"M. John Harrison - Light" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison John M)

'Shit, Ed,' Hanson said. He shrugged. Then he left too.
After he was sure they were gone, Ed went out to his car, a four to-the-floor '47 Dodge into which
someone had shoehorned the 409 from a '52 Caddy. He fired it up and sat in it for a moment listening to
the four-barrel suck air. He looked at his hands.
'We can do it either way you fuckers,' he whispered. Then he dumped the clutch and drove
downtown.
He had to find out what was going on. He knew a broad in the DA's office called Robinson. He
persuaded her to go to Sullivan's diner with him and get lunch. She was a tall woman with a wide smile,
good tits and a way of licking mayonnaise out the corner of her mouth which suggested she might be
equally good at licking mayonnaise out the corner of yours. Ed knew that he could find that out if he
wanted to. He could find that out, but ic was more interested in the Brady case, and what Rank and
Hanson knew.
'Hey,' he said. 'Rita.'
'Cut the flannel, Chinese Ed,' said Rita. She tapped her fingers and looked out the window at the
crowded street. She had come here from Detroit looking for something new. But this was just another
sulphur dioxide town, a town without hope full of the black mist of engines. 'Don't put that sugar on me,'
she sang.
Chinese Ed shrugged. He was halfway out the door of Sullivan's when he heard her say:
'Hey, Ed. You still fuck?'
He turned back. Maybe the day was looking better now. Rita Robinson was grinning and he was
walking towards her when something weird happened. The light was obscured in Sullivan's doorway.
Rita, who could see why, stared past Ed in a kind of dawning fear; Ed, who couldn't, began to ask her
what was wrong. Rita raised her hand and pointed.
'Jesus, Ed,' she said. 'Look.'
He turned and looked. A giant yellow duck was trying to force itself into the diner.
 FOUR

Operations of the Heart




'But you never phone!' Anna Kearney said.
'I'm phoning now,' he explained, as if to a child.
'You never come and see me.'
Anna Kearney lived in Grove Park, in a tangle of streets between the railway and the river. A thin
woman who fell easily into anorexia, she had a constantly puzzled expression; kept his surname because
she preferred it to her own. Her flat, originally council housing, was dark and cluttered. It smelled of
handmade soap, Earl Grey tea, stale milk. Early cm in her tenancy she had painted fish on the: bathroom
walls, papered the back of every door with letters from her friends, with Polaroid photographs and
memos to herself. It was an old habit, but many of the memos were new.
If you don't want to do something you don't have to, Kearney read. Do only the things you can.
Leave the rest.
'You look well,' he told her.
'You mean I lock fat. I always know I'm too fat when people say that.'
He shrugged.
'Well, it's nice to see you anyway,' he said.
'I'm having a bath. I was running it when you called.'
She kept some things for him in a room at the back of the flat: a bed, a chair, a small green-painted
chest of drawers on top of which lay two or three dyed feathers, part of a triangular scented candle, and