"Simon Hawke - Wizard 2 - The Wizard of Whitechapel" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawke Simon)

Simon Hawke - The Wizard of Whitechapel.htmTHE WIZARD OF WHITECHAPEL

Copyright ┬й 1988 by Simon Hawke All rights reserved.
e-book ver. 1.0
For Adele,
with thanks for a decade of working together. Here's to the next ten.

PROLOGUE

London had changed little in two hundred years. It was hard to believe he'd
been
away so long. The neatly bearded blond man with the gold wire-rimmed glasses
sipped an unblended Scotch as he stared out the window of his suite in the
Dorchester Hotel. He was wearing a white silk shirt with lace trim and an
elegant, high-collared black suit. It was a cool, early-autumn evening, and
through the open window he could hear the orchestra playing in the pavilion
in
Hyde Park. He lit a cigarette and removed his coat, revealing the black 10-mm
semiautomatic he wore in a shoulder holster under his left arm.

People and fashions come and go, he thought, but the city always stays the
same.
Like Rome and Venice, London was a city that stubbornly resisted change.
Londoners took great pride in their city's history. They cherished the
buildings
that dated back hundreds of years. They installed blue plaques on houses
where
famous people had once lived. 48 Doughty Street had been the home of Charles
Dickens; 34 Tite Street boasted Oscar Wilde; Thomas Carlyle had once kept
lodgings in Cheyne Row. Londoners took meticulous care of their ancient
monuments and statues and fastidiously restored their old mansions, mews, and
churches, maintaining a tangible connection with their noble past. But the
artifacts of London, from its Tudor architecture to its Victorian gas lamps
to
the nightmarish Bauhaus office buildings of the Windsor Era, were mere
novelties
to him. He remembered a much older England, when London had been little more
than a thatch-roofed village eclipsed by that great stone monument to the
roaring ego of his fatherтАФa castle fortress known as Camelot.

Almost two thousand years had passed since Modred first left England at the
close of the sixth century. Back then, he never thought he would return. They
had all believed him dead, all except Morgana, who had never given up. And
now
she, too, was gone. England held nothing for him anymore, and yet he had come
back once again. It had always been that way. Years would pile up into
decades,
decades into centuries, and he would find himself once more inexorably drawn
back to England, to see what new generations had accomplished and what, if
anything, remained of the England he once knew.