Running Dog Read Free Page A

the young lady that movement, the simple capacity to change position, is an important erotic quality. Probably the single biggest difference between old and new styles of erotic art is the motion picture. The movie. The image that moves. This assumes you consider movies art.”
    “Oh, I do,” Moll said.
    “In the same league with painting, sculpture, so on.”
    “Absolutely.”
    “All right then,” Lightborne said. “For several months I kept hearing rumors about this very curious film. People in the business. Collectors, dealers, agents. It’s a world of rumormongers. What can you do? But then the noise died. The little hum, it faded away to nothing. I don’t think anyone noticed. The rumor was implausible to begin with. Hardly anyone took it seriously. So, silence for thirty years. Not a word on the subject. Then, six months ago, the rumor is revived. I hear it from three people, none of them in contact with the other two. Precisely the same rumor. A film exists. Unedited footage. One copy. The camera original. Shot in Berlin, April, the year 1945.”
    Lightborne nodded to indicate a measure of absorption in his own commentary. He went to the refrigerator and got a box of Graham crackers. He offered them around. No takers. He sat back down.
    “In the bunker,” he said.
    He took a cracker out of the box and dunked it in his coffee.
    “Spell that out,” Moll said.
    “The bunker under the Reich Chancellery.”
    “And who appears in this footage?”
    “Things get vague here. But apparently it’s a sex thing. It’s the filmed record of an orgy, I gather, that took place somewhere in that series of underground compartments.”
    Selvy gazed at the ceiling.
    “I don’t believe it myself,” Lightborne said. “I’m the chief skeptic. It’s just the curious nature of the thing. The recent rumor is point for point the same as the original, despite a thirty-year gap between the two. And the few people who believe the thing, at least as a possibility, are able to make some valid historical points. I happen to be a student of the period.”
    Robbins and Selvy watched the soggy bottom half of the cracker in Lightborne’s hand detach itself and fall into the cup. Lightborne used a spoon to gather the brown ooze and eat it.
    “In any case I thought it might be useful to trace the story as far as I could, maybe with luck even to its source. Eventually a contact in the business, someone I trust, put me in touch with an individual and we arranged a meeting. He didn’t volunteer his name and I didn’t ask. Man in his thirties. Slight accent. Nervous, very jumpy. He said he knew where the footage was. Said prints had never been made. Guaranteed it. Said the running time would qualify it as full length, more or less. Then he grew melancholy. I can see his face. A performance, he said, that would surely take its place among the strangest and most haunting ever given. He also said I wouldn’t be disappointed in the identities of those taking part. All this and yet he wouldn’t give a straight answer when I asked if he’d seen the footage himself or were we dealing in hearsay.”
    Lightborne stirred his coffee.
    “The idea we agreed on was that I would act as agent for the sale. I have the contacts, I know the market, more or less. We further agreed that with sex exploitation reaching the level it has, certainly there’d be no problem finding powerful and wealthy groups who’d be utterly delighted at the chance to bid for distribution rights to something this novel. Think of it. The century’s ultimate piece of decadence.”
    “And it moves,” Moll said.
    Lightborne sat back and crossed his legs, holding the cup and saucer to his belly.
    “So,” he said, “a small-time dealer in erotic knickknacks, some good quality, some not so good, and here I am with a chance to act as go-between in some monumental pornography caper. I begin to send out feelers, veiled hints, to this part of the country, that part, to this