Read Hell for Free Online Page A

once.”
    “So he’s gone?”
    “No. He’s back.”
    “Why doesn’t he go out again?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe he forgot how. Memories are short around here.”
    “And there are plenty of liars.”
    She shrugs. “That’s why you private dicks stay in business. To sort out the lies.”
    “So where is he now?”
    “I don’t know. I try to avoid him.”
    “I’d think you’d want to stay close. In case he breaks out again.”
    “I avoid him.”
    “Why?”
    “Because whenever I get near him, I have to reach into his chest and pull out his heart, and it bursts into flames, and when it’s done burning, I eat it.”
    For a moment, not surprisingly, what film theorists call the “aesthetic distance” has been broken for Hatcher. This is, after all, still Hell.
    But before Hatcher can think further about this, Bogey is beside him again. “So you’re that kind of dame, are you?” he says.
    The dame rolls her thin shoulders, which makes Hatcher reach inside his coat pocket and pull out a pack of cigarettes. “I guess I am,” she says.
    Somewhere far off a police siren wails.
    Hatcher pops a cigarette, puts it in his mouth, stuffs the pack—his brand is Lucky Strikes—back into his coat, and he finds matches in a side pocket. He strikes one. He lifts the flame to the tip of his cigarette, and he realizes the conversation has stopped. Both Bogey and the dame are watching him. Hatcher takes the cigarette out of his mouth and turns it around, elegantly, and offers it to the dame. She opens her mouth slightly. Gently he puts the sucking end between her lips. She closes them on the cigarette, and they brush the tip of his finger. He draws his hand away slowly.
    “Thanks,” she says, real low.
    Hatcher feels a hot tidal wave of unfocused regret wash over him. He aches.
    Bogey says, “So you want us to locate this boyfriend and find out what he knows.”
    “I just want out,” the dame says, lifting her face and blowing a thin plume of smoke into the shadows above her. “You figure out how.”
    “It won’t be easy,” Bogey says.
    “If it was easy I’d do it myself,” she says.
    “This town,” Bogey says.
    “Yeah,” she says.
    “The walls have ears,” he says.
    “Don’t I know it,” she says.
    “So you have to figure somebody already knows you’re trying to blow the joint.”
    “Maybe.”
    “And he knows we’re supposed to help.”
    “I don’t care. I’ll take that chance.”
    “But will I?”
    Hatcher looks at them. He understands that they’re talking about Satan. A chill passes through him, a physical reaction that’s rare in Hell. It occurs to him that perhaps this whole scene isn’t just another fleeting fabricated form of torture. Perhaps this is Bogey’s ongoing life here, and the dame’s. So why the chill? It’s the newsman’s chill, he realizes. As if there is a story. A big one. A way out. The young woman’s face is angled toward Bogey, partly eclipsed in dark shadow. “What’s your name?” Hatcher asks.
    She turns to him, her full face flaring bright. She takes a long drag on the cigarette and blows the smoke out through her nose, never moving her dark eyes—as dark as Anne’s—off his. “Beatrice Portinari,” she says.
    “You’re Dante’s girl,” Bogey says.
    “In a manner of speaking,” she says.
    Hatcher says, “He’s the guy who’s supposed to know a way out?”
    “That’s right.”
    “He lied,” Hatcher says. Maybe there’s not a story here after all.
    Beatrice shrugs. “He’s a poet.”
    “He made the whole inferno thing up.”
    “But the lies were true,” she says.
    Hatcher wags his head at this paradox he has never understood. “That’s why I hate interviewing writers.”
    “Down here he’s trying to write a novel,” she says.
    Inside Hatcher’s head, he is answering himself: You understand the journalist’s paradox well enough. That truths can be put together to make a lie.
    “Look,” Beatrice says. “He came and he went.