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

Farley looked shocked, and he stared down at his shoes, which were so highly polished he could probably see his face in them.
"Did you ever talk to him about -- a castle up in the mountains?" I asked.
His thin, sensitive face was tight as shellacked paper. He looked straight at me and said, "No." After a pause, he said, "But he was shot down with you, wasn't he -- "
I started playing "Look for the Silver Lining," which everyone knew, then "Wild Rose," and "Ma -- He's Making Eyes at Me" which Snap Geraldson sang in falsetto. That was something to hear -- and see. Isn't often an elephant imitates a parrot being squeezed into a juicer. I played and sang Bessie Smith's "Downhearted Blues," and, of course, nobody knew who she was; but Rick Moss and Snap started dancing with each other. I taught them how to Charleston, which had just become all the rage, and all hell broke loose with everybody swaying back and forth, slapping their knees, swiveling around on the balls of their feet, and falling over like they'd been dancing in a marathon for two weeks. After a while I started playing slower tunes again like "All by Myself" and "Who's Sorry Now," and then even a little Lizst and Bach, and the party broke up, and --
"You can't sleep on the piana."
I don't know how he did it, but somehow Skip got me up and dragged me or walked me or rolled me toward my room. I remember seeing open doors that led into rooms with pool tables and ping-pong tables. I remember a kitchen and gymnasium and a room that was so bright I could barely look into it. I passed the fabled library that God had provided with all the classics but no up-to-date _Saturday Evening Posts_, and I remember feeling a pressure around my temples; I imagined that Joel and I were back in the Moth, and the engine was on fire, and my forehead was hot, and then something squeezed my stomach, and from far away Joel or Skip or somebody said, "Hot damn," and I dreamed about beautiful Phoebe looking down at me from the perfect golf-course gardens and tennis courts of Heaven. Her eyes, set in her sun-bronzed face like perfectly shaped transparent gems, were impossibly blue. Sky blue freedom.
And then I woke up in Skip's room.
"Drink this. Hair of the dog."
Skip probably looked worse than I did. I couldn't see him very well -- my head was pulsing with pain. I guess I wasn't used to drinking real hooch. The rotgut I'd been drinking since '20 hadn't killed me, but it sure felt like the vintage Johnny Walker and Chivas Regal would.
I drank the tomato juice and brew, which Skip called "Virginia Dare." It went down like razor blades, and when I stopped being sick, I asked him why he'd decorated most every surface in the room with a towel -- there was a white bath towel neatly tacked over his desk, a white dish towel on the bed table, a red face towel placed like a doily over the back of his stuffed chair, another added color and warmth to a utilitarian tallboy, and towels of various sizes and hues decorated the inside of every drawer open to my view.
"I learned how to do that when I was a kid. I spent a few years in an orphanage." He grinned. "Well, not exactly an orphanage. A private school. But same difference. After Dad popped it, and Mom decided she'd follow by sticking her head in a stove, Dad's best friend kept me in the best schools for as long as my inheritance money held out, which wasn't long."
That was more than I wanted to know about Skip's schooldays, but he seemed cheerful about it all, even about finding his mother, who he said was "blue as a curtain." He said he'd learned about making things cozy in "the orphanage," and he'd got used to decorating with towels.
"Thanks for the bed," I said, "but you didn't have to sleep on the floor. You could've slept in my room, if you couldn't drag me that far."
"I could barely get you _this_ far," Skip said. "You're heavier than you look. But I never sleep anywhere but right here. It's as much home as anything else. Some of the other guys move around. You know -- "
I didn't, and I could feel the nausea working its way up to my throat.
" -- sleep with each other, like that. No girls here, what else you going to do? Except get really friendly with Madam Palm and her five daughters." He grinned again, looking pop-eyed and childlike, and wagged his right hand at me. "I prefer Madam Palm."
"Can't God up there help you out with some women?"
Skip laughed and said, "Old Jefferson's very prim and proper. You heard him. The choice is wives or girlfriends, or nothin' -- and he'd make you marry your girlfriend, sure as shit, not that it would matter, anyway, 'cause once they got here, they wouldn't have any choice. They'd be stuck here forever amen like we are. And who knows how dangerous it would be for them, what with all the other guys. We asked Jefferson if we could borrow some of his slave girls, although we never saw them, but he doesn't believe in whorin' and promiscuity, as he calls it, and, anyway, according to him, he wouldn't misuse his slaves."
"How does he keep slaves? It's 1923, for Chrissakes, not 1823."
Skip shrugged. "There's all kind of stories. George Bernard, who's been here the longest -- over twenty years -- probably knows, but he ain't saying. You didn't meet George. He's sort of a hermit, doesn't even go to the tower when the old man calls. He don't talk to no one. He wasn't no flier, that's for sure, but, like I said, he don't talk. You got to respect that, I figure. Anyway, none of us talk about the slaves since Lowell Legendre was poisoned -- now he _was_ a pilot, shot down just like the rest of us, only he could speak a couple of languages. He had your room, come to think of it. Anyway, he said he was learning how to talk slave-talk from one of the slaves who brung the food. That must have been some trick, 'cause I've never met any of the old man's slaves who could speak or understand one word of English. Lowell said he was getting the hang of it, though, and that once he'd figured it all out, he'd know what was going on and maybe we could figure a way out of here. But he got sick after eating dinner -- it was terrible, worse than my mother -- and we tried calling for someone to get us some help. But the old man and his slaves suddenly got deaf, dumb, and blind. We didn't get any food after that for a week. All we had was water. And after that, all the slaves that had anything to do with us were new. So probably best not to get too curious about them. You'll see your share."
"I want to meet this George Bernard," I said.
