"Fritz Leiber - Gondolier" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leiber Fritz)

which was menacing him. The police even make light of the very material clues which I pointed out to
them.

Or else Daloway was taken off, grimly and against his will, to parts utterly unknown and blackly
horrible. That is my own theory, especially on lonely nights when I remember the dreams he told me of
the Black Gondolier.

Of course the canal is a rather small one, showing much of its rough gravel bottom strewn with rusted
cans and blackened paper, except when it is briefly filled by one of our big winter rains. But gondolas
did travel it in the illusion-packed old days and it is still spanned by a little sharply humped concrete
bridge wide enough for only one car. I used to cross that bridge coming to visit Daloway and I
remember how I'd slow down and tap my horn to warn a possible car coming the other way, and the
momentary roller-coaster illusion I'd get as my car heaved to the top and poised there and then hurtled
down the opposite dusty slope for all of a breathless second. From the top of the little bridge I'd get my
first glimpse of the crowded bungalows and Daloway's weed-footed trailer and close behind it the black
hunch-shouldered oil well which figured so strangely in his dreads. тАЬTheirclosest listening post,тАЭ he
sometimes called it during the final week, when he felt positively besieged.

And of course the Grand Canal is pretty dismal these days, with its several gracefully arching Bridges of
Sighs raddled with holes showing their cement-shell construction and blocked off at either end by heavy
wire barricades to keep off small boys, and with both its banks lined with oil wells, some still with their
towering derricks and someтАФmostly those next to beach side housesтАФwith their derricks dismantled ,
but all of them wearily pumping twenty-four hours a day with a soft slow syncopated thumping that the
residents don't hear for its monotony, interminably sucking up the black petroleum that underlies
Venice, lazily ducking and lifting their angularly oval metal heads like so many iron dinosaurs or
donkeys forever drinkingтАФdonkeys moving in the somnambulistic rhythm of Ferde Grofe's Grand-
Canyon donkey when it does its sleepyhee ... haw. Daloway had a very weird theory about thatтАФabout
the crude oil, I meanтАФa theory which became the core of his dreads and which for all its utter black
wildness may still best explain his disappearance.

And La Gondola Negra is only a beatnik coffee house, successor to the fabulous Gashouse, though it did
boast a rather interesting dirty drunken guitarist, whose face always had blacker smears on it than those
of his stubbly beard and who wore a sweatshirt that looked like the working garment of a coal miner and
whom Daloway and I would hear trailing off (I won't venture to say home) in the small hours of the


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morning, picking out on his twangy instrument his dinky тАЬTexas Oilman Suite", which he'd composed
very much in imitation of Ferde Grofe's one about the Grand Canyon, or raucously wailing his eerie
beatnik ballad of the Black Gondola. He got very much on Daloway's nerves, especially towards the end,
though I was rather amused by him and at the same time saw no harm in his caterwauling, except to
would-be sleepers. Well, he's gone now, like Daloway, though not by the same route ... I think. At least
Daloway never suggested that the guitarist was one oftheir agents. No, as it turned out,their agent was a
rather more formidable figure.

And they don't call the plaza St. Mark's, but it was obviously laid out to approximate that Adriatic-
lapped area when it was created a half century ago. The porticos still shade the sidewalks in front of the
two blocks of bars and grimy shops and there are still authentic Venetian pillars, now painted salmon