"Bishop, Michael - The Quickening" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bishop Michael)

"Signore, " the boy hanging on his belt cried. "Signore. "
Lawson let his eyes drift to the boy's face. "Ciao," he said. It was the only word of Italian he knew, or the only word that came immediately to mind, and he spoke it much louder than he meant.
The boy shook his head vehemently, pulled harder on Lawson's belt. His words tumbled out like the contents of an unburdened closet into a darkened room, not a single one of them distinct or recognizable.
"English!" Lawson shouted. "English here!" -
"English here too, man!" a voice responded from the , milling crush of people at the mouth of Sierpes. "Hang on a minute, I'm coming to you!"
A small muscular man with a large head and not much chin stepped daintily through an opening in the crowd and put out his hand to Lawson. His grip was firm. As he shook hands, he placed his left arm over the shoulder of the Italian boy hanging on to Lawson's belt. The boy stopped talking and gaped at the newcomer.
"Dai Secombe," the man said. "I went to bed in Aberystwyth, where I teach philosophy, and I woke up in Spain. Pleased to meet you, Mr.-"
"Lawson," Lawson said.
The boy began babbling again, his hand shifting from -
Lawson's belt to the Welshman's flannel shirt facing. Secombe took the boy's hands in his own. "I've got you, lad. There's a ragged crew of your compatriots in a pool-hall pub right down this lane. Come on, then, I'll take you." He glanced at Lawson. "Wait for me, sir. I'll be right back."
Secombe and the boy disappeared, but in less than five minutes the Welshman had returned. He introduced himself all over again. "To go to bed in Aberystwyth and to wake up in Seville," he said, "is pretty damn harrowing. I'm glad to be alive, sir."
"Do you have a family?"
"Only my father. He's eighty-four."
"You're lucky. Not to have anyone else to worry about, 1 mean."
"Perhaps," Dai Secombe said, a sudden trace of sharpness in his voice. "Yesterday I would not've thought so."
The two men stared at each other as the wail of the city modulated into a less hysterical but still inhuman drone. People surged around them, scrutinized them from foyers and balconies, took their measure. Out of the corner of his eye Lawson was aware of a moonfaced woman in summer deerskins slumping abruptly and probably painfully to the street. An Eskimo woman-the conceit was almost comic, but the woman herself was dying and a child with a Swedish-steel switchblade was already freeing a necklace of teeth and shells from her throat.
Lawson turned away from Secombe to watch the plundering of the Eskimo woman's body. Enraged, he took off his wristwatch and threw it at the boy's head, scoring a glancing sort of hit on his ear.
"You little jackal, get away from there!"
The red-cheeked woman who had been glaring at Lawson applied her foot to the rump of the boy with the switchblade and pushed him over. Then she retrieved the thrown watch, hoisted her skirts, and retreated into the dim interior of the cafe whose door she had been haunting.

"In this climate, in this environment," Dai Secombe told Lawson, "an Eskimo is doomed. It's as much psychological and emotional as it is physical. There may be a few others who've already died for similar reasons. Not much we can do, sir."
Lawson turned back to the Welshman with a mixture of awe and disdain. How had this curly-haired lump of a man, in the space of no more than three or four hours, come to respond so lackadaisically to the deaths of his fellows? Was it merely because the sky was still blue and the edifices of another age still stood?
Pointedly, Secombe said, "That was a needless forfeiture of your watch. Lawson."
"How the hell did that poor woman get here?" Lawson demanded, his gesture taking in the entire city. "How the hell did any of us get here?" The stench of open wounds and the first sweet hints of decomposition mocked the luxury of his ardor.
"Good questions," the Welshman responded, taking Lawson's arm and leading him out of the Calle de las Sierpes. "It's a pity I can't answer 'em."

111

That night they ate fried fish and drank beer together in a dirty little apartment over a shop whose glass display cases were filled with a variety of latex contraceptives. They had obtained the fish from a pescaderia voluntarily tended by men and women of Greek and Yugoslavian citizenship, people who had run similar shops in their own countries. The beer they had taken from one of the classier bars on the Street of the Serpents. Both the fish and the beer were at room temperature, but tasted none the worse for that.
With the fall of evening, however, the wail that during the day had subsided into a whine began to reverberate again with its first full burden of grief. If the noise was not quite so
loud as it had been that morning, Lawson thought, it was probably because the city contained fewer people. Many had died, and a great many more, unmindful of the distances involved, had set out to return to their homelands.
Lawson chewed a piece of adobo and washed this down with a swig of the vaguely bitter Cruz del Campo beer.
"Isn't this fine?" Secombe said, his butt on the tiles of the room's one windowsill. "Dinner over a rubber shop. And this a Catholic country, too."
"I was raised a Baptist," Lawson said, realizing at once that his confession was a non sequitur.
"Oh," Secombe put in immediately. "Then I imagine you could get ail the rubbers you wanted."
"Sure. For a quarter. In almost any gas-station restroom."
"Sorry," Secombe said.
They ate for a while in silence. Lawson's back was to a cool plaster wall; he leaned his head against it, too, and released a sharp moan from his chest. Then, sustaining the sound, he moaned again, adding his own strand of grief to the cacophonous harmonies already afloat over the city. He was no different from all the bereaved others who shared his pain by concentrating on their own.
"What did you do in . . . in Lynchburg?" Secombe suddenly asked.
"Campus liaison for the Veterans Administration. I traveled to four different colleges in the area, straightening out people's problems with the GI Bill. I tried to see to it that Sweet Jesus, Secombe, who cares? I miss my wife. I'm afraid my girls are dead."
"Karen and Hannah?"
"They're three and five. I've taught them to play chess. Karen's good enough to beat me occasionally if I spot her my queen. Hannah knows the moves, but she hasn't got her sister's patience-she's only three, you know. Yeah. Sometimes she sweeps the pieces off the board and folds her arms, and we play hell trying to find them all. There'll be pawns under the

sofa, horsemen upside down in the shag-" Lawson stopped.
"She levels them," Secombe said. "As we've all been leveled. The knight's no more than the pawn, the king no more than the bishop."
Lawson could tell that the Welshman was trying to turn aside the ruinous thrust of his grief. But he brushed the metaphor aside: "I don't think we've been `leveled,' Secombe."
"Certainly we have. Guess who 1 saw this morning near the cathedral when I first woke up."
"God only knows."
"God and Dai Secombe, sir. 1 saw the Marxist dictator of . . . oh, you know, that little African country where there's just been a coup. I recognized the bastard from the telly broadcasts during the purge trials there. There he was, though, in white ducks and a ribbed T-shirt- terrified, Lawson. and as powerless as you or 1. He'd been quite decidedly leveled; you'd better believe he had."
"I'll bet he's alive tonight, Secombe."