"Baker, Kage - Company 4 The Graveyard Game" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baker Kage)
The tech looked horrified.
"I'll find out." Lewis slipped his hand free and took his briefcase and keys. "Ciao, then. If I have to stay over, I'll give you a call."
"Oh, stay over," Maire ordered, waving him to the door. "Too long a drive to make twice in one day. Besides, you could use a little vacation. Get this unfortunate incident out of your mind."
"Oh, that," said Lewis, as though he'd forgotten already. "Yes, well, I imagine a ride on a cable car will lighten my spirits."
He wasn't referring to the popular tourist transit. Theobroma cacao has a unique effect on the nervous systems of immortals. Maire chuckled at his joke. The tech looked over his shoulder in a surly kind of way as Lewis stepped out into the heat and light of a Southern California morning.
He walked once around his car to inspect it for vandalism. When this Company HQ had been built, thirty years earlier, the gated community in which it was situated was regularly patrolled, to say nothing of being perched so far up on such a steep hill as to deter most criminals. Times had changed.
Sooner or later, they always did.
Satisfied that his leased transport was safe for operation, Lewis got in. Carefully he fastened his seatbelt and put on his sunglasses; carefully he backed out onto Zeus Drive and headed over the top of the hill to the less crowded exit from Mount Olympus. As he descended, he had a brief view of the city that stretched to the sea. Beyond, it had once been possible to see Catalina Island. The island was still there, but the smog hid it. Only once in a great while, when atmospheric conditions were just right, could it be glimpsed.
He proceeded down to Hollywood Boulevard and headed north through Cahuenga Pass, where he got on the Hollywood Freeway. He bore east to Interstate 5. After Mission San Fernando he followed the old stagecoach road, now a multilane highway into the mountains. It took him north, under arches restored since the last earthquake.
Long high miles brought him to Tejon Ranch, where the road dropped like a narrow sawmill flume between towering mountains preposterously out of scale. At the top, the San Joaquin Valley hung before his eyes like a curtain, and far down and away the tiny road raced across it, straight as an arrow.
He shivered, remembering how bad the grim old Ridge Route had been, especially in the season of flash floods, or forest fires, or blizzards, or summer heat so extreme, it made automobile tires explode. The modern road had only the drawback of the San Andreas Fault, which lay directly beneath it.
But there was no earthquake scheduled today, so as he shot down onto the plain through a miasma of burning brakes he muttered a little prayer of thanks to Apollo, in whom he did not particularly believe, but one really ought to thank somebody for getting safely down that pass.
For the next four hours the view was the same: the lion-yellow Diablo Range on his left, flat fields on his right, stretching across the floor of the valley to the Sierra Nevadas, the eastern wall of the world. Straight ahead lay the highway, shimmering in the heat. Memory rose like a ghost from the bright, silent monotony.
He did not want to remember himself striding along the front walk of Botany Residential with a bouquet of red roses, and he was even whistling, for God's sake, he was that happy. Could anything have been more of a clichщ? Right in through the lobby, past all the mortal servants and the Botany staff leaving for early dinners, and he didn't care who saw him. He waited at the elevator, still whistling. He might as well have had a neon sign on his forehead: I AM A HAPPY MAN.
The elevator doors opened, and there stood Botanist Mendoza, ice bucket in hand. She smiled at him, briefly. She didn't smile at many people, but once at a party he'd been casually kind to her. It hadn't amounted to much; he'd seen her alone at a table, miserably unhappy, and brought her a handful of cocktail napkins to dry her eyes. Could he help? No, she explained with brittle dignity: it was only that she'd once loved a mortal man, and he'd been dead now for forty years, and she hadn't realized it had been that long until something at the party reminded her. She didn't really want company, but Lewis stayed long enough to be sure she was all right.
He smiled and nodded at her now, and she nodded back. They stepped past each other, she to the ice machine and he to ascend into realms of delight. He thought.
As it turned out, he got ice too.
