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

SHE'D WORN HER BEST for the interview, but it was raining in
Brussels and she had no money for a cab. She walked from
the Eurotrans station.
Her hand, in the pocket of her good jacketa Sally Stanley
but almost a year oldwas a white knot around the crumpled
telefax. She no longer needed it, having memorized the ad-
dress, but it seemed she could no more release it than break
the trance that held her here now, staring into the window of
an expensive shop that sold menswear, her focus phasing
between sedate flannel dress shirts and the reflection of her
own dark eyes.
Surely the eyes alone would be enough to cost her the job.
No need for the wet hair she now wished she'd let Andrea
cut. The eyes displayed a pain and an inertia that anyone
could read, and most certainly these things would soon
be revealed to Herr Josef Virek, least likely of potential
employers.
When the telefax had been delivered, she'd insisted on
regarding it as some cruel prank, another nuisance call. She'd
had enough of those, thanks to the media, so many that
Andrea had ordered a special program for the apartment's
phone, one that filtered out incoming calls from any number
that wasn't listed in her permanent directory. But that, An-
drea had insisted, must have been the reason for the telefax.
How else could anyone reach her?
But Marly had shaken her head and huddled deeper into
Andrea's old terry robe. Why would Virek, enormously weal-
thy, collector and patron, wish to hire the disgraced former
operator of a tiny Paris gallery?
Then it had been Andrea's time for head-shaking, in her
impatience with the new, the disgraced Marly Krushkhova,
who spent entire days in the apartment now, who sometimes
didn't bother to dress. The attempted sale, in Paris, of a
single forgery, was hardly the novelty Marly imagined it to
have been, she said. If the press hadn't been quite so anxious
to show up the disgusting Gnass for the fool he most as-
suredly was, she continued, the business would hardly have
been news. Gnass was wealthy enough, gross enough, to
make for a weekend's scandal. Andrea smiled. "If you had
been less attractive, you would have gotten far less attention."
Marly shook her head.
"And the forgery was Alain's. You were innocent. Have
you forgotten that?"
Marly went into the bathroom, still huddled in the thread-
bare robe, without answering.
Beneath her friend's wish to comfort, to help, Marly could
already sense the impatience of someone forced to share a
very small space with an unhappy, nonpaying guest.