boat was going first to Hong Kong. What she feared was trouble with the desk, though ordinarily there should be none. If anybody was curious, she had been visiting Rita Turner.

The elevator door swung open and she alighted on the main floor. It was crowded with people and she saw now that her escape, the escape from the hotel people, would be easy.

What she did not see at once was the man whose coat collar had been turned up — the man who had been following her. He was sitting in a leather chair in the lobby, waiting for her.

His coat collar was down now, and she could see his face clearly. It was white and looked very frightened. She stopped, straining to remember where she had known him. Surely, she had known him sometime in the past. Perhaps in the nightclub, but then she had known so many... Why had he followed her?

He saw her, and rising, came toward her. Panic seized her. There could be no scene here. She must get to the street and away from him. She must talk to no one except the man who waited at the telephone booth in Frenchie’s — perhaps with money, but certainly she must see him so that counter-spies would not trail the new Rita Turner from Shanghai.

The man followed her, however, and at the door he caught her arm, turning her half-way around. She looked again into his face, and for a moment his name, or his place in her past, was on the tip of her tongue; but it escaped her.

“Please,” she said, “please, don’t touch me.”

“But listen, I—”

“Please!”

She jerked away from him, and in a moment she was in the street. He followed her out the door. She ran, and turned a corner. She could hear him chasing.

Her heart shoved against her side, and sharp pains from running came so that it was difficult for her to breathe. The man would kill her perhaps. No one meant any good in this mess. Her flight was instinctive. She heard him call out — then she was flinging herself out through the gates of the International settlement, climbing into a rickshaw.

“Frenchie’s,” she said.

There was no other conveyance, and when she looked back she saw the man standing there, waving at her to come back. Then, in the flare of a torch, she saw that he had begun running; he meant to follow the rickshaw. She heard him yell, “Wait for me! Wait!”

The wooden wheels of her cart clattered over the road, putting murder and the unknown man behind her. But she saw presently that the coolie was running like a fool with no sense of direction. She called at him to stop. Her voice grew frantic. The coolie kept running. She was terrified lest this be a trap of some kind, and yet common sense told her that it could not be that.

They turned up a street that was a tumult of noise and light, and then suddenly she saw that the crazed coolie was running right into the middle of a company of marching Japanese. She held on to the side and waited. The crash came. She saw a bayonet flash, and then she saw the blade sever the coolie’s head so that it fell off, easily, like the loose knob on a door.

Then she was on the ground, struggling to escape. Desperate, like a rabbit, and somehow she squirmed away from them, shouting all the time: “I am English! I am English! You don’t dare touch me! I’m English!”

She was running again, then telling herself she must keep her mind or be lost in this confusion.

She found herself on an open street, and somehow she had stopped and was looking up. She didn’t know at first why she had done this; she didn’t know until she heard the throbbing of giant plane engines, and saw the bright lights, and the wings that seemed to descend on her. She thought then that it was all over.

But it wasn’t. It had just begun. A store, across from her, rose in a ball of streaked fire, and then Anna was crouching, holding her hands over her head, and the débris was coming down everywhere.

Just ahead of her she saw another bomb tear out the street and shower bricks everywhere. She could hear the bricks falling, one by one, like drops from a monster hail storm. And through all this, an ear-splitting roar of plane motors, and bursting bombs.

Anna could hear the steady, never-ending blend of screaming people... people dying... people lying all around her, some of them resignedly holding their arms in their laps.

She got up, and stumbled, kept trying to run. She saw a little baby sitting in a pool of blood, crying. She saw two little girls running and crying and dragging the corpse of an old Chinese woman.

She told herself she must keep sanity, she must keep going. Her murder — the murder she had committed — must not converge upon her. This couldn’t be her punishment. Men died with guns in the backs of their necks, not from the débris of bombs, when they committed murder.

She must not die! What she must do was escape Shanghai. Escape war!

She ran into someone, suddenly. She looked up and saw the man who had followed her from the hotel. She didn’t care now who he was. She threw herself into his arms; she pressed her shuddering body against his protecting one and waited for the noise and the death that was everywhere.

“We must escape. We must get away from here!” shouted the man.

“Frenchie’s,” she shouted back. “Frenchie’s! We must go there.”

“Kid,” said the man, “I—”

“Don’t talk. We must get to Frenchie’s!”

“Anna!” he said. She looked up, terrified; so he knew her. Oh, good sweet God, that was funny, because she didn’t know him from Adam.

“Don’t talk,” she said. “Frenchie’s! Take me there.” She was used to the easy companionship for men, and this did not seem strange, that she should make this request of him; he was here to use.

He started to talk to her again, but another bomb exploded, and he picked her up and began running with her. She knew it was only a thousand-to-one chance that they would get through, get off this street alive.

But they did.

Anna did not know how much longer it was, nor how many blocks they had come. She knew only that when the stranger who knew her set her down, it was in front of Frenchie’s. He was sweating, and there wasn’t much left of his suit. He was laughing, and half crying, and that way he looked much more familiar. He was saying:

“Babe, I love you like seven hundred dollars on Christmas day, and—”

“I must go in here,” she said; “wait for me until I come out. I won’t be long.” She realized he could help her get to the transport; he was big and he was strong, and like so many men at many times, he loved her.

“Anything you say, babe, but you will come out?”

“Of course I will.” She was a bit impatient. It did not occur to her to thank him for saving her life.

“You know why I’m here?”

“No,” she said, “I don’t know.”

“Because I love you,” he said.

