"Harlan Ellison & Ben Bova - Brillo" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

Brillo
Harlan Ellison and Ben Bova


Crazy season for cops is August. In August the riots start. Not just to
get the pigs off campus (where they don't even happen to be, because
school is out) or to rid the railroad flats of Rattus norvegicus, but they
start for no reason at all. Some bunch of sweat-stinking kids get a hydrant
spouting and it drenches the storefront of a shylock who lives most of his
time in Kipps Bay when he's not sticking it to his Spanish Harlem
customers, and he comes out of the pawnshop with a Louisville Slugger
somebody hocked once, and he takes a swing at a mestizo urchin, and the
next thing the precinct knows, they've got a three-star riot going on two
full city blocks; then they call in the copchoppers from Governor's Island
and spray the neighborhood with quiescent, and after a while the beat
cops go in with breathers, in threes, and they start pulling in the
bash-head cases. Why did it get going? A little water on a store window
that hadn't been squeegee'd since 1974? A short temper? Some kid
flipping some guy the bird? No.

Crazy season is August.

Housewives take their steam irons to their old men's heads. Basset
hound salesmen who trundle display suitcases full of ready-to-wear for
eleven months, without squeaking at their bosses, suddenly pull twine
knives and carve up taxi drivers. Suicides go out twenty-story windows
and off the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge like confetti at an astronaut's
parade down Fifth Avenue. Teenaged rat packs steal half a dozen cars and
drag-race them three abreast against traffic up White Plains Road till they
run them through the show windows of supermarkets. No reason. Just
August. Crazy season.

It was August, that special heat of August when the temperature keeps
going till it reaches the secret kill-crazy mugginess at which point eyeballs
roll up white in florid faces and gravity knives appear as if by magic, it
was that time of August, when Brillo arrived in the precinct.

Buzzing softly (the sort of sound an electric watch makes), he stood
inert in the center of the precinct station's bullpen, his bright
blue-anodized metal a gleaming contrast to the paintless worn
floorboards. He stood in the middle of momentary activity, and no one
who passed him seemed to be able to pay attention to anything but him:

Not the two plainclothes officers duckwalking between them a
sixty-two-year-old pervert whose specialty was flashing just before the
subway doors closed.

Not the traffic cop being berated by his Sergeant for having allowed his
parking ticket receipts to get waterlogged in a plastic bag bombardment
initiated by the last few residents of a condemned building.