"Barker, Clive - Lost Souls" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barker Clive)

"Keep smiling," he said to Norma, and left her to her brandy and the dead
gossiping in the bathroom.

Linda had gone back to the house on Ridge Street as a last resort, hoping
against hope that she'd find Bolo there. He was, she vaguely calculated,
the likeliest candidate for father of the child she carried, but there'd
been some strange men in her life at that time; men with eyes that seemed
golden in certain lights; men with sudden, joyless smiles. Anyway, Bolo
hadn't been at the house, and here she was-as she'd known she'd be all
along-alone. All she could hope to do was lie down and die.

But there was death and death. There was that extinction she prayed for
nightly, to fall asleep and have the cold claim her by degrees; and there
was that other death, the one she saw whenever fatigue drew her lids
down. A death that had neither dignity in the going nor hope of a
Hereafter; a death brought by a man in a gray suit whose face sometimes
resembled a half-familiar saint, and sometimes a wall of rotting plaster.

Begging as she went, she made her way uptown toward Times Square. Here,
amongst the traffic of consumers, she felt safe for a while. Finding a
little deli, she ordered eggs and coffee, calculating the meal so that it
just fell within the begged sum. The food stirred the baby. She felt it
turn in its slumber, close now to waking. Maybe she should fight on a
while longer, she thought. If not for her sake, for that of the child.

She lingered at the table, turning the problem over, until the mutterings
of the proprietor shamed her out onto the street again.

It as late afternoon, and the weather was worsening. A woman was singing
nearby, in Italian; some tragic aria. Tears close, Linda turned from the
pain the song carried, and set off again in no particular direction.

As the crowd consumed her, a man in a gray suit slipped away from the
audience that had gathered around the street-corner diva, sending the
youth he was with ahead through the throng to be certain they didn't lose
their quarry.

Marchetti regretted having to forsake the show. The singing much amused
him. Her voice, long ago drowned in alcohol, was repeatedly that vital
semitone shy of its intended target-a perfect testament to
imperfectibility-rendering Verdi's high art laughable even as it came
within sight of transcendence. He would have to come back here when the
beast had been dispatched. Listening to that spoiled ecstasy brought him
closer to tears that he'd been for months; and he liked to weep.

Harry stood across Third Avenue from Axel's Superette and watched the
watchers. They had gathered in their hundreds in the chill of the
deepening night, to see what could be seen; nor were they disappointed.
The bodies kept coming out: in bags, in bundles; there was even something
in a bucket.