"Kim Newman - Andy Warhol's Dracula" - читать интересную книгу автора (Newman Kim)

nostrils stung with dead cordite.
Uncomfortable, he broke the connection.
Johnny told the driver to take him to Studio 54.

Even now, this late in the night, a desperate line lingered outside the
club. Their breaths frosted in a cloud, and they stamped
unfashionably-shoed feet against the cold. Losers with no chance, they
would cajole and plead with Burns and Stu, the hard-faced bouncers, but
never see the velvet rope lifted. An invisible sign was on their
foreheads. Worse than dead, they were boring.
Johnny paid off the cab with sticky bills lifted from Nancy's purse, and
stood on the sidewalk, listening to the throb of the music from inside.
"Pretty Baby," Blondie. Debbie Harry's living-dead voice called to him.
The taxi did not move off. Was the driver hoping for another fare from
among these damned? No, he was fixing Johnny in his mind. A man without a
reflection should be remembered.
"See you again soon, Jack," said the white man.
Like the black men outside the Chelsea, the taxi driver was a danger.
Johnny had marked him. It was good to know who would come for you, to be
prepared. The white man's name was written on his license just as his
purpose was stamped on his face. It was Travis. In Vietnam, he had learned
to look monsters in the face, even in the mirror.
The cab snarled to life and prowled off.
Moving with the music, Johnny crossed the sidewalk towards the infernal
doorway, reaching out with his mind to reconnect with the bouncers,
muscular guys with Tom of Finland leather caps and jackets. Burns was a
moonlighting cop with sad eyes and bruises, Stu a trust-fund kid with his
own monster father in his head; Johnny's hooks were in both of them,
played out on the thinnest of threads. They were not, would never be, his
get, but they were his. First, he would have warm chattels; get would come
later.
He enjoyed the wails and complaints from losers as he breezed past the
line, radiating an "open sesame" they could never manage. Stu clicked the
studded heels of his motorcycle boots and saluted, fingers aligned with
the peak of his black leather forage cap with Austro-Hungarian precision.
Burns smartly lifted the rope, the little sound of the hook being detached
from the eye exciting envious sighs, and stood aside. To savor the moment,
Johnny paused in the doorway, knowing the spill of light from inside made
his suit shine like an angelic raiment, and surveyed those who would never
get in. Their eyes showed such desperation that he almost pitied them.
Two weeks ago, he had been among them, drawn to the light but kept away
from the flame. Like some older creatures of his kind, he could not force
his way into a place until he had been invited across the threshold. Then,
his clothes Ч found in a suitcase chosen at random from the carousel at
the airport Ч had not been good. Being nosferatu was unusual enough to get
him attention. Steve Rubell was passing the door, and took note of
Johnny's sharp, beautiful face. Possessed of the knack of seeing himself
as others saw him, Johnny understood the owner-manager was intrigued by
the vampire boy on his doorstep. But Shining Lucifer himself couldn't get
into 54 with a Bicentennial shirt, cowboy boots and black hair flattened