"Carrol, Jonathan - Fish In A Barrel (txt)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Carroll Jonathan)

blue folder on the desk. "This is your Zip file. Your brain will serve to unzip
what's here, if I can put it that way."

After a long silence, the boy murmured in a thin, timid voice, "I just want to
remember my mother. I keep trying to remember her voice but I can't."

"This will help."

Everything in the room stopped. The two people, the noise, dust motes. Even the
strong morning light waited to see what would happen next. The irony being there
was no question what happened next-- the kid had to open the file and face his
facts. Face his music. Face the face he'd never seen before because he had been
living behind it until this very minute.

Lamentably, Aoyagi chose that moment to enter the room eating a cheese Danish
and whistling "My Sharona." To his credit, he never would have done it if he'd
known what was happening. However, so few people visited the office that it was
usually ninety-nine percent safe to assume no one would be there.

Be that as it may, the moment went up in smoke. Right the hell up!

"Sorry! I didn't know we had a visitor."

Always the professional, Kropik hid his anger behind the mask of an impassive
face. "I was just telling him about his file before handing it over."

Aoyagi's eyes flicked back and forth between the old man and the boy. He knew
what was about to happen and was checking the temperature between the two to see
how things were proceeding. Unlike his priggish, self-satisfied colleague,
Aoyagi did not enjoy this job. He enjoyed Icelandic women and Japanese
literature but could not bring those things into this office. He could only
bring himself from nine to four, five stupefying days a week. Always waiting for
the hapless few, like this poor chumpy kid, to come in with their hopes sky high
and their guards down. All of them naively certain they would discover in lost
memories what was missing from their lives. Instead what they found was that
most of those memories were a writhe of poisonous snakes set to strike. No one
got out of this office alive. And the older Aoyagi got, the more he came to
realize that applied to Kropik and himself as well.

"What's your name, son?" he asked.

Surprised by the question, the boy looked at him. "Milton Kropik."

The red hair struck Aoyagi more than anything else did. He looked at the boy's
strange hair and then immediately at the old man. Old Kropik had no hair.
According to him, he had been shaving his head since he was twenty-five. Red
hair, no hair. All Aoyagi could focus on was that difference. Not the fact the
boy had exactly the same name as his tiresome colleague. Not the fact that there
probably wasn't another person on earth who owned such a lousy name. No, all
Aoyagi could think about was one had hair and the other didn't.