"Jack Dann - The Diamond Pit" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dann Jack)

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