"H. L. Gold - The Old Die Rich" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gold H. L)

or have one written; I might really make a name for myself, even get a Hollywood contract, maybe, if I
could act them as they should be acted.
So I sat there in the lone chair, trying to reconstruct the character of the old woman who had died
rather than spend a single cent of her $32,000 for food.

MALNUTRITION induced by senile psychosis," the M.E. said, writing out the death certificate. He
turned to me. "There's no mystery to it, Weldon. They starve because they're less afraid of death than
digging into their savings."
I'd been imagining myself growing weak from hunger and trying to decide that I ought to eat even if it
cost me something. I came out of it and said, "That's what you keep telling me."
"I keep hoping it'll convince you so you won't come around any more. What are the chances,
Weldon?"
"Depends. I will when I'm sure you're right. I'm not."
He shrugged disgustedly, ordered the wicker basket from the meat wagon and had the old woman
carried out. He and the beat cop left with the basket team. He could at least have said good-by. He
never did, though.
A fat lot I cared about his attitude or dogmatic medical opinion. Getting inside this character was
more important. The setting should have helped; it was depressing, rank with the feel of solitary
desperation and needless death.
Lou Pape stood looking out the one dirty window, waiting patiently for me. I let my joints stiffen as if
they were thirty years older and more worn out than they were, and empathized myself into a dilemma
between getting still weaker from hunger and drawing a little money out of the bank.
I worked at it for half an hour or so with the deep concentration you acquire when you use the
Stanislaysky method. Then I gave up.
"The M.E. is wrong, Lou," I said. "It doesn't feel right."
Lou turned around from the window. He'd stood there all that time without once coughing or
scratching or doing anything else that might have distracted me. "He knows his business, Mark."
"But he doesn't know old people."
"What is it you don't get?" he prompted, helping me dig my way through a characterization like the
trained Stanislayskian he was — and still would have been if he hadn't gotten so sick of the insecurity of
acting that he'd become a cop. "Can't money be more important to a psychotic than eating?"
"Sure," I agreed. "Up to a point. Undereating, yes. Actual starvation, no."
"Why not?"
"You and the M.E. think it's easy to starve to death. It isn't: Not when you can buy day-old bread at
the bakeries, soup bones for about a nickel a pound, wilted vegetables that groceries are glad to get rid
of. Anybody who's willing to eat that stuff can stay alive on nearly nothing a day. Nearly nothing, Lou,
and hunger is a damned potent instinct. I can understand hating to spend even those few cents. I can't see
going without food altogether."

HE took out a cigarette; he hadn't until then because he didn't want to interrupt my concentration.
"Maybe they get too weak to go out after old bread and meat bones and wilted vegetables."
"It still doesn't figure." I got up off the shaky chair, my joints now really stiff from sitting in it. "Do you
know how long it takes to die of starvation?"
"That depends on age, health, amount of activity—"
"Nuts!" I said. "It would take weeks!"
"So it takes weeks. Where's the problem — if there is one?"
I lit the pipe I'd learned to smoke instead of cigarettes—old men seem to use pipes more than
anything else, though maybe it'll be different in the next generation. More cigarette smokers now, you see,
and they'd stick to the habit unless the doctor ordered them to cut it out.
"Did you ever try starving for weeks, Lou?" I asked.