"Norman Spinrad - tHE FAT VAMPIRE" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spinrad Norman)

"Huh?"

"Look, the guy eats and eats, and we get fat, right? Somehow, the results of all the stuff he crams down his throat goes straight to our stomachs...."

"So?"

"So maybe there's a limit."

"I never noticed one, hon! Have you?"

"Never tried to reach it, did we? I mean, the Count uses his victims like we just used these toilet bowls, right, only somehow he doesn't have to stick his finger down his throat, sort of like ectoplasmic bulimia, or like he's a cow, and we're his extra stomach...."

"Gross!"

"...he eats and eats, and we keep dumping it for him.... Well, what if a cow's extra stomach is stuffed to the gills to begin with? Wouldn't it like maybe back up the system? Reverse the flow? Give him a dose of his own hi-cal medicine?"

"Oh no, Chris, you're not suggesting--"

"I'll bet he's never even learned the Hollywood Diet Secret...."

"Jeez, hon, you don't imagine you can eat Armand Kubescu under the table!"

"It'd be sort of like getting him to do it to himself, wouldn't it? After a certain point, I'm stuffing my face, and he's putting on the blubber."

"After a certain point!" Allie groaned. "By that time, you'd weigh more than an elephant!"

"Maybe not. Not if I did it all at one sitting."

"What are you gonna do," Allie said, "challenge him to a pie- eating contest?"

Christine grinned at her. "After all the meals he's bought me, don't you think it's only fair that I take him out to dinner for once? At Mom's Good Old Country Kitchen."

#

Mom's Good Old Country Kitchen had been in business out in Glendale for something like sixty years, though it had certainly seen better days. You wouldn't think to look at it that it was still one of Los Angeles County's most expensive restaurants.

A single-story concrete building was tackily painted to simulate a Disneyland farmhouse. There was a one-third scale barn and silo out back and the whole compound was surrounded by rustic wooden fencing. Two diseased-looking cows wandered listlessly around the ersatz barnyard, along with half a dozen scrofulous chickens, and four hairy Mexican pigs. The smell, at least, was authentic.

"You're sure this is the place?" Armand Kubescu said dubiously, as a phony hayseed in dry-cleaned bib overalls let Christine's
Porsche into the parking lot.

"Just part of the atmosphere," Christine assured him. "It's an old LA institution, you're gonna love it."

Mom's Good Old Country Kitchen had been founded by a family of Okies back during the Great Depression. In those days, it had been all you could eat for $5, stiff by the standards of the day, and now, at $100 for the same, likewise.

The original idea had been to appeal to Dustbowl refugees who had made it in The Industry. In the forties and fifties, it was the in place for Hollywood cowboys seeking to establish their country roots. During the macrobiotic sixties, it had fallen into disfavor, relying somewhat precariously on the custom of perverse right-wing producers who used it to inflict their version of power lunches on hapless Beverly Hills trendies.

In these health-and-body-conscious days, Mom's Good Old Country Kitchen was reduced to a dwindling clientele of loyal old lardbuckets and European tourists. Christine had read about it in an old airline magazine someone had left in her gynecologist's office, never imagining that she would ever dare to set foot in such a place.