Lookout Cartridge Read Online Free Page A

revolution, they cared only to put it behind them. The mathematician interjects that Charles the First’s last word before they chopped off his head was Remember .
    The bearded man seems not to hear her. He says that indeed Americans confused the natural resources of their continent with their own ability to exploit those resources, even mingled those minerals and plants with the illusion of philosophical ideas, and now in the interest of holding violence down, whom does America back?
    I am about to intervene, as I have on some other evenings with a glass in my hand on the side of ideas I do not hold defending, for instance, American internal security systems (for after all we do have something to be secret about!); challenging the standard of living here which for ten years the English middle classes have comfortably not let themselves inquire into; and gently (though later at home Lorna often says I was terrible) attacking…what was it?…the Truman Doctrine? Churchill, self-fulfilling Cold War prophecies?…the ease of friendly intercourse has buffered my memory-but I don’t intervene now, for the bearded man is saying he’s not sure what violence is and he can sympathize with the man in question. And Geoff Millan returns us to the man in question himself, an American resident here from whom now for lack of information the talk finds its exit into sex, and I have the odd sense that no one in the room in fact knows this mythical committee of one, and it turns out that Geoff doesn’t know the name of the man.
    I stay and stay.
    When the other guests are gone, Geoff does not betray surprise when I ask if I can stay over. It’s very late, a new stage of talk.
    Who is Claire?
    Claire is in New York.
    Cartwright’s contact.
    For the film.
    Yankee dollar.
    You measure the pound by it.
    You rely on the American connections.
    My boats on the south coast were bought with money I made here in England. So were the French stoves, you have one yourself.
    You bought into those young married boutiques, you started an antique bottle shop.
    Was it money I wanted?
    It was cordless electric carvers from the States at the time of the assassination. And who ever heard of exporting brass beds from here to Manhattan?
    My margin was surprising.
    And quilts from Maine and Appalachia, some old, some new, and antique stoves from France that aren’t really antique. And then that University of Maryland education racket at your Air Force bases here.
    I’m hardly involved.
    And this film.
    Which film?
    Cartwright, international businessman.
    Sounds like the title.
    What did you hope for?
    More than what we have.
    Is it all a waste?
    What can you do with several pounds of ruined film?
    You’re the American.
    The English take photographs too.
    Not so many.
    Maybe they don’t see so much.
    They’re not so busy snapping pictures.
    They would know better than an American what to do with a load of ruined film.
    You said some burnt. Well then, blow up the negative, silkscreen it, rephotograph the print, hang it over that flak hole in your study—
    It’s a crack—
    Or just hang the blown-up negative.
    Find me the negatives and we’ll go into business. There are no negatives. Or just one.
    But you had other prints. I don’t understand.
    You really don’t, The point is, it hadn’t been processed. So no negative. Dagger was taking most of it in on the Monday to someone he knows in Soho. When Dagger found it, it had been just yanked out of the cans, most of it.
    Were you actually there?
    He’s my friend.
    What was it all doing lying about?
    When Dagger shot most of it he put off thinking about rushes. Anyhow a lot was shot in the boondocks.
    Not exactly a home movie. Real art.
    This was real. This was something.
    Where was it lying?
    On a table Dagger uses. For working, eating, talking. A big table by a window.
    You said yanked out of the can. Was it burnt then?
    There was a magnifying glass on the sill and a couple of inches of leader was