The Girl With the Long Green Heart by Lawrence Block
I went for him and kept missing. He spun away and ducked and dodged while I threw everything but the bed at him. He said, “Old man, I’m going to take you apart.” I hit him again and he bounced back off a wall. I moved in low and he chopped me in the side of the head. A slew of colors danced inside my head. I felt myself slipping forward, put my hands out in front of me, caught his knee with the point of my chin. I snapped straight up and started over backward.
Everything was trying like hell to turn black. I wouldn’t let go. He was standing over me, and I threw myself at his legs and held on. He tried to kick his way loose but didn’t make it, and I got squared away and hauled his feet out from under him. He landed on top of me and threw a barrage of punches that bounced off my shoulders. I spun him around and tried to hit him but my arms wouldn’t move all that well. I got up. He came up after me and shoved and I went over on to the bed. I kicked him coming in. The kick didn’t have much power in it, but it caught him fairly square between the legs and put him on the floor again.
“You son of a bitch,” he said.
He got up from the floor and I hauled myself off the bed and we stood in the middle of the room hitting each other. Neither of us had the energy to be cute. We had stopped dodging punches. We just kept hitting each other. I don’t know if he felt the punches. I know I didn’t, not any more.
I just stood there taking it and trying to beat the son of a bitch to the ground. I hit him and he hit me and I hit him and he hit me, over and over, just like that. We had screwed each other up but good, and we felt a clean uncomplicated hate for each other.
A heavy could have taken either of us. We were not strong-arm types. We were grifters, and grifters are rarely much help in a back-street brawl. He had some years on me, and maybe a couple of pounds, but we still wound up close to even.
Once his arms dropped and his eyes glazed over, and he stood there taking it while I hit him. He took a lot of punches before he went down. I stood over him, waiting, and he got up shaking his head and I swung and missed and he hit me square in the gut.
A little later he put another blow over the heart and I felt the way men must feel when they have a coronary. Everything froze, time and space, and I hung there breathless until he hit me in the face and put me down on the floor. I had trouble getting up. He asked me if I had had enough, and I pushed myself up and swung at him and missed, and he hit me again and I went down again. He didn’t say anything this time. I got up and hit him, and hit him again, and we were back in the swing of things.
All of this seemed to go on forever. I spent more time on the floor than he did, but not too much more. It got so that it took less out of me to get hit than to lift an arm and throw a punch. We were both of us too arm-weary to do a hell of a lot of damage. And it ended finally with me tumbling back against a wall and holding onto it and sliding down it toward the floor while he sagged backward and sat down on the bed and then lay backward, half on the bed and half on the floor. Neither one of us moved after that, not for a long time.
There was no john in the cabin, just a sink. He washed up, went out to the car to get us some fresh clothes. We took our time cleaning up and changing. We were both of us pretty bloody. He had a split lip, a few cuts on his face, swellings under both eyes. I wasn’t cut up quite that much but I had managed to lose one tooth somewhere along the line and my jaw was in fairly sad shape.
Doug was the first to talk. He was looking in the mirror, and he shook his head and said, “Beautiful.”
“We’re both pretty.”
“You can sure as hell take a few punches, Johnny.”
“I should have been a boxer.”
“Yeah. Both of us. I can’t find my cigarettes.”
I dug out a pair of mine and gave him one. We chucked our dirty clothes in the corner and went out to the car. He headed north, drove slowly.
“It was a good idea, stopping here,” he said after a while. “I was aching for a crack at you ever since Toronto.”
“Well, we worked it out.”
“We did at that,” he said.
I smoked my cigarette all the way down and flipped the butt out the window. I asked him what he figured on doing next.
“I suppose I’ll head for Vegas,” he said.
“To give the money back across the tables?”
“Part of it. Or I’ll beat them for a change. I like it out there. Get some sun, lie around the pool, get a little drunk, rest up while I figure out how to connect for the next one.”
“Sure.”
“I guess I’ll drive. I lucked out on the car, bought the first one off the lot and it doesn’t ride bad at all. I figure I can drive it to Vegas with no trouble.”
“You’ll want a new name.”
“Well, that’s no headache, Johnny. Pick a new name and sell it to myself and then register it in Nevada with Nevada plates. I’ll probably put it in my own name, I don’t know. Maybe not.” He was silent a moment. “I have to pass through Colorado, I guess. Or close enough to it. If you feel like riding along, feel free.”