Ten minutes later he was standing outside the elevator on the fifth floor of Botany Residential, in the act of tossing the roses into the trash chute, when the door opened and Mendoza was standing there again, witness to his bitter gesture. Her eyes widened. He drew himself up, summoning what shreds of self-respect he had left, and adjusted his cuffs.
"Hello, Mendoza," he said.
"Oh, Lewis. I'm sorry," she said.
She took him down the hall to her apartment, and he didn't mean to pour out his woes, but he did, and she listened.
They stayed there for hours, until he talked it all out, and then it seemed like a good idea for them to sneak down to the bar in the lobby and go on talking over drinks. For some reason she decided to let him past the wall of sarcasm with which she kept the rest of the world at bay. It couldn't have been his little moment of chivalry with the cocktail napkins. Lewis had been kind to a lot of women. But, laughing with her in that cramped little bar, he spent the best evening he'd had in a long time. And they were seen.
"You went out with the Ice Witch?" hooted Eliakim from Archives. "Mendoza? Botanist Mendoza? You took a flamethrower instead of a bottle or something?"
"None of your business," Lewis said. "But it might interest you to know that she's a perfectly delightful woman."
He merely shrugged. "It doesn't bear discussion."
Of course they promptly went out and told most of New World One, and for about two weeks rumors flew. He went to Mendoza to apologize.
"To hell with them," she said philosophically. "Us a couple? Are they nuts? What a bunch of nasty little academic gossips, and what overblown imaginations."
"I just wanted you to understand that none of it came from me," he said, not that pleased.
"I know," she replied, looking at him with a fondness that made his heart skip a beat. "You're a good man, Lewis. You're the nicest immortal I've ever known."
She kissed him, then, on the cheek, and tousled his hair.
They never became lovers, but she was affectionate with him in a way she never was with anyone else. He accepted that. They became great friends. When he was transferred to England, he found he missed her terribly. When he learned what had happened to her, years later in Los Angeles, he was sick at heart.
San Francisco
He gave a sigh of relief when at last he turned west through the Altamont Pass, fighting the wind until he got through to the East Bay cities, leaving the golden desolation well behind him.
Chrome and glass, sea air, the Oakland Bay Bridge with its section that had fallen out during the last big earthquakeЧall nicely replaced now, millions of busy commuters never gave it so much as a thought anymore, but Lewis's knuckles were white on the steering wheel until he had crossed into the city.
He made his way along the diagonal of Columbus, where he turned up a steep and narrow street and called upon a man in a dark rear apartment. A price was named and met; several bundles of cash were removed from Lewis's leather briefcase, to be replaced by a certain packet of letters. Lewis got back into his car and checked his internal chronometer.
Three hours ahead of schedule.
He started the car and took it up the long spiral to Coit Tower, apologizing to the transmission. There he parked and walked to the edge of the terrace, to all appearances a young executive taking an afternoon off to admire the spectacular view.
He removed his sunglasses and folded them away in his breast pocket. He looked out across the bay at Marin County. Somewhere over there . . . ? He transmitted a tentative inquiry. It was returned immediately, from the depths of the city at his feet:
Receiving your signal. Who's that?
Literature Specialist Lewis. Joseph?
Lewis! What are you doing up here?
We have something to discuss in private. Coordinates, please?
Directions were transmitted. Lewis got back into his car and drove down from Coit Tower, apologizing this time to the brakes and promising to go nowhere near Lombard Street's notorious block.
He drove to another tourist attraction instead: the great outdoor shopping mall on Pier 39. Parking, he wandered through the mortal throng, the Europeans with cameras, performance artists, recovering addicts hawking cheap jewelry from card tables. Near the entrance Lewis spotted the location he sought. It was an amusement arcade of the modern variety, promising the thrills, so popular in this late twentieth century, of vicarious mass destruction and simulated murder. Cautiously he went in, politely declining a handbill that would have got him twenty cents off a frozen yogurt cone.
He stood peering down a long dark corridor filled with electronic games, tuning his hearing to sort through the wall of noise. Beeps, crashes, screams, roaring, and a familiar voice:
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