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

"I'm not _saying_ it fell, it _did_ fall. I didn't make this up!" He felt anger rising despite his caution. "And what if I _am_ making it up, what's the problem here? I did a decent thing, I made a good samaritan phone call; I got a number that had been changed. Obviously, that's the answer. What is it you _think_ this is all about?"
"I don't think it's about anything, sir. I'm asking a few questions."
There wasn't anything to say to that, so Pen sat and waited. It had to stop sometime; perhaps now.
"So you don't know Henry Chatley."
Pen said, very seriously, sitting forward and placing his hands opposite the pale, freckled pair: "I wouldn't know Henry Chatley if he walked through that door. I have never _met_ a Henry Chatley; I have never _heard_ of a Henry Chatley; and I wish to god I'd never seen his damned check! Now does that satisfy you? Have I been here long enough for you to run me through your computers or whatever you do, long enough for you to understand I'm a used-book seller and not Ashenden the Secret Agent?"
The young man with the bad eyes said nothing. He looked at all the parts of Pen's face, as if certain duplicity would reveal itself in dark lines if he applied enough visual pressure. Finally, he said, "Thank you, Mr. Robinson."
Pen was astonished. It was over, as abruptly as that. His inquisitor obviously meant for him to go.
"That's it?" he said. Now he was annoyed. It seemed he should have ended with a bit more fanfare ... _something_!
"That's it, sir."
"Not even going to tell me what this has been about, are you? Not even a word, right? Just let me march out and find my way back to my place of business, from which you dragged me for this waste of time!"
"Goodbye, Mr. Robinson." The door opened behind him, and he felt a chill. The cold hand touched him again, and he knew it was time to get up, now, right now, and go with the agent.
Three minutes later, he was on the street.
He was hailing a cab when it hit him. How _did_ that two-week-old check, written on a New York bank, by a man whose phone number had been changed with such impossible swiftness that it had already been reassigned to a bicycle repair shop in Queens, get into a book that had sat on an old man's bookshelf in Detroit for possibly decades? And who the hell was Henry Chatley?
* * * *
In the cab going back uptown, he felt as if he stood poised before a membrane. Where he stood, on this side, it was the real world, the mimetic universe, a place of order, even if this thing with the FBI made no sense, was something out of _Alice_. On the other side, through that translucent curtain, lay a great many small items, only imperfectly seen, but probably very important. Where the check had come from, how it had gotten into the book, who Henry Chatley was ... or had been. He had an overwhelming sense of certainty that Henry Chatley, whoever, wherever, was dead.
But how to get through the membrane?
He needed a trope, a metaphor, a puff of smoke, a rabbit for the hat. Twenty minutes later, back in the shop, near to closing time, the rabbit manifested itself.
While he had been at the Pan Am building, his clerks had tended to the benefits proffered by the two Puerto Rican boys. The shop was empty.
He decided to lock up early, cleared the cash register, gave out the paychecks, and watched as the clerks wandered up the street, seeking weekend euphoria. He stared out the front window for a time, then locked the doors and stared out the window for a longer time. In all, it had been only twenty minutes, yet in that time he had resisted the impulse to find the book again: not once, but a hundred times.
Finally, he went back into the storeroom, to the stack of books he had removed from the crate the day before. He had not lied to the inquisitor. He really _didn't_ know which book it had been. When the check had floated to the floor, he had laid the book on the stack beside the crate, and had taken no further notice of it. If all was as it had been, the book should still be there.
It was. One of the clerks had placed a folded newspaper atop the stack, but otherwise, everything was as it had been. He picked up the book. _Elements of Structural Design_, with a copyright notice of 1926. Pen held the book in both hands, and stared at it; then, as he flipped the pages, he discovered two more pieces of paper.