I didn’t answer him right away. I thought about a lot of things, added them up and checked the addition.
“Maybe I’ll ride on through with you,” I said. “I could use a vacation. I don’t even remember what Vegas looks like.”
He looked at me.
“I don’t gamble much,” I went on. “But the sunshine sounds good, and all the rest.”
“I figured you were anxious to get back to your town.”
“Well,” I said.
“And you’ll be tight enough on money. You wouldn’t want to blow some of it in Vegas. Even without gambling—”
I lit another cigarette. I thought that it was funny how a couple of days took the prison fever right out of a man. Running the risks and being utterly in tune and getting everything right and beating the system did wonders for you. Lost confidence came back. You found out, once again, just who you happened to be.
“I’ll just take things easy in Vegas,” I said finally. The words came easy now. “And we’ll both of us keep our eyes open, you and I, and when the right proposition comes along we’ll be ready for it. Next time we’ll play it straight. We’ve got enough troubles without conning each other.”
“You—” He stopped, started over. “You want to work with me again?”
“Why not? We’re a good match for each other. We work damned well together. We already proved that much.”
“But—”
“We both made mistakes we won’t make again. They don’t change the fact that we make a good team.”
He drove a mile or two in silence. “That roadhouse in Colorado,” he said.
“What about it?”
“You figure you need one more score to afford it?”
It would have been easy to say yes, sure, that was it. But it wasn’t, and I was not about to say so. So I thought for a minute or two, and I pictured myself standing behind a bar wiping glasses, or sitting in an office keeping careful records for the tax beagles, or figuring interest rates and depreciation schedules and breakage allowances. I thought about the last few days and I thought too about the weeks before them. The tension, the feeling of running wide open with the gears meshing and all the machinery perfectly aligned. I thought about The Dream, and I thought about The Girl, and about all dreams and all girls. No dreams come true, I guess, and no girls are as perfect as the heart would have them.
And beyond all that, I thought that a man must be what he is and do what he is geared to do. He cannot permit himself to be conned out of what he truly is. Not by the scare of a prison cell. Not by the smell of a woman, or the teasing song of a dream.
So I told Doug this, or most of it, and maybe he understood, and maybe he did not. At least I did. He pulled out to pass another car and put the gas pedal down on the floor. The sun was about gone but we were heading toward where it had disappeared from sight. West, toward Las Vegas.
A New Afterword by the Author
I
“I love a good long–con tale, and The Girl with the Long Green Heart is one of the best. In terms of pure entertainment value (and educational value, if you’re an aspiring criminal like me), it belongs side-by-side with The Sting. Block devises a con so well, it makes you wonder if he hasn’t been involved in a little “research” himself. Written in the first person, The Girl with the Long Green Heart has a lot of internal monologue from John’s point-of-view. Much of it has to do with the planning of the job, but a preponderance is simply one man’s thoughts when thrust into a set of situations he did not plan on, and Block manages to somehow make it all utterly riveting.” (Craig Clarke, “Another Great HCC Title from Block,” review of The Girl with the Long Green Heart, by Lawrence Block, Amazon.com, November 17, 2005)
The review likens the book to The Sting, the 1973 film starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, with Robert Shaw as the perfect bad guy/fall guy. The comparison strikes me as reasonable, but every once in a while some genius decides I ripped off The Sting. Since my book was published half a dozen years before the film came out, well, I don’t think so. Nor do I feel ill-used by the filmmakers; I’d say both their film and my book owed a bit to David Maurer’s nonfiction work The Big Con.
There’s been occasional film and TV interest in The Girl with the Long Green Heart, but nothing’s ever come of it. A producer bought me lunch once, and I went home to wait for a check and a contract and a deal to write a pilot—but lunch was as far as that deal got, and that’s farther than these things generally get. I once coauthored a book called Swiss Shooting Talers and Medals, and the only reason I mention it is that nobody ever seems to have considered adapting it for the screen. I’ll tell you, that really sets it apart.
I read The Girl with the Long Green Heart again to prepare it for ebook publication, and did so just days after doing the same with Grifter’s Game. What struck me was how much I’d developed as a writer in the four or five years between the writing of the two books. I’d like to think I’ve learned a thing or two since Long Green Heart, but I have to say it has nothing to apologize for.
