"Campbell, Ramsey - The Parasite 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Campbell Ramsey)

sleep, before dreaming. Everything was peaceful, except for Bill.

Diana had invited herself and Jack to meet Josef Dietrich, the director. `No, I'm not Mrs.. Tierney,' Rose had heard her saying. `I'm, uh - I'm their agent's secretary. Oh, you didn't know we were here too? Sure, we'd love to come along.' Rose could tell that Bill was wishing he had resisted Diana's pleas.

When the tram squealed leisurely around a curve Rose reached forward to massage Bill's shoulders, but he shrugged her off, muttering `It's all right.' The tram had left behind the Hauptbahnhof and the night-clubs where bouncers enforced absurd prices; now the route led through residential streets. Balconies were giant window-boxes, glowing with flowers.

`Maybe you two could figure an angle on some of the new stars,' Jack was saying. `Go out to Hollywood or wherever and interview them. Something that the mass audience is going to want to read. What do you say?'

'Well, we'll put our heads together.' He glanced back for Rose's agreement. `But just now I'd like to keep my mind clear for Dietrich.'

Diana was reading from Rose's Berlitz phrasebook: ` "Go away, keep your hands to yourself, leave me alone, stop or I'll scream" - Jesus, what kind of holidays do these guys have?' Bill's shoulders clenched, but she wasn't annoying him; he was standing up - here was their stop.

The tram moved off towards the Nymphenburg Palace, reeling in its gleam along the tram-lines. Bill led his party into a side street, between two birch trees like sentries. The few houses were set in spacious gardens; poplars swayed gently, almost imperceptibly, bushes were formed into glossy shapes of gnomes. Giants, mysterious luminous incarnations of sunset, hovered on the walls of houses; Luftlmalerei, Rose had learned they were called - paintings on the air.

No figure adorned the house before which Bill halted. Wide balconies stood out from the bone-white walls; the balconies were crimson with flowers, slashes of blood against the bone. Like its neighbours, the house was caged by sharp railings. Low bushes squatted about the lawns.

A grille in the gatepost considered the names of the party. Its bars glimmered, a paralysed snarl. Eventually a man in uniform appeared, leading a spiky Doberman. `Come,' he said with the voice of the grille.

All the way along the drive the dog kept nosing at Diana, who flinched away. A smile glinted in the man's bland face. Around them the lawns were wide and dim; nobody could creep up on this house. The bushes looked to be dissolving into shadow.

As the man knocked on the pine door, the dog squatted alertly beside him on the steps, baring teeth like the spikes of its collar. The knocking was complicated, obviously a code. A buzzer sprang the door open, revealing a bright pale hall.

At the foot of a gracefully curving staircase, a man leaned on a stick. Grey hair barred his balding skull. Piercing eyes gazed from beneath eyebrows wiry as strips of steel wool. For a moment he stooped over the stick, as though pinning down his surroundings, making himself their centre.

Then he strode forward, limping slightly. `Mr.. and Mrs.. Tierney,' he said. `You are exactly like the picture on your book. You must introduce me to your colleagues. Thank you, Giinter,' he said, closing the door.

`Jesus, I don't like that dog,' Diana said.

`I am so sorry. Has he bothered you? He belongs to my son. All this is my son's property. He is in chemicals. I told him, don't go into films, it will break your heart.' He smiled apologetically, as though he'd let them overhear that by mistake. `Now here is my room.'

The room was very large and very white. Rose was reminded of a film set, for its contents looked isolated, cut off from one another: a modern suite surrounding a Persian rug in the middle of the room; shelves of books on cinema; swords crossed on the wall, above a shield; a desk with typewriter, telephone, a framed photograph of Dietrich as a young man standing with a young woman, both dressed in 'thirties clothes, amid mountains.

Dietrich lowered himself on the lever of his stick into a chair. `Does everyone like brandy? I can have something else brought without trouble.' As he filled a trayful of glasses he said `Shall I start at once? Perhaps it is better if I start talking rather than we waste time on - wie sagt man? - small talk, yes?'

Bill switched on the cassette recorder. `As soon as you're ready.'

`I was born in 1897. Do you want that kind of thing?'

`What? You're eighty years old? Why, that's incredible. I'd have said sixty.' Diana subsided as Bill frowned, but Dietrich said `Yes, I try to keep myself well. One needs something to occupy the mind, even if it is only the body.'

`We did research your biography,' Bill said. `I thought we sent you a copy.'

`Yes, I remember now. Well then, you know all that. We shall speak of my career. It was my father who brought me into films. He was a famous stage director in Berlin, but the cinema excited him - he could see its possibilities. Reinhardt angered him. You know of Max Reinhardt, who wanted films to be nothing but recordings of plays? And there were the Kinoreformbewegung, the ones who would make it a crime to interpret Schiller in a film. Puritans and philistines, they are two heads of the same animal. They would stifle the imagination, and today they are succeeding. Oh, 'I forgot,' he said with apparent irrelevance, `does either of you speak German?'

For a moment Rose failed to realize that the question included her, for she was listening for something in his monologue, hiding there or waiting to be said. `Bill does,' she said.

`Good. You may know that they allow me to speak about films at the University. I spoke to the tutor about you, and he would like you to address the students. Here is his number for you to call.'

He sipped his brandy and favoured it with a smile. `Now, you must know that the First World War was the midwife of our film industry, since we could import no films. So Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft - Ufa, you know - hired my father and me too, as his assistant. My leg was broken in a fall from a horse on my father's estate, and saved me from the war.' He sounded obscurely bitter, as though over a lost opportunity.