"Dann,_Jack_-_The_Diamond_Pit" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dann Jack)

I got up to leave, and she said, "If you go now, I'll never speak to you again."
"What's the difference?"
"What's the _difference_ -- ? Do you seriously believe I would bring my friends here, knowing Poppa wasn't going to allow them to leave?"
"Well, you have. _I'm_ your guest. Or rather your victim."
"Go fly a kite! You were going to rot down there in the pit."
"But I wouldn't be about to be murdered. Is it this week or next?"
"I wouldn't allow Poppa to murder you. He agreed that when you're finished tutoring me for my recital, you'll go back in the pit. So there! I wouldn't kill anybody. Not even you."
I could hear her breathing falter like she was going to cry, but I persisted. "But you have, haven't you? You've probably had as many guests as Marion. Or Morgan. Or your mother, for that matter."
"Mother never has guests, neither does Poppa," Phoebe said. "They allow us to have guests because there's no other choice. Mother stays by herself and barely speaks, or haven't you noticed? She lost her best friends, and couldn't stand to lose any more."
"It's disgusting."
"We're not like other people. We can't live like they do. If we could, we would. And for your information, Mister Know-it-all, when I found out what Poppa had to do, I refused to invite anybody else ever again. I'm content to read and enjoy music and walk in the gardens. Alone."
"That's very white of you."
"Thank you."
With that, I turned and walked away.
Half-dressed and shoeless, she caught up with me.
"Paul, do you really believe I could abide you being killed or put back with those other -- men?"
"I don't really know," I said. "I would guess that you could."
"I love you. I didn't know that when I saw you in the pit, or when I heard you play the piano like a genius. And Poppa would never hurt anyone in the family."
"I'm your piano teacher, Phoebe. I'm not in the family."
"But you will be when we're married -- "
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*Eight*
Phoebe was, of course, correct. Her father left the mountain by himself to take care of business. It seemed that eight pilots had already been murdered by his agents, yet none of Jefferson's sources could be absolutely sure that the right pilot had been dispatched. Jefferson was going to take matters into his own hands and direct his army of spies, scouts, facilitators, lawyers, bankers, and mercenaries to find the "conspirators," wipe them out, and smooth over the facts so that no one would ever recollect that anything odd or untoward had ever occurred. Whether Jefferson was a good general, a coward, or just foolhardy, I couldn't say. But when the shooting started and all hell broke loose, he should have been present.
However, I'm getting a bit ahead of myself --
The next few weeks were bliss. Just Phoebe and me. There were long, languorous hours in the mirror gallery, the afternoon sun a dusty-golden mist filling the long, arched room as Phoebe concentrated on her music -- and me. She was going to dedicate her recital to me and play a selection of my favorite piano works by Erik Satie. I tried to talk her into playing a selection of Chopin's waltzes and preludes and explained that Satie's music was absurdist and humorous and only seemingly simple, but she was not to be dissuaded. The hours of practice were punctuated by lovemaking and champagne lunches on the balcony. She disappeared the slaves. They were to be invisible, yet at her beck and call, as it should be, she said; and she was summer itself. Every day another Phoebe appeared, as though by magic. Sometimes she was an Egyptian queen in evening gown. Sometimes a chic matron wearing cloche hats and "Coco" Chanel skirts and pullovers and suits designed specifically for her and no one else. She could be "Flapper Jane" with heavy makeup and oiled hair and whiskey on her breath, or an athletic fresh-faced beauty in pleated skirt and blue bandeau.
And so the days passed, each delicious, each one only slightly different from those before. We swam in a green pool illuminated by ivory lamps under a ceiling of hammered gold. Surrounded by marble Roman sarcophagi and statues of Sekhmet, the Egyptian goddess of war and destruction, we made love. We had dinner with the family and made small talk; we hardly saw Morgan and Marion, who were sullen and secretive, as if they were privy to something we were not.
I found out what _that_ was all about a few nights later.
Although Phoebe and I made love every night, we slept in our respective rooms. "When we're married, you can stay the night," she said; and, indeed, by midnight I would be so exhausted from the rigors of the night -- and the day -- that I would fall into a deep, satisfying sleep, only to be awakened by Robert with breakfast on a gold tray and the bright, pure light of another perfect morning.
But on the night when all hell broke loose, I was dreaming of the boys in the pit. I was back there with them, and so was Joel, who was dead, of course. But in the dream, we were all dead -- except Phoebe and old man Jefferson and Morgan and Marion, who were all dressed in formal finery and standing on the golf course above us by the grated opening of the pit. Jefferson was praying for us and mixing up the part about dust to dust, and then Phoebe started crying while her brother and sister began shoveling dirt into the pit to bury us. There would be no more golden days and luminous nights with Phoebe, no more lovemaking in Jefferson's forests of gold and glades of diamonds, no more Bach or Beethoven, nor the ironic mockings of Satie. I could smell grass and rot and decay, the Paris perfume of Phoebe mixed with her sweet sweat as the clumps of black soil fell on top of us. Black rain. Phoebe's tears, tapping, dropping like soft leather heels on marble.
