Читать книгу The Grand Dark онлайн | страница 41
Largo chained his bicycle near the back of the theater and Ilsa in the ticket booth waved him inside. He crept through the lobby and slipped between the red velvet curtains into the performance area. The first play of the evening was already under way.
He found a seat in the last row and sat down. The Grand Dark specialized in Schöner Mord, little productions of violence and depravity performed by life-size puppets controlled by actors backstage in galvanic suits. The dolls required no crude strings, but were instead powered by nearly invisible wires along the floor furnishing the watts needed to make them seem almost alive. They moved with fluid, eerie grace, like a three-dimensional zoetrope brought to life.
The night’s first production was called The Boudoir Phantasm. It was a fiction in which the ghost of a murdered wife possessed the body of the husband’s new bride and killed him with a cleaver, the same way he’d killed her. When the new wife came out of her hypnotic state and saw what she’d done, she threw herself from the boudoir’s window to her death, much to the delight of the murdered bride. It was a simple tale but elegantly produced. In fact, the run had been extended for two weeks. Since the end of the war, spiritualism was all the rage in Lower Proszawa, so ghost stories were very popular.
When the play ended, Largo wanted to rush backstage and tell Remy what a wonderful job she’d done as the murdered bride, but she never liked to socialize between plays, so he remained in his seat. Normally he would have joined the other patrons in the lobby for a smoke or a drink, but he was thinking about expenses again, so he stayed where he was. Besides, it wasn’t as if the show had stopped completely.
The small band that provided the soundtrack for the plays performed during the intermission for tips—and the Trefle numbers of elegant gentlemen and ladies they might meet for trysts later in the night. An evening of murder in the Grand Dark was known to get even the stodgiest patron’s blood up. And the drugs helped, of course. By intermission, the air in the theater was heavy with hashish smoke. In the dark corners of the lobby, men and women snorted cocaine together and kissed in groups of two and three. It was a condition of the tension that gripped the city: after the horrors of the Great War, grab as much pleasure as possible before the next, inevitable conflagration. Largo felt a stab of jealousy watching as other theatergoers with money spent it on such pleasures and indulged in them so deeply and openly.