"Richard Preston - The Demon In The Freezer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Preston Richard)

The Demon In The Freezer
A True Story

by Richard Preston

Random House New York City 2002



This book is lovingly dedicated to Michelle



Chance favors the prepared mind.
- Louis Pasteur


The author expresses his gratitude to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
for a research grant that helped the completion of this book.



{A glossary of microbiological terms used in this book is at the end of the text}



Part One - Something In The Air

Journey Inward
OCTOBER 2-6, 2001

In the early nineteen seventies, a British photo retoucher named Robert Stevens arrived in south
Florida to take a job at the National Enquirer, which is published in Palm Beach County. At the time,
photo retouchers for supermarket tabloids used an airbrush (nowadays they use computers) to clarify
news photographs of world leaders shaking hands with aliens or to give more punch to pictures of
six-month-old babies who weigh three hundred pounds. Stevens was reputed to be one of the best
photo retouchers in the business. The Enquirer was moving away from stories like "I Ate My
Mother-in-Law's Head," and the editors recruited him to bring some class to the paper. They offered
him much more than he made working for tabloids in Britain.
Stevens was in his early thirties when he moved to Florida. He bought a red Chevy pickup
truck, and he put a CB radio in it and pasted an American-flag decal in the back window and installed a
gun rack next to the flag. He didn't own a gun: the gun rack was for his fishing rods. Stevens spent a lot
of time at lakes and canals around south Florida, where he would spin-cast for bass and panfish. He
often stopped to drop a line in the water on his way to and from work. He became an American citizen.
He would drink a Guinness or two in bars with his friends and explain the Constitution to them. "Bobby
was the only English redneck I ever knew," Tom Wilbur, one of his best friends, said to me.
Stevens's best work tended to get the Enquirer sued. When the TV star Freddie Prinze shot
himself to death, Stevens joined two photographs into a seamless image of Prinze and Raquel Welch at a
party together. The implication was that they had been lovers, and this sparked a lawsuit. He enhanced
a photograph of a woman with a long neck: "Giraffe Woman." Giraffe Woman sued. His most famous