"Mona.Lisa.Overdrive" - читать интересную книгу автора (3-Mona Lisa OVerdrive)

and bright, like the eyes of a painted doll. Your mother is dead. Do
you understand? And all around her the planes of shadow in his study,
the angular darkness. His hand coming forward, into the lamp's circle of
light, unsteadily, to point at her, the robe's cuff sliding back to
reveal a golden Rolex and more dragons, their manes swirling into waves,
pricked out strong and dark around his wrist, pointing. Pointing at her.
Do you understand? She hadn't answered, but had run instead, down to a
secret place she knew, the warren of the smallest of the cleaning
machines. They ticked around her all night, scanning her every few
minutes with pink bursts of laser light, until her father came to find
her, and, smelling of whiskey and Dunhill cigarettes, carried her to her
room on the apartment's third floor.


Remembering the weeks that followed, numb days spent most often in the
black-suited company of one secretary or another, cautious men with
automatic smiles and tightly furled umbrellas. One of these, the
youngest and least cautious, had treated her, on a crowded Ginza
sidewalk, in the shadow of the Hattori clock, to an impromptu kendo
demonstration, weaving expertly between startled shop girls and
wide-eyed tourists, the black umbrella blurring harmlessly through the
art's formal, ancient arcs. And Kumiko had smiled then, her own smile,
breaking the funeral mask, and for this her guilt was driven instantly,
more deeply and still more sharply, into that place in her heart where
she knew her shame and her unworthiness. But most often the secretaries
took her shopping, through one vast Ginza department store after
another, and in and out of dozens of Shinjuku boutiques recommended by a
blue plastic Michelin guide that spoke a stuffy tourist's Japanese. She
purchased only very ugly things, ugly and very expensive things, and the
secretaries marched stolidly beside her, the glossy bags in their hard
hands. Each afternoon, returning to her father's apartment, the bags
were deposited neatly in her bedroom, where they remained, unopened and
untouched, until the maids removed them.


And in the seventh week, on the eve of her thirteenth birthday, it was
arranged that Kumiko would go to London.


You will be a guest in the house of my kobun , her father said.


But I do not wish to go, she said, and showed him her mother's smile.


You must, he said, and turned away. There are difficulties, he said
to the shadowed study. You will be in no danger, in London.


And when shall I return?