"Players" - читать интересную книгу автора (Delillo Don)

2

Lyle shaved symmetrically, doing one segment on the left side of his face, then the corresponding segment on the right. After each left-right series, the lather that remained was evenly distributed.

Crossing streets in the morning, Pammy was wary of cars slipping out from behind her and suddenly bulking into view, forcing her to stop as they made their turns. The city functioned on principles of intimidation. She knew this and tried to be ready, unafraid to stride across the angling path of a fender that probed through heavy pedestrian traffic.

The car turning into Liberty Street didn't crowd her at all. But unexpectedly it slowed as she began to cross. The driver had one hand on the wheel, his left, and sat with much of his back resting against the door. He was virtually facing her and she was moving directly toward him. She saw through the window that his legs were well apart, left foot apparently on the brake. His right hand was at his crotch, rubbing. She was vaguely aware of two or three other people crossing the street. The driver looked directly at her, then glanced at his hand. His look was businesslike, a trifle hurried. She turned away and walked down the middle of the street, intending to cross well beyond the rear of the car. The man accelerated, heading east toward Broadway.

They roamed in cars now. This was new to her. She felt acute humiliation, a sure knowledge of having been reduced in worth. She walked a direct line toward the north tower but had no real sense of destination. Her anger was imparted to everything around her. She moved through enormous smudges, fields of indistinct things. In a sense there was no way to turn down that kind of offer. To see the offer made was to accept, automatically. He'd taken her into his car and driven to some freight terminal across the river, where he'd parked near an outbuilding with broken windows. There he'd taught her his way of speaking, his beliefs and customs, the names of his mother and father. Having done this, he no longer needed to put hands upon her. They were part of each other now. She carried him around like a dead beetle in her purse.

In college the girls in her dormitory wing had referred to perverts as "verts." They reacted to noises in the woods beyond their rooms by calling along the hall: "Vert alert, vert alert." Pammy turned into the entrance and walked across the huge lobby now, the north space, joined suddenly by thousands coming from other openings, mainly from the subway concourses where gypsy vendors sold umbrellas from nooks in the unfinished construction. They'd been stupid to make a rhyme of it.

Lyle checked his pockets for change, keys, wallet, cigarettes, pen and memo pad. He did this six or seven times a day, absently, his hand merely skimming over trousers and jacket, while he was walking, after lunch, leaving cabs. It was a routine that required no conscious planning yet reassured him, and this was supremely important, of the presence of his objects and their locations. He stacked coins on the dresser at home. Sometimes he tried to see how long he could use a face towel before its condition forced him to put it in the hamper. Often he wore one of the three or four neckties whose design and color he didn't really like. Other ties he used sparingly, the good ones, preferring to see them hanging in the closet. He drew pleasure from the knowledge that they'd outlast the inferior ties.

He was sandy-haired and tall, his firm's youngest partner. Although he'd never worn glasses, someone or other was always asking what had happened to them. A quality of self-possession, maybe, of near-effeteness, implied the suitability of glasses. Some of the same people, and others, watching him shake a cigarette out of the pack, asked him when he'd started smoking. Lyle was secretly hurt by these defects of focus or memory on the part of acquaintances. The real deficiency, somehow, he took to be his.

There was a formality about his movements, a tiller-distinct precision. He rarely seemed to hurry, even on the trading floor, but this was deceptive, a result of steady pace, the drift-less way he maneuvered through a room. His body was devoid of excess. He had no chest hair, nothing but downy growth on his arms and legs. His eyes were grayish and mild, conjuring distances. This pale stare, the spareness of his face, its lack of stark lines, the spaces in his manner made people feel he would be hard to know.

The old man was outside Federal Hall again, leaky-eyed and grizzled, holding his sign up over his head-the banks, the tanks, the corporations. The sign had narrow wooden slats fastened to each vertical border, making it relatively steady in the breeze, when there was a breeze. Lyle crossed diagonally toward the Exchange. The air was smothering already. By the close of trading, people would be looking for places to hide. In the financial district everything tended to edge beyond acceptability. The tight high buildings held things in, cross-reflecting heat, channeling oceanic gusts all winter long. It was a test environment for extreme states of mind as well. Every day the outcasts were in the streets, women with junk carts, a man dragging a mattress, ordinary drunks slipping in from the dock areas, from construction craters near the Hudson, people without shoes, amputees and freaks, men splitting off from groups sleeping in fish crates under the highway and limping down past the slips and lanes, the helicopter pad, onto Broad Street, living rags. Lyle thought of these people as infiltrators in the district. Elements filtering in. Nameless arrays of existence. The use of madness and squalor as texts in the denunciation of capitalism did not strike him as fitting here, despite appearances. It was something else these men and women had come to mean, shouting, trailing vomit on their feet. The sign-holder outside Federal Hall was not part of this. He was in context here, professing clearly his opposition.

