"Newman, Kim - The McCarthy Witch Hunt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Newman Kim)

income tax returns for the last ten years are being re-audited as part of
a random survey. There might be some trouble with the financing of the
loan on their house.'
'Sounds good. She must be sweating.'
Finlay wasn't so sure. The others in the coven were Manhattanites,
self-important and concerned with position. The Stevens woman was Mrs
Average, a June Allyson character. It was quite possible she had a real
sense of values. The sincere ones were always the most dangerous, the most
powerful.
'Say,' Cohn grinned, 'could we play up the sex dirt thing? That's the part
that really sticks in the craw with the unwashed. Could we get some naked
photographs of rituals or something? Preferably with animals, or a
two-fer-one, or kids or something.'
Cohn, despite his smarts and his ambition, wasn't all that different from
Brother Dwight.
'We can try,' Finlay said.

1951
'They say it's Christian,' Brother Swaggart explained, 'but it's voodoo,
so far as I can see.'
Finlay and the local Brother stood at the back of the tent, the crowds
between them and the platform. It was even more sweltering inside than it
had been out in the Louisiana heat. He had been bitten by bugs, and didn't
have a shirt that wasn't imbued with the smell of his own wet-and-dried
sweat.
The girl on the platform - about thirteen or fourteen - praised someone
who could have been the Lord or could have been Baphomet, and plunged her
arms into the dry fishtank, up to the elbows, allowing the rattlers to
wind around her wrists, to climb up over her, to wrap around her head and
shoulders. She stood up and her snakes hung from her, slowly writhing like
sea-anemone fronds.
Finlay had seen enough. There was a cross outside and the man who preached
wore a dog collar but this was black magic, as much as bowing before a
goat-headed image or drinking cockerel's blood. He would report it and the
Bureau would send a team in.
He pushed out of the tent and tried to breathe clean air.
A group of children were sitting on the hood of his car, bare feet
dangling, grazed knees showing through their pantslegs, big eyes staring.
They looked like the shocked children he'd seen in Berlin, unable to
believe the cataclysm they'd just survived.
A flame danced in his eyeline and he blinked it away.
Finlay shooed the kids off like flies, and slipped into the driver's seat.
A small human figure hung from his rearview mirror, sack-cloth stuffed
with straw, limbs and head stuck out like starfish-legs, neck gathered in
with string, a rusty nail driven through its heart.
Finlay didn't feel a thing as he tossed the doll into the dirt.

1953
It had gone beyond polite 'this is not an interrogation' interviews. Mrs
Stevens had been subpoenaed before the latest HUCAC hearings, a new deal