Take No Prisoners Read Online Free PDF Page A

came hammering irresistibly into the forefront of my conscious – that disturbing pattern that evidenced itself in the Monday-afternoon movies as a whole. In items like The Great Escape and The Wooden Horse I'd seen plucky British prisoners-of-war outwitting rather stupid Germans and gaining their freedom. There were battle movies in which the forces of the Axis got the crap beaten or bombed out of them by the Allies. The Brits or the Americans had almost always been portrayed as brave heroes; the Germans and the Japs almost always as cowards or villains or both – or just as expendable non-people who could be mown down in their hundreds and thousands without the smallest tear being shed. Moreover, although it hadn't been stated, these movies' stories had seemed implicitly part of a larger story in which the Axis had been defeated and the Allies had triumphed. Indeed, now that I began to think about the whole thing properly – started using that rational mind which my parents had donated so many thousands of dollars to train – it seemed distinctly peculiar that any of these movies had ever been made at all. OK, one, perhaps two – as curios in which the tables were turned on history. But dozens of them?
    Taking this further, how come the cops were allowing the Rupolo to show such seditious features? – for seditious they were, now that I'd begun to regard them analytically rather than just with the wide-eyed, naive gawp of enthusiasm. Surely the place should have been busted by now and its owner marched off for, at the very least, extensive interrogation? A chill ran down my spine as I realized that the audience, too, should have been scooped up in the net. We were almost as guilty as the Rupolo's proprietor through having returned, week in and week out, to watch such dangerous stuff. Without ever noticing that I was doing anything illegal, I'd become in effect a habitual criminal, a serial offender – a traitor in thought and arguably a traitor in deed as well.
    Up to this point in my life I had always been the most law-abiding of persons. I hadn't committed so much as an act of littering. Now I was involved in an extremely serious crime.
    Is it any wonder that I never made it back to the laboratories that afternoon, but instead drifted home haphazardly, my stomach feeling as if it were filled with ice and my head most certainly filled with visions of my arrest, my interrogation and the shame I would bring down on the heads of my parents?
    ~
    Yet by the morning my attitude had changed. This might seem surprising – indeed, in retrospect it's slightly startling even to me – but you must remember that I had for months now been affected by that curious sensation of being more related to the fictional world of Chips and Ginger and Forbes-Hepplewhite and the rest than to what my intellect but not my gut acknowledged as the real world: the world around me. In that sense, to ask myself to give up my Monday afternoons at the Rupolo was to require of me more than forgoing a pleasurable activity: in a very true sense it was to require me to give up my existence – in effect to commit suicide – for I was a part not of a three-dimensional Technicolor world but of a two-dimensional monochrome one. If I abandoned the monochrome world, then something that strongly resembled a doctoral student called Kurt Stroheim would continue to go through all the action of existing in the Technicolor world, but he wouldn't be me : he – or it – would be just another puppet, like all the rest of the denizens of that world.
    There was another factor, which was that I was young, and immature even for my age. Continuing to attend the Rupolo's Monday double-bill matinees was risky and risqué, it was to partake of forbidden fruit – and thus it was infinitely appealing to me. Life as an impoverished postgraduate was generally dull and sometimes duller than that, and the excitement of deliberate illegality added a sparkle to something