I was living in Tonawanda, a suburb of Buffalo, when I began the book, and I went to Toronto, Canada, and Olean, New York, to research the scenes I set there. (Years later a professor at Olean’s St. Bonaventure University booked me for a talk and reading; the book was a hot ticket in Olean, let me tell you, if nowhere else in the known universe.)
Halfway through the writing, I moved to Racine, Wisconsin, to take a job with a numismatic (currency) magazine, and I finished the book in Racine, getting up early to put in a couple of hours before I went to the office. Gold Medal Books was the first publishing house to see the book, and they took it.
As you might guess from the book’s ending, I had it in mind that John Hayden and Doug Rance might team up again sometime, and that I might chronicle their subsequent adventures. It never happened, and I can’t recall ever giving it much thought. I’m pleased, though, that their sole caper has survived them by almost a half century, and I can but hope that you’ve enjoyed it.
—Lawrence Block
Greenwich Village
Lawrence Block ([email protected]) welcomes your email responses; he reads them all, and replies when he can.
A Biography of Lawrence Block
Lawrence Block (b. 1938) is the recipient of a Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and an internationally renowned bestselling author. His prolific career spans over one hundred books, including four bestselling series as well as dozens of short stories, articles, and books on writing. He has won four Edgar and Shamus Awards, two Falcon Awards from the Maltese Falcon Society of Japan, the Nero and Philip Marlowe Awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, and the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers Association of the United Kingdom. In France, he has been awarded the title Grand Maitre du Roman Noir and has twice received the Societe 813 trophy.
Born in Buffalo, New York, Block attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Leaving school before graduation, he moved to New York City, a locale that features prominently in most of his works. His earliest published writing appeared in the 1950s, frequently under pseudonyms, and many of these novels are now considered classics of the pulp fiction genre. During his early writing years, Block also worked in the mailroom of a publishing house and reviewed the submission slush pile for a literary agency. He has cited the latter experience as a valuable lesson for a beginning writer.
Block’s first short story, “You Can’t Lose,” was published in 1957 in Manhunt, the first of dozens of short stories and articles that he would publish over the years in publications including American Heritage, Redbook, Playboy, Cosmopolitan, GQ, and the New York Times. His short fiction has been featured and reprinted in over eleven collections including Enough Rope (2002), which is comprised of eighty-four of his short stories.
In 1966, Block introduced the insomniac protagonist Evan Tanner in the novel The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep. Block’s diverse heroes also include the urbane and witty bookseller—and thief-on-the-side—Bernie Rhodenbarr; the gritty recovering alcoholic and private investigator Matthew Scudder; and Chip Harrison, the comical assistant to a private investigator with a Nero Wolfe fixation who appears in No Score, Chip Harrison Scores Again, Make Out with Murder, and The Topless Tulip Caper. Block has also written several short stories and novels featuring Keller, a professional hit man. Block’s work is praised for his richly imagined and varied characters and frequent use of humor.
A father of three daughters, Block lives in New York City with his second wife, Lynne. When he isn’t touring or attending mystery conventions, he and Lynne are frequent travelers, as members of the Travelers’ Century Club for nearly a decade now, and have visited about 150 countries.
A four-year-old Block in 1942.
Block during the summer of 1944, with his baby sister, Betsy.
Block’s 1955 yearbook picture from Bennett High School in Buffalo, New York.
Block in 1983, in a cap and leather jacket. Block says that he “later lost the cap, and some son of a bitch stole the jacket. Don’t even ask about the hair.”
Block with his eldest daughter, Amy, at her wedding in October 1984.
Seen here around 1990, Block works in his office on New York’s West 13th Street with, he says, “a bad haircut, an ugly shirt, and a few extra pounds.”
Block at a bookstore appearance in support of A Walk Among the Tombstones, his tenth Matthew Scudder novel, on Veterans Day, 1992.
Block and his wife, Lynne.
Block and Lynne on vacation “someplace exotic.”
Block race walking in an international marathon in Niagara Falls in 2005. He got the John Deere cap at the John Deere Museum in Grand Detour, Illinois, and still has it today.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © by 1965 Fawcett Publications, Inc.
cover design by Elizabeth Connor
ISBN: 978-1-4532-0840-3
This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media
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New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
Table of Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
A New Afterword by the Author
A Biography of Lawrence Block
Lawrence Block, The Girl With the Long Green Heart