«Великий Гэтсби» и другие лучшие произведения Ф.С. Фицджеральда

In a well-fanned Forty-second Street cellar I met Gatsby for lunch. Blinking away the brightness of the street outside, my eyes picked him out obscurely in the anteroom, talking to another man.

�Mr. Carraway, this is my friend Mr. Wolfshiem.’

A small, flat-nosed Jew raised his large head and regarded me with two fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril. After a moment I discovered his tiny eyes in the half-darkness.

�So I took one look at him,’ said Mr. Wolfshiem, shaking my hand earnestly, �and what do you think I did?’

�What?’ I inquired politely.

But evidently he was not addressing me, for he dropped my hand and covered Gatsby with his expressive nose.

�I handed the money to Katspaugh and I said: “All right, Katspaugh, don’t pay him a penny till he shuts his mouth.” He shut it then and there.’

Gatsby took an arm of each of us and moved forward into the restaurant, whereupon Mr. Wolfshiem swallowed a new sentence he was starting and lapsed into a somnambulatory abstraction.

�Highballs[63 - highballs – highball is a cocktail of whisky mixed with soda and ice, served in a tall glass]?’ asked the head waiter.

�This is a nice restaurant here,’ said Mr. Wolfshiem, looking at the Presbyterian nymphs on the ceiling. �But I like across the street better!’

�Yes, highballs,’ agreed Gatsby, and then to Mr. Wolfshiem: �It’s too hot over there.’

�Hot and small – yes,’ said Mr.

�What place is that?’ I asked.

�The old Metropole.’

�The old Metropole,’ brooded Mr. Wolfshiem gloomily. �Filled with faces dead and gone. Filled with friends gone now forever. I can’t forget so long as I live the night they shot Rosy Rosenthal there. It was six of us at the table, and Rosy had eaten and drunk a lot all evening. When it was almost morning the waiter came up to him with a funny look and says somebody wants to speak to him outside.

“Let the bastards come in here if they want you, Rosy, but don’t you, so help me, move outside this room.”

�It was four o’clock in the morning then, and if we’d of raised the blinds we’d of seen daylight.’

�Did he go?’ I asked innocently.

�Sure he went.’ Mr. Wolfshiem’s nose flashed at me indignantly.