And Then There Was No One полностью

God, they were good! Slavorigin really did know how to dance. I watched him as he and his partner clamped themselves onto each other’s now electrically taut, now sensual and yielding torso. I watched how, his head tossed back, he would brusquely stamp his feet in a ferocious tango tantrum while his partner raised a single black boot behind him, casting a furtive glance at its heel as though in fear that he might have trod on something unmentionable. I watched too how, glissando after glissando, every joint and pivot of their bodies would click magnetically together, before terminating in a perfectly timed four-legged splits.

When, still hand in hand, they walked back off the floor, Slavorigin whispered in the ear of the sweaty young stranger, who began smiling and nodding, just smiling and nodding. Then, as they were about to reach our table, they abruptly unclasped hands and went their separate ways. Watching his partner disappear into the crowd, Slavorigin reclaimed his seat beside us, his long legs sprawling sexily under the table.

I myself slipped unobtrusively away half an hour later, and I have no idea when the evening ended for the others.

* Except for Jochen, who had to fly off to Hamburg, where his presence had been requested at another literary festival the very next day.

† Sanary, strangely, had a voice that was both soft and metallic, even piercing at times, and, although I tried not to eavesdrop, I still couldn’t help hearing the essential of this latest bee in his bonnet. In case any reader is curious, it concerned the fact that in Hammett’s novel the eponymous thin man is actually the victim, the victim of the murder on which its plot revolves, and not the detective. Hence the titles of the five film sequels which followed the first adaptation itself – After the Thin Man, Another Thin Man, Shadow of the Thin Man and so on – made no sense whatsoever. For once I already knew that.

Dreams like hallucinations divine and speak to our fear of dying, and sleep, as many have written before me, is the green room of the hereafter.* That night I slept fitfully. On one of my room’s twin bedside tables I had earlier in the evening laid out a brand new sleeping-mask and a pair of boules Quiès, by then as grey and tough as wads of chewed-out gum. Now, wandering naked into the bathroom to brush my teeth, swallow a blood-pressure pill and take one last pee for the road, I switched on the alarm-clock radio and located a sort of classical-music channel: Honegger’s Pacific 231 followed by the ‘big tune’ of a Rachmaninov piano concerto, etc. Although I had packed a snug little compact-disc player along with three favourite late-night discs, whenever I am about to sleep alone, away from home, I do prefer the radio to records. Somebody is out there.

It was close to midnight when I slid beneath the duvet. As predicted, I had to wrestle with the bolster, wedging it under the nape of my neck (which made me feel as though I were in a barber’s chair), piling a second bolster on top of the first (a dentist’s chair), then experimenting at length to discover whether it might be practical to dispense with the damn things altogether (a coffin). At last, faute de mieux, I arrived at a tolerable position by clasping one of them to my jawline like a violinist his violin.

Only after these and other such threshings, turning my face over on my left cheek then my right cheek then my left again, then, as a despairing last resort, trying to sleep flat on my back, my eyes sightlessly open under the already sticky mask, then getting up twice to fiddle with the radiator’s complicated thermostat – the room abruptly revealed itself to be suffocatingly warm, something I seemed not to have noticed before – only then did I succeed in losing consciousness. And I was no sooner asleep, so it felt, than I started to dream.

Now for me all dreams, all dreams, are nightmares; there is, I find, a denaturingly strange and suggestive something about the state-of-the-art scene-shifting of even the prosiest of dreamscapes, just as in the staidest of surrealist paintings. Hence, however unscary this dream of mine may strike the reader, it was from my point of view a nightmare none the less. I didn’t wake up screaming but, when I finally did surface, I feared at first I would have to vomit.