"I'll show you his room," Skip said, "but he won't let you in. I once -- "
I made a dash for Skip's toilet, but didn't make it.
When I came around again, still hung-over with a blinding headache and a mouth that tasted like it was full of metal shavings and dirt, I was back in my room.
Old Skip must have found new reserves of strength. Or a few buddies.
* * * *
George Bernard _did_ receive me, as if he wasn't a prisoner like the rest of us, but a guest with special privileges. However, I waited before knocking on his door, which was a football field away from the rest of us.
I got to know my fellow inmates. I spent time in the "sun room" with Snap Geraldson discussing Edward Egan and Sam Mosberg, who took gold in the Lightweight and Light Heavyweight categories respectively at the Antwerp Olympics in '20. It was like discussing boxing with the Buddha. I played ping-pong with Carl Crocker and pool with Keith Boardman and Harry Talmadge, who wanted to be brought up to date on current events; and we argued over the Sacco and Vanzetti convictions. I swam every day in the pool, usually with Skip, who did a couple of miles a day, when he wasn't coming off a hangover, and I spent hours talking plays and movies and books with Farley James and Stephen Freeburg in the library. We discussed Conrad and Gide and Ibanez and Waley and Apollinaire, while we drank God's good whiskey until we were ossified. And every day I practiced the piano. I played for hours, doing scales, working the life back into my fingers, which flew over the keyboard; and if I had to be here, if I was going to be trapped in this diamond pit with this ragtag group of swillers in this speakeasy prison, I'd get my hands back. I practiced the sonatas of Scarlatti and Clementi and Mozart and Bach and Schumann and Brahms, and Liszt, of course; and it all came back to me; it was like I'd never left conservatory. I played Debussy's _Etudes for Piano_, Ravel's _Daphnis and Chloe_, Schoenberg's _Five Piano Pieces_, which I knew by heart, and Stravinsky's _Piano-Rag Music_. I played until I was exhausted, and there were no days or nights, just melody, counterpoint, rhythm, and drinking and talking.
Was I in prison? Or purgatory?
Or Heaven, as it surely was for Skip -- good food, whiskey, friends, a room tidied up with towels. But after Snap Geraldson threw a fit and hurt his back, I began to suspect that _everyone_ was crazy --
That's when I decided to visit George Bernard.
* * * *
"Welcome, Mr. Orsatti."
A beefy man dressed in an old-fashioned military-style smoking jacket with silk cord frogging stood hulking like a costumed bouncer in the partially closed doorway. He was the same body type as Mr. Randolph Estes Jefferson -- a bull-dog endomorph -- and he was wearing flannel trousers that were so wrinkled they looked like he had been sleeping in them for weeks, which he might have been. His slippers were torn, and his sparse, curly brown hair appeared as though an electric current had passed through it only seconds before my arrival. But while the Lord God Jefferson above struck me as conceited, self-satisfied, and vital (as male members of the upper crust were trained to be), George Bernard seemed somehow incongruously tall and fat and fox-like. He sized me up, seemingly taking in every detail, and grinned.
"How do you know my name?" I asked, trying to place the ratchety noises that were emanating from all over his room. But I couldn't see past him.
Obligingly, he stepped aside.
"Skip Cinesky told me that -- "
I suppose I was stopped dead in my tracks -- so to speak! -- because George's room was mostly a huge table covered with Lionel standard gauge HO track that ran over perfectly modeled hills and rills and suspension bridges, and through pastureland and woods and tunnels and realistic towns with main streets fronted by electrically lit municipal buildings, stores, and porched houses. It was like looking down from a cockpit, except there were too many trains chugging and spewing wisps of smoke as they rushed through miniature fields to miniature destinations. At least twenty brass-trimmed Lionel and American Flyer locomotives pulled blue, green, and yellow enamel cattle cars, boxcars, oil tank cars, coal cars, day coaches, Pullmans, baggage cars, and bright red cabooses.
"You wanna try it?" George asked, as he pointed out a large black box that controlled the switching and speed; and I thought I said, "No," but there I was working the controls of the Blue Comet while George went into the kitchen to fix up drinks. Unlike the rest of his neighbors, he had a suite down here in the pit. I couldn't judge how many rooms he might have had.
For a few seconds, George's Blue Comet train set occupied all my attention because he had pushed all the rubber-tipped control levers over to #9 and the locomotives accelerated. They were chugging along so fast that they'd fly off the tracks when they hit the curves or smash into each other at the track switches. I pulled all the levers back, but not before a Cowen Comet Special locomotive pulling freight cars with their own magnetic lifting cranes jumped the track. Cars scattered across the table; although I prevented a few cars from falling, I couldn't reach the expensive, heavy black locomotive, which broke when it hit the floor.
"Good save," George said, returning with two whiskey glasses and a bottle.
"If that's your idea of a good save, you must have a lot of broken train sets."
George gestured toward two easy chairs placed around a table in the corner of the room. "What's the good of having things if you can't break them?"
There wasn't much I could say to that. We sat down, and he poured far too much whiskey into cut-glass tumblers.
"That's why I'm down here. I broke too many things. So why give up a bad habit?"
"What did you break?" I asked.
"Ah -- . Confidences. The golden rule of silence. But only when I got drunk."
I tasted the whiskey, which was woody and bitter and good, and hefted the weight of the tumbler.
"You can _try_ breaking that," George said, "but I'd drink up the contents first. You think it's crystal, don't you? Wrong, my boy. It's diamond -- and probably enough to buy you the Ritz-Carlton in New York City, I would judge. But the boys have already told you that this mountain is one big diamond, didn't they? But that's probably about all they could tell you."
"What can _you_ tell me?"