Circus. Alistair MacLean

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СКАЧАТЬ sitting only two seats away in the same row. Immaculately clad in a dark blue suit, matching tie and white shirt, he had a lean, thoughtful, almost scholarly face, with neatly parted grey hair and pebble glasses.

      ‘That’s Wrinfield?’ Pilgrim nodded. ‘Looks more like a college professor to me.’

      ‘I believe he was once. Economics. But bossing a modern circus is no longer a seat of the pants job. It’s big business and running it requires corresponding intelligence. Tesco Wrinfield is a highly intelligent man.’

      ‘Maybe too intelligent. With a name like that and on a job like this it’s going to be – ’

      ‘He’s a fifth-generation American.’

      The last of the elephants left the arena and then, to the accompaniment of a blare of trumpets and the suddenly amplified effects of the orchestra, a golden chariot, drawn by two magnificently adorned black stallions, erupted into the arena at full gallop, followed by a dozen horsemen. From time to time these horsemen retained some form of contact with their horses, but for the most part performed a series of acrobatic feats as spectacular as clearly suicidal. The crowd yelled and cheered and applauded. The circus had begun.

      The performance that followed more than bore out the circus’s claim that it had no peer in the world. It was superbly arranged and superbly presented and, as was to be expected, it numbered among its acts some of the best in the world: Heinrich Neubauer, an all but incomparable trainer with an uncanny power over a dozen very unpleasant Nubian lions; his only equal, Malthius, who treated the same number of even more unpleasant Bengal tigers as if they were kittens; Carraciola, who had no trouble at all in making his chimpanzees look a great deal more intelligent than he was; Kan Dahn, billed as the strongest man in the world, which, on the basis of his extraordinary one-handed feats on the high wire and trapeze while seemingly unencumbered by the presence of several attractive young ladies who clung to him with a touching degree of devotion, he might well have been; Lennie Loran, a high-wire-walking comedian, who would have made any insurance agent in the country jump on his pen; Ron Roebuck, who could perform feats with a lasso that a rodeo cowboy wouldn’t even dare dream about; Manuelo, a knife-thrower who could extinguish a lit cigarette at twenty feet – with his eyes bandaged; the Duryans, a Bulgarian teeterboard team who made people shake their heads in wonder; and a dozen other acts, ranging from aerial balletists to a group who climbed up tall ladders and balanced there entirely unsupported while they threw Indian clubs at each other.

      After an hour or so of this Pilgrim said graciously: ‘Not bad. Not bad at all. And here, I take it, is our star turn.’

      The lights dimmed, the orchestra played suitably dramatic if somewhat funereal music, then the lights came on again. High up on the trapeze platform, with half a dozen coloured spotlights trained on them, stood three men clad in sparkling sequinned leotards. In the middle was Bruno. Without his mandarin’s gown he now looked singularly impressive, broad-shouldered and hard and heavy muscled, every inch the phenomenal athlete he was reputed to be. The other two men were fractionally slighter than he. All three were blindfolded. The music died away, and the crowd watched in eerie silence as the three men pulled hoods over their blindfolds.

      Pilgrim said: ‘On balance, I think I would prefer to be down here.’

      ‘That’s two of us. I don’t think I want to look.’

      But look they did as The Blind Eagles went through their clearly impossible aerial routine – impossible because, apart from the occasional roll of a solitary drum in the orchestra, they had no means of knowing where each other was, of synchronizing their sightless movements. But not once did a pair of hands fail to smack safely and securely into another and waiting pair, not once did an outstretched pair of hands appear even remotely liable to miss a silently swinging trapeze. The performance lasted for all of an interminable four minutes and at the end there was another hushed silence, the lights dimmed a second time and almost the entire audience was on its feet, clapping and shouting and whistling.

      Pilgrim said: ‘Know anything about his two brothers?’

      ‘Vladimir and Yoffe, I believe they’re called. Nothing. I thought this was going to be a one-man job.’

      ‘It is. And Bruno has the motivation? The incentive?’

      ‘If any man ever had. I was making enquiries when I was in eastern Europe time before last. I couldn’t find out much from our man there, but enough, I think. There were seven of the family in the circus act – dad or mum more or less retired – but only those three made it over the border when the secret police closed in. I don’t even know why they closed in. That was six, maybe seven years ago. Bruno’s wife is dead, that’s for sure, there are witnesses who will testify to that – well, they would, if they didn’t live in the part of the world they do. He’d been married two weeks. What happened to his youngest brother, his father and his mother, nobody knows. They just disappeared.’

      ‘Along with a million others. He’s our man, all right. Mr Wrinfield is willing to play. Will Bruno?’

      ‘He’ll play.’ Fawcett was confident, then looked thoughtful. ‘He’d better. After all those weeks of trouble you’ve been to.’

      The lights brightened. The Blind Eagles were now on a wire platform some twenty feet above ground, the wire itself stretching to another platform on the far side of the centre ring. Both other rings were empty and there was no other performer in sight except one – and he was on the ground. There was no music and among the crowd the silence was absolute.

      Bruno straddled a bicycle. Across his shoulders was strapped a wooden yoke while one of his brothers held a twelve-foot steel pole. Bruno edged the bicycle forward until the front wheel was well clear of the platform and waited until his brother had placed the pole in slots across the yoke. It was totally insecure. As Bruno moved off, bringing both feet on to the pedals, the brothers caught hold of the pole, leaned forward in perfect unison and swung themselves clear of the platform until, again in perfect unison, they hung suspended at the full length of their arms. The wire sagged noticeably, but Bruno didn’t: slowly and steadily he pedalled away.

      For the next few minutes, balanced partly by himself but mainly by the perfect timing of Vladimir and Yoffe, Bruno cycled backwards and forwards across the wire while the brothers went through a series of controlled but intricate acrobatics. On one occasion, while Bruno remained perfectly steady for seconds at a time, the brothers, necessarily moving with the same immaculate synchronization, gradually increased their pendulum swing until they were doing hand-stands on the pole. The same extraordinary hush remained with the audience, a tribute that wasn’t entirely due to the performance they were witnessing: directly below them as they performed were Neubauer and his twelve Nubian lions, the head of every one of which was turned yearningly upwards.

      At the end of the performance the silence in the audience was replaced by a long and far from silent collective sigh of relief, then once again came the same standing ovation, as heartfelt and prolonged as the one that had gone before.

      Pilgrim said: ‘I’ve had enough – besides, my nerves can’t take any more. Wrinfield will follow me. If he brushes by you on the way back to his seat that means that Bruno is willing to talk and that you’re to follow him at a discreet distance at the end of the show. Wrinfield, I mean.’

      Without making any sign or looking in any particular direction, Pilgrim rose leisurely and left. Almost at once Wrinfield did the same.

      A few minutes later the two men were closeted in one of Wrinfield’s offices, a superbly equipped secretary’s dream, albeit somewhat compact. Wrinfield had a much larger if ramshackle office where most of his work was normally СКАЧАТЬ