"The Bridge Trilogy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gibson William - The Bridge Trilogy)

'Don't get any on you,' Rydell said, watching the care with which Sublett treated the gloves.
'Go ahead, laugh,' Sublett said mildly. He took out a pack of hypo-allergenic gum and popped a piece from its bubble. 'How's ol' Gunhead?'
Rydell scanned the displays, satisfied. 'Not too shabby.'
'Hope we don't have to respond to any damn' stealth houses tonight,' Sublett said, chewing.
Stealth houses, so-called, were on Sublett's personal list of bad calls. He said the air in them was toxic. Rydell didn't think it made any sense, but he was tired of arguing about it. Stealth houses were bigger than most regular houses, cost more, and Rydell figured the owners would pay plenty to keep the air clean. Sublett maintained that anybody who built a stealth house was paranoid to begin with, would always keep the place locked up too tight, no air circulation, and you'd get that had toxic buildup.
If there'd been any stealth houses in Knoxville, Rydell hadn't known about them. He thought it was an L.A. thing.
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Sublett, who'd worked for IntenSecure for almost two years, mostly on day patrol in Venice, had been the first person to even mention them to Rydell. When Rydell finally got to answer a call to one, he couldn't believe the place; it just went down and down, dug in beneath something that looked almost, but not quite, like a bombed-out drycleaning plant. And it was all peeled logs inside, white plaster, Turkish carpets, big paintings, slate floors, furniture like he'd never seen before. But it was some kind of tricky call; domestic violence, Rydell figured. Like the husband hit the wife, the wife hit the button, now they were making out it was all just a glitch. But it couldn't really be a glitch, because someone had had to hit the button, and there hadn't been any response to the password call that came back to them three-point-eight seconds later. She must've messed with the phones, Rydell thought, then hit the button. He'd been been riding with 'Big George' Kechakmadze that night, and the Georgian (Tbilisi, not Atlanta) hadn't liked it either. 'You see these people, they're subscribers, man; nobody bleeding, you get your ass out, okay?' Big George had said, after. But Rydell kept remembering a tension around the woman's eyes, how she held the collar of the big white robe folded against her throat. Her husband in a matching robe but with thick hairy legs and expensive glasses. There'd been something wrong there but he'd never know what. Not any more than he'd ever understand how their lives really worked, lives that looked like what you saw on tv but weren't.
L.A. was full of mysteries, when you looked at it that way. No bottom to it.
He'd come to like driving through it, though. Not when he had to get anywhere in particular, but just cruising with Gunhead was okay. Now he was turning onto La Cienega and the little green cursor on the clash was doing the same.
'Forbidden Zone,' Suhlett said. 'Herve Villechaize, Susan I yrell, Marie-Pascal Elfman, Viva.'
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'Viva?' Rydell asked. 'Viva what?' 'Viva. Actress.'
'When'd they make that?'
'1980.'

'I wasn't born yet.'
'Time on tv's all the same time, Rydell.'
'Man, I thought you were trying to get over your upbringing and all.' Rydell de-mirrored the door-window to better watch a redheaded girl pass him in a pink Daihatsu Sneaker with the top off. 'Anyway, I never saw that one.' It was just that hour of evening when women in cars looked about as good, in Los Angeles, as anything ever did. The surgeon general was trying to outlaw convertibles; said they contributed to the skin-cancer rate.
'End game. Al Cliver, Moira Chen, George Eastman, Gordon Mitchell. 1985.'
'Well, I was two,' Rydell said, 'but I didn't see that one either.'
Sublett fell silent. Rydell felt sorry for him; the Texan really didn't know any other way to start a conversation, and his folks back home in the trailer-camp would've seen all those films and more.
'Well,' Rydell said, trying to pick up his end, 'I was watching this one old movie last night-'
Sublett perked up. 'Which one?'
'Dunno,' Rydell said. 'This guy's in L.A. and he's just met this girl. Then he picks up a pay phone, 'cause it's ringing. Late at night. It's some guy in a missile silo somewhere who knows they've just launched theirs at the Russians. He's trying to phone his dad, or his brother, or something. Says the world's gonna end in short order. Then the guy who answered the phone hears these soldiers come in and shoot the guy. The guy on the phone, I mean.'
Suhlett closed his eyes, scanning his inner trivia-banks. 'Yeah? How's it end?'
'Dunno,' Rydell said. 'I went to sleep.'
Sublett opened his eyes. 'Who was in it?'
'Got me.'
Sublett's blank silver eyes widened in disbelief. 'Jesus, Berry, you shouldn't oughta watch tv, not unless you're gonna pay it attention.'

