"Gibson, William - Count Zero" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gibson William)

the previous five years.
Something Midwestern in the bone of the jaw, archaic and
Amencan. The blue sheets were nicked across her hips, the
sunlight angling in through hardwood louvers to stripe her
long thighs with diagonals of gold. The faces he woke with in
the world's hotels were like God's own hood ornaments.
Women's sleeping faces, identical and alone, naked, aimed
straight out to the void. But this one was different. Already.
somehow, there was meaning attached to it. Meaning and a
name.
He sat up, swinging his legs off the bed. His soles regis-
tered the grit of beach-sand on cool tile. There was a faint,
pervasive smell of insecticide. Naked, head throbbing, he
stood. He made his legs move. Walked, tried the first of two
doors, finding white tile, more white plaster, a bulbous chrome
shower head hung from rust-spotted iron pipe The sink's taps
offered identical trickles of blood-warm water. An antique
wristwatch lay beside a plastic tumbler, a mechanical Rolex
on a pale leather strap.
The bathroom's shuttered windows weie unglazed, strung
with a fine green mesh of plastic. He peered out between
hardwood slats, wincing at the hot clean sun, and saw a dry
fountain of flower-painted tiles and the rusted carcass of a
VW Rabbit
Allison. That was her name.

She wore frayed khaki shorts and one of his white T-shirts.
Her legs were very brown. The clockwork Rolex, with its
dull stainless case, went around her left wrist on its pigskin
strap. They went walking, down the curve of beach, toward
Barre de Navidad. They kept to the narrow strip of firm wet
sand above the line of surf.
Already they had a history together; he remembered her at
a stall that morning in the little town's iron-roofed mercado,
how she'd held the huge clay mug of boiled coffee in both
hands. Mopping eggs and salsa from the cracked white plate
with a tortilla, he'd watched flies circling fingers of sunlight
that found their way through a patchwork of palm frond and
corrugated siding. Some talk about her job with some legal
firm in L.A., how she lived alone in one of the ramshackle
pontoon towns tethered off Redondo. He'd told her he was in
personnel. Or had been, anyway. "Maybe I'm looking for a
new line of work
But talk seemed secondary to what there was between
them, and now a frigate bird hung overhead, tacking against
the breeze, slid sideways, wheeled, and was gone. They both
shivered with the freedom of it, the mindless glide of the
thing. She squeezed his hand.
A blue figure came marching up the beach toward them, a
military policeman headed for town, spitshined black boots