"Kim Wilkins - The Autumn Castle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilkins Kim)

Gerda giggled; nobody genuinely liked their wealthy benefactor. "If we run into him downstairs in the
gallery we won't have much of a chance of losing him. Coming now?"
"No, give me a half-hour to get cleaned up." Jude indicated his shirt, which was splattered with brown
paint.

"We'll be at Super Jazz on Chausseestrasse. It's just been voted the smokiest club in Europe."

"I'll bring my gas mask," Christine joked.

"Yeah, yeah, I'll convert you yet, Miss Starlight," Gerda said. "You can't be the only person in the hotel
who doesn't smoke." With a cheery wave she disappeared. Jude had turned back to his painting.

"I want to give it another fifteen minutes," he said, picking up his brush. His eyes were taking on a
distracted gaze.

"I'll wait upstairs." She'd lost him; until he came back from wherever it was in his head he went when he
was painting, he was no longer hers. She glanced at him as she left the studio: his right shoulder was
flexed, his hair fell over his eye as he touched the brush delicately, carefully to the canvas. As long as he
was happy, his painting was a mistress Christine was prepared to tolerate.

***
Two hours had passed before they arrived at Super Jazz, and by then the others were all drunk. Mandy
was not with them, to Christine's relief. She found Immanuel Zweigler the most loathsome being she had
ever met. He was a tall, corpulent man with pinkish skin and pale watery eyes. He dyed his hair black,
but ginger roots peeked through, conspiring with his ginger eyebrows to give him away. He usually
smelled of the heavy incense he burned in his upstairs rooms, where he also wandered around naked and
didn't care who came to the door; Gerda had already reported popping in to borrow coffee and getting
an eyeful she'd never forget. But it was none of these thingsтАФhis appearance or his habitsтАФthat Christine
despised. It was some other ineffable malignancy that washed off him, some calculating miserliness or
inhuman detachment, that made her lean away whenever he spoke to her.

"Drink for you?" This was Fabiyan, the Belarusian sculptor who lived across the hall from them. He had
to yell over the band playing loud Miles Davis in the corner. Jude slid onto the sofa next to Gerda, and
Christine took the seat opposite.

"Beck's," Christine said.

"Beck's!" Gerda exclaimed as Fabiyan went to the bar. "You're so predictable."

"I'm living in the capital of Germany," Christine responded. "It's only right I should drink German beer."

"Berlin's not the capital of Germany," Gerda said, waving her cigarette effusively, "it's the capital of the
world."

Every year in summer, four new artists took up residence at Hotel Mandy-Z for their twelve-month
Zweigler Fellowships. This year they were Jude Honeychurch, New York's hottest young tiling with a
paintbrush, fresh from an immensely successful West Chelsea exhibition; Gerda Ekman, an ebullient
Swede who worked in metal and stone; Pete Searles, a nineteen-year-old Australian who put together
bizarre video and multimedia installations that required warnings about epilepsy; and Fabiyan