He wasn't in the hospital very long, after he shot Kenneth Turvey; barely two days. His lawyer, Aaron Pursley himself, made the case that they should've kept him in there longer, the better to assess the extent of his post-traumatic shock. But Rydell hated hospitals and anyway he didn't feel too bad; he just couldn't recall exactly what had happened. And he had Karen Mendelsohn to help him out with things, and his new agent, Wellington Ma, to deal with the other people from Cops in Trouble, not one of them as nice as Karen, who had long brown hair. Wellington Ma was Chinese, lived in Los Angeles, and Karen said his father had been in the Big Circle gang-though she advised Rydell not to bring it up.
Wellington Ma's business card was a rectangular slice of pink synthetic quartz, laser-engraved with his name, 'The Ma-Mariano Agency,' an address on Beverly Boulevard, and all kinds of numbers and e-mail addresses. It arrived by GlobEx in its own little gray suede envelope while Rydell was still in the hospital.
'Looks like you could cut yourself on it,' Rydell said.
'You could, many no doubt have,' said Karen Mendelsohn, 'and if you put it in your wallet and sit down, it shatters.'
'Then what's the point of it?'
'You're supposed to take very good care of it. You won't get another.'
Rydell never actually did meet Wellington Ma, at least not 'til quite a while later, but Karen would bring in a little briefcase with a pair of eyephones on a wire and Rydell could talk with him iii his office in LA. It was the sharpest tele
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presence rig Rydell had ever used, and it really did look just like he was right there. He could see out the window to where there was this lopsided pyramid the color of a Noxzema jar. He asked Wellington Ma what that was and Ma said it was the old Design Center, but currently it was a discount mall, and Rydell could go there when he came to L.A., which was going to be soon.
Turvey's girlfriend, Jenni-Rae Cline, was bringing an intricately interlocking set of separate actions against Rydell, the Department, the City of Knoxville, and the company in Singapore that owned her apartment building. About twenty million in total.
Rydell, having become a cop in trouble, was glad to find that Cops in Trouble was right there for him. They'd hired Aaron Pursley, for starters, and of course Rydell knew who he was from the show. He had that gray hair, those blue eyes, that nose you could split kindling with, and wore jeans, Tony Lama boots, and plain white oxford-cloth pima cotton cowboy business shirts with Navajo-silver bob-ties. He was famous and he defended cops like Rydell from people like Turvey's girlfriend and her lawyer.
Jenni-Rae Cline's lawyer maintained that Rydell shouldn't have been in her apartment at all, that he'd endangered her life and her children's by so doing, and that he'd killed Kenneth Turvey in the process, Mr. Turvey being described as a skilled craftsman, a steady worker, a loving father-figure for little Rambo and Kelly, a born-again Christian, a recovering addict to 4-Thiobuscaline, and the family's sole means of support.
'Recovering?' Rydell asked Karen Mendelsohn in his room in the airport Executive Suites. She'd just shown him the fax from Jenni-Rae's lawyer.
'Apparently he'd been to a meeting that very day,' Karen said.
'What did he do there?' Rydell asked, remembering the Last Supper in drying blood.
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'According to our witnesses, he openly horned a tablespoon of his substance of choice, took the podium by force, and delivered a thirty-minute rant on President Milibank's pantyhose and the assumed current state of her genitalia. He then exposed himself, masturbated but did not ejaculate, and left the basement of the First Baptist Church.'
'Jesus,' Rydell said. 'And this was at one of those drug meetings, like A.A.?'
'It was,' Karen Mendelsohn said, 'though apparently Turvey's performance has triggered an unfortunate sequence of relapses. We'll send in a team of counselors, of course, to work with those who were at the meeting.'