Lyle made small talk with the others at his booth. The chart for a baseball pool was taped to the wall above a telephone. The floor began to fill. People generally were cheerful. There was sanity here, even at the wildest times. It was all worked out. There were rules, standards and customs. In the electronic clatter it was possible to feel you were part of a breath-takingly intricate quest for order and elucidation, for identity among the constituents of a system. Everyone reconnoitered toward a balance. After the cries of die floor brokers, the quotes, the bids, the cadence and peal of an auction market, there was always a final price, good or bad, a leveling out of the world's creaturely desires. Floor members were down-to-earth. They played practical jokes. They didn't drift beyond the margins of things. Lyle wondered how much of the world, the place they shared a lucid view of, was still his to live in.

Moments before noon something happened near post 12. To Lyle it seemed at first an indistinct warp, a collapse in pattern. He perceived a rush, unusual turbulence, people crowding and looking around. He realized the sharp noise he'd heard seconds earlier was gunfire. He thought: small arms. There was another burst of activity, this one more ragged, at post 4, nearer Lyle, not far from the entrance to the blue room annex. People were shouting, a few individuals, uncertainly, their voices caught in a hail of polite surprise. He saw the first clear action, men moving quickly through the crowd, sideways, skipping between people, trying to hand-force a path. They were chasing someone. He approached the entrance to the blue room. Total confusion in there. A guard brushed by him. It was not possible to run in this gathering. Everyone moving quickly went sideways or three-quarters, in little hop-steps. The electronic gong sounded. At the far end of the room he saw heads bobbing above the crowd, a line of them, the chasers. The people in the blue room didn't know where to look. A young woman, a messenger in a blue smock, covered her mouth with the piece of paper she'd been taking somewhere. Lyle turned and went over to post 12. There was a body. Someone was giving mouth-to-mouth. Blood spread over the victim's chest. Lyle saw a man step back from a small inching trickle on the floor. Everyone here was attentive. A stillness had washed up. It was the calmest pocket on the floor right now.

Later that afternoon he had a drink with Frank McKechnie in a bar not far from the Exchange. McKechnie was beginning to look like some crime czar's personal chauffeur. He was stocky, grayer by the day, and his clothing could barely resist the surge of firmness and girth that had been taking place these past few years. They smoked quietly for a moment, looking into rows of bottles. McKechnie had ordered two cold draft beers, stressing cold, almost belligerent about it.

"What do we know?”

"George Sedbauer.”

"Doesn't sound familiar," Lyle said.

"I knew George. George was an interesting guy. He could charm people. Charm the ass off anybody. But he had this thing, this almost gift for complications. He would find ways to get into trouble. If a way didn't exist, he'd invent one. He was in trouble with the Board more than once. George was likable but you never knew where he was.”

"Until now.”

"You know now.”

"I heard they caught up to the guy down on Bridge Street or somewhere?”

"They got him in the bond room. He never made it out to the street.”

"I heard street.”

"He made it no further than the bond room," McKechnie said. "Whoever told you Bridge Street, tell him he's spinning a web of lies.”

"I heard he made it out.”

"Sheer fantasy.”

"A trail of deceit, is that it?”

"What did you hear about his identity?”

"Nothing," Lyle said.

"That's good, because there's nothing to hear. That anybody's heard of, he never existed before today. Hey, when the hell are you coming up to have dinner with us with your goddamn spouse and all?”

"We never seem to get out.”

"My wife is still with the tests.”

"We seem to have trouble getting out. We're not organized. She's as bad as I am. One of these days we'll get organized enough.”

"You sure you're married, Lyle? There's talk you got something going with so many women in so many places, you couldn't possibly have a wife too. I hear talk.”

Lyle blinked into his beer, smiling lightly.

"He had a visitor s badge, I understand.

"Correct," McKechnie said.

"Well whose visitor? Obviously that's the thing.”

"He was George Sedbauer's visitor.”

"I didn't know that.”

"George got him on the floor.”

"Well you have to wonder if they knew each other why the guy would shoot him right there instead of some side street.”

"Maybe it wasn't planned, to shoot him.”

"They had an argument," Lyle said.

"They had an argument and the guy whips out a handgun. Which they recovered, incidentally. A starter's pistol with the barrel bored out to take twenty-two-caliber ammunition.”

"How do you have an argument with an outsider on the floor? Who on the floor has time to get into an argument with someone who's his own guest?”

"Not everybody with a guest badge is your sister-in-law from East Hartford. Maybe George had interesting friends.”

With his index finger McKechnie made a wigwag motion over the glasses. The bartender moved their way, talking to someone over his shoulder.

"You know what it all means, don't you?”

"Tell me, Frank.”

"It means they'll install one of those metal detection devices and we'll all have to walk through it every time we go on the floor. I hate those goddamn things. They can damage your bone marrow. My life is crud enough as it is.”