"Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 290 - Death has Grey Eyes" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Maxwell)

"At myself. That must have been how all my illusions began." Dick's hand
swept his forehead as though to brush away the straight lines that crossed it.
"I keep thinking of myself in slow motion, Eric, as though I were someone
else."
"Perhaps you were something of a mental case, Dick." Pipe in hand, Eric
was watching Dick closely. "I was on the verge myself, you know."
"While you were a prisoner?"
 Eric nodded.
"I was shot down early in the war, you know," he said. "Very silly of me,
and I brooded about it. So I was sent to some hospital where they had a
psychoanalyst."
Dick took his own pipe from his mouth.
"Quite a famous chap, I understand," continued Eric. "Maybe you've heard
of him - Doctor Kurtz Greug."
"That's the name!" Dick's fingers came up with a snap. "Greug! The man
with the grey eyes!"
Eric stared doubtfully.
"The eyes you saw here? In the hallway mirror, only last night?"
"I thought I saw them."
"Imagination, probably, like those sounds you've been hearing. Remember
anything else?"
"A railroad whistle -"
"Here?"
"No. Wedged in my mind like a fish-bone in the throat. A whistle, piping
shrill, from one of those European locomotives. Shrieking a name, it was."
"Not mine, I hope." Eric laughed indulgently. "I wouldn't want to believe
the banshees were howling for me."
"No, it wasn't Eric." Dick pondered, feeling the stir of recollections.
"Not Eric, but something like it - something more -"
Eyes half-closed, Dick tried to close the link. It was the way he'd been
working with all his memories, only to have gaps widen, the more he fought to
bridge them. This time, however, something clicked.
"I have it!" Dick exclaimed. "Friedrich!"
Eric's teeth set hard upon his pipestem. It was only the smoke that
trickled from his lips that prevented Dick from noting the man's savagery, in
a
sudden change of expression.
"It's a name they called me," spoke Dick slowly. "I don't know when or
why, but I associate it with myself. Perhaps if I'd asked Doctor Greug, he
would have explained it."
Eric's tension relaxed.
"You mean Greug was sympathetic?"
"In a way, yes," admitted Dick. "Only I never had a chance to question
him. He put all the questions and I answered them. All things about my past
and
myself."
Eric Henwood stepped out to the hallway telephone and while he dialed, he
drew out a letter that he had transferred from the pocket of his coat to the
borrowed dressing gown. The number that he called was Grand Central Station
and