Spy Line [antikvár]

1 'Glasnost is trying to escape over the Wall, and getting shot with a silenced machine gun!' said Kleindorf. 'That's the latest joke from over there.' He spoke just loudly enough to make himself heard above the strident sound of the piano. His English had an American accent that he sometimes sharpened. I laughed as much as I could now that he'd told me it was a joke. I'd heard it before and anyway Kleindorf was hopeless at telling jokes: even good jokes. Kleindorf took the cigar from his mouth, blew smoke at the ceiling and tapped ash into an ashtray. Why he was so finicky I don't know; the whole damned room was like a used ashtray. Magically the smoke appeared above his head, writhing and coiling, like angry grey serpents trapped inside the spotlight's beam. I laughed too much, it encouraged him to try another one. 'Pretty faces look alike but an ugly face is ugly in its own way,' said Kleindorf. Tolstoy never said that,' I told him. I'd willingly play the straight man for anyone who might tell me things I wanted to know. 'Sure he did; he was sitting at the bar over there when he said it.' Apart from regular glances to see how I was taking his jokes, he never took his eyes off his dancers. The five tall toothy girls just found room on the cramped little stage, and even then the one on the end had to watch where she was kicking. But Rudolf Kleindorf - 'Der grosse Kleiner' as he was more usually known -evidenced the truth of his little joke. The dancers -