"Block, Lawrence - CMS - This Crazy Business of Ours" - читать интересную книгу автора (Block Lawrence)

Lawrence Block - This Crazy Business of Ours

From: The Collected Mystery Stories

The elevator, swift and silent as a garotte, whisked the young man eighteen stories skyward to Wilson Colliard's penthouse. The doors opened to reveal Colliard himself. He wore a cashmere smoking jacket the color of vintage port. His flannel slacks and broadcloth shirt were a matching oyster white. They could have been chosen to match his hair, which had been expensively barbered in a leonine mane. His eyes, beneath sharply defined white brows, were as blue and as bottomless as the Caribbean, upon the shores of which he had acquired his radiant tan. He wore doeskin slippers upon his small feet and a smile upon his thinnish lips, and in his right hand he held an automatic pistol of German origin, the precise manufacturer and calibre of which need not concern us.

"My abject apologies," Colliard said. "Of course you're Michael Haig. I regret the gun, Mr. Haig, even as I regret the necessity for it. It's inconsistent greeting a guest with gun in hand and bidding him welcome, but I assure you that you are welcome indeed. Come in, come in. Ah, yes." The doors swept silently shut behind Haig. "This thing," Colliard said distastefully, looking down at the gun in his hand. "But of course you understand."

"Of course, Mr. Colliard."

"This crazy business of ours. Always the chance, isn't there, that you might turn out to be other than the admiring youngster you're purported to be. And surely there's a tradition of that sort of thing, isn't there? Just look at the Old West. Young gunfighter out to make a name for himself, so he goes up against the old gunfighter. Quickest way to acquire a reputation, isn't it? Why, it's a veritable clichВ in the world of Western movies, and I daresay they do the same thing in gangster films and who knows what else. Now I don't for the moment think that's your game, you see, but I've learned over the years never to take an unnecessary chance. And I've learned that most chances are unnecessary. So if you don't mind a frisk-"

"Of course not."

"You'll have to assume an undignified posture, I'm afraid. Over that way, if you don't mind. Now reach forward with both hands and touch the wall. Excellent. Now walk backwards a step and another step, that's right, very good, yes. You'll hardly make any abrupt moves now, will you? Undignified, as I said, but utilitarian beyond doubt."

The old man's hand moved expertly over the young man's body, patting and brushing here and there, making quite certain that no weapon was concealed beneath the dark pinstripe suit, no gun wedged under the waistband of the trousers, no knife strapped to calf or forearm. The search was quick but quite thorough, and at its conclusion Wilson Colliard sighed with satisfaction and returned his own weapon to a shoulder holster where it reposed without marring in the least the smooth lines of the smoking jacket. "There we are," he said. "Once again, my apologies. Now all that's out of the way and I have the opportunity to make you welcome. I have a very nice cocktail sherry which I think you might like. It's bone dry with a very nutty taste to it. Or perhaps you might care for something stronger?"

"The sherry sounds fine."

Colliard led his guest through rooms furnished as impeccably as he himself was dressed. He seated Michael Haig in one of a pair of green leather tub chairs on opposite sides of a small marble cocktail table. While he set about filling two glasses from a cutglass decanter, the younger man gazed out the window.

"Quite a view," he said.

"Central Park does look best when you're a good ways above it. But then so many things do. It's a great pleasure for me, sitting at this window."

"I can imagine."

"You can see for miles on a clear day. Pity there aren't more of them. When I was your age the air was clearer, but then at your age I could never have afforded an apartment anything like this one." The older man took a chair for himself, placed the two glasses of sherry on the table. "Well, well," he said. "So you're Michael Haig. The most promising young assassin in a great many years."

"You honor me."

"I merely echo what I've been given to understand. Your reputation precedes you."

"If I have a reputation, I'm sure it's a modest one. But you, sir. You're a legend."

"That union leader was one of yours, wasn't he? Head of the rubber workers or whatever he was? Nice bit of business the way you managed that decoy operation. And then you had to shoot downhill at a moving target. Very interesting the way you put all of that together."

Haig bared his bright white teeth in a smile that gave his otherwise unremarkable face a foxlike cast. "I patterned that piece of work on a job that went down twenty years ago. An Ecuadorian minister of foreign affairs, I think it was."

"Ah."

"One of yours, I think."

"Ah."

"Imitation, I assure you, is definitely the sincerest form of flattery in this case. If I do have a reputation, sir, I owe not a little of it to you."

"How kind of you to say so," Colliard said. His fingers curled around the stem of his glass. "The occasion would seem to call for a toast, but what sort of toast? No point in honoring the memory of those we've put in the ground. They're dead and gone. I never think about them. I've found it's best not to."