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

deal with the Mafia. They don't do divorce work and I don't drop bodies into the East River.
Understand?" I put the gun back in the drawer and slammed it shut.
"I don't blame you for being afraidтАФ"
"Afraid? Miz Four Ghentlee, I'm not afraid. I'm terrified! How old do you think I am?"
"Call me Belle. You're thirty-five, maybe forty. Why?"
"You're kindтАФand I'm rich. Rich enough to buy youth: I've been in this business almost
forty years. I take lots of vitamins and try not to fuck with the Mafia."
She smiled and then was suddenly somber. Like a baby. ""Try to understand me. You've
lived sixty years?"
I nodded. "Next year."
"Well, I've been alive barely sixty days. After four years in a tank, growing and learning.
"Learning isn't being, though. Everything is new to me. When I walk down a street, the
sights and sounds and smells, it's . . . it's like a great flower opening to the sun. Just to sit
alone in the darkтАФ"
Her voice broke.
"You can't even know how much I want to liveтАФand that's not condescending; it's a
statement of fact. Yet I want you to kill me."
I could only shake my head.
"If you can't hide me you have to kill me." She was crying now, and wiped the tears
savagely from her cheeks. "Kill me and make sure every cell in my body is destroyed."
She took out her credit card flash and set it on the desk. "You can have all my money,
whether you save me or kill me."
She started walking around the desk. Along the way she did something with a clasp and
her dress slithered to the floor. The sudden naked beauty was like an electric shock.
"If you save me, you can have me. Friend, lover, wife ... slave. Forever." She held a
posture of supplication for a moment, then eased toward me. Watching the muscles of her
body work made my mouth go dry. She reached down and started unbuttoning my shirt.
I cleared my throat. "I didn't know clones had navels."
"Only special ones. I have other special qualities."
Idiot, something reminded me, every woman you've ever loved has sucked you dry and
left you for dead. I clasped her hips with my big hands and drew her warmth to me. Close
up, the navel wasn't very convincing; nobody's perfect.

I'd done drycleaning jobs before, but never so cautiously or thoroughly. That she was a
clone made the business a little more delicate than usual, since clones' lives are more rigidly
supervised by the government than ours are. But the fact that her identity was false to begin
with made it easier; I could second-guess the people who had originally drycleaned her.
I hated to meddle with her beauty, and that beauty made plastic surgery out of the
question. Any legitimate doctor would be suspicious, and going to an underworld doctor
would be suicidal. So we dyed her hair black and bobbed it. She stopped wearing makeup
and bought some truly froppy clothes. She kept a length of tape stuck across her buttocks to
give her a virgin-schoolgirl kind of walk. For everyone but me.
The Mafia had given her a small fortuneтАФbirdseed to themтАФboth to ensure her loyalty
and to accustom her to having money, for impersonating Kraus. We used about half of it for
the dry-cleaning.
A month or so later there was a terrible accident on a city bus. Most of the bodies were
burned beyond recognition; I did some routine bribery, and two of them were identified as
the clone Maribelle Four Ghentlee and John Michael Loomis, private eye. When we learned
the supposed clone's body had disappeared from the morgue, we packed up our moneyтАФ
long since converted into currencyтАФand a couple of toothbrushes and pulled out.