"Block, Lawrence - Rhodenbarr 2004 - Burglar on the Prowl" - читать интересную книгу автора (Block Lawrence)

Lawrence Block - Rhodenbarr 2004 - Burglar on the Prowl

Author's Note

Once again, it's my great pleasure to thank Writers Room, of Greenwich Village, where some preliminary work on this book was done, and Ragdale, of Lake Forest, Illinois, where it was written.

A good thing about writing, so they tell me, is that you can do it anywhere. Well, the hell you can. ButI can, in these two blessed places, and I am forever grateful to them.

One

The man," said my friend Marty Gilmartin, "is an absolute.a complete.an utter and total." He held out his hands, shook his head, and sighed. "Words fail me."

"Apparently," I agreed. "Nouns, anyway. Adjectives seem to be supporting you well enough, but nouns-"

"Help me out, Bernard," he said. "Who is more qualified to supplyle mot juste ? Words, after all, are your mВtier."

"They are?"

"Books are your stock-in-trade," he said, "and what is a book? Paper and ink and cloth and glue, to be sure, but if a book were nothing more than those mundane components, no one would want to own more than one of them. No, it's the words that constitute a book, sixty or eighty or a hundred thousand of them."

"Or two hundred thousand, or even three." I'd readGrub Street recently, and was thinking about the less-than-eminent Victorians George Gissing wrote about, forced by their publishers to grind out interminable three-volume novels for a body of readers who clearly had far too much time on their hands.

"That's more words than I require," Marty said. "Just one, Bernie, to sum up"-he glanced around the room, lowered his voice-"no, toimpale Crandall Rountree Mapes like an insect upon a pin."

"An insect," I suggested.

"Far too mild."

"A worm, a rat." He was shaking his head, so I shifted gears and exited the animal kingdom. "A bounder?"

"That's closer, Bernie. By God, heis a bounder, but he's much worse than that."

"A cad."

"Better, but-"

I frowned, trying to conjure up a thesaurus spread open before me. A bounder, a cad.

"A rotter?"

"Oh, that comes close," he said. "We'll settle for that if we can't do any better. It's just archaic enough, isn't it? And it's better thanbounder orcad because it's clearly not a temporary condition. The corruption is permanent, the man is putrid to the core." He picked up his glass, breathed in the bouquet of aged cognac. "Rottercomes very close indeed to conveying just what a thoroughgoing shitheel goes by the name of Crandall Rountree Mapes."

I started to say something, but he held up a hand to stop me. "Bernie," he said, wide-eyed with wonder, "did you hear what I just said?"

"Shitheel."

"Precisely. That's perfect, the quintessential summation of the man. And where do you suppose the word came from? Not its derivation, that would seem clear enough, but how did it get into our conversation? No one saysshitheel anymore."

"You just did."