"Ellison,_Harlan_-_The_Avenger_of_Death" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

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The Avenger of Death
by Harlan Ellison
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Copyright (c)1987 The Kilimanjaro Corporation. All rights reserved.


Fictionwise Contemporary
Fiction


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The first one Pen Robinson killed came to his attention partially through the good offices of the Manhattan branch of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He had been holding a dusty copy of _Burke's Peerage_ when they took him into custody.
They came for him -- two frosty agents who had bought their suits at the same Big & Tall Men's Shop -- just after two-thirty on Saturday. The bookstore -- "just off Broadway, rare books and technical texts in Good Condition" -- was busier than usual because of the two Puerto Rican boys who had approached him the previous Monday as he was unlocking the shop. They had braced him, suggesting a way in which he -- Meester Robinson of Robinson's Good Used Books -- could attract new business, "guaranteed _absolutamente_." For a small fee, they would undertake to slip under the windshield wipers of every automobile parked between Eighth Avenue and Park, between 42nd and 59th Streets, a flier advertising whatever Meester Robinson wanted to push that week.
Pen had gone to the Kinko instant print shop on Lexington, and had ordered three thousand fliers extolling the arcane virtues of books scented with shelf dust and written by men and women who had vanished into the lonely posterity of the Dewey Decimal System.
The boys had been as good as their word, and mailboxes, doorways, lunch counters -- and windshields -- had worn his fliers throughout the week. Pen had paid them gladly; and Saturday was busier than usual when the FBI chilled the doorknob of the shop, entering to take him into custody.
One moment he had been standing there, dusting _Burke's Peerage_, and the next he was crossing the sidewalk on 51st Street, being sternly guided by a cold hand, slipping as effortlessly as an exhalation, into the velour darkness of the black limo double-parked in front of the shop. Fifteen minutes later he was somewhere in the towering abyss of the Pan Am building, seated in a moderately comfortable knockoff of an Eames design, being punctiliously but courteously questioned by a man half his age. Pen Robinson, at age fifty-five, looked no older than forty; and his judgment of the inquisitor's youth may have been faulty. He was under no misapprehension about the quality of the man's eyes, however.
He thought, _I'm glad I never have to look out of those eyes._ He knew he would not like the world seen from that side.
"You called a bicycle shop in Queens yesterday," said the wearer of the bad eyes.
"Uh, yes..." Pen was wary.
"Why did you call that number, Mr. Robinson?"
"It was a wrong number."
"Whom," he said precisely, "were you looking for at that number?"
Pen furrowed his brow. He had no idea where this was going. "They said they were from the FBI. The men who brought me here. I never asked to see their identification. I suppose it's against the law to say you're from the FBI if you're not. Are you really the FBI?"
The young man neither nodded nor blinked. "Whom were you seeking at that number, sir?"
"Maybe I ought to ask to see your credentials. I don't even know your name ... there's nothing on the door out there. How do I know you're -- "
The young man leaned forward, resting his pale, freckled hands on his desk blotter. The desk was empty of all but the leather-framed blotter, and a pair of pale, freckled hands. "You don't want to get yourself in any deeper, do you, Mr. Robinson? You're only here for a visit; you understand that the liaison we share, at the moment, does not involve the possibility of arrest, imprisonment, detainment, any of that. You understand that, don't you?"
Pen was frightened. People vanished, it happened all the time; and not just in Latin American dictatorships. Right here in the United States, it could happen: Judge Crater, hundreds of children every year, Jimmy Hoffa. And those who vanished into _apparats_ controlled by people who spent their time spying on one another. There had to be hidden places where the vanished were taken. And from there to other locations ... from which one never returned ... or if you did, the years would have been stolen, and your loved ones would never recognize you ... to come back as an old, old man they did not know. There were no loved ones: Pen was alone in the world. But that only made it worse. If they decided he would never return, who but the New York State tax assessor would try to find him?
"Look, I don't know what this is all about," he said, trying to get back to whatever safe place he had unknowingly abandoned. "But this is all crazy; it's a mistake of some kind. Why don't I just tell you what that call was about."
"Why don't you tell me that, Mr. Robinson." No resonance: flat silver panes of reflective glass.
So he told him how inconsequential it had been.
"I bought a library at an estate sale. From an agent in Detroit. It was one of the last elements of the dissolved estate of a man who had worked for GM for many years. I was told there were hundreds of technical journals and books of design." He paused a beat to clarify. "My store specializes in technical texts."
The eyes blinked. Pen took that as encouragement.
"I was opening the crates ... so I could catalogue what had come. I was slapping them."
Another blink. Pen was beginning to get the drill: he clarified.
"Slapping them. Flat banging two books together to get the dust off them. Then I turn each one upside down and riffle the pages; for good measure. A check fell out of one of them. I picked it up, and it was a check that had been written by a man named Henry Chatley. The address was in Queens. It was a perfectly good check drawn to cash, in the amount of something like one hundred and fifty dollars. It was only two weeks since it had been written, it was a check someone could cash. I called the number on the face of it. A man answered and said it was some bicycle repair shop. I thought I'd misdialed, and called back, and got the same man. I dialed very carefully the second time. So I didn't know what to do."
The mouth beneath the eyes moved. "How did it get there?"
"How did _what_ get there? The shop, the man, what?"
"The check, Mr. Robinson. How did the check get into that book?"
"How am I supposed to know?"
"You say you bought these books from the library of a man who lived in Detroit."
"Yes. He died, and they liquidated his assets to pay outstanding taxes."
"This was an old book?"
Pen shrugged. "I didn't check the copyright, but I'd say it had been in his library for years, yes, I think I can say that."
"What was the title of this book, that you say the check fell from?"