"Gibson, William - New Rose Hotel" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gibson William)

William Gibson. New Rose hotel

Seven rented nights in this coffin, Sandii. New Rose Hotel. How I
want you now. Sometimes I hit you. Replay it so slow and sweet and mean, I
can almost feel it. Sometimes I take your little automatic out of my bag,
run my thumb down smooth, cheap chrome. Chinese .22, its bore no wider than
the dilated pupils of your vanished eyes. Fox is dead now, Sandii.
Fox told me to forget you.
I remember Fox leaning against the padded bar in the dark lounge of
some Singapore hotel, Bencoolen Street, his hands describing different
spheres of influence, internal rivalries, the arc of a particular career, a
point of weakness he had discovered in the armor of some think tank. Fox was
point man in the skull wars, a middleman for corporate crossovers. He was a
soldier in the secret skirmishes of the zaibatsus, the multinational
corporations that control entire economies.
I see Fox grinning, talking fast, dismissing my ventures into
intercorporate espionage with a shake of his head. The Edge, he said, have
to find that Edge. He made you bear the capital E. The Edge was Fox's grail,
that essential fraction of sheer human talent, nontransferable, locked in
the skulls of the world's hottest research scientists.
You can't put Edge down on paper, Fox said, can't punch Edge into a
diskette. The money was in corporate defectors. Fox was smooth, the severity
of his dark French suits offset by a boyish forelock that wouldn't stay in
place. I never liked the way the effect was ruined when he stepped back from
the bar, his left shoulder skewed at an angle no Paris tailor could conceal.
Someone had run him over with a taxi in Berne, and nobody quite knew how to
put him together again.
I guess I went with him because he said he was after that Edge. And
somewhere out there, on our way to find the Edge, I found you, Sandii. The
New Rose Hotel is a coffin rack on the ragged fringes of Narita
International. Plastic capsules a meter high and three long, stacked like
surplus Godzilla teeth in a concrete lot off the main road to the airport.
Each capsule has a television mounted flush with the ceiling. I spend whole
days watching Japanese game shows and old movies. Sometimes I have your gun
in my hand.
Sometimes I can hear the jets, laced into holding patterns over
Narita. I close my eyes and imagine the sharp, white contrails fading,
losing definition.
You walked into a bar in Yokohama, the first time I saw you.
Eurasian, half gaijin, long-hipped and fluid in a Chinese knock-off of some
Tokyo designer's original. Dark European eyes, Asian cheekbones. I remember
you dumping your purse out on the bed, later, in some hotel room, pawing
through your makeup. A crumpled wad of new yen, dilapidated address book
held together with rubber bands, a Mitsubishi bank chip, Japanese passport
with a gold chrysanthemum stamped on the cover, and the Chinese .22. You
told me your story. Your father had been an executive in Tokyo, but now he
was disgraced, disowned, cast down by Hosaka, the biggest zaibatsu of all.
That night your mother was Dutch, and I listened as you spun out those
summers in Amsterdam for me, the pigeons in Dam Square like a soft, brown
carpet. I never asked what your father might have done to earn his disgrace.