I choked. I couldn't breathe. I --
Woke up to scuffing, whispering, creaking. Then the click of the diamond doorknob being turned, the sighing of the door. I didn't wait to determine who the intruders were because I was sure they were going to try to kill me, just as they killed all the other guests. But I couldn't escape without somehow getting past them. Unless --
I felt for the button on the wall beside my bed and pressed it hard. The bed tilted and drapes parted with hardly a sound as I slid down the chute into the empty bath. The aquarium walls of the bathroom were a luminous green, and as I hastily made my way out, I could see the shadow of a ray swimming toward me. I turned the knob on the bathroom door. It wasn't locked, and I made my escape down the stairs. Indeed, my first thought was to go directly to Phoebe's room on the other side of the house. I certainly wanted to, but for all that I loved her, could I really trust her? She was, after all, a Jefferson; and I was, after all, just a guest, a guest who even now could not help but be awed by the pre-dawn magic of this house; by the cathedral walls covered with medieval tapestries; by the loitering stone and marble fauns, naiads, satyrs, soldiers, gorgons, gods, and goddesses, all pale as moonlight and bigger than life; by the carved ceilings so high above; by the emerald and turquoise rooms that each opened into other, even more magnificent rooms. Tall, jeweled lamps cast a roseate light, and pitch-velvet shadows concealed treasures that could only be imagined.
I rushed toward the atrium, where I thought I would escape into the gardens.
And I heard Phoebe screaming hysterically. "You'd better not have killed him. He'd _better_ be alive."
I retraced my steps and waited behind an archway near the ivory staircase. I wasn't surprised to see slaves pacing nervously on the landing above. Wordsworth and Isaac had obviously been sent to kill me, and perhaps Isaac had been given his chance to get back into the family's good graces.
But I _was_ surprised to see Morgan step out of my room onto the landing; a very angry Phoebe was right behind him. I suppose Morgan had finally found his courage, although he seemed to have lost it again in Phoebe's presence.
"What the hell did you think you're doing, Morgan?" she shouted. Her voice seemed magnified by the dark, cavernous spaces. "He's my guest, you little twit, and what happens to him is _my_ decision, not yours. Or Marion's."
"Marion has nothing to do with this," Morgan said. "It was all my idea. I just wanted to help you."
"Help me?"
"Anybody can see how much you're stuck on him, and you know Father isn't going to let you keep him, no matter what. He told me that before he left."
"Did not."
"He did too, and he practically told me to take care of things for him while he's gone because the more you fall in love with him, the more you're going to be hurt. And Marion thought that -- "
"That's just what I thought," Phoebe said, but she did not continue because at just that moment everyone looked up into the grayness above, as though we could see through the ceiling. We could hear the sound of aircraft overhead, and then there was a terrible concussion. I felt heat and was thrown backward. The ceiling shattered. The archway cracked and fell in a cloud of red dust and smoke before me.
More explosions.
Bombs falling, and I remembered my dream. Clumps of black soil falling. Black rain. Phoebe's tears. And, indeed, I was drenched. Water poured through cracks in what was left of the ceiling, which would soon give way; and the swimming sharks and rays and groupers and cuttlefish would fall onto the jewel-polished floor below.
Somehow, I had to rescue Phoebe, lest she be caught in the inevitable waterfall, a vertical tidal wave that would smash and splinter the balcony like balsa wood; but as I called out to her, my voice was swallowed by the staccato thunder-pumping of machine guns above. At least the slaves had the presence of mind to stand and fight. As I ran to the grand staircase, I met Marion and Morgan. We stopped for an instant, amid the cacophony of exploding bombs, machine guns, and the abdominal groaning of the castle. Water dripped like rain through the cracking and bulging ceiling high above. Morgan scowled at me, Marion called me a filthy something, and then I ran up the stairs to Phoebe while they, presumably, ran to the bunkers where they would be safe and sound and fitted out with champagne and caviar until the danger was over.
"Phoebe," I shouted, catching the back of her. She was running through the corridor, which curved around the inside of the house like a mullah's ledge on a minaret. She heard me over the firing of machine guns and the thrumming shaking deafening exploding of bombs.
She stopped and shouted, "Mother," which I understood as code for "I've got to find Mother," and then disappeared into one of the many branching corridors. I followed her, my eyes and nose burning from smoke.
"You've got to -- "
I meant "You've got to get off this floor now immediately run," but I seemed to run right through my words. I was intent on grabbing her up and getting out of the house, into the bunkers, perhaps, off this mountain; and then, in those heart-pounding exploding acrid smoke-smelling seconds I imagined that we'd somehow miraculously escaped from the mountain, from her father and family and everything associated with them, and I wondered whether she could live in the real world five minutes with me, without the insulation of millions -- or billions -- of dollars. It was idiocy even to dream of getting out, much less turning Phoebe into Suzy Housewife. In spite of the smoke and sudden heat, for the house was certainly on fire, although I couldn't see flames -- yet, I think I grinned at the thought. But if I had the chance, the split-second chance of a lifetime, I'd take Phoebe away, without a dime in my pocket, I'd take her away for as long as she'd stand me.