The first was part of a press release for a book titled _Tian Wen: A Chinese Book of Origins_. It had been torn off, possibly having been used as a bookmark. It bore an excerpt from the twenty-three-hundred-year-old Taoist catalogue of mythology, philosophy and pre-Imperial legend. It read as follows:
1
>>>Of the beginning of old,
Who spoke the tale?<<<
2
>>>When above and below were not yet formed,
Who was there to question?<<<
3
>>>When dark and bright were obscured,
Who could distinguish?<<<
He had no idea what it meant. He _never_ understood such riddles, though apparently entire nations found the words urgently meaningful. The only one of such epigraphs that had ever made sense to him was: _The oxen are slow, but the Earth is patient._ That seemed peculiarly appropriate now, even if the three excerpts from _Tian Wen_ were not.
So he continued flipping the pages of the book, and came, at last, to the stiff file card wedged into the spine fold. Printed on the card were the words CHATLEY and WHERE THE WOODBINE TWINETH. Under these words, written in a fine hand, with an ink pen, was the direction _Take by truck, corner 82nd and Amsterdam, Friday, 7:17 pm._
He took the IRT uptown to 79th and Broadway, and walked quickly to 82nd and Amsterdam. He expected to find a shop, or an apartment, or something that related. He found nothing but the dead faces of apartment buildings as night fell.
But he knew he had been intended to find _something._ However the three seemingly disconnected pieces of paper had found their way into that book, he understood in his meat and bones that it was he, Pen Robinson, who had been meant to discover the puzzle, and to solve it. He had never been a mystic, lived life surely in the pragmatic universe of shelf dust and self-prepared meals after work, and knew there was a logical explanation waiting for him here on the corner of 82nd Street and Amsterdam Avenue.
He loitered. He leaned against a wall and studied the street. Nothing, for the longest time. He looked to the rooftops, and then to the filthy New York sky. Nothing, for a longer time. He felt his eyes closing. He knew he shouldn't be weary, nothing really exhausting had happened to him that day. Perplexing, emotionally taxing, but not truly something to make the flesh sag. But the waiting was beginning to take its measure of him.
And the rabbit came again.
Across the street, directly opposite his station, a pale blue light pulsed softly from the stairwell leading down to a basement apartment. He studied it for a while, and then slowly walked across 82nd to the apartment building. He looked over the wrought iron railing, leaning between heavy black plastic bags of garbage waiting for the truck some distant morning. In the stairwell, lying on his back, was a man with a hole in his chest. From the hole pulsed a distressingly blue light, and as Pen watched, the hole expanded slightly, and the glowing light colored the man's anguished face. He was in terrible pain.
Pen walked to the gate in the railing, slipped the latch, and walked down the stone steps to the filthy bottom. He knelt beside the man, and looked into his face. "Henry Chatley," he said. He knew who this had to be.
The man looked up at him, and nodded with the tiniest movement. "You found the termination order," he said, the words sighing from between lips that barely moved.
The glow pulsed steadily, as Chatley's chest was being eaten away; and Pen could see inside him. It was like looking into a cauldron of soup being roiled by an invisible ladle. "What's happening to you?" Pen said urgently. He felt he should be doing something for Chatley, but this new strangeness was more frightening than anything that had yet happened. "Is there something I can do?"
The man made an attempt to smile. It was a thin rictus, the corners of his mouth twitching for just an instant. The sound coming from the glowing hole in his chest was faint, but if Pen leaned closer he could make out the unmistakable keening of mountain winds. Whatever was happening to Chatley, it had been intended that he would suffer. Pen asked again if there was some help he could offer: a hospital, moving the man's limbs to a more comfortable position, some kind of cover that would block the hole?
Chatley shook his head without much actual movement. "I took George S. Patton and Bert Lahr."
Pen said, "What? Say again, please: I couldn't make that out."
"Patton and Bert Lahr. And Huey Long and Groucho Marx. I took them."
"Took them? Took them where? Were you a cab driver? What?"
"I took them where the woodbine twineth. And Ansel Adams. I took him."
"Who are you, Mr. Chatley? What are you saying to me?"
Chatley looked up, and for a moment there were ages in his eyes. And enormous measures of pure pain. And the sense of things rushing away from the lens of his sight, while mountain winds howled. "I worked for the Dust Man. I collected for him. Got notices and did the actual work."
Pen had no idea what he meant.