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

the suffusing light, nor could I see the inset marks of tile, only high,
straight, iridescent planes that reached to a ceiling of the same substance. I
was lying in a comfortable feather bed with a jewel-inlaid footboard; the bed
and an ebony table and elbow chair were the only pieces of furniture in this
smooth, glittering travesty of a monk's cell.
"Well, sleeping beauty has awoke," said Clarence. He had a pale,
freckled complexion, red hair that was graying, and a pop-eyed look, no doubt
because his eyebrows were so white that they seemed to disappear. "You're
probably still feelin' dopey," he said to me. "The slaves drugged you so Old
Jefferson could do his interrogation. Takes a while for it to wear off."
"Well, they didn't drug _me_," said the man who had been goading
Clarence about his name. He was bald, tall, and aggressive; and he had a ruddy
complexion like Clarence -- it was as if both men were of the same Irish and
Dutch ancestry. Both wore pants and shirts that looked like pajamas, except
Clarence wore an aviator's jacket and the bald man wore a cap.
Eleven other men were standing in the room behind them, and a short
wiry aviator -- I was sure right then and there that they were _all_ aviators
-- said, "Old man Jefferson drugged _everybody_. Even you, Monty. You just
don't remember none of it, while we do."
"But none of us remembers much," said Clarence, who introduced himself
as Skip, and then introduced me to Monty Kleeck and Farley James and Rick Moss
and Carl Crocker and Eddie Barthelmet, Harry Talmadge, Keith Boardman, Gregory
"Cissy" Schneck, "Snap" Samuel Geraldson, and Stephen Freeburg, who "was the
only Jew in this mess of Protestants."
"You a Jew too?" asked the skinny, nervous upchuck who was called
Cissy. There was a meanness in his voice, but he wasn't big enough to back it
up, and I knew he was more dangerous than the three-hundred-pound hulk they
called Snap.
I thought about saying yes, but I figured I might be here a while --
maybe for life, from the look of them -- and so I said, "No, I'm Catholic. You
have a problem with that?"
"No, no," said Cissy, backing off. "I got no problem with Christians."
Then in an undertone he said, "Long as they're Christians -- "
"Where the hell am I?" I asked, some of the muzziness from the drugs
finally clearing -- if, indeed, I'd been drugged. I directed myself to Stephen
Freeburg, who had the same kind of dark, sharp features as Rudolph Valentino,
who last I heard had gone to prison for bigamy.
"You're in the Randolph Estes Jefferson Hotel," Freeburg said, smiling.
"It's probably the fanciest, most comfortable jail in the world. And unless
you can think of something we haven't, you're here for life."
"No, we'll get out," said Carl Crocker, a short, overweight, squarish
chap with bristly brown hair -- they must feed these guys pretty well, I
thought; but everything was just words and thoughts wriggling like worms in
sand. Nothing seemed real. My mouth felt like it was stuffed with wire. My
eyes were burning. My head was pounding. Wake up, I told myself. Wake the hell
up.
"Yeah, your tunnel," Freeburg said sarcastically. "Next, you and Snap
will be drilling straight down." Everyone laughed at that.
I guess I looked bemused because Eddie Barthelmet, a reedy yet muscular
man with thinning black hair, whom I figured immediately as the sort who kept