She laughed, bitterly. “How very nice! But I must go in here now—”

“I’m A.W.O.L.,” he went on, “and I’ll get socked behind the eight ball for two months for this, but, geez, a guy—”

“So you’re a sailor?”

“Of course,” he said.

“Why didn’t you tell me? Why are you wearing those clothes?”

He laughed. “How long do you think I’d last on the streets in uniform? They’d pick me up before I could move.”

“And you risked all this to tell me you loved me?”

“Of course. You must have known how I’ve felt that time in—”

“I knew you at the Navy Sport Palace?”

“Sure. Aw, come on, baby, don’t tell me you’ve forgotten. You’re not that hard.”

“Aren’t I?” she thought; but what she said was: “Of course I didn’t forget you, darling. Now wait for me. Wait here for me.”

She turned and went inside, and the last she heard from him was when he leaned back against the building and began to whistle. She had heard the tune earlier this evening and it gave her a start. It was “The Lady Is a Tramp.”

She looked a wreck and she knew it, but she was past caring. She moved from table to table, went to the back of Frenchie’s where there was the bar. She stopped here and had a stiff drink. It made her feel better.

She heard soft muted music, and she saw people who were still trying to look gay. You’d never know there was a war; or that ten minutes ago bombs were raising merry hell, she thought. Human beings can play the damnedest games, and keep their nerve, or what looks like nerve from the ivory polish surface of their skin.

She went at last to the telephone booths. She spotted the contact man almost at once. He was tall and had iron-gray hair. He was wearing a white mess jacket, and highly polished black shoes. She could not distinguish his nationality; he looked cosmopolitan, smooth. He smiled when he saw her: one of her own kind of smiles — with his teeth.

“Ah, my dear,” he said.

She looked arch. “Pardon me?” This was a come-on; there had to be some come-on, she thought. Marlene Dietrich had always had one in those films that played down by the Bund.

“But, my dear Rita,” said the man, which gave the perfect rhythm to everything.

She nodded, and he went on: “Shall we go upstairs to the balcony?”

“All right.”

“You have the papers?”

“Yes,” she said.

She allowed him to escort her up a flight of steps to a room over the main part of the club. It was rather dark, and the windows faced the street. He turned on a light, but it was only a colored Oriental lantern. His face seemed softer, somehow flushed in this illumination.

She lifted the packet of papers from her breast and handed them to him. He inspected them briefly in the half-light, and then he looked up smiling.

“Everything is here, I believe,” he said.

“Then I can go? I can have some money, and then I can go—”

He bowed slightly, from the waist. “But of course.”

It was then that she saw the small automatic in his hand. She turned to run from it. But another man was walking slowly up behind her.

“We’ve waited for this a long time, Rita,” one of them said.

She saw now what it was. These men were agents from a government which opposed the one for which Rita Turner had been working. They had deliberately set a trap for her.

Bitterly in that flashing, horrible second, she remembered the entire telephone conversation. She had thought she was leading the man out; in reality he had been leading her; he had tipped her to Frenchie’s to get her here. He had believed she was Rita, and he believed it now; the rest of these men believed it.

Rita must have been an elusive secret agent whose identity had never been entirely revealed, but the papers Anna had just handed the man with the iron-gray hair were sufficient to sign her death warrant.

This realization came to Anna quickly, suddenly, even as the men were closing in on her, and it did her ego no good to look back upon it and reflect that the real Rita Turner would never have fallen so blindly into an enemy trap. It was only she, Anna, the fool, playing a game she knew nothing about.

“It is too bad, Rita,” she heard one of the men saying.

She knew it would do no good to protest that Rita Turner was already dead. They would merely laugh at her, deride her protestation. She saw from their expressions that Rita Turner must have been dangerous to them, for they meant now to kill Anna. They intended wasting no time or effort.

Anna saw a knife flash, and knew in a moment that it would pierce her throat. There was no way she could turn. There was nothing she could do. She hadn’t time even to cry out, for all the good that would do her...

For a moment there was only silence here in the half-light, and the men closed in so that they facaded up about her in a wall. And in this moment Anna was looking back at murder and wondering now what had finally happened to the Frenchman who had stabbed the man and laughed — for she knew now about crime and punishment, and that punishment wasn’t something in storybooks so that little boys would go to Sunday school.

She knew, too, that there was no escape for murder, even in war. She knew that she had come to her last second on earth, and even in that there was too much time, to reflect, to listen to the echo of laughter down the long memory of years, to hear the screams of dying Chinese which would seem like a song now by comparison.

She saw again the baby sitting in a pool of blood, and a sailor, A.W.O.L. from his ship in a suit of clothes that were half torn off his back.

And she knew suddenly why the sailor downstairs had followed her. He had fallen in love with her at the club, poor fool, and he had ditched off from his ship to come and marry her; to come and marry her because he knew that she was a White Russian and she couldn’t get out of Shanghai unless she was a Navy wife!

He had been sorry for her, and he had been willing to marry her so that she could be evacuated honestly as Anna on the big transport that was going to America by way of Hong Kong.

It was all clear now, in this final instant of life, that he had been following her to tell her, to marry her and take her away; and if she had remained at her apartment, if she had not gone to commit murder, this would have happened, and she now would be safe and free!

She remembered the sailor saying: “Babe, I love you like seven hundred dollars on Christmas day,” and then she felt the point of the knife at her throat; and as she slid to the floor, the only sound that came through the silence was the familiar whistling of someone leaning in the front of the building outside whistling: “The Lady Is a Tramp.”