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

As I glanced at the embarrassingly fraught yet boastful love letters, Phoebe continued. "Her name is Greta Gustafsson, but Poppa changed her name to Garbo because he thought Gustafsson sounded like it could be a Jew name, although anybody would know it was Scandinavian. And he hired his pervert friend Mauritz Stiller to pimp for her. Do you know who he is?"
I confessed I didn't.
"He made that sex film _Erotikon_ back in 1920."
I shrugged.
"Poppa showed it to me in the theater. He laughed all the way through it. It wasn't that bad, I suppose, but it was trash. Like her." Phoebe took the photographs from me. "Well, her career is down the drain. I've seen to _that_."
"What have you done?"
"Taken Poppa back, the filthy snake in the grass double-crossing, double-dealing -- "
"Phoebe -- "
She hunched over the bed and wept. "He murdered Mother and sold us out. The dirty bastard." Then she shook her head, tried to smile at me, and said, "I found it all out from Uncle George."
"Uncle George?" I asked. "He's crazy -- and he's in the Pit."
"He knows more than you think. He's got ways of knowing everything, and the slaves trust him. It was Robert who passed on his messages, and because of you, I've probably lost a good slave forever."
"Because of _me_?"
"Well, slave or not, he shouldn't've broken your ribs and treated you like a bump."
"Phoebe, about your father?"
"He sold us all out. He brought in the planes and the bombs and the gunfire. After he changed his name and converted most of the money."
"I can't believe he'd do all that, just for a little bit of cheesecake."
"It was getting too dangerous to keep the mountain," Phoebe said. "Uncle George explained it all to me. It was so simple. Father allowed that pilot to get away from us, or could have allowed it, anyway. Once the mountain was found out, then the market for diamonds would crash, which is why Poppa started putting his money into -- radium. Now he thought that would be perfectly safe, but he was wrong about that, too." She paused and stared at the contraption on the desk. "Poppa thought of most everything, I've got to hand him that. He'd even made sure that two of the aviators who tried to invade us were reporters, just to make certain that the word got out properly."
"It doesn't make sense that he would give up everything," I said.
"Did you read those letters?"
"Still -- "
"And he wasn't giving up hardly anything. Only us. He'd end up with more money than he had, once the government clamped down on the diamond market, which Uncle George says would certainly happen. Poppa has hidden diamonds everywhere you could imagine."
"I can't imagine he'd harm his family. And family tradition was so important to him."
She chuckled. "So was his freedom, and he figured that we'd be let off. He probably also figured we'd all be safe in the bunkers. But he knew Mother wouldn't go to the bunker because of her claustrophobia. He _knew_ that, and he killed her just as sure as if he pulled the trigger."
"But he came back," I said.
"Yes, Paul. I _brought_ him back."
"How?"
"Uncle George. He knows everything Poppa knows. He and I -- became Poppa, and used the slaves and his contacts to chase him down. We caught him buck naked with his mistress. I've got more photographs, but Uncle George is against letting the press have them."
"I should imagine he would be."
"And so am I -- of course."
I nodded and watched her walk over to the desk and adjust the contraption.
"Come here, Paul, and I'll show you how Poppa kept an eye on everything."
I followed her to the desk, and she turned a switch that engaged gears below us -- I could hear them shift. She directed me to look into the concave glass that covered the large pipe. For an instant everything looked ghostly and smeary, as if I were gazing at a crystal ball, and then my eyes grew accustomed to the images. I was looking into a room lit by uniform light. Looking down. Looking at Randolph Estes Jefferson, the old man himself. God.
"Can you see him?" Phoebe asked.
I nodded, fascinated. The room looked slightly askew, curved somehow, as if the edges were being pulled upward.
"It's hard to see sometimes."
"What's he _doing_?" I asked. He seemed to be kneeling beside his bed, except the bed was transparent as a diamond.
"That's the biggest diamond in the world -- except for the mountain, of course," Phoebe said.
"Is he praying to it?"
Phoebe laughed mirthlessly. "He asked to have it sent down. It was all he wanted."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because it's perfect," Phoebe said. "Poppa has had I don't know how many diamond cutters working on it. They're all in the tunnels."
"You mean they're dead," I said.
She nodded.
I gazed at the stone, which seemed to be suffused with blue light.
"He calls it God's Blue, and I don't know what he's doing with it now. I eavesdropped on him when I first sent it down. He tried making some sort of deal with God. If God would turn everything around like it was before he left, he would give up all his sins and build God a diamond cathedral. Silly, but I guess he's quite mad." She looked at me -- I could feel her staring at me -- and said, "But no more mad than the rest of us, I suppose."
"Are you just going to leave him there?" I asked.
"Until he drops dead," Phoebe said quietly.
"Have you talked to him?"
"I'll never speak to him again, but Uncle George visits him regularly and makes sure he eats."
"The other men will kill him."