"Joe Haldeman - Blood Sisters" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

BLOOD SISTERS
So I used to carry two different business cards: J. Michael Loomis, Data Concentration,
and Jack Loomis, Private Investigator. They mean the same thing, nine cases out of ten. You
have to size up a potential customer, decide whether he'd feel better hiring a shamus or a
clerk.
Some people still have these romantic notions about private detectives and get into a
happy sweat at the thought of using one. But it is the twenty-first century and, endless
Bogart reruns notwithstanding, most of my work consisted in sitting at my office console
and using it to subvert the privacy laws of various states and countriesтАФfinding out
embarrassing things about people, so other people can divorce them or fire them or get a
piece of the slickery.
Not to say I didn't go out on the street sometimes; not to say I didn't have a gun and a
ticket for it. There are Forces of Evil out there, friends, although most of them would
probably rather be thought of as businessmen who use the law rather than fear it. Same as
me. I was always happy, though, to stay on this side of murder, treason, kidnappingтАФany
lobo offense. This brain may not be much, but it's all I have.
I should have used it when the woman walked into my office. She had a funny way of
saying hello:
"Are you licensed to carry a gun?"
Various retorts came to mind, most of them having to do with her expulsion, but after a
period of silence I said yes and asked who had referred her to me. Asked politely, too, to
make up for staring. She was a little more beautiful than anyone I'd ever seen before.
"My lawyer," she said. "Don't ask who he is."
With that, I was pretty sure that this was some sort of elaborate joke. Story detectives
always have beautiful mysterious customers. My female customers tend to be dowdy and too
talkative, and much more interested in alimony than romance.
"What's your name, then? Or am I not supposed to ask that either?"
She hesitated. "Ghentlee Arden."
I turned the console on and typed in her name, then a seven-digit code. "Your legal firm is
Lee, Chu, and Rosenstein. And your real name is Maribelle Four Ghentlee: fourth clone of
Maribelle Ghentlee."
"Arden is my professional name. I dance." She had a nice blush.
I typed in another string of digits. Sometimes this sort of thing would lose a customer.
"Says here you're a registered hooker."
"Call girl," she said frostily. "Class One courtesan. I was getting to that."
I'm a liberal-minded man; I don't have anything against hookers or clones. But I like my
customers to be frank with me. Again, I should have shown her the doorтАФthen followed her
through it.
 Instead: "So. You have a problem?"
"Some men are bothering me, one man in particular. I need some protection."
That gave me pause. "Your union has a Pinkerton contract for that sort of thing."
"My union." Her face trembled a little. "They don't let clones in the union. I'm an
associate, for classification. No protection, no medical, no anything."
"Sorry, I didn't know that. Pretty old-fashioned." I could see the reasoning, though. Dump
a thousand Maribelle Ghentlees on the market, and a merely ravishing girl wouldn't have a
chance.
"Sit down." She was on the verge of tears. "Let me explain to you what I can't do.
"I can't hurt anyone physically. I can't trace this cod down and wave a gun in his face, tell
him to back off."
"I know," she sobbed. I took a box of Kleenex out of my drawer, passed it over.